Sermil and the Banter of Randomness: Random Banter #228

[Peelee]

And yet apparently English curry is really Indian, and we didn't make apple pie either.

Look, the sun never set on the British Empire, so don't be upset at people punching up.

[Anonymouswizard]

Look, the sun never set on the British Empire, so don't be upset at people punching up.

Still aint set, and we're planning to tidally lock the Mercury colony just to be sure

[Peelee]

Still aint set, and we're planning to tidally lock the Mercury colony just to be sure

Just so long as you're prepared for jokes about how bad the food is there, that's fine.

[Rater202]

In my sophomore year of Highschool, on literally the last day of school, at literally the last minute, they told us that we would have to volunteer to work at specific local businesses, for no pay, and with no benefits, starting with my class and that refusal to do so(we were not told minimal hours for it) by the time we completed out the senior year we would not be permitted to graduate.

I was naturally quite pissed off, since it basically amounted to local businesses using the local high school students as slave labor and, it being sprung on us at literally the last minute meant we could not voice our complaints about it for a whole summer.

Of the other students, and m family, I was literally the only person who seemed to have a problem with being made to work on my own time for no pay to graduate. It wasn't like they were having us do community service or entering volunteer programs, they literally wanted us to go to specific private businesses who'd cut deals with the school and work for no pay.

(And pro-tip, if you're forcing someone to do it, it's not volunteering, it's extortion.)

But my class being told about this new policy was also the last we ever heard it. I did not do any such 'volunteering' and still graduated.

I don't know the details, but I'm pretty sure that such a policy would be in violation of several laws and that someone pointed this out.

The school also made kids who were in ISS help the cafeteria and janitorial staff when someone called off work sick, which I have since been told is illegal, and according to my little brother special needs students would sometimes help restock the vending machines(he didn't act like he was forced to, but he's lower functioning.)

My mom used to work for the bus yard and said that the school city was the Mafia. Now that I think about it... I mean, one year I got put on the suicide watch list for a day or two becuase a teacher took my short story out of context. Mom got a call. She starts tearing into the bullcrap but it only gets fixed when she mentioned working for the schools.

Year later, some ******** takes something I said out of context to make it seem like I'm planning to shoot the school up. This time, the principal talks to me and gets my side first instead of just doing something without getting the facts straight. Which, in thirteen years of schooling, had never happened ever to myself or anyone I knew. Honestly, considering that my answer to "are there any weapons in your house" was to explain in detail how you could murder someone with a box of tissues, I should have gotten in trouble. (There was a brief misunderstanding. I was not aware of the rumors going around until after I was called down) but nothing came of it and I got off scot free.

It was obvious to me and to my family that the only reason I was given the benefit of the doubt was because my mom was in the "Mafia."

[el minster]

That's horrible I have no words
How does a school like that not get shut down

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, over here you do a week's compulsory slave labour before reaching the end of compulsory schooling (which is now different to the end of compulsory education), but from my understanding most businesses went along with it to avoid being given students at random. It's mainly used as an excuse to shove the worst work off to the work experience kid for a week, I spent most of my time typing up teacher's notes (which, in all honesty, is not a bad one to get, could have been stuck in retail).

But yeah, are you sure you were actually sent to a school, and not some sort of afterlife?


On my way home from work I got annoyed that there's no open world Tarzan game. Just imagine having to switch behind some Mirror's Edge style running and vine swinging, keeping up speed so you don't get caught or lose your prey? It could be amazing.

[DataNinja]

FYI, posts per page were half the current amount back then, so it was technically 25 pages, adjusted for inflation!

We've kept the amount at 50 because it keeps managing threads much easier. Also, who the heck is going to read a 1000+ page thread? You would melt faces!

Yeah, that was a neat little bit of trivia I also saw in that thread. The fun things you learn from a random google with a select few keywords.

Yeeeeeeeeah, it's definitely a lot harder to skip around in bigger threads, as well as just... looking overwhelming.
But Rawhide, you can't just start reading a series in part 49 of 50.

[Rater202]

I';m gonna conclude my stories about my k-12 experiences(I'dd never finish if I told them all) by saying that the mot satisfying day of my pre-college academic career was not the day I graduated but in my freshman year when the English teacher admitted to my face that I was smarter than her.

I'm sure you all can understand why.

[Peelee]

I';m gonna conclude my stories about my k-12 experiences(I'dd never finish if I told them all) by saying that the mot satisfying day of my pre-college academic career was not the day I graduated but in my freshman year when the English teacher admitted to my face that I was smarter than her.

I'm sure you all can understand why.

Smarter than she. She should have taught better English.

I don't normally go for prescriptivist jokes, but that was lobbed right over the plate.

ETA: What's the over/under that she was just saying that to make you happy/end an argument she wasn't interested in?

[Sermil]

On local cuisine...

I had a co-worker who was born and raised in China, didn't come to the US until graduate school. He said the Chinese food in California is actually, in some ways, better than what he got back home.

In China, if you were in northern China (forgetting the exact names here), you could only get good northern-China cuisine. Food in the southern, western, etc styles was usually touristy and sub-par.

But in California, if you knew where to go, you could get good, authentic northern Chinese food one night, good, authentic southern Chinese food the next night, good, authentic Korean BBQ another day. (And we have good hospitals to skin-graft your tongue back together after eating the authentic Korean BBQ.)

[Fyraltari]

Look, the sun never set on the British Empire, so don't be upset at people punching up.

... the sun set on the British Empire. It set so hard in fact, that there isn’t à British Empire left.

[Peelee]

And we have good hospitals to skin-graft your tongue back together after eating the authentic Korean BBQ.

I'm not quite sure how to read that. Speaking as someone who has been to a number of authentic Korean BBQ restaurants (no small number of which were in Korea).

... the sun set on the British Empire. It set so hard in fact, that there isn’t à British Empire left.

That's exactly what they want you to think!

[Sermil]

I'm not quite sure how to read that. Speaking as someone who has been to a number of authentic Korean BBQ restaurants (no small number of which were in Korea).

Well, the last Korean BBQ I went to was extremely spicy. Burn-your-tongue-off spicy.
But maybe the Korean friend I went with was just into spicy foods? She ate a lot of very hot kimchi as well.

[IthilanorStPete]

... the sun set on the British Empire. It set so hard in fact, that there isn’t à British Empire left.

Pitcairn Islands say hi. They're keeping the "sun never set..." claim alive.

[Peelee]

Well, the last Korean BBQ I went to was extremely spicy. Burn-your-tongue-off spicy.
But maybe the Korean friend I went with was just into spicy foods? She ate a lot of very hot kimchi as well.

Having a half-Korean wife, Korean MIL, and large extended Korean family who treated me like their own child when we visited Korea, I can say with near-certainty that the Korean friend you were with was into spicy foods, and probably didn't take into account/didn't know that you were not prepared for that. There are plenty of much less crazy-hot foods that Korean BBQs totally serve; I used to love spicy foods, but these days good Louisiana crawfish is about the spiciest I can take anymore, so I absolutely know your pain, but I can attest that you can definitely find foods there that are both authentic and super tasty without killing your taste buds.

[Fyraltari]

Pitcairn Islands say hi. They're keeping the "sun never set..." claim alive.

I mean, I, personnally, would be remiss to bring up the island where 33% of the adult male population sexaully abused children.

[Rater202]

Smarter than she. She should have taught better English.

I don't normally go for prescriptivist jokes, but that was lobbed right over the plate.

ETA: What's the over/under that she was just saying that to make you happy/end an argument she wasn't interested in?

She was one of the ones that was more good than bad about it.

She was trying to reassure me that she understood why I was so frustrated with the actions of other students or things I perceived as pointless busy work: I've never actually felt as smart as I'm supposed to be, but apparently I have an IQ of 185. (or at least, 185 by the standards set by that particular test at the time I took it. It'd probably be lower if I took it now becuase recalibration. People are getting smarter over time and they set the test so the average person will always score 100) so if the test was in any way accurate I'm some kind of super genius that is miles beyond most people. (I've never actually felt like that, so...)

I'm kind of ashamed of myself, but I used to act like it. Partly as a defense mechanism, becuase, well, I got bullied allot and had to put up with some asshat teachers and "I'm much smarter than them" was a way of reassuring myself.

But, of course, it also led to me getting more frustrated becuase when you're gaining self-worth from the knowledge that you're smarter than 90% of the people around you, you start to notice when you're being talked down to or when people are acting stupid on purpose to piss you off.

(Our when you're the only one taking things seriously. I got kicked out of an engineering class for calling my partners idiots because they were alternating between doing nothing and making suggestions that wouldn't do the thing we had to build something to do. That assignment was thrown out because literally no-one in the class got it done in time.)

So the teacher was trying to convince me that she understood that I was frustrated.

[Cazero]

I'm not quite sure how to read that. Speaking as someone who has been to a number of authentic Korean BBQ restaurants (no small number of which were in Korea).

Dude, you're a dragon. You breathe fire.

[factotum]

I mean, I, personnally, would be remiss to bring up the island where 33% of the adult male population sexaully abused children.

It's still British, much as we might wish otherwise...

[enderlord99]

Dude, you're a dragon. You breathe fire.

Silver dragons breathe ice, though.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've never actually felt as smart as I'm supposed to be, but apparently I have an IQ of 185. (or at least, 185 by the standards set by that particular test at the time I took it. It'd probably be lower if I took it now becuase recalibration. People are getting smarter over time and they set the test so the average person will always score 100) so if the test was in any way accurate I'm some kind of super genius that is miles beyond most people. (I've never actually felt like that, so...)

Could be faulty calibration. I'm the only one of my full siblings not to have taken an IQ test (like my half sister I had the luck of being in a county without grammar schools when I was in year six, went to a ****ing amazing comprehensive). Assuming families tend to clump together I'll be in the high 130s to low 140s by noughties standards. However compared to my siblings I've always felt like the dumb one, partially due to having problems with both standard schoolwork and expression (hooray ASD!), despite probably being in the top 10% of people I know for raw brainpower.

Then again, my standard method of problem solving is brute force and ignorance. So I might not actually count as intelligent.

In all seriousness, I remember at university I was really good with code, I could hash out a working bit of VHDL for an electronic lock in like two hours (plus two hours of tweaking), and breezed through the first year C++ practical exam despite handing in C code rather than C++ code. But I'm definitely not the smartest person I know, and probably not a genius.

It's still British, much as we might wish otherwise...

Am I allowed to be comfortable with Children's TV presenters yet? I always worry we'll hear things in forty years that'll make it much less nice.

[factotum]

Am I allowed to be comfortable with Children's TV presenters yet? I always worry we'll hear things in forty years that'll make it much less nice.

I'm less than a week off my 50th birthday, I'm really not the person to be asking anything about the current crop of children's TV presenters.

[LaZodiac]

Today I woke up feeling a bit sleepy and kinda bad because I stayed up a bit later than normal.

Then I saw that

Spoiler: Spoilers for a series called Sleepless Domain

Show

Undine and Heartful Punch kissed

and now I have energy again.

[Aotrs Commander]

Just seen on an advert sidebar.

"Wear a mask. Pass it on."

And you can clearly see at no point did anyone think about how completely, actively self-defeatingly that could be misinterpreted.

"But Bleakbane, people aren't that stup-" YES THEY ARE.

[el minster]

Could be faulty calibration. I'm the only one of my full siblings not to have taken an IQ test (like my half sister I had the luck of being in a county without grammar schools when I was in year six, went to a ****ing amazing comprehensive). Assuming families tend to clump together I'll be in the high 130s to low 140s by noughties standards. However compared to my siblings I've always felt like the dumb one, partially due to having problems with both standard schoolwork and expression (hooray ASD!), despite probably being in the top 10% of people I know for raw brainpower.

Then again, my standard method of problem solving is brute force and ignorance. So I might not actually count as intelligent.

In all seriousness, I remember at university I was really good with code, I could hash out a working bit of VHDL for an electronic lock in like two hours (plus two hours of tweaking), and breezed through the first year C++ practical exam despite handing in C code rather than C++ code. But I'm definitely not the smartest person I know, and probably not a genius.



Am I allowed to be comfortable with Children's TV presenters yet? I always worry we'll hear things in forty years that'll make it much less nice.

C++is backwards compatible so of course it worked when you submitted C

[2D8HP]

I was recently reminded of something that happened to me in high school, forgive me the rant...

Ugh.

I went through a pretty bad time in high school as well...

Rant totally forgiven, and speaking of High School...

...in 1982/'83 (Freshman year), something changed that year that really gave me a 'punk' attitude:
My Mom made a fuss and I was moved from the mostly poor kids "Intermediate" English track, to the mostly middle-class "Advanced" English track, and this change was awful for me.

In the "Intermediate" English class most days most of the boys would skip class and it was me and the girls (who were nice to me) and the teacher would play recordings of speeches and we'd write our reactions which only took a few minutes and much of my time was spent talking to the girls or reading a science fiction book someone had left by the window, but the "Advanced" class was very different, there were books we were given, much more homework, and the teacher was very clear that one additional student was not welcome in her class and most days I had to move and get out of whatever chair I was on when of my classmates came in to take an assigned seat, and I usually had to stand or sit on the floor and the teacher would chastise me for being "disruptive". I hated her, hated my new classmates, and they hated me back, especially after standing against the wall I threw up in class. I wished to take their books and go back to my old class with the poorer neighborhood girls and read there instead, it was clear to me that who was in which class was based on what neighborhood we were from and a "chip on my shoulder" grew that decades later has never really left, though truthfully I already had an anti-authority attitude against some teachers 'cause in Junior High School (ages 12 and 13) one of the male teachers would smoke marijuana with my female classmates (and yes years later he would be arrested for having sex with a minor), I hated our 9th grade (I was 14 years old) algebra teacher as well 'cause the first day he told us "Half of you will fail this class", I counted how many of us they were, didn't bother to raise my hand and just yelled out "You're telling us that 16 of us are wasting our time here?" - needless to say I was among the failures despite being judged "one of the advanced students that's ready for algebra" the year before (since they were only four of us so judged in our whole school they just gave us the textbook, said "teach yourselves", and we sat in a corner of the regular math class and played cards all year). Years later my sort-of-girlfriend (we saw A LOT of movies together) told me of that teacher "He came onto me my freshman year".

In 1984 I started volunteering at KALX (our local "college" radio station) mostly at night alphabetising the record collection, and from time-to-time going to the listening station, often I'd be the only person at the station besides the D.J. and in time I was trained to be one ("Dr Frank" later author of "King Dork" I think was the first to train me), and since I was already often there after midnight I came to be a substitute D.J. for the night/graveyard shifts quite a lot.

The crew at KALX were very welcoming and I was thrilled to be accepted by real adults (most in retrospect only a few years older than me), I had my first taste of mulled wine and a poppy seed muffin at a KALX Christmas party (both were delicious!), explored the fanzine collection, and very much felt at home.

For a while at KALX it was ruled that "community members" (non-college students and non-college employees) could only continue to volunteer there if enrolled in a local 'community college' "Radio Technology" class, which I did, but when I re-enrolled for the next semester they told me that it was a mistake as I was still under 18 and still a High school student and couldn't re-enroll without permission from my High school, so I scheduled an appointment with a counselor who told me "If you want permission you have to take a test on a Saturday", I did, it was a lot of questions, but easy ones, and when I passed I was told that not only could I now take whatever community college classes I wanted but that I now had a "California High School Proficiency" diploma and to get the Hell off campus, and out of my High school classes as in the eyes of the law I was a graduate and was no longer to attend BHS (a bit of a surprise!) so I was kicked out of high school.

Ah, Canada. Where Boston Pizza is a Canadian restaurant that sells burgers and Canadian Tire is a home improvement store. You truly live in a magical land.

Canada truly is a magical land!

Spoiler: my visit to Canada, where I find a precious treasure, love, motorcycles, and Punk, spoiled 'cause this post is already long

Show

My first love and first real girlfriend was only 16/17 to my 19/20 and she was also 'spending time with' (cue Biz Markie) an "about 30 years old" man who gave her the Wire's 1977 "Pink Flag" album, and after I shared with her a bunch of albums she told me about it (and where she got it from) and we'd listen to it together.

After my tearful breakup with "K" it was 1989, I was now 21 years old and going to see Helios Creed in San Francisco, on the way to which I saw "N", an older than me (not yet but closer to 30 than 20) very Punk girl who was also going to the gig who I befriended back when I was 18 when we were both worked the refreshment stand at a local club (the one Green Day started in), I was surprised to see her back in California, and she was a different first to me before she left California again. Some months later I visited her in Ottawa where we went to a record shop that had pretty pricey British imports including "Pink Flag" which I paid $20 Canadian dollars (about $15 U.S.) for, which was the most money I ever spent on any piece of media until the late '90's, but I finally had my own copy of Wire's 1977 "Pink Flag", and it's 21 (short) songs.

Ottawa was weird, so clean it felt like a film set, we went to one Punk Rock show together (with an amazingly peaceful audience), crossed over to Francophone Hull, and visited a museum in Montreal. Montreal, despite being a French speaking city, felt more "American" somehow than Ottawa. The last day before I returned to returned to California she told me "Thank you for making me love you again", I sent her letters afterwards, she sent one back apologizing that she "Can't love you the same way" and I never saw her again,

I still have "Pink Flag", I still treasure it, and listen to it a lot, one of my favorite songs on it is the beautiful "Fragile":

♪♫♬
Tears fall in slivers, you broke my shades
The light too bright, let me bury my heart
Filter emotions of green, cowardicee gives blue
A restricted view, let me open my heart
I have a fleeting love
Searching when it lands
Fragile, needing precious hands
Fragile
You eat my energy, give me more rope
Nail in the wall, let me hang my heart
I have a fleeting love
Searching when it lands
Fragile, needing precious hands
♪♫♬

which is immediately followed by the ANTI-love song "Mannequin"
the lyrics of which I have often ached to say to bosses and co-workers.
Mannequin has been often recorded by other artists (and often sounds romantic despite the lyrics), but I've only seen it performed once, at a house party hosted by KALX D.J. Lisa Albright/Anaconda, where the band there that night performed it, and that night is the last time I saw the beautiful "J" before her suicide. We were both KALX volunteers, went on a few dates together, but that night we only spoke briefly as she was with a guy who stayed close to her and stared daggers at me (who could've been her brother, they did look enough alike). She's been gone decades now, but I still think of her, and "Mannequin" is among the songs that trigger those memories.

In June 1992 me and the women who I later married went to see "All the Vermeers in New York", it was my birthday that week, and she told me "I'm glad you were born", within a month she asked me to live with her, we each went on one last date with others that we'd pre-committed to, mine taking poor "A" to a show in San Jose that took me far too long to get to because I got lost and it's hard to read a map on a motorcycle at night (sorry!), D's was with "a tattooed guy', and the next half year when D and me lived on our unemployment checks was the happiest days of my life and I wasn't a punk anymore, though sadly (though she well deserved it) she never had as much of my love that I could give when I was even younger because my heart was smaller by then (too much scar tissue).

In '93 I found a job at a motorcycle shop (the manager liked my then still punk hair, which the owner hated), and my punk anger (or "working class anger" as my best male friend of the '90's "W" called it in a tale of his clubbing unconscious a mouthy new German car owner) came back.
Sometimes the old punk surfaced more, a young new hire at the motorcycle shop I worked at asked me what I was thinking about and I responded: "There will always be a moon over Marin", he asked me what I meant by that and I told him "They're lyrics from a song by the band who's name you have painted on your jacket", I pointed to I different name on his jacket "Eater" and recited 'Outside View', then I did "Jesus Built My Hot Rod" (okay, Ministry isn't really Punk, but close enough to it), "Which band was that?" he asked, "The one on your left arm" I told him (yes, I was kinda being a jerk, sorry).

When me and "D" seperated in '98 (she moved back to Seattle to be with her dying father, I kept working at the motorcycle shop and paid rent so she could come back to California) I rode motorcycles more, and I also went to a couple of gigs again, I again went on a date with "K" (she had come back from her brief time at a college in Washington State, where weirdly my wife was then near) and I don't remember anymore a word we said to each other then. I met "B" who years ago had introduced me to "K", and afterwards did "salvage work" on me (she's who I saw a lot of movies with, in retrospect too many: "Sid and Nancy", "She's Gotta Have It", et cetera, that feature men being horrible to women) an X gig that I arrived at shedding a massive amount of water because I rode my motorcycle in a downpour to get there, she told me she was moving to the U.K. to be with her mother that she hardly knew growing up, and I never saw her again. At a warehouse party in west Oakland I found myself at I met again some of the old crew, including "R" (who did a painting that became a Green Day album cover) where he told me he was going to New York "to be in the belly of the beast", and I remembered having the same desire once, but it was gone, along with almost all my lusts for anything new, all I wanted was the familiar. At a Lookout records anniversary show after the band named me as "a guy in the song" and pointed at me, a much younger than me audience member said "I always wondered who that was", I asked him "How did you get into this music?", "Green Day!" he answered. After talking with them I found that the new punks of the late '90's weren't like the old ones, they were cheerful beyond even the "Fluffy Punks" of the late '80's, "They're not like we were, somehow they're not broken, they can take the jacket off, walk into an office and still smile, few of us could work that trick" I later thought. Eventually I saved enough to pay rent for months without a job, temporary quit the motorcycle shop (winter was coming and they really didn't need my hands for that season anyway) and I went to Seattle to be with my wife again, and after the awaited death of her Dad we returned together to Oakland, California, and we never really talked of our time apart.

@Peelee, you may be interested in what I've spoiled 'cause I mention punk rock and motorcycles, @Anonymouswizard, you may be interested in what I've spoiled because I mention love and romance in one's twenties.

[Anonymouswizard]

C++is backwards compatible so of course it worked when you submitted C

The point is more 'didn't do it the way the module intended', I used some libraries we hadn't been introduced to and did it in a less efficient way than intended, and still got an A. Plus side is that it'sfar easer to format with printf than cout.

The hardest part was keeping myself entertained until the accessor notice that I'd asked them for marking (if you passed you goted as completed and didn't have to continue testing, because half the class would finish well wthin the time limit and the other half would be debugging until the end).

[Bartmanhomer]

Anyway yesterday I have a fun time with my solo D&D 3.5 game. There was no fighting but K'yorl received a letter to his little sister.

[LaZodiac]

Oh boy I love vomiting the day I have to actually do a fair amount of work at work. Woo.

I'm okay it just sucks a lot!

[DataNinja]

Oh boy I love vomiting the day I have to actually do a fair amount of work at work. Woo.

I'm okay it just sucks a lot!

Oh no, Zodi! Take care of yourself...