Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Last snowboarding session, and they still didn't teach me how to use the chairlift so I could go to the better slopes. Oh well.

[Sirus]

I'm kinda confused, because when I went skiing for the first time you had to use chairlifts to access any slopes at all, even the beginner ones.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The green slopes here are accessed by conveyer.

[Ogdibus]

.

[Frumple]

... how's that work, exactly? 'Cause it's... not at their expense. At all.

And I don't exactly think you're there to help other people pass tests. If you are, it should be by helping them study and learn, not by intentionally performing poorly. That cheapens your experience and steals their chance to be evaluated appropriately. It benefits no one.

So, feel good about your score. If you did well, you did well. You literally can't succeed at the expense of others in that situation. They're not involved in your good performance.

[Ogdibus]

.

[penguinofhonor]

So a friend recommended me to pinterest to get recipes... and yeah, it's admittedly pretty good for that. If you ever find yourself wanting to swap information that a 40 year old woman would want to exchange with you, pinterest is pretty useful for that shit.

Anyways, I usually rate recipes for their deliciousness to difficulty ratio, which I think is pretty reasonable, but everyone here rates them based on deliciousness to calories. It just puts a damper on the whole thing.

[SalmonGod]

Just read a letter from a shelter manager talking about the horror of his job.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I am posting this (and it is long) because I think our society needs a huge wake-up call.

As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all - a view from the inside, if you will.
Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don’t even know - that puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it’s not a cute little puppy anymore.

How would you feel if you knew that there’s about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at - purebred or not! About 50% of all of the dogs that are “owner surrenders” or “strays” that come into my shelter are purebred dogs.

No shortage of excuses
The most common excuses I hear are:

We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat).
Really? Where are you moving to that doesn’t allow pets?

The dog got bigger than we thought it would.
How big did you think a German Shepherd would get?

We don’t have time for her.
Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs!

She’s tearing up our yard.
How about bringing her inside, making her a part of your family?

They always tell me:
We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her. We know she’ll get adopted - she’s a good dog. Odds are your pet won’t get adopted, and how stressful do you think being in a shelter is?

Well, let me tell you. Dead pet walking!

Your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off, sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy.
If it sniffles, it dies.

Your pet will be confined to a small run / kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it.
If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers that day to take him / her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose.
If your dog is big, black or any of the “bully” breeds (pit bull, rottweiler, mastiff, etc) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door. Those dogs just don’t get adopted.
If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed.

If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed, it may get a stay of execution, though not for long. Most pets get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment.
If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles, chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.

The grim reaper
Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”.
First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk - happy, wagging their tails. That is, until they get to “The Room”.

Every one of them freaks out and puts on the breaks when we get to the door. It must smell like death, or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there. It’s strange, but it happens with every one of them. Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs (depending on their size and how freaked out they are). A euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process. They find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk it’s leg. I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood, and been deafened by the yelps and screams.

They all don’t just “go to sleep” - sometimes they spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves.
When it all ends, your pet’s corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back, with all of the other animals that were killed, waiting to be picked up like garbage.

What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know, and it probably won’t even cross your mind. It was just an animal, and you can always buy another one, right?

Liberty, freedom and justice for all
I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head. I do everyday on the way home from work. I hate my job, I hate that it exists and I hate that it will always be there unless people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.

Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.
My point to all of this is DON’T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!

Hate me if you want to - the truth hurts and reality is what it is.
I just hope I maybe changed one person’s mind about breeding their dog, taking their loving pet to a shelter, or buying a dog. I hope that someone will walk into my shelter and say “I saw this thing on craigslist and it made me want to adopt”.
That would make it all worth it.

What makes me sad is that I can't even bring myself to care much.  I understand that it's horrible, but I burn all my emotional energy worrying about humanity's problems.

[Xantalos]

^
...
*looks at cat*
...
HARGBLARGLAAAAAAAAAAAAFFFFUUUUU
SMASH BAD THINGS
I AM OVERWHELMED WITH INCREDIBLE RAGE AND ANGER

[Telgin]

I can take a little solace in that my family has never dumped an animal off at a shelter at least.  And now I feel pretty petty for coming to post this, but I will anyway.

I made an extremely amateur mistake last week while coding up a profiler for this DSP.  So, while I knew the unoptimized version of this code was taking about 290 million cycles to complete, I was misled to believe that I had reduced that time to about 8.5 million cycles.  An astronomical improvement, which was plausible given the changes I made (caching intermediate results in a very fast SRAM instead of writing them back to external memory every time).

Yes, well, I discovered my mistake today.  Instead of reducing the running time by a factor of 34x, I actually increased the running time by about 5%.  How was I so grossly misled?

An uninitialized counter at the start of the profiling code.  It just happened to pick a number that looked plausible.  Oh, no, normally when you do this you get something like -199 (negative time makes no sense), or an extremely high value that's absurd, or an extremely tiny value that's likewise nonsense.  Nope, this time, it picked a number that looked like it might be okay, but it wasn't.  The code runs inside a debugger and so fast that I can't tell the difference between 0.008 and 0.29 seconds, so I intuitively had no idea it was wrong.

Now, normally I'd just be frustrated and conclude that my optimization attempt was a bust and try something else.  Oh, but I already told my research advisor I got those numbers, and he may have already sent them as part of a proposal for a grant.  So, my extremely amateur mistake may have falsified data (unknowingly at least), my advisor thinks I'm a god at this stuff, and I'm back to square one.  After weeks of fighting this thing.

Well, okay, that's pretty annoying.  But, to put the icing on the cake, I was supposed to meet with my advisor at 3:15 this afternoon.  As usual, he's nowhere to be seen.  I can't remember the last time we scheduled a meeting and it actually happened remotely close to when it was supposed to.

So I guess he'll just get the bad news in an email, and I get to walk back home swearing to myself for making such a stupid mistake and not being anywhere closer to getting a publication or finishing my Ph.D.

I've known for a while now why something like 80% of students drop out of the Ph.D program, but I still don't like being reminded of why.

[Lord Shonus]

When my family wants a new pet, we just grab one of the kittens climbing the screen door.

[MagmaMcFry]

When my family wants a new pet, we just grab one of the kittens climbing the screen door.

How to deal with sieges: One adoption at a time.

[Korbac]

'Anti-racist is Anti-white!'

Well, yes, if you're a white racist.

Also, they're right. I'm totally anti - white, despite being white. I've obviously been getting it wrong all these years!

[fqllve]

Youtube comments: what the fuck does that have to do with the video?

[Bdthemag]

The 'Anti-racist is Anti-white!' brigade is infesting the comments of quite a few dream theater videos...

I'm fed up with them, to be honest. They say a fuckload of bullshit, then act as if they're superior and anyone not agreeing with them are actually retards.

Oh, I see your problem. You're reading the comments.