The General Chat thread

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AdmiralMemo
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby AdmiralMemo » 20 Apr 2016, 01:34

I have the address of the MK3 Moonbase, but that doesn't help either, since we're now on 4. Probably email [email protected] and get the new PO Box. Graham said that they're eventually going to put the PO Box on the site itself.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby phlip » 20 Apr 2016, 06:25

I've been told that James might be the person to contact for getting such information, but I tried emailing him about sending in some boosters for TTC and I haven't heard back, so maybe not?

Sorry, I don't have anything more useful to add.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Merrymaker_Mortalis » 21 Apr 2016, 00:48

Is there a way to unfriend someone on Facebook without them noticing?
I accepted a friend request, and I dumbly didn't screen their feed and now I regret friending them.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby AdmiralMemo » 21 Apr 2016, 01:21

They don't get a notification that you unfriended them, if that's what you're concerned about. However, if they go to your page, they'll see you're not friends anymore... That could get them messaging you.

The real trick here is that you can keep them as your "friend" on Facebook and uncheck the "Follow" button, which is right next to the "friend" button.

That way, you'll still be "friends" but their posts won't show up in your feed. I've done that to a few people who are genuinely nice but have some... questionable... ideas. (Like my cousin, the 9/11 truther).
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Kapol » 06 Jun 2016, 14:41

So I'm starting to drink different types of tea. For a while, I pretty much only drank black tea. So now I want to test out the variety available to me.

So does anyone have any recommendations for brands/types to try out? I've had 'sleepytime,' earl gray, and some fruit blends. So far the Earl Gray is my favorite. Alternative, anything I can put in my tea to spice it up a bit?
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby betsytheripper » 06 Jun 2016, 15:09

If you like loose leaf, I'm gonna rep my favorite tea website, Adagio Teas http://www.adagio.com/. You can order sample packs and they have a lot of different flavors/blends to choose from. It is, at the very least, a way to look at all the types and kinds of flavors available.

Personally, I love earl grey, and the lavender earl grey from Adagio is delish. I'm also a big fan of rooibos teas (actually an herbal, naturally quite sweet), and chai spice blends. I've made my own "chai" before with plain black tea, milk, and powdered spices closer to how it's traditionally made, by boiling the tea on the stove in a sauce pan, adding the spices (clove, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, spices are variable, add what you think you'll like), adding the sugar and milk and bring to a simmer, strain and serve.

If you're looking to try some bagged brands, I'm fond of Stash, but also a particular fan of the Bigelow decaf earl grey. If you like iced tea, I've found that the Stash Moroccan Mint (green tea with lemongrass and peppermint) is a great cold-brew iced tea option. (Pull the tags off of ~5 bags per ~1 gallon, tie the strings together, shove in your container, fill with water, close, stick in the fridge overnight. Serve over ice with some sugar, if you like.)

TL;DR: Chai spice style is great, taking influence from South Asian style tea, if you like those kind of flavors. Rooibos is a good herbal, naturally quite sweet. Green tea with lemongrass and mint can be an excellent iced tea.

Stash is a great bagged brand, and Bigelow is pretty decent. If you're looking for loose leaf, Adagio is great. Adagio also has pyramids (fancy bags), if that's your jam.

Hope this helps!
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Prospero101 » 06 Jun 2016, 17:00

Looks like you guys are light years ahead of me. I told my computer "Tea, Earl Grey, hot" like three years ago and still nothing.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Kapol » 07 Jun 2016, 14:56

betsytheripper wrote:Hope this helps!


That helps quite a bit. Thanks. :) When I have a bit more money, I think I'll pick out the Adagio starter set and go from there. I've never tried loose leaf before. But the variety they have seems pretty nice. I also appreciate the other recommendations. The iced tea seems like it will make a good summer drink.

Prospero101 wrote:Looks like you guys are light years ahead of me. I told my computer "Tea, Earl Grey, hot" like three years ago and still nothing.


At least you didn't get something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby betsytheripper » 07 Jun 2016, 21:22

Glad I could help! A couple sidenotes about loose leaf: I will steep mine by pouring the hot water over the tea into a vessel (pyrex measuring cup, travel mug), and pouring through a little hand held strainer (like $1 at the grocery) into my actual mug when I'm ready. I don't use any fancy equipment, so don't think you need any crazy fancy stuff to get your loose leaf on. That said, my friend has the Ingenuitea, loves it, keeps it on his desk, and uses it daily. Also, all of the tea from Adagio comes in air-tight zipper-lock opaque bags, with tea name, ingredients, steep time and steep temperature right on the bag! Never worry about scalding your white or herbal, or the tea going bad. Seriously, it took me two years to go through the pound of earl grey, and the "fresh" new bag tasted exactly the same as the old one, which I kept well-sealed.

Just holler if you have any other questions, I'm sure someone can address them. :D
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Atifexe » 07 Jun 2016, 23:31

I just happened to stumble in to a discussion on tea! Awesome!

Speaking of, and since I saw all three types mentioned, I'm actually a fan of steeping bagged earl grey, decaf chai, and rooibos together, then adding a bit of milk and sugar. On their own, I tend to find each of those teas has something about it that I don't quite care for (earl grey is a bit too floral for my tastes, chai tends to be too little tea flavor to the amount of spice, and rooibos, while tasty, isn't orange pekoe enough for me) - but when steeped together, they create a balanced, unique flavor with notes that effectively support one another. At some point I want to try this blend in loose leaf, so I'm not using up quite so much to produce a single mug.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby AdmiralMemo » 12 Jun 2016, 05:17

Just had a significant "Baltimore is different" moment. There's a news story that's all over national news and blowing up on Twitter about 20 people being murdered in a night club. I sat there watching the news, waiting for the other shoe to drop, letting me know why this story warranted more than a 5-minute news blurb before moving onto other news. I waited... and waited... After a while, I realized there was no other shoe. This was the whole story. So I'm thinking "Must be a slow news day." It was then that I realized what was significant: it wasn't Baltimore. I remembered that the rest of the world was not used to an event that would be a slightly larger than average weekend in Baltimore. It made me realize how calloused I am to such things, simply due to where I live. I've grown up with "Baltimore Normal" which is way OFF "normal" from most of the rest of the world. Living in a place where individual murders regularly fail to make the headlines warps your thought patterns a bit.

Edit: OK, the body count is up to 50 fatalities and 53 injuries. That's significant, even by Baltimore standards. That's a quarter of the year in a single night.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Prospero101 » 12 Jun 2016, 09:52

On the other side of that coin, this is the first time that an outside event has actually triggered an anxiety attack for me. It's always just been my own stupid brain up until now. Now I have to worry about trigger warnings and I just...I can't be an adult right now. I can't. I can't anything.

Christ, Logan, how fucking selfish can you be? Fifty people are dead and all you can think about is yourself?
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Jamfalcon » 12 Jun 2016, 10:17

I think it's pretty natural to get introspective when a big tragedy like this happens. We can only see things through the lens of our own experiences, and sometimes that makes something that isn't directly connected to us hit a lot closer to home than we might expect.

I'm sure there's a lot of people out there right now feeling the same way, and it's not like you're making a conscious decision to focus on yourself. You can't control what causes you anxiety, and when something like this happens, it's super important to take care of your own mental wellbeing. Especially in this day and age, where it's so easy to get swept up in social media and news coverage and get overwhelmed by it all.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Arclight_Dynamo » 12 Jun 2016, 10:27

What Jamfalcon said.

But also... why is this causing you anxiety? Because you recognize this is screwed up and wrong and a lot of people are in pain. You're anxious because of your empathy.

That's nothing to be ashamed of.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby AdmiralMemo » 12 Jun 2016, 16:03

Here's my favorite bit of advice in situations like these: You are unable to help others effectively if you're neglecting yourself. If you need to look after yourself, do so, no matter how insignificant your issue might seem in the grander scheme. Make sure you're good enough to help others first, then do so.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby MagisterMystax » 19 Jun 2016, 03:25

Here's something cool I discovered: Fort Tectoria, where Desert Bus 8 happened, has an indoors Google Streetview location.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Gap Filler » 22 Jun 2016, 13:48

Moment of clarity as the whole sorry affair rolls into the day of reckoning. Leaving would not be a terribly British thing to do but it would be a depressingly English thing to do.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby JustAName » 23 Jun 2016, 03:31

Oh, bah. My work moved me to independent contractor status (which is fine and I'm surprised they didn't do it earlier given that I'm living 5,000 miles away and only putting in hours when I can), and I realized that that means I'll have to pay taxes out of what they give me instead of having it automatically drawn out of paychecks. I don't mind paying taxes it all, but it hurts a lot more to have money that is basically not there than to not ever have it in your possession in the first place.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby fantôme » 23 Jun 2016, 07:26

Gap Filler wrote:Moment of clarity as the whole sorry affair rolls into the day of reckoning. Leaving would not be a terribly British thing to do but it would be a depressingly English thing to do.


The public get to voice their opinion, but the actual decision would still have to go through parliament anyway. And as always, I have every confidence that our great and fearless leaders would have our very best interests at heart.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby JustAName » 23 Jun 2016, 08:22

Actually, looking into this more, I don't know if my employer legally CAN change me to an independent contractor? I'm still performing the same work, just elsewhere, and on my timetable. See example two here: http://www.blueavocado.org/content/downsizing-employees-independent-contractors The work I'm performing involves managing their data using their website backend through skills I acquired at their company, and does represent a regular part of their business. Hm.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Phailhammer » 23 Jun 2016, 15:12

That does seem kinda dodgy. Certainly worth looking into. :/
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Kapol » 01 Jul 2016, 20:58

So... I'm curious about something. Because this has been something that has been bothering me for a few weeks now. What, exactly, is the moratorium for spoilers? Like how long would you say it is before it's fine to spoil something for others? Specifically by speaking it out loud in a public setting (including places like Facebook). I wrote a post in the venting threat of why it's come up. But I'm curious for other peoples' opinions.

Personally, I don't think spoilers are ever really 'alright.' There will always be people who experience something for the first time. And going in with knowledge about what happens can help lessen the experience. There are the spoilers that became so common that they're almost part of popular culture (or even memes). Like Dumbledore, I am your father, and he was a ghost the whole time. But even those kind of bug me.

I feel like how bad the spoiler depends on a combination of how recent the spoiler is, and how major of a subject it is. A major detail of a recent piece of media feels much worse, than, what happens in an old black and white movie.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby MinniChi » 02 Jul 2016, 06:45

My take on spoilers is: Anything major in the past year is NOT okay. I don't have cable so I usually wait until the end of any given season to watch a show, when it is available online.
That being said, anything super popular is not okay to spoil. Such as GOT, the recent Star Wars, Deadpool etc. Heck Breaking Bad a while was a bad thing to spoil. And the Walking Dead.
Some people are still watching those (yay netflix) and the last season of any of those would be a mean thing to spoil.
My cut off is usually the last year for any popular t.v. show, and 3 years for any major motion picture.


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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby Prospero101 » 03 Jul 2016, 05:56

I'm a writer, which means I spend most of my time watching/reading popular culture and trying to pick it apart on a molecular level. It's gotten to the point where I can detect the act breaks in a movie by looking at it, and I can usually follow foreshadowing to its logical conclusion.

For me, if something is utterly ruined by knowing "the twist" or some specific event of the plot, it wasn't very good to begin with. A work that is truly good is good for the experience of seeing it.

I'm not saying certain things aren't IMPROVED by remaining unspoiled. I'm SO GLAD no one spoiled Daredevil Season 2 for me, for example. But if I knew going in that D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk masterfully manipulates entire episodes near the end, it wouldn't have ruined it for me.

But I realize that's kind of weird, so I've learned to respect other peoples' views toward spoilers. If I'm about to discuss a spoiler, I just say "Has everybody seen X?" or "Anybody mind if I spoil Y?" and if anybody gives me a negative response, I shut up.
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Re: The General Chat thread

Postby My pseudonym is Ix » 03 Jul 2016, 13:45

Funnily enough, research suggests that people enjoy TV and film more (or, at least, GOOD TV and film) if they've had major plot points spoiled for them. It's thought that knowing the basic plot beforehand lets you immerse yourself in the experience more fully.

It's not a particularly well-studied field, to be sure, but it's an interesting hypothesis and one with a decent amount of evidence behind it.
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