I always thought that was funny. Same with cheap, stick-built apartments with only the wood studs and two layers of drywall between them, the hallway, and other units, but tenants massively fortifying only the door.

I dunno, does it mount vertically or horizontally?

Linux is so much better now! My only gripe is inconsistent/buggy dock support, but resetting Cinnamon every 15-20 minutes is a small price to pay for freedom.

It’s less about no microbes than starting with a reasonable amount. As long as the wound is cleaned of debris and large amounts of dead tissue, one’s immune system will typically be able to prevent bacterial overgrowth or handle a small amount of pathogenic bacteria. I make the distinction in the hope that people don’t go overboard with disinfection. You just need good enough.

I had a sizable wound treated with a hydrocolloid bandage. They’re sealed to form a moist environment by retaining exudate and are changed every 5-7 days. No antibiotics are used. It should have been a festering mess according to previous wisdom, but it was fine the entire time.

There has been a lot of talk about their intent to change, but I fear I still see them leaning hard on the same maladaptive coping mechanisms that helped get us here. It’s still early yet, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned. I drew up a plan that I’m following, so I’m just waiting until I have enough info to know to continue or divorce.

I’m sorry you’re feeling frustrated and hopeless about your relationship. It’s really demoralizing when the other person doesn’t want to hear there’s an issue, or understands but there are issues with them working on it. I’ve experienced both from both sides and understand it’s often more complex than it seems, but it still comes down to if they have the commitment and follow through necessary to make positive, sustained change, because that’s hard to do. Really hard.

If I may provide some unsolicited advice, couples counseling can be great. If you go that route or have already and want to try again, I’d recommend seeing a therapist that specializes in couples and is experienced in providing therapy for any conditions present, like ADHD, borderline personality disorder, or PTSD. The Gottman Method is great. Couples counseling is also most effective in conjunction with individual counseling, so partners can really dig into their own experience and what they bring to the relationship.

Better! We’re working it out, so that’s good, but we have over a decade of things to go through, plus working on ourselves as individuals. It’s exhausting.

My partner was the one to pull the divorce card, actually with no warning whatsoever. It’s so appropriate for a relationship that turned out to be significantly defined by poor communication.

In retrospect, the critical signs were pretty obvious, but we both mistook them for other things. We had become very emotionally disconnected, but we were preparing for a huge move out of the country with a small pack of house pets so each of us thought that’s why the other was stressed. This actually was true for me while my partner was stressed because they wanted to run screaming but didn’t feel comfortable saying anything.

We had both been withholding some major concerns about the other throughout our relationship, so each had a second, secret narrative that wasn’t being discussed or challenged in couples counseling. Plus we both have CPTSD from shitty childhoods and have cross-reactive behavior. Lots of angst here.

This stuff can sneak up on you if you don’t have healthy habits that help identify and prevent it, but it’s clear as day once you learn. We’re getting there and we’ll be better people for it, but it’s brutal sometimes and we’re just at the beginning.

I highly recommend solving the important ones and learning to let the rest go, speaking as someone whose marriage just exploded over exactly that.

DIY concrete is fucking brutal work, though, even with a mixer, unless you’re pretty strong or have strong friends, and you have to do it in one go if structural strength is a concern. I love the savings and personal satisfaction of DIY, but I started eating the cost of getting concrete poured professionally somewhere in my early thirties.

I just exclaimed “HOLY SHIT” loud enough to get my partner’s attention. There are two in my area! They have so many tools!

Why didn’t I know about this?! I considered myself educated, but now see I still have much to learn.

Internal Family Systems teaches that we have multiple internal personas that have different roles in protecting the true self at the center. It has been useful for self discovery, though I don’t know if I believe it’s completely correct

I did learn that I have multiple sets of behaviors that l adopt based on need. It’s like code switching, except it changes everything - speech cadence, word choice, body language, thought patterns, you name it. It’s not multiple personalities or anything, just changing relative proportions of various traits for a given situation, like job switching in an RPG. It was initially really jarring for my partner. They are one of the few people I’m genuinely myself around, but if I’m in a very stressful situation or interacting with co-workers about work, they see me acting very differently. It’s disconcerting but it makes me more flexible in social situations.

Edit: I also recently learned I’m what is known amongst the commoners as “autistic as fuck”, so that may be a factor. Still learning!

Yes! This exactly. I’m learning Italian and having a dictionary open on one side would be awesome.

I was worried at first you were having a stroke. It took me a moment to realize it’s a damn good impression of the president of the United States.

2025 is the worst year… yet!

Same, it’s great. Battery life is extended, the fan isn’t screaming, and I have great process continuity between devices since I’m usually connecting to a central point.

Great article! I’ve been trying to explain VPNs to my family members for years and it just doesn’t stick. I’ll send this their way next time.

Pot roast smell, just musk and a little rosemary essential oil, was my single times secret weapon. People asking about it was a zero effort conversation starter and it dovetails perfectly with my style of attempts to be charming.

Yeah, alum, usually potassium alum, is just a solid block of one of the ingredients used in antiperspirants to plugs up sweat glands to keep you from sweating as much. That’s partially how it works as a styptic - it’s irritating, so blood vessels will contract, but it also just plugs up some of the smallest vessels. Its use was much more common before the widespread adoption of electric razors, even if just as a little styptic pencil.

Yes, I’m one of those hobby shaving people.

As far as I understand, a certain level of data hygiene will do wonders for even a basic setup.

For example, on our server, we have a container that maintains a kill-switched connection to a subscription VPN. Several other containers, including one with a browser, can only route their traffic through that container, and we don’t use any of them for anything personal or outside their intended purpose. We basically act as if there are completely different people on that connection, like we have a secret second family. Remote activity is done through a self-hosted VPN to the home network, then VNC to the containers.

If we want to use the subscription VPN on other devices, we connect to a different location and possibly use Tor browser for extra anonymity. No activity or information overlap, ever.

And lasts for ages. You can also use it to stop bleeding, though it STINGS.

Fuck yeah, rock it. I am a naturally very manly smelling person, sometimes to my dismay, so I always stayed with scents that “matched”: cedar, sandalwood, rosemary, juniper, bergamot, and the like. I often smelled like a lumber mill or a very conversational pot roast.

I got a scent sampler pack from Boy Smells a bit ago and I get so many compliments from others when I wear them.

I miss the old days, when the opposite seemed true about every other major release, though the early bars were low so that was straight progress for 1.0 through 95.