Posts made by Arkandel

This is really interesting. I haven't dated in a reaaaally long time but it sounds pretty fascinating that the way we look for romantic interests can (or is!) actually changing society as we know it.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/first-evidence-that-online-dating-is-changing-the-nature-of-society

The Superbowl being at the same time as our weekly basketball league game meant most of the team wasn't there. There were six of us, playing 25-year olds, so we only had one sub.

I ended up playing slightly over 40 minutes. There was nothing left in the tank near the end, my legs were dead, the lungs on fire and during a timeout I could barely stomach water.

Now and then I really, really feel my age - those motherfuckers wouldn't stop running and slamming into us in the paint.

It was still glorious. But Monday morning is decisively not fun now.

@Auspice Look, I'm no master of etiquette. I don't know of a good way to ask someone "uh, so are you offering me sexual favors in exchange for money or are you just dressed like it?". What if I was wrong?!

Also I still didn't get my damn massage which irks me.

This didn't happen too long ago but it's pretty cringe-worthy so here's it is - my story.

After many years' worth of staring at screens and sitting in awkward positions my lower back is pretty sensitive. It can take a lot of punishment in some ways but very little in others - for example I can't stand up and still for a long time, although I can run, play sports, etc just fine. As a result I sometimes need to visit an RMT to loosen it up. Thankfully there is a very good massage/physical therapy clinic near my workplace, so I can always pop over my lunch hour or after work.

One December, not that many Decembers ago, I needed a visit again... but as it was near the end of year many people were taking their leftover 'freebie' insurance company-paid massage appointments then, so the clinic's RMTs were all booked up every day.

I figured it was okay, I could just try a different massage place - and you can probably already see where this is going. It's going there.

I Googled for places and reviews and simply picked the highest rated one, since I could really use a massage. However I neglected to do two things: Include the actual "RMT" term as part of my search criteria and I did not actually read the reviews themselves. I just went by the grade - a solid 4.6! Hey, these people must be good, right? So I called, got an appointment and went over.

In my defense it just looked like a regular place, but perhaps I should have been tipped by the receptionist's... shall we say... unusually tight clothing. And yet I am not one to judge! If that's what the lady wanted to wear so be it, right? Right? So she lead me to this room where some things did seem off, and alarms started (too late) to go off in my head, so I started thinking maybe this is a terrible mistake, but I'd committed to the course at that point. Why was there a shower in the room? Why did she quote a number for the full hour half of what the RMT clinic charged? And why was she really, really surprised I wanted to use my card to pay instead of cash? Like... she had to run back to her desk and figure out how the card reader worked.

Yeeeah at this point it looked like mistakes had been made but this was all at noon in a mall between a bunch of corporate buildings. Surely business people did not... like, no way. Surely. I was being paranoid.

So when the massage person finally came she was also dressed in a really, really liberal fashion. So far nothing had gone truly awry, yet in my emerging panic I had no real way of asking - politely - if this is what I signed up for or not. Dammit, how do you even start that conversation?

And then finally (thanks, lady) she asked if I wanted the regular massage or 'the enhanced one'.

Okay, look, at this point I had to ask. I had practically left myself no choice - so I did. "... What's the enhanced one?", which she told me (for the uninformed, the reduced cost was because the tip wasn't included.... please, no puns).

Long story short I came clean, which I'm sure she probably knew as well well before I did. Things stopped there, but I did leave a tip for her time anyway since I was taking her time away from properly paying customers.

Following all this I did need to call my S.O. since, well, that charge on my card might not have looked great in retrospect. She couldn't stop laughing about it then and to this day she's been repeating the story with coworkers and friends with wild impunity.

This is my story. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Organized, competitive basketball on Sunday nights is amazing. It's fun and exhausting in equal measure.

What's not fun is that the games are late (they start at 7 pm) and then I just can't sleep. I'm not sure if it's the adrenaline rush or the caffeine consumption before - I'll adjust the latter, at least - but two weeks in a row I couldn't get to sleep until past 1 am, which just straight up murders my Monday morning.

@Macha I listened to his most recent interview on All The Smoke a couple of weeks ago where he spoke about coaching Gianna's team (while Tracy McGrady coached his own kid's team) and how much Kobe loved doing that since it was about pure basketball.

Apparently another parent+child was with them on that helicopter, going to a game.

@eye8urcake Can we not do that on the thread about the guy's death?

WTF Does That Mean Kobe Bryant

I'm in shock. What the hell.

@Admiral It involved Jewish people and ovens.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/black-man-received-settlement-race-181529506.html

Inception!

I don't know that it belongs in this thread but I kinda love it anyhow so...

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/who-killed-the-great-american-cable-tv-bundle

@Aria said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

The problem is that they treat people like shit in the process

They do. 100%.

That's why treating companies as anything other than the other party in a mostly temporary arrangement is a mistake, as the association will only be valid as long as it's beneficial to them.

There's no such thing as loyalty on the corporations' end; they will drop you the microsecond it serves them better to do so, which is why if at any point an employee would be better served by leaving they should do exactly that. The same thing applies to salary negotiations, promotions, everything.

@Aria said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Apparently, they have a tendency to wait until the new hire has settled in for a few weeks before bothering to cut the other candidates loose.

Not justifying this practice at all, but it's because turnover in the first few weeks tends to be high. In fact there's a percentage of applicants who accept a position then use it as leverage to secure better compensation at their current job.

Sometimes corporate policy is to hire then see if the person shows up and they're competent before letting anyone else know.

@Auspice Well Picard can't be episodic. It's like expecting Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry to come out of retirement in his 80+, barely able to walk, then work random murder cases. Why would this ever happen?

@SG I haven't watched the first episode yet but the complaint I heard was that it's "not in episodic fashion".

I mean I get it... but shaping the narrative of an 80+ year old Captain coming out of retirement to do random missions every week doesn't make sense. Unless Picard put all his money into a bad investment or something and he needed the salary to save his farm.

As a strong PrP believer I can still point to these potential issues:

• Access to ST varies between groups. Do you want only specific people shaping the game?

• Timezones are the bane of PrPs. Would you be excluding part of the playerbase from shaping the game?

• Coordination between STs can be a logistical task on its own. Getting/keeping everyone on the same page isn't a trivial challenge.

That's just from the top of my head.

@GreenFlashlight said in Depression Meals:

I like how many of the entries in this thread are some variation on Italian food.

We love our breads and bread variants, we depressed people.

What kind of monster doesn't like bread.

We had some downtime tonight since redis decided to freak out and took the nodebb service with it.

When I'm more awake I'll look into the root cause. Please let me know if anything more unexpected than usual has stopped working properly.