Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
1d ago
With the caveat that they are indeed better than nothing, aww Hell no pretty much sums up my opinion on the target date retirement funds. Maybe somewhere there's an organization that has a decent set of them but every time I've looked at them they've been chronic underperformers. I'm skeptical of the entire bond market in general, have been ever since cities going bankrupt became a Thing over a decade ago, so I stick with index funds and I've thrown in a RE fund for funsies.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
1d ago
I'm curious about Crash. Maybe twenty years ago, I tried reading the source novel, but found it painfully slow and uneventful. May have to try again.
Only seen the movie but fuck was that a good film. The casting of James Spader in the lead is particularly inspired, Elias Koteas puts in a Hell of a performance in his own right, and Deborah Unger is pure perfection.
Microsoft Works--now there's a name I've not heard in a long time. My admittedly shaky memory says it was clunky, the file format was annoying and (IIRC) wasn't as widely supported, etc. etc. It seemed to be the M$ attempt to clone AppleWorks, and not terribly well, either, so Works was something most folks ended up getting by virtue of it being bundled with their Packard Hell or whatever. You know what? The more I think about it, the more I'd agree that it's a good example of your point.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
1d ago
I'm on record as saying that it was mid-book five where I stopped my re-read, specifically the bloody menagerie, and I'm not sad that I stopped there. That said, I can't help but suspect that the middle books would have been more engaging if Jordan hadn't gotten sick, and some of them were pretty good in their own right. My shaky memory says it was pretty much good book bad book right up until the end.
Heh, yeah, I'm just sneaky like that!
ETA: Also, thanks! Can't agree hard enough with the absence of reality bit.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
2d ago
Yeah, this is why I said I could only speculate, I'm only really familiar with anorexia, though I've been unhealthy myself in pursuit of my weight goals. That said, while I have the ability to ignore hunger until it goes away, I'm trying to be good to my body right about now.
Meanwhile anorexia is often best modeled as a psychotic process (at least a psychotic level of functioning) that responds poorly to medication. Borderlines and other Cluster-B personality types usually have variable or sketchy reality testing, not absent.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
3d ago
Ahh, that's totally fair then. I'm tempted to rat-hole this whole thing further, but the truth is that I can only speculate as to the overlap between individuals with eating disorders and individuals with any flavor of personality disorder. Suffice it to say that I wonder if there isn't some underlying Thing that ties them together.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
3d ago
Yeah, saying eating disorders are difficult to manage is putting it mildly in my book, and IME the ED itself tends to have other comorbidities that will inexorably come out to play over time. I don't think they're evil, either, but I do have to strongly disagree that the fallout is restricted to themselves because it exacts a heavy toll on their loved ones as well, even the ones that understand that it's something to be managed, not fixed.
While Posner of course takes us through the forensic evidence from Dealey Plaza in exhaustive detail, he also wants to make the case for Oswald as a lone wolf, demonstrating both that he was a) the kind of person who could commit an act of savage, unprovoked violence and also b) not the sort of person any self-respecting intelligence agency would trust to run the hot tap. As such, the book is as much a character study of Oswald as it is a forensic analysis. I was familiar with the broad strokes of Oswald's biography (troubled childhood, Marines, attempted defection to the USSR, return to the US with Russian bride in tow), but Posner goes much deeper, and his portrayal is not at all flattering.
This, to me, is what makes Case Closed such a good anti-conspiracy read. Just as an accurate three-dimensional portrayal of the SBT necessarily precludes a lot of the more fanciful potential shooting locations and strongly points towards the TSBD, so too does an actual look at Oswald make clear that he was a highly troubled young man who wanted to Be Somebody and Do Something Important, not the mere patsy that he tried to portray himself as. Throw in trying to assassinate General Walker April 10th, 1963, and failing only because he hit the wood framing the window panes, and it's pretty clear that he had the motive, means, and the opportunity to be the shooter, despite his protestations to the contrary.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
8d ago
Go on...
I actually saw an ad for this at a screening of the original Hellraiser recently, first I'd heard of the game. I need to know more!
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
9d ago
Congratulations, happy for the two of you!
Coffee Haters Club
It's been awhile since I've done a purely coffee post, so let's rock! Today's brew is an old Sumatran, a honey process coffee from Kerinci Seblat that I roasted one week ago. It's an interesting cuppa, with strong herbals and a tantalizing sweetness that doesn't quite neatly match to a more precise flavor note such as a fruity taste or a raw sugar. In retrospect, it might well have been better if I had stopped roasting a degree or three earlier in the process and aimed more on the city side of the roast, but I had been thinking along general regional lines when deciding what temperature I was aiming for. If I hadn't been finishing this one up, I'd be interested to see how it would taste at a lower roast level. Checking myself against the cupping notes, it seems like I'm still pretty dialed in, as they read, "layered sweetness like a demurara [sic], rice syrup & honey accented by dried stone fruit, golden raisin, herbal aroma, sweet basil, pineapple sage." Yep, sage and golden raisin both check out as particular flavor notes, and I can definitely see the dried stone fruits, though the sweet notes weren't that distinct for me except for maybe rice syrup, and I'd never even heard of demerara syrup before reading this particular description.
More generally, I've been roasting down African coffees that I've already discussed, and even did a Yemeni roast that didn't turn out so good, hence its exclusion from the coffee haters notes, but I'll be getting back to Central/South American roasts soon enough, and may even do a batch of an espresso roast just to see how it tastes as a pour over.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
12d ago
Arguably the best one ever made is Master of Orion 2, and it's just the fact that it's an older DOS/WIN9X game, and the fact that it had terrible sequels, that even gives other games a fighting chance.
I've yet to play a 4x space game that kept me coming back the way MOO2 did. By modern standards, it's so unbalanced as to be broken AF, but even so, like the earlier iterations of Civ, it had a level of accessibility and that, "just one more turn," gameplay feedback loop that, IMAO, is far too rare these days.
Not only is it cool that you've reached that point where you know you can cash out, but it's extra cool that you'll be able to do so when your son is still so young. Writing games in 6502 is just the cherry on top for an old fogey like me who cut his metaphorical teeth on one its close cousin!
I'm older but in a similar space, financially, like perhaps a month's difference similar. Several things will need to fall into place, but barring a large scale crash, I'll probably be able to live quite comfortably on my accumulated savings. That said, as it stands right now I'll want to have a decent answer to the question of what to do with myself if I'm not working, so one of my major goals for the next several years is to find something worthwhile to point my brain towards so that it doesn't eat itself alive looking for problems to solve once Mojito Island gets old.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
15d ago
What can I say, it's a total favorite, eminently quotable, and for bonus points it was one of the things that got me into soul music. Fuck, I'm going to have to watch it again for that last reason alone!
I don't think we're in fundamental disagreement here. It sounds like you've developed some antibodies for folks using therapeutic speak to justify their own bad behavior, and I'm going to encourage you to hang onto those antibodies. If that means the word internalized makes you suspicious, no worries, you're aware of the reason why it makes you skeptical and that's the important part. The narcissists can and will weaponize anything and everything convenient to them to cast themselves in only sympathetic roles while demonizing anyone and everyone else necessary to do so. I totally killed that dragon and everyone was super stoked on me before I came here and gave you that joke, Jimmy, but I'm going to be the better person and stop making it an issue! We see this all the time not just with words like internalized, but also trauma, abuse, entitlement, etc. etc. etc.
I'm of the personal opinion that our culture has adopted therapy language in incredibly destructive ways, and that the whole field of psychology hasn't covered itself in glory, either, but that doesn't mean that the concepts are all invalid and that they're selling snake oil. I'm IT, but I actually work in the mental health field, so that means I talk therapeutic speak all the time, and all 'internalized' really parses out to is a strong, often ingrained habit. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Buddhists are big on mindfulness and warn about the danger of habits. How much conscious attention do you pay to the myriad daily habits that are necessary for life and hygiene such as the brushing of the teeth, bathing, eating, etc.? And neuroplasticity is the explanation for how, over time, repeated activity forms and strengthens a neural pathway in the brain, and a habit is simply a neural pathway that becomes so strong that it takes barely any effort to achieve the desired result, in the same way that someone experienced with a manual transmission will have no problem starting on a hill, while someone just learning the clutch would struggle. Neuroplasticity explains the other side of the coin, too. Just like I've forgotten how to play many of the songs that I used to play on guitar because I stopped playing a decade ago, so too can habits be neglected for long enough that their associated neural pathways atrophy to the point where they are no longer functional, and another good example in this case is that my brother reminded me of a particular chord in a song that I couldn't remember, but that I had taught him decades ago, and that he still remembered because he got way better than I ever did and never got as far away from it as I did, either.
I was actually making my comment in the vein of that whole maybe the purpose of my life is solely to serve as a warning to others, and I have made a bad habit of talking about how the stereotypical midlife crisis can be intensely real and heartbreakingly spectacular. One of the overwhelmingly common themes is, strategies that people use to try and deal with their shit that don't really work in the long run and actually break completely over time, and that started for me in earnest in my early forties and picked up speed until I hit the wall in my late forties. I've spent just about five years now trying to dig out and get my shit together in earnest. That, in turn, brings me to the answer to how one becomes aware of habitual/internalized attitudes and behaviors which is technically surprisal, but for the purposes of this discussion, pain. Lots and lots of pain. I love quoting Feynman when it comes to this shit, specifically that the first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. I thought I had dealt with my feelings, but I was fooling myself, and it took my marriage unraveling and having to put my dad into a home in the same time frame to overwhelm me enough to break me of that belief.
Your final paragraph shows that you know the answer to your question of how that assertion that someone has changed their ways can be taken seriously: the person in question doesn't simply take responsibility for their behavior with word, they back up that ownership by acting with obvious openness and integrity. That's simple to say, much harder to live by, but I'm tryin', Ringo.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
15d ago
I mean, there's a museum in Dublin whose entire marketing schtick is based on the idea that there's more to Irish people than whiskey and spuds, and they're so aggressive about it that it goes full circle and becomes full-blown oikophobic – and yet, listening to these bands sort of makes me feel how black Americans supposedly felt about Louis Armstrong appealing to white audiences by puttin' on and deliberately playing up negative black stereotypes.
Well, the Irish are the blacks of Europe, and Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin, soooo... say it once, say it loud?
Completely agree about the Guinness, btw, it's just not the same.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
16d ago
Something that has always stuck with my about Scott is that he had a rough time in High School, especially with bullying, and, from time to time, this bursts forth in his posts. He's open about his bad experiences back then.
I think it's odd that any person over 35 would still have that much emotional resonance with anything short of real-deal physical / sexual abuse from childhood and adolescence. To my knowledge, Scott doesn't claim anything to that level.
While my thirty-odd to forty-odd year-old self would have readily agreed with you, a funny thing happened to me as my mid-life deepened, and in the past year and change, I've been spending a lot of time and paying a lot of attention to some of the specific attitudes and behaviors I ended up adopting in Junior High and High School, simply because they still persist and no longer serve their intended purpose. It turns out that in my case, at least, my own rough time in school did still resonate with me, but not consciously, for I had internalized attitudes and behaviors that ultimately helped me to fit in at the time, and it is only in having seen them again and understood them that I can let those things go.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
16d ago
Por que no los dos? I think that America in general now has more of an interest in spicier peppers, giving some truth to 1, but also that 2 has generally been true for my entire life, hence the warning that your waitress gives you. More generally, back when I could reliably tolerate genuinely spicy food, I would frequently receive warnings similar to the one you received in the Chinese restaurant yourself. One of the Indian places that I liked to frequent had both a hot and an, "Indian hot," level of spice, and another did a sliding scale of 1-10 on every dish. I can remember the chef coming to speak to us, impressed that we could actually tolerate food at the level of a 10.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
20d ago
I want to preface this comment by restating that I am also judging primarily by my own experience here, so this is definitely a YMMV situation. Additionally, I would agree that normies aren't particularly well equipped to deal with sociopaths either, but I would nevertheless liken their comparative advantages to having bronze age tools and weapons as opposed to stone age ones, by virtue of their natural ability for nonverbal communication. If, on top of that, the autistic individual in question was raised in the classic autistic father/borderline mother pairing, then there is likely, at the least, an additional layer of cognitive distortion hampered by mother's chronic gaslighting that must be overcome, and likely a host of maladaptive coping mechanisms as well, and here I am thinking of things like Scott being totally cool with polyamory and yet tweeting about his intense jealousy in the moment, because I personally identify with that exact sort of hacking around actual feelings via thoughts and habits. I did far too much of that, to my cost, as said ability was something that steadily degraded until it broke down completely in middle age.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
20d ago
Right off the top of my head, literally certainly qualifies. Rewind about a century or so, and it was much more common to see the word literally used as a more emphatic version of the word figuratively, which actually makes a sort of sense, given that a common use of the word literature is to refer to creative writing, be it fiction, poetry, or whatever. Example: by voting for x, we are literally eating our own seed corn.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
20d ago
Being more realistic, autistic sex-positive dorks are going to attract sociopaths like flies to shit.
I cannot help but wonder at the prevalence of a cluster B parent in the lives of the autistic sex-positive dorks in question. I know this is my own experience talking here, but I strongly believe that having been conditioned to accept a sociopath's behavior as "normal", those dorks would naturally be more vulnerable to manipulation, hence spawning perpetual Drama.
Muninn
"There's nothing to see here, people, keep moving on..."
24d ago
I swear to Odin I posted my thanks for your report of your experiences in here earlier, but it seems that it was eaten by a glitch in the matrix. Anyway, appreciate the report, Omarchy was my alternate distro choice to try out Real Soon Now and I may replace my aging Pop! install with it because Cosmic desktop is teh suXX0rz and I'm tired of dealing with its dumpster fires.
Indeed they will, and I wouldn't disagree with anything that you're saying in a general sense. Bonds are still, generally speaking, viewed as "safer" than stocks, and in many cases, I expect that they are, and are still a good choice for the more risk averse. For me personally, it always made more sense to go with straight stock indexes simply because they had the best long-term returns, and the only time period in which that was even close to coming into question in my own life was the doldrums of the Great Recession. That's something that I'd probably think long and hard about if I were a younger investor, and there's a good chance that I'll reallocate down the road if/when financial turmoil gets significantly worse. In these Interesting times of inflation and interest rates once again starting to reflect reality, I may well see things differently a few years down the road, but for now, my concerns lie elsewhere.
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