• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Just consider two things you said here. You have said that he doesn’t care for your opinion, or seemingly even like you, and that you won’t call him by the name he wants to use. There is a pattern here which is fairly obvious.

    You don’t respect your son but expect respect from him. You want an asymmetric relationship where you are the parent and he is the child and what you say goes. Imagine if someone else wanted that in reverse with you. Would you respect them? Care about their opinion? Care about their feelings?

    It is also likely that if you have this structure to your relationship you also probably do a bunch of other things that make him feel lesser and disrespected. Do you invade his privacy? Assert control over things? Make support contingent on his compliance?

    Think about what respect actually means to you, what behaviours someone can have towards you are how they can make you feel. Really think it through and define respectful behaviour for two equal parties. Now evaluate whether you act towards your son in the ways you would consider respectful. We are not talking about subservient, bowing head and scraping the floor, we are talking about two people on an even footing having a conversation.

    If you can’t honestly say that you behave towards him in a fair and respectful manner then any disrespect from him has to be seen for what it is. He has been trained by you in how he treats other people. If he is being an asshole to you chances are it is for a good reason.

    In summary, YTA until further evidence is presented. Many people in your generation have this problem and it comes from having an authoritarian parenting style. Learning about that may help you to chart a new and better path forward. Good luck.


  • I definitely feel similarly about bad instructions. I have found a few recent products that actually had good instructions which made me really understand the issue.

    Good instructions give a single possible interpretation. Bad instructions could be interpreted to mean mutually exclusive things.

    Does the washer go on the bolt before the bolt enters the hole? Or on the other side? If you get it wrong you may not tighten it correctly and may compromise the strength of the furniture.

    I recently bought and built a few items and they had clear, unambiguous instructions. Only one possible interpretation, clear logical steps, and well labeled parts. One was from GiantX and the other was Fantastic Furniturea chain here in Australia. The difference between those and other flat pack items was insane.


  • Yep, when you have life with a major block and then experience a significant reduction in it you will definitely feel the pull to have even less. There is a sweet spot for meds and it can be different than you initially think.

    I find that having my morning dose of 40mg Ritalin LA and my afternoon dose of 20mg Ritalin standard release works really well, but if I am just doing stuff like dinner and hanging out I may actually split that 20mg dose into two sequential 10mg doses a couple of hours apart. That gives me relief from some of the sensory issues for much more time but doesn’t give me as much help with the motivation and activity level stuff.

    So for you it may be worth considering an adjunct of lower dose Ritalin for after the big dose wears off, obviously depending on how it worka for you. I would recommend speaking to your prescribing doctor about trying a few different dose schedules for their recommendations, and really to use the language of testing so they understand you mean to experiment within safe bounds to understand how it works best. That means the same overall dose but tweaking the delivery timing and measuring the outcome.

    Some psychiatrists will be uncomfortable with this. Some may be reluctant to have you try things and experiment. Some may think you are heading towards abuse. For that reason I would also recommend saying you want to optimise the dose you currently have, not increase, and also be open to other things like modafinil or similar non-stimulant meds.

    Also, consider non-medication interventions. A great one is hard, heavy exercise, for example powerlifting. You burn a bunch of calories in a short time and release some of the body tension that builds over time and eventually causes issues. I find that lifting heavy things helps settle me and makes the next 3-5 days way better. Cardio never does the same for me, but maybe it would work for you.




  • This.

    I loved some of what was available on Reddit years ago. What really made me leave was exactly this problem, the fact that the same platform that allowed things I was interested in also allowed Nazi stuff, things like fatpeoplehate and jailbait. If you have a Nazi section of your bar and a pedo section of your bar it is a bar I don’t want to be in, it is a Nazi pedo bar.

    Also, to be super clear, I am absolutely making the strong claim that fatpeoplehate was a Nazi subreddit along with jailbait. Nazis see people as less human when they don’t fit their narrow definitions of human, thus the term useless eaters. They also see women as breeding capacity without humanity and have strong tendencies towards younger and younger girls over time. These are solid links and part of the ideology, not incidental. If you have a Nazi bar it will be a pedo bar too, and they will also hate on people with disabilities and those who are lgbt+.


  • It isn’t their job to educate you, in fact requesting that is putting that additional burden on someone who is already burdened by this bigotry.

    It is really unfair to ask them to explain it so that you can be a better ally. If you want to be a better ally it is worth looking into it yourself.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yAbQ-CaJXs

    That is a good primer, but it is just one person’s perspective. If you search “stonetoss Nazi” or “stonetoss bigot” you will get tonnes of people explaining it in more detail.

    Just to be super duper clear, I’m not dragging you here. I’m not saying “you suck for not knowing, you should know, and asking is just you being a bad person”. That would be silly and short sighted. I am saying that as a person who is not trans you are not experiencing the horror of anti trans bigotry all day every day and so you aren’t worn down by it. You surely have your own problems and they are real and hard, and so do trans people. It makes sense to listen when they speak about it and hear what they are saying, but asking them to spend their energy on your understanding is a different thing. You can spend your own energy on figuring it out and make yourself a better ally.


  • Physorg is a great resource for someone who is not currently fully educated in the field but has a strong interest. They do really good summaries of each topic and provide just enough context to go and find out more. They also do have good RSS feeds available, so you can easily use whatever client you like to get their content.

    As for FOSS clients, just have a look in F-Droid and you will find a bunch. I use Feedflow at the moment but I have tried a few from F-Droid and they are all similar. On desktop I would recommend looking at a different one depending on your desktop environment. On EndeavourOS with KDE I have used a few but be one included with the Kontact suite is fairly good.



  • Oh wow, I just had a look at that, normally Grafana is used for monitoring things like server response times and internal stats. Using for a Garmin fitness device is awesome! I would never have thought of it as a good way to get that kind of data and see it visually.

    Do you use it to see your training progress over time? Or is it more for seeing specific runs and comparing? How do you actually use it? Is it useful for you?





  • I have a proxmox host on a HP Elitedesk G3 with an i5 7500. In that I have a VM with HAOS and it runs like a dream. If something goes horribly wrong I can get remote terminal access from the proxmox interface along with rebooting and backing things up.

    Also, you can actually run Grafana under HomeAssistant directly, though that does mean if HA is down then you also lose Grafana at the same time. IMO it is reasonable to use lots of stuff alongside HA but monitoring and remote access should be on a separate machine, and for that I have an old laptop (integrated battery so no need for UPS) and that machine is really only for managing remote access and monitoring.


  • I will add that this study looked at biological markers of inflammation and so on with cells exposed to vape vapor. If you are looking at it and saying “looks like there is activity, so maybe there is harm, more likely than not” but not saying anything about how much harm then it is not very useful for making choices. Sure, it is not without some risk, but a quantified risk assessment would say that based on the current best evidence it is likely not anywhere near as bad as smoking and it is easier to taper nicotine out if you want to do that.

    From a public health/harm reduction perspective vapes may be a useful tool if used correctly, or a terrible additional harm with increased addictiveness and known dangerous chemicals, such as the popcorn lung issues. We need rational science and appropriate regulation, not panic and bizarre policies.


  • Broadly speaking it seems mostly to be the point of focus. In Libertarianism it is all about the individual, having freedoms from others, and being an island.

    In Anarchism it is about specific external coercive forces. Those forces impact individuals, groups, communities, and so on.

    So a Libertarian may think about food security from a perspective of deregulating supply so that you can choose to buy unsafe food because you think it is a good idea. An Anarchist may instead think about mutual aid, local cooperative production, and preventing external power structures like corporations or governments restricting sharing of resources.


  • It serves more than one purpose for me, so the calculation is a little different. My freezer has about $1200 of meat in it. If the temperature in there gets up over freezing the meat will start thawing and become damaged or spoiled. Saving that meat from being spoiled would save me spending that $1200 all over again.

    The solar panel means that even if the whole power system is out for multiple days I should be able to keep my freezer below zero and keep my meat frozen. Last year we had snow, for the first time here since the early 90s, and it took down power lines on the other side of town. People there were without power for as much as 4 days, which obviously would be enough to heat my meat back up and ruin it, so it isn’t a ridiculous possibility.

    Also, I intend to make something larger over time on a trailer which I can move from house to house as I move, being a renter. I want independent power and learning a little with this system is a good stepping stone to building out my own system with much more custom parts, especially including a larger battery system, inverter, and more panels. I plan to run as much as possible from the DC to skip inverter losses, so using cheap modules to pull from the 24-48V system I build to do USB C ports with 100W+ output gives a lot of options, along with using smaller dedicated inverters for required loads like a kettle.

    The coolest thing is the fully DC power supplies for a PC. You can run directly from a battery and solar system with just 12V, 5V, 3.3V, and a few little bits and bobs. Very fun stuff.



  • The battery degradation is overblown with lithium iron phosphate batteries, which is what is in the Bluetti Elite 30. If you aren’t putting it through deep discharge (greater than 80%) or high temperatures (above 30°C) it should still work well for a long time. The higher your draw on it, pushing up to that 600W limit, the worse the impact is too.

    That said, it can work very well as a UPS for a freezer like what I have mine for, and adding a solar panel extends the usefulness of it a lot. I have a 200W panel which gives around 130-170W at any given time through the day, leading to a full charge in theory in about 2 hours. My freezer pulls around 60-80W with transient spikes to 700W when starting the compressor, but the power station can boost to cover that need for a short time. Over a day I use about 550Wh per day, so about 4 hours of sun per day in theory. It should be covered by the panel I have but the capacity is a little low so I can’t get through the night at this point, it has to switch over to AC after a while. Still, during the hottest hours where I need the most power I am getting solar to do it, so that’s handy.

    Anyway, yes, they are useful, another more powerful system is definitely in the cards for me, but they are a great first step and handy as a backup for bad weather.


  • Yep, definitely a good time to take plan B. Also, the responsibility to use protection is on both partners. Being as he was sober he was in a better position to manage this and made an active choice not to. You bear the burden of what happens and dealing with it, but he gets to have fun and run away. Very uncool.

    I would consider how well you could really consent and if you want people who don’t care about that to be involved in your life. You, along with everyone else, deserve someone who will not take advantage of the situation to get off at your expense. Also, he should really foot at least half the bill for the plan B, without him it would not be needed and if it becomes a larger and more expensive problem it would be something he was responsible for there too. Any self respecting person should pay for their share.


  • I’ve seen a fair few people go through a similar problem, having trouble with food and hating that fact. Unfortunately it is a fact that you are having that issue now and will in all likelihood have that issue in the future. That said, the suffering here is coming not from the “picky eating” itself, it is the judgement and pressure which is causing most of the suffering.

    Obviously it sucks for you to be unable to grab some random food from any random food stall or restaurant, not being able to eat at a food court can be annoying and not having a safe food available can lead to hungry times. That is all shitty and it sucks a lot. The problem here is that if you just had that and everyone accepted it then you would have a fairly normal experience of food with a small tweak of sometimes not being able to have something or sometimes going hungry until you can get home.

    Anyone who has Celiac’s disease is in the same boat, but their experience is really different. Why? Because their needs are recognised as a medical need, therefore acceptable. Other people recognise that if they eat gluten they will have medical issues including very serious and obvious physical problems. In other words, people can’t deny their problems are real.

    Neurotypicals often deny the experiences of people that they cannot relate to. They do this with autism, they do this with ADHD, they do this with PTSD, they do this with poverty. If they haven’t experienced it then it isn’t real, but once they experience it they are happy to shout from the rooftops that it is real and horrible and everyone should be kind about it.

    You have a real, measurable, replicable difficulty around food. It isn’t just you. It is you, me, my partner, several of my clients, tonnes of the people in this community, and so many people around the world besides. It is normal to find that kind of sensory issue difficult to manage, but you have also been taught that it either isn’t real or you are choosing it in some way. It is real, you wouldn’t choose it if you could, and you have to live with it.

    I would recommend learning about what works for you and then defending that set of strategies vigorously. If you need to have a known safe bag of jerky or a protein bar in your bag then you need that. If you need to abstain from food at an event and eat before or after, do it. You are the one who has to live your life, not them, so you should get to decide how to do it.


  • Honestly, being a woodworker for yourself is fantastic fun. I would recommend learning about it on your own and not limiting yourself to woodworking only as a career. If you love it you can do it on your own terms and in your own time. If you make things people want you can sell them. If you make things you like you can keep them. The skills you develop are yours and you can benefit from improving them. Having someone else employ you means they take your labour and turn it into profit for them, so they end up reducing your autonomy and ability to explore while also extracting money from you.