violetgarden

Yeah! I have a very soft voice. I’ve practiced to make it bigger, but even my loudest voice is not terribly loud. Ordering things behind the counter can be tough for me especially if there’s background noise of people chattering or machines whirring like in a coffee shop. Kind of an odd situation, and I’ve been able to get through life fine without self order kiosks, but I’m glad when they’re there because I just feel like I’m easier to deal with as a customer.

I love watching shows like this! The Great Pottery Throw Down was good too on HBO Max. I love watching creative people work. I find they have a lot more freedom to their process than I do. I’d probably logic myself out of 10 ways to do something, but creatives seem to have an easier time of “I’m gonna try it and see what happens.” Even when they don’t get a result they expect, they might find it lovely anyways and just go with it.

It’s crazy to think about the child Malala to this!

Thanks for the details! I know what I’m gonna try when I row later.

This gives me hope. I thought I just couldn’t breathe through my nose while exercising. I find it super uncomfortable to unbearable when I feel like I’m not getting enough air. I didn’t realize you could just practice more.

This is so sad. Reminds me of the Challenger where the concerns from engineering were ignored due to pressure from management.

I went to SF two years ago. I was just shocked by the amount of drugs around. Walked out of my hotel at 8 AM and was offered crack. Waiting at the walk signal, there would be people in the throes of a high hallucinating and screaming at no one in particular. I brought sandals with me on the trip but had to stick to close toed shoes because of the needles/human waste on the streets. I used to just love SF when I was younger, but my recent trip really put me off.

The sad thing is, I think it’s good that SF is trying to treat addicts differently. However, I don't know if they’re attracting more addicts because they are lax or maybe you just see more because they aren’t thrown in jail? I’m not from Cali so I don’t know the situation too well. Sadly, it just seems like it’s spiraled out of control whatever they’re doing.

That’s really cool! I’m in the US, and the farms I have seen are so large, I don’t think a normal person could pop in and ask questions. I’ve never seen a building near one of these farms because the rows of vegetation goes on for miles it seems like.

That said, smaller farms and dining experiences are popping up all over. I feel like the local, craft experience has been really popular and is trending us back to seasonal, organic ingredients. I was just saying to a friend the other day that I feel like I don’t know what season anything is in because we can get so much produce all year round. We’ve started little veggie gardens in our yards and were trying to sus out what we could plant.

I’m American, and I don’t know anyone who eats this much hamburger. A lot of us find them to be pretty heavy, so it’s more like a meal that you have once in a blue moon. However, someone commented below that it might just be the income bracket we’re in. Poorer people might be consuming more of them because they’re cheap and fast to get.

Where I live, there is extreme weather like hurricanes or tornadoes. Even if you opt for a more expensive roof, the wind might come along and wreck it. Most people I know have shingles, and they wear down in the elements after 20 years or so. You might start getting leaks or you might not, but once your roof reaches a certain age you can expect to start seeing problems. Kinda like a car.

Shoot, I’m so grateful to be in a state that was loose with the lockdowns. A friend in another state was frustrated that even the large parks where he lived were locked down. Even in our strictest phase, you could still go to the park and get a little relief from the confines of your home. I cannot imagine how other states are coping where things are much stricter. I am just shocked at the mental component of all this. It’s hard to articulate the way it makes you feel living through all this.

Exactly! There’s a totally different bar to entry. Look at North Korea. I don’t think they rank highly as a concern with traditional kinetic warfare, but they have made themselves a major security concern even with scant resources because the bar to entry with cyber warfare is just that much lower.

I’m surprised by the backlash regarding this tool. Well, I guess surprised is the wrong word. I get that it is creepy. There are lots of websites that do this very thing like whatsmyname.app.

I personally like running my username through tools like this and aggregating my digital presence. When I was younger, I signed up for lots of sites that were the cool, new thing. Checking myself years later, I am shocked by the wide berth I left. Fitness accounts. Accounts from that time I was getting into studying chess. I’m the type of person who is always on to the next hobby. I go 100% in on something, then pop to the next thing. It was a big wake up call to me looking back seeing how much presence I left. Many accounts are so old I can’t even get into them anymore to clean up what’s out there. Tools like this can be used for good.

That said, I totally understand the cyber stalking/bullying concerns. I am also astounded by the cyber sleuth types. In the documentary, Don’t F* with Cats, people spent 100s of hours carefully walking through streets in Google Maps to match a location to a photo they had of a guy who killed a cat on YouTube. It seems to me where there’s a will, there’s a way. It’s scary, and unfortunately a lot of tools we can use to protect ourselves are the same tools that can be used against us. Look at cyber security in general. A black hat and a white hat are people with the same skills, but ethics draw a line between them.

When I was younger, I thought homeschooling was almost exclusively because parents were weird and controlling - maybe even in a cult like situation. Or I thought homeschooling was for socially hopeless kids that couldn’t cut it in “real” school. I have no idea why my perception was so negative. Now that I’m older, my opinion has completely flipped. I am grateful to have had access to public education, but it was probably bronze standard at best. If I had children, I’d probably homeschool them.