RobsTea

My friend was thinking tremclad high-heat enamel. She figures that since it's for high heat, it shouldn't be toxic.

The rats don't really chew at the bars or anything, and obviously it'll be well dried before they're moved back in, but I know nothing about this and think she's wasting her money getting a product not more designed as, say, an acrylic lacquer. One that actually says non-toxic on it, perhaps. :p

I'd be working off of http://improvencyclopedia.org/games/index.html for game rules, probably.

I'm helping to run a small gathering of artists (some musicians, some visual artists, some etc.) and wanted something for those who may not have any tools to bring. I'm a total novice but am interested in playing around with acting to develop my own craft (writing) - any suggestions?

Here’s some background.

I read pieces of a book (short on time; no library borrowing privileges due to fines) which described pieces of the EEG and MRI readings of the Dalai Lama and another Lama, and how they shifted in response to certain meditations.

I’ve long been interested in neuropsychology, to the tune of having studied both independently and in formal post-secondary settings.

I am also an alcoholic; 11 years now, largely drinking every day (despite health risks, etc.) and via attempting treatment probably about 5 years ago, came across a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn… who has co-authored some papers with the author of the study the Dalai Lama was involved.

I am fully convinced of the scientifically proven benefits of meditation. In my understanding, it seems like specific mediations can bring out essentially what I use exogenous chemicals for, and nor is that a surprise. In my long and historied experience with drugs and alcohol, I have largely been seeking for a way to get those effects without negatively affecting my body.

Here’s the issue:

I am severely undisciplined. I would like to learn discipline. However, since I cannot stop my desire to ask “why?” I am not sure that I can simply follow a philosophy. Reading about the effects of meditating on compassion, I am reminded of what I do when I am (quite uncomfortably) withdrawing from alcohol: I remember the very beautiful times that I had with one particular past lover and girlfriend. While it doesn’t entirely negate the symptoms, it does certainly calm me, as long as I can keep focused on the joy of the togetherness we shared.

I am concerned that because of my inquisitive, impatient nature & my desire to always take shortcuts if I think I understand where I am heading, I am not going to be able to follow any sort of program. I don’t even have the discipline to get out of bed unless something is pushing me to. I have a history of depression and anxiety, and I know that if I were mentally disciplined enough, neither would be a problem – that doesn’t apply to everyone, but from experience I know (or at least believe) that it applies to me.

Is it appropriate for me to pursue any Buddhist discipline?

If I am going to overanalyse why meditation works, am I trying to cheat or simply being a good scholar?

Is it right to pick and choose what I believe or practice, in a Buddhist faith, or is that simply failing to let go of desire?

Can one succeed at progressing along some path without letting go of the desire to know “why?”

I imagine that perhaps someone will be paying attention who has traveled this path before. I suspect I may be trying some sort of faith to cure my alcoholism, since it is currently getting in the way of the potential I perhaps have to make the world a better place – although it is still a life that I enjoy leading, I feel I perhaps am no longer leading and am merely following some past decisions. For instance, I live on the street & it’s a beautiful life, but being an addict on the street means my time and energy are often severely restricted.

Hopefully someone can tell me where (and whether) to start disentangling this morass via this direction. I’m not sure that I can just “take” advice; I fear that would lead to me automatically distrusting (analyzing) any guru, although I would expect that they have something that I do not possess.

Want to display row for chronological purposes, but data will be sorted frequently. Also want to show dependencies, currently based on row # (i.e. data in row 14, based off cell 13, is 13.1) row 16, based off 15 is row 15.1 (14 is skipped)

Any ideas? Probably the same in excel. Sorry, I know this is probably easy to research, but I know someone knows the answer and I doubt I'll find it without spending 15 minutes or half an hour on it, which seems silly for something trivial (but important to me, still!)

Thanks!

-if you care about what's being asked

-online vs. IRL

-if you think the person genuinely needs information

-if they're specifically asking about other perspectives

answer as much or as little as you want. ;)

All about a girl who came to stay

She's the kind of girl that makes you want to say "she's whoring,"

but only cause she has these bills to pay...

Um, so the relevance is... I'm thinking about whoring my work out and trying to become a paid writer. Obviously not by ripping off Beatles tunes... although many of my friends do make money whoring themselves as musicians, I don't have the best busking setup and why take money from generous or needy people when I can take it from the hands of the print media, in their dying days.

Maybe. If I turn out to be able to learn how to get good.

So I need to create work first. Which means I need to learn how to tighten up my writing... and that depends on having a concise list of instructions to check myself against for why something's not "popping" the way it should. Some sort of "rules of rhetoric and journalistic genius" list, not just a style guide.

And, ideally, a community of people to learn from. Any ideas? I can already write, just not well, and I'm a quick study; I always got good marks in papers as long as I didn't have to throw attributed research in, because trying to cite stuff I read ten years ago from who knows where is a pain.

Also, I ramble.

So that's the big thing - terseness, connecting ideas, avoiding research, basically taking what's always been fun about writing - getting to "hear" myself "talk," or create content at any rate - and get better at the creation/editing so that it doesn't feel overwhelming, arbitrary or full of ambivalence.

And then edit your post? Especially if it was some amazing response and then you edited it to say something disgusting, like "PS: I'm naked and covered in peanut butter and jam, sandwiching with my cousins." ...so that then people would have given a bunch of thumbs up that they couldn't take back.

PS: this is against the TOS.

So?

Or if you have, what were they like? What would you compare them to?

If I am interested in why people believe what they do, or how they change their minds, or how to convince or influence people... or alternately have them shy away from what I am saying, where do I find this in psych? Is it under social and cognitive psych? Can you point out specific references?

Specifically I am interested in the way that logic and emotion correspond with belief on topics that people are inflexible about. e.g. religion and politics, to name a couple.

I want to understand more about this inflexibility, and learn how to get people to engage in actual discussion of the merits and disadvantages of their closely-guarded beliefs. In the case of religion, I know there are religious edicts against questioning belief - but those mostly apply to when outsiders get you to question them. I can lie and say I'm an insider, or a lapsed insider of a religion... but is dishonesty the only way to get someone who is closely guarded to talk about their religious beliefs? Same with politics? I know you have to approach changing beliefs from within the belief structure... and you can also turn people away by being false flag... "I am a separatist! I am going to blow **** up and wreak havoc!" ... suddenly separatism's not so popular, if that's more radical than how most people feel. Can you link me to or advise me on where to learn about these tactics, and specifically what about them works? (Polarization, group identity, etc.) I find them deeply interesting. Thank you!

If who we are at any one time is determined based on a physiological state - in a reductionist, scientific standpoint... and this seems to be borne out by experimental studies which seem to also show that religious feeling can be induced both by drugs and electrical stimulation, then does Christianity inherently come into conflict with neurological fact as a part of its teachings, or is ignorance of our chemical nature simply adopted as a defense mechanism to ignore fact?

Are there any atheists here who see anything other than a materialistic interpretation of existence? Do you think that there's some sort of dualistic body-soul thing going on, or do you accept that we are who we are because of natural processes going on in our bodies? In which case, do you assign blame to the crazy/criminal? Do you believe in free will? If you can't answer silly, insane questions without snarking is that a reflection on me or on you? I find it amusing that you feel the need to respond to something you consider odious. But instead, here I am tempting you to tell me again that I am annoying and dull. All you'd have to do is copy-paste the "annoying and dull" and it would answer all my questions.

Earlier I thought I had a _brilliant_ idea for social networking being used as a tool to save the world.

Then I stayed at home an stared at my laptop without moving... with really wide eyes, so focused that I'm too busy to do much of the drinking I intended to do to ease the withdrawal from going from tons to less...

also the lack of sleep for nights in a row (3-4 hours?) and vivid unpleasant dreams (I dreamed I was Edward from the Narnia series, and everyone else had been killed, and I had this time-travel thing that I'd overused and was trying to refill it with something that would make it work, but couldn't and was about to die... and then woke ... fast heartbeat, hyperfocused,

also wtf - Narnia? I'm 25 years old! And atheist, what's that doing in my dreams?

PS: my time travel device involved lip-chap protector. (like, mango flavoured? Or tangerine? Good stuff - good disguise!)

So is this hypomania? What if I hear imaginary music? What if it's voices?

Hypomania, agitated depression? Depressed hypomania? Mixed state or pure?

Can't really comment on other symptoms, but there were halos around lights for the last couple days, feelings of guilt and dread interspersed with productive happy chatter (day by day, hour by hour) - cyclothymia? The DTs? Chylamydia? Cytotoxic effects of alcohol?

Okay, this is a guessing game and not to be taken seriously. I won't take it seriously, I haven't even really provided you with proper symptoms.

I am thinking hypomania at this point. I am not currently hearing imaginary music. Currently.

If you say "you're on crack," you lose too points cause that's a shitty guess. Annnnd.... go!

Otherwise I will stay at home and drink in bed.

Or I could visit a friend.

Or get pizza.

What should I dooooooo?

(Other suggestions encouraged)

I want something pre-made or purchasable or if you can give me a little bit of guidance or assurance that it's possible without insane effort I'll learn how to do it myself. I have thousands of pages of docs and need to pick out keywords and separate sections into separate documents (and eliminate any duplicate text, ie if I have 2 keywords, this and sentence (obv. not real keywords) I don't want one instance of the copy to say "this is a sentence - cool isn't it?" and the next to repeat "sentence - cool isn't it? Like frosty nipplesque towering mountains."

Any, any, any suggestions? Relatively common keywords, e.g. "politics" "leftist" "left-wing" "right-wing" would all output to a politics file. All my own writings, but I can't be arsed to edit back in a million (literally) words for anything actually on one topic and cut it out by hand, I want most of the cutting done for me.

I can potentially pay for this job when I am not so broke, but this is the internet, so yeah I'd need to just know the tools that are needed and whether it's doable so I can find someone local and tailor the end product to my needs.

However: I need to have (ideally hidden) reference to what file and page it came from, so anything especially important I can track down in case I missed some text.

Thank youuuuu genius programmer types!

I have a lot of stuff on politics and random topics, some best suited for an adult audience, although I think with just random ideas teens have cool insight. Also just some random old bad writing (prose/poetry) that I get a kick out of when I read it, because I'm like: "what is this guy on?" and then I realise I didn't even drink in those days. And I'd like to share that too. Where can I post snippets of thoughts in an active place where one actually gets feedback?

I'm looking for a community rather than a blog ideally, but when YOU get an idea and want to share and get feedback, where do you put/post it?

I'm looking for something on the social psychology of a good video, and on publicisation.

I am just getting into this medium and don't want to make too many amateur mistakes - I also don't want to spend too much time on it. I am not a natural actor and these are interesting but tricky concepts. If you have any suggestions of channels to model myself on, or tutorials, or even just voice/video synchronization software, since I'll be recording audio separate from video, that would be great. Never done video editing, just any suggestions - please and thank you!

I'm trying to make my journal process a little more manageable. I want to go back and collect all ideas on say, education reform, or politics, or environment, to try to collect different points and assess which are better ways of saying things, since I often consider the same points and arguments.

The best way I can think to do this would be with keywords (I would need to use multiple per document, ex: education, "school system," whatever else... and maybe have a separate output file for things like "school" that could ambiguously not refer to school.

Ideally what I need also would have a mouse-over or field attribute of some sort indicating the source, so I can go back and refine.

Alternately, if I put tags in my documents like {education} {/education} (or with <>) around sentences that I feel I want to excerpt? Can I get a macro to bring those into one file, or can I get them hidden in the main file if I don't want to look at anything about that?

2nd alternative, to create alternate output files with excerpted text omitted, but that's difficult in case of overlap.

I am using OpenOffice right now but as this project is insurmountable without a mechanical aid, I would be willing to purchase Microsoft Word or other editing software if it would be helpful.

We're talking hundreds of files, some hundreds of pages long. Some with passwords, though I can manually remove those if necessary.

Does anyone please have any suggestions? I have no idea what macros can do or where to start in writing them, but am a quick study as whatever time I put in would be less than the manual editing would take - and would produce an immediate slimming of volumes of info.

Plus I have programmer friends who I could ask to help.

ANY advice would be appreciated. I'd prefer not to have to convert to .txt or .rtf files as I'm afraid of losing formatting and other capabilities but .rtf might not be so bad if that would help in any way. Doesn't have to be a macro, just anything.

Not trying to be a creeper, just trying to ask a question that might raise an eyebrow.

For the record, I chill naked all the time, and have been to a nude beach on exactly one (1) occasion. Please don't give me creepy answers.

I have a line of inputs that I entered as just "13dec" etc, thinking last year, but of course the information is defaulting to this year. Is there any way to select a number of entries in a column and change the date?

If not, I'll just change the way the days displays and save last year's info in a new file, but having it correct would be a bit handier. Anyone know how? Format doesn't seem to want to let me, or maybe I don't know how to do it, and I don't know anything about macros.