• 1 Post
  • 140 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle


  • I had a partner with genital HSV-1. YMMV, but in general:

    • No BFD; the stigma of HSV is the result of a marketing campaign in the 70s (not 100% on the date) by a company selling HSV treatments
    • Be honest and inform your prospective partners; yeah, some people who haven’t done the reading are going to react negatively
    • Antiviral treatments are available; the one my partner was a daily pill
    • In eight years of unprotected sex with her, she never had an outbreak and I test negative
    • You may never have another outbreak, you may have regular flare-ups, or something in between
    • Talk to your doctor and any take all of my previous comments like the Internet rumor it is

  • Your point is spot-on. Fully agreed: modern dishwashers are way more energy- and water-efficient than manually washing dishes. Like at least an order of magnitude.

    I personally struggle with this one for different reasons. Energy and water consumption are a very tight concern since I live on a sailboat. I can’t just crank the tap to get more water. Marine health is also a concern since, ya know, it’s all around me, and I eat some of these critters around my boat. Surfactants in detergent are deeply problematic in the environment and are not removed by most wastewater treatment. Moreover, surfactants impede wastewater treatment because of the emulsification interfere with aerobic treatment (Poland seems to be actively working on the problem). FWIW, manual dish detergent also has surfactants, especially SDS/SLS, so manual washing is not a panacea.

    I don’t think there is a “right” answer to be had. But it sticks in my craw both ways.



  • Thank you for this. My wife left about a week ago. It blindsided me, but I’m hindsight I could have seen it.

    1. Happy to help
    2. JFC, I’m sorry to hear what you’re going through, and I deeply empathize. I’m just some douchebag on the internet, but if you need a trained ear, please feel free to DM me.
    3. Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but a critical component is giving yourself grace and emotional space

    Now I realize that if I don’t work on myself, I will bring all of my problems to any future relationship. I’m only at the very start of the journey, and every day is still painful – our relationship lasted 15 years, and that can’t be unwound quickly.

    There is sense of closure and ability of growth in understanding the whys. Explicitly working to avoid carrying forward the injuries is a huge step. As you probably already read in Gottman: the best couple’s therapy is individual therapy. Empathy by way of anecdote: when I was reading Levine’s “Attached,” so many of the example conversations had me feeling like “Were y’all in the room when we were arguing?!”

    I’m serious about the being a sounding board/ear. I hope you find inner peace sooner rather than later.


  • Fully agreed. According to Gottman’s research, relationships can survive “infidelity” just fine. It’s the betrayal of trust that nukes relationships.

    I can take a lot of shit, but I just don’t want to be lied to. And that’s why I prefer ENM/poly. People are gonna do people things, but letting my partner have that outlet, not feeling trapped in any way, is (in my experience) critical to keeping the flame alive.


  • She didn’t change; she finally revealed herself. In short, her attachment type is anxious-avoidant. That shit burns down everything around it. She was jealous AND cheating, which was just rich given that we were ENM/poly. I was so busy with life, work, and my sailboat that I only had romantic bandwidth for her.

    I am forever changed. I went on an intensive therapeutic and introspective journey. Anxious-avoidant people can be immensely attractive anxious attachment types like me. I identified that in myself, addressed my own life traumas, and developed my personal boundaries. These days, I’m less poly, more monogamish. I approached dating with explicitly defined intentions and must-haves, rather than just random chance. I found the partner of my dreams, and we’re about to celebrate eight years together.

    Early on, there were mutual warning signs, but we both thought we had the tools to face any challenges. As I mentioned, I had poor boundaries, which now would put an immediate end to any such bullshit.

    What can I offer now?

    • Learn Attachment Theory and know yourself
    • Read John Gottman books before and all during your relationships
    • Get professional therapeutic help; CBT, DBT, EFT… you might already have all the tools, but a good therapist will teach how to use them in integration
    • Learn non-violent communication and/or take a workshop; this will provide massive return on investment in all aspects of your life
    • Practice meditation and mindfulness; also pays dividends everywhere



  • Regularly throughout my life. I’m also 5’7". It seems to be less of an issue now that I’m older. People are going to like what they like. But people who limit their choices to strict deterministic traits tend to completely skip right over awesome people, and then they wonder why they’re partners are so terrible.

    So yeah, this shit is going to happen. You’ll also get chosen for your height. Focus on improving those physical traits over which you have control.


  • I collaborate with other people who are also on DRS. Before I had teammates on DRS, I tried using Blender, Openshot, Shotcut, KDenLive. Those NLEs are just not there yet.

    I actually started my solid modeling/parametric journey on FreeCAD, and I prefer the parametric workflow. I switched to Inventor when FreeCAD kept crashing when the object tree was ~60 primitives even on my monstrous workstation. I would love to go back to FreeCAD, because fuck AutoDesk in its ear, so hopefully they get the stability + complexity under control.


  • Rant on, bruddah! I am also in the “must use it for work” group, and I despise my work laptop with the fury of 1000 suns. In my personal work and prior to this new job, I was staying on Win 10 for Inventor, AutoCAD, FL Studio (and a bunch of VST synths I bought), and DaVinci Resolve Studio. My experience with my work laptop has spurred my nearly-complete jump to Linux.

    FL Studio has been replaced by Bitwig, new learning curve and loss of the VSTs just being the cost I have to eat. I almost have DRS running in perfectly in Aurora Linux. And my two Win 10 machines will just go into an isolated network until I can figure out workarounds/replacements for the Autodesk garbage.


  • Depends on which context in which you’re interested. Internet? Hm… For the refit part and thinking through/designing for all of these factors, maybe The Duracell Project (https://www.youtube.com/@TheDuracellProject/videos). Most of the people I know actually doing this stuff are… actually doing it. There’s not a lot of time and bandwidth to create an accessible internet resource. And the seriously salty folk, most of them barely have email. Among my sailing peers, I’m the most technologically capable, and that’s not saying much. :D We tend to eschew the high tech that invariably will let us down when we most need it. Much of seafaring knowledge and skills are born from hard experience and sitting around getting drunk with old salts, which is its own kind of hard experience. :D

    You start small, push the limits, break shit, find fixes in order get back to port, and find what works for you with what you have at hand. Anything you couldn’t fix, you go to your marina neighbors or the internet to find jury-rigs for that specific failure mode. In your day-to-day life, learning some basic knots, how to make whoopie slings and soft shackles with Dyneema, wilderness first aid, wilderness first responder training, even basic disaster preparedness all help change your perspective on how you approach your day. For example, drilling for natural disaster response, at least for me, shifts my mindset into a “what could go wrong,” “what are the failure modes of [this critical component]” way of thinking. These are aspects you can explore without a boat or having wilderness nearby.

    I haven’t watched a lot of her stuff, but Wind Hippie Sailing (https://www.youtube.com/@WindHippieSailing/videos) is a seriously badass solo dirtbagger (not a pejorative; it’s technical term cribbed from rock climbing). Solo sailors are a breed apart and a few steps above the rest of us salty dogs who have crew.

    Downloaded to my Kiwix app or installed on phone/tablet and mirrored across a bunch of backup devices:

    • 100 Rabbits
    • Ready.gov
    • Animated Knots
    • U.S. Army Ranger Handbook (hard to ignore 200 years of military refinement)
    • Survival Manual (sadly no longer available)

    Now if you’re okay with books, lots of great resources there.

    • “Sailing Alone Around the World” by Joshua Slocum
    • “Sailing a Serious Ocean” by John Kretschmer
    • “Cruising in Serrafyn,” “The Self Sufficient Sailor,” “The Capable Cruiser” by Larry and Lyn Pardey; hell, almost all of their books are great reads; they sailed the world for decades with almost no electric and no engine
    • "Where There Is No Doctor and “Where There Is No Dentist,” Hesperian Health Guides
    • “Annapolis Book of Seamanship” by John Rousmaniere
    • Just about anything by Fatty Goodlander, funny stories on the dirtbagging lifestyle

    Let me know if you any additional questions. Happy to share.

    Edit to add: Practical Sailor (https://www.practical-sailor.com/), a great internet resource . JFC, how did I forget that?!



  • Sure, I’m not going to be replacing any modern consumables or modern tech. And the LiFePO4 cells are ultimately going to wear out. The solar cells will lose generation capacity. But I’ll probably be long dead before that capacity becomes a concern. Hopefully the hardcopy books don’t get wet, because that’s where I keep the stuff I don’t keep in my head.

    That said, there’s very little I can’t fix on my boat. I did all of the work in my complete refit. If you know any open ocean sailors or sailboat delivery captains, we are a ridiculously resourceful bunch. Prepared AF. Kinda like the Eagle Scouts of the sea. Also, our gear is robust, resilient, and fault tolerant.

    We sit around and practice this shit. There’s not much else to do out in the ocean. :D “Oh, your refrigerator compressor died.” I’ve got a brand new, spare compressor and a second refrigerator; move the most critical foods accordingly. “The second fridge died.” Immediately switch to non-refrigeration food preservation techniques. “You’re running critically low on salt.” Use the brine rejection from the watermaker. And so on. Because of all the interlocking dependencies on sailboats, we have failover modes all the way down to tarring the hull and weaving hemp lines. Okay, not that far, but you get the idea.


  • A) I’m very resourceful and have formal wilderness training, but naked and completely foreign environs… Probably not going to do so well, especially if the weather is harsh.

    B) Pretty well. My backpack is my bag of tricks and my daily loadout includes my multitool, an IFAK, some clothing layers, and two water bottles. But it’s still going to be a challenge because of completely foreign environs.

    C) Perfectly awesome, living my best life. My home is my sailboat with solar, 40000Wh battery storage, water makers, extensive first aid, dried food and spices, and more books, movies, and video games than I could possibly finish in my remaining years.




  • I don’t really get all the hate on the comments.

    Agreed. “Oh no! Not an ETL!” I wish more applications were backed by MySQL, MariaDB, Mongo, etc. Give me the option of encryption at rest, and when it’s time to change apps, I have granular control over everything.

    On the other hand, the advantage of all the hate is everyone presenting their faves and providing their reasons. So …net win for the audience?