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."
3d ago
letthehateflowthroughyou.jpg
Soulless is a good word for how pre-ground coffee tastes once one's palate has become accustomed to fresh beans. It's more like coffee flavored water than actual coffee! Once coffee is ground, all of that fresh coffee flavor locked into the bean is now exposed to oxygen and that flavor unique to that particular batch of beans is literally evaporating by the minute. Even if the beans were ground right at the store when you bought them, you'd have to rush right home and make coffee with the grinds to have a shot at a decent-to-good cup of coffee from them before the staleness started setting into the taste.
When I have to travel, I can subsist on the drek that's offered up at hotels and such, but it's never my preference. One of the joys of the craft coffee revolution is that there's a decent chance that I'll be able to try out some local coffee shop even in BFE and if not, I can try to fall back to a Starbucks for some Blonde Espresso ('bout time they started going down that road, a smart move IMAO) or decent drip coffee at the worst.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
Second this one, I'm of the mind that it's true myself, though I think that simple bureaucratic inertia plus public safety concerns, when taken together, is more than enough to explain the conventional wisdom.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
First blush guess as to why it's terrible would be the film grain, in which case I can tell you that the NR version is a lot prettier and seemed to be pretty well done in that regard, though it's been a good while since I watched it. If it's more that it's the 77 version of Star Wars and not the ANH re-release, yeah, not much to be done about that.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
15d ago
I am a fan of multiple book series featuring talking cats, eg Dungeon Crawler Carl, Craig Alanson's Convergence.
Hey, hey, hey! It's the dog that talks in the Convergence series! Mister Boots is a grimlik. Okay, okay, he does talk, and he looks like a huge cat, if cats had three toes, but still. Grimlik. Completely different!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19d ago
It's probably been a decade since I read that but I can't help but wonder if that someone got A Deepness in the Sky mixed up with perhaps A Fire Upon the Deep or another one of his works. IIRC, the closest Deepness gets to software is with the whole
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
I agree that ruminating on a cause or closure might not be terribly helpful. In a larger sense, just about everyone I know well has had some straight up weird shit happen to them in life. My uncle told me stories of seeing a smiling face named Subsunk on the wall when he was a kid. He seemed to think of Subsunk as mostly an imaginary friend but he was clear that he really, physically saw Subsunk on his wall and not just in his mind's eye. For another example, my wife was all alone one day (after waking up from a nap, I think) when she heard a voice tell her out of the blue that she would be pregnant, which according to an earlier doctor, wasn't supposed to be possible for her, and she did in fact become pregnant later in life. I always personally thought that there was no such thing as "normal", but then again, being autistic I would think that, wouldn't I?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
Arright, I'm going to try and stick with spectrum specific stuff here and just say that it's probably worth looking into ASD regardless but generally speaking, the cerebellum is underdeveloped in ASD folks, leading to characteristic clumsiness/physical awkwardness/gawkiness. Hope the book gives you some good stuff on getting better sleep and I'd be interested to hear what you've learned from it. WRT sleep and autism specifically, basically my understanding is that the autistic brain has a smaller reservoir for emotional stimulation while also processing emotions more slowly, and one of the ways that this manifests is in an active resting network and generally more frequent and vivid dreams compared to neurotypicals.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
Reposting the bulk of my reply to this thread.
WRT masturbation specifically, from a therapeutic standpoint my understanding is that children can and do sometimes discover it at an early, pre-sexual age absent any sort of sexual abuse. There is even some debate about whether some observed fetal behavior/movement in the womb is actually masturbation! For whatever it's worth, while my earliest concrete memories date back to 4-5 years old, some of those memories are of masturbating. I don't remember discovering it, mind, but I do remember it as being this strange sort of urge that would come over me from time to time. Puberty/sexual awakening also happened for me at a normal age, and it was at some point during that time of my life that I connected the dots and came to understand that what I had been doing was masturbating. I've also never had a single nocturnal emission in my entire life, but then, I don't think I had any periods of complete sexual abstinence greater than six weeks or so before my mid-thirties.
From what you're saying, I'm not seeing a concrete explanation for your memory of the unfamiliar woman either. Irrespective of the wider question of sexual abuse, it certainly seems like something that a three year old would imagine all on their own.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
WRT masturbation specifically, from a therapeutic standpoint my understanding is that children can and do sometimes discover it at an early, pre-sexual age absent any sort of sexual abuse. There is even some debate about whether some observed fetal behavior/movement in the womb is actually masturbation! For whatever it's worth, while my earliest concrete memories date back to 4-5 years old, some of those memories are of masturbating. I don't remember discovering it, mind, but I do remember it as being this strange sort of urge that would come over me from time to time. Puberty/sexual awakening also happened for me at a normal age, and it was at some point during that time of my life that I connected the dots and came to understand that what I had been doing was masturbating. I've also never had a single nocturnal emission in my entire life, but then, I don't think I had any periods of complete sexual abstinence greater than six weeks or so before my mid-thirties.
As for the rest of your broader post, I share several other symptoms. I am a disordered eater myself, either over or undereating depending on what's going on with me and I was a chronic undereater as a teenager. I've always had occasional problems sleeping and the most reliable sleep aid that I've found for myself has been pointing a small fan at my head and turning it on before going to sleep. That habit broke in my 20s and although I'll still sleep with an oscillating fan during the summer months, it's not something that I practice any more. I didn't have chronic tendinitis when was younger, nor did I ever experience a rash of UTIs. I do, however, have above average social anxiety, part of which manifested as keeping my head down and throwing games and the like to keep the peace with more sensitive friends, and looking back in my past, I can identify it in my behaviors then even though I didn't know what I was dealing with. In fact, I'm confident that masturbation as a young child was an unconscious coping mechanism to deal with my own otherwise high strung nature. Ultimately, my own sleep and anxiety issues are a result of being on the spectrum, which were it not for you saying that you seemed to have excellent physical coordination, I would otherwise suspect could be the case for you as well.
You seem to have a lot going on with irregularities in your life, and I sympathize with you when you say that you feel that it's unfair. It sounds like you put a lot into your own well-being, though, and that's actually pretty awesome if not a superpower in its own right and I encourage you to keep it up.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
24d ago
Good luck, sir, and congratulations on the pregnancy. Hope you make out like a bandit with the NVDA stonks and that you find something better soon!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
28d ago
If this isn't a straight line begging for a Kipling Reference, then I don't know what is.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
When it comes to sexual orientation specifically, it manifested for me personally during early puberty, and attraction to specific girls came a few years after that. My older brother introduced me to nudie mags much earlier, mind, and they always had that "Adult" mystique about them that attracted me, much like candy cigarettes and sitting at a bar and ordering Shirley Temples, but when puberty hit, the appeal suddenly made sense to me on a whole new level. That said, I've also heard from some people that their orientation was obvious to them significantly before puberty, and I found these accounts to be perfectly believable. In fact, there are aspects of my own sexuality that I can trace back to early childhood things, FWTW, so to me this is one of those parts where we all have commonalities and differences in our own individual experience of life.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
It took hindsight to see it has no substance, no nutrients in it.
Shouldn't that have been expected with J.J. Abrams though?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
My reply won’t be culture war focused BUT it is truly insane how poorly Microsoft has handled windows.
IDK, I don't disagree with a single criticism in your post, and I'd generally agree that the overall decline of Windows as a platform has certainly been dramatic. That said, I think it's clear that given Microsoft's high profile failures at expanding Windows into the smartphone space and, with the exception of the Surface Pro, into the tablet space as well, managing the decline of Windows is a completely rational decision, strategy-wise. It seems to me that M$ properly understood that their platform was burning and largely succeeded in moving the crown jewels of their business into the cloud with 365/Entra/etc., and as long as they don't fuck up legacy Windows and Office badly enough to cause a mass exodus, they'll be as secure as anyone else can be in our glorious, cloud-based future.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Reporters are abandoning their standards and playing a game of "we aren't reporting y, we're just reporting that people said y" instead of verifying anything.
What standards? This tactic is so old that South Park was pointing it out 20 years ago in the Hurricane Katrina episode Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow.
Probably true! My reply was totally tongue in cheek and at least a little hyperbolic in that particular sense.
I agree with all of this as well. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong or inferior with mass market coffee, it's that I quite enjoy the ritual of sipping a nice fresh shot of good espresso or cup of pourover coffee and discovering the flavors that said shot or cup contains, which is not something I can do with the mass market stuff. In fact, I'd say that it's highly impressive how brands from Folger's and Eight O' Clock to Starbucks can crank out a specific taste profile for their coffee year in and year out given the inherent variability of the beans themselves!
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