I wouldn’t know, I have a different product that works similarly.

It’s more like fiberglass or compressed rockwool than asbestos, according to the product information from when I bought it years ago, but who knows.

Are there batteries in laptop charger cords? That doesn’t sound right…

Fair enough :) maybe that’s different or maybe I’m just weird. I’ll never know 😁

First of all, your skills may not be where you want them yet, but you made art (and it’s pretty good besides; drawing is hard), you are an artist. An artist early in your journey, so think of all the aspiring art students that make just terrible stuff while they learn, and be happy you aren’t doing it for a career while improving. :)

That said, I don’t really see what the AI added to it. Sure it colored it in, but you could have done that too, and it would have been another chance to hide some of the blemishes that you don’t care for, and give it more of your own personality. The personality is the art, as much as the thing that gets made.

It doesn’t have to be perfect to be progress. Keep drawing, keep drawing the sorts of things you want to get good at, and think about how you’d like to color them, and just try it out, use crayons, colored pencils, markers, or maybe a digital image editing program. I’m sure there are some good free open source programs for that. You don’t get good without lots of practice, so train those muscles to do the fine motor skills you want them to do, and train your brain to think about what colors would be best for what you are trying to depict (something AI can never really do for you).

If you like the ai stuff for yourself, enjoy it, but personally I’d be put off by it being used in a book. Even bad art that’s hand made is better than AI, imho.

Those did suck, until erasable pens came around and they changed what the blue stuff was made of, if memory serves. I remember those early erasable pens that had a similar blue eraser in the cap… usually only worked if you wrote lightly, but the ink tended to be kinda thick and required force to write… so you’d always have that blue smudge left over and could probably read what was written anyway.

On a related side note, has anyone tried the frixion line of erasable pens? I got them for my knockoff rocketbook (a planner-size notebook of “paper” made from stone fiber, in which you can erase special pens like frixion using water, like wet erase markers, or the eraser, and reuse the paper indefinitely) and even on regular paper they are just amazing to erase. Every color comes off cleanly, and the eraser is just a rubber nub of some sort that doesn’t wear out.

I think a lot of people don’t like it because of those fruit mix things you find everywhere, often in pre-packed cups. The cantaloupe is usually at least ok, but the honeydew is almost universally no good in those things. Always hard and rarely sweet, like they only pulled from next to the rind.

Have you ever stuck your head out a moving car window, into the high force wind, and found it very difficult to breathe? That’s what I imagine sky diving is like (not something I particularly want to try), and a ‘chute would slow that enough for comfortable breathing, I imagine.

I’m a huge fan of people wearing skin-tone yoga pants that don’t match their own skin tone, but do match the skin tone of a common major population. Like black or Hispanic people wearing buff-colored pants in areas of mostly Caucasian people. Because initially it just doesn’t register that it’s not the right color and you still see it as nudity. And that’s just a fun juxtaposition to me.

My partner once sleepwalked into the kitchen to get food (bad habit of sleep eating, probably due to alcohol) and I just watched them because they were talking nonsense so I knew they were asleep. My sister was also a big sleepwalker/sleep talker, so this was fairly routine for me.

At the end they offered a plate and said “here, do you want some?”

They had unboxed a new wireless NES-style controller that had been sitting on the counter, plated the controller, and offered to me as a snack. Had no memory of it the next morning.

Been a running joke ever since when we try to decide what to eat.

I got a degree in STEM that hasn’t been useful to me. Turns out the sorts of jobs I got it for don’t really exist anymore/around me, and where they do, they pull from other more traditional graduate and post-graduate pools. At this point it’s been long enough since I got it without working a role related to my field that it’d be pretty hard to get hired into even if the labor market wasn’t falling apart. So I switched gears and applied my breadth of knowledge to a different goal, and that’s a work in progress. Time will tell if it’s successful.

But I started when I was in my mid 20s, and it was a very good time of my life, even with a lot of negative life events in that time. If I could be a professional student, I would have loved to.

However, I tried to pursue a masters through online courses, but I wasn’t really excited about the specificity of it (I’m more of a generalist), and I wasn’t in the right mental state to do it properly, so I withdrew. So who knows if professional student would have really worked for me or not.

This is basically why I’m giving up collecting physical media. I have several hundred games on disc/cartridge, and consoles from most generations, but it’s really hard to find newer games on physical media these days. Most of the good ones can’t be found used, and good luck finding a new copy anywhere.

And of course all the older physical media is also getting harder to get because people are paying a lot for it now… like I have some games in the $80-500 range that I paid very little for years ago. I know the used sales probably don’t count to this article, but you can just look at them to see what’s going on with new physical sales. They made whole consoles that don’t have disc drives, so people couldn’t buy used and bypass them making profit, ffs. Of course the physical game market is crashing. They did that on purpose.

PS5 era is the last hurrah for physical media for me, and I honestly barely even play on PS5 because there’s just nothing to get. I’ve managed to get like a dozen discs for it, and that was difficult. Meanwhile I have easily 4x that for ps4, and prior generations are even better represented. I’d like to get the current Xbox since it’s mostly backward compatible with the one before it IIUC and I have a 360, but I just have no motivation to do so.

Holy shit mine too! Mines much higher pitch but it was also briefly relieved. Ima keep that video in my pocket…

I wonder if there’s a way to tune that to match and negate an individual’s sound waves…

I’ve never even heard of it. Do you have a link to a recipe that you’d recommend?

I don’t mind “wasting” garlic. I grow it, and it’s cake to plant more :)

First time I met my partner they offered me some of their ghost pepper garlic wings.

Garlic is delicious. Eat it. Someone good for you will be eating it with you.

You’re right, I would do the same in that position and I know my friends did too. It’s a support; they didn’t volunteer the pages, I asked for them.

Thank you :)

Oh man, kids are brutal when it comes to pointing out insecurities you have about yourself.

They don’t care if they destroy everything you are, they are going for maximum damage.

That’s a good point about having everything laid bare. It’ll be a challenge to separate out actionable issues, but at least I have somewhere to start. Thank you for that :)

That’s a good way to frame it, thank you. They are providing me an excellent reference for the position I really need to be in. I hate needing to ask for help in the first place (support has been lacking in my life) and that probably makes this whole thing feel worse.

I have AutDHD, and rejection sensitive dysphoria, to boot, so I’m a bit of a sensitive mess about stuff, however that’s also why I sometimes like to get outside thoughts before I act on any of it. I know I’m a sensitive mess and I want to reframe things so I can approach them properly.

Most of what they mentioned I knew, and I know they played it up for the sake of the job. There were some things I hadn’t considered because they didn’t seem connected to me. They made some connections that have me on that introspection ride, and dealing with that has been the major challenge. I’ve always asked people to be honest and upfront with me and it feels like maybe they haven’t been, but maybe because it doesn’t rise to the level of concern. I don’t know, and I don’t know if it’s worth pursuing.

Seeing an exaggeration of my burden hurts too, but I literally asked for that. I can’t fault them for delivering. One sent me multiple drafts and asked if they should add more, because they had a lot to say. And I said write as much as you want, they have to read it all.

You are absolutely right, and I do know they played it up for the sake of the claim. They, however, pointed out a lot of things I hadn’t even personally considered as impacts, and they are right. They brought up examples I’d forgotten about. They expressed everything with such kindness that I know it wasn’t meant to be hurtful, but it still hurts.

But you are also correct that they do stick with me in spite of it. We all have our own issues and we all make accommodations for each other, and they did mention times I showed up in a big way for them even though it was difficult. I hope that’s more how they see me than the parts I actually asked them to write about how bad it is heh :)

I appreciate your perspective, thank you for taking the time to help me manage these feelings.

Thank you, I appreciate your words and support <3

I do my best to let stuff go, this one is just challenging my view of myself as capable and independent, and that’s hard.

I meant it more like short term worries than long term memories. Running programs vs. saved files.

Everything that makes me who I am is in my saved files, that should all be safe through a shut down.

But the little running program fragments, all those little worries that never fully go away but don’t actually need to be taking resources to process, that’s all in that memory cache. Wipe that and the whole system is more efficient for a while, until they build up again.