Best posts made by Derp

@roz said in 2022: A New Year, New Dead Celebrities:

What the hell, man. Gaspard Ulliel dies in a skiing accident.

Nooooo.

He was my favorite Hannibal.

@wildbaboons said in The Work Thread:

@too-old-for-this said in The Work Thread:

@silverfox My son walks to school (there are bullies on his bus that he wants to avoid and he's familiar with the route). Yesterday, the day where the skies opened up and dumped like 4-5 inches of snow? He chose to wear his hoodie and sneakers because 'it didn't look that bad out'. People suck at judging the weather. XD

That just sounds like standard kid. We got maybe 3" of snow today and I saw at least three kids walking to/from school in t-shirts. It isn't cool to be warm. You just don't understand.

Kid? I'm still 100% this guy. It's 23 degrees and I'm in a polo.

I don't like stuff touching my arms.

Or my legs but I still haven't convinced them that shorts are totally work appropriate.

@tnp said in Girl Scout Cookies:

@macha said in Girl Scout Cookies:

I thiiiiiiink it's Tagalongs? the peanut butter ones? And thin mints. And the samoas.

thankfully, I can get dupes for all these at Aldi, all year round.

And cheaper too, I'm sure. I've never really understood the obsession

They're very much not the same though. Even though I get teh wal-mart samoas. DON'T JUDGE ME OK?

@ganymede

Ehhhhhh. That -- really depends on what we're talking about when we say 'kids'.

A teacher letting a kid think it's ok to exclude someone because they don't believe in the same invisible man as you is about the most fertile ground for future bigotry I can think of.

Especially if these are very young kids.

If their parents want them to believe that strongly in whatever, private religious schools are an option, and they can pay to have their child go to the super elite place where they can solely be around their own people.

So I wasn't sure whether to put this here or RL Things I Love, so I opted for here because it's more specific:

I take a (really pretty optional) medication that the details of aren't super important.

What's important is, I got a new version of this medication -- one that my insurance pharmacy stuff apparently doesn't cover.

They approved my claim and are like 'congrats! You owe us $1600 for a one month supply, but we put it toward your deductible of 2000 and your out of pocket maximum of 3500'.

...for a medication that I don't actually pay for anyway and only turned into insurance because there was a spot on the website for insurance.

Thanks, insurance company, for not covering a med I get for free and putting me that much closer to not having to pay for anything else this year. Appreciated!

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

The word "binging." Two syllables spelled almost identically, yet the I and the G are both pronounced differently, and there's no way to infer that without just knowing.

I mean, technically, they first G could be either, depending on if the base word is binge or Bing, the search engine. It'll never be as popular as Google but someone's gonna try to make that a word eventually so we might as well accept that both pronunciations are correct and have different meanings.

@ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

have you considered getting a P.O. Box?

This is one solution. Another solution is to do what I did -- request that they hold all package deliveries at the post office for pickup instead of delivering them to the home. I had an issue with someone constantly stealing our amazon boxes and my post office staff just gave me a little form to fill out, and they would leave a little notice in my mailbox that I had a package waiting. It was really nice.

@sunny said in The Work Thread:

Asking somebody who wants "total" and "amount" on the same spreadsheet what the difference is between the two columns, and getting the word "amount" as the bulk of the total definition and "total" for the bulk of the amount definition.

THAT IS NOT HELPFUL, BRENDA.

(eta: think like, 'the amount is the total paid, and the total is the amount we paid')

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

Oh yes darling, your delightfully undercooked pasta salad is just the way I like it

I will take "delightfully undercooked pasta salad." David's pasta is like, "Oooh, mashed potatoes! ...oh. Spaghetti, you say..."

@thebird said:

Sick on vacation.
Like, 101+ degree fever on vacation. Both my dad and I are so sick. This is so lame... At least I waited toward the end to get sick.
Buh... I want my own bed. And my own cold medicine. And my own house.

That's why they tell you to never drink the water!

I finally got to see it. I have to agree. It was bloody awesome. I was so worried they were gonna bomb it, but they really pulled through.

Although, goddamn, Carrie got old.

@Wizz said:

@Derp said:

@Wizz said:

I am going to 100% guarantee you that no one has thrown a bottle at your head or screamed a racial slur at you for just trying to buy groceries. Or just for walking down the street. No one has denied you fucking housing, or told you or your partner to leave a public area because you held hands.

I think my partner, Will, would disagree with you. Racial slurs, no, I'll grant you that much, but race isn't the only category that happens in. But sure, let's turn that into a race war, instead of shitty humans being shitty.

Genuinely my bad for assuming. But you're absolutely right, it's not the only category, and you then have the experience to know that. That's what we're talking about here, is that being white and a dude means that you are shielded from so much bullshit. It's crazy to not admit to it, for real

@Derp said:

The whole thrust of your argument is "Affirmative Action is bad!" Yeah, maybe. It's a gray area. You had to struggle a little harder to get into school? Aww man.

And if I were a black person being denied scholarships based on the color of my skin? Would that be outrage-worthy? If we're going to talk equality instead of revenge, then at what point do we actually step up and start saying that it shouldn't happen to anyone?

You weren't "denied" a scholarship for being white, you didn't qualify for the scholarships that exist. That maybe sounds pedantic, but it's an important difference, because (in part) Affirmative Action was a response to systematic denial of service, extreme cultural inequity. And again, I'm not saying that in some senses Affirmative Action has been taken to an extreme in some interpretations, or that it's some sort of permanent solution to the problem. You're not arguing with anyone here, so far anyway.

But you're arguing both sides of it here, which is a relatively common thing in these circles. You can't say 'you don't qualify for X thing based on your race and that's okay' by backing it up with 'being white shields you from so much other bullshit that it just balances'. The same could be said for the other side, in that there are inherent advantages to the color of your skin and things that white people have to deal with that people of other races are legally shielded from.

And that's why this argument bugs the hell out of me. Everyone just assumes that it only goes one way, when it doesn't. It's just that one side isn't allowed to talk about the hardships that they endure based on it because people from our distant past made some bad calls, and now we're forced to live with the stigma of it because society won't tolerate any deviance from the mea culpa routine. We inherited a cross to bear, and any sign of wanting to shrug that off is simply not tolerated, and words like 'racist' get thrown around before anyone even asks 'why?'

We're not equal to each other, sure. I can get behind that. But one side is not universally more disadvantaged than another, either. We're unequal in different ways. In that sense, I guess we are sort-of equal in the sense that we each get handed some bullshit in areas we shouldn't be handed bullshit in, but until the bar is set at a position where everyone can reach it at the same damn level across the board, granting more special stuff to one side is ludicrous, and pretending that whitey has his boot on everyone's neck is shortsighted to the point of lunacy.

(FWIW, this is the same reason that I disagree with Obergefell. Yes, let's create another class of citizens to grant special legal statuses to rather than just saying something as simple as 'marriage as a legal institution makes no sense, so we're going to simply say that any two adults who wish to enter a domestic partnership can, under simple contract law, and leave this term 'marriage' to mean whatever people want it to mean for them'. Because insulating one group never breeds hostility or causes problems, and there's no way we'll be facing any future backlash from that. Right?)

Mietze's advice is great, especially the part about doing your gen-ed work at a community college. It's cheaper and more reliable, and frankly, only the classes you need for your major really need to come from your main university, and only then because they have residency requirements most of the time which require you to take X number of your major classes there in order for them to award you the degree.

Me, I decided to take a riskier route. I've always had a passion for law, and wanted to be an attorney, but the kind of attorney I want to be (Civil Rights/Civil Liberties) is absolutely not where any sort of realistic money is at. But about halfway through my polisci degree, I had a realization. As much as I'd love to practice that sort of law in any meaningful way, what I'd really like to do more than that is teach.

Except, law professors are some of the most competitive fields in the nation, especially given that lawyers are now less in demand than they were.

So now I have to take a gamble. Get my BA in PoliSci, and apply to law school at one of the satellite universities that I'm attending, wherein I will pursue a joint J.D/Ph.D program in Law and Political Science, and then spend the next two years in a Civil Rights/Civil Liberties LL.M. program followed by a Jurisprudence LL.M.

Why? Because it'll distinguish me from other candidates, and give me a fuckton of publications under my belt that show I'm a serious academic as well as a competent attorney. Which is what law schools are looking for when they go to hire professors, who make a surprisingly decent salary. But that's assuming that I stay on top of my shit the whole way (much easier, admittedly, since i'm not 18 and I know damn good and well what lies down this road).

But with the Ph.D in my pocket, if all else fails, I can fall back to teaching PoliSci, which is the next best thing, or possibly go into politics myself.

So really, anything you wanna do that's less risky than -that-? I'd say go for. Especially if you find something you're really passionate about.

@Luna said:

I highly recommend Lynda. I get access for free with my school. Maybe your school offers that too. It's nice.

Lynda is seriously boss. If you haven't checked it out, you should.

@Cobaltasaurus

Really, I don't think anyone should go to college right out of high school. It's a terrible idea. You need some real world experience before you have an idea what you want to do/what your passions are in that real world. High school is not the place to learn that, while they're busy cramming knowledge down your throat that most of us will never use.

The lies my teachers told me still boggle the mind, and had I gone to college right out of high school, no way would I have ever picked Political Science, or Law, and I wouldn't be pursuing minors in Legal Philosophy and Spanish. Those are decisions that young adults just should not be making until they see what the world is like.

Was told about this place by a friend. Wanted to comment on something. It was like, 4am and I'd been up for two days trying to hammer out a term paper from scratch since my original idea turned out to be unworkable, and it was a 400-level class. Literally everything I tried, failed, so finally when I had run out of ideas I sort of jokingly typed 'Derp' into the thing and amazingly, it took it. Since it was easy to remember I stuck with it.

I've been trolling Spotify's Top 100 and Viral 100 charts for Hispanophone countries so I can get some actual listening practice, since I live in the most Whitebread town in the USA. Argentina's list never seems to have much rock-rock on it, but it has some nice alt rock and pop stuff that is very entertaining.

I will look at these, too. I may hit you up for some suggestions.

@Insomnia said:

...stop fucking buying smart tvs phones for old dumb people!

This was my Customer Service rallying cry. If the phone you use is smarter than you, you need a more basic phone.

I liked Hateful Eight.

But in other news, has anyone else seen 10 Cloverfield Lane yet? Am I the only one who was seriously impressed with that movie? I mean, 3 people in a bunker, can't be that great right? Wrong. Laughs, tears, horror, suspense. That movie has everything. Just the right mix of dread and really, actually funny humor, and then a sudden ramp up into overdrive when it turns out to be not very fucking funny anymore. It even has an incredibly creative, intelligent, believable lead female character.

@Bobotron

Sooooort of.

Revealing how, though, would be spoilers.