eigenstuff

I'm planning to do the same (so thanks for the link!) in addition to roping off the wild patches of milkweed in our hay fields so they don't get mowed by the farmer we lease our land to.

I'll add on to this, if anybody out there is interested, join the monarch waystation network! I got my waystation certificate in the mail a few weeks ago. https://www.monarchwatch.org/waystations/

Just dropped everything and bought that stamp! I'm an artist so a sketchbook is just part of the job, but I have tried and failed for years to keep a proper planner. I like this, though, it's so easy and less overwhelming.

I live in a rural area and I go to "my" Dollar General so much I know all the people who work there.

I'm not going to the Dolla G to do grocery shopping. I'm going there to get stuff like glue sticks, tooth paste, paper, tape, etc I need in a pinch. The only groceries I'm buying at the DG are eggs in an emergency and beer. Every once in a while I'll get a frozen pizza if I'm exhausted and don't feel like cooking because the closest fast food is 15 more minutes away. I'm sure it's the same for most people who shop for groceries weekly.

This whole argument doesn't make any sense to me and completely misunderstands the role DGs play in rural communities: saving you an hour round trip to Walmart if you just need a fucking bottle of shampoo.

>It’s impossible for an person who is attractive to the recipient to send a “creepy” message, because it will not be perceived as such.

As a woman, this is completely false. "Creepy" doesn't mean "ugly," it means makes me feel unsafe or threatened. I don't care how hot you are, if you give off rapist/murderer vibes, you're a creep. I have met hot guys who were creepy.

Speaking as someone in the TVA service area: it doesn't get any better. In fact, it gets worse.

I live in the kind of rural place you're talking about. Rural town of 2500, majority farmland/undeveloped, historically impoverished part of the country.

Many people in my town are exactly what you'd expect. But a good fraction of them are millionaires with huge McMansions and lakeside property. The cars that go down my road are a mix of beat up pick up trucks and Cadillacs.

I guarantee you, no outside entity subsidizes us. Not with those kind of property taxes coming in. And I guarantee you, my town is not unique in this regard.

Hello yes checking in, not a HUGE fan but love her!

This comment is so wrong it's not even wrong.

The IRS is in charge of taxes. They have nothing to do with campaign finance laws. That's the Federal Election Commission's job.

Also obesity.

You forgot about the part where they were also responsible for the entire plot of Erin Brockovich!

The World Bank just promised $200 billion to help them out?

Our demand for energy is NOT increasing, at least not in the US. Demand has flatlined since 2007 and more efficient appliances, bulbs, etc are to blame. I have TVA and they have been egregiously self-sabotaging their own solar program in all sorts of ways because the dang sun is a threat to their monopoly and would cut into their revenues. And renewables are so much cheaper, TVA has shifted $1.4 billion of their operating costs from large industrial to residential customers to further disincentivize their switch.

Honestly it's outrageous.

I'm ADHD and have a hard time sitting through movies in movie theaters but got roped into seeing Inception somehow. I left aggitated and absolutely furious after sitting through a 3 hour movie with so little character development that I didn't give a shit if any of those people died. God, that was a painful experience.

I'm a professional sculptress who makes math and physics visualizations, weed is indispensable to my creative process for exactly the reasons you described. It helps me get into that state of flow faster, helps me better visualize abstract concepts and figure out how to translate them into physical objects, makes the boring repetitive parts more fun, and it helps me find more novel and interesting solutions to different construction problems I encounter. I never get stoned, just buzzed, because if I get stoned then I can't do anything. And I really only smoke when I'm sitting down to get to work, I'm not much of a recreational smoker at all. Weed is for business hours! If I just wanna have fun, I'm gonna drink beer.

Alcohol has a pretty negative effect on my work, though. I get sloppy and it's a terrible idea to play with sharp objects and permanent inks if you've been drinking anyway. Loosening up and being unafraid to make things I think might fail isn't something I really struggle with because my creative process is super iterative and experimental. That one Ira Glass quote made me realize the power of full-on wallowing in and relishing the ugly prototype stages of things, so I do a lot of that knowing that after a few different versions to work out the kinks and try some different approaches, I'll have something really good on my hands. I love putting a final sculpture beside the ugly prototype it began as and seeing how far it evolved, it's like looking at a baby picture beside a picture of the successful, well-adjusted adult the baby grew up to be. I can't help but take pride in both of them!

>Finally - if you /really/ want to have a gun to “protect your family/self” use a shotgun. There’s less harm to people who aren’t directly in the line of fire, the effective distance is vastly shorter so less risk to people in other rooms, and you don’t have to be as good at aiming.

This! And I think there's another aspect of shotguns that makes them far better suited for self-defense: the sound of just pumping a shotgun is LOUD. It's absolutely a "warning shot" in and of itself. If you're looking for a self-defense gun, get a pump-action shotgun. If that sound alone isn't enough to make any intruders scatter like cockroaches, only then do I feel like deadly force would ever really warranted, because no bumbling hapless robber just out to steal your TV is going to stick around after hearing it.

Did you read the article, though? The fonts used were actually specifically designed for use in legal proceedings.

My cat is indoors only and made a couple escape attempts that were a little traumatizing for me (helicopter cat mom here), so while I considered getting him a leash once, I ultimately decided against it because I was afraid it'd make him a little more comfortable with the outside world and might emboldened him to make more escape attempts in the future. Not happening in a rural place where there's coyotes, oh hell no.

So instead of walks, we play catch. I wad up paper scraps and throw them and he'll leap into the air to catch them with his paws or swat them away. His ability to catch is honestly amazing to me, he gets it the vast majority of the time, and sometimes he'll leap a good 3 feet in the air, it's super impressive. It's also extremely entertaining! I have a lot of fun with "cat baseball practice", and I think the reason he's so responsive to paper wads is because those were the only cat toys I had for him as a kitten, so every time he hears the sound of paper crumpling he perks up and comes running.

He also loves diving into 12 pack cardboard boxes with the ends ripped off to make them into a tube. My living room floor is constantly covered in trash cat toys but I love it.

I live in a rural area, I love it when I go days at a time without leaving. I'm very strategic about my trips into town, and with few exceptions won't leave unless I have a minimum of two things I need to do. I definitely did WAY more driving when I lived in the city and the burbs, but out here it's just so inconvenient/time consuming to run into town that I avoid it at all costs.

I get my nails done regularly because I struggle badly with compulsive skin picking and chew on my cuticles a lot. They clean up my ragged cuticles for me (so I don't get carried away doing it myself and make them worse), and the nail polish makes my nails thicker so it's harder for me to pick at my skin. I work in a machine shop and regularly work with acetone on the job, so regular nail polish I could do myself is not an option. I recently started getting the powder dip manicures because they're pretty indestructible and extra thick, and it'd be extremely difficult to give one of those to yourself.

Who are you to say nail techs don't contribute to society? Getting my nails done as harm reduction strategy for a mental illness is an enormous boost to my quality of life. I'm often in a lot of pain because of my cuticles or because I've got some picking spot I can't leave alone, and getting my nails done always comes with a sense of relief for me. I've gotten less and milder staph infections since I started getting them done regularly, too.

Don't poo poo on nail techs, man. Most fabulous, glittery "medical treatment" I've ever gotten.

I had never heard of Paw Patrol until I got some Paw Patrol snack size ziplock bags at my local Dollar General because they were cheap.

So cheap that they busted open when I was using them for dying plastic beads with alcohol ink. Beads and ink went flying all over my apartment. I bought them specifically for dying beads btw.

I've resented Paw Patrol ever since.

I live in a small community in the rural American South, everything is too spread out to get anywhere quickly by walking. It's like a 7 minute drive to my post office. Lots of houses on my street living on pretty big parcels of land.

I wish, though! I hate how dependent I am on my car for transportation.

Ah, yes, because the Hutus and Tutsis are trashing the environment with all the single use plastics in all the TV dinners they eat and with their big ol honkin gas guzzling SUVs.

Lol what? You realize that the Amazon rainforest gets cut down to make room for growing more future McDonald's hamburger patties, right? And that southeast Asian rainforests are being destroyed to make palm oil for Cadbury eggs? Did you forget about how big a deal it was when China decided it was going to stop importing our garbage? First world countries are "better environmental stewards" simply because we exported the environmental damage our consumerist lifestyles generate off to poorer countries with less infrastructure and regulatory oversight. We're not better, we just made it their problem to deal with and are destroying their backyards instead of ours. At the end of the day, we're still the real problem. This notion that they're more of a problem than we are is p much just victim blaming imo.

I don't think anybody is forgetting the role of corporate entities. I think the individual aspect is what's being more forgotten about, or at least it seems that way looking at my Facebook feed. It's deeply distressing to me to see so many otherwise woke, informed liberals stomping their feet and refusing to make any alterations to their lifestyles because they've decided any suggestion for reducing their carbon footprint is some kind of corporate blame-shifting conspiracy when it's... not. The UN climate report said change is gonna have to happen on BOTH the corporate and individual level. Our consumerist Western lifestyles are exactly what created this mess in the first place. How the same people who only a month ago wouldn't stop screaming about how every vote counts can then turn around and decided that no individual effort to combat climate change could ever possibly count is baffling to me.

Ironically, one of the things I uncovered in the process of raising my pitchfork and planning a protest against my local utility was the best evidence I've found of just how much of an impact individual actions can have collectively: power consumption in the US has completely flatlined since 2007, so much so that My Local Utility's 20 year plan put out in 2015 was made completely irrelevant in only 3 years. Why? Turns out it's just a little bit more efficient appliances and then a hell of a lot more efficient lightbulbs. Dead serious, that's all it took to stunt the growth of our national power consumption, even accounting for things like manufacturing moving overseas. And the only reason the appliances haven't made as big an impact as the lightbulbs is their longer replacement cycles delay their impact.

Stuff that small and simple absolutely, 100% makes a difference. Those are the quickest, easiest changes we can make because they are the changes within our power, and to act like people can't focus on both at the same time is absurd and imo completely irresponsible. Yes, raise our pitchforks, but always keep in mind that we're the market and our wallets have the power to fuck their shit up. After reading that 10% of total global power consumption is literally just heating and cooling, I'm dropping $80 on a programmable thermostat because that's an easy, effective thing I can do between now and my protest at the end of the month. (Oh ho, stickin it to ya twice, TVA! ;] )

Liberal in the South. Few things. 1. It's beautiful here, you mean paradise? 2. You realize the South is THE gayest part of America, right? One out of three LGBTQ people live here. Congratulations on erasing their existence. Reminder: Matthew Shepherd, the victim of the most famous homophobic hate crime in the country, was in Wyoming. 3. When I think of infamously racist, corrupt police departments, the first ones who come to my mind are Baltimore and Maricopa county, AZ. We by no means have a monopoly on racism down here, not even close. Don't forget, Oregon was literally founded as a whites only state! 4. Regardless of whether you consider the prompt for the #metoo movement to be Weinstein or Bill Cosby, worth mentioning: neither of them are in the South. 5. You wanna know why so many Southern conservatives are all about owning the "liberal elites"? Because bicoastal liberals are often so condescending and disparaging towards Southerners in general that they even leave us liberals in the South and in Appalachia feeling completely alienated, insulted, and resentful a lot of the time. 6. "Educated people" bruh, Vanderbilt is not considered an ivy league solely for reasons of geography, and we have a national lab here in Tennessee, the hell are you talking about? If the South is less educated than other parts of the country, that's a product of us being the poorest part of the country. Do you have any idea how classist that makes you sound?

Stop acting like the South has a monopoly on bigotry because you're too uncomfortable with acknowledging that it happens just as much in your own liberal back yards.

Thank you for this! I had a pretty successful Tumblr where I posted all my crazy, colorful class notes from my math and physics classes and I've been wanting to get all those scans off there and into another place for safe back up. I had hundreds of posts on there, this will actually make it feasible to do this.

Seriously. And how else are you supposed to navigate the conversation to those things with a complete stranger you just met? Be a mind reader and know those things about them and ask them explicitly? I don't understand why these questions are getting so much hate, for me they're just a starting point when I have no obvious one, and it's a great and easy way to get a general sense of what someone's all about. A getting the ball rolling kinda thing. And having used "so what do you do" as my default ice breaker for years now, I have always felt it put people at ease more than anything, especially people who seem kinda shy. It's open ended and they can go where they want with it. They gotta cool project they're working on they'd love to talk about? They can jump right to it for all I care, sounds good to me!

Or maybe my southerner is just showing super hard in this thread, ha.

I have always just asked "so what do you do?" because I'm in my 20s in a college town so I always assume that many of the people I'll encounter at bars etc are students. Leaves it open ended: are you in school? Are you working? Both? Neither? Something in between? Secretly five groundhogs in a trench coat? And actually many times I've had people tell me in depth about their art/writing/music pursuits and only briefly mention their serving job or something, and honestly that's way more fun and interesting to talk about for both of us.

My go-to is "so what do you do?" and it works pretty great for me.

Seriously. I've been on stimulants for ADHD for almost 25 years. The price I've paid is a few root canals due to dry mouth and I'm on beta blockers for a mild, benign arrhythmia I developed this spring.

Beats the living hell out of my alternative: on the streets, in jail, or 6 feet under because ADHD is hell. It's a price I'd pay every time without hesitation. It's a price I think EVERYBODY would prefer I pay cuz like yo, I ain't safe to drive unmedicated, this a public safety thing.

Coal IS immoral, and you don't even have to bring climate change into it. The US coal industry was built by exploiting the poor in Appalachia, from the beginning all the way until today, and then taking all the wealth out of the area and leaving us with nothing.

Things I'd like to see talked about? That the largest armed uprisings on American soil since the Civil War were the coal wars in West Virginia in the early 20th century. Coal unions fighting for better than what the coal mine companies, with the backing of local police and sometimes the US military, told them they were just lucky to have.

And that of the 900 clean-up workers at the 2008 Kingston fly ash spill, 30 are dead and 250 are dying because they were refused to gear and fired if they brought their own, because if they wore so much as a dust mask, the neighbors might suspect that maybe the largest environmental disaster in US history wasn't as non-toxic as the TVA tried to pretend it was. It will still be years until those people get a dime of compensation.

So many places in Appalachia with poisoned water, polluted air, no futures, and no prospects. Cheap energy tho amirite