This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

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SpoilerThese are stereotypes that only people who do not live here poke fun at. But they invented them. So.

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SpoilerIt's only to get back at Los Angeles for doing the same to them

Boneless Wyngz: Legally Speaking, If We Don't Spell It "Wings," We're Not Saying It Came From An Actual Bird's Actual Wing™

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SpoilerVir “The Old Dominion” Ginia really likes being Virginian more than most of the other states like being themselves. We have Old Dominion beer and root beer,* and even though it is clearly a state just like the rest of them, we insist (wherever we can get a way with it) on calling it a Commonwealth, which is an Anglo–Saxon-derived term roughly meaning “I sure hope the Spanish haven’t found this place first because that would be awkward after three months at sea”. Puerto Rico is another famous Commonwealth. We particularly do this to annoy Maryland and Massachusetts for being not as old. We also like to annoy North Carolina by saying we were there first.

Our flag/seal portrays the Ancient Roman deity/virtue-personification Virtus** as an amazon warrior vanquishing a tyrannosaur, which is awesome and not believing in these things is no good reason to censor it.***

Virginia exports a lot of coal and tobacco, which are very smoky and bad for the air. There is also a large agricultural industry, producing tasty produce and not quite as tasty dairy. There is a technological sector, which produces industry-grade trolls and nobody likes them. This is largely fueled by Washington, DC being right across the Potomac but not quite big enough to hold the ever-expanding US government (and also everything there is either expensive because you’re in the rich part of town, or a hellhole because you are in the hellhole part of town). Tourism is another significant industry, where the slogan is “Virginia is for Lovers” because everything they’re advertising may be pretty and dressed for the occasion, but also kind of normal, aside from the history stuff, which again we have more of than Massachusetts and we’re also bigger, neener neener. Vanity plates are a minor industry, giving people something to read seven letters and/or numbers at a time while they sit in rush hour traffic. There are some normal license plates, too, but these are grandfathered in, much like that law they repealed in 2004 that made it illegal to work on Sunday but over the years had accumulated exceptions for every conceivable line of work there was.

The geography of the Commonwealth, as taught and forgotten in the fourth grade, divides the state into five physical regions, Tidewater (home of the Great Dismal Swamp), Piedmont (a French word meaning “home of George Washington”), Blue Ridge (named for the appearance of the mountains from afar; it’s an optical illusion caused by coal radiation), Valley and Ridge (encompassing the Shenandoah Valley, home of Skyline Drive, a Natural Bridge, caves, and hot springs), and the Appalachian Plateau (which we never really got around to talking about in fourth grade). These regions extend to the surrounding states, but elementary schoolers don’t need to know that; I mean, sheez, they can’t even drive or anything. Politically, the state is confusingly divided into both “counties” and “independent cities”, the latter of which may serve as a county seat but cannot be a part of a county itself, and the former of which may be entirely city but not itself a city.

Also, very few people ever seem to remember that eastern peninsula is part of Virginia, aside from those that bothered to look up where Chincoteague Ponies live (not, Chincoteague, but Assateague).

Virginia gubernatorial elections happen every four years, one year after presidential elections; since modern Virginia is a swing state that votes with the gut, this is a practical recipe for ensuring that much of the time we hate one party for being the President and the other party for being the Governor in a vicious cycle of perpetual voter’s remorse. Every single governor of the state since the 90s has become famous on the national stage (but only to people who follow politics so closely it makes other people uncomfortable) and the two major-party candidates for this year’s elections are already famous on the national stage (but only to people who follow politics so closely it makes other people uncomfortable). In every other respect, nobody bothers to look up the rules for anything because it’s easier to just ask Larry Sabato instead of doing your job. Rumor has it, though, he has fallen mysteriously silent on the subject of how come such a pretty swing state can’t get laid.

* Old Dominion Brewing Company, headquartered in Delaware
** “Virtus” is the Roman virtue of manliness
*** a censor was a Roman official charged with maintaining the public morality, which meant banning smut and keeping tabs on how many Romans there really were, which meant they needed good eyes to work, hence our word “sensor”.

I am not sure why I wrote that.

Just set the new message box to default to full-screen mode.

I'm weird and send my gmail account to microsoft outlook. Plenty of buttons over here.

I've used Thunderbird, as far as I know it's still viable to use it with the latest version of Gmail and it's a pretty good system.

It should not take three clicks to italicize text in a rich text editor. I'm just gonna give Thunderbird a go.

Not trying to talk you out of looking at other options, but you can just Ctrl-I for italics, and similar for at least bolding and underlining.

The Ctrl key shortcuts were never supposed to cause emacs pinky. A pox on whoever decided it should!

(Apple is always giving me more and more reasons to stop giving them business every year, but the fact that they haven’t moved the ⌘ key is in and of itself a pretty compelling reason to stay.)

Giant Eagle is a regional entity! When I first went into eastern Pennsylvania, I was oddened to find that it there was a supermarket with the exact same signage of Giant Eagle, but without the Eagle.

A very sad state of affairs indeed. No American should be forced to live without more eagles in their lives.

The best part of LA is "its"¹ AL baseball team. The Los Angeles² Angels³ of Anaheim⁴. And yes, I am aware the conversation has moved on past this, but I am so annoyed with this I just have to get it out.

---

1: Actually in Anaheim.
2: False; see 1.
3: Redundant; Los Angeles = The Angels, so it's The The Angels Angels.
4: Contradictory; How can they be in both Los Angeles and Anaheim?

i'm just delighted to find out that there is a chain of stores called "Giant Eagle" which have nothing to do with giant eagles so everybody acts like it's normal

i will also comment that it seems like the same-ification thing happened to China when it decided to become modern by making a whole bunch of identical looking buildings with storefronts and billboards in them and then all of the cities copied each other

We should change the name of the forum to Giant Eagle Time and rake in those sponsorship $$$

Stij, I think that is illegal and is one of the prime (*beef) reasons that Mad Men needed a permit to use Coca-Cola in their show!

*We are now offering prime beef ribs on sale as well as whole grain Kellog's in the cereal aisle! Buy Now! -Giant Eagle Time

Can we make Giant Eagle Time a skin option, where all the font sizes are doubled?

Come to the Silicon Valley! It's like San Francisco without all the cold and fog, but with all the tech jobs and that devastating earthquake coming in the next few years that we're all just ignoring! (At least it only took us 23 years to (temporarily) repair our most vital piece of infrastructure!)

e: also we have it's-its

what about my jokes about "south san francisco: the industrial cityland"

As Bodhi (or not) said to Shinji-san in the floating world of indeterminate duration: y/n, n/y.

I have ascended into the top five most prolific human posters on this board, knocking MrGuy into sixth place. Of the top five, I am the only one to not post in any creative writing or game threads, meaning all of my content is meaningless blather in this forum.

I do not feel good about this.

Fuck, I've lapsed. I've let you all down.

This is the end of an era.

Not to be confused with Absolutwurst, a physically impossible form of sausage.

Alternatively: An awful flavored vodka.

I think it's because people don't want to be alone, also regular, non-passionate people have regular interests so they can find something to talk about with most people. Also because that's a thing "normal" people do and so it shouldn't be questioned.

I was just thinking the other day about attractive people that are terrible and how weird they make me feel.

E: I don't disagree with you, i hate small talk. I remember reading something about introverted and extroverted people and how their brains were wired differently and that caused people to behave differently but i'm lazy and i don't want to look it up. It also said something about the percentage of introverted vs extroverted being something like 20 to 80%, so there you go, you're part of another minority.

I don't think I know anyone that I don't share at least one mutual interest with but that mutual interest was more of an introductory point than the sole topic on which we talk. When people are talking about things I am entirely not interested in then it is usually in a group setting and I can just tune out or switch to a different IRC room until the conversation turns back to something I actually have opinions about or want to know more about, or to make asinine jokes taking the previous line of conversation out of context.

But I'd say yeah I usually enjoy people for their company rather than interests then? Having both is good but a lot of the people I regularly associate with I do so because they talk about things that are interesting or funny or in some other way entertaining but not necessarily related to something I do personally. I don't think I actually spend much time talking about my hobbies and interests at all really.

I only talk to like two people one-on-one on a regular basis though so in that way I guess I'm not sure I'm quite talking along the same lines as you are. If I need to fill a silence when it's just me and someone else I dry up pretty quickly. That doesn't mean I don't count the people I don't regularly talk to on their own as friends though? I have a lot of people I'd even regard as close friends that I just never seek out to talk to on their own because I'm not good at that.

But how can you enjoy someone's company if you have absolutely no reason to care about them in any meaningful way? Like, what do you do? Just stare at each other? You have to talk about something you're interested in, right?

I remember reading something about introverted and extroverted people and how their brains were wired differently and that caused people to behave differently but i'm lazy and i don't want to look it up. It also said something about the percentage of introverted vs extroverted being something like 20 to 80%, so there you go, you're part of another minority.

I'm not sure where exactly you heard that statistic, but I probably wouldn't want to trust anything else from that source in the future if I were you. The actual percentage is a lot closer to 50-50. (The Myers-Briggs website was the most reliable looking source I find, and it claims introverts as being 50.7% of the population to extroverts' mere 49.3%)

The problem of course, is that for people on the far end of the introvert bellcurve, (such as myself and probably a good number of other people on this site for instance) even the "moderate" introverts tend to look a lot like extroverts. Which is probably the same part of the population where most of the ~15-20% estimates come from.

Shared interests are a good way to meet people but I can definitely still be interested in watching people talk about things they are interested in but I'm not?
I also really don't think shared interests can be described as "the only meaningful reason to care about someone"...

Frankly I am usually a passive rather than active conversational partner in the first place, I just react to people rather than raising my own topics unless I have some burning question or problem I need solving. A lot of people I know are witting or funny or interesting or passionate almost regardless of what they are talking about and this makes for a fun conversation even if it is one in which I am playing the role of someone who doesn't even know what they are talking about let alone have any particular investment in it. Shared interests aren't the only conversational topic which it is possible to bond over, people can talk about what they did in the day, what they are planning to do, how they are feeling... Those don't last very long as subjects of themselves but they branch out once you get going (which is easier and more likely when there is more than one person you are talking to, which is why that is what I do more commonly) and you share anecdotes and make dumb inside jokes and make people laugh.

Making people laugh is fun, I can do that regardless of whether I am interested in the particular topic they are talking about.


e: I have a terrible habit of rereading and editing posts I make at least three times and I swear people are already replying to the original version by the time I'm satisfied, I should probably think things through before hitting Submit.