PSA: today's Saint Nicholas. Starting tomorrow, Christmas season starts and we're allowed to look forward to that. Today's the day the red-and-white guy comes and puts gifts in children's shoes/stockings, don't let Coca Cola tell you otherwise.

Also, happy name day to all the Nicks on this Forum.
 
PSA: today's Saint Nicholas. Starting tomorrow, Christmas season starts and we're allowed to look forward to that. Today's the day the red-and-white guy comes and puts gifts in children's shoes/stockings, don't let Coca Cola tell you otherwise.

Also, happy name day to all the Nicks on this Forum.
We (or rather, my family) do celebrate this tradition. My mother got Li'l Z a chocolate Santa and some elves and put them in his shoes. I remember doing this a few times when I was little, too.
 


St. Nick, the Bishop, is one of the signatories on the Nicene creed, and is also remembered for his... dramatic behavior at the council. Going so far as to punch Arius, whom he deemed a heretic. (Arius, the starting point for Arianism argued that Jesus was solely human, with no divinity at all.)
 
The story that he punched another bishop at Nicene is apocryphal, though - there's no proof whatsoever that bishop Nicolas even attended the concily of Nicea.
If you're going to bring up that story, you need to tell it completely...He punched Arius, was cast in the dungeon, and freed by the Virgin Mary herself, and was given a Holy Bible and his robes(both still on display as relics in several churches).

It's about as trustworthy a story as that he actually made three children whole again after they were butchered and sold for meat.
 
The story that he punched another bishop at Nicene is apocryphal, though - there's no proof whatsoever that bishop Nicolas even attended the concily of Nicea.
If you're going to bring up that story, you need to tell it completely...He punched Arius, was cast in the dungeon, and freed by the Virgin Mary herself, and was given a Holy Bible and his robes(both still on display as relics in several churches).

It's about as trustworthy a story as that he actually made three children whole again after they were butchered and sold for meat.
Ya, but Saint stories are fun. I had a friend who was doing her doctorate on hagiographies, and she had some truly wild stories.

I'd forgotten the freed by Mary bit!
 
Ya, but Saint stories are fun. I had a friend who was doing her doctorate on hagiographies, and she had some truly wild stories.

I'd forgotten the freed by Mary bit!
Oh yeah. Way back in high school, I had a great religion teacher in 4th (errr...10 grade in the US system IIRC, 15-16 years old). He was fired the year after because *gasp* he turned out to be gay (can you tell I went to a Catholic school?)! Anyway, he set aside a few hours every semester to talk about "appropriate" saints (such as Saint Nick in December, Saint Valentine in February,...). I'm sure the nuns leading the school thought he was telling us we had to believe and to try and convince us or something, but he spent the time telling us a bunch of Saint stories and possible interpretations, trying to make us think how they could be explained, which could be plausible, which were probably entire fabrications, and so on. Lots of fun, one story worse more hilarious than the next.
 
Oh yeah. Way back in high school, I had a great religion teacher in 4th (errr...10 grade in the US system IIRC, 15-16 years old). He was fired the year after because *gasp* he turned out to be gay (can you tell I went to a Catholic school?)! Anyway, he set aside a few hours every semester to talk about "appropriate" saints (such as Saint Nick in December, Saint Valentine in February,...). I'm sure the nuns leading the school thought he was telling us we had to believe and to try and convince us or something, but he spent the time telling us a bunch of Saint stories and possible interpretations, trying to make us think how they could be explained, which could be plausible, which were probably entire fabrications, and so on. Lots of fun, one story worse more hilarious than the next.
In my Christian History class in seminary, our prof always had a saint of the day which she would tell us about at the beginning of class. For most of us protestant peeps it was entirely new, and always fabulous. And she always encouraged our 'wait, what?' and 'srsly?' responses. And the icons that she brought in were beautiful.
 
I swear, while I'm not Catholic anymore, that one gay teacher who openly discussed doubts as an integral part of faith, told us to dare question what we were told, to think about interpretations, and look beyond superficial meaning for stories in the Bible and in and around Christian faith, did more to keep me sympathetic towards the Church than the other 5 years of being taught by (literal or figurative) nuns together.
 
Welp, I'm sitting in Starbucks with my laptop. Got Dill's latest adventure cued up. Wrote about 400 words so far. I skimmed some of the previous chapters and they're not as bad as I thought.

This is the first time since the summer I've tried doing any writing.
Looking for a job is one of the most stressful and depressing things one can do - it's almost automatically linked with being rejected, over and over.
Writing is one of the hardest creative things to do - it requires you t, quite literally, invent /create something out of nothing, and get it make sense to others as well as yourself. It's draining and demanding - there's a reason there's a lot of writers who can "only" produce one book every two or three years, even if it's all they have to do, and quite a few who just can't manage to finish what they started (look at GRRM for example).
It's great that you've found the energy/motivation to start both up again - perhaps slowly at first - and doing both means you can take a break from one or the other without feeling like you're "not doing anything useful" or letting yourself down.
Good luck with both, I hope to be reading a new Dill soon :)
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Sunday I noticed a huge spike in ad revenue on my youtube channel. These days, an average day is between 50 cents and a buck fifty. But Dec 1, according to the analytics somehow, pulled in almost 10 bucks. I was like, "cool." Then the next day that number went to zero, with from Dec 2 on returning to fluctuate between 0.50 and 1.50. There's a bulletin now at the top that says data from 12/1 is "delayed" and will be "available soon." Something smells fishy. I wonder if it will be "revised" down after the delay for whatever it is they're doing.
 
Sunday I noticed a huge spike in ad revenue on my youtube channel. These days, an average day is between 50 cents and a buck fifty. But Dec 1, according to the analytics somehow, pulled in almost 10 bucks. I was like, "cool." Then the next day that number went to zero, with from Dec 2 on returning to fluctuate between 0.50 and 1.50. There's a bulletin now at the top that says data from 12/1 is "delayed" and will be "available soon." Something smells fishy. I wonder if it will be "revised" down after the delay for whatever it is they're doing.
Youtube's been fucking with their sub system or something. A bunch of high profile guys are threatening to jump to other services if Youtube doesn't fix it. More than that, no one really knows what is going on.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Youtube's been fucking with their sub system or something. A bunch of high profile guys are threatening to jump to other services if Youtube doesn't fix it. More than that, no one really knows what is going on.
Just about everything with Analytics has been screwy the last couple months. I mean, they were always of limited utility to begin with, given that there was always a 2 day delay on data (how am I supposed to promote when I don't find out what links are drawing traffic for at least 2 days?) and it was entirely without transparency ("here's your share of the revenue with no data to explain our figures whatsoever!"), but lately it's been especially janky and useless.
 
So I guess I'm a firefox user now. Chrome was taking 2 gigs of memory to have 7 tabs open, none of which were doing anything complex.
 
I'm sure the people who develop Chrome all have 6-core machines with 32GB RAM, but the rest of the world sure doesn't.

--Patrick
 
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