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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: November 21st, 2025

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  • Fun fact about phobias!

    You can frequently cure them with pills and a truly slight bit of effort!

    Propranolol, a beta blocker that has been in use since the 60s mostly for blood pressure control, has few notable negative side effects, but it has the absolutely -lovely- side effect of blocking fear signals from the amygdala if you have the stones to expose yourself to your triggers while taking it. This exposure coupled with a totally not over-reacting nervous system, can mostly or totally cure phobias.

    I watched a documentary about it, where they used it solely in conjunction with exposure therapy (not constantly taking the med), and they had amazing results on common fears like spiders and heights. I realized I had an old prescription, and went “well fuck, why not try to cure my social anxiety? That’s basically a phobia, anyway!” And so I started taking it again instead of the med I was on for blood pressure. The effect happens at doses too low to be noticeable if you don’t need the pressure reduction, but it also works when you have blood pressure doses.

    Anyway after about a month of taking it and living life as normal I realized yep, it worked. I don’t panic about going out anymore.

    So hey, if you have an irrational fear of something, talk to your doctor.

    Here is a probably biased bit of info about it and how it works (it was the best I could find without doing tons of digging for the specific study on phobias, which used 40mg), direct from the people who make it.

    https://propranolol.com/propranolol-for-anxiety/


  • My first one, which was downtown, did the exact same thing, but didn’t even have enough parking for the people with passes, so everyone parked juuuuuuuuuust off campus and didn’t pay. All the houses within a 3 block radius were owned by either faculty or people who rented them to students, so they didn’t care at all. The only students who really used the lots were either living on campus and had to pay to store the vehicle anyway, or disabled people who didn’t have to pay.

    The second one I transferred to, however, was amazing. Every building could be accessed via tunnels, and was set up like a wheel with spokes so each building connected to the center as well as its neighboring buildings, iirc. You could navigate the entire campus without going outside (Midwest winters). Every building also had a huge parking lot nearby, which was free because the campus was not close to anything but residential housing; campus was completely surrounded by conservation study acreage, as ecological sciences were very important there. Busses came mostly as scheduled. It was a dream of a place to go to school, honestly.


  • I disagree that violence taints your soul permanently.

    This depends upon your own morals, personal justifications, and probably a ton of other factors.

    I think the idea is that it’s something you are going to have to live with, one way or another. You might hurt an innocent by accident, do more damage than intended (most people would struggle to live with having killed someone, for example), or even harm yourself irreparably. You might cause people to look at you differently, you might have the wrong information, you might change the course of your life permanently.

    Violence is a very complicated subject, but perpetrators of it are, indeed, always marked in some way by it, just like every other experience you have.


  • We have supper clubs here, which are apparently highly regional… as in I never saw one when I was more than a few hours out of my region, and that was several years of looking. Meanwhile nearly every town here has at least one.

    It’s mostly boomers, tho you’ll find considerable millennial representation these days as well (not typically much younger people). A nice low ceiling, dim light, carpeted place that expects you to sit for a drink or two and socialize before food, take your order long before you are seated at your table sort of thing. Slow, quieter, intimate, and so popular they are gathering spots for old people. Also the food is usually killer, and/or stuff you can’t get elsewhere, for decent small town prices. No poker machines tho.





  • As someone who wore nothing but superhero flip-flops through the entirety of high school in the Great Lakes region, yeah it was neither practical nor particularly socially acceptable. But they flashed lights when I walked. I never had light-up shoes as a little kid, and these were marketed for “kids at heart” so, tradeoff. 🤷🏻



  • I tried to get security to approve using that or something similar for work, but nope. Too sensitive of a job to allow that much access, I guess.

    I tried messing with the flags in chrome to allow dark mode default natively as well, but that broke a bunch of stuff, instead.

    I do use that stuff on my own devices though :)


  • Very possibly. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be always, like there are medications that cause sensitivity to light as a side effect.

    There isn’t really much to be done about it, unfortunately, other than learning to recognize what triggers it and doing your best to avoid or reduce exposure to those environments. But even that can make a huge difference. I try not to drive at night for the same reasons you do.

    Maybe pay attention to the actual light levels from the window and see if brighter days are more headache inducing. In office buildings it could also be from fluorescent lights, those are horrible, especially if you can see the flicker.


  • I had a job in which I was seated at a computer in front of a window wall facing southwest. Like I was facing the window to see my computer. I wasn’t right next to said window, but it was the entire wall so it genuinely didn’t matter. There wasn’t really anywhere in our office that wasn’t looking at that window wall.

    I’m photophobic (aka abnormally sensitive to light, it causes pain and headaches) and lemme tell you, I hated working there. Even sunglasses didn’t help in the afternoon, and I’d go home with the worst headaches.

    I dislike light mode for the same reason even if it’s less extreme. It’s just so much light. I hate that it’s the default for websites and there’s usually no option to change it.




  • Wow is that ever a pointlessly nit-picky challenge of a story from when I was a kid, over 30 years ago………. Almost like memory isn’t perfect or something, omgno!

    I don’t know if there were some little lines or something; I remember it being a black screen. But little lines would give the exact same impression of a dead/infected machine so it barely matters outside of pedantry. It didn’t display an interface, that’s the important part. As for the boot up, maybe, but also very possibly not. They had some Monty python suite of software (themes taken to an extreme, very 90s) that may have made the system function differently than you, some random techbro with absolutely zero information about the computer itself, expect. It replaced literally everything with Monty python stuff and was installed from iirc 12 2.5 floppy discs! Did it replace the boot images, causing them to not display properly when booted in the wrong resolution? Maybe, idk. Wouldn’t be surprised. But even if it did go through the boot sequence and then land on a black screen, the result is the same. Non-functional-looking computer, because no interface. As for DOS boot, we never ran dos on it so genuinely don’t know.

    The only sign of life we had from it as far as I can recall was when the screensaver would go on after 5 min, it would play the Klingon national anthem, which is a big part of why they assumed virus. It was one that used an escape key to exit because it was interactive. We didn’t know until much later that was what was happening, or that my sibling changed the screensaver and maybe other stuff, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place, but the other software may have covered up those signs you are talking about, or maybe we all just still didn’t know what to do with it with the boot images and stuff showing up, which… idk if you know this, but even today most people don’t know how to troubleshoot or fix their computers, and don’t even know what a BIOS is… My parents were not tech inclined, my sibling and I were around 10-11, and it’s not like they could just look up how to do these things when their computer wasn’t working… which is exactly what my sibling did when they got a computer of their own.


  • “Instead of getting the tool designed specifically for the thing, just get a different tool that isn’t designed for the thing, and then learn to make really precise difficult cuts!”

    I come from a big cheese area, and genuinely, no. A sharper knife isn’t the problem, the surface area of the blade is the problem. Even an oiled ceramic knife doesn’t cut cleanly through many cheeses (ceramic is extremely sharp, oiling is to attempt to prevent buckling and breaking because the cheese sticks to the blade). A wire cheese slicer is consistent, and safe and easy enough for a child to use (I know because that was my first experience with one, around 5-6).


  • We had a computer sitting for like 3 years in the mid 90s, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.

    Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.

    Turns out, someone, or some program, messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.

    It never “just worked”.