Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
6d ago
This place can metamorphize you merely from the memetic infection of reading and writing on it.
You say that like it's bad...
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
6d ago
Congratulations! I once eschewed therapy, too, but after Serious Shit went down in my family a little over a decade now, I became open to the idea, even though it took almost six years and a total breakdown before I actually started seeing a therapist myself. In the almost five years since I started, it's become an integral part of my own life, and I'm not even sure that I'll be slowing down anytime soon. There's a strange sort of alchemy that happens when I'm getting my thoughts and experiences out of my own head and sharing them with someone that I can trust that helps me to understand myself, my choices, and my experiences much more fully. Minimizing that to the idea that I'm paying someone far out the ass to basically redirect me back towards taking care of my own self and making the choices that are best for me and damn the torpedoes really doesn't do the experience justice. I've thought a lot about doing an effortpost on this, but I have yet to be brave enough to do it.
I’m still fiercely critical of the “medical model” of mental health, and find much in contemporary “therapy culture” that is deeply disagreeable to me.
This part I don't blame you for at all. I can understand why medicine seemed so promising 50-odd years ago when, "the screaming stopped," as the OGs used to say in reference to the efficacy of the first wave of antipsychotics. These days it's obvious that there's far, far more to mental illness than simple neurochemistry, especially when considering things like spontaneous-seeming remission of schizophrenia, but as always, the old joke about how many therapists it takes to change a light bulb is evergreen, and when it comes to treating symptoms, drugs are at least something, even if only a placebo. And as I said in this exchange, the narcissistic and personality disordered types have thoroughly weaponized therapeutic concepts for their own ends, which in a way is a sign of its success, but also deeply corrosive to the overall field. We have, IMAO, over-corrected.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
12d ago
Count me as interested as well. It's actually the sort of thing that drew me here in the first place, though being relatively heretic-friendly didn't hurt either!
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
12d ago
Right now I'm using an Aillio Bullet, and it's probably the last roaster I'll ever own. A popcorn maker is a great place to start, and my first roaster was actually a Fresh Roast, which is what I recommend for most folks if they're ready to spend a few hundred on a roaster.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
13d ago
Coffee Haters Club
Today's roast is Guatemala Antigua Pulcal Inteligente, several years aged. It was a smaller batch, weighing in at 294 grams pre-roast, so it won't be lasting long and in fact, the several cups that I have had thus far already put me about halfway through it, so I'll be roasting again later this week. Guatemalan coffees tend to be over-represented for me both because Sweet Maria's does good work in Guatemala but also because their climate diversity leads to a richer than normal variety of beans. Additionally, Pulcal Inteligente has been good stuff IME, so I knew I'd be in for a nice cuppa. Anyway, I pulled this one right as it was passing the city mark, at about 410 degrees, and I got a bright, slightly sweet cup with frequent hints of this note or that, spicy, floral, sometimes nutty, but nothing consistently standing out, like it was a will o' the wisp, flavor wise, leading me in all different directions but not totally tangible. I checked the cupping notes today and they read: brown sugar, hints of herbal tea in light roasts, apple at wider roast ranges, a balanced cup, enough top-note complexity to make it a highlight coffee. Outside of the apple, which I didn't really get, I'd have to agree, that's pretty much it.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
15d ago
Right? I've had an order confirmed and then silently canceled simply because I was using a VPN!
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
17d ago
Indeed they will, and I wouldn't disagree with anything that you're saying in a general sense. Bonds are still, generally speaking, viewed as "safer" than stocks, and in many cases, I expect that they are, and are still a good choice for the more risk averse. For me personally, it always made more sense to go with straight stock indexes simply because they had the best long-term returns, and the only time period in which that was even close to coming into question in my own life was the doldrums of the Great Recession. That's something that I'd probably think long and hard about if I were a younger investor, and there's a good chance that I'll reallocate down the road if/when financial turmoil gets significantly worse. In these Interesting times of inflation and interest rates once again starting to reflect reality, I may well see things differently a few years down the road, but for now, my concerns lie elsewhere.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
17d ago
With the caveat that they are indeed better than nothing, aww Hell no pretty much sums up my opinion on the target date retirement funds. Maybe somewhere there's an organization that has a decent set of them but every time I've looked at them they've been chronic underperformers. I'm skeptical of the entire bond market in general, have been ever since cities going bankrupt became a Thing over a decade ago, so I stick with index funds and I've thrown in a RE fund for funsies.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
18d ago
I'm curious about Crash. Maybe twenty years ago, I tried reading the source novel, but found it painfully slow and uneventful. May have to try again.
Only seen the movie but fuck was that a good film. The casting of James Spader in the lead is particularly inspired, Elias Koteas puts in a Hell of a performance in his own right, and Deborah Unger is pure perfection.
Microsoft Works--now there's a name I've not heard in a long time. My admittedly shaky memory says it was clunky, the file format was annoying and (IIRC) wasn't as widely supported, etc. etc. It seemed to be the M$ attempt to clone AppleWorks, and not terribly well, either, so Works was something most folks ended up getting by virtue of it being bundled with their Packard Hell or whatever. You know what? The more I think about it, the more I'd agree that it's a good example of your point.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
18d ago
I'm on record as saying that it was mid-book five where I stopped my re-read, specifically the bloody menagerie, and I'm not sad that I stopped there. That said, I can't help but suspect that the middle books would have been more engaging if Jordan hadn't gotten sick, and some of them were pretty good in their own right. My shaky memory says it was pretty much good book bad book right up until the end.
Heh, yeah, I'm just sneaky like that!
ETA: Also, thanks! Can't agree hard enough with the absence of reality bit.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
19d ago
Yeah, this is why I said I could only speculate, I'm only really familiar with anorexia, though I've been unhealthy myself in pursuit of my weight goals. That said, while I have the ability to ignore hunger until it goes away, I'm trying to be good to my body right about now.
Meanwhile anorexia is often best modeled as a psychotic process (at least a psychotic level of functioning) that responds poorly to medication. Borderlines and other Cluster-B personality types usually have variable or sketchy reality testing, not absent.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
19d ago
Ahh, that's totally fair then. I'm tempted to rat-hole this whole thing further, but the truth is that I can only speculate as to the overlap between individuals with eating disorders and individuals with any flavor of personality disorder. Suffice it to say that I wonder if there isn't some underlying Thing that ties them together.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
20d ago
Yeah, saying eating disorders are difficult to manage is putting it mildly in my book, and IME the ED itself tends to have other comorbidities that will inexorably come out to play over time. I don't think they're evil, either, but I do have to strongly disagree that the fallout is restricted to themselves because it exacts a heavy toll on their loved ones as well, even the ones that understand that it's something to be managed, not fixed.
While Posner of course takes us through the forensic evidence from Dealey Plaza in exhaustive detail, he also wants to make the case for Oswald as a lone wolf, demonstrating both that he was a) the kind of person who could commit an act of savage, unprovoked violence and also b) not the sort of person any self-respecting intelligence agency would trust to run the hot tap. As such, the book is as much a character study of Oswald as it is a forensic analysis. I was familiar with the broad strokes of Oswald's biography (troubled childhood, Marines, attempted defection to the USSR, return to the US with Russian bride in tow), but Posner goes much deeper, and his portrayal is not at all flattering.
This, to me, is what makes Case Closed such a good anti-conspiracy read. Just as an accurate three-dimensional portrayal of the SBT necessarily precludes a lot of the more fanciful potential shooting locations and strongly points towards the TSBD, so too does an actual look at Oswald make clear that he was a highly troubled young man who wanted to Be Somebody and Do Something Important, not the mere patsy that he tried to portray himself as. Throw in trying to assassinate General Walker April 10th, 1963, and failing only because he hit the wood framing the window panes, and it's pretty clear that he had the motive, means, and the opportunity to be the shooter, despite his protestations to the contrary.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
25d ago
Go on...
I actually saw an ad for this at a screening of the original Hellraiser recently, first I'd heard of the game. I need to know more!
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
25d ago
Congratulations, happy for the two of you!
Coffee Haters Club
It's been awhile since I've done a purely coffee post, so let's rock! Today's brew is an old Sumatran, a honey process coffee from Kerinci Seblat that I roasted one week ago. It's an interesting cuppa, with strong herbals and a tantalizing sweetness that doesn't quite neatly match to a more precise flavor note such as a fruity taste or a raw sugar. In retrospect, it might well have been better if I had stopped roasting a degree or three earlier in the process and aimed more on the city side of the roast, but I had been thinking along general regional lines when deciding what temperature I was aiming for. If I hadn't been finishing this one up, I'd be interested to see how it would taste at a lower roast level. Checking myself against the cupping notes, it seems like I'm still pretty dialed in, as they read, "layered sweetness like a demurara [sic], rice syrup & honey accented by dried stone fruit, golden raisin, herbal aroma, sweet basil, pineapple sage." Yep, sage and golden raisin both check out as particular flavor notes, and I can definitely see the dried stone fruits, though the sweet notes weren't that distinct for me except for maybe rice syrup, and I'd never even heard of demerara syrup before reading this particular description.
More generally, I've been roasting down African coffees that I've already discussed, and even did a Yemeni roast that didn't turn out so good, hence its exclusion from the coffee haters notes, but I'll be getting back to Central/South American roasts soon enough, and may even do a batch of an espresso roast just to see how it tastes as a pour over.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
29d ago
Arguably the best one ever made is Master of Orion 2, and it's just the fact that it's an older DOS/WIN9X game, and the fact that it had terrible sequels, that even gives other games a fighting chance.
I've yet to play a 4x space game that kept me coming back the way MOO2 did. By modern standards, it's so unbalanced as to be broken AF, but even so, like the earlier iterations of Civ, it had a level of accessibility and that, "just one more turn," gameplay feedback loop that, IMAO, is far too rare these days.
I find it to be fascinating myself, and I am fond of the education that I got from the hackers, (note: hackers, not crackers) the cypherpunks, and the individualist flavors of techno-libertarian that were the primary culture of the nascent internet at the time. For better and for worse, those things are a part of my DNA, even though I'm old enough to have watched my ideology fail and die. And IME, yes, participating in internet culture is a case of the abyss also gazing into you, metaphorically speaking. I was never a normie in the first place, so I couldn't tell you to what extent the internet revealed to me versus changed me, but I can tell you that it's absolutely been a Thing for me.
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