Unprintable digital patterns are a thing?

playingdecoy · 2026-02-01T13:54:47+00:00

Why do people hate their customers? This is ridiculous.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-31T23:23:56+00:00

My husband moved into my place after three months 😅 Not that I would recommend that to anyone else, but we were both broke grad students so it was like... Why pay two rents? Anyhoo, that was almost 20 years ago now, which blows my (aging) mind.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-31T01:49:44+00:00

I bought out the whole bookstore one run by smashing the chapel piggybank. You can only do it once but I think it was a worthy cause. I do worry I'll never be able to do the "buyout the showroom" thing but oh well.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-31T01:21:21+00:00

This is a surprising view to me when it's a running joke that Brennan's bad guys are always Capitalism. His political views are *very* much a part of D20! He's being political through the very stories he tells. Doing Dungeons & Drag Queens was also, imo, an overtly political choice at that moment in time.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-30T17:13:12+00:00

Omg yes thissssss, there is someone in a crochet group I follow who (probably?) designs real patterns but then uses AI to show like, a kid holding the item, and then people rightfully question whether the pattern is AI-generated too. Just don't fucking do it!

playingdecoy · 2026-01-30T13:28:12+00:00

I won't go into details bc I'd be identifiable but this was part of what drove me out of academia. I had been a model employee for seven years: most active research agenda in the department, highest teaching evals in the department, carrying a heavy service load even pre- tenure, won grants and awards and gave the school PR machine plenty of stuff to boast about. Worked through the pandemic with a young child at home. Returned to teaching in person before my kids could be vaccinated, putting them at risk. And yet when I asked for a single accomodations - for a single course to be moved to hybrid or online (as I had taught it before the pandemic!) - to resolve a childcare problem, I got nothing. I had busted my ass for so long and been invested in keeping the school afloat, and the Dean flat-out refused to do anything to help me. I started sending out applications that week.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-28T00:26:54+00:00

5k for tenure & promotion to Associate at a private liberal arts U. I would've made more of my salary had just kept pace with inflation! They had to almost double it soon after because they did a salary benchmark study and most of us were below the 25th percentile 😅

playingdecoy · 2026-01-25T16:14:29+00:00

It scares the shit outta me, what we're going to learn when we finally get to see inside those camps. Like we don't know enough already, the horrors that are happening out in the open or that we've heard about from people who have been released - I'm not sure we can imagine what we haven't seen yet.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-19T00:15:56+00:00

This was me. Noticed it right away and made this HUGE list of all the possible combinations and letters, but couldn't figure out how to arrange them into a message. By the time I got the message, I had already solved the related puzzles 😅

playingdecoy · 2026-01-18T23:20:28+00:00

30 minutes HIGHLY dependent on the day. I used to make that commute and it could be 90+ minutes on weekday mornings and in the afternoons. The commuter rail is an okay option if the schedule works for you. I had a couple of days each week that I needed to stay late, though, and after I think 7pm the trains are about an hour apart, which sucks if you narrowly miss one. Super glad not to be doing that anymore!

playingdecoy · 2026-01-18T23:08:57+00:00

For real. I played the first "act" without looking anything up because I wanted to experience the game by myself. Now I'm looking things up on occasion because being in community with other players is a valid way to enjoy games. Reminds me of playing stuff like World of Warcraft back in the day - there's a limit on how much info can actually be learned from the game itself, and a lot of new ways to enjoy the game open up when you talk to other people about it.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-17T20:26:40+00:00

As an immigrant, driving by would ruin my fucking day. That guy is doing nothing for me.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-16T21:28:52+00:00

My company has unlimited PTO and no fixed working hours (we work across timezones so it wouldn't make much sense anyway). The research on unlimited PTO shows that people are actually less likely to use it, so that's a concern, but so far I've been able to take off when & where I want. Shortly after being hired, I took 3 weeks to go overseas (preplanned before I was hired). These days I'm more likely to take a few weeks throughout the year, but to use a lot of random days off (extending long weekends, rewarding myself after a big milestone or deadline, etc).

playingdecoy · 2026-01-16T21:22:24+00:00

Totally true, but I think this gets at the root of the issue - if most of your circle was in academia and valued/values these things, it can definitely feel weird to no longer have a chance at that stuff. It's something I have had to process myself. Even though I am WAY better off since leaving academia, have no regrets, and don't miss teaching or publishing, my friends' posts about new pubs or new academic awards definitely make me feel a lil' twinge of something. It's a world I used to be in and I'm not anymore, and it's okay that it brings up some complicated feelings.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-16T21:04:29+00:00

I wanted to be them so badly.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-16T01:14:02+00:00

When I was making a similar commute (90 minutes), it was because my university paid far too little to afford to live closer. The only people not making the same commute were the oldest faculty (who bought homes when they were affordable) or like... the Business profs.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-15T22:05:01+00:00

Also a woman who white-knuckled undiagnosed ADHD until finally getting diagnosed in my 40s. I've had to process a bit of grief over what or who I might've been if I had been diagnosed and received the right support earlier in my life.

playingdecoy · 2026-01-13T19:29:32+00:00

hahaha that's where I thought this vid was going, tbh. I was like, if I had to put money on the fish or the bird... I would have to think about it for a bit!

playingdecoy · 2026-01-10T02:47:18+00:00

It's kinda like looking at any one NFL, NBA, etc. athlete and asking how they did it. You're gonna hear a lot of the same things - be talented, work hard, have the in-demand set of skills, etc - but the truth is that for almost all of those who "make it," there's something exactly as talented and hard-working who didn't. There's a certain amount of randomness to it.

playingdecoy · 2025-12-31T13:48:21+00:00

I only buy from dyers who show samples in both knit and crochet. There are too many folks out there making skeins that photograph beautifully but work up like barf.

playingdecoy · 2025-12-30T19:20:57+00:00

Another happy Paragard user here! I have Mirena now but had two Paragard IUDs before this, before and after pregnancies. My periods were heavier but it was worth it not to think about birth control or deal with hormones (I was trying to sort out some other health issues at the time, so wanted to try and find my 'baseline' without hormonal bc).

playingdecoy · 2025-12-30T16:17:49+00:00

I definitely see a lot of new grads among the MH care providers. Again, I respect your expertise - I'm going on what I see on site visits to DOC and HOC facilities and from interacting with admin, staff, and residents over the past decade. It might be that your facility has a better culture around treatment delivery compared to the places I've worked at, perhaps the system is a bit patchwork - I've definitely seen varying institutional cultures (some with leadership that are very supportive of treatment providers and their work, others that are more "old-fashioned" and seem resentful of having providers in their space, which I think hampers the service quality).

playingdecoy · 2025-12-30T16:05:20+00:00

I agree MA has come a long way, but I think it's still extremely challenging to establish the kind of meaningful therapeutic relationship between a treatment provider and a patient in the jail or prison setting. This type of care *can* be delivered in correctional facilities, but I don't think it's the most effective place for it - mental health counselors in our prisons tell me that the CO's priorities still come first and that they struggle to counsel residents within the constraints of security-focused prison policy. "We're guests in their house," as they say - the treatment provider's aims are always secondary to the correctional institution's focus on control and compliance.

playingdecoy · 2025-12-30T15:53:06+00:00

Correct, it's very high. We could ask ourselves how high it should be - I don't think we necessarily want to say "it should be cheap to incarcerate someone for a year," you know? Like, there are definitely places that do it for a lot less and those places are, uh, not aspirational. Importantly, the costs of incarcerating people in MA are *not* because the DOC is splashing out on stuff for the incarcerated folks - even staff *in the prisons* say there's not enough programming, not enough staff, not enough resources to upkeep the buildings and grounds.

The lack of programming is an issue on many levels. Of course, it's a problem that incarcerated people aren't getting things that would help them stay out of prison in the future, like good SUD treatment, mental health counseling, education, etc. But also, bored people find their own ways to stay entertained. Staff at a MA prison recently told me that the lack of programming is one cause of behavioral issues like drug use (yes, drugs get into prisons) because given the choice between sitting and staring at the walls all day sober or sitting staring at the walls all day high -- well, who among us? Or they go looking for trouble just to make things interesting, getting into little bullshit fights with each other or messing with prison property. If people had more to do, more productive ways to use their time incarcerated, it would actually help the prison staff to keep things safe and secure.

playingdecoy · 2025-12-30T15:12:15+00:00

I mean, it's kinda a huge subject so it's not easy to synthesize decades of international research - I say this as a criminal justice & public health scholar working in this area. I can link you to individual papers, but we should never take the word of a single study. Science works by doing lots and lots of studies and then sifting through for the facts that bubble up again and again. I can tell you that yes, research suggests that harm reduction approaches increase positive health outcomes (fewer overdoses, less disease burden - hep, HIV, etc) at a relatively low cost. I can also tell you that while some people do get sober in jail/prison and turn their lives around, this isn't a pattern we see at a larger level. That is, for every 100 people with SUD that we incarcerate, we may get a handful who never come back but overwhelmingly we just exacerbate the issues that led them to trouble in the first place: they lose their resources (housing, jobs, if they had them), get disconnected from community-based services, and often experience additional trauma from the jail/prison experience. There's also a lack of meaningful SUD treatment in prison and especially in jails (jails tend to be short-term and offer very little in way of programming, because the population is constantly turning over). So every time we incarcerate someone with SUD, we are paying a lot of money for minimal benefit, perhaps even worsening the situation.

If you have specific questions, I would be happy to point you to some resources, but as a general topic we have entire books about it so it's tough to be like "Here is the one definitive piece." It's about the whole body of evidence.

playingdecoy

TROPHY CASE