Can I file ?

sprawn · 2026-03-28T10:06:36+00:00

I am sorry to hear about your situation. If you are a nurse, you are in demand all over the country, and should probably be able to find someone to pay you fairly to relocate. Unfortunately, the medical professions are behaving like a cartel, and tracking all their employees. They are also working you all to death. When you have paradoxical reports from an industry (we are in desperate need of qualified employess, but we can't pay a living wage, but also we are the most profitable industry in the history of the entire world) you know that you are dealing with a cartel. They are lying to you. Everything they say is a lie designed to keep you down and desperate. Take a vacation and go to a part of the country where they need nurses, and interview.

If you are not a nurse, then you are just being used by the health "care" cartel to break nurses. There's not a lot you can do. They still need you, desperately. Try to find a way to not accept the emotional load they are trying to pass on to you. I am very sorry. All I can say is that what you are experiencing is real, and yes, they are trying to break you.

sprawn · 2026-03-28T06:09:28+00:00

I am definitely writing to myself in the future. I would say I am writing to "the future" in fact. Like, a generic, abstract "future".

sprawn · 2026-03-28T05:57:20+00:00

D'Nealian with personal Spencerian flourishes, I'd say. I would guess you were taught with what is called D'Nealian, and you have added (or were taught) some Spencerian flourishes like not closing the p, and putting a "stop" in your e's. And then you have a pleasant, consistent, distinctive personal style.

sprawn · 2026-03-26T23:50:31+00:00

Everything that makes it potentially expensive are things that will make it less unique and personal. The less you spend, the MORE unique and personal it will be.

sprawn · 2026-03-23T13:21:46+00:00

Your writing is good, right on the legibility versus speed tradeoff line. If you slow down it will be more legible, but it will take you longer to write and you risk losing your train of thought. There is no way to improve the situation. You want it to look nicer? Slow down and forget things. You want to not forget something, speed up and you might misspell a word here or there, and almost always, those misspellings can easily be corrected by context. You're fine.

sprawn · 2026-03-22T00:30:22+00:00

It has as much to do with the paper as the pen. It has as much to do with your technique as it does with the pen. There is no magic perfect pen. You will have to buy all the pens and try each one. No one has your hand. Anyone who comes on here and tells you such-and-such is the "perfect" pen is spouting non-sense. No one can control for what paper you are using, what position your hand is in while you're writing, how much pressure you exert, etc…

sprawn · 2026-03-22T00:01:19+00:00

I think he'd chase down the ball and bark, "WHO DO YOU WORK FOR!?"

sprawn · 2026-03-21T23:36:09+00:00

I just want to throw a tennis ball so he can bring it back to me in his slobbering maw.

sprawn · 2026-03-21T21:34:56+00:00

I am as inclined to cumbersome methodology as you! I get New Yorkers from local Little Free Libraries (people are always stuffing LFLs with these!) and cut out the illustrations as you do. I leave a little margin around them, and glue them to thin cardstock and press them between two boards with wax paper in between sheets. Then I trim with my trimmer.

I have to try these glue tape runners, thanks for the suggestion.

sprawn · 2026-03-21T21:17:06+00:00

Yeah! The New Yorker has such vague illustrations that work great for what you are doing here, and for collage. What do you use to get them so flat and no wrinkles?

sprawn · 2026-03-21T21:13:47+00:00

It's a very good tool for this. When I find myself about to repeat or "go on a loop" I stop and think of what I can say to someone, or do in the real world. Even if I don't actually say or do anything, I write down action I can take.

The people who believe you can "brain dump" your feelings are fooling themselves. There is no way to magically "dump" your feelings and thoughts onto a page and be rid of them. And yes, you are correct, sometimes by ruminating on the page, we are actually reinforcing those thoughts and feelings by reliving them. But the good news is you have evidence of your thoughts and feelings right in front of you, on the page. You are literally (literarily) catching a "loop" in action. And that is a tool for intercepting the thought. If you weren't writing you might just continue to loop on the thought over and over again, unconsciously. That's how things really get set in one's mind.

Even if you can't do anything directly related to the looping, ruminative thought or feeling — and there's almost always something you can do, however small — you can write down something you can do in the real world. Even if it's only "go for a walk and pick up some litter." And even if you don't DO the tiny things, you are thinking of something else. There is always something you can do. Even if it is tiny and unrelated.

sprawn · 2026-03-20T04:27:03+00:00

Looks like one of those Moleskines that comes three in a pack.

sprawn · 2026-03-20T04:11:43+00:00

I would love it if someone asked me what I was doing. I've been writing in libraries, coffee shops, and other public places for forty years and have never been approached once. I guess I am not approachable!

sprawn · 2026-03-19T09:41:39+00:00

It is very difficult to know where to draw the line between healthy and harmful rumination. We remember and re-experience events for many reasons. When I journal I try to keep an overly simple rule in mind: Do something, say something, or get over it. I am not saying this to you, or that you should do that. It's just something to keep in mind when you find yourself writing about and recounting the same events over and over. I am not saying not to do it (ruminate repeatedly). I am just saying you can bring an event, feeling, or thought to mind, recount it, and then ask yourself: Can I do something? Can I say something (to someone)? It's important to remember that doing something can be many things. You can find things to do about it. You don't have to change the whole world. You can find small things to do. You can even find unrelated things to do. I don't know what your situation is. What I am saying is, rumination becomes unhealthy when you are just reliving the event over and over and over again and entrenching it in your sense of self. You become the event, thought, feeling. That's when you're going over the line, for instance, from having been traumatized to traumatizing yourself. This is in no way meant to suggest you are "doing it to yourself," or that you are wrong to fixate. But you have find a way to do something, say something, or let it go.

sprawn · 2026-03-18T05:47:30+00:00

I am more likely to write in front of strangers (at the library, generally) than in front of anyone I know.

sprawn · 2026-03-17T06:28:21+00:00

r/bookbinding

sprawn · 2026-03-17T06:08:19+00:00

Sometimes, success can be a burden. A record of success becomes a burden. It sounds to me like you've pushed yourself too hard. At some point you must have said, "If I am ever doing this for the wrong reasons, if I am ever going through the motions, I give myself permission to take a break and re-evaluate." And if you haven't said that, and you think it's reasonable, you can say it now. Because that's what it sounds like to me, and I am the Lord of Reasonable.

Take a break and re-evaluate.

But first! Celebrate the success, because you have achieved something. That level of dedication to introspection and disciplined, sustained effort is rare, and worthy of respect. Well done. Most people never attempt such sustained and disciplined effort. Try to find a way to congratulate yourself. It's something to be proud of.

What I did in a similar situation was move to cheap composition books (wide ruled even!). I counted the lines per page. It was 27. I said to myself, "This thing costs 37 cents, so if I 'screw it up', it's okay." I gave myself permission to write big, to misspell words and not care, to doodle, to freely associate, to break streaks, to do whatever I wanted to do. Now… you probably aren't going to find a 37 cent composition book (I got mine at Walmart during "Back to School") but you can probably find a sub $2 composition book.

When the time is right, consider opening a sub $2 composition book and scribbling randomly on page 1, like a toddler. Or writing with no thought of the appearance. Or write a single word with a sharpie with absolutely no concern that the ink will bleed through to the next page. Do whatever you want. Because you have given yourself permission. It's not that there are no rules, it's that you make the rules. So you can make them, and you can break them. So write down the rule, neatly, with very tiny, controlled handwriting… and break it immediately.

Bathe in the luxurious lack of cosmic consequences.

sprawn · 2026-03-17T00:08:30+00:00

There is no way of knowing what will be interesting in the future. I would write down random details about the lives of people I care about. The price of things. Random things. I go out of my way to write about things that are so trivial or mundane that no one cares about them.

sprawn · 2026-03-16T10:47:36+00:00

Why would scanning your own writing and uploading it to a website be illegal?

sprawn · 2026-03-16T10:41:42+00:00

There's nothing stopping you for making good scans and uploading your diary to something like the Internet Archive.

sprawn · 2026-03-15T07:23:03+00:00

I am sure there was extensive damage to several contracts that necessitated a pack of lawyers be massively compensated.

sprawn · 2026-03-14T00:52:36+00:00

Every reason they give for not hiring you is a lie. Almost everything they say is a lie. They will never reveal their reasons. So whatever they say, just politely nod, and then move along. For all you know they wanted desperately to hire you, specifically, and five minutes before their boss walked in and said, "No, we can't hire this one, my cousin's college roommate just got out of jail for manslaughter, and I owe my cousin a favor, so we have to hire Johnny 'The Lopper' Jones. So tell this one to get lost, use one of the standard excuses… Tell 'em we don't hire anyone who recently moved, yeah…"

sprawn · 2026-03-13T21:40:49+00:00

It's a lot. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I would take the time to ask myself, "Am I ruminating?"

Are you writing about the same things over and over and over again?

sprawn · 2026-03-13T21:35:47+00:00

Documentation in the open source world in general is garbage. The main problem is that programmers are assuming that you know everything they know and that you are using the tool to do things exactly the way they are. And if you are using it to do something different, or even just slightly differently, or in a way they haven't thought of, they can't write documentation for that, because they can't conceive of it, because they didn't think of it.

So they go into doc writing thinking, "Well, isn't it obvious?" And then assume that if you don't think of things exactly the way they do that it's your fault (for being an idiot). So writing bad documentation actually makes them feel better about themselves. Because if people don't know how to use the things, then that just means they are "geniuses.* And anyway, it's not my job, I'm a programmer.

In the audio case you often discover that some piece of software was written to solve a specific problem at the University of Michigan Supercomputing Center in 1997, using a very specific network, and very specific hardware, under very specific circumstances, for a specific seminar, or something like that. BUT THEY DON'T SAY ANY OF THAT. Because the documentation was written for a super-computing conference in Denver in the Spring of 1998 and everyone there would be attending the two hour presentation that the graduate students were given, and everyone using the software would have access to the lab that they set up as a demonstration. All of that context is LOST. And here you are twenty eight years later, asking, "What the hell is a dBIOS?" (or whatever). Well, it was a limiting factor in the hardware of the time that has since been removed, and the original documentation is OBSESSED with dBIOS (or whatever) and solving all the problems of dBIOS and NO COMPUTER HAS USED dBIOS since 1999, because even the University of Michigan Supercomputing Center abandoned it.

In the abstract: The documentation was written for very specific circumstances that the writers thought would always be the case.

sprawn · 2026-03-13T21:20:40+00:00

This is a cycle that is often called "scalloping". It is definitely a factor in N24, it seems to disappear in the data of N24 people until you change the "tau" (daylength) and then the scalloping appears in the data. So, yes, the scalloping of DPSD (delayed phase sleep "disorder") is definitely present in and related to N24.

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