RaiderOfALostTusken
No bio...
User ID: 50
RaiderOfALostTusken
5d ago
There's nothing fancy - i looked like one of those kids in those "preteen you're arguing with on the computer" memes. I let my hair just sit flat on my head, across my forehead, 0 effort.
My mom especially begged me to throw some wax or gel, or let it get cut in a more stylish way and I just thought it was dumb, but a good hairstyle can really improve confidence and how people interact with you. Took me too long to figure out.
RaiderOfALostTusken
14d ago
It's funny - I asked my optometrist relative if he had "noticed" anything, like no studies per se, but a gut feeling of something you've realized looking at dozens of eyes a day for years and years. He said he was almost certain that kids not spending enough time outside was linked to why more kids need glasses today. So I'm always trying to do the opposite, get my kids outside for reasonable increments depending on UV index, etc.
Recently some govt org here in Canada made the recommendation that kids be encouraged to participate in lightly risky activities, and that was always a thing I've tried to do. There are some things where I think - as long as the risk of this going bad doesn't result in long term damage, I'm fine with it. My wife stays at home which makes a lot of this much easier, because we know our kids and their limitations really well. It seems to work out well.
RaiderOfALostTusken
30d ago
As a parent, parents who "gentle parent" almost universally have awful kids to be around. Our kids are generally very well behaved (twins age 5) to the point that it's not uncommon to get complimented at the store about it. We follow the "reprove betimes with sharpness, followed by an increase in love" approach. We like being around our kids.
Whenever my kids have play dates with gentle parented kids, the amount of yelling, mean things, stealing toys, hitting, breaking things (ours or their own) is genuinely shocking. But you know, even our kids sometimes act out, what's annoying is that there is no discipline in the moment. The moms just take the kids and be like "ohhh dear oh no, are you having some big feelings?" And then kid goes right back to it after sitting with his mom for a few seconds. Sadly, these moms also often complain that they can't control their kids! We saw one really awful moment with one of these where a 4 year old smacked his mom at Church (hard enough that people gasped). She got embarassed (understandably) but then kinda just went, "aww, yeah, he just does that haha", again, understandable when tons of people are around but, i know for a fact that it happens at home too.
like, i guess we just have no qualms or even see it as a point of pride to calmly and sternly take our kids out of a situation to correct the behavior. And i think it shows! And we vastly prefer to hang out with kids of parents who are more like us!
RaiderOfALostTusken
30d ago
I live in Southern AB and had a chance to talk to a border guard recently. He mentioned the process of "flagpoling" - i guess new arrivals (visitor visa, education etc.) Can apply for permanent residency but the process takes a few months. What they do is drive across the border to the USA, get turned back, and then just by pulling up to the canadian border on the way back, it expedites the permanent residency application to be days. The border guard said most of his time now was filling out residency applications. Seems bad imo.
RaiderOfALostTusken
13d ago
Huh, well there you go! He must have been somewhat familiar with the literature then
RaiderOfALostTusken
1mo ago
Moviebattles 2: a mod for Star Wars, Jedi Academy.
Finally, someone figured out how to do sabers vs guns in a multiplayer game. It's basically a standard class based deathmatch - various classes with abilities that you spend points to buy. You could be a bounty hunter with snipers and grenades, a sith who can jump and run and blast people with 2 handed lightning, a droideka with powerful shield and quick movement - possibilities are nearly endless. Playing on a series of movie accurate maps (seriously, the Phantom Menace hangar/throne room map...), 2 teams of various units face off to either kill everyone or complete the objective.
The lightsaber isn't a baseball bat. It's a one hit kill (unless the super battle droid opted for Cortosis!), BUT, when not in blocking stance, you are vulnerable to blaster fire. A skilled jedi could wipe out numerous trooper type units, but working together a good soldier could hold their own. The dueling as well, I never could figure out but was pretty high skill ceilinged. Really really fun, hours and hours of my youth on that.
RaiderOfALostTusken
4mo ago
One funny thing about the Daycare situation is that now everybody can afford to put their kids in, but there aren't enough daycares. My wife knows people who have been waitlisted for years in our small city. Of course, the proposed solution is to just import more workers to do this job nobody wants to, and also pay them more money which will increase the cost and competition for houses even further, and around and around we go.
RaiderOfALostTusken
1mo ago
Double Date: you get a dollar store notebook. You fill in each page of the notebook with one absurd item that doesn't exist in a store. Each couple then passes their notebook over. You go to a store and walk up to an associate, flip the page, and ask where to find "Daddy Butter" or "Snoop Dogg Goes Jewish Vol. 1", whatever it says. Basically Impractical Jokers style thing.
Taste test - go pick up different types of bottled water, french fries from different fast food places, apples, whatever and try to decide which one is best
Chopped - go get 3 random ingredients from the store for each person and challenge to make a dish. Requires reasonably stocked kitchen.
RaiderOfALostTusken
7mo ago
I just love it. It's such a funny thing, especially the part where the speaker said the "thank you for your service" incantation. I didn't think we would surpass (multiple, separate occasions) photos of our "woke dream" PM doing blackface in terms of pure lol factor, but this has to be close. The politician who got caught on a home camera peeing in a coffee mug is maybe a close 3rd. Canada politics man.
RaiderOfALostTusken
3mo ago
I'm in a similar boat as OP, and I've enjoyed his writing on education and his piece on "Wokeness", i think he's got a really good handle on cancel culture stuff, and his perspectives on media have been enjoyable even when I don't agree
RaiderOfALostTusken
9mo ago
Came across this story on Wikipedia while reading a bit about Japan's surrender in WW2 and found it really funny
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_McDilda
Long story short - an american P-51 pilot was shot down over Osaka and captured 2 days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Japanese started torturing him and threatening to kill him asking questions about "how many atomic bombs does the USA have" - to this pilot at this time, an Atomic Bomb would have been something out of an HG Wells novel, a theoretical science fiction possibility. Imagine a Japanese officer threatening to cut off your head unless you explained how many Warp Drives the USA had..."we have warp drives?" - but not only that, they then demanded that he explain how the atomic bomb works - to which his explanation is actually not half bad in my opinion. He also claims that the USA has 100s of atomic bombs because the guy isn't accepting 0 as an answer, and my understanding is that this intel helped partially lead to Japan's surrender.
He's so convincing that he gets flown in as a VIP to Tokyo where a civilian scientist realizes he's full of crap, but appears to not fully narc him out? I'm just imagining this story, finding out via your captors that some space age tech is real and then being forced to answer questions about it! Kind of funny to imagine
RaiderOfALostTusken
8mo ago
To add my 2c, my experience with this was that I served an LDS mission from 2010-2012, which in a sense is like being cryogenically frozen (culturally) for 2 years. If anyone doesn't know, briefly - you don't (at least, you're not supposed to...) watch movies, listen to popular music, play video games, at the time browse the internet (missionaries now are permitted Facebook for contacting and proselyting, which is a whole thing but big no-no back then.). We had a cellphone but this was a new thing for missionaries and it had only the most rudimentary calling ability. I remember we gained the ability to "text" about halfway through which was very exciting.
Prior to my mission I enjoyed surfing the internet, I remember spending a lot of time on sites like Failblog, and many of the other sites under that umbrella. Facebook was still somewhat cool and I spent time on there, but that was a young people thing. I remember near the end of my mission one of the older members of a congregation I was in had an iPhone 4S, which had this thing on it called "Siri" which was a real life virtual assistant! But before my mission, the only people who had iPhones were like the cool tech bros I was friends with, so that felt like a bit of a shift.
Another thing was getting home and my family members telling me about the song "Party Rock Anthem" and "Shuffling", some one-hit wonder named Gotye, and Kony 2012. The sense I got was that a lot of stuff that maybe used to be more limited to more Online people (as it were in the late 2000s), was now breaching "containment" of sorts and virality was extending more to the normies. I don't know if that's an accurate read, perhaps I wasn't aware enough pre-2009 to see that it was always there in that way, but I think it was a little different. I remember Pants on the Ground and Antoine Dodson ("hide yo kids"), but that was 2010! I thought it was earlier. Is there an online meme "inflection point" as far as normie virality goes, and when was it?
RaiderOfALostTusken
7mo ago
As a member of a professional association, there is a sense where I can see where they are coming from. I also feel like there is no way if he was using the same invective against say, Nazis or Donald Trump (like calling him an odious thing, or saying "Not Beautiful!" About him), that he would be in this situation. In fact, I've seen him say pretty rude things about anons on twitter (much to the consternation of them) but that didn't make it into the complaints...
However, it comes with the territory. If you want to be a member of the College you gotta pay the jizya, which is to say, cool it. I do enjoy the irony in complaint a, which could likely become an official government recommendation (under MAID) when/if they extend it to mentally ill people. It may literally become a College practice to tell patients that "they are welcome to leave at any time"
RaiderOfALostTusken
7mo ago
The church statement was confirmed by Deseret News, and KUTV. It originated from an employee named Doug Anderson, and at least I'm tapped into rumors in LDS-land that yeah, it's bad and the Church is pissed at Ballard. If the Church would like to make a statement disavowing the Vice article, they have had 5 days to do so and have not.
RaiderOfALostTusken
2mo ago
I wonder if the whole "lottery" aspect to the tickets also made this go crazy. They were so exclusive! I know people who couldn't get tickets. I know someone who bought tickets online (Stubhub maybe?) And flew to brazil and when they landed found out their tickets didn't exist! There were all these stories and tales of great sacrifice to go to these concerts.
RaiderOfALostTusken
5mo ago
I thought The Lego Movie was a innovative use of CGI that made something genuinely impressive, especially how well they got the lighting figured out. It made sense narratively that it should look like that, and acted as a good contrast for the later emotional live action beats.
RaiderOfALostTusken
3mo ago
Our first miscarriage was a major blessing because up to that point we weren't even sure that my wife could get pregnant. So it was sad, but ultimately we saw it as a positive. And wouldn't have known without early detection
RaiderOfALostTusken
9mo ago
Most recently, Top Gun: Maverick appears to buck this trend. The mentor/mentee relationship is Tom Cruise/Miles Teller, and then at the end of the movie Tom Cruise realizes "No I actually don't really have to hand things off to you". They kind of both save each other.
RaiderOfALostTusken
7mo ago
I should have clarified, it was refreshing to watch a movie that wanted me to have fun, and not preach to me or annoy me. I am glad it wanted to entertain, and wish more movies had that as their sole aim
RaiderOfALostTusken
1yr ago
I want to double this and kind of ask the question in a different way:
If someone says: "I am a woman, and I want to be a man" - we put the person through an intense, and experimental regimen of hormones and surgery. We do massive amounts of work, with a few high profile regretters. The process seems to carry a high risk of infertility?
If someone says: "I am gay, and I want to be straight" - nope. Sorry. Technology just isn't there. You have to accept who you are. There is nothing we can do, nothing we can try. "But I really don't want to be-" stop internalizing your own homophobia. Your lived experience here is wrong. - is this an exaggeration? I'm not trying to strawman here.
Really in all directions, I feel like I have seen a lot of people in my life go from evidently and obviously straight to gay. Like, if they were closeted, they were Daniel Day Lewis level acting and hiding their true feelings for decades. Even talking to one wife just shrugged and was like "it literally makes no sense". I have never seen someone go from gay to straight (sorry, I don't believe Milo). Even members of my faith who do the "i'm gay but I'm not acting on it" don't try to pretend that they became straight. Why? If it's a spectrum, and fluid, why does it only ever seem to go in one direction?
I hope this doesn't come across as hostile or sarcastic - I'm genuinely curious how a lot of this stuff works inside the brain/body, and if there was a way to change it how that might change a lot of things. I get why on some levels we don't - awful stories of conversion therapy attempts from the 70s and 80s seem to have really hurt a lot of people. Maybe there are people who had a successful time and we just don't hear about them. But I'm guessing the outcomes were negative, and the health establishment isn't willing to risk it again. But they seem to be willing to risk it for other things - and if it's consenting adults as opposed to minors, then well...give er? I'm assuming there is still a market for "Christian guy who doesn't want to be gay", but maybe not as much.
RaiderOfALostTusken
5mo ago
On bad service, I did read some discussion that this is downstream of the tight labor market. Service jobs are struggling to hire good people because good people would rather get other jobs if they could. So they have to hire crappy people or nobody at all. I'm also seeing anecdotally that teenagers are delaying drivers licenses and jobs, so I think the talent pool is smaller on that side.
There was some talk about service being the best during recessions when all your laid off engineers/etc got jobs at Dairy Queen and crushed it.
RaiderOfALostTusken
5mo ago
I posted a while ago asking for advice about switching from a job I really love, to a job with much higher pay (and apparently vacation time) and full remote. Well, I ended up getting that job, and start in a few weeks. So now I'm trying to set up a nice home office so that the remote work part doesn't turn into a negative. I have a sense of what kind of aesthetic I like, but I'm trying to find good artwork or desk decorations to add the final touches. Anyone know a good place or site to get inspiration for this? is the answer just pinterest/etsy or is there something I'm overlooking?
RaiderOfALostTusken
6mo ago
We met at a Church youth conference. The conference put all the youth in different groups (EFY for anyone LDS or adjacent) of various ages - I redshirted myself into the 14-16 group as a 16 year old so I could be the oldest, as opposed to being youngest in 16-18 group. My (now wife) was 14. We took a photo together! She was from a city 6 hours away, lost contact. The next year, she was in my sisters group and confessed that she had a crush on me...
Fast forward, I'm in my early 20s and happen to end up in her older brothers congregation. We become friends, and I make a joke about dating his sister. He mentions this to her, phone numbers get exchanged, she comes to my house and I make (very soggy) grilled cheese sandwiches for her and a friend. 9 months later we're married and we're coming up on our 8 year anniversary.
RaiderOfALostTusken
7mo ago
It felt like a movie made by someone who only wanted to entertain an audience. Like at every point they said "what would look cool or be fun?" and you think that the movie doing a "pass the torch to the younger generation" but nope, Tom Cruise is like "I will save the day" and does (with good help, satisfying like when Han Solo rescues Luke in A New Hope). Great sound, great jet footage.
Spend literally 2 minutes a day on your hair, it's going to make a huge difference and you won't look so stupid in future photos
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