That’s a great journey you’re on. Takes a lot of guts to re-evaluate our worldview, even when the old one is making us miserable.

Managed to get to the stage with my job, where I just kinda resent having to go to work because I’d rather be doing other things, as opposed to deeply hating it because I’m freaking out constantly. This is a big step for me, I had to leave my last career after crashing and burning, due undiagnosed ADHD. Had a couple of years off getting myself sorted out and correctly medicated, and started back in a new role, but with a genuine question about whether I could have a professional career again.

The first couple of years were really hard, just so stressful and I needed to see a therapist at points to keep going. But I did, and now in my 3rd year I’ve hit a very manageable level of stress that seems normal and bearable. Interestingly, this isn’t because I finally started being organised and stopped leaving things to the last minute. Nope, I just embraced my terrible work habits, stopped beating myself up about them, and changed my expectations for work so that paperwork was minimized and doing all my prep at the last minute was fine. Much less mentally horrific for me and, despite ‘lowering my standards’ the quality of my work probably increased, because I was doing what I could actually achieve not pushing to do something amazing that never materialised.

Mmm Arran gold is great stuff. I’m planning on trying out a home made whiskey cream recipe I came across. Basically a bottle of jamiesons, condensed milk and some other stuff.

I think there’s a way that society represents “what sex is” that is very different from most people’s experience of it. For various reasons, Hollywood/advertising/porn all promote skinny and heavily made up women. And even if they find those kinds of actresses or models hot on the screen, that’s not the kinds of women most men actually crush on.

The reality is most people have a fairly limited number of sexual relationships, and they’re often with people who do not meet some abstract societal idea of ‘hotness’. A lot of the time people are attracted to people because they like them, and they have good chemistry. Sometimes it’s more of a ‘type’ or whatever (knew a guy who was really into short girls, and then I met his tiny mother…)

Same with relationships or sex or whatever. People learn a bunch of expectations and assumptions growing up, and then as theynget older they realise that most people don’t actually fit that arbitary standard. Sure, some guysnare horny all the time and just want emotionless sex, and so do some women. But it’s not as ‘normal’ as some media would suggest.

Kneel down and see which one comes to me first

Just started playing this again for the first time in years. Trying out the texture upgrades from tfix, and they seem pretty good. Still feels very retro!

I generally play at least one of the Ultima games every year, mostly the late 80s and early 90s ones.

More of an app than a website but meow meow beenz from Community.

France. It’s great and i love being here, but I teach English so there’s a lot of having to speak English and not a lot of push to speak French. Things should quite down in six months and I hope to be able to focus more on French and start actually gaining confidence in talking.

Given that almost everyone in the world speaks one of a tiny fraction of world languages, there’s less than 0.1% chance that anyone you ever meet will be able to understand you. Google Translate only covers 250 of more than 7000 world languages, so there’s a 97% chance I can’t even use online tools to get my message across.

If it was weighted it would still suck as I’d need to travel to other countries based on what i happen to speak (if it changes each year). That doesn’t sound worth it, especially not for the rest of my life. If it changed after every sentence, it would be like having an awful speech impediment. Trying to have a conversation would involve repeating myself half a dozen times until I hit the right language, and only if I’m in top 5 langauge areas. If I was trying to speak french I’d need to repeat myself 20 times before I was likely to be understood.

And what’s the benefit? That I can understand lots of langauges but can’t functionally communicate?

I’m not a fan of that change, but I don’t really see it as an attempt to be more ‘politically correct’.

Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, “Should he be a cold-blooded killer?” Because I was thinking mythologically—should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, “Yeah, he should be John Wayne.” And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first]—you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to."

I think Lucas is wrong, because even if he shoots first Han is being threatened with kidnap and death, so he’s not a cold-blooded murderer to shoot the guy threatening him. But unless we’re rolling all ideas of heroism and morality into woke/PC then I don’t think that example works at all.

You don’t need to actively kill people off unless you’re in a rush. Just let climate change render parts of the world uninhabitable while enforcing strict border control, and make sure your population don’t have access to decent healthcare and vaccinations so that prevmtable diseases reduce the local numbers.

Not only is it distracting and disgusting, but it starts normalising ads everywhere. Cigarettes were digitally removed so as to not set a bad example for kids. But letting them think that it’s perfectly normal to have glowing ads decorating the walls of your workplace is fiiiine.

What movie dialogue did they edit?

Here’s something from 2025 and it’s even better, because AI!

Its definitely just proof of concept for now, but it seems a grim, if inevitable, step in the war of ads vs adblockers.

I don’t know. It’s something I think about a lot, especially when I’m wasting too much time online. But it really isn’t that simple. I had lots of friends and saw them pretty regularly, but I moved countries to be with my partner and I’m very happy with that choice and our life together.

But I don’t speak the language here, I’m learning but slowly. So if I wasn’t in message groups, sharing memes and video chatting my friends back home I’d feel pretty lonely. And it would make the couple of trips home each year much more awkward. By keeping in touch so regularly it feels totally normal to spend the day with a friend, even if I haven’t seen them in 9 months because I know all the little things they’ve been up to or excited about.

On the other side, if I had none of that, maybe I would have worked harder at learning the language. Especially with the lack of distractions the internet provides (being able to watch tv in English instead of local stuff is probably the biggest hurdle to learning), but realistically we’re busy and live in the country, so if I had some intermediate language skills and was vastly more lonely I’d probably not have made any real friends. I’d just go to some more social events in the year and participate a bit akwardly and feel sad.

I drink quite a lot of caffeine (four or five strong coffees most days) and i’ve not had any problems, or noticed much of a difference on terms of ‘over caffinated’ symptoms compared to pre-Methylphenidate.

In fact, the one time I tried to cut back on coffee (I’d been really ill for a week and had stopped drinking coffee, so I decided to not restart the habit) I found that without coffee my medication didn’t seem as effective. After two weeks of no caffeine I wasnt feeling caffeine withdrawals, I wasn’t tired in the morning or craving coffee, but I just felt like i was on too low a dose for my ADHD. My attention, focus, willpower were all back to being a struggle. Then I read somewhere online saying that this could happen, and that caffeine increased the effects of the meds. For some people, I guess that means that too much coffee would lead to an overly strong dose. But for me, I’d much rather have a couple of cups of coffee than have to move to a higher dose of Ritalin. So I started having coffee again and things went back to normal.

They’re all fine with some extendent. It really depends specifically what and how you’re cooking. I like cast iron for steak because you can heat it up a helluva lot, even without fat, while trying that with non-stick pans can damage the coating and make some weird smells. Similarly, I prefer it for frying eggs because I like to use a metal slice to flip eggs, and worry about scarcjing my non-stick. But I have both and happily use both.

The photo is by nature photographer Pier van den Bemd, from his Instagram. He says it’s in Norway, and that he’s “by far the heaviest polar bear” he’d ever seen.