It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

I grew up playing World of Walmart

Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s thumbthing weird about that image.

It doesn’t say ‘open with your thumb’. Open it with a knife or some other technique, then insert your thumb & lift.

It probably comes partly out of the social dynamic that causes the tendency to value men primarily by their usefulness rather than who they are personally. Feeling gets in the way of me getting shit done, earning money to support my family, etc., so I turn feelings off, mostly. I could turn them back on and learn to manage them and whatnot, but if that doesn’t make it easier for me to earn money, fix the house, etc., or worse, actively gets in the way of those things by taking more of my work time or making it harder for me to want to do those things, then I don’t have an incentive to be genuinely emotionally connected.

Also, evident confidence in one’s ability to handle shit helps to make dependents feel happier and safer, so experiencing uncertainty, fear, and other such emotions tends to act against one’s own interest in getting shit done and avoiding drama that distracts from shit getting done.

So yeah, it’s kind of a question of ‘who do you want to be?’. Personally, I put a fair bit of effort into suppressing ‘negative’ emotions (fear, uncertainty, sadness, envy) and try to encourage positivity (curiosity, joy, whatever the word for the opposite of envy is (ChatGPT says ‘mudita’, vicarious joy). I figure this tends to blunt some of the more subtle and nuanced emotional states since I’m kind of artificially managing the states, but it is a practice that helps people who depend on me feel stable and safe so they can do the things they want to do, which is important to me.

Compassion is probably the hardest to manage this way, mostly because it is a response to sympathetic feelings of negative emotions. Like, if I see someone who is sad and I am suppressing my sadness emotions this also has a heavy damping effect on my sympathetic sadness which is what usually triggers compassionate behavior. So I have to kind of manually watch for situations where sympathetic responses are appropriate and ease up on the suppression a bit (but not too much) to allow the empathy to kick in.

If you want to grow the sport, you need to facilitate a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

Hm. In addition to a welcoming environment it might be fun to have a ‘cutthroat’ class with an opposite approach where intimidation, bullying, and over-the-top shit-talking is encouraged. They could have competitors come out in like pro-wrestling gear or something and have a stare-down at the beginning of the match.

need to be taught how to feel.

And before that you’d need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.

Thanks for this tip, very useful

I use a cheap paper notebook, like 5x8 inch size. Each day, first thing when I start work, I write the date at the top of the next blank page, copy the items from the previous page that are not done, and add new items at the bottom of the list as they come up. Tasks I haven’t started have a blank box next to them, tasks I’ve started get a half-filled box, and finished items get a filled box. Anything that moves from one day to the next that hasn’t been started gets a digit in the box that increases by one each day. If the number gets to 10 I cross the item off as cancelled. When I’m picking a new task I try to prioritize some the tasks with higher numbers.

If I need to take notes I’ll use nearby blank space, sometimes a facing page. Generally I keep notes very short, long details go into whatever ticketing system we’re using with the ticket number in my notebook so I can find it again. There are a few other habits I use that are generally in line with the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity techniques, like simple flags for what sort of action I can take on the item (completable (about half a day or less), needs more info, needs decomposition (more than half a day of work)), with the notable difference that I don’t make any effort to ‘capture everything’. I load-shed aggressively and early, which is in-line with the way I want to live my life.

Mostly I don’t keep very many active tasks, so it’s rare that I have to cancel items. If my list is getting long I stop putting new items on it and just tell people I’m too busy to accept new stuff. I used to try to track more stuff, but I learned that just meant I ended up with lots of notes about stuff that I never had time to do, so I quite wasting my time tracking them.

When the notebook is full I put it on the shelf and get a new one.

I keep the notebook next to me on my desk. If someone asks me for something I check the book, if it looks like I’ve got time, I add it to the book. When I go to a meeting, I take it with me. If I don’t happen to have it I usually remember what’s on the current page because I just wrote it there that morning.

It’s low-tech, and I like it that way. Partly because I like to find nice pens to write with.

That’s me! Moved to a very small town with fast internet so I could have a house for about 0.75x my annual salary. It’s great, now we can almost afford to pay for student loans!

the fact that I didn’t come in 2 hours early and nap at my desk meant I was lazy.

I’m curious, if you were in the office but obviously doing not-work activities like playing video games or table-top games with coworkers instead of napping would that be seen negatively?

perfect mechanical shuffle

What’s perfect in this context? It’s maybe a little counterintuitive because I’d think a perfect mechanical shuffle would be perfectly deterministic (assuming no mechanical failure of the device) so that it would be repeatable. Like, you would give it a seed number (about 67 digits evidently) and the mechanism would perform a series of interleaves completely determined by the seed. Then if you wanted a random order you would give the machine a true random seed (from your wall of lava lamps or whatever) and you’d get a deck with an order that is very likely to never have been seen before. And if you wanted to play a game with that particular deck order again you’d just put the same seed into the machine.

“Hey, how do I get to the Plex server?”

“Open your browser and go to Hell”

“…”

Previously my server was just a Debian box where I had a ‘docker’ directory with a bunch of .sh files containing ‘docker run’ commands (and a couple of docker-compose files for services that that have closely related containers). That works really well, it’s easy to understand and manage. I had nginx running natively to expose stuff as necessary.

Recently I decided to try TrueNAS Scale (I wanted more reliable storage for my media library, which is large enough to be annoying to replace when a simple drive fails), and I’m still trying to figure it out. It’s kind of a pain in the ass for running containers since the documentation is garbage. The web interface is kind of nice (other than constantly logging me out), but the learning curve for charts and exposing services has been tough, and it seems that ZFS is just a bad choice for Docker.

I was attracted to the idea of being able to run my services on my NAS server as one appliance, but it’s feeling like TrueNAS Scale is way too complicated for home-scale (and way too primitive for commercial, not entirely sure what market they are aiming for) and I’m considering dumping it and setting up two servers, one for NAS and for running my containers and VMs.

they have a hard time seeing water

When my cat was a tiny kitten learning to drink from a bowl he would always dip his face in too far and get a nose full of water, causing him to sneeze. He learned to always dip his paw in the water first to see where the surface is before putting his face in. He still does it every single time. It’s pretty cute.

my theory is that they might also want something else.

I keep about 4 different kinds of food around for our cats. I have three auto-feeders in different parts of the house each with a different foot and dispense schedule. That way the cat has some choice about what they are eating, and there’s a bit of environmental enrichment where they can eat in different places.

I also hide little piles of cat treats in various locations around the house. Keeps the cats curious and exploring to see if they can find something good to munch.

cat didn’t like stale food

That’s a thing too. Dry food in bags has more odor than food that’s been sitting out for a while. The fats in food left out in the open air will eventually go rancid too, but that takes a long time and shouldn’t happen if you’re cleaning the bowls periodically.

Thanks for that. I’ve been kinda-sorta keeping an eye out for a good solution for this. My house has three main panels (it’s set up for subletting) so solutions like Sense won’t work well, plus I don’t want it to be dependent on a cloud service. I’ll check out this product.

humans must’ve walked around naked before covering up for some period of time, right?

Some still do, but they tend to wear some kind of genitalia covering.

Contemporary humans have disproportionately large penises compared to many other animals. Perhaps when we started evolving larger penises we co-evolved small dick jokes (“I was in the pond!”), leading to habitual use of various types of penis-hiding clothing.

I think of an ambitious person as being one who is strongly committed to achieving a very difficult goal with a high risk of failure, usually something that will require near-daily effort for at least a few years, possibly decades.

To me it’s the level of challenge that the goal presents to the person attempting it that matters, it doesn’t have to be something with global or historical significance.