What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

New house owner here, a couple of weird plumbing things I'm noticing and not sure how big of a concern they are. All of these are very sporadic.

Possibly relevant things to note, I live in the US, we do not have a basement, do have a crawlspace, are connected to the town sewer lines, have lived in the house for about 2 weeks and it was vacant for a month prior to us moving in (with occasional visits and contractors.)

1. A couple of times, but only a couple, the bathroom sinks have made a sound when flushing the toilet. Maybe once this happened with the kitchen sink but I couldn't be sure. Not sure if this is something I should be trouble shooting or I'm overthinking it.

2. We've had occasional sewer gas odors. I've run water down the second bathroom's drains just in case it was due to those being unused, but I can't tell if that fixed it because it's inconsistent. Anything else I can/should do?

3. The main suite shower is a circular rain style shower head. Occasionally, hours or even a day after using it, it'll just run water, the way you'd expect it to drain out of the shower head after turning off the shower. The internet suggested this could be just something where the water is held in the shower head until air/water pressure shifts and it can escape. It's also possible that this needs a vinegar bath to clean up some hard water scaling. Am I on the right track?

4. One of my toilets keeps running/not running when the float gets stuck. I've fixed that before, though the last time I did it, it was a rubber float on a stick and this is some plastic contraption. (I am discovering home repair makes me feel like a 72 year old grumpy old man. ) Pretty sure I can clean it and see if that fixes it, adjust the screw on it, and replace it if needed. But any tips there besides a YouTube video or two?

Never owned a house before so any advice is worthwhile.

Gonna see DIIV later this month, St. Vincent in August, and Interpol in November.

I saw TOOL earlier this year, and they were awesome, but man, their new songs and album are so much more "Ehh" than the others.

What concerts have you gone to or will go to this year?

Hey, so I'd really just like to get an idea that's been in my head for god knows how long out into a program, even if it's just a demo of what I've imagined. But I never had enough knowledge in a particular engine to just get the idea out. My main programming knowledge is from Java classes, and I've dabbled in enough in HTML/CSS, Javascript, SQL, Powershell, etc. enough to get through classes, projects, small scripts, deployments, etc, so I have programming experience from a conceptual point. But I've never really worked with GUI elements in a serious manner outside the Cocoa IDE handling all the heavy lifting. Any time I get the itch to tackle this I give GameMaker or Godot or something else a try via some tutorial, I never get to the end of it. I figured learning by example would help, but I forget most of the basics on how I'm supposed to set up an object or attribute... Then I try it the other way around where I try to learn it bottom-up and I get overwhelmed if I lose my way in the middle of a process... It's extremely frustrating, I swear I've been through this about three times in the last seven years or so.

I'm curious, has anyone had this much trouble with this? What did you do, what was your in?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I’m a software engineer with 4 years of experience in a contract position that ends in a few months, with no renewal or conversion. Previously I was laid off in December 2022 and didn’t find work until March 2023, so I’m trying to stay ahead of unemployment by applying for jobs before my contract ends.

Since January I’ve been applying to all sorts of SWE jobs, either tailored to my experience or generalist roles I can fill. I’ve had two interviews, and they were for small on-site companies in my town. One I had to turn down an offer because their company was a nightmare, and the other went with a candidate who had more experience.

I feel demoralized, frustrated, and anxious. Only two interviews in nearly 6 months? I thought the job search in 2023 was rough, but this is ridiculous. I’m confident in my ability to perform above expectations and I think if I could at least get more interviews I wouldn’t be searching for so long.

I assume my resume must be the issue so I’ve rewritten it several times, getting feedback from managers and senior employees while also feeding it through ATS scanners. It’s come a long way but as of recently they all tell me it’s a great resume. They say it should at least get me an interview. And ATS scanners aren’t telling me anything is missing.

Recently I even got an internal referral for a position through a friend of a friend, and my experience lined up nicely with the job description too. I thought this would be a sure thing, most hires come from networking rather than cold applications. Their engineering manager viewed my LinkedIn profile and I’ve since been ghosted. This experience hurt the most, because what else could they want? I feel like I’ve got a sticky note on my back that says do not hire instead of kick me!

I can’t be alone in this experience. Is anyone else on here struggling in this job market? How long can this go on for and how bad is it going to get?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I put on Hit Man last night and about an hour into - it once some romance got going - I just.. stopped caring. I realized I just don't care.

I am strictly homosexual, important to note.

It wasn't even mainly a romantic movie. Nor a bad movie. It was pretty average but I often quite like these turn-off-your-brain type action/comedies. The weird thing is that the same director made the Before trilogy which are some of my favorite movies of all time, but maybe it's just that they're better movies?

In any case, it just kind of surprised me that I had this reaction since I usually don't mind this "tier" of movies. It's not disgust or anything either! I just.. didn't care. But if it were a gay or lesbian romance, I would have definitely been super into it.

I assume I'm not alone in this. I'm just having kind of an epiphany moment here! You'd think a 30 year old who's been out for years would have had this realization a bit earlier: we/I am not the "default" target audience.

Feels pretty weird?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

This thread is for organizing a group to play Scythe online. Everyone mentioned has either been in my specific thread about Scythe months ago or mentioned it elsewhere. I FINALLY got around to getting the Steam version in addition to the Invaders from Afar dlc since it was a bundle.
I'd love to get a Discord group started so we can all finally play together and ultimately shoot the shit and have some fun.
Also I couldn't figure out how private messaging works which is embarrassing but this is way easier, anyway.
If this gets enough traction in the next couple of days I'll make us a discord group and we can go from there as far as scheduling goes. I'd also be open to other games if the group wants to do so. 🤘
@0d_billie
@guissmo
@Beowulf
@Notcoffeetable
@TreeFiddyFiddy
@ocdbear
@AugustusFerdinand
@TownshipTeleporter
@clerical_terrors
@KapteinB
@Spongey

Hi all,

I am in the middle of taking bids with my local HVAC companies and am looking for someone to nudge me in one direction or the other. For background, I bought my house in western Michigan, right off the lake Michigan coast near Grand Rapids, last Fall. My home inspection made it clear the AC would need work and I haven't started to feel the need for it until recently. I called an HVAC company out and when they said the unit was 25+ years old, I just told them to forget about even fixing it because it would be at least 10% of the cost of a new unit and still way less efficient.

So.

My natural gas furnace is also ~20 years old and the first HVAC guy said that if it broke down, it likely wouldn't pass a safety inspection. They said something about how the coils being dirty or positioned someway or something, I can't really recall 100% what the issue would be but the gist that I got was that when it breaks down, whether it be 1 year, 2 years, or 5 years, it won't be worth fixing or it will be unfixable. A new AC would be ~$6500 and a new furnace would be ~$7000.

So I started up the conversation towards installing a heat pump unit in instead of a standard AC unit. My initial thinking is that when the furnace goes, I have the back up ready to go instead. Now a heat pump unit is going to cost me around $2000 more. I don't think my plan will be to ever install a replacement furnace. Depending on what the solar assessment says, evaluating both ground mounted and roof mounted solar, will tell me how worth it is to go that route and have discounted or free heating and cooling.

Where the calculus gets tricky for me is there is the Inflation Reduction Act which will give me a $2000 tax credit for a heat pump. But that will come with buying a more expensive, and efficient unit, and I believe I will also have to completely get rid of the furnace I currently have since the total home system has to meet the efficiency standard. In addition, last month I replaced my fuse box with a 200 amp panel and if I meet the requirements to get the $2000 tax credit, I would also get $600 tax credit for the panel since I can tie them together.

All in all, I am looking at getting a more efficient unit for roughly the same price as the less efficient unit but without the natural gas furnace as either main heating, or back up heating. My hesitation is that natural gas is so cheap that it doesn't make sense financially to go heat pump only unless I have renewable energy to pair with it. But maybe I am just overthinking it? And maybe I have gotten something wrong in my calculations?

Any advice or clarifications would be greatly appreciated. I have one more quote coming this Thursday and I hope to make a decision by Friday to get the work started