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What’s something you’ve done recently that you’re proud of / want to show off?
It can be anything; a small or big accomplishment, a project you‘re working on, or anything else you’re proud of.
It can be anything; a small or big accomplishment, a project you‘re working on, or anything else you’re proud of.
I gave 4 hot-dogs to a homeless guy (two one day, two on the second). He lives near my apartment, very friendly and awesome. Clearly does not use drugs or alcohol. Very thin.
I think I'll just give 60 BRLs a month to the hot-dog stand so they give two hot-dogs a day for him. The hot-dog lady is very nice to him and I trust she'll honor the deal.
Thank you for this. Not enough of us take the time to consider those in need. My wife was homeless when I met her, so this is a topic very close to my heart. Sometimes even the simplest gesture such as a couple hot dogs, some spare change, an old jacket, a blanket or even just a kind word can save someone’s life.
It’s very hard because I don’t wanna give people money for drugs, and even if I give food for an addict I know that’s just money he’s saving for crack. But this dude is alright.
I’d love to know your history with your wife ;)
My wife is the most interesting person I’ve ever met, I’ve tried to get her to write an autobiography but she won’t. I seriously don’t know how I ended up with her, but I am thankful everyday for it. Trying to explain her history would be a disservice to her, but I’ll try to give a very condensed version.
My wife is the youngest of four children. Her father is the youngest of 16 and an immigrant from Ecuador. His family was very influential and while not politicians, many past politicians could be found at their parties. Her mother was born in Connecticut but was raised in Puerto Rico. Her parents met while her mom was a nurse in the ER in Los Angeles and almost killed her dad after he had heart issues while screwing one of his professors at UCLA. We didn’t find out until a couple years ago that her mom divorced an Israeli soldier that she had met and married while he was on vacation, to marry her father after a couple months.
My wife likes to describe her childhood as a mix between the movie Kids and I Love Lucy on crack. No one knows (or at least will admit) what happened, but when she was 4 she fell (maybe pushed) out a 2nd story window and broke her skull. She was in a coma for a week until a person (changes between a man and woman depending on who you ask) came into her hospital room to pray over her, never to be seen again. My wife remembers waking up from the coma, but nothing before that.
Her childhood was filled with chaotic parents that are the most narcissistic people I’ve ever met. Fist fights and thrown dishes were a regular occurrence. When she was 15, she was arrested for shoplifting a teddy bear for one of her close friends that was in the hospital with leukemia. By then she was regularly drinking alcohol, smoking pot and snorting cocaine. Her brothers had been in and out of homelessness and the courts and unbeknownst to her, her parents made a plea deal with the judge. After a “vacation” to snowboard in Whitefish, Montana, she was dropped at a facility where she became a ward of the state. The stories she has are chilling and we once saw a former classmate of her on the Montel Williams show talking about some of the horrors (which is how I first found out about what she had been through).
I met her a month or so after graduating the program and becoming an emancipated minor (she was 17). She had tried to move back in with her parents, but the chaos has only amplified after one of her brothers had rode his bike onto the freeway in front of a semi truck in a suicide attempt (he’s schizophrenic after dipping his hand in a jar of LSD on a dare, her other brother is also schizophrenic due to drugs). She was couch surfing when she could, sleeping on benches when needed. We met at a birthday party for a friend of hers/ girlfriend of one of my friends. She hid the fact that she was homeless from me for the first couple months we dated. After she cried to me that a guy friend expected sex in exchange for letting her sleep on a couch, I gave her the first month’s rent and security deposit for a room (the original plan was she would pay me back when she could since I had money due to working 60 hours per week to help my parents out). I didn’t find out until years later, but she had asked a friend who did hits (aka killed people) for a meth dealer to threaten that guy for trying to take advantage of her (there was some other fucked up shit that happened as well). All the while, she almost broke up with me because I wouldn’t have sex with her until she was 18 (I was 20).
A few months before she turned 19, she got pregnant. We found out together at a Planned Parenthood clinic. I’ll never forget her turning white as a ghost and then screaming as loud as she could while we were driving out of there. I told my parents while my dad was getting ready for work. He shook his head in disgust without saying a word and left for work while my mom got super excited over the idea of becoming a grandma. I was with her when she told her parents. Her mom was in shock, her dad demanded an abortion and one of her brother’s offered to babysit when he wasn’t too busy in Zion.
I quit my job managing a pizza place to work as an electrician and enrolled at a fantastic university for engineering. I worked 4 days a week, went to school 2 days and over the years she worked evenings as a Certified Nurses Assistant, a barista and multiple sales jobs. We were super fortunate that her mom knew the system and got us enrolled in food stamps and Medicaid. After I got my Bachelors degree, she went back to school and got hers. We both now have Masters degrees (and tons of student loan debt).
Lots of other stuff has happened in that time as well. We’ve had our ups (2 kids, vacations, bonding experiences, etc) and downs (depression, anxiety, fights, she broke her skull again, etc) and have come close to calling it quits, but 15 years later we are still together and even more in love than ever before. At least that’s what she confessed to me the other day before I started crying and confessed I wouldn’t be on this earth without her (I had attempted suicide once before meeting her and she stopped me before I could try again a couple times throughout our marriage). Now she is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in EMDR and trauma/crisis intervention (on good days I tease her that I trained her), I am a R&D engineer and our kids are happy and healthy.
I apologize for writing too much and probably having errors, but I was a bit drunk and on mobile when I wrote this
I know my comment is going to sound pathetic to some people, afterall, you're doing a good gesture but:
Regardless, thank you for being a compassionate human being.
I agree with you. But the guy is literally starving. It's better than nothing, and I don't have much money. I could give him something else but would probably not be much better. Healthy food can be expensive. A hot dog is 1 BRL, which is the equivalent to 0.24 USD. It's really affordable for me.
But I will take your comment into consideration. My own nutrition is not very healthy at all, so I don't really know what to give him.
Eating hotdogs every day may not be the healthiest for someone, but it's better than them starving. And all things considered (cost per calorie, effort required to acquire every day, etc.), I suspect donating hotdogs from a street vendor might actually be a surprisingly reasonable option here.
I started making fermented pickles and sauerkraut! I read the book "The art of fermentation" and was inspired! Next up is raw honey mead :)
My cousin brews beer and made some raw honey mead once. He had to let it sit in the bottles for a year before it got to a point where he was willing to let others try it, because it was too harsh. At that point, it tasted like a fruity sake. Not at all what I was expecting, but good nonetheless.
Yeah I've had some dry meads before... I kind of want to try mixing in some fruits to add more of a sweet flavor. Not sure if that'll make it harder though.
Beer is really fun. Your cousin sounds like a chill person! What got them into fermenting things?
My cousin is super chill! He’s a California redneck that’s into metal, and full of tattoos, but is genuinely one of the nicest persons you’ll ever meet. He got I to brewing because him and his roommates were drinking everyday and he figured it would be cheaper if he made his own. Now that he’s older, he only drinks on the weekends but still brews his own beer, mead and moonshine.
I got a library card a month ago, and last week I finally put it to use and checked out a book! This seems ridiculous to even type out, but I haven't been in a real library since I was in high school (I'm 23) and I tend to procrastinate on lots of different things.
Libraries are excellent! I "discovered" them a few months ago, and have certainly become addicted. If you're in the states, you can use the Libby app to check out ebooks on an ebook reader/etc.
I can get through a book a week just by squeezing in 20-40 minutes of reading per day, usually just before going to bed, plus maybe an extra hour or two on a weekend. Don't let reading feel like procrastination: read what you like, and read during times where you would normally procrastinate.
Also, if you only have school reading as a basis of what you like to read, try to explore other genres. Schools tend to be curriculum/classics focused, and don't do a great job of exposing you to some idea of the wider variety of what's out there. I have found that I really like memoirs, which I wasn't really exposed to in school.
I'm not in school at the moment (and not even working) so I've got a lot of time on my hands to do some reading. Gonna try to finish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Bruh that's excellent! I didn't use mine for years and then one day I found it and started using it again. Honestly, I'd recommend to get into the habit and don't be too hard on yourself if you falter or aren't able to finish a book in time. Just by trying your bettering yourself.
Thanks for the encouragement! I used to be a real bookworm as a kid, but that kinda tapered off when I grew up and got online.
That's fair. I've found that online reading is great to get to know a subject, but to really dig down deep into it is when I get into book territory.
I've been making strides in cutting down on my redditing/tildes-ing.
A while back I read a review of Atomic Habits that was basically a cliff notes of the book and realized I had a bad habit of browsing reddit for too long in the morning before work. So I set up a daily cron job to add a localhost entry for reddit.com in /etc/hosts. In the mornings I also started getting ready for the day in a different bathroom so that I wouldn't pass my laptop on the way to brush my teeth and be tempted to "just check the time" (which invariably ended with me loading up reddit).
In the past week or so I did a few things to cut down on my redditing even more and also started trying to cut down on tildes browsing. I tweaked the cron job so that it disables tildes in addition to reddit, and I rescheduled it to run hourly instead of daily. I have DNS caching disabled in my browser, and with page caching this setup is surprisingly good at interrupting my redditing/tildes-ing at a natural breaking point -- If I clicked through a link, viewed it, and couldn't click back to the reddit page because my cron job happened to run, I would probably get frustrated and disable the hosts entry, but with page caching that tends to happen when I'm done with one page and try to load a new one. Since I haven't seen the new page yet there's nothing on it I'm looking forward to checking out, so I don't get frustrated by a browser error signalling me to take a break and do something productive.
I also changed how easy it is for me to pull up certain multireddits that I tend to passively browse, but in order to explain how I did that I need to explain my browsing habits a bit. I have Firefox keyword bookmarks set up so that I can type
r *subreddit*in the url bar to go to /r/subreddit, andm *multireddit*to go to one of my multireddits. I realized that whenever there was a pause in my browsing, I would reflexively open a new tab with Ctrl+T and go to one of two multireddits withm lolorm awwand just work my way through the low-effort content in those multireddits. Looking back it's frustratingly insidious how often I would do this ... like I'd finish some task, look up from my laptop thinking "what next?", meanwhile I've subconsciously typed seven keystrokes and when I look back down there's a bunch of links to memes and gifs or puppies and kittens.So anyway, to break that habit I just renamed my "lol" multireddit to "humorous" and my "aww" multireddit to "adorable". It sounds silly, but just that little change has done wonders for my browsing habits. Breaking my muscle memory and forcing myself to type just a little bit more to get to vapid content is enough make me to stop and think "wait a minute, maybe there's something better I could be doing with my time". And it's had cascading effects -- I'm finding myself visiting fewer specialized hobby subreddits and tildes less because I'm no longer going to them in search of more content after consuming those two multireddits.
I finally got a GUI attached to my toy roku remote app: https://github.com/crespyl/rust-roku
I've been a fan of QT/QML for a while (long time KDE user), but have never actually written anything using them, and until relatively recently the mismatch between Qt's advanced C++ style and Rust has made using Qt from Rust rather awkward at best. Thankfully qmetaobject exists now, which made things surprisingly easy.
I cut a bunch of pieces of wood and did seemingly well on a physics quest (quiz/test intermediary assessment). They are little, and very inconsequential, but they make me not feel like I'm a complete fraud. So I'm happy with them.
I enjoy making maps but havent done much for the past year or so for multiple reasons. A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine was talking about the tabletop system/setting he has been working on and now we are working on making a map together, which often times breaks down to me saying "thats not how things work" and him replying with "I dont care, its cool", and then I add it to the map because its his world and actually pretty dang cool.
He has been thinking of the story before the geography so trying to fit this together in a realistic (or at the very least believable way) on a map has been a fun challenge.
here is the fairly early map, no political boundaries have been added yet and the regions and stylization will probably change a good few times more but so far Im pretty happy with it and he seems to be as well, especially since the only real visual reference he gave me to work off of was this
I found out about the book Crafting Intrepreters a bit ago thanks to a comment @skybrian made about it, and having been going through it for a while now.
I'm only in the first half of the book so far, but I've still been having a blast. The creation of programming languages has been something I've wanted to learn about for ages, and this book does an absolutely excellent job of both teaching and presenting it all throughout. I recently made it past the hurdle of Turing-completeness as well, and I can't undersell how awesome it feels to have written a language – however meager it may be – that is so capable.
learning to cook new things. all homemade naan, a couple masala's, gyros (minus store bought pita bread), american chili, jumbalaya, biscuit breakfast sandwiches, burger variations, fajitas, pizza. i've gotten great feedback on everything, and there's rarely any leftovers