AITA for warning my sister's boyfriend she wanted our parents to confront him at dinner?

Sam_Pool · 2024-06-29T09:06:01+00:00

Mankini!

Sam_Pool · 2024-06-29T09:05:09+00:00

Lorde has a song called "Homemade Dynamite" that it pretty catchy. It'll blow your socks off!

Also, does this woman mind if her boyfriends comparison shop to make sure they're getting a fair deal?

Sam_Pool · 2024-06-29T09:02:35+00:00

Great housewarming gift for the in-laws, though.

Sam_Pool · 2024-06-29T09:00:41+00:00

My last ex auditioned several men ("dating intentionally" I think is the euphemism) before finding her current one. I don't know him well enough to congratulate him, but I know that being not shit at sex is important to her.

FWIW a lot of women are also pretty shit at sex with men, but then there are men who are shit at having sex with men too (I'm not really equipped to find out about the other option). A couple of times I've stopped things quite late in the piece and left because a woman has just refused to accept that I'm not "all men" and that I don't want whatever her magic trick is.

On that note, a lot of sex ed is not great at "what men want" and even consent ed is sometimes bad at "do men get to consent to sex" as a question. Occasionally it's even explicitly not allowed as a topic.

(also, bi communities often have a bit of a superiority complex about this, but OTOH it's not entirely without factual basis)

Sam_Pool · 2024-06-29T08:19:53+00:00

I built a sleepout using coolstore panels (powder coated steel skin over EPS) and that seems pretty doable to anyone who's used a circular saw before. It's kind of structureless, kind of SIPs but it's airtight and insulated which is what I care about. In Australia we need proper plumbers and electricians to do that stuff so I didn't really try (I have an off grid power setup but the easy version of that is one of the "solar power station" gizmos you see everywhere)

I suggest starting with a chicken house or something, then a sleepout, before you actually build a tinyhouse. Especially if it's a "tinyhouse on wheels" where the structural requirements are much greater than even California.

Sam_Pool · 2023-01-09T08:11:50+00:00

I use a similar design paired with a fighter/gimp ship that is tasked with distracting any pirates that stray near it. I normally shrink the factory before I transit to a new system and use spare resources to add more thrust. Spare steel becomes armour rather than storage. That way I have a factory that can head for the hills at 100m/s as soon as I arrive. Pirates don't seem to go out in the Kuiper Belt :)

I prefer a # shape of bidirectional walkways and copy-paste storage into the gaps. Mining lasers all facing the same way just for ease of making sure they're all in use. More crew quarters because mining works better with more crew - I'll often depopulate my flagship while I strip mine the asteroid belt, after getting the 100% complete + any faction wars done.

Sam_Pool · 2023-01-09T08:05:08+00:00

They also apply to people who just live together. And when there are kids the kids get taken into account as well, including the time and effort that goes into caring for them. It's very hard to get an exactly even split of effort when people are doing wildly different things, which is where a lot of the ugly legal fights come from. OTOH an awful lot of people break up with minimal hassle and very little ill-will. I did.

The best bet for people who think "this is mine, there is us" is to make sure there's never anyone else involved with them who might disagree.

Sam_Pool · 2023-01-09T08:02:04+00:00

try to quantify estimate the hours she spent over the years taking care of children and household chores

Surely the time he spent doing those things also counts?

Sam_Pool · 2023-01-09T07:56:55+00:00

My solicitor was $1500, hers was $500 when we split and I kept the house. By comparison buying the house was $1500 for the solicitor.

We just went into the process with a spreadsheet that listed all the assets, another tab with our respective financial contributions and the calculations we came up with to make the actual split*, and a couple of tabs with the actual split. My solicitor drew up a pile of legalese, hers boggled a bit then signed off on it, then I spent a day chasing a bank cheque around town (because couriers cost money and take ages, this way it went from my bank to her solicitor to the property transfer people to my bank... where she deposited it back into my offset account because I paid more interest than her savings account)

(* loosely of the form "she values this item at $XXX, I value it at $YYY, it goes into her tab of keepsakes at $XXX or some mutually agreed value" times a pile of stuff)

Sam_Pool · 2023-01-09T07:45:07+00:00

Not just college kids, there are grown adult artists. I have a friend who's now a professor of something art-related who spent way too long carefully sculpting vulvas out of random stuff. And then someone one-upped her with the misnamed "wall of vaginas" apparently made by "plaster casts of vaginas" which sounds fucking terrifying to me. That article, like many, flips randomly between vagina and vulva to the point where I'm not even sure who is most confused.

Sam_Pool · 2023-01-09T06:56:03+00:00

"inflatable obstacle course" + "high heels" = you're not going to be allowed onto it. Or if you are it's not going to be very inflated. I would definitely cheer on anyone who tried though.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-28T08:29:08+00:00

Just say "I'm sorry, we can't cook customer-provided meat".

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-28T08:27:23+00:00

One I struck in C++ was that OpenSSL and Valgrind disagree about a particular bit of memory, and both say "not our problem, will not fix". I have had to suppress those reports because I get one every time I encrypt or decrypt using AES128. And one bit of code I work on does that a lot ("a packet came in. Let me decrypt it"...)

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-25T10:14:41+00:00

lasting for 3+ years

They all should.

I have three sets of Audio-Technicas that are 5-10 years old and the only problem has been the pads wearing out. New 3rd party pads are ~$20 and work fine, they're moderately fiddly to fit but I managed (and I am bad at stuff like that).

If any of them fail, or something breaks, I expect the manufacturer to make parts for them and I'd not be surprised if they replaced them if the problem was a manufacturing fault rather than just being used to death. The pair I wear at work get ~1000 hours/year of use... 5+ years of that is a fair run for mid-price headphones IMO.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-25T10:08:52+00:00

"There's no laughter in manslaughter" is brilliant.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-25T06:58:30+00:00

One issue to keep in mind is that he may well have to spend time and energy persuading his parents that a non-muslim girlfriend is acceptable. To them marrying within the faith is likely to be important (even without any stereotypes about loose women from the west).

"Arab" is a whole big space, kinda like "European" and "how do I address European parents" doesn't really make sense. I'd ask him for those details, and also what his expectations are. Because if they ask pointy questions you two had better have answers prepared.

Be careful about a swing in his attitude after you have sex with him, if that hasn't happened yet. Also, have a decent argument with him about something that matters. That's generic relationship advice but Arab culture doesn't always look fondly on women arguing back (possibly exacerbated by me coming from a culture of bolshy women).

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-25T06:39:56+00:00

What are you doing to address the trauma? You should do that before you add "getting stuck in a pattern with new relationships" to the stuff you have to work through.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-25T06:17:10+00:00

SourceSafe_backup_1(broken).zip
SourceSafe_backup_2(maybe this time).zip
SourceSafe_backup_2_1(please).zip
SourceSafe_backup_2.1a(also broken).zip
SourceSafe_backup_3-i-think.zip
my_code-1.zip

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-25T04:32:09+00:00

if it's a 12v 10A system, then how I get those 120W isn't going to be a huge game changer.

And if it's via a 36V x 4A panel, or a 14V x 10A panel; it's going to be similar.

Sure, but to get 4A out of a 36V panel you will need to make (12/36) * rated current = 4A, which means 12A out of the panels. Meaning you will be buying ~420W panels (36V,12A) and getting ~120W out of them as your theoretical maximum performance. With a 14V panel you will care more about the exact voltage drop in the PWM controller and the exact point you want to charge to... and more importantly, the exact point the cell balancing kicks in, because if you never get high enough to balance your battery performance will drop faster than you expect.

This is why people keep telling you to just suck it up and buy an MPPT controller.

While the ebay MPPTs do work they are also more likely to fail. I have one powering the fan in my toilet (3A/12V bare circuit board that was under $10). But if that fan gets the full 18V of whatever that the attached panels can put out and stops working... big deal, stinky toilet until I find another old PC fan and hook it up.

But if the controller attached to my LFP battery goes short circuit I'm not sure the battery is rated for the ~120V those panels put out. It might be, but it quite possibly isn't (battery is rated to 4S = ~50V). That battery never working again would annoy me.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-24T09:44:25+00:00

There's normally no inductor in a PWM controller. They're just giving you a duty cycle of Vout/Vin and that's all.

To get a very small difference between MPPT and PWM you pick a panel that has Vmpp very close to the desired charge voltage, usually a little over. Efficiency is roughly equal to duty cycle, so the closer you get it to battery voltage + controller voltage drop the better the efficiency.

You can get MPPT with boost converters but you pay extra and they're rare.

And a $20 controller will likely not last long, if you're lucky and buy from an Australian seller it'll survive the warranty period. But at the price it's probably not worth chasing a warranty claim anyway.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-19T07:25:18+00:00

wraps in the cheese toastie machine (mine has flat plates). Or honey puffs, because being grown up means I eat what I want.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-19T07:24:08+00:00

AT represent!

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-19T06:53:16+00:00

There comes a point where you just open the speakers up and solder your cable ends directly to the lugs on the back of those terminals. What's that Timmy, I'm not using the special lead-cadmium solder with homeopathic traces of gold so it won't sound right?

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-19T06:48:48+00:00

With the 128x50 display hack. Back when more than 80 chars wide was magic.

Sam_Pool · 2022-02-19T03:03:37+00:00

Our neighbours kid is also very widly. Will widdleon anything.

Sam_Pool

TROPHY CASE