Tell me something interesting about yourself

not today, nsa ,👁👄👁

nice try, fbi
- Not on your lives, MI5
I'm just bored, talk about what you want.

Lmao. my friend just texted me:

So somehow i managed to supercool like half this box of freeze pops, and now every time i grab one theres a 50% chance its liquid that freezes as soon as i touch it

This is the content I demand

I am one of a handful of people in the world known to have been diagnosed and treated for a rare sarcoma cancer in an even rarer area of the body, that generally effects only women (I am a man).

It's a really crappy club. I wouldn't suggest joining.

Shit.

I'm really sorry, dude. I genuinely hope you get better.
- I'm over it. Life goes on. Weird club though.

I’ve never had to do a job interview. 5 different jobs, all word of mouth.

amazing, but how?
- I would also like to know where people network to find jobs. Haven't had any luck. I just want a help desk role.
- My first ever job was running a wood chipper under my uncles tree business. Did that almost every weekend for a number of years. Even sometimes in the winter. I wasn’t even a teenager when I first started this job.
  
  Second job was working in a warehouse at a company my mom worked at. They really needed weekend help.
  
  My third job was doing landscaping over the summer at a smallish company where my brother in law worked at. The owner loved to hire students for cheap.
  
  Fourth was a few software development internships ran by a research group at my college. I had a friend who was part of the group and vouched for me.
  
  My current job is my first true career job as a software engineer. The project manager from one of the internships I had actually got a job as CTO at this company. Offered me a junior position there out of college. Been there almost 6 years.
  
  I have applied to places where I certainly would have needed interviews, but I was never offered an opportunity.
  
  To make this even more awesome is that I’ve interviewed candidates myself at my current job for junior positions.

I got synaesthesia, and Track_Shovel is a red and yellow name.

That's super cool! What colour is your name
- Mothra is kinda brownish-mauve, but my irl name is orange
What colour is my name?
- Pale orange
I don't have synaesthesia, and Track_Shovel is a name.
- Fair enough, equally valid

Depression and anxiety greatly hindered my educational goals, so I only have an associates degree in accounting. However, the woman I married has a master's degree in computer science and a good, well-paying job. Our first child had medical issues requiring full-time care for several years, so I am now a stay-at-home dad to two kids, guiding them through homeschool.

Hey man. I got 2 young kids too, and it is N O T easy. I'm not SAH: we both work, but I can't imagine how tough it is to go it alone every day like that.

Keep up the good work

I approve people for disability money when I can. It's a lot of reading medical records and ensuring I'm being compliant with some really stupid rules.

Depending on the kind of metal you like I'm a big fan of Delain, especially The Human Contradiction, The Agonist, especially Lullabies For The Dormant Mind, and Infected Rain, especially 86.

For useless tidbit, the barnacle has the biggest dick to body ratio of any animal.

Best meal I've ever had was the pizza my realtor made for me after hubs and I closed on our house. I don't know how he did it, it was an outdoor dinner in a frickin wood fired pizza oven, he made a margarita with miyoko's mozzarella and fresh basil he grew with homemade sauce. It was so fucking good.

Most fun place I've ever visited was New Orleans. I went on a cruise to Mexico once that left from there, and I had an amazing time both days I was in new Orleans and a miserable time while I was on the boat.

Those recommendations are on the punch list.

That's a super cool, and I imagine, rewarding job.

I'm an Asian (Hongkonger to be exact) and I speak Cantonese. I love sharing about my culture, most of the time including language. People don't quite like it tho.

Meanwhile I study CS, make vector arts, play piano, and stream.

A proper Chinese always knows how to piano
- Of course I do, like half of my friends

I used to not cook at all. Then I realized I can’t go on like this and started a challenge: Eat a self cooked meal every single day for a month. It was super challenging but I learned a lot (and initially wasted a lot of food due to bad planning). Now I still cook almost every day.

When you wanna know if a hobby is for you, try doing it every day for a longer time and see if you still enjoy it.

may we get some pointers on what did you start with?
- I don’t remember what meals I started with. Nothing too fancy but also not too basic. In Germany we have a cooking app called KptnCook that has very easy instructions with pictures and a shopping cart that’s integrated with major grocery chains to show the exact name and price of products. It was really helpful for the beginning and they have many recipes I still cook today. I’m sure something like that exists in other countries.
  
  In the beginning it's important to read the recipe first before you even begin to plan it. You might need some utensils that you don't have or furiously need to search for during the cooking process. Later on when you're more advanced you will probably have everything (or something similar) on hand. It also helps in the preparation. Sometimes there is a step to add multiple spices at once. You can pre-mix them in a small bowl.
  
  Do the preparation first and have everything ready. American recipes already often list their ingredients pre-cut. But in Germany it will just say 1 onion, 3 tomatoes and so on and then in the recipe it will tell you how to prepare it.
  
  Look up Youtube Videos. It will have techniques and cool recipes. Pick Up Limes, Yeung Man Cooking and The Nard Dog Cooks are my favorite channels.

I never quite understood emotions until I started hrt at 32.

What do you do for work, or what are you studying towards

Studying towards masters in electrical engineering.

Musical recommendations (bonus points for metal)

If you like the song by Beyond Creation, you'll love this.

Useless tidbit you know (bonus points for citing sources)

The Ibanez Tube Screamer pedal contains no tubes.

Best meal you've had

I have a sous vide machine. I've obviously done the whole "food porn steak" thing, but one time I took an entire chicken breast, sous vided it like a steak, breaded it, pan fried it, and ate it like a massive chicken nugget with a juicy interior.

Best place you've visited

Home lmao. Close second would be Cedar Point, although I don't think I can fit on roller coasters at my current weight.

That's wild about the tube screamer, given the chubbies pedal heads get over them.

I haven't had a pedal with a tube yet, but I've got a Wampler Pinnacle deluxe that covers some ground that my Supersonic 22 can't do.

That second recommendation is outstanding. First one is good, too but more prog than I usually go for. I like prog, but I'm so far down the atmospheric black metal rabbit hole it's dizzying.
- atmospheric black metal rabbit hole
  
  Fuck I love me some atmoblack. It's honestly my biggest inspiration as a musician. But I've been jamming tech death lately because it helps me study. I gotta recommend Mare Cognitum for a heavier atmoblack sound, and Trna for an instrumental post-black metal expanse.
  
  That's wild about the tube screamer, give the chubbies pedal heads get over them.
  
  I keep a Tube Screamer clone in my arsenal precisely because it's not a very "tube-like" sound. It is midsy and crisp. Like 95% of all metal recordings are done with a Tube Screamer, 5150, and Vintage 30s, or digital clones thereof. It's a dream to play, but that's kinda why I'm trying to move away from it as a guitarist. But as a producer, it's a really nice tool for the toolkit. Also if I was playing tech death or something where I'm at the limit of my skill level, I'd probably rock a Tube Screamer so stuff is easier to play.
  
  Also though, I believe that historically it was marketed as "tube sound without the tubes" early in its life. Which, compared to some of the alternatives available at the time, did come a little closer to tube amps' softer clipping.
  
  But IMO as a metal player and electrical engineer, I think that whether or not your distortion is generated by tube, transistor, or simulation isn't that important [1] compared to properly tailored filters at every stage, especially the "tone stack", at least not for metal players or people who play with "fully saturated" distortion. For this reason, I'm absolutely not afraid to use solid state amps if they sound good, and for metal they absolutely can sound better in the mix.
  
  And even though tube distortion pedals do literally have a tube in the signal chain, they are probably not being run at a high enough voltage to actually be the source of distortion. You'd have to check the schematic to be sure. So there's no benefit to getting a tube distortion pedal in general, and tubes have microphonics and just electrically kinda suck. Tube amps are great, but again, it's more because of the various filters and the fact that the saturating nonlinearity exists at all rather than that the nonlinearity is generated by a specific device, so long as you use fresh tubes because old tubes do deteriorate an amplifier's performance. But also, tube amps are "warm" without any further filtering, and I typically find that "warm" amps have trouble standing out in a metal mix. Hence why when I (and other metal players) pick tube amps, I pretty much exclusively use amplifiers (and their simulations) that filter out that warmness, which shows up in metal as muddy garbage.
  
  [1] Assuming you're using monotonic distortion characteristics like soft and hard clipping, power laws, exponential. Non-monotonic distortion characteristics (like a sine or Chebyshev polynomial) sound whack and I really wish that more metal guitarists would check them out.

Im the person who's been "chosen by the people" to do "IT stuff". Family, friends, teachers, and neighbours reach out to me for the simplest tasks. Stuff they could probably figure out on their own, but insist I do for them.

I'm a nightmare for my school administrators, as I know my way around every blocking and monitoring thing they've set up on the school equipment.

I've also caused headaches for the entire city wide school system, as I got cloudflare to (unintentionally) block traffic from our ip address, and since all traffic is funnleded trough a VPN to a central gateway (all schools in said city use the vpn) ,meaning I blocked 66k kids from using the internet for 15m. ( I didn't get in trouble :3)

I thought I only had some ADHD, MFW filling out the psychiatrist's questionnaire and I'm marking everything on the inattentive section as "almost always"

? isn't scoring highly on the inattentive section consistent with having 'some ADHD'?
- No idea I have my first session next week, I'll know more then. This was all just some homework they gave me to do beforehand.

I really enjoy butterscotch and scotch

I'm a storyboard artist/3d generalist and I'm working towards my dream of one day developing my own cartoon or video game. I'd love to be a showrunner or game director and this is one of the ways I believe I'd be able to get there!

A few of my favorite songs are Love You by Idenline, Sacrificial by Rezz, Over You by Flume, Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones, and Walk by Pantera.

Did you know that for the music in 2016s Doom they used an actual chainsaw as a sound one of the songs (https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/5i51ov/til_mick_gordon_pitchshifted_a_sample_of_a/)

Best meal I've ever had was a BBQ burger in New York. I can't quite remember the restaurant since thus was back in high school but I've never tasted something as good as that since.

Best place I've ever visited was Banff in BC, Canada. I went with a lot of friends and to this day I still cherish those memories of walking around the town, having ice cream, and just having fun.

I once intentionally starved myself till the point of a huge headache as a personal experiment

Did a 30 day fast years ago, definitely need to look up medical information beforehand though. There's some nutrients your body needs to function but it's a short list which you can take with water (stuff that helps your neurons, etc). Was truly a different experience, would probably do it again if I had the time available.

Part-time cashier at a big orange hardware store while trying to get my degree in horticulture.

Best cake I've ever had: Chocolate Chocolate Chip by Nothing Bundt Cakes. Seriously, if there's a location near you that you've always passed by, stop by and try it. Their Carrot cake and Lemon cake are also amazing.

Omg the carrot cake is delicious. Everything I’ve tried has been on point.

I work as a Java programmer, which means that I spend about 50% of my day complaining about Java. Why doesn't it have enums like Rust? Why are there no tuples? How many goat sacrifices do the Java gods require to support named optional arguments to functions like Python? In the remaining time I have meetings, write docs, write tests, and sometimes even code. Nothing to complain about though, seeing how we are treated compared to people I know who work as taxi drivers or in elderly care, we programmers are basically treated as gods.

As for music, I like Hardstyle and Drum and Bass primarily. Examples: "Phuture Noize & Devin Wild - Waves", DnB: "Telomic & Susan H - Underwater". I'll be visiting the DnB festival "Liquicity festival" this weekend so I'm very hyped right now

Really? Come to the C# side... We have all those, and concise code too.

I am a woman who prefers short men.

So you also like them short in bed?

What do you do for work, or what are you studying towards

My day job is in tech. At night, I'm a bonafide freak. I perform with fire and sharp things.

Musical recommendations (bonus points for metal)

In This Moment - Ritual

Useless tidbit you know (bonus points for citing sources)

The tongue consists of two muscles that go down to your throat. I know because I have a forked tongue.

Best meal you've had

I will kill for sweet plantains

Best place you've visited

Salem, MA is one of my favorite places. I go very frequently (just not in October)

I'm going to a King Gizzard show next month, pretty excited.

Best meal I probably had was an emotional support curry I made for myself.

I'm also excited about restarting my D&D campaign after a small hiatus.

Currently I'm pretty tired but I'm also going though some revenge bedtime procrastination...

I've never actually sat and listened to Gizzard. On my list, but my free time is chronically limited.

Curry is love. Curry is life.

What are you going as for DND? I don't play, but know enough to be dangerous. Also, I'll make an AI drawing for you if you like.

Example:

Goblin Cleric

Hope you rest up. I burn the candle at both ends so I know the feeling.
- If you're a metal fan give PetroDragonic Apocalypse and Nonagon Infinity a try. Their other albums aren't metal but pretty good nonetheless.
  
  I'm the game master actually! So I play as all the NPCs lol.

I work in a makerspace, that's in a public library.

What are your tips for a library opening a tiny maker space? Some libraries near me have been given grants to have a "tool library" section, with some work benches and basic hand tools, that can be borrowed.
- I think my biggest suggestion might be to try to avoid the huge industry of companies selling "makerspace" stuff to libraries, i.e. GlowForge, etc. All of it is wildly overpriced and underpowered, at the supposed tradeoff of having a lot of support. It's a bad trade, the support isn't worth it.
  
  Try to build your own open source equipment, like Voron for 3d printing, OpenFlexure for microscopes, all the Precious Plastics designs for plastic scrap processing, etc. Building these from scratch is ultimately cheaper. Also, it means you'll know how to fix anything that could possibly go wrong, since you know it inside and out
  
  Don't worry about not having the necessary skills/experience. It's all very learnable by anyone, and also there are definitely members of your community with those skills willing to help out. On that note, you really want the community running this thing more than the library admin. They know what they want/need.
  
  Pay attention to the environmental and health consequences of this stuff EARLY ON, before you invest in something terrible. Use easily compostable materials like PHA and hempwood, or post-consumer recycled stuff like PETg from used soda bottles. Get into making/recycling your own materials if/when you can.
  
  That's what i can think of for now, hopefully that's at all helpful.

Check out gnoosic.com they have a really strong algorithm that's great for finding bands. It's sent me shit with 27 monthly listeners.

Work: Self-employed software developer, currently designing veterinary shop microservices. Still haven't decided if I will use Java(spring) or Python(django-rest), (or none?) Insights will be highly appreciated ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Music: EDM, Robert miles ~ children . This song reminds me how we moved around a lot when i was 3-4 yo. (My father was a civil contractor on different companies, states apart) Finally, a song that sums up the confusions I had.

Tidbit: People highly underestimate their hearing capabilities. I mean, We're not dogs, but our ears collect more information than we ever asked for. All you have to do is LISTEN.

Best Meal: My mom's. And yes, I know I might be highly biased on this. I've tried pizzahut, KFC, and every premium buffet out here. But naaah. My mom hosts catering services, BTW.

Best place: to date? High school where I was studying. It's at the foot of Mt meru, at the gates of Arusha national park. Almost every day, we wake up to the sound of zebras and giraffes grazing high trees, takes all the stress away.

Man. That HS experience. I would give a kidney to see Africa like that
- Lol, you should have seen us the day buffalo herd grazed 50m away from school fence bruv, absolutely no one got out of the hostels (of which, as a high schooler, jumping and hanging all day in the rooms). One of the guards almost got horned.
  
  Still, I wouldn't trade anything on this earth with this experience. I'm highly thankful 😊
  
  Edit: To be frank, I was busy chasing my crush, who was also chasing her crush, who was my homie, whom we played GTA san Andreas together. (a stupid triangle 😫). Every time I got a chance to look out the window on my hostel and see these graceful creatures, it reminded me how lucky I was.

International buyer for performance exhaust system manufacturer.

My foster child is also my niece

LOVED Belgium. Visited St Truiden, Ghent and Brussels. I cried for a week when I left I missed it so much.

I have every album by Radiohead, Bela Fleck and Medeski Martin and Wood.

That's really great you took your niece in.

Never been to Europe and kick myself for going to Asia instead.

I have a bachelors of science dual majored in microbiology and chemistry with a masters in education and I work in IT.

Here's some music from one of my favourite bands :)

https://open.spotify.com/album/1B12ldQwBhDeS0gIcUg0ux?si=Bf9GHetQSQGup-A50OzRTQ

My 2nd and 3rd toes are webbed up to the first "knuckle" on both feet

What types of metal do you like? I can try to aim if I have an idea of what you're into.

If I'm going just for an out of the blue rec, maybe try Emptiness - Not For Music if you're not already familiar. Belgian black/death band having turned toward the avant garde have left nearly every indication of their more extreme roots on this album, and it's fantastic. All the tracks are great but if you're looking for the "single" maybe try the track Ever.

This is right up my alley; it's going on my collaborative playlist called 'forks in a blender' which is just me and my bud making a playlist.

I really, really like Vvilderness. Huge fan. Also like panopticon, Unreqvited, Witchcraft, Nordic Winter, Skrm (I think?) Elderwind. Psychedelic Witchcraft and Blood Ceremony are up there too.
- Ok, I can work with that. If you are a Panopticon fan you may already be familiar with this, but if not it's worth a listen: Eneferens. A little more toward the VVilderness vibe, but essentially purely folk, check out Ekstasis. And to go with the psych vibe, if you haven't heard Hexvessel - Dawnbearer then give that a spin and thank me later.

Bonus points for metal

I always recommend Shaka Ponk

More electro-rock-metal but still jaw-dropping

I want to be a programmer by day and animator by night. I am nowhere near achieving that goal but everyday I am getting closer.

Music: Ritual Genocide by Ritual Genocide

Usless tid bit: I have 9th pair of teeth in my upper jaw.

Best meal: Naleśnik with pears by two lovely ukrainian ladies from a food truck

Best place: An overnight camping with hammocks in a medieval castle.

Arron Nordstrom from Gemini Syndrome and I could pass as brothers, and not just because we are both albinos. We both look a lot alike, even though I probably have 80 lbs on him.