Guys, I'm excited about this fancy D12 that finally arrived today. It's for tracking time, so I can keep tabs on how much time I spend on different projects (I'm a contractor, and I need to bill different projects differently). And maybe it'll keep me on task. For once in my life.
I feel like a huge dork for being excited about this.
@crawfish I'm just going to keep using the original as a very appropriate Discord emoji.
Migrating databases is my day job currently. I'd be willing to help as needed.
@too-old-for-this When my friends' son was young, still in diapers and nonverbal, he escaped one morning around 5 am. He'd disabled the lock on their sliding glass door, then closed it behind him. He'd slid open the lock on the back gate and closed that behind him. Then he trotted about two and a half blocks to play on the playground wearing nothing but a diaper.
The neighbors called CPS, of course.
And when his parents' alarm went off at 5:30 am, they had no idea what happened. He was just gone. The front door was locked. There was no sign of forced entry. It took a bit to realize how exactly he'd escaped, at which point they started canvassing the neighborhood in a panic, trying to find him. They asked the neighbors if they'd seen him, and the neighbors refused to answer. His mother still holds a grudge on that.
CPS eventually did show up with him, and he was blissfully unaware of how upset he'd made all of the adults. His father installed a lock on the sliding glass door at the top, and within a week, the kid was pushing over a chair to stand on to disable it. Eventually they did have to lock him in his bedroom at night.
@Cobalt and I met on a MU more than a decade ago, and somehow, I ended up taking her under my wing. She's an extra little sister for me; I'm an extra older sister for her. She's slept in my guest room when times were rough, and we've been through good times and bad together, sometimes from across the US.
Anyway, I'll do what I can to keep an eye on her for you guys, even as she fades from here and applies energy to other things.
And even if I haven't approved of every stupid thing she's done, I still love her for who she is. I'm very glad so many of you remember her so fondly. It makes me happy to know I'm not the only one who considers her a friend.
@kestrel said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
But the therapy I see recommended for ADHD is CBT, and my awareness of the history and proliferation of it in modern psychology leads me to be very sceptical of it.
I have done CBT with a therapist who didn't stand to profit from it in any way, and I had a really good experience with it. I was really functional for months and months afterwards, but I've found that not practicing at it means that I don't do the mindful things I'm supposed to be doing.
You can buy your own CBT workbook off of Amazon (or your local bookseller) for about $30. Some of the things in it will apply to you, and some just won't. Make sure your therapist is not an idiot who insists on following the book even when it doesn't make sense. Also, maybe don't buy from the therapist directly.
I mean, I could also pull my copy of the workbook off my bookshelf and submit some exercises semi-regularly here, sort of like group therapy. It is the kind of thing that you do want to spread out, because you want to try to practice some of the mindfulness exercises regularly. Like, for a week or so, before you up the challenge.
I feel like CBT is a great structure to use if you have a good therapist, but it's not perfect. I would definitely do it again, just to refresh it all.
@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
@greenflashlight said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
The web client is too likely to lose connection and/or stop sending me notifications.
There are also connection limitations by some work or school firewalls, but nothing widespread that I’m aware of.
There was a hospital firewall awhile back (2 years, now, maybe?) that I could not manage to use the Ares web client through. Which was frustrating, because hospitals involve a LOT of waiting, especially when you're not the patient because you're less likely to get to sleep through it all. Eventually, I just used my phone as a hotspot, because the firewall wouldn't let us watch Disney+ on the laptop, either. And we were bored.
@ganymede said in Online friends:
@wizz said in Online friends:
What factors make y'all decide to move further? Is it solely just time and trust?
I have never met anyone I MUSHed with in person for over twenty years.
I, on the other hand, recently asked someone if they were the person I'd met up with 20 years prior.
Turns out, yes. @Sunny and I had indeed met for drinks 20 years ago when she was on vacation in New Orleans, which is where I lived at the time. Her then toddler had tried to lick the French Quarter in many ways. It was delightful catching up with her.
Y'all, we old now.
@horrorhound said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
Ehhhhh. Idk man. The engineers who make theme parks are reeeeeeaaaaaal fond of CAD and whine a bunch when they get paradox from Reality.
I've done CAD on and off for 20 years now. I put myself through college doing AutoCAD drafting. I had a position for awhile where I used AutoLISP and VBA to make AutoCAD and Microsoft Office communicate very smoothly so that I could do my job in like 2 hours and then read my book for the next 6. I still do some CAD work, freelance now.
I am super judgmental about CAD drawings.
Because I've seen a lot of garbage produced by a variety of different shops, and it's clear every time you get a bad drawing that someone didn't understand anything about the software they were using. Finding things in an ostensibly 2-D drawing that don't connect because someone drew them three feet off the ground -- not that they go there, but whoever drew it had somehow screwed up a setting and said, "Whatever, it prints fine." Trying to figure out why the scale of a drawing is off and discovering it only works if you set the program to measure metric but give it Imperial measurements. Noting you cannot fit equipment into a closet, much less leave a 6" clearance, because an architect disregarded an engineer's requirements.
Generally, in my experience, people are so bad at CAD that they don't understand why their CAD doesn't correspond to Reality because they think CAD is infallible. The computer is only as smart as the user.
@jibberthehut said in Crafting Thread Part ?:
What size are these pictures?
Mine are 6" x 4.5" and 6" x 9".
@wretched My therapist handed me a pen and made me write in a blank notebook during a session once.
The ewok is having a crisis because there's thunder and he's not supposed to be in the bedroom.
(I love his snaggletoof.)
@faraday said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
This is a kid who is literally in tears over math homework because there's an insurmountable wall of awful in front of them that's keeping them from reaching their goals.
When I was a kid, my third grade teacher made us do word searches for spelling problems and I hated it. I thought it was pointless and stupid and awful, and complaining to my mother only resulted in her telling me, "Word searches are fun!"
Homework is awful as a child. It's just awful. And while I understand practicing things like speed math and handwriting, for the most part, it's unnecessary.
One of my big coping strategies for dealing with tasks I didn't like was to work with a group. This works better in college, where study groups are more of a thing. If other people are working with purpose, it helps keep me on task. Even if they're not, just having someone there to be a minor distraction helps.
Anecdotal example: When I taught university, I found grading exams to be utterly excruciating. I loathed it. If I had time to do oral one-on-ones for 250 people 4 times a semester, I sure as fuck would have. But no, so it was paper exams. So after every exam, I'd take my friend Jen out to lunch somewhere that would tolerate us taking up a table for 3 hours. And she'd sit and chat and read while I graded, and the work would get done.
Another anecdotal example: One of my students had ADD, and she had an official testing accommodation that said she needed her exams printed on yellow paper. Why? Because she'd basically formed a coping strategy that allowed her to focus on yellow paper as priority. She took her notes on yellow paper. I once left her exam, printed on its yellow paper, on my office printer, and I was so crestfallen when I realized where it was that she just smiled in delight at me for understanding how important it was and told me she'd just take it on white. Because I had, of course, offered to leave a room of 90 other students taking exams to run fetch it.
@macha I'm not sure if that's worse. It might be. Because even though you're getting paid, you know you mean nothing to them. And it's so much work trying to find work.
@macha said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Job hunting when you thought you had finally found a job to belong in.
Had a contract position last three and a half weeks. They laid me off because they were "going in a different direction." Laid on the floor and cried while the dog licked me in the face trying to figure out what was wrong.
@tori Your love makes me happy! 
I have a new update: https://github.com/OddishDoggish/asciiArt/releases/tag/v0.1.8
You can see all the buttons and there are scrollbars now. Please check it out, and if you catch any bugs, please let me know!
I will also take feature requests!
Okay, so it's not technically art, but I crafted it with math and logic, and it might help other people make art:
https://github.com/OddishDoggish/asciiArt/releases/tag/v0.1.5
This software is still in testing. It will take an image and convert it to text to be inserted into an Evennia game. No image is required, however: one can simply type and color in the upper window and click "encode" to have it converted to marked-up text. There is a button to copy directly into the clipboard. Highlighting a colored character will allow you to check its color. You can change the color of highlighted characters by clicking the color you desire. For accessibility, you may toggle tags on and off: highlight the area that should be contained in the tags and click the button. Highlighting areas that shouldn't be contained in the tags but have been marked ascii can be removed from the selection by just toggling the button.
If you have any questions or find any bugs, please let me (Sorrel@Arx) know.
Splash art is Ida Cat by Crawfish@Arx.
Sometimes I will log on while I'm working, especially if I think things are going to be slow with work.
And sometimes that doesn't work out. Work eats me. And I work from home, so I have access to all of my toys, but no time to play with them.
But I do read what I missed and try to follow up.
(I've done this on video games, too. On one contract, my boss told me he would give me a new assignment at 1 pm, so I had the morning off. So I logged onto a game, played half an hour, and then, at like 10 am, my boss was like, "HEY! I HAVE AN ASSIGNMENT NOW!" And I alt-tabbed to deal with him. And while I was dealing with him, my friend was like, "OMG, Trib died! What killed Trib?" And my spouse, who was also playing, replied, "Work. She starved to death in the base, and needs to corpse run within the base.")
@sixregrets said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
@wretched said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
@sixregrets oof
I love my Cpap, I hope mine isnt recalledThere's a list here, but it's basically all machines made by Respironics in the last decade and a bit: https://www.philips.ca/healthcare/e/sleep/communications/src-update
The key takeaway seems to be that if you're using an ozone generator to clean your machine, stop doing that. Now.
Thank you so much for posting this. Mine is recalled and they did not bother to notify me. I'm just thrilled.
Please enjoy Ozzy, my trash goblin, and his boxes.
(I cannot figure out why only the one gif seems to work. It's making me a smidge crazy. The links are https://imgur.com/n6eLaQN and https://imgur.com/f9BuYa1 for your viewing pleasure.)