Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Octane Haha yeah. If I run into that issue I just go to one of the 24 hour net-cafes and snooze there until morning.

@NEStalgia Yeah yeah, I can sympathize. I actually used to enjoy driving actually. Until I got side swiped by a semi truck (I think the British call them Lorries?) when I was 17. I was just as reckless as the average teenager when I got my license at 16. I remember doing twice the speed limit once in the middle of the night. Almost hard to believe that was more than a decade ago... #oldman

@Heavyarms55 - Hey now, you can’t call yourself an old man yet because it makes all the old men feel too old. I was wondering, when you mentioned being bummed out about leaving Japan next year, why do you have to leave?

I’m okay with this. Rated E for Everyone.

I’ve been conscripted into the SQL forces all week, @Tyranexx. Is it just me, or when someone asks “That would be easy to find out, right?”, there’s a descent of madness in the mind as one realizes that the desired data requires a complex conditional record selection and embedded subreport values?
And every statement someone makes for the rest of the 3 hour executive meeting starts sounding like IF/NOT IIF statements?

Or is that not normal...😂

@bimmy-lee Well I don't actually have to. I'm not being kicked out or anything. It's just that my current job is ending. It was always a temporary thing. The benefits of having a foreigner teaching English decrease as the foreigner essentially becomes assimilated. So the job has a 5 year limit. August 2020 will be the end of my 5th year. I could get another job here if I wanted but I am worried about my mother. My father passed away a couple years ago and my mother isn't getting any younger. While her health has always been good, age is cruel to all. I have no siblings and her brothers aren't that much younger than her and actually have health issues. So if her health takes a turn, I want to be back in the US living nearby so I can take care of her as needed. I don't want to have to fly back and forth or to drop her into a nursing home unless absolutely necessary. Having worked for a summer years ago in one of those places - I know they are miserable.

If friends and family in the US weren't a factor, I'd never go back to the US. And if, God forbid, something happens to my mom in the short term, I am gone again. Although I miss my American friends, I'd only return to America for something I feel I need to do.

Blah. Where did all this humidity come from? Had to mow my lawn in this misery before it gets worse over the next few days. An Excessive Heat Warning is in effect from tomorrow afternoon into Sunday evening.

I'm not sure if I'd ever fully leave the US, though I've never been gone out of it long-term. I AM contemplating moving to a different state, but not seriously just yet. I know plenty of other countries have issues of their own, the grass is always greener on the other side, etc., but I've always wondered what would happen if I tried living in another country short-term. I sometimes wish that I'd tried studying abroad in college, but I don't know if I would have been able to swing that financially at the time.

@Heavyarms55 Not just Japan, but other places too; I've had unpleasant experiences at touristy places. My "space bubble", so to speak, has wider boundaries than most. Other than my hands - because handshakes, grabbing stuff from others, etc. - I don't like when someone is uncomfortably close to me without at least some sort of barrier. What I dislike even more is when someone touches, bumps, brushes past me, and so on without warning.

It's not that I fear human touch itself. I just dislike when others violate my boundaries. More so when they do it voluntarily.

Bimmy asked what I was wondering btw. I hope that your mother's good health continues. If I didn't have so many family ties to where I'm currently at, I'd probably find it easier to move.

@NEStalgia I'd say a barrel roll would've been better to avoid in that situation. 😜 At least I still (knock on wood) haven't ever managed to hit a deer, but there have been many close calls.

@ThanosReXXX I'm glad someone completely understands what I go through. Between my work day, errands, how many news articles I'm interested in on the main page, etc., I often don't get to the forums until late afternoon/early evening. I more often than not do read through a lot of this thread, but I tend to skim the longer walls of text these days if I'm not mentioned within them. XD

@HobbitGamer That...actually doesn't sound too different from what I've had to deal with more than once in my coding work, so I can definitely sympathize. XD I'm fortunate to have a manager with a coding background who understands that good, solid work takes time and adequate planning. He and our support staff are pretty good about prioritizing stuff that needs to be done. Stuff doesn't get done as fast as it used to (to the ire of some older customers on occasion), but that's because we have a better testing process and more organization in place versus the "Sure, we'll do this arbitrary fix that only affects how YOU do reporting and roll it out ASAP!" chaos from before.

Yes, IF, IF/NOT, CASE statements, what-have-you can get QUITE interesting sometimes.

@Heavyarms55 - It’s a noble sacrifice you’re making then. You won’t ever regret choosing to be available and spend time with your mom, and I’m sorry to hear about your dad. Five years is a long time to make plenty of impressions. When you do come back to the US, keep up with your Japanese contacts, and like you said; you could be back there again one day. I considered ESL after English undergrad, but I didn’t want to go back to school, and honestly, I probably didn’t have the guts to fly to the other side of the world for five years. It’s obviously been an amazing experience for you.

@Tyranexx Apparently before I joined the department it was like getting teeth pulled for IT to build a simple report. When executive found out I could decipher things, some Folks weren’t happy. So I’ve had to learn a lot of the ins and outs of our EMR myself, with assistance from our vendor’s community portal, but mostly by deconstruction of existing reports or community portal repositories. If I had admin access to our EMR I could do even more, but that’s one of those “cold dead hands” situations. I think I’ll learn scriptlink next, since the middleware is java and then I could model forms better.
That’s all just a side hobby. When I’m not submitting and processing medical claims. Because...I’m in the billing department. It’s like Game of Thrones, without all the entertainment.

@bimmy-lee Yeah, I honestly don't expect anything to top my time here. I love it and wouldn't trade it for almost anything else. But I wasn't there to help with my father... I left most of that to my mother until he finally passed. I wont have anyone else to dump my responsibilities on, and even if I did, I shouldn't.

So some nutcase or sociopath apparently fire bombed the KyoAni studio in Kyoto. Kyoto Animation. Apparently 10 people dead, dozens injured. Hate to see this kind of violence anywhere and it's all the more shocking here... They caught the guy it seems, he was injured in the attack. I say they should let him burn. People who carry out random violence like this are subhuman trash.

ahhahaha

It's dangerous to go alone!
Take this!

@ThanosReXXX Haha, yeah I certainly didn't mean to make an impact, but big things have small beginnings, to quote Alex Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia.

I'll happily answer you since you were thoughtful enough to ask. I find the topic of overpopulation very interesting so I wanted to give my opinion in brief. I realized pretty quickly, however, that you and @NEStalgia make rather robust posts, and I honestly just don't have the inclination to craft the kind of responses they called for. It also seemed like y'all had fairly set opinions on the matter (I mean, saying that I'm unequivocally wrong doesn't leave much room for discussion, lol). And even though we're not discussing politics per se, there are political implications (references to socialism, etc.).

In general, debate (read: argument) is not something I enjoy, as I am pretty non-confrontational. So perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place, eh? But in any case, no offense taken, hopefully none given, y'all keep doing your thing, I'll sound off every now and then!

@BougieBeetle Ah, the Chit Chat thread. Also called The Long Forum 😂

@Tyranexx I'll make a mental note to remind myself to tag you in all of my future text walls.
Just because...

@BougieBeetle Heheh... if you've seen some of the replies that me and @NEStalgia fling back and forth, you'd easily be able to guess that I'm not that easy to offend. Once I am, though... let's just say I got an elephant's memory...

But in all seriousness: no, I took absolutely no offense, and I already kinda amended for calling you "unequivocally" wrong by toning down my earlier comment in the following one, but I do think that the allocating resources comment was a bit too short-sighted, because it really isn't as simple as that.

If it were, then we wouldn't be having famine in third world countries, and we also wouldn't have first world countries robbing second and third world countries of all their natural resources and habitats, in order to create space for all of our useless luxury product ingredient plantations...

So, in short, it's a complex situation that requires an equally complex solution, especially if it's supposed to be a sustainable solution that'll last us more than just a couple of generations.

As for all of my comments in general: I'm the most social guy you'll never meet, so none of my comments have any angry intent, and should therefore also not be interpreted as such. I'm actually also not really a confrontational guy, but if and when challenged/provoked, I won't walk away either, because I'm afraid of nobody.
But I never go looking for trouble, and all of that only counts in real life. On forums, I'm pretty mellow.

And since I'm also a "say what you mean" kinda person, you'll know when I actually am ticked off or about to virtually strangle someone. Right, @NEStalgia?

The thing with online discussions/communication is that, somehow, a lot of people always try to read between the lines when reading other people's comments, or at the very least interpret things their own way, which is where (in my opinion) most of the conflicts come from, so I'd say that in more than half of the cases, there never even needed to be any discussion or disagreement in the first place. But because you're missing important factors such as tone of voice and being able to look someone in the eye, you have to be extra clear with what you're trying to say.

Sometimes even I myself tend to forget that, and then I find myself spending two or three text walls to re-explain my original intent or point...

@HobbitGamer Amen to that...

@ThanosReXXX That's a dramatic simplification of history though. Somehow history has been reduced to comic book villains single handedly responsible for their nations actions, wholly crazed without practical rationality, where the heroes won and the villains were dispatched, and justice always prevails! Stalin's probably the only one of the group that comes close to that anti-ideal.

It's so much more complicated, for all the nations of the named dictators. In the case of the Nazis, it wasn't a one-man show until late in the war years where he was fully tyrannical and in control unchecked. In the beginning he was the face of the movement, largely because he was highly charismatic, a great orator/motivational speaker, and his partially manufactured background story was perfectly tailored for the message/provocation it was designed for. But it was very much a COMMITTEE movement. He was involved but wasn't even the main drafter of the agenda. He didn't have unchecked power at the time, especially before the war began in earnest in the 30's and was very much part of a consensus panel, albeit as the figurehead. It was a lot bigger than one person. And there was a lot more involved than "revenge". Yes, the mixture of the excessive reparations from WWI, the humiliation of defeat, and the Great Depression mixing with that to make a truly miserable place made the public overall desperate for revenge, and regaining status....but that was only part of it. The actual historical context gets lost. The Ottoman and Austrio-Hungarian empires had collapsed (notice you almost never hear that aspect mentioned in modern infotainment history?) The actual political and social structure had just been crushed and radically altered producing vast uncertainty. There was the economic crisis of the Depression (and specific problem of the Depression + overreaching sanctions/reparations by the US and France mostly.) There was the dawn of the industrial revolution and it's tremendous upheaval of the order of society and the realization that whoever controlled industrialism controlled the world - and Germany was being entirely left out of it as a result of the said overreaching sanctions and reparations.) And there was the threat of the Iron Curtain expanding ever Westward. That one there is really the catalyst that finally started the whole process. The public voted on the fairly radical party (but not as radical at the time as after they had cemented power and gained control of all things) because they were desperate for solutions on all that, and it was something that stood opposed to their idiot aristocrat leaders who got them into their current problem for their own ends to begin with, and that was the only party that actually seemed to have an agenda to address all of it. But with the cocktail of problems present, in reality, even if there had never been a Hitler or a Nazi party, there probably still would have been a war, just a more conventional one without the comic book larger than life villains. The situation was untenable, and IMO, historians massively blew it, separating WWI and WWII in historical context. Viewed as a whole, it's actually just one long war with a sizable lull between phases as the pieces regrouped. That's more a failure of historians segmenting things after the fact that are really a single long event. Instead of "WWI and WWII" it would probably make more sense to have just called the whole thing "The Great War" rather than only referring to "WWI" by that name. Historians mark the surrender of WWI as the end of that war, but in reality it was a fake surrender - the hostility fomented only until a leadership with a renewed strategy was found, and it didn't take long. It was much more a continuation than a second war (and many of the other regional wars continued unabated, or followed in step with the powers resuming hostilities.)

And then there's Stalin and the USSR....I could fill 10 forums just on that alone, so I won't bore you

There's so, so, so, so much detail, and nuance, and inter-connectivity. I swear nobody understands a thing about history. Even relatively recent history! No WONDER we keep going in circles in the world! If nobody knows what actually happened in the past and everyone just knows storybook cliff notes of it, of course we'll keep screwing up the same things! From overpopulation and the ME in the 11th century to understanding the situation in Germany from WWI into the election of the Nazi party nobody ever seems to have awareness of what really happened! You just get comic book cliff notes of a comic villain in a police state and death camps and a warpath. That was the END of the story. After everything already was going very badly. It misses everything about how it got there, the real practical concerns that it was attempting to solve! Especially how history is taught in the US, you would think the Nazis sprang into existence fully in control of Poland and Czechoslovakia and bearing down on the UK. It's as though nothing between the Hundred Days Offensive and the Warsaw Blitzkrieg existed.

@Heavyarms55 That's remarkably shocking in Japan. If it were here I'd yawn...just another normal day in a place of dissimilar groups/"tribes" squashed together in a world of make believe. But in Japan? I mean that sort of thing is practically unheard of! I'm curious to hear if they release any details on motive etc. I feel like whenever that sort of thing happens in Japan the culprit is usually someone that's very visibly unbalanced, and is known to be unstable, etc. just a true deranged individual, versus here where it's usually ideology/political message/revenge/hate demonstration related. I'm interested in hearing more details whenever there's more information.

Also, if you ever go back, you're taking me with you. No exceptions. I'm not going to listen to you living the life I wish I were living again.

@HobbitGamer We're not even warmed up yet.....

I swear being a collector is a disease. This is an insane amount of mark up, but I must have it... I just need them to start releasing Starlights merch so I can get my 3 statues and get my life back.

https://www.nin-nin-game.com/en/figures-goodies/23017-sailor-...

@NEStalgia Agreed on the historical context of what I call ‘sound byte storytelling’. The US Civil War faces some of the same tropes, in terms of most folks only discussing the abolitionist ideal as the reason. There were a lot of lead up policies and political tit for tat events before Fort Sumter. Yet all the dang tourists in Charleston would love to look out the bay at Battery Park and day “So that’s where the South started the war”.

@Heavyarms55 30+ people dead. It's a really shocking act of mass murder, especially for such a peaceful nation.

There's a GoFundMe set up by Sentai Filmworks on behalf of KyoAni that has already hit almost a million dollars, if anyone is interested in donating.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-kyoani-heal

Have you ever had that thing where like, the tip of your thumbnail gets separated from the thumb, and it feels like you have a papercut right between your nail and your thumb?

I hate that.

Also, oh woah that's horrible. The shooting.