My college years are now officially over! I had my final thesis presentation and defense on Monday. I got an 8 out of 10 for my thesis, which is equivalent to an A or A+ I think? Above average at least. My thesis committee really liked the parts I cared about and had some good feedback. It was a great day, except for the fact that my family couldn't make it. They departed well on time but got stuck at a bridge that wouldn't close properly for four hours with no way to turn back. We were supposed to have dinner together afterwards. My mom was really heartbroken that she couldn't make it. In a weird turn of events, the story of the bridge and my mom made it onto the front page of the local newspaper, and now a local restaurant has offered to give us a free dinner this Friday. So at least there's a silver lining. :) The title of engineer is protected here - you're only allowed to use it if you've graduated with an engineering degree. So besides MSc, I now get to use the "ir." title. Gonna look super fancy on business cards.
Congrats veen! I want that business card in case I need a smart person to do something smart from really far away.
Congratulations! Not just for making it through but for excelling into the bargain. Sucks that your family got stuck, but smile-inducing that the restaurant have offered you dinner. So they don't capitalise titles in Dutch? Anyway, milk it.
Tell you in a year and a half, when I'm teaching school children.
Congratulations! "Engineer (van der) Veen" sounds awesome. :)
Things I made this week Socks. Mittens, for the babe. Ring, v. 1 In action (on me). It turned out okay, not perfectly straight. The solder joint is a bit messy, and I only have a polishing cloth to buff/polish with, so it's not as well finished as I'd like. Still, good first try.
At this rate it won't be long before The Babe can clothe themselves entirely in flac-made gear!
Gettin reeeeaaaalllll close. Top to bottom, I've already made: Hat, Cowl, Shirt, Dress, Jacket, Belt, Mittens, ring*, legwarmers, and socks. Starting work on a sweater this weekend, if I ever learn to cobble, the dream will be complete! Actually, I did once cobble one shoe when I was 15, but it was made with suede, and was kind of shitty. Something I'd like to get back to, though. Looking into how to make Espadrilles *not yet done to my satistfaction. Once I make a good enough one, I'll propose.
Love all these! I keep thinking about that article about making a ring and thinking about trying it myself but I don't think my soldering skills are there. But maybe I should do the thing anyway, there's only one way to get my soldering skills to that level, right? Using round wire is a great idea, makes the inside like a comfort fit band.
For a simple metal band, it's actually not too hard to solder - just put a tiny solder chip on top of the seam, and let it heat up fully. Actually getting a flush seam is a lot harder, and is still something I'm working on. If you do give it a shot, I'd recommend starting with a thick guage (10 or 12) so that it's easy to see everything. There's some very comprehensive tutorials on youtube by the user "AtTheBench", I'll link them after work.
I've been lurking in the woodwork for a while, figured I'd pop back in and say hello. The good Had my first drive on Mars on Jan 2nd which was super exciting. More on that in a post I'm working on & will link here when it's done. Bottom line - it was awesome. Drilling capability on the rover should be back soon! Fiance's sister is getting married this weekend, which means we get to see family for the first time in over a year. It will only be a couple days, but his family has the most fun weddings and I really really miss them. The normal Training for marathon #6 is going well. Not too enthused that my running routes are all flat and the race is going to be hilly, so hopefully the stairs and inclined treadmill I've added into my training routine will help with that. Not sure what else to do besides drive myself into the mountains at 4am to get in hills before work. We'll see what happens. I've started making art again! https://imgur.com/a/aztKc Always trying to be creative with xmas gifts for friends and family, I decided this year to sketch everyone's pets onto plywood, use nails for a good border, and then fill in the colors with yarn. I'm pretty proud of how they turned out, and it's one low-tech thing I can do now that really does relax me. Which I need because... The ugly I can't even begin to describe how burnt out I am right now. I can't remember even basic words when speaking (would call it aphasia but it goes away when I'm not long term loosing my mind; had it on and off in grad school), GAD is hardcore kicking in, and basically I feel like I'm trying to live on fumes with half a brain. It's so frustrating to not be able to articulate myself at work, and I'm sure it must be confusing to see someone who clearly knows what they're doing not be able to use words to talk about it, and someone who a few months ago was on top of everything and coming in before deadlines no longer be able to make an extended, extended deadline. I love the work I'm doing and don't want to complain, but at the same time I keep getting asked to work overtime on days off and can't get myself to say no. I was supposed to work overtime the day before NYE and ended up being so sick I couldn't leave my bed for 4 days. On day 5 I was back at 8am. At least in a sense it shows how much I love what I'm doing, because it's a dream job. I know the answer is that I need a break, I just don't know how to get one, because I have no vacation days. Without trying to go into too much detail, I got hired into NASA not as a full employee but as a long term contractor (DC level people putting a stranglehold on JPL hiring is my understanding) which means while all my colleagues get 8+ weeks of vacation every year I max out at 5 days. I was told that the contractor->JPL transition would be quick, but 2 years later here I am, still with no ability to take a break, and still no timeline for the conversion. Going to Nepal feels like a mistake, and even half of that trip was unpaid leave. I didn't know this would keep going this long. With half our family on the other side of the country and the other half in Europe, I haven't seen family besides my sibling, who luckily lives nearby, in a year. It doesn't help that I hate living in a city setting, I don't like LA weather (would much prefer to be snowed in right now! I used to love it) and our rent just raised us out of being able to afford our apartment. So now we're hunting again, and most places ignore you when you mention you have a service animal. Guys, I'm exhausted.
To be fair it's not just work that has me so stressed. We went from evacuated for a wildfire that came within a few blocks -> watching my sister's psychotic dog that barks constantly for 2 weeks -> overtime fiesta at work with no time to just sit. I just want to afford to be a hermit for like 3 weeks and then come back and still be employed lol
Big fuckin' meteor flew right over my house last night around 8 pm, then exploded with such a force that it registered 2.0 on the Richter scale! I didn't see it, but it lit my living room up with a crazy pinkish-orange light for a second then the explosion shook the house a minute or so later. Pretty wild.
Did it sound like shrieking, or brakes on a car? I heard something weird last night, but I was in a windowless room
I'll bet there's an awesome German word for "compared to everyone around you your life is peaches yet you're still dissatisfied and melancholy you choad." My bad day? I spooked and puked a small fraction of ETH because I was home all day bored answering emails and dumb shit like that. My roommate's bad day? He rear-ended someone on the freeway so now he has no car to get clear across the Valley. And I mean, my kidneys work. But I'm in LA, and my family isn't, and while it's nice sleeping in, it sucks sleeping alone. I have new tires. They might shave a couple minutes off my commute. They might also cause my innertubes to explode because innertubes are dicks. Okay, I'll load up an extra CO2 cylinder. You do this enough and "bicycle" becomes "2-wheeled conestoga wagon."
This is a pretty good representation of how things are going. The only thing of note is that dating is going really, really well right now. Somehow have stumbled upon a girl (we even initially met in real life - wow) who makes me feel a lot of emotions I haven’t felt in years. She’s...awesome.
I am going to give a talk/class to a bar full of people expecting to be entertained and learn something. I am trying to not freak the fuck out. This bar wants to invite thinkers, scientists, artists etc and have then give a 30 minute talk on why you should give a shit about what they do. Not exactly the "Beer with a Scientist" events that are popping up, but in the same headspace. My talk will be about the moon and how we came to figure out that the earth is round, moves around the sun and how people have used the sun, moon and stars to tell time since before Stonehenge. Since we are getting two Blue moons and a total lunar eclipse they wanted an astronomer and I picked the short straw. Oh, and this is going to be their first event and are going to use me and the turnout to judge if they are going to keep doing these sorts of things. So we are going to be outside. with telescopes. In January. The title of the talk? New Moon, Full Moon, Red Moon, Blue Moon.
Don't put the burden of Grand Success on your shoulders. You don't need to, you're not the one who's organising this. Focus on the thing you're arguably good at (because otherwise you wouldn't have been asked): making people excited about astronomy! If I went to such an event, my expectations would be "someone smart who tells about their field of study with excitement". Aim for that. Like, how the hell do we know all those things about the Earth and about our stars? It's weird for outsiders that you can look through a tube, make some calculations and predict a friggin' eclipse.
One, Two, Three to the Four Onepac, Tupac, Threepac, Four Fourpac, Threepac, Tupac, OneThe title of the talk? New Moon, Full Moon, Red Moon, Blue Moon.
The Keto Diet is going well. Down from 269 to 254 now. Decided that on Jan 15th, I would allow a little greater diversity in my diet. But I'm thinking I'll wait until the end of the month. The habits are not ingrained yet. For example, went to bed without making food for the next day. Got up the next day and left home before I realized the oversight. Definitely not a habit yet. Gotta get maintain consistency. I'm also progressing on building my whisky bar. Have been practicing with resin for the first time in my life, because I am going to seal the top of the wood (and all the wormholes) with clear poly resin. It looks GREAT. Got the table saw I need to get the boards trimmed to the right shape. Trying to get the planer I need, but the guy who is selling it won't call me back. Finally, starting to look at new cars. 184k miles on mine, and within the next 20k or so, it will need to be replaced. I like the Chevy Volt, but my wife won't let me buy something that isn't a hatchback that I can put a roof rack on. I explain to her that is HER car. What I need is just a comfy box to shuttle my carcass to/from work, and I am tired of having "college student cars". It's time to get a real grown-up car. My 50th birthday is coming up this year. So there's that...
The Bolt is interesting. It doesn't feel like any car I have been in before. It feels "prototype-y" in a good way... the seats manually adjust, the accoutrements inside are pretty rudimentary (weight reduction) to get the greatest battery life, the knobs and switches are all lightweight... and all that appeals to me in my "commuter car". I don't want to commute in a Bentley. I want a utility vehicle for commuting, and the Bolt feels like that... but "more" due to the fancy tech. After 10 years of running my own business, carefully tracking all of my mileage and expenses, I have zero range anxiety. ANY recent electric vehicle is going to have PLENTY of battery for my type of use. (Plus, we have the Rav4 and the motorcycle and the RV, if we need another vehicle.) I think driving any of these all-electric vehicles is going to change your perception of driving, from "all the comforts of home, in the car", to transportation as utilitarian need. I'm interested in that mental journey. HOWEVER. Went to lunch yesterday with a coworker in her new Honda Civic (or whatever their little commuter car is called nowadays). It was AMAZING. Comfortable. High-tech. Efficient. And I could have TWO of them - new - for the price of a Bolt or Volt. ahem.
Interesting, and that makes sense considering range is the name of the game with EVs right now and weight from extra BS = less range. I wonder though how that will change when widespread use of autopilot enters the game, since my assumption is that autonomy is more likely to show up in all the EVs/hybrid/tech-y cars before the gassy ones (totally talking out of the air here). Once you remove the passenger from driving, it seems like the trend would go towards making the interior more home-y rather than less. I guess it makes the most sense to think two branches will emerge: one cheap utilitarian set of vehicles, and a set of luxury ones. Those new Civics keep popping up in my life lately as a lot of my friends and family are getting them and loving it. I got to drive one over the weekend and yeah. If they could stuff a battery in the bottom I'd trade in my Prius for it yesterday. I think driving any of these all-electric vehicles is going to change your perception of driving, from "all the comforts of home, in the car", to transportation as utilitarian need.
Hello I said! Halfway through January and I'm still trying to internalise that 2017 actually happened. I'm beginning to acknowledge that things as they currently are are a bit ridiculous. Last year it was my intention to stay at home and use the tremendous amounts of downtime at my disposal for two particular things - learning to drive, and writing the book about my walk. An entire year has gone by without measurable progress on either of these things. I'm not here to be a downer, though - a bunch of good things happened and some productive things too. But in general, when they write my biographies, 2017 will be a short chapter. So we look with renewed determination at 2018! One thing is certain: I gotta leave home. There are a lot of attractive things about my town - easy accommodation, familiarity, a sense of being part of the community. But I need to at least get some proper full time work and to be somewhere where things are happening and where there are people my own age. I'm terribly conscious of the fact that I'm getting older. But before I leave home, I want those two tasks accomplished or mostly so - the driving, and the book. It's getting increasingly sillier not being able to drive (when I have to tell people, they look at me as if I never learned to read or how to count), and as for the book, no-one wants to read about something like that if it happened fifteen years ago. Shit or get off the pot time, boys! I do have a wee project for the summer, too - time to get those bare feet back out - but I'll leave mentioning it here till Pubski next. I went up to Dublin this weekend to a going-away party - a couple of friends are moving to Canada this week, and they'll probably be gone for the next couple of years. A little sad, but it was good fun. I accidentally ended up drinking the night before with a bunch of other Dublin friends, though, and between the two I was feeling rightly used up when I landed home. Which is a good sign, even if my memory is a tad hazy. So my sister got me a Kobo ereader for Christmas as I mentioned somewhere else around here, and it's fantastic - you can store a needlessly large amount of books in the space of less than a single volume. I've already been reading a bit more - just finished blasting through The Princess Bride today and I have to say I love it as much as I do the movie. Gravity's Rainbow, in paperback form, is sitting on the bedside table and being much more slowly chewed through. But it has changed how I buy books. Now, I would almost never buy new books anyway, unless I really wanted something and it was impossible to find secondhand. But most of the books I read come off of a large and vague mental list of titles and authors that I've heard of or had recommended, and I would mainly browse through second-hand bookstores and pick up cheap copies of one of these. (As an aside, I've been thinking lately of the dangers of forming a sort of "reading bubble" around oneself. Food for thought.) Well, I was in Dublin visiting Chapters, with its labyrinthine used book section upstairs, and doing exactly that. With one difference - I kept Library Genesis open on my phone. If there's an epub available, I ain't buyin'. I'd feel less guilty if I was in the 'new' section. A quick check tells me that in the last years I've spent less than €80 per annum on books, which is a pittance considering that my to-read pile, though by no means massive, has never actually decreased in size. I'm beginning to think I will start spending even less. What are people's feelings regarding piracy of books? In other ereader related news - I will start a newsletter to keep ye up to date - my sister also ordered a case for it, which failed to arrive after several weeks. She discovered that the listing had disappeared and contacted the seller, who failed to respond, and decided to just get the money back through PayPal. This was rather a stroke of luck, because I discovered she'd bought one for the wrong version, and ordered another of the correct size. Days later the first one arrives. Oops. But it doesn't fit, because it's for the Aura Edition 2 model, which is very slightly different in shape. I'm not surprised she made this mistake; after looking it up, I can now present to you in chronological order the release schedule of the Kobo Aura line of ereaders over the last four years: Kobo Aura Kobo Aura H2O Kobo Aura Edition 2 Kobo Aura One Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 Confusing. This is almost as bad as Nintendo with the DS family. And with that I must leave you, my comrades, and go for a cigarette, because obviously I haven't actually quit smoking. Kobo Aura HD
Hermit looking at the city from a distance. Hermit showing a flower to a curious creature. Two weeks ago in Pubski I said I had an idea to draw a silent comic about a hermit who finds himself deciding to live in a city. Here he is. Obviously, these aren't comics, but I think I'm just gonna draw him in various scenes for a while, just to practice drawing. I'm really and seriously thinking I'm gonna go back to school. It won't be for anything crazy, like a degree, but a friend of mine showed me one of my community colleges has a bunch of work certifications and work retraining programs and they look doable, and affordable, and I'm gonna fucking make it happen. They have so many options, from forklift training to HAZMAT certification, to clerical training, to machine repair, to all sorts of shit. I bet this isn't an anomaly. I bet there's colleges all over the place that offer shit like this. Best of all, it's not a for profit, over the internet, we're gonna scam you college. This is a real place, with a physical campus, with real teachers, and all that shit. This shit is legit. I had a draining day at work today. All of my enthusiasm has been sucked out of me today. But man, when I think about this, and talk to Dala or my parents or my friends about this, I'm so fucking pumped. I feel like I've been facing a brick wall for years now and someone just came by and said "Psst. There's a sledgehammer behind those bushes. Go to town." This year, I'm gonna stroll over to that sledgehammer, give the wall one last look, and then beat the ever loving shit out of it until it's nothing but rubble. Fucking wall deserves to be nothing but rubble, cause I want what's on the other side. Fuck yeah.
While I have no background that qualifies me to judge art, I love your drawings. I hope you keep doing them and sharing them.
Thank you! That actually means a lot to me. I don't think I'd ever win any competitions, but I think I've finally learned being "good" at drawing and enjoying drawing are two different things. Knowing people enjoy them a bit makes it that more worthwhile.
Yes! I enjoy lots of things I'm not good at! There's something about your style I really like. I think it's the comic influence.
I went back and badged your comment. Yesterday took a lot out of me and honestly, that compliment did alot to turn my mood around. I love art from all over the place (even product packaging, believe it or not), but comics are definitely some of my favorite. It's amazing to see all the different ways people decide to draw things and the details they decide to focus on or leave out. I didn't know it showed in what I draw, But I'm glad it does. :)
I think it's what's left out that appeals to me in your art. Although things aren't straight in nature, the straight(ish) lines of things like the river or the sun appeal to me for reasons I can't describe. Maybe it's like a story. I've heard it said that a good author doesn't tell a reader what something is like, they show them. Maybe it's similar here for me. Showing too much would have been telling the viewer, and instead the minimalist aspects help show me. Again I'm no professional art critic, but I genuinely enjoy seeing your drawings and these pieces especially.
The retail apocalypse is pushing more and more logistic operations into the metros. Traditional shippers need more and bigger facilities to handle the constant rise in volume, and stuff like Amazon Same Day is only viable if they have major warehouses inside of population centers. Right now it's an industry that is labor heavy, but that'll change. Pretty much every warehousing/logistics automation video I've seen on youtube is either robits or complex conveyor systems.
Things are looking mostly gloomy for the Hubsquad this week :( Instead of piling on my own list of bs here is a popsicle-stick-action show about a cowboy named Little Ray that walked through a wormhole and is now trying to get back to Texas. It will be a waste of your time and you won't be glad you watched it, but you might appreciate its low-effort authenticity. /https://youtu.be/sgfU9YN7Saw?t=26m13s
The flu this season is awful, I thought it went away but it came back yesterday with avengence. This has apparently been happening to most people who don’t get it severely enough at the start and it’s just so cruel. So basically I started a new job today sick, tired, and with a hefty dose of cough medicine which doesn’t make the first day paperwork very easy considering the dyslexia really shines through under those conditions so that was interesting. This will just be another part time job since it’s much quieter in the winter but I’m kind of stoked about having a day job that might correct my sleeping schedule a bit. Trying to figure out the whole University thing and what job I really want. Currently looking at psychology for my undergrad and then doing Law school or working on becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist. Psychiatrist looks like the schooling takes longer and I’m not sure I would want to do that until retirement. I figure I can switch to psychologist pretty easily when I’m getting up there. The schooling seems daunting but last night I tried looking at it as how long I would have this job as opposed to how long I would study to have this job and it seemed more worth it when phrased that way. I don’t know, I’m going to nap now and hope I don’t wake up feeling worse because who really knows with this flu from hell.
Feeling lots of things all at once. Mostly unpleasant. At the most petty level, I'm upset that I was asleep when we nearly had a Tunguska event here in Michigan. Spending the rest of the afternoon in the lab with some TB positive blood, so I don't have the luxury of not being present and aware and focused.
Last week I won a bid on a Yamaha PC-100. It arrives tomorrow. This week I won a Casio VL-1, the infamous half-calculator half-synthesizer. I'm starting to become an addict.
31 hours of awakeness + 10 hours of sleep + waking up at 3 AM = a totally confused sense of time. All because I didn't want to sleep last night. The big exam is finally behind me. All that's left is the small exam, of which I'm not worried. Enjoying life suddenly seems worth it... which confirms my suspicion: I have anxiety issues which manifest as depression. Finally finished Tyranny, the game that inspired Rosa so much. It has solid writing, good worldbuilding and badass characters that don't shy away from being real enough. That said, it's clearly intended to be the first chapter, and I'm definitely getting the sequel, whenever that comes out. Meanwhile, apparently, Obsidian's other classic-esque RPG, Pillars of Eternity, is good, too. Reconciling low fantasy with high fantasy is... difficult. I had an idea the sleepless last night to merge the world of two fantasy stories that I had in mind, Rosa being one of them. It's an awesome idea, but I've been working on the first story's world for a decade, and it feels like a loss giving it up for the mix. On closer inspection, however, not much would change, and the ideas could be easily incorporated. It's just... the feeling of loss. Like Bennett Foddy said, working with ideas is like working with quick-set cement: you shape them, and with time, they harden and settle, you being unable to move them even if you wanted to. Being useless today for any sort of mental work, so I'm going to play the day away. Fallout 4, here I go! (goobster, cheers for the unintended suggestion) P.S. I have a new favorite word: thmackadoodle. (see 0:21)
Best writer's advice ever: Kill Your Children In other words, whatever your favorite part of your writing is? It will be deleted eventually, because the story doesn't need it. So mourn Rosa, and then get on with the rest of the idea. It clearly has your interest right now, so run with it! Fallout 4. Finally figured out the perks system, and now regret almost all of my prior perks. I'm level 35, and will never have a gun that does more than about 70 DMG, simply because I didn't put enough perk points into Gun Nut. Sheesh. And I went back and did a couple of the earliest Quests, which I had been ignoring as I explored the world.... and managed to unlock some key information and functionality (like Trade Routes) that I had NO IDEA EXISTED. This has transformed the game for me. Not "done" yet, but already planning my NEXT playthrough!
Man, you're doing well on the "fighting in the apocalypse" front! I'm pretty sure there are ways to respec your perks, either in the original or, more likely, in the DLCs. If not — there are mods available for XBox One's version of Fallout 4, as well: all legal and Microsoft- and Bethesda-approved. Won't crash your game, either, unless it's a particularly bad mod, and I'm sure you have the sense to distinguish, even if you've never tried modding. Here's the link to the one big mod depository, already filtered for those that have XBOne support. Some small, some real big, like the Sim Settlements mod that has two expansions packs already and allows for massively-improved settlement experience. Also: Fallout 4: New Vegas. How 'bout that. Thanks for the advice. Rosa's not dead: she just sees a new light — which, appropriately, may give her a new, more solid character ground. I'm good to go with it now.
Houston had at least one icy bridge: I don't think the city stocks salt anywhere. Really, this place hardly functions under perfect weather conditions.
my grandfather is dying, unfortunately otherwise things are better than they have been for a while
I've been reading about the nature of consciousness today, and I really wanted to share this thought. So, turns out that our experience of consciousness isn't actually real-time; what we perceive – sensory input, our thoughts, the decisions we make and so on – as happening right now has actually already happened. Everything we perceive is tens to hundreds of milliseconds in the past, and when we become conscious of making a choice, the choice has already been made. It's like our consciousness is the brain's/mind's way of letting "me" know what's going on, and actually being the "me"; it gives us a narrative. I was sort of blown away by this idea that what I experience as "me, here and now" is in a way only the tip of the iceberg of my mind and what my brain does. Like I'm looking at a movie of my own life
I was pretty despondent after I bricked my camera, but kleinbl00 pointed me towards sending it into the manufacturer for repairs. It worked out to be significantly cheaper than replacing, even though the damage I'd caused necessitated replacing the main board and thus tearing apart the entire thing.
The SD card slot is soldered into the main board, and a new one is like 300$ without the work. But my boyfriend contacted a friend that might be able to unsolder it and fix it (he’s some kind of Russian electronic geek, if he can’t do it, no one can). Also ordered a new flex wire for the 2nd camera off Ali express and hopefully I’ll be able to fix it by myself. I just hope I don’t fuck it up further trying to fix it. But wear and tear has been brutal. That camera has been from 45 degree weather to -30. And survived the dust of Burning Man with at least weekly use for 2.5 years. When I opened it up, half the plastic prices inside were cracked already. Anyway, fingers crossed I can at least fix one. Cause buying a 2 new ones is gonna seriously affect my budget. On the bright side, disassembling / assembling the cameras has been fun. It’s like adult LEGO with a hint of danger when the capacitor electrocutes you (oops).
It's been snowy this week down (or up or over) here, but my office doesn't believing in closing for weather, so nothing came of it in terms of time off. Well, at least not time off that didn't come out of my leave balance. Speaking of which, I'm waiting to see if I keep getting paid after tomorrow. I mean, I'll mostly be fine; I mainly will have to put off a few larger payments for things. Now, the real kick in the nuts will be if I get deemed "essential" and have to work for free for awhile (although obviously at that point they have to give me back pay). Nothing much else going on other than that. I'm playing Dwarf Fortress again, which will come in handy if I suddenly have time off. I'm drawing more, thanks to my tutor. I'm back to working on my New Testament readings a little bit too, so that's cool. I'm actually looking at doing a non-degree program on written ministry from a Quaker seminary out in Indiana. I should be able to scrape together the cash by the fall to do a single class, and then we'll go from there. Overall, not too bad. My brain still likes to try to jump me in dark alleyways sometimes, but I'm slowly learning to relax into things more.
Dude one of these days Sean and Chili Klaus are going to really get themselves in trouble. That last special gave me sympathy heartburn. Once you migrate from super-hot peppers to extracts you cross the line into chemical weapon territory pretty damn quick. That reminds me, hey nowaypablo have you been pepper sprayed yet? Like, as part of training?
Oh boy have I, it's part of basic training. They had it easy in this video. They made us recite all kinds of shit before they let us out. I watched the cockiest guy in my platoon lose his shit and try to fight the door guard to let him out. Obviously that just kept us inside longer.
I've only done it once and then volunteered to take a second "hard mode" run at the end of the training with some of my idiot friends, where we left our gas masks outside. It simulates suffocation although you certainly won't die to temporary exposure like this, and every so often some kid walks in and discovers he's naturally immune to its effects! I definitely was not one of those kids. You feel it burning your skin under your uniform the moment you walk in, and then as you take your first breath (which you would've held had they not forced you to speak at length) all your senses just go nuts as you compound the problem by trying to get air. The burning spreads to your insides, which sucked. You can breathe immediately once you're out and after 10 minutes you're pretty much fine. The annoying thing is that the gas crystallizes on the inside of your gas mask so when you don't clean it and then put it on later you gas yourself again :D It'll fuck up kids who leave their contacts in though. All in all 6/10, would not recommend save to see your friends' reactions.