General Discussion Thread

[Róisín]

The problem with roos and detection systems is the same as with roos and fences. A big roo can jump more than six feet off the ground. And not just roos are car hazards: hitting a wombat is like hitting a boulder in the road. Though the most damaging accidents I have been in with animals have been when the driver of the car I was in hit a horse which was standing sideways in the road on a blind corner north of Alice Springs (fortunately for us what broke the windscreen was the animal’s back rather than its hooves), and a wedgetailed eagle that came straight through the windscreen of a truck in which I was a passenger as it came down a slope in the Blue Mountains. Being in a truck cabin with a big, injured and very angry bird of prey was extremely unnerving.

[JoB]

It looks like Scandinavian history is currently busy repeating itself ... ?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68824189

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Fire_of_1728
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Fire_of_1795

[midwestmutt]

The insanity keeps coming closer. Today the 14 year old granddaughter of friends of mine from our reenactor club was in lockdown for over 6 hours today after another 14 year old student tried to enter their school with a rifle in Mt Horeb Wi. He was shot dead by police.

[Keep Looking]

That's truly awful, I'm sorry to hear.

[thorny]

That is indeed terrible. I'm sorry for all concerned. And how are we getting 14 year olds into such a state? (And I wonder whether they could have stopped the child without shooting him. News stories don't seem to be addressing that, at least so far.)

[Glass]

The world is in a particular kind of way at the moment - chaos is constant, but it seems tragedy is haunting the 2020s more than usual.

[Jitter]

I have a friend who is a teacher, nowadays in Texas. I just can’t wrap my head around the way she repeatedly mentions having been in lockdown and of days when she’s debating whether she should send farewell messages to her own children. Several times a year. Being a teacher is not supposed to be a high risk job! How can it possibly be that things are that bad?

We had a school shooting in Finlad just recently, a 12-year old shot one classmate dead and two others were seriously injured. But this was the first incident in over 15 years. In the US there were 207 school shoorings in 2010-2019. Since 2020 to date it’s at 193 (source Wikipedia). Are we quite sure the end of the world has not already happened?

[noonnoommoon]

Probably a strange question to ask in a forum of Adults, but! Does anyone have any tips/tricks for someone who's going to be a high schooler next year? I'm. Kind of scared ngl...
Also hiii I haven't been here for like half a year

[Keep Looking]

Hiya, good to see you!

At least from my personal experience (as a kinda socially awkward nerd), my tips for high school would be "don't be afraid of talking to different people and making friends" "if your friends suck and start treating each other badly, don't be afraid to leave them" and "if you do leave a group of friends, don't be scared to try and find a new group".

I say this because I left a friend group who were treating each other badly, but I didn't make new friends until I moved schools and spent two years being sad and lonely. To be fair, making friends was kinda difficult, but there were people I probably could have befriended if I hadn't been so apprehensive about it.

Also: try not to get too caught up in people's drama, it never really turns out well. Teenagers can have drama over a lot of stupid things.

On the academic side, pay attention in class and try and keep on top of assignments and things, but it's ok if you don't put 100% of your effort into your schoolwork - good grades in high school can be helpful but they really don't make or break that much of your future. I did not take this advice (or at least I understood it conceptually but could not bring myself to do it) and I was very stressed in my last few years.

[thorny]

A viewpoint from many years later:

If you have a great time in high school: excellent! A lot of people do overall, even if they have some bad moments; and you very well may be one of them.

If you don't have a great time in high school: there's very little connection between having a good high school experience, or a good teenage experience in general, and having a good life later on. Many of the excellent people, living good lives that they'd chosen, who I got to know and love as an adult had a bad time in high school.

-- if you're scared specifically of in-school violence: I'm afraid I can't speak much to that. That was certainly a problem some places while I was in high school; but news distribution was a lot different at the time, and we rarely heard of problems that weren't local to us. I will suggest being careful of where you get your news from, and also recommend only checking news occasionally, not making it a continuous part of your day -- I know that's a lot harder to do than it used to be.

[JoB]

Two quick fun links before I disappear on two weeks' worth of travel ... :

There seem to be cooks getting into the footsteps of master chef Madsen now.
Also, there's some more intel about the origin of squirrel cookies available.

[thorny]

some more intel about the origin of squirrel cookies[/url] available.

That was great! Thanks!

[wavewright62]

Hi folks.
.
Do you know what today is?
.
It is the tenth anniversary of the establishment of this Forum.
.
Looking over the list of names of those who joined that first day, I notice JoB and midwestmutt are still active.  Wow.  (I spy, with my little eye, a couple of folks who have had a peek recently, too.  We miss you folks, feel free to say hi?)  I appreciate all of us that are still here and still sharing a piece of ourselves in the slow lane.
.
You know what?  I'm going spam y'all with some of my favourite fanworks that I've done over the years.  Feel free to join me. 
(If it gets popular, I can spin it into its own thread.)

[thegreyarea]

Wow !!!  10 years!

I wish I had found this on the beginning, yet I'm grateful for every day, particularly for the wonderful people that I met here 

A Wave of Fan-tastic works is a great idea!

I'll be out this morning, but in the afternoon I will check my own and make a selection 

Hugs

[wavewright62]

I like many of my fanfics too, but I'll just do visuals here.

This one isn't a favourite per se, but it is the very first SSSS fanwork I made - an edit, about lutefisk.  (Would you believe I assembled it in MS Word?)


Some may remember when we all made SSSSonas.  I took out the drawing pad for the first time in years to contribute mine, a Finnish-Estonian woman who made a living carving government stamps and bootlegging.


This one is a Secret Santa gift I made for Unlos - she was just talking about this the other day (she's a mod this year for the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang).  It's called 'Bark Up, Bark Down', depicting the perennial Norwegian argument about the best way to load logs onto the fire.


This one is still my favourite Trond and one of my favourite Mikkels - in which Trond 'persuades' Mikkel to join this expedition, by revealing to Mikkel what dirt he has on him.


I was inspired to try and learn how to do digital art thanks to SSSS.  I now know ...the tiniest bit about it, just enough to know that I know nothing.  But I really like this Reynir image.


I struggle with drawing Lalli, always have.  This is one of the few I actually like.


This one I like mostly for the buzz it gave me, thinking about how to choreograph and stage this.  It was an imagining of a production of the ballet The Nutcracker created in a future Denmark, based on the wildly popular memoirs of the hero Mikkel Madsen.  It's the battle against the rats, as the battle at the end of chapter 12 where Tuuri gets bitten and Kokko comes and helps the hero Mikkel vanquish the trolls (except for one, who has chosen between Tuuri and Reynir).  Anyway.



And possibly my all-time favourite, the Yellow Submarine inspired tribute to Adventure 1.