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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • On one hand if you actually read the article this number is already misleading because they didn’t even bother to include the price with materials, which are leather (and assuming high quality leather at that), which probably drives that number up a bit although nowhere near the final cost.

    On the other hand, duh, this is how commerce works? I make something (or buy it from someone who can make it in high volumes) and then sell it at higher price than I sold it for. I guess it’s just the commentary that there are people out there with enough disposable income to spend 3 grand on a bag? That is ridiculous for sure but it’s nothing new, been around for decades


  • What’s crazy is you can get a whole home surge protector in your panel for like $130 plus the cost of a breaker for your panel (~$10-20) if you don’t have an empty one of high amperage (been awhile since I installed mine but I think it needs a 50a breaker). they’re pretty simple to install but if you’re not extremely comfortable working with electricity you absolutely should get an electrician to do it and not fuck around inside your panel though. If your home is relatively new you also potentially already have this as iirc they added this to building codes in many locales in recent years

    Edit: I’m realizing the monthly fee is for generator monitoring. I have a generac generator and they charge similar fees if you use their crazy overpriced hardware but the genmon project on GitHub uses a raspberry pi and some cheap cables to achieve much more robust monitoring without the need for a subscription if you have a Honeywell or generac generator. Fuck fees.

    But that’s actually a decent price for a whole home surge protector + install, which makes me assume it’s probably a cheaper one. Mines one of the nicer spec’d models bc I use a decent amount of power, there are def cheaper options, plus I’m sure they get them much cheaper buying in bulk


  • I don’t have a name for it but excessive idle scrolling without purpose can be considered a deactivating behavior and may contribute to depressive states. It generally does not give us a sense of accomplishment or happiness.

    It’s not a horrible thing to engage in of course but it’s all about moderation and context. 10-15 minutes on your break? Probably not the worst thing. 3 hours after work? Maybe not the best but for some people maybe helps wind down. 3 hours right after you wake up? Probably not a great idea, setting a bad momentum for the day. But all of these as isolated incidents? Not a huge issue. All of them happening regularly? Maybe look at replacing them with something that makes you feel more of a sense of achievement or at least feels intentional and see how that impacts your mood. Might be more drastic than you’d think



  • Are you talking about haloperidol? It doesn’t really get used a sedative in emergency psychiatric situations but often gets paired with benzodiazepines. Sometimes one or the other. Sedative would more typically be Ativan. To be clear haldol does have some sedative effects but it is not typically used as a first line sedative in inpatient psychiatric settings; it’s a poor choice for this purpose because it has a fairly slow onset for sedative effects to be seen (~15-20m for many individuals)

    Haloperidol is used for acute psychosis and agitation. Ativan is used for sedation. Care has to be taken because benzos/ativan can worsen delirium, eg in an elderly patient, thus the use of haldol if they are agitated. Or you might use diazepam if you are intending a chemical restraint as this lasts longer than ativan. But this metabolizes via liver so you again have to be careful about pt, late stage alcoholic would get ativan bc metabolic pathway is renal. Additionally ativan alone be best fit for someone detoxing from alcohol who is agitated as the underlying cause of their agitation better targeted by benzos than haldol. Knowledge of pt is key. Of course that info is not always available unfortunately

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298219/

    Project path explains rationale behind psychopharmacology for emergency treatment of agitation better than I can


  • If Russia is forcing this for all people with autism they are foolish but that is extremely unlikely and a reactionary response

    What is far more likely is that this is a treatment for extreme behavior in a small subset of people with autism. It is important to remember that autism is a spectrum and not everyone with autism is a secret stem genius who is just socially awkward. It’s actually kind of fucked up to keep projecting that stereotype. There are people with autism who are bad at math and science. There are people with autism who cannot speak. And there are people with autism whose cognitive and expressive deficits cause them to get so frustrated and irritable that they frequently become violent.

    That said it is crucially important to note that treating with haloperidol as a first line of defense is also very fucked up. That is a strategy that is basically saying “shut these kids up”. It is a strategy of sedation and a lack of concern over side effects. Haloperidol is admittedly safe and usually well tolerated but not always and is heavily sedating. Drugs like risperdal do not have nearly as much of a sedative effect, an arguably more tolerable side effect profile (weight gain and breast tissue accumulation/gynecomastia are the big ones), and allow the individual to maintain a better quality of life. And with either additional focus has to be on simultaneous clinical treatment to address skill deficits in stress management, executive functioning, etc as well as government policy to increase access to early intervention to decrease likelihood of future cases



  • Cloudflare has absolutely told websites to fuck off because they don’t like their content. They haven’t done it a ton of times but they absolutely have. No one cares because the sites they’ve done it to are toxic cesspool shitholes that, to be fair, the world is probably better off without. But each time it showed that cloudflare can simply wield its power if it feels like it.

    If your site becomes controversial in the future and is protected/hosted by cloudflare don’t be surprised if they suddenly send a letter saying “fuck off”. They’ve become arbiters of internet censorship and we have accepted it because the daily stormer and kiwi farms and 8chan are bad.

    The ridiculous part is all of those sites are still accessible; daily stormer and kiwi farms both still accessible from clearnet (iirc 8chan is tor only) so cloudflare dropping wasn’t even all that effective. Well funded hate speech found a way. But for the next ones that don’t have major alt right cash behind them to fund cloudflare alternatives they’ll just simply disappear. And then we will have the internet where corporations like cloudflare, who should absolutely be content agnostic, decide what we can and cannot see. You may think it’s fine right now because they’re doing it against websites that are admittedly gross and terrible, but what happens when they overstep and the line blurs?

    They should act like a proper tier 1 provider: find evidence of crossing a legal threshold, get a court order, and terminate service if something that bad has occurred. Anything less and they suck it up and honor the contract they signed. They haven’t, so fuck cloudflare. The internet is an amazing place but it’s also a disgusting abhorrent cesspool. Don’t get involved in hosting it if you can’t deal with that.



  • Flac 44.1 16bit level 3. Host with something that meets your needs. I have my files in jellyfin and navidrome and can then access the library remotely either through jellyfin web client, navidrome web client, substreamer, Finamp, kodi, etc. but this way if another amazing format comes up down the line I will always have my library in a good state to transcode from. Tag and sort everything with beets.io (or musicbrainz picard is great, I just like that beets is cli). This results in a library I can access on my phone, laptop, tv, carplay, etc

    Technically you could go for 24bit but imo the extra file size isn’t justified. though one could make that argument for flac vs 320cbr mp3, transcoding 320 mp3 is more likely to create artifacts, thus the reason for keeping around flac

    Alac may be easier for you if you use mac



  • The characters being ancillary and easily edited out/cut is by design so they can still use the movies in foreign markets that are hostile to lgbt rights

    If the gay character is only identified as gay in one scene where they say “I’m gay” or kiss for 10 seconds you can just cut that part out and still screen it in Saudi Arabia. Disney doesn’t actually give a shit about lgbt issues, they give a shit about what will sell

    Thus a prominent main character who is gay or a movie about a character coming to terms with queer identity is far less likely because that basically means they instantly lose out on much of the lucrative international market



  • I used my old ones a ton. I had the original nook and had been using it for 13 years. I finally upgraded to a newer one with a color e ink screen and I like it a lot. It’s a boox ultra tab c. It was pricey so I wouldn’t get it unless you really read a lot and like e ink

    I use it for reading almost exclusively. I read 1-2 books a week and a few volumes of graphic novels/manga per week as well. I have poor vision and the e ink is much easier on my eyes than lcd/oled screens. I can read on this for hours but reading on a traditional phone/tablet/laptop gives me eye strain/headache after a few hours. It’s nice to have a screen you can read with no back or front light. I do use the front light at times but I usually have it off

    It’s handy for taking notes and annotations. I’ve read it’s good for drawing as well but I am terrible at drawing so I don’t know. The stylus seems comparable to my friends Apple Pencil except you can use the back as an eraser like an actual pencil

    battery life is much better to a traditional tablet - a charge lasts 2-3 days usually, can last longer if I keep the front light off and all the wireless radio stuff off. I’ve gotten it to last a week. It’s a bit heavy bc of the battery though

    Wrt color it’s a mixed bag. It’s a very handy feature for manga and graphic novels. But the color panels are new tech so they come with issues; primarily ghosting/image retention. After some time I’ve found an ideal mix of settings to minimize the issue and make the color look as good as possible. The boox os also has a little nav ball that can quickly force a full refresh the screen at any point to remove any retained image. But the color is still not comparable to an lcd/oled by any means

    Mine is based on a kaleido3 panel. There’s a newer gallery3 panel that has more vibrant color but with a trade off of noticeably slower refresh rates. It’s not actually an eink panel but something called acep; it was more meant for advertisements/billboards so quick refresh rates weren’t a priority. There’s also no real options for a device with it at the moment aside from one that has real mixed reviews and one that has an open preorder with no eta on delivery as far as I know.

    It’s also a somewhat capable android tablet but I don’t really get this part. Like you can run YouTube and games and stuff. But i don’t know why you would bother? It’s workable but not nearly as good. The exception to this is web browsing depending on the site. Heavy text based sites work well in Firefox.




  • This is pretty much what I meant by that fucked up misinterpretation of stoicism

    Like you have the actual Aurelius stoicism which has some very good value; everyone should read meditations once or twice. But then it’s been cliff notes’d and perverted by a bunch of people into to lose the message entirely from “be in control of your emotions” to what you’ve described: horrific rigidity to keep it all in at all times until of course it doesn’t work anymore and you break down spectacularly. Like somehow the message has gone from “control” to “emotional numbness”

    A similar dynamic has happened with nihilism where some the writings on it are not so bleak and terrible; that it is an expression of freedom. But over the years it’s been perverted into nothing matters, why bother



  • I am an actual licensed therapist and while there are a number of real actual creating barriers specific to men pursuing mental health treatment there are a few factors I’ve consistently seen that are ubiquitous across gender, race, sexuality, class, etc

    Money, time, availability

    Therapy is inaccessible. I am a therapist who mostly works with insurance companies. They pay me about 100-115/hr. My clients will often have a high deductible health plan which means they need to pay this $100-115 per session until they hit their deductible, which can be 5,000+ dollars. It’s a lot to ask someone to pay $100+ weekly. On top of that they still usually have a responsibility afterwards of (typically) 10-30% so $10-34.5 per meeting which is still a notable weekly cost for many people on the high end especially after shelling out $400+ a month for months on end.

    Other clients have PPO insurance which is a fixed cost per meeting but this can vary wildly. More affluent clients have excellent PPOs where they might pay $10-20 per meeting which is not terrible. But that’s rare. We are often covered under the “specialist” copay and many PPO plans have tiered provider coverage now. So a copay for me might be $50 or more per meeting (the worst I saw was $125 which was absurd because it was actually $27 more than I’d get from the insurer in question).

    So you have this on top of these plans taking hundreds of dollars out of each pay check. “Well budget for it”. Hard to do because the need for therapy can be inconsistent and many of these people are coming in fo(and specifically symptoms like poor money management). Then on top of that even if you do budget for it you have the inherent issue that the need for outpatient therapy is often not dire/acute so if something more pressing comes up (eg a serious dental/medical issue, car breaks down, short on rent) therapy might be the corner to cut if it’s already established because in the overwhelming majority of cases you won’t die without it; it will just lower your quality of life (sometimes significantly so)

    Then comes the time portion. Even if you can get past the cost barrier you have the availability of the therapist and yourself. I’m a night owl and I work late but many of my colleagues don’t. I’m pretty nontraditional though, no kids and my partner is very career oriented themselves whereas many of my peers tend to value the traditional 9-5 much more so they can be home for their children and such.

    So when you go to schedule with someone it’s often that you can only get seen during business hours. It’s one thing when it’s a doctors appointment that you have once every few months that you need to duck out of work for but a weekly hour long engagement is much harder to explain. This brings back in the masculinity issues - many men find this basically impossible to disclose to the workplace and basically wouldn’t even try to get an exception for weekly therapy. Even without explicitly saying so asking for 1 hour open a week consistently for a doctors appointment is going to be perceived as therapy by many. But stigma aside many of us simply can’t do that. I’m on the practitioner side and I know I’ve ignored my own physical health at times because it was inconvenient to schedule doctor appointments during my workday.

    Our systems of employment (at least in the USA) simply do not provide or protect for medical leave, even when it’s very brief and especially when you are a low level employee (executives and admins tend to have less of an issue ducking out for doctors appointments in my experience at least). There is no legal right to paid or unpaid time off for medical appointments in the USA and that is completely disgusting in 2023.

    The final piece is practitioner availability. I have a waitlist through October at the moment and am not accepting new clients. All of my colleagues are in the same boat. The old practices I used to work at constantly call me to see if I’ll take any referrals because their waitlists are so overloaded. The hospitals and clinics I have referral relationships with email me every week for updates. It’s extremely stressful. Every new client, especially adolescent, complains that they are happy to finally have someone after waiting 3-6 months. Even if someone wants a therapist they have to wait ages. It is not uncommon that I get someone and when I call them to start they say they don’t even remember why they called in the first place.

    We need more people doing the work. Or ideally we need to make societal reforms so that there are less people experiencing mental health issues. I’ve been doing this almost 15 years now. I, and anyone who doesn’t exclusively work with the rich, can tell you that a significant degree of what we work with is people who lack resources and not proper mental illness. I mean, it is depression and anxiety, but it’s because they have been paycheck to paycheck for years or theyre under a mountain of student loans or credit card debt and the stress is just too much to bear. And their jobs won’t give them raises and there aren’t any other jobs out there that pay more. Not everyone is a software developer or investment banker that can jump ship to another 6 figure job with cushy benefits. Most people work jobs that pay 40-60k with shit benefits and little upward mobility.

    To answer your question more directly:

    In my opinion it’s a systemic issue based around that super fun phrase everyone loves, “toxic masculinity”. I personally do not subscribe to gender labels but I am amab/male presenting and get a lot of male clients as a result. Many of them tell me they hide the fact that they are in therapy from everyone but their partner. This is indicative of the problem; that being in therapy is weak. That being in therapy makes them a bitch, a wuss, all kinds of pejorative terms. It’s bad, is my point.

    So part of the answer imo is not in having doggies and cool dude stuff in the office. Its far more complex and involves redefining masculinity to still including things like being a lumberjack or carpentry or whatever. From there though you need to shed the part where it means you have to be emotionally numb to everything, constantly display strength, embrace the fucked up misrepresentation of stoicism that has you shove all your feelings into your stomach, and glorify anger, rage, and violence as the only appropriate means of emotional expression.

    this could also be extended to the stigma surrounding therapy itself and the tendency to associate therapy need with weakness. This is an issue that goes beyond therapy though; there are people who won’t see medical doctors for the same reason even though they’re in physical pain. Our pride is our downfall.

    Tldr make therapy cheap and accessible, make protections for workers to seek medical care, increase the amount of practitioners (or decrease the need for them), and systemic reform to the societal concept of masculinity and pride. So probably gonna take awhile