Life

[jennegatron]

Sick Missouri burn. My boyfriend is from Oklahoma (which is why we were driving down I-35), so he has no room to look down on Kansas, or anyone else for that matter.

[Bjorn]

Making fun of Missouri is pretty high on my list of favorite things to do. 

[jennegatron]

Being from Illinois, I tend toward making fun of Iowa and Indiana most, but I have an affection for all of the Midwest, and a great deal of the Great Plains states.

[SecretAsianMan]

I don't think I'd mind flat land.  Driving around hills is a pain, especially when it snows.  I have to imagine the gas mileage is closer to the manufacturer's claims than what I get.

[jennegatron]

My childhood home is on an enormous hill that makes it impossible to walk or bike anywhere in town. It does mean you get an amazing view of the Mississippi river from the park a block from that house, so you win some, you lose some.

[Dewar]

When I was young we took a road trip from our home, near Seattle and the Cascade mountains out to Omaha. It was seriously unnerving for me to be able to see the horizon like that. I imagine it would be roughly equivalent to a kid living inland for their whole life and then seeing the ocean for the first time.

 

Thinking about it now still makes me nervous.

[feelthedarkness]

That fact about the KS mountain is awesome. I grew up near a woodsy lake in metro-NY suburbs so it's all awesomely foreign. Os's pictures are great too. 

[Bjorn]

Being from Illinois, I tend toward making fun of Iowa and Indiana most, but I have an affection for all of the Midwest, and a great deal of the Great Plains states.

 

I have a lot of love for the midwest, even though it frustrates me to no end at times.  I've had the opportunity to move multiple times in the last twenty years, but ultimately have always stuck around here as I've never really gelled with the cultures of other areas where I've spent time. 

[jennegatron]

We're currently in California, and I think for a while I'll be able to survive off of the sunshine, but I'll hit a point where I'll need to return to the land of fried cheese & John Deere.

[Erkki]

Estonia is relatively flat too, but I guess it's no match for Kansas. We don't have any mountains, but there's a lot of hills in the south.

[root]

My webcomic patreon recently clipped a milestone that enabled me to afford an a3-size fine-art scanner that actually scans my watercolors with accurate color fidelity.  I am pretty stoked about this for a few reasons, the first and most obvious being that my comic pages will actually look the way I painted them, and the second being that I snagged it on ebay for about a third of what it usually goes for.  I paid as much in shipping as I did for the scanner itself.  

 

It is also the size of a small planet.

[Mawd]

My computer screen finally died. It's thankfully still under warranty but until the new screen ships in 2-10 days I'm using an eye destroyingly fuzzy 32" tv screen.

So hey after that discussion about needing Tv screens it looks like I've finally found a use for one!

My webcomic patreon recently clipped a milestone that enabled me to afford an a3-size fine-art scanner that actually scans my watercolors with accurate color fidelity.  I am pretty stoked about this for a few reasons, the first and most obvious being that my comic pages will actually look the way I painted them, and the second being that I snagged it on ebay for about a third of what it usually goes for.  I paid as much in shipping as I did for the scanner itself.  

 

It is also the size of a small planet.

Awesome!

[Hermie]

Yeah, having grown up on an island surrounded by mountains, landscapes as flat as Kansas seems unnerving to me.

[SuperBiasedMan]

The flatness is weird but the emptiness even more so. Ireland is full of hills and fields of stuff. You can barely see anything in my south eastern region unless you're elevated.

[Twig]

Well coooool I impressed this girl so much that five seconds into the second date she informs me that she's moving to another state!!!

Exciting!!!

Welp.

[Patrick R]

For some reason my last job withheld waaaaaay too little from my taxes all last year and now I owe 375 dollars to the IRS. I wish I had some kind of recourse because it's not the kind of thing I knew enough about to notice when I was getting my paystubs, but there's no reason they should have withheld so little.

[Zeusthecat]

For some reason my last job withheld waaaaaay too little from my taxes all last year and now I owe 375 dollars to the IRS. I wish I had some kind of recourse because it's not the kind of thing I knew enough about to notice when I was getting my paystubs, but there's no reason they should have withheld so little.

 

You might want to update your W4 form to make sure you aren't declaring any personal allowances. Even if your allowances match up to your situation, it still more or less comes down to an educated guess as to what they should remove from your paychecks and you will almost always owe a little or get a little back no matter how accurate you are when you try to fill those forms out. So make it as low as possible if you want them to take the max amount out of your paycheck.

 

On the bright side, you can look at it as getting an interest free loan from the government.

[SecretAsianMan]

Depending on how you manage your money, owing taxes is sometimes better than getting a refund.  A refund means you overpaid and are getting some money back, but that money isn't paid back with interest so you lose any possible earning potential from it.  Even putting it into a basic savings account would technically put you ahead overall.  Of course that assumes you don't spend that money over the course of the year.

[Patrick R]

I don't make enough and have too many debts to have a savings account. Right now my income is somewhere around 7,200 a year.

[JonCole]

If you're going to have trouble paying it off, keep in mind that the IRS lets you setup payment/installment plans to pay it off over time.

[SecretAsianMan]

I don't make enough and have too many debts to have a savings account. Right now my income is somewhere around 7,200 a year.

 

Yeah, what I said is definitely not a universal situation.  It's a thing I hear a lot around tax season.

[feelthedarkness]

you're also only under obligation to file by today. you don't actually need to pay. you can defer that basically forever as long as you're filing the paperwork. like when romney was running for pres in 2012 and the most recent return he had was like 2009. 

[N1njaSquirrel]

So help me out here guys.

 

About 2-3 weeks ago, some random guy added me on PSN. I didn't think much of it until he invited me to a chat party, where it became very apparent he wasn't from the IT forums. Turns out he was a 14 year old kid from the South of London. Which was weird, but also hilarious as he's so naive about everything. 

 

What wasn't so hilarious is that it's pretty apparent from talking to him that he's being bullied at school. He even said to me 'I don't have any friends at school apart from x, so all I have is you guys on the internet'.

 

So here's the crux of the matter: Should I do anything about this bullying? Is there anything I can do, or should I just be a sympathetic ear to this kid? I've also been subject to a fair amount of bullying in my life, so I know how crappy it can be, and would like to help if I can.

 

I am also very aware that I'm 11 years his senior, and anything I try to do might come off as me being anything but a concerned friend. 

[Dewar]

Bullying is a weird subject for me. When I was in late grade school and middle school (age 9-14) I was bullied to the point of injuries and no one in the school system cared. I toughed through it and thankfully my parents were supportive and eventually pulled me out into home school. Part of me wants to say "I toughed it out, so can kids these days" but I also have to remember that I was very lucky to have parents that cared and a lot of kids don't have that support to help push through it. Plus, just because I had it hard doesn't mean that future generations should.

[Apple Cider]

Why should anyone have to tough out being tormented day in and out?