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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)W
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10
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462
Joined
2 yr. ago

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  • 3, but the pajamas erasure here is unfortunate.

  • Oh, Peppa is a total asshat, but she'd generally have to eat shit in a way certain other kids' animation asshats didn't (coughcalilloucough). There was enough of old-school cartoon and comic strip tropes from Warner Brothers shorts and Peanuts that it wasn't the worst show to endure.

  • Daddy Pig was pretty badass when the wolf family moved to town.

  • I'm a few years out from that age range, but Caillou, Ryan's Toy Reviews, and motherfuckin' Blippi made Peppa look like Shakespeare.

  • Some of the jokes in this show seem targeted to adults, which makes no sense, as absolutely nothing in this show is watchable to anyone above the age of 4.

    Clearly you never saw the one where Peppa is a stone-cold bitch when she realizes everybody but her can whistle or learn within seconds.

  • If only we knew where she got her name...

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  • I haven't revisited it in some time, but I loved Northern Exposure as a teen. Shit, I even applied to (but didn't attend) The University of Alaska Fairbanks from Florida. They called to make sure I wasn't just fucking with them, but I don't think the admissions person had it in them to put on the hard sell.

  • I've had many laptops over the years, from the original eeePC to 17" portable workstations, and the smallest I personally found to be "usable" on a daily basis were in the 12" class; I used a Sony Z505 throughout law school. Get that size with a usable keyboard and touchpad. Anything reasonably modern with 8GB of RAM should be able to putz around in Linux as a secondary device.

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  • If it’s within your means, could y’all take a long trip out that way?

    This is a very good idea, again, if they have means, though it's probably not absurd if he's looking to buy. AirBnB's in Wyoming aren't super common, but there are options, and frankly most of them are probably "easy mode" in the sense that they're close to SOMETHING. Get a feel for what it would be like to be stuck there doing your shopping, finding something to eat, finding something to do. Drive to the nearest hospital, then imagine doing it frequently or while in a lot of pain.

    Maybe it will be fine, even for ten or fifteen years, but they're absolutely right to take this one slow and be wary. I know Massachusetts is pretty built up, but it's not fully paved. I wonder if OP might float the idea of moving another 20-30 minutes farther out and finding a little patch of ground? Or doing something SUPER crazy like moving to New Hampshire? 🤣

    As another alternative, if he's determined to have mountains, something just outside Denver or even, sigh, Salt Lake City would blunt some of the biggest issues. Wyoming has almost literally nothing. Cheyenne metro has around 100k people, smaller than Lowell, MA.

    Just to add, my very bookish aunt and uncle moved to the Appalachian foothills outside Charlotte after they both retired from government jobs in DC. After a couple of years of dealing with rural bullshit like annoying neighbors and poor infrastructure, they moved into suburban Charlotte and seem happier.

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  • As everyone else has said, this is a pretty normal hangup, and if it's really where you plan to live for the foreseeable future, only time will wear down the edges of that anxiety. It sounds like your parents raised you to be very open and you have an honest relationship with them and open invitation to live with them until you find a path that takes you elsewhere. Frankly, that's great. My own daughter is a pre-teen but honestly I think we're on a fairly similar path, but that's more because it's what feels like the right thing to do and the right way to treat someone, compared to the arbitrarily rigid households my wife and I grew up in. It doesn't make make it magically not-alien.

    It's only been a month and he likely grew up in a different style of household. Honestly, in the US at least, the communities that most commonly do multi-generational living are very much not the ones okay with unmarried partners staying over. That's a pretty significant cultural disconnect, and it's going to be a while before he gets over it and truly believes that your parents are as okay with it as you claim. It's probably going to require them to be almost comically over the top about it being okay (which has its own social hazards, LOL), or else it's going to require baby steps. A trip together could help, as someone else mentioned. Or, a movie night that runs long and he stays in a spare bedroom. Eventually, with exposure and with a relationship between the two of you that proves to be solid over time, he may come to feel that it's less awkward or disrespectful. He might also be a bit (overly?) self-conscious about the slight age difference in front of people whose primary job over the last 20 years has been keeping you safe.

    So yeah, he's sort of bringing his hangups into the relationship in a way you likely find frustrating, but I wouldn't worry about it, certainly not until it's been a good bit longer. It's a common thing, coming from an honest place (and as mentioned, anxiety+expectations could create a lot of issues around the very intimacy you want to promote). In the meantime, it's fairly easy to work around, especially since you do have the kind of relationship with your parents that makes staying at his place unremarkable. Eventually, yes, he should grow to trust you and your parents enough to believe you all when you say it's fine, and if that's still not enough then to have the kind of open conversation with you as his partner to understand why it's not going to happen. For now, just keep doing things to make him comfortable at your place, but for the most part I'd let this one go.

  • Ohhh, we got a sumgai over here. Nothing super fancy in my collection, topping out with probably a mid-range conical nib Sheaffer lever-fill, but I still regret selling my little marbled M200 with nib changed out for that sweet solid gold Pelikan BB.

  • If I really wanted to go HAM, about one third of a Norbauer Seneca. For me in reality, my laser engraver, 3D printer, soldering station, and other tools I typically use to do keyboard projects probably all come together to be about EUR1000.

    Would that it 'twere my only hobby.

  • Chocolate and cinnamon creme, to read the image. I reckon the goal is for it to taste a bit like Mexican Hot Chocolate, which is generally delicious.

  • Maybe something like you get as many bases as you have runners on base, plus one. Leave it in the game as a universal positive, but make it anticlimactic unless you've got guys playing small ball first.

    Baseball in general just seems like it's as close to a "solved game" as you're going to get in an athletic contest. Analytics were just too powerful for a game so focused on discrete events with limited active participants.

  • But yes thats the point I was trying to make too.

    Fair enough. Pro-Rel has certain direct consequences that make a salary cap untenable, but I can see how it's the whole system of a pyramid that includes pro-rel that you were getting at. I am actually fairly protective of the American system as a completely alternative system of professionalization that emerged fairly organically here and actually has some advantages to go with its disadvantages, but you can't just pick and choose pieces of them to insert into the other. A salary cap in UEFA is laughable. FFP is already eye-rollingly abused.

    Absolute mind fuck.

    Yeah, it's absolutely byzantine. The legal structure of MLS is bizarre as well. Technically, it's still a single entity, though de facto the "investor operators" now work almost as independently as traditional American franchise owners, but the roster rules absolutely reflect their legal origin as intracompany transfers and "funny money" credits, all filtered through a traditional US-sports collective bargaining agreement, and goosed whenever a sufficiently big star wants to play out a few years here.

    And the college system helps too.

    The number of players coming up to MLS through college has shrunk quite a bit over the years, and the number of impactful players doing so has cratered in the men's game. It's basically now a place to fill out a few spots on the bottom of the roster and the reserve team, and as an occasional pleasant surprise among the late developers whose pro prospects at 18 were bleak enough that a college degree seemed the prudent choice. Once MLS realized they could make player development pay for itself with academies sitting on top of the already lucrative American youth setups college soccer was doomed to be an also-ran. Really only American football and men's and women's basketball depend heavily on the College system, where those sports are financially self-sustaining, so in exchange for not getting players brought up in your own style of play, the pro leagues get 100% free player development, including bearing the risk for injuries. Baseball too, though to a lesser extent and "minor league baseball" as a development path for teenaged players from across baseball-playing countries is still perfectly viable. I am less well-versed in Ice Hockey, but it seems like a hybrid system of independent youth clubs, some college, and European clubs.

  • American football:

    Universal:

    1. No TV timeouts. The game is already insanely stop-start. Get your shit together, TV broadcasters, and make it work as-is.
    2. No "wounded duck" pass interference penalties on poorly thrown balls. Defenders in pass coverage should be entitled to their existing vector of motion.
    3. Players leaving for injury must be out for 4 plays or more, maybe the length of the existing drive. Something though. One play is not sufficient to dissuade simulation for tactical advantage.

    Stuff to try in college or the spring league:

    1. No radio communication. American football can be too regimented sometimes, and old men treating young men like chess pieces is part of that.
    2. Limited substitutions per play if there is no is no change in phase. You come out, fine, but you're not going back in until the next time your team is on offense/defense/special teams. This will also enhance numbers 1 and 3.
    3. Even shorter play clock. Keep it moving. Adjust when the clock runs if you want to keep the number of snaps consistent.
    4. Remove kicking entirely. They're vestigial minigames at this point that could be replaced with throwing the ball. Workshop it in the offseason to see how small the goalposts need to be to replicate current play balance.
    5. College only: Admit they're professionals, make them employees with enforceable (and purchasable) contracts, and route enough money into the non-revenue sports to keep them viable. It is what it is; don't let the creeping in of sensible labor practices destroy the sport. Use the inevitable anti-trust exemption you'll get to mandate some sort of nexus between the players and the schools (lifetime tuition waiver? part-time enrollment?), but stop acting like the already snobbish and laughable "amateurism" of the NCAA is even a viable concept.

    Stuff to bring in that would make the game weird to modern eyes but might help reduce head injuries:

    1. Mandate wide splits on the lines, two-point stances, and a wider neutral zone so that players are not exploding into each other head-to-head. A snap should look like a sumo match, not two horny rams on a hillside.
    2. To allow for number 1, make "1 yard to go" the minimum for a given offensive snap.
    3. Remove most/all of kicking again, though with the idea of reducing high combined-velocity impacts rather than just because it's anachronistic. Treat an incomplete pass on fourth down like it was a punt. Give up on the idea of kickoff returns. Field goals could stay, but subject to the same scrimmage rules as other plays.
    4. Consider whether every play from scrimmage should require the Offensive Line's first step should be backwards or lateral. They already are on many passing plays, but making it mandatory would further encourage upright play that's often ineffective technique today. The running game will be severely affected, but it is what it is and "every run play looks like a draw play" is a small price if we want to save American football over the long term.
    5. Revamp tackling rules. Make it rugby style and penalize hits above the shoulder harshly. Consider whether big hits resulting in heads thumping against turf are common enough to be banned altogether.
    6. Consider removing helmets so players have a sense of preservation over their own heads, but if not that, then go with something much lighter and more ice-hockey style so the helmet is not as tempting as a weapon and doesn't encourage a false sense of invulnerability. It was for all the wrong reasons, but the "Extreme Football League" (nee "Lingerie Football League") uses this type of headgear.
  • HEMA: I'm right here!