A “go bag” is a bag you have for when you need to leave (“go”) in a hurry. For example, you might have a change of clothes, cash, hygiene items, your passport(s), snacks, a week’s worth of prescription meds, first aid kit.

My friend has one because he’s an immigrant and doesn’t feel secure in the current political environment. I have one because I’m trans and I don’t feel secure in the current political environment.

I downvoted you because it felt skeevy to be told I was providing backup to you, when I didn’t feel my data was particularly supportive. It felt like you putting words in my mouth.

“only 33% of naturalized citizens from Venezuela have a go bag packed” is not the support you think it is.

Sample size of 3: my naturalized citizen (from Venezuela as an infant) D&D buddy is concerned AF. His (also naturalized) parents are more blithe about the current political climate.

Thank you for the pointer. I’ll try it out and see if I can recommend it to my colleagues. (I’m the library techie, so if a coworker has a problem, I’m the one they’ll ask for help. So, I should at least play around with it a bit first.)

BeyondCompare. I’ve used it for all my Windows text comparison needs for decades. It also handles comparing spreadsheets and directory structures.

My old man dog loves my heated lap blanket. I set the blanket on low with a timer while I work from home and my dog stretches out on top of it. Without the heated blanket he curls up into a tight little croissant.

Conservation land, in my area, is just land designated to not be developed. It might be privately owned and designated "conservation land* for tax benefits, or owned by the town, or what have you. Sometimes housing developers will designate part of their land plot as “conservation” for some benefit from the town (like taxes or zoning easement).

If your store has a Bob’s Red Mill section, it might be there.

I’m a big fan of TVP in spaghetti sauce, to give a bit of chewy texture. You can also use it to replace the meat in shepherd’s pie, or anywhere else ground meat provides texture but is overwhelmed by other flavors.

The shelf stable aspect is a huge selling point for my household.

Update: I asked and it was Gather Town.

I suspect it was https://workadventu.re/ because IIRC they self-hosted–my friend showed me the mothballed, just-moved-off-of version, so he wouldn’t run into co-workers. But, I could be wrong.

A friend of mine works in a wicked neurodiverse, geeky company. They telecommute from all over and have a virtual campus with proximity audio and rooms you can move your little character to encourage the spontaneous conversations that happen IRL. He said it really worked for him. He demoed it for me and it was adorable, pixel art, iirc.

The all day meeting idea sounds like hell.

Grief is complicated and doesn’t always look the same. When my dad died, he’d been in the hospital for a month for a surprise illness, so I had time to get used to the idea he might not make it out. His older sisters hadn’t seriously considered the possibility. I’d done some “pre grieving” and they hadn’t, so my reaction was a bit less dramatic? outwardly intense?

A friend of mine says grief is an ambush predator. You can be going about your day and suddenly something triggers you to suddenly drown in emotion. When that hits, I just swim in it, feel my feelings, all the complex emotions that come up–anger, loss, regret.

And as time goes on, I’ve gotten ambushed less often, but it can still feel just as intense. I have more practice swimming in it, so maybe I don’t have to excuse myself and hide in a work bathroom to cry anymore, I can just sit at my desk and focus on drinking my coffee.

(It’s after my bedtime, so I hope this all makes sense. There’s also the Grief Box analogy, which feels accurate to me.)

My bad. I should have linked directly to the one in the Miskatonic University archive. (it takes a while to load, but it does load for me, all the pages)

Am librarian. Here you go

My middle school home economics teacher told us the story of her cooking lobster for the first time. She thought they killed them for you when you get them at the grocery store.

She got home and opened the bag to find two live lobsters. The only pot she had big enough was glass. She watched those two lobsters boil to death and never had lobster again.

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I have a soft spot for cabbage food, so I’d happily celebrate St Patrick’s with some corned beef cabbage rolls/gołąbki.

I stopped eating almost any beef after discovering the cute cow gifs subreddit. They can be so puppy like! They’re also huge methane machines and having fewer cows would be good for the environment.

On the other hand, I crave a good pot roast maybe once a year.

Edit: and I can name my mother’s favorite childhood cow and the cow my grandpa let me name because we shared a birthday.

I’m trying to square my instinct that

1. snails aren’t bugs (because they’re squishy without the shell) with the feeling that
2. crabs are bugs (because they’d go tap-tap if you tapped on their exoskeleton with a finger) but
3. hermit crabs aren’t bugs if they’re in a shell but are bugs if they’re naked

My old manager used to take his team out to a Szechuan Chinese place and order for us, family style. It was awesome.

I’m white AF and it was the first time I had actually spicy Chinese food. He’d also order a few mild dishes for the pair of no-spice folk on the team.

Thinking back, manager was a Chinese immigrant, most team mates were Indian immigrants, and the spice-free teammates were both white. (I mention immigrant because my Indian teammates with kids would complain about their American-born kids’ low spice tolerance.)