Allamorph

They're only picky if they're a) horribly untrimmed or b) no longer attached to you.

Opening taped boxes is easy. Slit the tape across the top, between the flaps, with the side of your fingernail. Then yank up on the flaps. The tape has a fairly low tensile strength and will snap with only a minor exertion of force. I do it all the time. Paper tape or security shipping tape isn't quite so simple. Those are usually reinforced with some sort of twine, which makes the slitting somewhat iffy, depending on if the twine runs horizontal or slanted, and the yanking about impossible.

I only seem older than people because I happen to naturally English very well. (English is used as a verb in this context.) But don't worry. I'm only actually intimidating when I'm looking at you.

Pocketknives serve a variety of purposes, especially in a shipyard environment. Since the civilians have a lot of temporary systems rigged up throughout our boat and apparently don't care where it goes so long as it's 'up', I spend a lot of time on watch cutting tie lines and retying clusters of cables to maintain a clean-looking overhead stowage, which also allows all of us more headroom when walking around the sub. Having a pocketknife on my belt is much faster at cutting things down than taking out my diggit and working at flipping out the blade on it. They're also extremely useful at opening packages, declaring posted signs obsolete, stabbing things what ought not be where they are currently, and threatening people who are trying to fuck with your shit. Fun fact: My Benchmade will go through an inch of hardback-bound college rule green notebook. It will go through you. =)

This thread is very straightforward. Post your toys. For instance, I have a new toy. It is a Benchmade 810 Contego. Four inch blade, nine and a quarter inch total length. A nice, comfortable six ounces. Ambidextrous AXIS locking mechanism, smooth opening/closing action (pull lever, flick wrist). My blade is has the BK-1 matte black coating for corrosion resistance.. Hilt has a carbide glass breaker on the end. It is a good stabby thing and is sharp and pointy and I like it. It's much better than my SOG Salute, which I also like but which apparently has issues with the tip breaking, and which definitely has issues with the belt clip metal toughness. I am starting to have a lot of knives.... TOY POSTING GO

Here are the notes I took down during the midwatch. There was an open space four rows back from the entrance. Andy pulled into it, killed the engine and cut the radio, and sat there, indulging in one last uneasy hesitation. The sudden silence, broken only by the clicking and (groaning) of the settling car, snapped around him, wrapping him in a melancholic emptiness that seemed to grow a sentience of its own, pulling his indecision out into open view and judging him for it. Introspective - he is stuck between knowing intellectually he's pursuing foolishness and knowing in his heart he's just searching for reasons to avoid seeing a lonely, probably crazy old man he's been told is his great uncle. He wavers, but remembers the children at the gas station convenience store and the woman on the roof of the train. He can't explain them, and he's starting to think the headaches are related. And he just wants to sleep again. He gets out of the car and goes inside. Brief interchange w/ receptionist â?? use full name Andrew McIlroy (mother Janie McIlroy neé Tomlinson, mother Sarah Tomlinson neé Flaherty, brother Nicholas Flaherty), maybe something about "not many visitors", or "he'll be happy to have someone to see him" â?? Andy feels a slight hint of polite deception mixed with concern and worry. He isn't sure how he knows this. A nurse, nametag Margaret, soft beauty faded with age, kind understanding face, leads him into visitation area. Commentary on people living there. She is leading him to the far side of the room to a table by the corner window. Only one man is there, obviously tall despite being seated, his gauntness stark and accentuated with age. Hands once wiry, now bony and calcified, features sharp and angular. Hair greyed/silvered but with blazes of defiant jet black, as if refusing to bow to time. Eyes similarly sharp, but softened. He is gazing out the window in the absent reverie of an old man lost in memories. "Wait here a second, honey," Margaret told him, restraining gesture, arm + shoulder pat; she goes to get his attention "Nicholas? Nick, dear, you have a guest." He doesn't respond "Oh, Nick, don't be like that!" hands on her hips. Still nothing. She sighs, exasperation showing, leans over and murmurs something to him in Latin. "Close your eyes"? He gives a small start and turns to look at her. Brief exchange; he knows he is trying to her and is both regretful and grateful. Andy senses this and is again confused. When she mentions again that he has a visitor, his expression darkens. Andy gets more confusing sensations, realises that this is the same empathy he's felt before, and it appears to be getting stronger. Awkward exchange as Andy tries to break the ice with an old man who is clearly jaded and suspicious of new faces. Possible lines: - "...I'm not sure what to call youâ??" // "'Sir' would be appropriate." - "Why are you here?" // "I wanted to talk to you." // "Talk." *scoff* "No one wants to talk to a crazy man, a black sheep." In the end words cannot reach the old man. Andy brings out a small, careworn plush dog, says it belongs to his mother. Nicholas begins to tear up. "I gave her this...." Says she never believed, even after, and Andy interrupts with even after you saved her. He says she told him about the impossible things, the monsters, and her uncle. He says she couldn't believe because she had to live in the real world with real people and a real job. She even tried to forget. But she never could, and that's why he's here. She told him Nicholas could help. Nicholas has Margaret take them both back to his room. Once there and arranged, Andy tells him all about the headaches, the dreams and visions, the train with the woman on the roof and how he was himself and yet someone else; the gas station where everything went grey and he saw children running in slow motion but backwards and forwards at the same time, and the box that kept its color so he was drawn to it, behind stuff on a shelf, and how he took it and gave it to the store owner who saw it and broke down in tears, and when he looked for the shelf again it was gone. He asks what it means. Nicholas tells him about his former life, about creatures and monsters, about people called Hunters with extraordinary powers, about the Others who gave out these powers. Andy is skeptical, even despite what he's seen and felt. Their discussion stalls, and eventually Andy leaves. Nicholas keeps the plush dog.

So, I haven't written anything for a long time. If I'm being honest, I've never really finished any sketches I've started work on, except for the two I have posted over on TheOtaku on my Ether world.  Part of it, I think, is due to outside distractions and my incorrigible imagination ever moving onward, but I think a larger part is that my writing style for years has been to where my first draft is generally equivalent to a work ready for the final editing/revision process.  I don't really do this because I'm trying to be perfect on the first go, although that's probably what it ends up appearing to be.  Mostly I'm just so familiar with how to write things that I end up attempting to recreate everything in my mind's eye exactly as I see it when translating to the written medium.   An ugly side effect of this process is that I end up stymied by phrases becoming disordered or places where I know what I want the idea to mean but can't find the right word.  Spots like this create locks, essentially, on my creative process, and it's very difficult to continue on with anything else without attempting to break through that lock.  I had to start training myself to toss down a similar word or idea and notate it consistently in such a way that I remembered that it wasn't exactly what I wanted just so I could keep writing things.   Recently, though, I've begun to wonder if that's any good for writing at all.  I mean, high quality and fantastic ideas are all well and good, but if they're never brought to a finished state and shared, then what good is all that talent and skill?  No one cares about stories they can't read.  I have upwards of eleven distinct universes swirling around in my headspace, and at this rate no one else is ever going to get to enjoy them.   So what I thought I'd do is I'd become one of those deafmutes take all of the storycrafting that generally goes on in my head and start putting it down from the get-go.  I'm going to translate everything, from the initial concept to the development and building to the expansion and translation.  Hopefully I'll be able to see if this overtly slower approach will actually speed up the process, and potentially allow me to finish a sketch when I start it.   I'll start off with a concept that's been simmering in my head for a few months now, and started to burgeon a couple of weeks ago on the midwatch, when I decided to take a closer look at it.  Concept first.         A man's chronic headaches worsen, sometimes accompanied by sleeping and waking dreams he doesn't understand. He seeks out his great-uncle for assistance.

Your lipstick broke! That's why it looks like an i. Plus I can't write in my handwriting. People might think I wrote it. And then where would I be? Not looking up your next address, that's where.

Oh. Uh. So, that was, umm. That was me, actually. What did the scrawling, I mean. And it, um, it isn't .... it isn't 'nifty'. It's 'next'. You're next. So.......

Also this is a preposterous thing to say. There are only so many hours in the day. You can't magically make more. So if you want to work out, you're already changing your hobbies vis à vis you are getting off your lazy ass and doing Man Work, Son. If you don't want to change your hobbies, you're not going to stick to working out. It's that simple. Right now I'm having to choose between my typical routine of post-work gaming with my online gaming crowd and practising my bass guitar and working out. This weekend I chose the online gaming crowd because I chose to be a lazy good-for-nothing asshole. Don't be a lazy good-for-nothing asshole. =P Edit: I don't play Destiny. I don't even own a One.

It is hard. And you will feel worse. But you will also feel strangely satisfied. A personal trainer is a good idea because you'll have a person who knows a variety of structures to present to you and can work with you to tailor them to your wants and your body's needs. Said person can also push you harder than you can push yourself. However, the pitfall there is that a personal trainer is most likely going to be in much better shape than yourself, which can make it easier to make excuses about your workout routine. So if you already know you might not commit to the lifestyle permanently, I wouldn't get one. (If you are going to commit, they're fantastic.) I don't recommend working out at home unless a) you've already got a routine, or b) you know you're going to commit. Being at home, as DeLarge said, creates a lot of opportunity to make excuses and procrastinate and I'm Just Gonna Play One More Match Of Destiny Because I Want That Exotic Rifle and then the whole day goes by and you've done absolutely nothing. My roommate has a whole workout set downstairs in a spare room. You know how much he uses it? Once a month. You know how much I use it? Once since November, when I moved in. Wait. Twice. Two times. You know how many times I work out when I go to the gym? Every Damn Time. From personal experience, the Absolute Worst Thing is going to the gym by yourself. Especially just starting out. For me, I knew broad-spectrum what I wanted to do, but I didn't have much of an idea how to go about doing it, both because I wasn't really sure what exercises were going to do what for me, or how to structure them, and because I didn't really know what equipment the gyms around me had to offer. So, yeah, for a while there was a bit of a fear of going into someplace and standing around awkwardly looking at things and, you know, kind of "taste-testing" various machines and stuff. I just didn't want to be That Guy. It's much easier with a friend. I say this because it's true on multiple levels. A buddy sharing your awkwardness makes the whole thing less uncomfortable and more comical, since you each know exactly what the other one is feeling and just how silly they are for feeling that way. A buddy with a set routine of his/her own is invaluable because he/she can teach you about what different things do so you can start to develop your own routine--but that isn't entirely necessary, so if you don't have one, then don't sweat it too much. The important thing is that you can each push and encourage each other, and the whole sticking-with-it accountability thing gets a whole lot more personal when your mate can sit down across from you and stare at you and say "Hey. You missed Leg Day." Now the guilt is HUGE because you know they're no better than you are in terms of having the lifestyle, but they're definitely better than you because it was just as hard for them to choose to keep going and they still chose to when you chose not to. The point is: go work out. You'll be glad you did. And after a couple of months, you'll want to do it more.

This is how it starts. Do not go down that road. That road is a brightly-lit, colorful, comfortable, wide, smooth, and pleasant one, and ends in beer bellies, a sedentary lifestyle, and the mantra "man, when I used to work out...".

I wouldn't care about societal labels unless you want to wear them with pride. So if being an "otaku" means something special to you, fantastic. Otherwise the English language has plenty of perfectly good labels of its own that also don't make it sound like you're trying too hard to identify with surface qualities of a culture you've only had a fractional slice of contact with. You know. Like weeaboos.  

That just means you are a very nice, very sweet girl who occasionally holds people at gunpoint for forgetting to tell you happy birthday.

If it means anything to you, I don't think of you as a feminine guy. Just goofy.

The test results page says outright that it is a measure of how well the testee fits into traditional societal gender roles, and has no bearing on sexual orientation. Also: 67.77 // 67.77 // 65.50 Edit: I find this assessment oddly entertaining.

NEW NIGHTWISH ALBUM IN MARCH AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I really didn't mind the outcome.  Either team could have won and I would still have been fairly okay.   I respect Brady.  He may be a bit of an arrogant asshole at times, but he's an incredibly skilled player.  Peyton Manning may be more intelligent in regards to the game, and may know the nuances of offense better, but Peyton doesn't have the same grasp of the overall game as does Brady, and certainly nowhere near the same level of intuition.  But I live in Seattle now, and I would have liked to see the Seahawks win.  Also there are enough people here at work who are all on board the "I hate bandwagon fans" bandwagon that it would have made me very happy to see them all furious the Monday after.  If there's one thing I always enjoy, it's seeing people who embrace unreasonable points of view raging as they have to eat crow.

[FONT=calibri]I am always logged in.[/font]

[FONT=Calibri]One of them is me.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]Yeah, I don't think the site would have survived without [color=#800000]Boo[/color].[/font]

I almost forgot. Oh, really! Which ones, if you don't mind me asking? And, I'm sorry, but I have to break character for this. 'weither' omglol this is possibly the best thing i have ever seen hahahaha *ahem* This paragraph amused me greatly until I got to the very last sentence, and then I just started laughing. Ahh, irony. I've been told this before, actually. I think it's because the way I present myself intimates an incredibly high standard, when in all actuality I legitimately talk like this. I may stop and start a touch more, since my brain works significantly faster than my mouth and often words get sort of jumbled up when they all try to come out at the same time, but the format is generally the same. But at the same time, I'm not really trying to adhere to any sort of rules. I just think this way. I also find writing like I do makes it easier to communicate what I want to say, so in the long run it's just easier for me. But obviously I'm not above abandoning "proper structure". Oh, trust me, remaining silent is totally my decision. No one forces me, haha. I'm sure a few other members could vouch for the truth of that. Which stuff?

But there's the thing, really. I don't remember any moderators going specifically out of their way to hammer down on sub-perfect-quality discussion posts. The occassional atrocious one, sure, but the real oppressive atmosphere came from basically all the more grammatically-conscious members continuously nitpicking everyone else's spelling and punctuation and so on and so forth. I actually made it a point to limit grammatical badgering to people I was already friends with, to try and keep it to a sort of friendly ribbing thing and discourage the idea that you had to be 100% on top of your game all the time to even have a chance of being heard, but I don't think everyone else held that same kind of philosophy. I mean, if I actually wanted to rid the Boards of sub-perfect posters, I probably would have given people like Conrad and ... whatever the Aberinkula/Premonition/ForgotteÃ? HerÃ? dude's name was a whole lot more direct grief. (I think I started calling him Flava (of the month) behind closed boards.) That and the Size=1 clique. Yeesh. I can barely go back and read old threads right now because it's so goddamned tiny. And I even tried it once. It's just entirely awful.