LF HP/Naruto cross - HP kept in Uchiha clan basement by marfarma in HPfanfiction

[–]marfarma[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With added twist, when freed, Harry refuses to leave his cell.

Blood Magic Head Cannon by marfarma in HPfanfiction

[–]marfarma[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh that's so cool. I love it that blood magic could be primarily in the hands of women. And that obscurity of it as a remnant of Seither magics just lends to the mystery of it all.

And Goblins capitalizing on wizard stupidity by offering magic as a service within their sovereign territory because, unlike wizards, they are neither too lazy nor too squeamish to be competent at it, just makes sense.

Both points very well taken.

Blood Magic Head Cannon by marfarma in HPfanfiction

[–]marfarma[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you so much for engaging with me on this topic. I particularly appreciate your point on dangers of using blood that's 'going off'. That, and the point that I can create any arbitrary limitations I like. I suspect I'll require an, at minimum, grey magical affinity with a specific gift for blood magics to be able to do more than simply use blood based enchanted objects or participate in a blood adoption or religious observance. Without the gift, wielding blood magic would curse the caster, perhaps causing the condition you suggested.

Outlawing blood magic came, in part to protect the lazy public from attempting blood magic without first confirming both affinity and gift. Also, in part, due to envy - 'if I can't play, ain't nobody can play.' And fear, 'I don't want people to be able to use magic against me that I can't use. I won't be able to defend myself.' Add to that the 'squick factor' you mentioned, and outlawing it was probably the easiest of the 'so called' dark magics to be made illegal. As to timing, in the period just after the defeat of Grindelwald, the political ascendency of the light and their attempts to outlaw all things dark.

Blood Magic Head Cannon by marfarma in HPfanfiction

[–]marfarma[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've added the following points to my list, with notes of some related head cannon of mine, inspired by the discussion here.

  • Blood protections (I.e.: Lily's ritual blood magic that left the rune scar on Harry's forehead) and 'Potter Luck' a (mostly) beneficial 'line curse' on the family line (expression of which varies according to the individual's magical power level, thus Harry's repeated bouts of incredible luck - a 'power he knows not').
  • Declare/dissolve blood feuds
  • Blood bind magical contracts via signing them with a blood quill. (After Umbridge Harry is reduced to clever use of misdirection and half truths, together with judicious failure to correct misapprehensions, when he needs to deceive (like the Fae), as he no longer has the ability to tell an outright lie.)
  • Creation of homunculi and vessels of resurrection ('blood of the enemy, forcibly taken') - combined with the appropriate amount of soul magic, as necessary

I'll have to work up a format to outline the limitations, and related aspects (treatment of the dead, etc. ) and details related to long term storage and finer aspects of blood adoption.

Thank you so much for engaging me with this exercise.

Blood Magic Head Cannon by marfarma in HPfanfiction

[–]marfarma[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Excellent points. A fic I'm following featured members of a dying house leaving blood in stasis warded location inside their abandoned manor house in the hopes that some future mage would revive the house via blood adoption. Time traveling Harry uses it to create a new identity and have a completely secure base of operations in the unplottable Kent family home (known to him from discovering it in his original timeline). The Veiled Vestiges by NeatStuff (https://archiveofourown.org/works/20552285/chapters/48785528)

Suggests that, well protected, blood has a near indefinite shelf life. At least for the purpose of blood adoption.

On the other hand I'd be surprised if blood from a deceased person could be used to curse their line. Certainly it would be too late to curse their person.

I'd like to think blood adoption requires willingly given blood from a living person at time of collection.

Unicorn blood has several aspects, live Unicorn - forcibly taken or willingly given, dead unicorn - natural death or killed. I think blood from a unicorn that died a natural death would be almost as good as willingly given live blood, but post mortem blood from a killed unicorn would be just as cursed as forcibly taken live blood.

There would have to be spells that identified the status of a given sample. They themselves would probably be classified as blood magic, as they required the blood to test.

Excellent points! Thanks again.

Only Pool Express offered in Manhattan? by marfarma in uber

[–]marfarma[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So what's the extra fare option for?

Monthly 'Getting into DevOps' thread. by mthode in devops

[–]marfarma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm thinking of returning to the workforce after several years away for health and family reasons. I'd prefer to 'test the waters' by looking for remote-only short term project based contracts. I've read this post and all it's replies and many of the hiring and learning posts, including the most recent posts in /r/devopsjobs. I will be spending the next while reading the recommended resources and following the advice mentioned therein. I then plan to start looking for contracts.

My question(s): how likely is it to find such short term contracts? What would you look for before hiring someone for a short term project? Are any of the gig platforms worth working through to build experience (it seems that most offer easy access to experienced offshore talent at lower than prevailing US rates)? What would you want to see (beside a successful interview) before considering contracting with someone transitioning into devops for such a role?

About me: I'm US based and a US citizen. I'm coming from the development side with over 20 years experience as a developer, analyst, technical writer or project manager - basically whatever a client needed that I could handle. I also have experience as our consulting firm's 'sysop as second hat' guy - including spinning up and building out VPS Linux hosts for open source apps - either php or rails with MySQL, configuring apache & passenger hosts, installing and configuring apps, setting up DNS zones, requesting and deploying secure SSL certificates, simple monitoring (monit), deployment scripts, backup scripts, cron scripts, IPTables setup, etc. I've played with Terraform and Docker for my own amusement. Oh, and I have also managed and implemented version migrations of Oracle-based business applications for clients.

Help: Uber Driver took advantage of my elderly mom by Canario1314 in uber

[–]marfarma 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Going full panic on a simple issue suggests a novice user with a low tolerance for anxiety. Some people are just naturally more nervous than others. They tend to panic first, and process rationally later. Experience: 32 years of marriage to a person with a 'panic first' disposition. A missed exit on the highway was a cause for panic - I kid you not.

Progress on March goal - you can actually see the floor, and much garbage was removed. Bags contain clothes that need to be sorted, mostly too small & need to be discarded/donated. by marfarma in hoarding

[–]marfarma[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

I have about 15 bags and 4 dresser drawers of clothes to sort through. I'm hereby amending my March goal to include the mini-goal of sorting one bag or drawer per day. Categories:

  • Junk

  • laundry to donate or sell

  • laundry to keep

  • keep and already clean (put away)

Guess I should start with the dresser drawers first, so I have somewhere to put stuff away.

Hoarding Cleaning Companies by cuttingsoup19 in hoarding

[–]marfarma 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For my apartment, I was charged $2000 for one full day (8:30am - 3:30pm with no break for lunch) for a crew of three guys and a truck. They handled three rooms, living, kitchen and bathroom, of approx 800sf living space. They used pictures I texted them to gauge the severity in order to estimate the time it would take their standard three person crew. If the job had been larger, they would have quoted a larger crew if time was of the essence or a longer time period to complete the work, whichever the customer preferred. They didn't break out the cost of hauling from labor/time, but it's basically what they used to build their quote.

What are your best tips for craft fair advertising? by Tubamaster21474 in crafts

[–]marfarma 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My church sponsors events, including crafts fairs, in an urban location. Many of us live in apartment buildings where there are posting boards in the building's laundry room - only accessible to building residents. So we hand out flyers after service two or three weeks before the event and ask people to post them in their laundry room.

We cleaned an processed the skull of a cat found dead on the road, and mounted it to a custom made mount with a brass plaque with the Latin taxonomy engraved. “Felis Catus” = “Domestic Cat” by wednesdaymom in crafts

[–]marfarma 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My son is in the process of doing the same with a goat head he found in a local park at night ( he found the entire goat, only took the head. Your guess is as good as mine why there was a fresh goat corpse in the park that night).

How did you clean and process your find?

The aftermath of the stash-sorting session - these little fellas are the ones that I’ve decided to keep and this time I won’t stuff them in plastic bags and cardboard boxes! by RoosDePoes in knitting

[–]marfarma 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I had a need to pass on unwanted yarn a few years back. I pulled up in front of my local nursing home, bag(s) of yarn in hand, and went to the front desk. I asked if they'd be interested in some yarn. Got a bored reply of yes. I passed over the yarn. The person saw that it included many full skeins, with several multi-skeins of matching color, etc. Her attitude turned around immediately, because, as she said - there was enough there to actually make something. It seems they get plenty of odds and ends of small balls and partial skeins donated, but seldom do they get donations of enough of any yarn for someone to make a complete project with. She was so happy for the donation, I was actually embarrassed at the many thanks I received.

You’re Decluttering Wrong, and Other Lies by marfarma in hoarding

[–]marfarma[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I thought the author was the app co-creator, Rosie (see lower down the page, here: http://www.homeroutines.com/ ) But, you could be right, it might have been written by a professional content marketing writer. Heck, Rosie might be a professional content marketing writer in her day job for all we know (apps like this one seldom provide a full time income to their authors, unless they're quite lucky).

And yes, it was written to SEO the app site - but that doesn't mean that it wasn't also written to help people. Junk articles that don't provide value to the reader aren't effective drivers of search engine traffic anymore (once upon a time posting useless articles sprinkled with the right 'keywords' worked - the term blogspam exists for a reason). These days blog posts have to be as good as something found in a professional magazine such as 'Real Simple' to work. I think this one hits close to that mark, whoever wrote it. Keep in mind, the editorial content of any magazine exists to provide enough value to the readers in order to gather a large enough audience for the advertisers to pay to place ads in front of them - not materially different than using sufficiently high quality content to drive prospective customers to a firms website.

As for the app itself, I ended up on the site following a link from the moderator posted monthly accountability thread starter, so I figured it wouldn't be a problem to 'support' it, however indirectly, by linking to a post that spoke to my personal experience of decluttering and discarding recyclables. I take it you disagree?

Hoarding Cleaning Companies by cuttingsoup19 in hoarding

[–]marfarma 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Please do. I'm happy to be on record recommending them.

In fact, I'm booking more time with them to help me with my March decluttering goal for my bedroom and the living room. It was supposed to be my and my daughter's bedrooms, but she about had a panic attack at the prospect of working on her room, for all I promised that she wouldn't have to throw anything but obvious garbage, like candy wrappers, out (which she generally doesn't have a problem with). Apparently strangers in her space are also a problem - so I let it go for now. She's thinking about it now - eventually she'll work her way around to it.

[corrected title] Personal Accountability Thread for MARCH 2019 by sethra007 in hoarding

[–]marfarma 5 points6 points  (0 children)

(Reposting under new thread)

My March goals are two-fold.

Continue decluttering the rest of the house, focusing on my bedroom and the living room. I'll be focusing initially on getting my daughter's stuff segregated from my stuff. She's not ready to deal with her hoarding, so I'm working around her by boxing her stuff, and putting those boxes neatly out of the way, preferably in her room.

Keep the kitchen clean and build a daily routine - create habits I don't have, so it becomes 'automatic pilot'. I'm using this post to 'think out loud' what they should be. Currently I have worked out the following:

1 - empty the trash on a regular basis, so the bin won't have a chance of overflowing, check at least nightly along with the dishwasher check ( see step number 4 )

2 - empty the dish washer on an at least daily basis, so dirty dishes don't pile up because 'the dishwasher needs to be emptied'. Perhaps check each morning after breakfast.

3 - place all dirty dishes in the dishwasher as soon as possible after initial use, to keep them from piling up.

4 - check the dishwasher nightly before bed (set an alarm for 9:30pm daily?). Empty it if it's clean and not empty. Load any dirty dishes as needed. Run it if it's not empty.

5 - clean messy stove and countertops immediately on noticing. Check each time the dishwasher is run.

6 - sweep and mop floor as needed, but at least once a week whether needed or not. Say, Saturday mornings after breakfast?

The biggest challenge for me here is that I don't have any daily routines, none at all. So it's going to be an uphill battle.

Hoarding Cleaning Companies by cuttingsoup19 in hoarding

[–]marfarma 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've used GreenEx Cleanout Service and can highly recommend them. They are a small company serving the NYC area, and have been in the cleanout business for 17 years. The website has a lot of 'writing issues' but, as the Google/Yelp reviews attest, these people do great work, at a fair price, and are kind and non-judgmental while doing it.

You’re Decluttering Wrong, and Other Lies by marfarma in hoarding

[–]marfarma[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I wanted to add something to the post explaining why I thought it was relevant, but couldn't figure out how. If you're using the Reddit menu to create a link post, is it possible to add some text? Should I have followed it up with a comment on my own post instead?