jennegatron

One recurring theme in this conversation that really makes me sad is all the people who say they're "bad at math" and that's why they don't like tipping. You're not bad at math! You're bad at decimals maybe or mental multiplication! Mathematics is a huge, diverse field that I promise you are good at some facet of. I'm not good at mental math either, which is why I stick to multiple of 5s & 10s when tipping, but I'm really good at math! I'm great at single variable calculus and I'm a great proof writer! I think about this a lot, especially after spending the year or so after I graduated college tutoring elementary through college kids in math. You have 1 bad math teacher in school and you're convinced that you're bad at all math forever. You might be a geometry or trig whiz, but you'll never know because you carry that with you your entire life after you have a hard time memorizing your 7's in your times tables. You don't get one bad English teacher and decide you're never going to read anything ever again. I got a math degree and am only any good at (slow) mental math because I had to practice times tables with 10 year olds, not because I have a Bachelors! Like I get it, the way we teach math is totally broken and produces huge swaths of the population that think this about themselves. It just disappoints me because it's such a beautiful, rich, interesting field that 95% of people never even scratch the surface of because they think calculus is the end of math, and there's no more math to learn after you do that.

On a totally different note, in an attempt to actively combat 20 some years of internalized misogyny I've been working really hard at deliberately injecting positivity into my interactions and relationships with other women, and it's really nice? Like being genuinely complimentary and showing affection for other ladies instead of feeling jealous of their talent/appearance/whatever is really freeing! I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence resenting the fact that I was a girl as I felt it was worse than being a boy, and by extension resenting other girls/women who were doing the things I wanted to be doing. This persisted all the way into college at my 60/40 split college (women to men) and feeling animosity toward other girls/women in the Math & Computer Science department. Them being there & succeeding wasn't harming me in any way, why did I feel that way? I don't want to have children, but I do look at the girls in my life, like my niece, and know that my brother is doing nothing to tell her that she's worthwhile and a full person, and not less than because she's not a boy and my heart breaks. He isn't telling her that she's worse than her brother explicitly, but I do know that's the message she's absorbing. I do know that my brother actively scoffed at the idea of using the brown & pink carseat she used for her brother because it was pink and would turn him gay or something. I don't know. He shouldn't be allowed to have children is I think what I'm saying. (I live in CA and they live in IL. I hope that I can swoop in and be a cool aunt when she's older. I am really bad with kids. I think they can tell that they make me uncomfortable.)

There are still minimum wage laws for non-fast food restaurants, they're just absurdly low (like half of the normal wage), whereas McDonalds and other fast food places have to pay their workers the state/national minimum (whichever is higher)

I'm about 65 hours into this game and I can't get enough.

I totally agree. If you want to go out to eat, you need to either go for fast food, where minimum wage laws apply, or budget in an extra $5 - $10 that you'll be spending to go out.

I'm from IL originally, and 15% is normal for good/standard service, and you only tip more than that if you have exceptional service, and not tipping for extremely poor service is totally acceptable. I have actively shifted to tipping 20% always now that I can afford to do that.

Animal Crossing is a great game to play for an hour or so once a day for a long period of time, rather than something to marathon through, so if you anticipate having an hour or two of commute time on the bus/train, it's a great game for that.

Everything I heard was that they were mostly sold out before they were supposed to go on sale because Ticketmaster's website let people in early if they messed around with their computer's clocks.

I've been playing Story of Seasons and am about 46 hours in and am so totally in love with it still. If you have played Harvest Moon in the past, or that style of game is appealing to you, definitely check it out.

In all my German classes, the best way for a non-native speaker to approximate an umlaut sound is to pretend there's an immediate "e" after that vowel sound, so stringing together a "ue" is a good place to start (you can actually treat it as if it were a contraction in German if you don't have a German keyboard and be able to still communicate what you mean.) It's also a sound that's also harder to start a word with than to put in the middle of. Like grün is much easier for me to say than über.

I can imagine a joke about the monetary privilege that Caitlyn Jenner experiences or her white privilege being delivered by a poorer trans woman or trans Woman of Color, but I think it would be very hard to construct a joke about any trans woman's looks that isn't transphobic, because that joke is about her trans-ness & attempts to conform to the beauty standards created with cis white women in mind. We talk a lot about how good humor/satire should punch up, and I think it's hard to find an axis to punch up on as a cis white dude instead you need to make fun of yourself and your own experience as a privileged person, so it's okay to make fun of Brett Michaels or Micky Rourke. Like substitute Jenner's name for Fabio, and I think that joke becomes instantly more palatable. edit: I think Bjorn is right that it's a bad and lazy joke that wouldn't really benefit from swapping in someone else.

There are moments I watch this show and just think "Man Nic Pizzolatto sure is in love with his own writing and probably thought he was being very clever there." This happened with the apoplectic line, but also with a Colin Farrell line in this last episode, I think when he was in the bar with Ani? It instantly pulls me out of the show. He could get away with writing that kind of dialogue for Rust, but there's no character in this season that I believe saying some of the stuff he writes.

It wasn't easy, and the only way I was really able to do it was: 1. nightly skype calls, where we would just talk about our days, the calls weren't always super long, sometimes just to say good night and give a quick highlights, but it gave me something to look forward to each night. 2. Always having a day I could point to that we were going to see each other next, even if it was months away, having that date made this feel less like an indefinite relationship purgatory 3.having some media to share, like we would watch tv together on netflix, or watch it at different times and then talk about it together 4. Being in the same (or similar) timezones, so you can check in throughout the day 5. Texting or Facebook or skype messaging throughout the day, even if it's like "I saw a funny license plate, here's a picture" stuff 6. Building or leaning on a group of local friends to combat the loneliness 7. Playing games together, could be asynchronous like scrabble on your phone or real time like an MMO Personally I have a very hard time verbalizing my emotions, and that makes being long distance harder. If you or your partner communicate emotion mostly through non-verbal cues, it's can be straining. The things I missed most were certainly just the things that come with proximity to your partner, like just hanging out in down time, brushing your teeth at the same time or whatever. I never fault anyone for distance being a deciding factor in whether or not to end a relationship, because it's not super fun. I usually recommend people try it for a little while, but again, ultimately your choice.

Yeah, we were short distance for a year, then long distance for 2 and now short distance for 2 years and counting.

Ewokskick & I were long distance for 2 years of our relationship, so if you want some tips on how to navigate a long distance relationship, feel free to let me know.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html The NYT did one of these dialect quizzes that pinpoints where you're from based on your answers.

Sometimes I wonder if much of the Apple/Mac love of my generation comes from the affection for Kid Pix on school computers in the US. (My second grade teacher also had: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosaur )

Ewokskick & I are heading over now via bike. I'm a white woman, brown hair, gray t-shirt that says "pizza is life" on it. He's a tall light brown haired white man w/ glasses & a short sleeved button up plaid shirt.

Seconded. My parents also didn't want to have to chaperone a bunch of kids so I never had a birthday party with favors or anything. My grandparents & aunt & uncle & cousins would come over, but I never got to invite my friends. Last weekend I had a pool party at our apartment complex. (We didn't swim, but we did drink a lot next to the pool and eat BBQ sandwiches) It was the best.

I am very excited about this. Ewokskick & I will probably show up a little early to try and snag us one of the few tables. I'll be sure to post in here some identifying marker so that people can find us.

My favorite parts of True Detective are always Colin Farrell's interactions with his son, and I tweeted about that in reference to episode one. The young actor who plays him is obviously just searching twitter for mentions of himself, retweeting them & following people who love him as much as I do. Easily the highlight of my day. That adorable little round face. Can't get enough of it. https://twitter.com/TrevorLarcom

JULY BIRTHDAYS ARE THE BEST BIRTHDAYS

The one thing I keep coming back to is how the past few episodes I would describe only as "treading water" like we're not going anywhere new but the show seems to just want to revisit the same details over and over.

It is still ~1 second = 1 minute in game. They still do that thing where your initial tools are super tiring to use, but you upgrade over time to let you accomplish more in proportion to how far you are in the game. I can get through tending to the relatively small amount of crops I currently have growing, and to my couple cows, and still be able to run around chopping wood/smashing rocks, fish/dive in the river and have time to spare, especially once you get the horse. The harvest sprites seem to be back, but I haven't figured out how to get them to help me yet. My farm is still small enough that I don't need any help. The actual process of tending to your crops goes much much faster than the old games. Even with the worst watering can, you can water entire plots of 9 crops at once in a couple seconds and it's not super exhausting. Really it seems like they did a nice job balancing things that make you money for little stamina loss as well as things that you can do that have long term impacts (like clearing big rocks out of your fields) that you need a couple days worth of effort to do with the worst tools.

It's very much more Harvest Moon. I've played mostly Friends of Mineral Town. I'm only in Autumn of year 1, but I really like it. I like the way it slowly rolls things out to prevent you from being overwhelmed. There are minor differences from the ones I've played (like time doesn't stop when you're inside) There are some interesting changes, like instead of a shipment box on your farm, there's a market you go to to sell your goods, and in a given week, the vendors are going to pick a couple things to value more than usual. As you buy & sell more, the vendors will have more and more to offer, and more vendors will show up to sell different things. These are exactly the kinds of games that get their hooks into me, and if you liked Harvest Moon, this is a very safe bet. (I really like the animals they seem to have added. So far I've unlocked a long haired cat, cows, chickens & angora rabbits for purchase.) You also can constantly rearrange your farm buildings as you grow & expand. There are even secondary fields that are particularly good at growing certain crops (leafy crops, fruit trees, mushrooms, etc.) You compete against the NPC farmers to get a chance to lease them. (These are things that open up over the course of a couple seasons.) Also it doesn't seem like winter is a dead time with no crops. Winter was always my least favorite season, but there seems to be farming to be done then!