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What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Very early days yet, but I met a guy on tinder who appears to check most of the boxes: intelligent, same style of humour, cute, not exceedingly taller than me (I’m only 5’9”), empathetic, and importantly, looking for the same thing.
It only took us a single day to move off Tinder to other apps, so I’m hopeful this might be something that evolves into a longer term thing.
Downside! He’s 45 minutes away by plane. Although that’s not entirely unsolvable. Other downside? It’s really fucking up my work ethic and focus on other things! Hopefully that’ll pass over time.
Oh! Entirely unrelated to all of the above. I booked in for my first private pilot license lesson: effect of controls on flight (yes, some of you may already know me as the paraglider guy—a better term would be aviation nut).
Recently I decided I’d be much happier looking back on my life if I was able to fly aircraft versus having a couple of grand saved in investment funds, so that made the decision quite easy. Whether I want to go beyond a PPL into more serious opportunities like a CPL/ATPL, I haven’t decided yet. That might be a backup plan if my business doesn’t work out.
I hope you realize just how fuckin' cool that sounds.
Haha thanks, anyone can do it though! It’s primarily a money thing, unfortunately.
An anecdote to offset the bad feeling a little:
When my sister was dating locally (within the city), every she met was some form of an asshole. Okay guys on the outside, but when things got to breaking up...
Then she met this guy from Moscow. Genuinely good man, kind, caring, intelligent, and in a good place in life. From where she lived, Moscow is 4 hours by plane. She shone brighter than a rainbow whe she was gathering things to fly there.
They now live in a good apartment in the Moscow region, with a kid barely a year old. She's the happiest I've seen her in a while.
If you guys get together, maybe that flight ain't no thing after all.
Yeah I can completely agree with this viewpoint. There’s something to be said about casting a wider net and not just accepting spatial convenience in your potential dating pool. There’s lots of people out there!
I had 3 very gay dates, all of which were gay in very different ways. Outside of that I haven't really had a ton of time to get much done.
How did those gay dates differ?
Date 1 was with a tomboyish afab who hasn't really thought a lot about gender. We spent a good deal of time talking about patriarchy and queer empowerment.
Date 2 was with a poly gay boy. He started a queer org which hosts a variety of queer events - mostly techno and live music. He's very passionate about making them truly queer events as opposed to 1-2 queer artists among a long list of non-queer DJs.
Date 3 was with a trans girl who has only gone out as female in public three times now. We talked a bit about transitioning, her plans, what it means to be trans, how it's difficult to be genderqueer in public and other common early transition topics.
What is "afab"? Never heard that term before.
assigned female at birth
Thank you! I'm a little new to this space. Is there any implication with that term? For example, does it imply someone who was born non-binary, but parents/doctor/state assigned them a gender at birth, or is it just a term that anyone whose birth certificate says (or said) "female" but no longer thinks of themselves as female would use?
Both of the above.
For starters, these two scenarios are not mutually exclusive: they're just two different ways of describing the same situation. Someone who is born non-binary might have female physical characteristics, and therefore be assigned a "female" gender at birth. Their birth certificate will therefore have "female" on it. Later, as the baby grows up into a child, teenager, and adult, they will realise that they don't think of themself as "female". They might identify as non-binary... or male, or genderfluid, or something else more interesting.
However, given how you've separated this single scenario into two descriptions, I'm going to go out on a limb, and explain what "non-binary" means - and what it doesn't mean.
Non-binary is when a person feels like neither gender or both genders: they don't feel like either "male" or "female" accurately describes their experience of their own self. They are neither gender, or they are both genders at once, or they switch between genders (this latter alternative is also called "genderfluid"). But, in all these cases, it's about a person's own feelings and internal experience: they don't feel "female" or "male".
On the other hand, someone's body might have physical characteristics of both sexes. This is called "intersex". In some cases, this is highly visible, such as when a person has both male and female genitalia. In other cases, it's invisible, such as when a person has XXY syndrome, which affects their development during puberty.
Non-binary is a state of mind; intersex is a physical state.
When you say "someone is born non-binary", this might be true, but noone can tell: not doctors, not nurses, not parents. Because non-binary is a state of mind, noone can tell a baby is non-binary.
However people can tell if a baby is born intersex (sometimes), because that is a physical state. And, in most cases, intersex babies are assigned one or another gender - male or female - and raised as such.
So, "assigned female at birth" can apply to both non-binary people and intersex people.
Someone who is born non-binary might have a female body and therefore be assigned female at birth, but will later realise they are not female. This can be extended to other transgender people (of whom non-binary is only one example) who were born with female bodies, but feel themselves to be male, or genderfluid, or something else more interesting.
Someone who is born intersex might have mixed sexual characteristics but be assigned female at birth.
Thanks for the clarification!
Part of my confusion was that I thought there was another category of physical characteristics that could be described as neither female nor male. (I've sometimes heard this referred to as neuter, but don't know whether that's an accepted/acceptable term.)
But your description makes sense to me.
This would fall under the category of "intersex".
OK, cool. Thanks for your help!
pan poly enby
gender is a lie made up by bathroom companies to sell more bathrooms
How do you feel about people who pursue their gender identity? Not to extreme ends – not like machismo – but in a genuinely-interested fashion. The Art of Masculinity may be one example.
Nothing wrong with gender being important to your identity.
Then I must ask for a bit of clarification. If not one's identity, what's the target of gender?
I'm not sure I understand the question. What do you mean "target of gender"?
What's the point of the idea of gender if it isn't considered only a part of one's identity? As in, what else could it be?
Well now we are getting philosophical, or theoretical.
One idea is that gender in general is a social construct - built by unspoken agreements and just understandings in their specific societies. So what is to be manly in America is different than being manly in Puerto Rico or Sweden or Papau New Guinea. Margaret Mead wrote this book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, in like the 30s (I read this almost 2 years ago now so deets may be fuzzy.) But basically one society she studied had women who were socialized to be agressive as part of their role as a woman - and the men were socialized to be meek and compliant.
But that's just to say that maleness and femaleness aren't inherently one way or the other - society makes them so.
So it's still a matter of one's identity, but this part may be derived from an external source rather than be inherent to the person. I see. The idea of it being a part of something other than one's identity confused me, and had me curious.
@TrixieLee covered it pretty well, but societal constructs are often created to help reinforce norms, homogeny, or for other goals. It's hard to really put a finger on them, and they aren't necessarily created out of desire, but rather are created as a side effect of humans being social animals.
Now that's not to say I'm not social, I just celebrate diversity and believe that all humans are unique in their own way and it is precisely this uniqueness that makes us beautiful. Throwing arbitrary things into a bucket because you share a genital configuration with roughly half the people is just as silly as to me as arbitrarily throwing attributes into a bucket because you share a birth month with some number of individuals.
But those attributes might just line up really well with who you are as a person and it's perfectly okay to use them to describe yourself - celebrating your own identity is valid and important. It's the imposition on others that happens because it's not JUST self identified people but people with x attribute or born in y month that's problematic.
I don't want to come off as too heartless/jaded, but be careful of getting invested and stressing about it unless you've actually confirmed the situation is real somehow. I won't (or can't) go into any specific detail, but I've seen far too many cases of people massively exaggerating or completely making up stories on the internet (and Reddit in particular) for all sorts of reasons, and taking advantage of people's legitimate attempts to help them get out of the fabricated situation. Sometimes it's almost like some kind of fantasy or even a creative-writing exercise for them, but many times it leads up to asking for money.
Please keep us posted. Not for the drama of it: I want to see if the boy's mind changes, how, and why.
I had a friend in a remotely-similar situation. We parted ways years ago, before anything came to fruition with her. I guess this is my attempt at reconciliation.
For what it's worth, this Internet stranger wishes him well, and hopes he turns out okay, whatever the choice he makes.
Wow, that sucks. I'm very sorry you have to go through that, but it sounds like you're doing what you can reasonably do given the circumstances. You're planting the seeds. They just need to take root.
OK, now I can't stop thinking about this either. Did the boy come out to his parents at age 18 because studying outside home some sort of wakeup call? Was the boy homeless for some time, or did he meet the YMCA man prior to getting kicked out of home? I am asking because I do wonder if the boy is being completely truthful. It seems odd to be home schooled all your life, then choose the age of 18 to come out to your parents, then after getting kicked out, it seems coincidental to find a predatory male at the YMCA so quickly and easily.
It's clear this boy is saying he is in a predatory relationship, and is being encouraged to endure pain and risk his health and maybe his life for others pleasure. There are some who choose this lifestyle, but it isn't exactly a choice if you lost your entire support network and your other option is homelessness. The boy may not be ready to see this yet, but planting the thought now might help him see this sooner than he otherwise would. There was an interesting article that talked about how if you tell a teen to "not smoke" then you make smoking alluring, but if you explain the tobacco companies conspire to get you addicted to nicotine, then teens are less likely to smoke.
Does the boy consider the relationship equitable and fair? Has the boy set any boundaries at all? Either in his sex life or otherwise? If you have been homeschooled all your life, the idea of setting even small personal boundaries might be novel. But I believe even sex slaves need boundaries/ safe words.
Is the relationship a fully open relationship? Can the boy explore "gay culture" with other men that the YMCA guy does not know?
Honestly, you have probably tried everything you can, and you are likely causing yourself undue stress by worrying about something you simply can not change. It's not easy to understand the mistakes you made in a relationship until you are out of the relationship. It's not easy to see the patterns of abuse while you are being abused. It doesn't matter how eloquently someone explains them to you, if you are not willing to see it, you just wont see it until you are ready.
Fuck all.
My sleeping schedule has been out of whack for a while, and productivity suffered greatly. I may have made a couple of notes, but that's about it. Most of my days so far have been entertainment to either keep my spirits up or push the time.
It's a sucky intermediate state that I know will pass eventually – it has before – but in the meantime, the things I want to do are out of my reach. Watching loads of Steve Harvey during his stand-up days and on Family Feud helps make it somewhat bearable.
EDIT: "out of wack" → "out of whack"
I'm in a hard situation currently. Nothing I like to complain about, but – you asked. I'm sure it affects my mental state, including sleep, which in turn affects everything stronger by compounding. Doesn't help that the only way out is working more.
Hard correction worked for me once. It isn't working anymore because the source of the issue is different.
On a slightly-positive note, I did end up making some aggressive creative progress thanks to sleep deprivation. It's not much, but it's a good thing.
Had a major breakthrough with a project I've been dealing with at work for months (probably close to a year, really). We're developing a chat system for our client's web app using VueJS, websockets, and Cassandra. Worked flawlessly locally and on some of our more simple test servers, but once we threw it up on our multi-server setup with a load balancer, it went to shit. I'll spare you the boring details, but long story short the server folks (outsourced by our client) had to toggle some setting in their load balancer. That got things working-ish, but we couldn't get new messages to show up in real-time. I spent a good week pulling my own hair out trying to figure it out and long story short it was because those same server people had used a space-delimited list of IPs in Cassandra's config file rather than the require comma-delimited list. I was livid because right above that setting was a paragraph of very detailed documentation describing how to list the IP addresses.
They cost us a lot of time/money/sanity, but since they're not OUR vendor, we can't do much about it. But really I'm just glad I figured it out and we're back on track to meet our deadline, which was pushed back three times because of these issues.
Kill me with them boring details.
So when we realized it wasn't working on our two-server setup, we were really limited in how far we could go to debug. This collection of servers is our Staging server where the client tests features, content, etc. before it goes live. It's also used by some devs and our QA department. So any downtime has to be approved by like 5 or 6 people and it can only be for a few hours at a time.
So the solution was for us to recreate the environment (multiple servers and all) on AWS and do all of our testing there without any concern about interrupting someone else's work. Well to our surprise this chat feature worked like a champ on this new environment. So I spent a few days trying to discern what could be different between these servers and the staging ones. When the feature broke, there was nothing in any of the logs indicating what the problem was, so we were basically grasping at straws. Everything looked like it should be working, yet it wasn't on these original servers. And if we couldn't get them working there, we'd have issues whne pushing to production.
We began suspecting something with our client's vendor's implementation of the load balancer was to blame, so we asked them to setup a another server for us to run some basic websocket "hello world" tests on. Wouldn't work. Tried the same test on our AWS servers, worked fine. We showed them that, they did some tweaking, and boom the hello world test and the chat app began working again. Then we realized real-time messaging was messed up.
So we began pouring over the underlying software and our code to figure out what was happening. After a few days (And another server...ffs), I'd gotten no where. The idea of looking into Cassandra was pitched, but I really doubted it was the cause. I'd seen what Cassandra failures looked like and they were peppered all over the server logs when something went wrong. But I looked into it anyway. I looked at Cassandra's logs and it was showing difficulty connection to IP1 IP2 IP3. So I hunted down the config file and realized where the vendor who set Cassandra up initially had gone wrong. I made the change and everything's been working fine ever since.
I know a lot of the troubleshooting, lack of useful logging, and other blunders along the way seem amateurish, but a lot of it is because of how the project started. Was originally a 2 man project with me doing frontend and a contractor doing backend. Contractor suggested Vue, Cassandra, and Ratchet for websockets, poured 2 months into it, then quit on us, leaving the project floundering for a while. Then we find out the only thing he'd really done was stitch together a basic structure using code copy/pasted from the Ratcher and Cassandra beginner tutorials. Meanwhile I had taught myself Vue and, imo, done an amazing job at cranking out the frontend. But I'm bias. All of that messy crap was before we made the switch to Agile and stopped utilizing contractors.
Now that I see light at the end of the tunnel I realize I've learned a lot along the way. Learned VueJS, CQL, a hell of a lot about server management, websockets, and ended up creating a nifty bash script for myself to manage the half dozen set of SSH connections I had to make throughout all the servers/testing.
I've suffered from daily headaches during most of my adult life. Various neurologists have tried various medications and techniques with me over the years. Many have helped reduce the frequency of headaches, though none all that well. One got rid of them completely, but came with a host of side effects (weight gain, fatigue, etc.) so I decided to stop it as it was affecting my work and life more than the headaches. I've recently become unable to use NSAIDs because of gastrointestinal issues, and they were my main method of stopping a headache once it started.
Earlier this week, I went to a new neurologist because the old one retired. She told me about a new type of treatment called "monoclonal antibodies." A single shot often relieves headaches for an entire month and there are very few side effects. She gave me a shot and I have not had a headache since then, 4 days ago. So far, this seems to be exactly what I need. Unfortunately, insurance has declined to pay for the treatment which actually fixes my problem without side effects. The meds cost $700 for a 3 month supply. I can swing it, but I have some of the best insurance available. They should be paying for it. It's fucking ridiculous. I do have a coupon from the manufacturer to get it for significantly less (and maybe free?). But it looks like I have to pay out of pocket, submit a claim to my insurance company, then when it's denied or partially paid, submit the rest to some other random company. I really hate giving data to companies, so I have to decide whether it's worth saving $2800/year to not do that. Or I could try GoodRx or one of the other companies in that space. It's not a big deal, but it just irks me given how much we pay these insurance companies.
At work, I finally told off a coworker who's been an ass to me for many years. We mainly communicate via email because we're in different offices. He seems normal in person, but over email is a real jackass. I had repeatedly asked my management to do something about the problem, but they don't really know how to handle things like that, so they mostly just stand around shrugging their shoulders at these types of things. (It's not malice, just incompetence.) After arguing with me over email for a few hours, he gave a nonpology and said he'd try harder not to be an ass. Haven't heard from him since, so we'll see how it goes.
MoCA has free admission, now, so I walked there after work yesterday. Not that there should be any competition...but I gotta say I enjoyed their exhibits much more than The Broad's.
I am diving back into learning programming, self taught for now but I really enjoy it.
I have been stuck in a rut for a while and would one day like to see it become part of my career. Python has been recommended as a good starting point but curious of your opinions on the matter.
Is it reasonable to believe that being self taught will be accepted in the workforce with a competent portfolio or does a degree really open the door?
I'm kind of in the same boat as you. I'm not in the industry, and I'm sure there are many users here that are, but I believe a strong portfolio trumps a degree.
I forgot who, but someone recommended looking into Triplebyte for opportunities. I did well enough in the initial weeding-out process, but I'm too unsure of myself to take the next step and do a mock interview. It's not even a real interview...a mock interview! Still, I don't think my skills are up to par just yet. Anyhow, it looks like a good resource for when you're ready to take the next steps.
FWIW, I work for a FAANG company and help with the hiring process in our group. (I'm one voice among many, and I don't have the final say, but I contribute.) A degree to me is not a great signal of ability. I have one myself, so I understand the process it takes to get one. It does show you can stick with something for a few years, which is a plus, and it suggests you probably learned a certain common set of things during that time. But for me it will never be the deciding factor, and doesn't weigh very heavily. And honestly, we get applicants from all over the world, so it's hard to tell if J. Random University in Foo Bar, Elbonia is a good university or not.
Showing work you've done is the key, and being able to answer questions both about your work and about the specific topic of the job you're interviewing for is really key for acing an interview. And of course, some companies do the gauntlet of whiteboard questions. We don't do that, but we do have some things we go through with a candidate to assess their abilities.
The hard part is that the people in HR who screen the resumes don't have the same insight into candidates as the people who would be working directly with them. Despite having a degree from a good university and having the skills needed, I didn't get seriously considered for a job at my current company until I sent a friend in the same group I was trying to get hired in my résumé. That's the real issue: getting noticed by the decision makers before getting weeded out by HR.
There are some additional things to be aware of that I did not know. I have since read on other forums, like HackerNews, that there are also some odd rivalries out there. For example, one person said that they are South Asian and they automatically veto anyone who's East Asian and vice-versa. Since I'm neither of those, I wasn't aware that this sort of stuff went on. I don't know how prevalent it is, but others confirmed that it happens. It is blatantly illegal and against company policy, but it's very hard to prove, so it still goes on.
It depends. Like if you're trying to work for a software dev studio, than yeah a degree is probably important. But if you're trying to work for a non-dev company that has some need for programmers? Then, portfolio/some experience probably would be enough.
While I've never programmed per se, I was once a website manager. I learned HTML/CSS and a little JS waaaaay back when I was teenager. I was able to get a job as a "Web Generalist" at a small place that needed someone to update their website. After I was hired, I was told that I beat out other students and even grads because I had more "real" experience creating and maintaining my own small sites, versus the others' mostly classroom experience.
But if I had tried to work for a web design agency, I probably wouldn't have been hired.
That's not to say it can't happen. I imagine it's not as common.
I replaced the trackpad in my Thinkpad W540. I got a "classic" one replacing the "clacking" default that came with this model, which I didn't like at all.
Got more into the flow of things at the new job, started blogging again.
Whatcha bloggin' 'bout?
Well I I just started up my poem a day project again, after a long hiatus. Also life, mostly. It's more a diary than a focused thing.
You're welcome to read it: www.acdw.net
Didn't really have any big goals this week. Mostly to just get through it!
I had intended to work on setting up my Raspberry Pi as a private cloud server. I had looked up some more documentation, but otherwise hadn't made much actual progress.
Part of it, I think, is because I work in IT. Wen I get home, I don't want to do any more tinkering and configuring. I just want to veg and game, especially after a busy week at work like this one. Maybe I'll make some progress this weekend. Even a little, like being able to boot the thing from an HDD instead of a MicroSD card, would be good.
Looking ahead, I'll probably watch the Superbowl for real for the first time in forever. I'm from Kansas City and the Chiefs are playing, so I gotta support the home team. It's been 50yrs since their last appearance, after all. Bosses already decided to close the office on Monday since they/we are expecting us and the rest of the city to be hungover due to celebration or drowning of sorrows. Go Chiefs!
I went and checked out Hanoi for the first time and it was pretty nice, albiet overrun with foreign tourists like myself. That seems to be the norm in major SE Asian cities. Now I'm back home in Beijing, sitting alone at home on quarantine for the next two weeks due to concerns about the corona virus.
I generally spend most of my free time alone, but without having work as a social/productive outlet, I'm already starting to lose my mind here on day four. If it weren't for the miracle of modern communication technology, I would probably be fixing up my own version of Wilson the volleyball by now. I think I'm gonna brew up some of the coffee I brought back and clean every inch of my apartment.
I've been working on this print campaign for a while but it's just not coming together, it's like a massive admissions brochure for a private school - while they do have content up on the site I've also had to research and come up with the copy and track down images on ex employees desktops saved in their own weird folders. Makes me realize that I need to organize my files way better and looks like I've come up with my next project to keep my employed for a while - figuring out how they are going to manage and organize there photos.
I'm also still in school - last semester finally - but this professor who is so so so disorganized and absentminded is teaching 3 of my 5 classes. For example, she failed me in a course last semester because she didn't remember who I was. Not only am doing the work but then also documenting that I did the work.
To date she has never responded to an email. But she like to face time and text - and loves me when she remembers who I am.
I do have the pleasure of taking a drawing class - and it's amazing. Honestly makes the politics worth it.
I also haven't done my laundry in almost 3 weeks - down to bike shorts as underwear but still have 2 weeks of professional outfits and like 3 years non professional (I think I need to downsize my closet)
That's this week! Let's hope the next is cleaner.
I should probably make 2 advice threads out of these.
Get increasingly close to the end of vacation (I only have 2 more days left) and wondering if you can enjoy traditional/public school when your knowledge comes from educational YouTubers who can explain, edit, animate, choose topics however they please, whenever they please, with all the skill they have to offer while public school is limited by old and sometimes bad (inefffective?) teachers because the good ones go to private school where their job isn't a disgrace due to low pay and no proper supplying of textbooks, textbooks which have limited supply of visuals and are subject to government politics and take up physical space. I really want an answer to this because I'm really needing a reason to enjoy going to school.
I also went to the dentist because my teeth are badly organized and 2 are still milk teeth which are blocking my permanent teeth of which one (i think it's a pre-molar) is being born directly behind my milk teeth and the other one (canine) is waiting above and in front of it and she reccommended me to try to take the canine out (she also said it might have not fallen yet because the veins might have not been absorbed by the permanent tooth) and that surgery will be needed on the other one.
Taxes! Did you know you can make your file with TurboTax deluxe the whole way though, then switch to the IRS free file option at the last second and save $80 between Federal and State filing?
Also leased a car, so I put way more than $80 down to drive a James Bond car when I'm uncomfortable keeping Netflix for a month when I don't use it. The plan is that the car after this one will be able to drive itself, so hopefully it works out better than me picking up a side of the road car and riding that until it becomes unworkable.