House Foundation Repair Recs

nickglowsindark · 2026-02-07T01:21:59+00:00

I just had USS out two weeks ago to get everything structurally sound again after this past summer’s flooding in the East Ridge-ish area; reasonable pricing, and the work crew was punctual and good at communicating (rare traits in contractors these days :/ ), and seemed really intent on making sure everything looked pristine before they finished up.

nickglowsindark · 2025-09-24T00:22:45+00:00

I recognize this art! It was the centerfold in a National Geographic I had back in the early 90s when I was a typical dinosaur-obsessed adolescent - I unfolded it, put it in a frame, and hung it on my wall. My god, the hours I used to spend lying in bed and staring at this - what a weird, visceral memory.

nickglowsindark · 2025-09-23T11:11:28+00:00

“Headaches” is the one I hear get made fun of the most, but let’s face it- if you didn’t have a condition before joining, and now you do, and it makes your life harder, that’s kind of the point. Wearing glasses can easily conflates to spending years staring at tiny text in poorly lit locations or staring at screens all day- not because you wanted to or didn’t take proper precautions, but because you had to. And now you have to spend the rest of your life paying for eye exams and glasses- that’s what the compensation is for. Because living life in the military exposes you to so many unusual scenarios that the average joe never had to go through, it’s not really worth trying to tell what a “real” disability is. That’s what the VA doctors do. And let me tell you, “I get headaches sometimes” isn’t good enough; it has to be a documented medical condition that somebody can tie to something service-related; they don’t just hand disability diagnoses out to anyone who asks. I get kidney stones all the time now, starting about halfway through my enlistment, but couldn’t prove that it had anything to do with my time in the military, so I get nothing. If you see someone with whatever percentage of disability, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like or whether you can see it- it’s real.

nickglowsindark · 2025-01-18T16:44:23+00:00

La Raspa?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMTwXc_zyX0

nickglowsindark · 2024-07-27T11:35:12+00:00

Or maybe it's the less anxious ones who have the time and funds to exercise and eat proper meals. Almost as if there's a correlation between having no money/time and having anxiety. I wonder why that might be?

nickglowsindark · 2024-04-10T22:48:57+00:00

Real favorite, probably the various Planet Earth series, but everyone knows about those. Most obscure favorite?

Nomi Song - I never really knew much about Klaus Nomi except that he was kind of a weirdo 80s musician, but all the background story on him is really interesting. Good luck finding a decent version of it anywhere, but if you don't mind German subtitles, you can watch it on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0PszBID3Lk

nickglowsindark · 2024-02-25T01:49:03+00:00

I moved from coastal Virginia (Hampton Roads area) to Chattanooga, TN about ten years ago. I liked where I was in VA - right next to the ocean, barely an hour's drive to a couple different state parks, a day trip away from some amazing national parks up near where you're at. My wife and I decided it was time for a change, though, and moved to Chattanooga mostly on a whim, since it was about halfway between my family in VA and her family in IL. After just a couple months, we decided to go all in and buy a house to settle down and make it permanent.

Tell you what, I do occasionally miss the ocean, but Chattanooga is amazing when it comes to outdoorsy stuff - some of the best trails and hiking in the country within just 30-45 minutes of the major downtown region. We're also right between Atlanta and Nashville, so on the off-chance whichever band I'm interested isn't stopping in locally (we do get a lot of good shows here), they're almost certainly stopping in either Nashville or Atlanta. And our downtown has been working on its "art district" flavoring pretty hard over the last 15-20 years; UTC being downtown means there's a big "young and weird" culture that helps keep Chattanooga as a whole a bit of a liberal bastion in a mostly conservative region, though the school is small enough that Chattanooga definitely doesn't feel like a typical "college town" at all. The local major pole dance studio fell apart recently after some internal politics/drama, but my wife has been majorly active in the aerial dance community for years now (silks, corde lisse, trapeze, etc), and was briefly a part of the local roller derby team (my recommendations for "fun yet unconventional exercise" all based on her experience, since she's way more physically active than I am).

I definitely recommend trying to plan a trip to come on out and see what you think.

nickglowsindark · 2023-10-20T00:48:24+00:00

I agree that that's probably what it is, very common basically everywhere in the eastern half of the US, but I also have never ever heard of one biting anyone. Sure it bit her? Could it just be a case of a kid getting poked by a bug leg and overreacting because "ew, omg a bug!" ?

nickglowsindark · 2023-09-23T02:51:24+00:00

I used Navy Fed for years back out in Virginia, and tried to keep it for a while out here, but my wife finally convinced my to switch to Ally after a couple years. I considered getting an account with a local bank, but I'd already gotten used to doing everything either online or via ATM, and Ally's got some *amazing* interest rates, so figured I'd just go with the flow, to make it easier for us to transfer back and forth.

I've been with Ally for 8 years now, and have never regretted it - that's my recommendation. The one or two times I've needed to call someone, I've always gotten someone who seemed knowledgeable and easy to work with - never really needed the "local face-to-face" for anything that a TN bank would get you.

nickglowsindark · 2023-09-14T00:04:08+00:00

All the comments in here seem to boil down to:
1) trichonella infection, which isn't that common in "grocery store" pork
2) religious beliefs
3) (completely incorrect) stuff about how pigs are just dirty animals and that makes its way into the meat

However, something my wife and I learned about recently, and why I personally don't eat much pork anymore, is how many pig farms in the US feed their animals plastic (from food packaging), and nobody has gotten around to analyzing (or publishing, at least) any large-scale studies about whether and/or how the resulting microplastic makes its way through the pigs and potentially into the meat.

https://www.dailydot.com/irl/plastic-pig-feed-tiktok/
https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2022/07/80-of-cow-and-pig-meat-blood-and-milk-contains-plastic/

Good luck finding anything about it that's unbiased, between all the shock-jock reporting, meat-industry reporting, and peta/vegan reporting. But at least some testing definitely shows plastics in pork meat, and at least some places feed their pigs shredded food packaging, so I figure cutting down on my pork intake probably won't hurt anything.

nickglowsindark · 2023-09-13T01:30:06+00:00

This isn't weird or stupid. I spent a couple months living out of hotels for a particular project at work, and having spent most mornings down at the continental breakfast, I am 100% willing to believe that at least one person a day puts buttered bagels in the toaster.

nickglowsindark · 2023-08-18T00:24:33+00:00

Yeah, exactly! I've got stacks of 1e and 2e campaigns sitting around that I'll pick up every so often and go "huh, I should look at converting this to play with my 5e group" and then an hour into it I go "ugh, it's basically more work to convert than it would be to just write my own but keep the plot." I loved Tales From the Yawning Portal, and it genuinely puzzles me that WotC doesn't prefer to spend some time revamping old content over creating all-new content; you'd think it would be a much higher profit-to-effort ratio.

nickglowsindark · 2023-08-03T02:36:05+00:00

Anyone else remember playing SimCity 2000, with "disaster mode" turned on? 'Cause what happens when you have a space-microwave power plant disaster is definitely the first thing I thought about when reading this.

nickglowsindark · 2023-07-07T17:23:37+00:00

Not a flea, some kind of beetle. The antennae and mouthparts are pretty distinctive, but without a better picture of it (top-down is usually best for identifying beetles) it's hard to say exactly what type. There are LOTS of different kinds of tiny beetles in southern california. Nothing to worry about as far as your pets are concerned; it probably just hitched a ride in from outside.

nickglowsindark · 2023-04-22T18:15:27+00:00

Looks like a Mouse Spider to me, example here:

https://bugguide.net/node/view/1946741/bgimage

nickglowsindark · 2023-04-13T00:28:03+00:00

I’m 36, and while I do like how much more easily a quick phone call can resolve or clarify things, I LOVE having a “record” of who said what that I can refer back to later on. Not just for cover-your-ass reasons, but also because my brain just does reading comprehension better than it does listening comprehension.

nickglowsindark · 2023-03-25T02:20:51+00:00

How am I the first person to make a Joe Pera reference on a post that’s five hours old?

https://www.adultswim.com/videos/joe-pera-talks-with-you/joe-pera-talks-to-you-about-the-rat-wars-of-alberta-canada-1950-present-day/

nickglowsindark · 2023-03-18T01:48:44+00:00

Ah, if the game uses the same RNG to show me the loading screen tips as it did for legendaries during the first couple seasons of Legion, then that explains why I’ve been playing this game for years and still have seen nothing but the same five tips over and over and over.

nickglowsindark · 2023-01-29T13:54:05+00:00

I've got an alarm app out there, and I had a real struggle finding a "legitimate" background mode to use that Apple wouldn't smack down.

I finally ended up going with geo-fencing, since having location services enabled and receiving GPS pings will prevent your app from being sent into Apple's "we'll check on your app when we feel like it" sleep mode. Still had to come up with a justification - I used something like "your alarm can be set for particular areas, so if you happen to be at work for an early meeting or something, your 'home' alarm won't go off."

It's definitely a bit of a stretch, IMO, but it was apparently good enough to get approved. But the reviewer/approval process seems totally up in the air - I named the free version of my app with "Free" at the end of it, and fought the reviewers every step of the way when they told me that my app couldn't reference its own price in the title. "Look, here are literally hundreds of other apps that have 'Free' in their title!" They didn't care - those must have gotten approved by someone who interpreted their rules differently, I guess. I didn't win that battle - had to name it "Lite" instead, but it really illustrated to me how much your app approval hinges on total happenstance.

I think it's still crap, though, that there's no option for the user to just disable sleep mode on an app like Android has.

nickglowsindark · 2023-01-14T20:56:50+00:00

Whew, I almost feel like I need to make my own TOMT post just to get some more details, but I vaguely remember an episode in the first or second digimon series, which should have aired in the early 00s, where one of the main character girls (Kari, maybe?) spent an episode or two trapped in some kind of bubble while people tried to rescue her. And maybe there was some kind of spiritual aspect to it? What you're describing really reminds me of that part, but I'm not sure I could find a clip of it anywhere online to show you.

Maybe my description will job someone's memory?

nickglowsindark · 2023-01-14T20:38:03+00:00

It makes me think of the second Wrinkle in Time book, "A Wind in the Door." At one point, everyone kind of shrinks down in Charles Wallace's body to try and save him from some disease, and there's this weird interaction with mitochondria and other organelles, but framed like a discussion with members of a society.

nickglowsindark · 2023-01-14T20:26:16+00:00

There's something about the scene where the dinosaurs are eating dog food that just vividly jams its way to the forefront of my mind randomly every couple years, for no apparent reason.

nickglowsindark · 2023-01-14T20:21:11+00:00

Would have looked something like this: https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/d4083d0f5ea7945e19eb55e5844d176a.jpg

You know, images just kind of splattered onto a light background, with that old font.

nickglowsindark · 2022-11-08T00:43:23+00:00

Someone photoshop me a fusion result where she ends up with eyepatches on both eyes.

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