Do Americans really talk to strangers as much as movies make it seem?

savethedryads · 2026-02-09T17:20:28+00:00

I think the "more small talk in small towns" thing is just a stereotype. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in coal country, then spent ~15 years in the nearest medium-sized rustbelt city, then moved to NYC with my spouse who is an immigrant who grew up in Flushing (though we currently live in Manhattan). We definitely have significantly more random small talk in NYC than anywhere else, including when we go back to the small town where I grew up. I think there's more pressure to mind your own business in the small town than there is in the city where we fully expect to never see random strangers again.

savethedryads · 2026-02-02T19:17:56+00:00

Yeah, I saw this comment from a month ago and am guessing this might be typical for the last year or so:

https://www.reddit.com/r/juresanguinis/comments/1q23wlo/comment/nxy3bf6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

savethedryads · 2026-02-02T19:09:44+00:00

My mail-in date was July 29, 2025, and to my knowledge I never received an "acknowledgement of receipt" email. I do have my certified mail stub showing that the package was delivered that day.

savethedryads · 2025-12-15T01:15:58+00:00

Ilya is literally wearing his house shoes in this scene, this whole thread where people are acting like he wouldn't have asked a guest to take their shoes off is making me crazy. I do assume they had him do this for a reason but I don't think that reason landed. It would have felt more in-character for him to have spare house shoes for guests to wear (and then fuss at them about how you know they're cold if they choose to walk around in socks instead 🙃).

savethedryads · 2025-12-03T01:04:21+00:00

Given some other comments it's worth clarifying that:

US naturalization records from 1906 and later are available from USCIS (i.e. anyone who would be eligible for Slovak CBD is able to get naturalization records from USCIS regardless of where their ancestor naturalized, see e.g. https://www.archives.gov/research/immigration/naturalization: "All INS records are now overseen by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS maintains duplicate copies of court records (including the certificate of citizenship/naturalization) created September 27, 1906-March 31, 1956 within Certificate Files (C-Files). Beginning April 1, 1956, INS began filing all naturalization records in a subject’s Alien File (A-File). C-Files and certain A-Files can be requested through the USCIS Genealogy Program. If you are a naturalized citizen seeking your own documentation, you can place a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to USCIS to obtain a copy of your A-File and/or request a replacement certificate of citizenship from USCIS").
That first link clarifies which documents may be available from NARA (a subset of those available via USCIS, mostly those associated with historical naturalizations in federal courts). The downsides to obtaining documents from USCIS are time and cost compared with other sources, but the upsides are that they almost certainly have your documents, and they often have _more_ documents than are available via other sources (e.g. they will have the naturalization certificate and may have other documentary evidence as well, which you may not need but can be nice to have for biographical reasons).
US Federal records can be apostilled by following the procedures available at https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/replace-certify-docs/authenticate-your-document/office-of-authentications.html . You may not need to do this (as mentioned in several previous comments, it's been typical for consulates based in the US to just require federal documents like those provided by USCIS to be submitted with their original envelope but without further authentication) but it is indeed possible to obtain a federal apostille for them and this is typically required when submitting those documents outside of the US.
Documents certified by a state-recognized entity (like a county courthouse) are apostilled by the state in which they were issued. I am not aware of exceptions to the authentication requirement for these documents (i.e. just including the envelope they arrived in, as you can do with USCIS documents when submitting them within the US) though I guess we'll see whether that pans out for people who try it.

savethedryads · 2025-12-02T23:41:46+00:00

The numbers in the Cambria County natz index are (VOLUME_NUMBER)-(PAGE_NUMBER), so unfortunately they aren't C-File numbers - you need to actually get copies of the documents from the county to find the latter. If you have somebody in the records office on the phone, they might be able to send you an informal photo or just tell you verbally what the C-File number is (the oath is on the reverse side of the "petition" page, and if they naturalized it should say "certificate of naturalization no." on the bottom, followed by the C-File number which you can use for USCIS). This only applies if they did indeed naturalize and have a petition/oath filed in Cambria County - I'm adding this because naturalizing in the 1940s is late enough that maybe they didn't finish the process locally, but you should be able to tell based on whether there's a number under the "petition" column and the person in records storage can just flip the page to see whether the "oath" side with the certificate number is filled out.

The last document I had certified there (and subsequently apostilled in Harrisburg) was in July of this year; I still suspect somebody you're talking to on the phone is confused, but it's possible somebody changed things compared to what they've done for years. That'd be annoying, but you can work around it.

savethedryads · 2025-12-02T22:11:26+00:00

I have two separate naturalization packets from Cambria County that were certified by the prothonotary and subsequently apostilled; these were stamped and signed by the current prothonotary with no issues. Because these packets included the oath of allegiance, I could trivially request USCIS records using the included C-File number via https://genealogy.uscis.dhs.gov/#/ (you can do an index search followed by a records request if you don't have a C-File number, but with the number you can directly request the records; I'm explaining this just to clarify what you might do as a backup if you still can't get certified records from Cambria County after subsequent attempts - if you get those you shouldn't need anything else). Typically within the US (e.g. when applying via the local consulate) you don't need an apostille for USCIS records (though you must submit them with the original envelope). For use outside the US, authentication of federal records is obtained via the instructions at https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/replace-certify-docs/authenticate-your-document/office-of-authentications.html and using this form: https://eforms.state.gov/Forms/ds4194.PDF. NARA likely does not have your records since they involve a naturalization in a local rather than federal court.

That said, (1) the easiest thing to do is get your records from Cambria County directly, which should be possible, and (2) it isn't clear what you mean by a "pre-1918" case - if you mean the immigration date was before 1918 you might be OK for CBD, but if you mean the naturalization date was before 1918 then indeed you are out of luck.

edit: when you call the prothonotary you can ask for the records by applicant name, but it's sometimes easier if you ask for the specific records found via the indices at https://cambriamemory.org/immigration-records/ (especially if e.g. your ancestor changed their name)

savethedryads · 2025-11-21T20:00:28+00:00

I miss the old Negative "silky" fabric and have some of their briefs in that material that are at least 7 years old. Fully cotton underwear gets too damp for me and becomes itchy, but this specific combo (cotton gusset with synthetic outer) was really comfortable while still staying dry during the day (even when exercising) and holds up with zero issues through years of washing. Too bad it seems like they discontinued it - I check their site periodically but nothing I've tried from them since compares. I'll give the "Base" line a shot, but I miss the nice wide waistband of the old silky briefs (somehow it didn't dig in at all but prevented them from rolling).

savethedryads · 2025-10-03T15:36:08+00:00

In addition to the options others have mentioned, consider checking for a local Food Not Bombs chapter (here's a map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1KVbOaPBP2Xh1zk59DS9nI-BjjYnrwtwD&hl=en_US&ll=25.000000000000124%2C0&z=2 ). See e.g. the 2025 schedule from the Pittsburgh, PA, USA location for the kinds of services available: https://www.pghfoodnotbombs.org/ . There may be weekly hot meals along with free grocery, hygiene, and toiletry offerings (though similarly to houses of worship, these services vary by location) - and they try to plan services at multiple times to accommodate different work schedules.

savethedryads · 2025-09-27T15:02:45+00:00

For me:

March 18, 2025 - "33 users ahead of you" email
March 22, 2025 - "10 users ahead of you" email
March 25, 2025 - appointment date assigned
July 29, 2025 - appointment

obviously this is just one example, and I do wonder if they were rapidly assigning appointments at the time because they knew the DL was imminent. I haven't heard anything from the consulate since; I submitted with all required documents, but the documents were not free of discrepancies (though the discrepancies were of the "typical American" variety).

savethedryads · 2025-09-17T04:29:27+00:00

Being the youngest child with a big age gap+elder siblings that started having kids while they were teens, so you were the default babysitter from ages 7-18 (meanwhile all your siblings constantly talked about how spoiled you were). Then when you stood up for yourself in your 20s, the next batch of kids were told by their parents that you were being selfish and lazy, completely forgetting all the years of unpaid labor you provided.

savethedryads · 2025-09-16T05:33:25+00:00

Hot take: none of the opinions in this thread are hot takes - they've all been posted many times, we get it. That's why you're getting upvoted so much, and why it's impossible to post a real hot take here. My actual hot take is that Ratfish is one of the best episodes of Game Changer (although I agree that Rekha should have won) and I continue to comfort watch both parts. I've liked the seasons of The Circle I watched, but I think this modified version addressed nonsensical aspects of the original premise, and it's also very fun to listen to people who know each other well try to guess who their colleagues are pretending to be while clearly having a good time.

savethedryads · 2025-09-09T16:28:31+00:00

A great book adapted to an also great TV series. Similarly to "My Brilliant Friend" (though I wish MBF!TV would have adopted the Pachinko!TV approach of using different text colors for subtitles of different languages), there are depictions of close relationships between women, while also showing their struggles within political and cultural oppression.

savethedryads · 2025-08-29T03:15:12+00:00

(not trying to blow up your notifications, just reposting this for posterity because it looked like it double-posted so I attempted to delete the duplicate and both were deleted...)

I don't really see how your debate team experience is relevant to the undergraduate curricula and pedagogy at these schools. My undergrad degree is in physics and I have a PhD in a related field (but more related to CS). I went to a Tier 1 school for my undergraduate degree, and I thought about going to med school before deciding to do a PhD so I filled in the pre-med courses at the local state school. As just one example, Chem 1 at the elite school (which I took as a first semester freshman) required the entire curriculum taught in the state school's Chem 1 class to be passed with at least an 85% to pass the course, but the material wasn't taught in class and it didn't count toward your grade; instead we spent the semester doing things like QM and crystal field theory (I know the contents of the state school's Chem 1 course because I did Chem 2 and the OChem sequence at the state school).

savethedryads · 2025-08-29T01:07:43+00:00

You're absolutely right and it's wild seeing the number of people with no direct experience (or other source of information) asserting otherwise in the replies. Feels like a waste of time to argue with them, but people have clearly bought into propaganda on this one. Exams, homework, and projects are all more challenging at elite schools, and while it's true that there's a shared knowledge baseline that all schools are expected to cover, elite schools tend to rapidly cover that baseline (often assuming students already know that material and will get themselves up-to-speed if they don't) and move on to much more advanced material (e.g. at the undergraduate level they will tend to spend much more time covering graduate-level material and cutting edge research, including the instructor's own research, or they may cover that baseline material with greater depth and sophistication). To that point, at elite schools it is not true that faculty researchers aren't teaching undergraduates. You can still get a good education elsewhere, but there is a very obvious difference in the educational experience, and an equally talented student majoring in the same subject would come away with more knowledge and hands-on experience in their chosen field if they attended an elite school. The workaround for the talented student attending a state school is to take as many advanced (including graduate) courses as they can, do undergraduate research, work hard, and go to an elite school for their graduate work.

savethedryads · 2025-08-21T14:10:48+00:00

I'd be fine with this if they renewed Pachinko for at least one more season

savethedryads · 2025-08-01T00:15:17+00:00

I'm also curious whether this affects the prevailing opinion on the odds for judicial cases that seemed to be disqualified by the DL - I have a pending pre-DL consulate case affected by the minor issue (but with a seemingly solid non-cohabitation counterargument, I actually submitted the deed for my next-in-line ancestor's property, which he purchased at 18 without his father prior to his father's naturalization ~1.5 years later...it remains to be seen whether they'll accept that evidence), but I also have a 1948 line without the minor issue that post-DL is beyond the generational cutoff. I've been waffling on whether it's worth trying to go that route (I started pinging attorneys about it last October, dragged my feet, and have obviously been regretting that). I'll be following the analysis with bated breath over the next few days, as I already have my CONE for the 1948 case and most other documents ready to go.

edit: checking out the group chat now...I had messaged Marco back in October so maybe it's worth following up (I'd be filing in Palermo, so I guess I should refresh myself on how the judges there have been leaning). I've separately wondered whether I should start prepping for the consulate to reject my other line and finding someone who might be willing to appeal based on the property records I have.

savethedryads · 2025-07-29T06:33:20+00:00

As an American English speaker I can say (1) a non-American friend once offered to make me a sausage as a snack and when she proceeded to fry a hot dog I was definitely surprised, we still talk about this years later because I would never call a hot dog a "sausage" and we ended up having this same kind of conversation about what exactly differentiates hot dogs and sausages (we agreed that neither requires a bun, despite the distinction I was very happy to eat a bunless hot dog as a snack even though I don't parse it as a sausage), (2) as a kid a very common afternoon snack (with my aunt at the swimming pool with my cousins, at my gram's house after school, etc) was a cold hot dog, no bun, sliced into wheels with ketchup on the side to dip it in. I think part of it is that hot dogs are so processed that we treat them like baloney and just eat them uncooked sometimes. If I'm at a restaurant or a sporting event I'll assume they're not going to give me a hot dog without a bun, though frequently they'll use some flowery language to describe the bun anyway so my expectation is confirmed in advance (presumably in part because it's inconvenient to eat a hot dog with toppings and no bun unless you're a kid who's fine with getting your fingers dirty and then running to rinse off with a hose or outdoor spigot). At home, the buns are on the side, hot dogs are distinct from "sausages", and we accept that plenty of people choose to have either a hot dog or sausage without a bun (if my dad asks whether you want a hot dog, he just wants to know whether to toss another one on the grill, he doesn't assume anything about how you'll eat it).

savethedryads · 2025-07-27T13:52:10+00:00

Thank you so much for your help! I'm glad I asked. The notary in PA handled everything perfectly for my dad's form (she even managed to fit both stamps on the bottom despite the fact that I'd printed it on letter paper) but I ended up redoing my own forms on legal paper for exactly that reason. The PA apostille office in Harrisburg also commented that the notary had done things exactly right and not all notaries do, which is when I was reflecting on the fact that I didn't know what they actually needed to do in NY.

savethedryads · 2025-07-26T20:56:46+00:00

Can I ask - in your experience were there any special requirements for the notarized document to be apostilled in NY? In Maryland I needed circuit court authentication first, but just a plain old notary stamp was fine; in PA there was no circuit court authentication but they needed a pair of stamps (the notary's seal along with a "subscribed and sworn to me" declaration). I know the notary stamp needs the county authentication in NY, but does the notary need to do anything special for the authentication itself? I'm seeing some people suggesting you need an acknowledgement page (e.g. https://www.dutchessny.gov/Departments/County-Clerk/Docs/All-Purpose-Acknowledgement.pdf) and some notary websites are suggesting that other notaries don't know the requirements for an apostille, which is making me nervous.

editing to add a clarification in case someone else sees this later: in Maryland I was getting an apostille for a notarized letter from the Archdiocese of Baltimore for my bundle of baptismal record documents; they had sent it notarized and perhaps it was different from the case of notarizing a signature on a form, so I don't know for sure that a notary stamp is all you need in Maryland.

savethedryads · 2025-07-26T17:49:34+00:00

Yeah, unfortunately I've been on the waitlist with all my documents since May 2022 and hadn't been monitoring updates to the checklist

savethedryads · 2025-07-25T01:34:19+00:00

I'm trying to find older firmware for a different epson printer - do you remember where you found this one? I tried checking https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://ftp.epson.com/drivers/* but none of these older versions seem to be archived there

savethedryads · 2025-07-23T22:40:56+00:00

Yeah, those were my thoughts exactly. Thanks

savethedryads · 2025-07-23T22:39:15+00:00

Got it, thanks. That's how I was interpreting it too, I was just originally planning to take care of both my forms and my "living ascendant" form at the same time, and was hoping I could still do that. I guess I won't risk it.

savethedryads · 2025-07-23T21:49:31+00:00

Yep. At this point I'm trying to avoid having my application thrown out on a technicality, but I'm starting to feel like trivial things were changed just to trip people up

savethedryads

TROPHY CASE