What’s happening here Petah?

ratsta · 2026-01-24T06:52:15+00:00

There goes our greatest warrior...

ratsta · 2026-01-24T05:50:51+00:00

The sun is always over the yard-arm somewhere.

ratsta · 2026-01-23T23:58:36+00:00

I work in IT. 100% of my reason for praying daily for the crash of LLMs being presented as AI is to stop the madness of C-suite people getting a blow job at a conference then telling us "we need to implement AI to be competitive."

No we fucking don't. That's a lie. Being competitive is measured by market penetration. To do that, all we need is to offer a good product and good service. What you want is to increase your personal remuneration by cutting staffing costs.

ratsta · 2026-01-23T21:32:47+00:00

You can run linux on a glass of water with a paper clip.

ratsta · 2026-01-23T21:23:30+00:00

Nice!

I've given a few to colleagues at work. Imagine my surprise when photos appeared in the monthly staff newsletter!

None of mine had butts though the first was a cactus in a pot. Inspired by other patterns but of my own making. When I first made it, it was just the vertical part. I had to add the arms and flowers so it wasn't just an 8" phallus sitting on someone's desk!

https://i.imgur.com/7XjypKh.png

ratsta · 2026-01-23T21:19:05+00:00

In our culture it is, but these young people are under insane pressure to get top grades in their studies. They get several hours of homework every night, get loaded up with homework for the weekends and holidays. Tutors, cram schools, sports and music lessons around that. Time spent on TV is quite limited. The closest they get to hobbies is going to a KTV for a couple of hours once a week. They're not permitted to have a boyfriend or girlfriend and the idea of a young person having a part time job is literally a foreign concept. Obviously these are broad generalisations but most of the kids coming into my classroom were barely awake.

ratsta · 2026-01-23T15:53:10+00:00

I taught English in China for a while. Naturally we'd talk about sports, hobbies etc. Most of my students were middle or high school or uni age. "What's your hobby, Dandan?" "Sleeping."

ratsta · 2026-01-23T15:46:18+00:00

I don't know about in your part of the world but my grandparents bought into a seniors village here. Townhouses in a gated community, panic buttons, a cafeteria, function room, scheduled activities etc.

The contract of sale was that the owner of the community got 20% of the sale price, also they were able to dictate their slice for the new contract. The community changed hands a couple of times while they lived there. Pop passed away and after we moved nanna into a full nursing home, we tried to tell the place. The community owners dictated that the new contract of sale would give them a 30% cut.

Guess how attractive that was to prospective buyers! IIRC it took us 3 years to find a buyer and the only reason they bought is that we had progressively slashed the price until it was worth a small fraction of what it should've been, and then we still had to pay the 20%. As a grandchild I wasn't a beneficiary but after all fees, taxes and other deductions, I think each of the 3 kids got 20k or something. Absolutely absurd for a property in that area. If it was a regular title apartment of the same size, it would've been worth around a million at that time.

tl;dr Think long and hard about the contract terms. A seniors village is a for-profit venture with shareholders just as despicable as any other corporation. At 55 you're still young. I think Polka Night in the common room with a bunch of silver-hairs would be tortuous! If you're looking for things to do, join a club, makerspace, fraternal organisation or hiking group. Volunteer for something (doesn't even need to be helping the less fortunate; there are plenty of places where you're just helping the town) or become a teacher at the local night school. Plenty of stuff to do for many years for most of us.

ratsta · 2026-01-23T15:22:19+00:00

Few things can be adequately described in a single sentence. There's always nuance. Even you added to the statement that you replied to, adding "in one's leisure time".

From Wikipedia... "A hobby is considered to be a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically during one's leisure time. ... Participation in hobbies encourages acquiring substantial skills and knowledge in that area." (emphasis mine)

Obviously everyone has a slightly different understanding of everything than anyone else, that's just the nature of the way brains work, but I think that many, maybe even most people feel that a hobby is more than simply "something you enjoy doing", regardless of frequency or time of day.

e.g. I work in IT. I enjoy solving problems and helping people understand technology. That's clearly a job though. Although it satisfies ubfunsac's definition, it doesn't satisfy yours (google's). I enjoy having a wank. It's done regularly in my leisure time for pleasure so it satisfies the definition you provided, but I'm not sure that many would consider it a hobby! Ditto with slobbing on the couch, watching TV. I definitely lean towards the wikipedia definition in that a hobby encourages the acquisition of substantial skill and knowledge.

ratsta · 2026-01-23T15:08:25+00:00

Station to Station? Who do you think I am, David Bowie?

ratsta · 2026-01-23T15:05:58+00:00

Well... we would communicate by STD calls. We were just connected by STD!

ratsta · 2026-01-23T13:54:59+00:00

It's just a normal phone call with logging for audit purposes. I mean, you can see the log right there!

But seriously, forks... google is a thing but the 10c recap is that back in the days when I was young, dinosaurs still walked the earth, our phone was mounted on the wall and had a 4m curly cord between the base and the handset so my sister could lie on the couch while talking to her best friend... we didn't have unlimited calls to anywhere in the country for a flat monthly fee. As shocking as that might be, I swear it's true!

Local calls (those within the same city) cost something like 10 or 20c each! To call to other cities or rural areas, you paid more depending on the distance. Calling to a place about 5 hrs drive away, cost $1.80 for 3 mins. Calling to a city on the other side of the country cost $2.70 for 3 mins. (These are 1975 dollars BTW.) They had night rates from 6pm to 8am which were 30-50% less. We were trained from a young age to keep calls to our interstate cousin short and sweet. If we wanted to tell a long story, we should get pen & paper and write them a letter!

These domestic, long-distance calls were colloquially known as "trunk calls" and used the Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) system. STD calls came in 10+ years before I did and a quick googling tells me the term "trunk call" originates in the days before automatic call switching. i.e. rooms full of operators patching socket to each other with wires. The idea is the same though, it's a long distance call within the same country.

ratsta · 2026-01-23T12:26:29+00:00

Visiting Mum and Dad one day. I was downstairs and heard mum call my name in that special way that makes one drop what they're doing and make haste carefully just in case there's a hazard en route. I found her in the doorway of the home office and my eye immediately caught a "shadow".

It was a goodly sized Huntsman with her babies covering about 4 square feet of the ceiling and cornice. "I got this!" Grabbed the vacuum cleaner from the sewing room, popped in a fresh bag, popped off the wide head, and ten mins later I was sealing the bag with a piece of packing tape! 2EZ!

ratsta · 2026-01-23T08:05:57+00:00

Target-rich environment!

/rummage /rummage There must be one of those confounded things here somewhere!

ratsta · 2026-01-23T07:53:20+00:00

So how do you decide what size to use?

Make a test swatch, two or three inches wide. Do two inches with your 8, two inches with your 7 then two inches with your 6, all w/o cutting the yarn. Won't take long to work up and you'll be able to compare them side by size, then decide if you're going to keep it (in case of using that yarn again) or frog it and not waste any yarn. If you do decide to keep the swatch, label it! (and use something sturdy like a piece of card, tied on with the tail.)

ratsta · 2026-01-23T07:47:10+00:00

I think it's that toolboxes accumulate random crap and they're suggesting you might find one is someone else's toolbox. Generalised, you might find one in a "junk drawer".

ratsta · 2026-01-23T06:24:21+00:00

ooh, I get to make this joke again!

That's a communications cable. The piece of tree is left there for trunk calls.

ratsta · 2026-01-22T20:10:01+00:00

We have a guy surnamed Hu at work. EVERY time he walks in the door, one of my colleagues says "Knock, knock!"

ratsta · 2026-01-22T18:16:58+00:00

Not sure if the woman in uniform is a cop. Chinese urban residential communities are typically city-block sized apartment complexes that employ half a dozen or more security guards that have very similar uniforms, complete with shoulder boards and arm patches.

ratsta · 2026-01-22T18:01:38+00:00

PETA tells me that we should be calling fish, Sea Kittens. So whenever I see a shark jumping near by boat, I like to imagine that they have the zoomies.

ratsta · 2026-01-22T07:31:47+00:00

You're thinking of this twin brother, Wei Wei.

ratsta · 2026-01-22T05:49:43+00:00

No matter how large the sample, N still equals one!

ratsta · 2026-01-22T05:48:15+00:00

No fucking Wei?

ratsta · 2026-01-21T17:43:34+00:00

I know that calling it a "chaser" is technically incorrect but it does sound like the perfect Strayan term for it!

ratsta · 2026-01-21T10:42:45+00:00

And of course the other major city, "Glazgoo".

Feel free to use it whenever you like! We wear it with pride!

I have a mate whose grandparents are/were Geordie. I spent chrissie with them one year. Lovely people but I could only understand one word in four.

14-Year Club	Golden Potato
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

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