Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
My father was a workhorse. I have some very good memories of spending time with him as a young boy in his workshop or getting picked up from school but he was often absent, working weekends or double shifts for the extra money and also, I suspect, as a coping mechanism for my mother's infidelity. When we moved to a small town, he was much more physically present but still preoccupied with work. In adulthood, however, he opened up and started talking, and he and I had what I considered to be an excellent relationship before he passed away. My mother, as you may have guessed, not so much. Like problem_redditor*, I also experienced my mother as being controlling, self-centered, manipulative, frequently dismissive, and derogatory towards my father in particular. She and I saw things quite differently, and as a teenager I wasn't concerned with school, college, or career. My only goal was to become independent ASAP. That earned me a measure of respect from her, and once out of the family household I drank the Kool-Aid and spent decades playing the relatively happy and successful child. A little over a decade ago, Dad started developing Alzheimer's, and my wife and I tried to help. As is common in these sorts of situations, all of my family's unhealthiness came out to play during this time period, primarily, my mother's unhealthiness. That almost undid my marriage and I've kept her at arm's distance ever since. She has also developed Alzheimer's and between that and the damage that was done to my life and my marriage, I don't really speak to her anymore.
In navigating life, I've pretty much learned by doing and did not receive much guidance from either of my parents, which is in part a generational thing. That said, I think in a lot of ways my father set a wonderful example for me to follow and I try to do that. He was the kind of guy that spent several years building his own garage/workshop and I'd like to think I have some of that focus and persistence in myself when it comes to the important things in my life, and that his example helps me to believe that I can do just about anything I set my mind to. He also had a pure and loving heart, and I try to live up to the love and acceptance that he was able to show people as well.
*In linking that Wikipedia page, please note that I am referring only to my own mother.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
If you're into soul at all, check out the Isaac Hayes versions of Joy and The Look of Love.
Would you make the same decision? Should anyone be allowed to make that kind of trade-off with the assistance of medical staff?
Fuck no and yes, respectively. If you want to attempt to preserve your life through cryonics, that's your business. Me? I'm more than old enough not to be concerned with extending my life by any means necessary and also more than old enough that I just can't even with some shit these days. My brain just flat out BSODs at many modern trends, quite a few of which seem to be to be excesses to me. It doesn't need to be today, and I hope my death is not one that happens after a prolonged period of illness and lingering, but any sadness would mostly be because I'm leaving behind people that I love and that love me and that my absence in their lives will be painful and/or traumatic.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
GUH, looks like you're absolutely right. I just did my own $Internets_Search and I'm seeing several sources that back you up on the FHA having no closet requirement. At the time, I had been impressed by my realtor and so I just assumed she knew what she was talking about but it just goes to show you how pervasive those sorts of common misconceptions can be. With as much crap and downright weird stuff I've dealt with when it comes to mortgage companies over the years, the whole closet thing seemed pretty tame in comparison!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Pretty sure it's a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac thing, though. My first house was actually closet free so not only did I consider it, I did live that way, though doing so taught me that I really took closets and closet space for granted. Movable storage worked, but took up what was otherwise (seemingly) valuable storage space and although I got furniture to compensate, closets were a much more natural and better fit for me. And when the time came to sell the house, the Realtor straight up told me to pay someone for closets as otherwise the bedrooms could not be counted as such.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Silver Stars: Guardian of Aster Fall Book 8 by David North.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I was under the impression that the presence of mountain lions in the Eastern US was indeed rare but also pretty much an open secret these days. Two people that I've known from that neck of the woods have separately shared with me that they saw mountain lions in various parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they were trustworthy folks. When I did a little digging I ran straight into the whole, "they just have a large range," cope, which, while true, doesn't exactly satisfy when the sightings are still too numerous and much too far away from their known habitats.
Walter, Walter, what's the point, man?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Moonlight Relic: Guardian of Aster Fall Book 3 by David North.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Completely agree, there was a lot going on in that movie and although I can't say that I enjoyed watching it, I was left thinking about all of the different things that it touched on for days afterward.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
We really do need the bidet in the west.
Boy do I have some news for you! Hooks up to your existing water line so all it needs is a nearby outlet and you're good to go. Utterly life changing and I have no idea how folks endure the barbarity of making do with the standard bogroll.
Battlefield Reclaimer (Guardians of Aster Fall book 1) by David North.
For anyone that's also reading the Hollows series, by Kim Harrison, I want to freely confess that in an abnormal twist, my brain has subbed in not one but two real-life actors for certain folks in the series, due to their particular mannerisms of speech:
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
Oh man, Inland Empire was something else! I've seen it described (I think) as a journey straight through the subconscious, and it's a good analogy. Like a series of dreams, it meanders through its scenes, some seemingly furthering previous scenes, others jarringly discordant on the surface, but regardless of the relationship of each scene to the next, there's a constant symbolic undercurrent that propels the movie forward. I can see why it's not for everyone, given that I felt it was a little too long (which, tbf, may have been because I was watching it as part of a larger David Lynch retrospective) but it was still quite an experience. If I happen to find another screening of it at some point in the future, there's a good chance I'll catch it again, as I will with most of his work.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
This matches my experience as well. I find that consciousness almost constantly throws off quanta that emerge as concepts to which language then attaches, which defines and refines the concept into something more definite. My attention inevitably engages something from this firehose-like blast of experience and from this my inner monologue emerges, describing my experience to me. Emotions are unusually intense quanta with fractal-like definition that require much more attention and language to tease out, almost as if I have to weave my thought and language around them to accurately capture what I'm experiencing.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
I'm up for it, though I'm concerned that enough of you fuckers the fine Mottizens that are graciously volunteering in this very thread are deeply steeped in the knowledge of Pennsylvania's football teams to prevent me from scooping up later round bargains. Speaking of which, I fully reserve the right to draft a defense in the 9th round or a kicker in the 10th, and in fact to fuck up my entire draft because my other league is a full PPR league with 6 points for QB touchdowns and no kickers.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows Book 8) by Kim Harrison.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
I have to allow myself some skimming on the CW threads, but I read most of the normal weekly threads as well as any other thread that catches my interest, which is most of them.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
What is your advice for getting to know the ins and outs of a local community? We just bought a house and are joining an HOA for the first time.
Umm, abandon all hope ye who enter here? (Kinda sorta but not really) Kidding!
I've had the misfortune pleasure of living in two separate places with different flavors of homeowners organizations. The first community in question was a relatively large community of several hundred houses and the second was a much smaller community of ~50 houses. Both communities provided water and road maintenance for the respective homes. The first had some pretty restrictive covenants, was well run, and expensive AF while the second was almost completely unrestricted, cheap AF, and still trying to live in the close knit community days where everyone knew everyone and households pitched in together to fix community problems, which to me does not seem to work in the 21st century. Regardless, my experience has been tons of dramatically unreal expectations and soul sucking low stakes drama, which greatly inhibits the ability of the HOA to do meaningful things. This was, IME, especially true of the smaller community, which did not have enough of a homeowner base to really afford the type of service and reliability that the homeowners desired and expected. Both communities were big on getting new homeowners involved in the HOA. DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE ROPED INTO THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Leave the complainers and the power trippers to each other--your sanity will thank you.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
Ministry: The Lost Gospels According To Al Jourgensen by Al Jourgensen and Jon Wiederhorn.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
INTJ, every damn time. I found the whole bit about extroverted sensing being my inferior function quite interesting, as it explained a few of my RW peccadilloes like driving fun cars.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
Hard agree, I actually got two separate false positives not too terribly long ago when trying to fix up a copy of Civ 3: Complete that I had bought from GOG. The first false positive was because the original Civ 3: Conquests disc that had the missing scenario that I wanted to be able to play had Gamespy on it, which was unsigned code and the second was that I was attempting to install command-line software that would allow me to unpack the .CAB file to grab the single scenario file from the CD that was missing in my install of Civ 3.
GUH.
Damn, I'm sad to hear this. This is one of those times when I had really hoped that I was wrong about what was going on.
The problem, at least as I see it, is that even with this realization it's been hard for her to break her habits. We go out to brunch and she still eats her little vegan salads. I tell her she should add some chicken or other protein to the salads and she declines. She still consults the app on her phone that counts all her calories for the day. It's hard for me to figure out what the line is between pushing her to be healthier for her own sake, and being outright controlling over her lifestyle. Do I just put my foot down and confront her, pushing her to be serious about her health?
Here's the thing about all of this. You can't really control her behavior, and trying to do so is just going to be crazymaking for the both of you. It's her problem to deal with, and hardcore eating disorders are things that have to be managed, not problems that can be solved. It seems like you're really worried about her (and rightly so!) but the last thing you want to do in this situation is to behave in a pushy, controlling, or confrontational way. The most likely result of that kind of behavior is further withdrawal and further entrenchment of the eating disordered thinking--it just feeds the disease. Instead, I'd encourage you to see yourself as her ally, her first line of love and support, and think about your relationship with her on those same terms, which is to say that the more you can love, accept, and support her as she is, the more she'll be able to positively use her own strength constructively in her own life. You can still express your concerns or worry when she asks for feedback (which I'd recommend that you do as gently as you possibly can!) but otherwise those feelings are yours to deal with as well as you possibly can. You can check out The Secret Language of Eating Disorders by Peggy Claude-Pierre, it offers great insight into the minds of the eating disordered.
I said in my earlier reply that it's a long road, she needs a lot of people in her corner, and she needs to choose to work on this herself, yadda yadda yadda, and I'm afraid all of that is still true. Is that something you can live with? Think about what's best for you in this situation without any regard for whether or not she's going to be able to change her eating habits. Can you still love this girl and be happy even if she's always going to be controlling about her eating and even if she stays underweight? If the answer to those questions is a yes, then I'd encourage you to start with accepting that this is likely to be a chronic issue for the duration of your relationship with her, and I'd also encourage you to seek out and find support for those of us that love our eating disordered partners and spouses. There's bound to be lots of heartache and many bumps in the road, and the better you can do with keeping your own metaphorical oxygen mask secure, the better your relationship with her will fare.
Regardless, I still wish you well!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
You're right! I had to refresh my own memory on this some more and the additional detail that my brain was fuzzy on in the intervening years is the whole disaccharide vs. monosaccharide bit, meaning that because regular sugar is a disaccharide, the bond between glucose and fructose has to be broken, whereas HFCS contains free monosaccharides. I kinda remembered that sucrose took a bit more work by the body to digest, but I was misattributing that to the balance of sugars, which as you're pointing out, isn't really much different than regular table sugar. So to be clear, it's not the amount of glucose vs. fructose itself, the idea is that the free monosaccharides of fructose in HFCS are uniquely taxing to the liver in a way that regular sugar is not because the bonds on sucrose have to be broken before the fructose in regular sugar can be processed by the liver. That's... even more hair-splitting than I remembered it to be!
IIRC, the basis for the argument that high fructose corn syrup being worse than cane sugar comes down to fructose needing to be converted to glucose in the liver, as opposed to glucose, which does not. Sucrose is essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose, so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking.
edit: I didn't remember correctly after all. Apologies! Sucrose is a disaccharide, essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose bonded together. Enzymes in the mouth partially break down some of the sugar but most of the breakdown occurs in the small intestine, where the glucose and fructose are then absorbed into the bloodstream. High Fructose Corn Syrup contains free monosaccharides that can be immediately absorbed into the bloodstream from the small intestine. Once in the bloodstream, glucose can be directly utilized, assuming the presence of insulin, production of which the free glucose will stimulate. Fructose, OTOH has to be processed by the liver, and doesn't stimulate the production of insulin or enhance the production of leptin. As @sarker has helpfully pointed out in reply, HFCS actually contains similar amounts of glucose and fructose, so the key difference there is that regular sugar still needs to be broken down in the small intestine before it can be metabolized. Rest of original post follows.
Proponents allege that too much HFCS in the diet leads to more visceral fat and even metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The counterargument is that the difference in metabolic pathways is relatively minor, that if caloric sweeteners are that much a part of any diet, metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can result, and that the bigger issue is a diet heavy in processed foods in general.
The Oldest Starfighter by Jamie McFarlane. I've read this book before, just with different characters and a different angle to the whole, "humans are technologically inferior but," style of Sci Fi.
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