programmers-off-topic

[cyan shadow]

Is this what you use?

(It looks pretty good, ngl)

[dusty pollen]

(https://gist.github.com/irocendar/053a5d713a54e9708a328553da0a3d18 if you still want it! instructions at the bottom)

[cyan shadow]

Ah, thank you!!!

[pliant snow]

I use just pure Arch, but while it's not difficult to use persay, it requires a level of technical knowledge I only got by using other linux distros for a few years. Endeavour is, in my opinion, the best of the "Arch-based, but simplify the annoying things"

It keeps things like 99% the same as Arch, and only adds a handful of items preconfigured

[cyan shadow]

so I see

[pliant snow]

Opposed to some like Manjaro, which seems to inject more and more of their own stuff that just ends up causing issues down the line

[dusty pollen]

you should know though that if you accidentally end up in an arch support forum/site/etc at any point that they get very snotty about all arch derivatives (and also refuse to help)

[pliant snow]

They get snooty even if you're using regular arch, it's not personal

[dusty pollen]

manjaro was the reason I moved to actual arch, I never looked back tbh

[dusty pollen]

yes but they get extra snooty about derivatives

[pliant snow]

fuck.

[crystal wren]

The bottom line for me is that the distro I've broken least over the years is Arch. I don't understand how... but that's been the experience.

[pliant snow]

how dare they do this to me

[crystal wren]

GBA purple best purple.

[pliant snow]

This is certainly true. I have an ubuntu machine I occasionally use at work, and I'm shocked how badly it wants to break itself. I've been using arch for five years or so now and the only issues I've had is intel breaking their own drivers lol (which got rolled back almost immediately)

[crystal wren]

...Ubuntu being the one I've broken the most, yes.

[pliant snow]

what about purple steam deck

[dusty pollen]

I don’t think my experience with ubuntu counts because it was exclusively having it installed on the servers I was pushing continuous deployment nodejs stuff to and I feel like blaming it for that is just mean

[crystal wren]

Stop making me want a Steam Deck so I can make it GBA purple...

[dusty pollen]

(fun fact: I learned DevOps stuff for the first time by being like two days into my internship and being given a devops course to take over and fix )

[pliant snow]

what about purple gamecube controller

[worn remnant]

(anecdote time!) i can't speak for standard ubuntu, but the ubuntu server/lts i'm typing on right now has been solid enough. a few minor snags over the years but nothing i would consider "broken". things like repository keys getting fucky so apt hangs/spits asinine errors until you run a command that could easily have been automated, for example

[pliant snow]

is it headless?

[worn remnant]

no, i'm at the head currently

[cyan shadow]

seems to be a common enough experience

few things make my mother resort to cursing

ubuntu was one of them

[pliant snow]

I used it for a few years, but they just made some weird decisions

teenage engineering has some cool industrial design

I'm not sure this is one of them

https://teenage.engineering/products/computer-1

[earnest cairn]

https://hackerone.com/reports/2293343 wow

[sonic mirage]

$35k bounty

[safe dragon]

fun

client side code is always exciting

[dusty pollen]

congrats to the person, major yikes for gitlab

[safe dragon]

alright I have decided to order the framework 13

[dusty pollen]

why are they so expensive

[ivory shadow]

Because Framework doesn't have enough economy of scale to match the other manufacturers of laptops.

[safe dragon]

they are an evil company that want to exploit you for all you're worth

[ivory shadow]

Or that. Probably that.

[safe dragon]

[ivory shadow]

They do make a terrible non-upgradeable desktop after all

[safe dragon]

the idea would be that you could gradually upgrade after this and never buy a completely new one again

[safe dragon]

still bizarre

[dusty pollen]

oh I do like the upgradability part, it’s just… that’s SO expensive

half the reason I want upgradability is because of being broke

[safe dragon]

it's not a low spec laptop to be fair but...

you can definitely get the same specs for cheaper elsewhere

[dusty pollen]

it would have to match the specs of some of the giants at that price. I think that’s relatively upgraded XPS or macbook price

ik it’s because of scale, but just,,, expensive

[ivory shadow]

Well, the 12 should in theory be affordable if you can deal with the limited performance compared to the 13 and 16

[cinder karma]

Yeah that is out of my budget lol

I just deal with getting used business laptops

[ivory shadow]

The trick is to have a job that gives you an equipment budget and make your job pay for it. At least I have several friends with frameworks who did that lol

(I also have several friends who wish they could do that, but they are forced to put their equipment budget into Apple shit because they need to be able to test things on Safari.)

[safe dragon]

I would get murdered by my work if I even dared to use my personal laptop for work

or vice versa

using my work laptop outside work

[ivory shadow]

The other trick is to have a job that doesn't care about that lol

[marble jewel]

My work has their laptops so locked down now that they're barely even useful for doing work anymore

[safe dragon]

lmao well for reasons my job has to be very strict with security

[marble jewel]

Like sometimes they accidentally block our own internal websites

[safe dragon]

most people at the company have pretty locked down laptops but luckily as a dev I have more control

[marble jewel]

Or they rushed to implement/enforce passwordless before the applications could even support the new authentication mechanism

Which means everytime I need to login to certain apps, I have to do a password reset, and that pasword only works for that day

[safe dragon]

ew

[dusty pollen]

I had two work laptops when I was doing my gap year internship, one on each extreme contractor life

[safe dragon]

I have a password reset every 3 months which I already find awful

[marble jewel]

Yeah it turns out passwordless is just that you never know your password because it is randomized daily

[dusty pollen]

we had zero protections on one of them and the other had no usable usb ports etc

[safe dragon]

like everyone else at the company I just have a pattern to my passwords cause it'd be a nightmare to remember otherwise

if it changes every 3 months

[ivory shadow]

> passwordless
> look inside
> password

[marble jewel]

Serverless

[ivory shadow]

> look inside
> servers

[safe dragon]

serverless is such a terrible name

[dusty pollen]

probably using that different forms of identity idea where they wanted to tick off the “physical device” box instead of the knowledge box for some reason

[ivory shadow]

> cloud
> look inside
> not accumulated water vapor in the upper atmosphere

[safe dragon]

ah I get a free screwdriver with my laptop, incredible

I shall throw away my iFixit kit

I will no longer need it

[ivory shadow]

Your screwdriver came with a free laptop? wow

[dusty pollen]

oh in that case, that’s a bargain

[ivory shadow]

I hope Framework starts getting lots of business and school customers for the Framework 12 and they can start pushing down their prices.

[rain apex]

What does serverless even mean

[safe dragon]

on the edge!

[ivory shadow]

Serverless means it runs on a server, but you don't have to manage the server someone else does

[safe dragon]

it comes with really fun challenges like database latency

[rain apex]

I have vague idea of what it does (it scales up automatically?) but idk why that is remove server

[ivory shadow]

Yeah, the idea is getting easier scaling.

And it can be just convenient for some things but it is very use case dependent.

[rain apex]

Why don't they call it pay per use server

[safe dragon]

which is why most people who you see raving about serverless are people in their 20s who don't even host anything to begin with

they really need that scale

it's always fun seeing people online argue about technology that is meant for operating at a scale they will never see in their lives

[cinder karma]

Murdered eh

[dusty pollen]

because if I can’t see the server then there clearly is no server

[cinder karma]

I think work would federally prosecute me but murder js a nit far

[rain apex]

You know one of the reasons why i have dis framework is because it was the cheapest option for my specific desire for meh cpu but 1tb storage

[safe dragon]

a little murder never hurt anyone

[rain apex]

Other laptops gotta bundle that together and it sucks

[dusty pollen]

my dad has been arguing with me for a couple years now because he’s decided that “client-server architecture doesn’t exist any more”

[ivory shadow]

On the flip side, I set up a server component for one of my FF14 mods a while back with Cloudflare Workers and I really appreciate how I don't need to do a single fucking thing and it just works.

[safe dragon]

I actually got a pretty good price if you consider the very specific desire/need for a dedicated sd card slot in the laptop!

[ivory shadow]

I need to pay the $5 a month minimum because I use WebSockets, but I'm nowhere close to any of the initial quotas and the $5 is covering like seven things I have on workers now and not just this lol

[safe dragon]

nice

I should really look into this stuff even though we are essentially banned from using any of it for work lmao

[dusty pollen]

I should look into cloudflare at some point because right now I’m throwing anything that needs hosting to digitalocean

[safe dragon]

I already use cloudflare for my dns needs

[rain apex]

I don't have a website besides github pages

[ivory shadow]

Cloudflare Workers are pretty nice if you're doing something that can be done as JavaScript. Or python or rust, lol

[rain apex]

Although i do use backblaze for cdn they r really cheap

[dusty pollen]

my only real experience is with ibm cloud but that was because it was free for me at that time I’m scared to check pricing

[dusty pollen]

me either, all my hosting rn is discord bots lmao

which I should really take down tbh

[safe dragon]

I'm currently not hosting anything but when I will it will be selfhosted

well, I'm hosting an smb server if that counts

obviously not publicly accessible

[marble jewel]

All this talk about Framework laptops had me thinking. I wonder if this exists... and it does
https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/20916

You must buy a Framework for Linus

[safe dragon]

lmao

[rain apex]

NoU

Linux investment isn't even that much is it

the outreach of him making vids is worth a lot tho

[safe dragon]

while the recent presentation for framework made me feel very sad I did like them showing the linux mint logo on 1 slide cause it's the distro I was going to use on it

[dusty pollen]

me, making bespoke discord bots for servers: remember to assume that I have access to any channel this bot has access to. I keep logs. I check if things work. Don’t add this to your staff channels.
people who are way too used to just clicking “yes” whenever an app asks for perms: mmhmm pretty sure that’s fine though—

[safe dragon]

giving bots permissions they don't need never goes wrong, just ask aquo

[ivory shadow]

In theory I could run my discord bot on Cloudflare Workers but I wouldn't be able to use libsharp to generate the fancy dice roll images and that is a deal breaker to me, lol

[safe dragon]

[dusty pollen]

I literally asked them if they understand that I can see messages from their staff channel and they said “oh that’s okay we didn’t say anything bad”. That’s not what I meant

[safe dragon]

I have ordered the laptop

[dusty pollen]

probably going to send a message using the bot in one of their main channels letting them know it’s going to be taken offline soon since I haven’t been a member in that server for like half a year now and I’m pretty sure they don’t use it, and that if they believe that will cause any issues that their admins should contact me because I haven’t heard anything from them in months

[cinder karma]

God that is an expensive laptop haha

[safe dragon]

just close your eyes and press order

look at the prices for so long they become normal in your head

the same strategy used for booking hotels

[dusty pollen]

my logging rn for their server is just in the form of “forwarding” messages into a channel in my private server in the form of an embed with the relevant information (server, author, channel name) lmao (since this was before forwarding was a thing)

[ivory shadow]

Ugh hotels

[dusty pollen]

the trick is not to book hotels or upgrade your tech ever

[ivory shadow]

Hotel prices is one of the reasons I stopped going to GDQ. Staying in a hotel room for a week is just nuts.

That, on top of flight prices and on top of buying food for the week... no thank you

[dusty pollen]

gdq? my browser is refusing to load google rn

[rotund violet]

I looked up CDNs a while back and couldn't find one at a reasonable price point for personal use. Backblaze doesn't even seem to have a CDN? I just looked it up.

[dusty pollen]

game done quick

[ivory shadow]

Games Done Quick. Speedrunning charity marathon.

[dusty pollen]

finally loaded

the only things I know from gdq is those few clips from very early on of things like the speedrunner who was secretly cheating and didn’t know how to do the runs etc lmao

from that one time I binged a bunch of karl jobst vids

[ivory shadow]

The quality has gone up so much from the early GDQs.

[dusty pollen]

I assume so! I hear good things about it

[marble jewel]

My favorite speedrun categories are pretty much dead so I haven't had as much interest in GDQs lately

[ivory shadow]

The most recent AGDQ had a Crazy Taxi run with a live band to get around Twitch's policy for copyrighted music.

That was fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4AomNJHzHk

[dusty pollen]

if I were to ever do any speedrunning related things it would be via TASs anyway so not the kind of thing that gets attention/events

[ivory shadow]

GDQ always has a TAS or two lately.

[dusty pollen]

oh, nice

I’m just bad at video games lmao

for like a million and a half different reasons

[ivory shadow]

Me too. I'm just a washed up speedrunner who turned to modding.

Never had a world record. Still like the community though

[dusty pollen]

oh I’m miles worse than you then haha, I could probably hold records for unintended slowruns

[marble jewel]

My favorite speedruns to watch are ANY%. I don't have the patience to nail down any of the techniques used.

The grindiest thing I attempted was 100 jumps in Super Mario RPG, but I gave up on that.

[ivory shadow]

I love learning how to do glitches. Some of them are just too insane though.

[rotund violet]

Kinda depends on the game. Any% is pretty boring when it's some 12-second-long "get from title screen to end credits" glitch.

[ivory shadow]

I've only ever done a Wind Waker zombie hover once and immediately decided "screw this. never again"

[marble jewel]

Yeah, OOT was a fun Any% up through the end of the Cosmo-era

[dusty pollen]

there is a random dressup game I have literally found every single possible glitch in myself and then left the community I still get DMs sometimes from people letting me know a glitch got patched and asking me to come back to fix it

[marble jewel]

All of the frame-perfect tricks and such, watching them practice for hours

[ivory shadow]

On one hand I'm glad ACE exists cause it's such a crazy glitch. On the other hand ACE has to be the stupidest thing to watch.

"Let me just spaz out doing random looking stuff for 30 seconds and oops hey look the end credits how did they get here"

[dusty pollen]

what game is that for?

[rotund violet]

It's more interesting to me when mechanics are exploited that are actually intended game mechanics but weren't intended to be used in that way, vs. outright glitches, like is typically done in SM or SOTN.

[ivory shadow]

The first game where ACE really took off I think was Super Mario World

The big "this looks stupid and is stupidly broken" thing in OoT and MM is SRM aka Stale Reference Manipulation aka abusing pointers and predictable memory management

[rotund violet]

Like, some of the Bethesda games have runs where you just walk 15 minutes out of bounds to get to the last location in the game. It's... cool that you found that, I guess? But it's boring to watch because there's no actual gameplay.

ACE is the most extreme version but a lot of glitched runs can be like that.

[rain apex]

At risk of being on topic i like the sdv marry speedruns

It's got neat routing stuff where u sleep whole year to Emily's birthday

[ivory shadow]

One of my favorite glitches is bullet time in Breath of the Wild. How they just completely messed up how physics works so you can just be like yeet

[rain apex]

Or get 4k screen so u can see more of the mines at once

[fleet wren]

that's why there are speedrun categories

[rotund violet]

I'm aware of that; I don't think it invalidates my point?

Glitched is a gray area, SOTN death skip is a glitch but the run still has a lot of gameplay.

[dusty pollen]

ooo, that’s close to the main exploit I did in that dressup game iirc

[fleet wren]

(I wasn't trying to)

[dusty pollen]

(close-ish, the real issue was that they used some buffer for their menus that wasn’t cleared correctly between different menus)

[rotund violet]

This is actually why I've never really been into literal SDV "speedruns" and instead only look at minmax. Don't really enjoy either watching or doing 30 straight days of sleep.

Though I was entertained by the TAS that used sleep to manipulate the weather.

[fleet wren]

elden ring's absolute world record is 4 minutes, accomplished by standing in a specific spot, swinging your sword in a funny way and instantly teleporting to the endboss
it's boring so no one really runs it often anymore haha

[rotund violet]

Yeah, it's cool that people find these things, but they're basically one-and-dones. Once someone's done it, there's not much point in learning it or watching someone else do it.

[cinder karma]

#making-mods-general please!

[rotund violet]

For me, anyway. I guess some people are really into the whole "use ACE to completely rewrite every part of the game and turn it into some other game" deal, and while I can appreciate their enthusiasm, I can't help thinking that their talents would be better spent on some other pursuit.

[cinder karma]

What's ace

..... you know what

[ivory shadow]

Arbitrary Code Execution

[cinder karma]

Don't tell me, I know so little about this entire

Oh, cool!

[rain apex]

You can wiggle your little guy to put specific values into the memory/registers and run ur code

[safe dragon]

just gotta look in a very specific direction on a specific position while having an invisible ghost vase over your head and then press a

[ivory shadow]

You know what is crazy? float perfect tricks.

Having an exact floating point position is absolute madness

[safe dragon]

and yet

[rotund violet]

Those are usually TAS, aren't they?

[ivory shadow]

Usually, but not always.

[safe dragon]

sometimes a setup is found that makes it humanly viable

"humanly viable" tends to be a rather bold claim

technically possible for at least some human somewhere

[lethal walrus]

technically human possible to do the mario 64 upwarp, assuming your local sun plays along nicely

[ivory shadow]

Barrier skip in Wind Waker is... I'm not sure if it's float perfect but it is incredibly precise and absolutely relies on floating point precision

[safe dragon]

there's like a billion different methods for barrier skip now

some more precise than others

[dusty pollen]

next speedrunning trick will be running the game on a harddrive and using a magnifying glass at just the right angle

[safe dragon]

the original was at least vastly worse than pixel perfect

[rotund violet]

Usually those tricks are TAS first and then by doing the TAS someone stumbles onto a different kind of setup that's a lot more complex but easier to execute.

[sand frost]

https://xkcd.com/378/ reminds me of

[cinder karma]

I like the newest xkcd

[ivory shadow]

real programmers implement Doom on the TypeScript type system

[cinder karma]

The one about rna

[sonic mirage]

What did you spec it with? I spec'd one yesterday pretty nice for ~$1400

[fleet wren]

surprisingly (or not?), not even the second xkcd about RNAs

[crystal wren]

(One of us!)

[safe dragon]

😌

apparently the first .net 10 preview exists now

there's not a whole lot there

[cinder karma]

I'm orange:(

[safe dragon]

it happens

[lethal walrus]

I got a "new" laptop recently and I need to have it set up for this weekend.
I have not touched it yet..

Has a ssd already in it so can just install Linux, probably will do kubuntu again

[safe dragon]

kubuntu damn

[lethal walrus]

1. I like kde
2. I don't trust myself to update Arch often enough to not break things
3. I can remember apt commands

[safe dragon]

understandable

[dusty pollen]

arch is surprisingly durable tbh

I didn't even manage to break it after not updating for over a year

[safe dragon]

I like kde as well and apt commands certainly are easier to remember than the completely arcane bullshit that are the pacman flags

[dusty pollen]

I get what you mean though

[safe dragon]

to this day I don't actually have any fuckin idea why -Syu is the arcane string I need to update my packages

I just do it

ok

so
the S stands for Sync
then the y means refresh
then the u stands for system upgrade

[dusty pollen]

I kind of know

but like, half

[safe dragon]

there's also pacman -Syyu which refreshes even harder

I don't know why -y stands for refresh but maybe that makes sense in some foreign language

[dusty pollen]

yeah so S being Sync means install things from the remote repos (e.g. Si means get the info from the repos, but Qi means get the info for the locally installed version)

y I believe is update the cached info from the database, yy forces it to be updated even if it's not outdated yet

and u is system upgrade, I forget what uu does

[safe dragon]

uu also allows downgrades

[dusty pollen]

probably just every other letter was taken or ambiguous lmao

all I know is that the arch devs beg people not to do yy for no reason

my little maintenance script helps me avoid most issues most of the time but when I leave things for a year I have to go in a bit more manually

[safe dragon]

I still do it sometimes cause it fixes issues every once in a while

I don't know why it does

but it does

[dusty pollen]

sometimes it's fine, it's just that people sometimes just make Syyu their default version of this command, which puts stress on the servers apparently

[safe dragon]

I definitely prefer basically every other package manager I have used as far as intuitive use is concerned

[dusty pollen]

main smart thing I added to my maintenance script as someone who doesn't do it often enough is that I added specifically updating the keyrings first if nothing has been updated in over a month

[safe dragon]

but I the actual package management behind these arcane spells

[dusty pollen]

I like pacman tbh, once I learned it a bit it felt very flexible

[safe dragon]

I like the name the most

much more fun than apt or dnf

[dusty pollen]

whoever realised you can shorten package manager to pacman is a genius

[lethal walrus]

I wonder if apt means something other than "oh well I guess it's good enough, but we can't call it sufficient so let's say its apt"

[lethal walrus]

The only thing I don't like about kde, maybe it's just Linux in general but the fonts are so pixilated? Also I don't want to middle click to paste I want fast scroll :(

[rotund violet]

Advanced Package Tool, they weren't trying to be clever.

In the open source world, "advanced" is usually a euphemism for "needlessly complicated".

[remote swallow]

That's definitely fixable in settings

[safe dragon]

it's named after the song released 4 months ago

[cinder karma]

That's a ducking good song mate

[safe dragon]

fonts definitely shouldn't look any different on linux but I remember fighting a lot with this many years ago

I used to mess around with all the font rendering settings trying to get it to look normal

I actually have no idea what happened that caused me to never have this problem again

[rotund violet]

I've been out of the home desktop Linux thing for a while but is cleartype or equivalent properly supported yet? Last I recall, it used older anti-aliasing methods.

[safe dragon]

I don't think there's a single answer for that

I don't really know enough about it beyond the existence of subpixel antialiasing

which has been a thing for as long as I've used linux

[rotund violet]

I remember text generally looking OK when I used it at work, but kind of crappy on the few occasions I set it up at home or when I run it in a VM, so maybe it's something that just requires jumping through extra hoops to set up.

[safe dragon]

I would not be surprised if that one is also on the list of things that has gotten better with wayland

[lethal walrus]

Oh very definitely but I just haven't figured it out yet

[safe dragon]

messing around with font hinting and antialiasing

[lethal walrus]

Fonts are just not fun

[safe dragon]

tbh there was a long time on windows actually where I for some reason couldn't get fonts to look right while I went through the ClearType setup thing a billion times

it's kind of interesting how rendering text has been a part of computers for close to as long as they've had screens but even now it's still considered a pretty tough technical problem

obviously a big part of that is just increased demands for what font rendering entails

[rotund violet]

The Cleartype tuner does sometimes feel like the stress of an eye exam. "Which is better, A or B"? I don't know they look the same damnit!

[safe dragon]

yeah it's a fun one

[cinder karma]

"Well they are both bad in different ways?"

[safe dragon]

"well in A I can clearly see the separated colors from the subpixel antialiasing... and in B... I also see it"

[rotund violet]

Sometimes the vibe is also "well I can see they're different but I don't know which is supposed to look better"

[safe dragon]

it really is like an eye exam

[rotund violet]

I don't think my settings have ever gotten severely enough out of whack for me to be able to see separated colors, though. That's a new one.

[safe dragon]

I did have that

it's not pretty

[rotund violet]

Some AA settings can make the text look kind of bold, and bold text can be easier to read, but it's also... well, bold.

Obviously regular text shouldn't look bold. So yeah, it's an exasperating process.

[sonic mirage]

Note that sometimes font rendering issues are exacerbated by nonstandard subpixel layouts, typically found in OLED monitors these days

[safe dragon]

oh actually

I think my font rendering issues back then were on some really old dvi monitor

which I used for way longer than anyone should've

[devout vault]

Overall I'm thankful for my homeschooling but there are some ways it could've been better

At some point my brother and I just stopped doing the writing assignments and my mom never had us actually do them 😛

[white raft]

If you were going to homeschool your own kids, @devout vault , what would you change?

[devout vault]

And I'm pretty sure I never actually ended up taking biology or getting more than a month into chemistry

(Don't tell my college, they told us to make a transcript for what we covered in HS and I included chemistry anyways)

Honestly that last year I can't recall how much I actually did schoolwork wise outside of the virtual math and AP CS.

I didn't plan on going to college at first, I randomly decided at one point and it turned out to be the last day for late applications in spring when we drove there and talked to them about it. 😛

[cinder karma]

Fwiw, my high school was very hands off

[tranquil grove]

(am not casey, but: ) having an actual set of mail-in class docs and assignments in high school was helpful, though mileage varies a lot for individual kids

before that it was pretty freeform, and my sibling and I couldn't concentrate on most studying at all

[cinder karma]

You kinda had to either have yourself under control

Or you would fail

[sand frost]

At the high school level I think they are programs that help provide more structure

[cinder karma]

Oh, yeah, and gl have fun if you got below a B average

You were kicked out for that

[sand frost]

LIke I had friends who did online school things, while also in normal school

[white raft]

Sounds like life

[cinder karma]

We had people from local high schools online class jnto my diffeq class!!!!!

[rain apex]

The talk of homeschooling is like a whole other world to be

[devout vault]

Good question, I dunno. Assuming I have time to do that anyways, depends on the finances of myself and whoever I marry. 😛 And if whoever also wants kids of course.

And assuming I end up with kids - I'd have to adopt (transitioning MtF kinda messes up fertility and I didn't choose to pre-preserve any since I couldn't see wanting kids at the time), though I'd probably choose that anyways since to me having biological kids doesn't make a whole lot of sense with the way the world is headed (mainly the environment).

[rain apex]

I don't know anyone homeschooled cus asian

[sand frost]

I have homeschooled asian friends xD

[devout vault]

Wow, do I not count? 😢

[rain apex]

Don't know any irl I mean

And today is when i learned u r homeschooled

[devout vault]

That was the most common use of the florida virtual school program I think

[cinder karma]

You're also Canadian, chue

[sand frost]

I feel like I would not homeschool my (hypothetical future) kids because I cannot fathom doing that while fulltime employed

[devout vault]

Yeah, not sure if you've backread the convo in making mods but It was 1/4 through 6th grade that I started

[rain apex]

Im an immigrant

Born in china

[white raft]

This... is an issue. Yes.

[devout vault]

Mood, I had a lot of difficulty with that (until I got my first ADHD meds anyways, then my brothers were kinda weirded out by how much I focused on my school work 😅 )

[cinder karma]

Up until like very recently I didn't think I would ever be mentally stable enough to have kids, but the idea of starting a farming commune has never left me

[sand frost]

<my state> has some nice farms xD

farming is also an extremely intensive job tho

[devout vault]

That's why I said 'if I had time' earlier. 😅

I never thought I'd want to have kids but HRT can change a person. 😅 Though whether it's actually the hormones or just a layer of the mental brain fog lifting from it, who knows

[devout vault]

Same here (first part anyways, not the farming commune)

[cinder karma]

Yeahhhhh

[sand frost]

I've always liked kids, but it's the sort of thing where saying "oh yeah I'm def having kids" seems like a lot of certainty to have about a complicated and big thing

like I've taught kids in one form or another since i was a freshman in high school

[cinder karma]

The ideal situation is a small commune

[devout vault]

I worked at a Kumon for a few years during college. I only graded homework though

So much homework to grade...

[sand frost]

you're reminding me I should go home and grade

gave my first exam yesterday!

[devout vault]

Oooo, fancy

[safe dragon]

homeschooling is essentially illegal in my country beyond serious exceptions like severe autoimmune disorders

[rain apex]

There is difference between wanting kids but can't for socialecon reasons and just not wanting kids at all i feel

[devout vault]

True (and sometimes people ignore the reasons why it wouldn't be a good idea unfortunately)

[rain apex]

I don't really see the appeal but i can't really explain this to my family that i feel this way

It is big generation gap

[sand frost]

oof, sorry to hear that — I know my asian family is Not Reasonable about that

[devout vault]

I've got wonderfully amazing parents, but I know not everyone (maybe even most people don't) gets to have that

[rain apex]

Oh they r not rude about it it's just hint hint nudge nudge

[sand frost]

like my mom is a fairly well-adjusted human in most ways, but is completely baby-crazy

[rain apex]

Like i would say it straight that i don't but me mum is like well u will get it

[sand frost]

and my grandma's top pieces of advice to me have been 1) get married 2) have children 3) buy a house

(in that order of advice-giving though not specifically that order of operations)

[safe dragon]

have children, buy a house, get married

[cinder karma]

Yeahhhhh

The parents want grandchildren

[sand frost]

my aunts all gossip so much about whether so and so will be having a kid anytime soon

[rain apex]

Have house buy married get children

[sand frost]

buy married sounds illegal 😛

[cinder karma]

Anyways.

[devout vault]

My parents (mainly my mom) joke about wanting grand kids sometimes. I think they kinda gave up when my older brother got married to someone who didn't want kids (and my twin is gay and doesn't want kids), settling on the idea of 'grand kittens and grand puppies', though once I told them it's something I might want one day they were happy to hear that

[sand frost]

my mom will make her peace either way, but also will make her stance known

[safe dragon]

in dutch you do actually say "getting" children instead of "having" children so when I was still getting used to the english language I would often say "getting children"

[sand frost]

so and so begat so and so is maybe english equivalent?

[tranquil grove]

I probably should get diagnosed for that (case in point, wandering off while typing this )
my parents were very much into that "oh no kids are over-diagnosed" stuff at the time

[devout vault]

<insert joke about getting children from the discount section at the store>

[sand frost]

very archaic word

my mom used to joke she got us at costco in a multi-pack

there's a lot of us

[rain apex]

Are you kirkland branded

[devout vault]

I knew some people (the owners of the Kumon I worked at) that refused to let their kid take ADHD meds despite being diagnosed. I felt bad for them

[sand frost]

that's roughhh :/

some of my students are having meds supply issues and I can often tell

[cinder karma]

That royally sucks

[sand frost]

it sucks cause I can't do anything about it!!

[devout vault]

Wait, do you have a twin/triplets/etc.? Or did the multi-pack come with kids of varying ages (more of a variety pack so to speak)?

[cinder karma]

I'm still bouncing the idea around of "should I get an adhd screening" but tbh it overlaps a lot with high functioning depression anyways

[sand frost]

variety pack! all different ages

[devout vault]

Fair, but don't they often coincide too? I know autism and adhd do (and also being transgender with those two things, funnily enough)

[cinder karma]

(Ie, we can't conclude my focus isn't shot due to my terrible sleep schedule until we fix the sleep schedule)

[devout vault]

I imagine the transgender part mainly comes with the whole not being as concerned with fitting in sort of thing?

[rain apex]

Is there some kind of bingo board business here

[devout vault]

What do you mean

With how quickly we're changing topics?

[rain apex]

The way these conditions correlate

[devout vault]

Clearly we're just an adhd-riddled hivemind /s

[cinder karma]

The other reason is that well, not sure what we would do about it

[sand frost]

maybe it's BOGO

or BOGT

[cinder karma]

Meds are off the table.

[sand frost]

as the case may be

[cinder karma]

I can figure out coping skills without a diagnosis

[safe dragon]

what the hell is bogo... bogosort

[devout vault]

Buy one get one

[safe dragon]

oh

[sand frost]

^^

[cinder karma]

Buy one get one (free)

[devout vault]

I think it's mostly an american grocery store thing?

[safe dragon]

we just call that a 2 for 1 sale

[devout vault]

Could be wrong though

So, fun thing about publix (grocery store chain in the southwest US)

FL has true bogo (buy one get one), while other states have 50% off

[sand frost]

whatttt

[devout vault]

This is actually really important for couponing

[cinder karma]

Interesting

[sand frost]

other fun fact: they have some of the only kosher box mac n cheese available in the US in their store brand

[tranquil grove]

I think corps like being able to say "FREE" instead of "50% off if you buy 2" or whatever here, yeah

[devout vault]

(My mom and I got really into couponing at one point, since with public there's storecoupons and manufacturer coupons that you can use one of each on the same item)

[safe dragon]

we can get some slight math puzzles sometimes like 3 for the price of 2

[cinder karma]

Fun stuff

[safe dragon]

isn't buy one get one free just strictly worse than a 50% sale

[cinder karma]

Yes

[devout vault]

So for example, if publix had a true bogo sale, you could use a bogo manufacturer coupon and get both free.

If you had a store coupon to go with it, it would actually make the total you pay go down. (We called these money makers.) You often could do it to the point of the store paying you to take the groceries back then. Though my mom and I didn't really like that and instead added other things on so that the total came out to a $1 for everything or something like that.

[tranquil grove]

I do miss collecting/spamming coupons from the dispensers they had here
these days I just want to speedrun the shopping process

[cinder karma]

Tbh it's mostly for processed goods

[devout vault]

I actually developed an iphone app to help us calculate everything, it was complicated 😛

[cinder karma]

Which well.

I don't eat that many processed goods

[devout vault]

Before that app I did it all by hand with phone calculator and a clipboard

[safe dragon]

also you're reminding me a little too much my many days and weeks fixing bugs in our discounts software

[devout vault]

This is the app: https://spacechase0.com/other/couponers-cart/

[tranquil grove]

they do a decent amount of coupons here for fruit and such, but it's all dispensed at random based on purchase history

[sand frost]

what about like, canned beans

[rain apex]

Wait why would store bogo and manufacturer bogo combined make it free

Don't you just get 3 thinfs

[devout vault]

The pre coupon total you see in the screenshot was important because there were like $5 off $30 coupons and such (those were from a competitor that Publix accepted the coupons from though)

[cinder karma]

I don't eat canned beans

It's always cheaper to buy dry and soak

[devout vault]

Just the way it worked out. You buy one, get one free. Then you use the coupon on the pair and you get another 'free' amount, so it adds up to both being free.

There were stipulations like only one store coupon and one manufacturer coupon per item though

[rain apex]

Fascinating resolution

[safe dragon]

pro tip if you sell software that automatically determines what discounts to use... Never provide a guarantee to your clients that the discounts used are the absolute best ones possible for any given cart and active discount/sales

[sand frost]

yeah fair

i never remember to soak them

[cinder karma]

You don't have to remember if you have an instant pot

[devout vault]

Honestly, those days we easily could've been on the extreme couponing shows or something. 😛

[sand frost]

I also do not have an instant pot

[cinder karma]

You don't

Okay, memo to atra, wedding gift ideas

[sand frost]

oh no

[tranquil grove]

reminds me, there's a bug in a pizza chain's current website that lets me duplicate "$10 off" loyalty coupons until it's free
(not that I'm gonna submit it like that, and they'd probably just call to say no anyway)

[sand frost]

idk if the pizza shop workers would give enough of a shit to call and say no

i get the impression they do not specifically love the pizza shop chain

[tranquil grove]

fair, I've only been there once or twice but I think they're down to 2 staffers

[sand frost]

(i used to order a lot of pizza for the kiddos)

[safe dragon]

automatically applying discounts was one of the things in software that ended up being so much vastly more complicated than I could've ever thought

[tranquil grove]

probably not worrying much about the receipts

[devout vault]

I remember one time there was like a peanut butter and ziplocs combined deal (for pb&j sandwiches in theory) that was a money maker. We had so many ziplocs after that (we sometimes went to 5-10 publixes in town a day).

Like, we didn't run out for years after we stopped couponing. I think we only ran out 2-3 years ago (and we did this shopping in like 2014/2015 or something)

[sand frost]

peanut butter does sound like something that would keep for years

i mean, if you like the stuff

[cinder karma]

I used to do the scanned receipts thing

[sand frost]

and it doesn't kill you

[devout vault]

After writing that iphone app I linked earlier... I know what you mean. I can't imagine how complicated it gets on the store side though

[cinder karma]

But honestly it wasn't worth it

The scanned receipts apps

[sand frost]

i used to get a little bit of survey money from the bagel shop

[cinder karma]

Nielsen, etc

[sand frost]

it was like a couple dollars off what was usually a $6 or $9 order

[safe dragon]

Now imagine that but you provide a discount solution to hundreds of different businesses who all have their own unique quirky sale systems

[sand frost]

:fear :

[devout vault]

Oh, the peanut butter didn't last nearly as long. My dad was a peanut butter fiend.

[devout vault]

You know what? I'd rather not imagine it. Thanks for the suggestion though. 😇

[safe dragon]

😌

nightmarish code too, even ignoring the complexity of the problem

[devout vault]

Oh yeah, we did that sort of thing for a while too, since manufacturer's sometimes had mail in rebates and such.

[dusty pollen]

that’s illegal here in the UK (doesn’t stop schools from trying though, a lot of schools in my area get in trouble for doing this)

[sand frost]

my experience is that CVS has weirdly good deals, out of all the places I've shopped

[devout vault]

Those couponing days were great.

Even besides all the stuff we got for practically nothing, I got to spend a lot of time with my mom while we drove around to various stores and stuff (since I usually went with her). She's always been the person I'm closest to

[sand frost]

like they'll send me $4 off an order or 40% off coupons all the time

[cinder karma]

Magnet school

[rotund violet]

It does. I just checked the label on the one in my pantry and yep, "expired" 2021. Still tastes fine.

[sand frost]

in the US as long as you have A school to go to it's probably totally legal

[cinder karma]

Yeah but they price higher so it isn't worth it most of the time

[sand frost]

2001???!!???!

[devout vault]

Yeah, CVS was another place we went to sometimes. It didn't begin to compare to Publix though (especially since we were in FL with True BOGOs as we called them)

[sand frost]

oh

[rotund violet]

That was a typo. It was 2021 lol

[safe dragon]

there was this big method where it would go down I believe 6 different methods of determining which discounts to use and then it would pick whichever one actually ended up with the lowest amount.
All of these 6 methods had their completely own calculation logic so often we'd fix a bug with some specific combination of discounts not working right only to find out that in some nearly impossible to know in advance combination of items it would end up in a different path where this bug seemingly also existed

[rotund violet]

2001 would probably be bad by now!

[dusty pollen]

farming communes can be interesting my dad grew up on one

[sand frost]

I mean my grandparents had hazelnut oil from the 1970s lurking in their fridge

[rain apex]

Crumble how did the whole thing with honey impact ur thing

If at all

[safe dragon]

not at all

[cinder karma]

What whole thing with honey

[safe dragon]

I'm not american for one

[devout vault]

Sounds like a dream.

Specifically a nightmare. Nightmares are dreams too, after all.

[rain apex]

There's an auto couponing extension that was gaming the user

And also stealing affiliate links

[devout vault]

Oh I heard about that

[rotund violet]

I do actually have some coconut oil that's older than the peanut butter. Wonder if I should try it.

[sand frost]

wow yikesss

i have stuff from 2 moves ago in my pantry

[devout vault]

They redirected all orders to use their affiliate link, and weren't necessarily giving the best coupons either

[sand frost]

I should eat it, I guess

[devout vault]

So if someone clicked an affiliate link from someone else, it would still go to honey since it got to override it since it was a browser extension

[rotund violet]

It's still solid, so it might be OK. Coconut oil usually liquefies before it goes off.

[dusty pollen]

adhd meds? yeah, there’s a global shortage

[sand frost]

i think i have some ancient canned peaches

from like 2022 or something

[cinder karma]

I'm pretty good at keeping the pantry refreshed

[sand frost]

I am terrible at it

[rotund violet]

Also, that container of Kraft parmesan cheese everyone has had in their fridge since the mesozoic era.

[sand frost]

I get the sense we have wildly different food management skill levels xD

[cinder karma]

But also I buy 50 lb bags of flour for myself

[sand frost]

I don't have any kraft parm in the fridge!

[cinder karma]

And I eat allll of it within six months

[sand frost]

i get the costco giant lumps

you make bread, so that explains a lot about the flour

[dusty pollen]

what are they doing to mac and cheese to make it not kosher or is it just the only one certified

[sand frost]

certified

[cinder karma]

It's more that I eat the same things over and over again

[safe dragon]

honestly I don't think honey would've affected us either way. Hell honey coupons were basically a dream as far as easy calculations go cause they tended to just be x% off order which is extremely easy and doesn't even need to be applied to a specific item within the cart

[cinder karma]

And I don't branch out often

So it's easy to just assembly line it

[safe dragon]

generally speaking any discount that simply applied to the total of the cart was very easy to deal with

[sand frost]

well, that too

but I have to clear out the stuff in the back of my fridge and give it the sniff test

I don't think that would stand in your kitchen

[cinder karma]

If I did more experimental cooking with ingredients I don't use often it would be different

[sand frost]

and i regularly have freezer space problems

[devout vault]

Mood

When I get my act together I want to try cooking more, but I think I already told you that

[cinder karma]

(I do it more or less out of choice though, Casey)

[dusty pollen]

I assume that’s the equivalent of UK grammar schools, in which case, still illegal! they’re allowed to have entry requirements but not to kick people out for not maintaining grades

[cinder karma]

Over time I've refined a very decent set of meal prep recipes

[sand frost]

cooking is fun, in my opinion!!

[devout vault]

You mean you didn't like bunches of combinations of coupons that could apply to a choice of two items only if you bought this random third item, along with coupons for those individual items mixed in???

[cinder karma]

It is! But I run most of my life off autopilot

[sand frost]

it's kind of a pain to have to cook to eat food

but i also cook/bake for fun too

[dusty pollen]

also, do you eat kosher, elizabeth? or is that just a fun fact you happen to know

[cinder karma]

(I wish I did that more.)

[sand frost]

like having to feed myself every day??? terrible

[sand frost]

just a fun fact!

[cinder karma]

I used to do more recipe development

[rotund violet]

I like to cook, just hate to have to wait for cooking when I'm already hungry.

[cinder karma]

Now I just rotate the same recipes

[sand frost]

i'm not very jewish, only a little bit on the wrong side

[cinder karma]

Meal prep!

[sand frost]

I have a friend who keeps kosher though

i get sad when I have to eat the same thing over and over again

[dusty pollen]

I dislike cooking because if I’m being honest I dislike eating for the most part well, I enjoy eating, but only very specific foods

[sand frost]

so, not only am I lazy, I'm also picky

[cinder karma]

Maybe I should do more recipe development

I miss that.

[dusty pollen]

yeah, if they only eat certified kosher that definitely will be a struggle in a lot of places

[sand frost]

I do ""meal prep"" if by meal prep you mean cooking 6 servings at once because I can't cook less than that

[dusty pollen]

if they eat kosher but not necessarily certified it gets a lot easier

[sand frost]

certified, yeah

they cook a lot at home

and like fresh veggies and fruits and such are totally fine

[dusty pollen]

I assume not so orthodox that they have two kitchens

how often do they get asked if they can have regular salt

[sand frost]

Only one kitchen!

[devout vault]

Yeah, this is one reason why I never got into cooking

[sand frost]

I have never asked them that lol

I keep snacks to take the edge off while cooking

[rotund violet]

I mean, I just have to not get distracted and wait until 9 pm to start dinner, that's all.

[dusty pollen]

it’s a common question because of the whole kosher salt thing lmao (all salt is kosher, kosher salt is used in the process of making certain other things kosher)

[rotund violet]

It's not a whole melodrama, just the occasional mistake.

[cinder karma]

Usually on my cooking days I sample enough food to just call that dinner tbh

[devout vault]

Me, eating mostly the same thing for breakfast and lunch most days.

[devout vault]

I wish I wasn't so picky 😔

[dusty pollen]

I improved massively with cooking at uni when I lived on my own and forced myself to learn to cook instead of having daily meltdowns

[cinder karma]

(Again. I'm cooking a week in advance)

[rotund violet]

I have no qualms at all about eating the same thing for breakfast over and over again.

[sand frost]

to me, this is a form of not-picky!

qwe just have opposite pickinesses

[rotund violet]

Since I'm not stuffing poison like muffins and pancakes into my hole, there aren't even that many choices.

[cinder karma]

The other thing for me is that the macros have to be on point tbh

[sand frost]

i also do not do that

[devout vault]

It would be very helpful if I liked a wider variety of things though for if I eat out or something 😛

[sand frost]

if I want to eat only oranges for dinner, only oranges for dinner it is

[safe dragon]

another part that you might not even think about is that we need to make absolutely certain that if someone returns one item that was part of a sale that applied to several of the items they would get the correct amount for that specific item with the part of the discount that applied to that specific item being accounted for. What also needs to be correct is that if they return every single item of that sale one by one in separate orders, the amount they got back in the end was exactly the original sum paid and not a cent off or whatever.

So you had this complicated system of dealing with impossible rounding differences of partial cent discounts that you would have to then redistribute over the affected items "fairly" and then save with the order in advance.

[sand frost]

yeah that's super fair. your kind of picky is probably harder to deal with!

[rotund violet]

I think eating a bag of oranges would only leave me even hungrier.

[dusty pollen]

I get what you mean casey, I have serious issues with textures that make eating out a nightmare

[sand frost]

i definitely get less hungry when eating oranges — they have fiber, for one

[rotund violet]

If I have a decent plate of bacon and eggs, I'm full. If I add an orange, I'm hungry again.

[sand frost]

my form of picky is the softer form where I don't like things but as long as it won't kill me I will still eat it

[dusty pollen]

that’s why learning to make my own food helped so much, it’s considered normal for students in the UK to eat out for almost every meal (either in hall or from restaurants) and I just couldn’t

but when you make your own you can just leave things out!

[safe dragon]

we had an endless battle where our invoice/receipt layouts tried to display how much of a discount you got on each product but they didn't have access to all the information the original transaction did so it would try to "recalculate" what they got but then the rounding differences would sneak back in which caused so much pain

[sand frost]

honestly eating out all the time makes me long for a nice vegetable

just gnaw on some lettuce like a feral rabbit

[safe dragon]

honestly if I had to say the one thing that was the worst about writing retail software it was dealing with rounding differences

[dusty pollen]

I feel like this and the stuff casey did are the reasons so many shops have a “one coupon per order, one discount per item” rule now

[cinder karma]

Yup

Can't get the macros right if I'm eating out

[devout vault]

Yeah, I understand that. It does sound complicated.

There were some people in couponing that would get sundown vitamins (which were a big money maker, relatively speaking), then return the vitamins without a receipt (publix allowed this) for a full price refund. I think it's one big reason why publix started cracking down on things and offering less good deals with their coupons and what not.

I mainly knew about this because some of the people who my mom got into couponing at our church did this and bragged about it. Always felt kinda unethical to me, even if it's a corporation you're ripping off. (Back then it felt weird that members of the church would engage in something clearly unethical, and brag about it... ah, a more innocent time for me)

[rotund violet]

Grocery stores don't exactly have obscenely high profit margins. Ripping them off doesn't make me feel patriotic.

[dusty pollen]

those things just kinda feel sleazy more than anything else. Like I won’t cry for the corporation’s lost profits but I do question feeling so proud of it

[devout vault]

Yeah, it's part of what makes me wonder if I have some mild autism since I've heard it's common with that. (My dad got diagnosed with it a year or two ago - he's definitely more on the severe but high functioning side though).

If I feel an onion in my mouth, or even taste it now that I've got the association, I start gagging.

[sand frost]

I feel like couponing to get things you actually use is very reasonable, but if you don't even use it...that's just waste, and returned vitamins may just be tossed

[cinder karma]

It's fine. The manufacturer gives them the money back

[sand frost]

my views on food waste are a bit on the extreme side though I think, I have such a hard time throwing anything out even if it's bad

[rotund violet]

I think that is sometimes but not always the case, it just depends who is running the promotion.

[dusty pollen]

autism is almost definitely the reason I deal with this! you could always try one of the self-reporting tests if you’re interested in knowing, they typically have like 99% True Positive/True Negative (idk how the 1% splits between false positive and false negative though)

[cinder karma]

Yesssss everything must be used

[rotund violet]

I do have a bugbear about throwing out food that isn't bad, but when I'm already full.

[dusty pollen]

on a mostly unrelated note, I saw someone very confidently use true/false positive/negative wrong the other day and it made my eye twitch a little ngl

[sand frost]

oh yeah, I definitely wont' do that

[devout vault]

To be fair it was my mom doing it... though I was a big enabler, what with handling all the calculations while shopping and even making the app. 😅

I'm also the one who got my mom into software automation and stuff during one of her businesses (internet marketing... ||totally not making a bunch of spam sites that profited from affiliate links, nooooo||). She's said before that I opened her eyes to a lot of possibilities - her jobs that she's gotten since that time are largely stemming from that.

[sand frost]

I don't manage to use everything

[safe dragon]

couponing is an entirely foreign concept to me honestly. LIke I have seen coupons a few times in my life but... LIke 99% of the discounts we worked with didn't even involve coupons they were just "33% discount on these items, mixing/matching is possible" or "5 euros off if you buy item x with item y"

[sand frost]

It just bothers me a lot when I don't, and then have to throw things out

[rotund violet]

I mean, forcing myself to eat it when I know I'm going to feel kind of sick afterward. Because I'm not going to refrigerate an ounce of grilled steak.

[sand frost]

so it's this sort of pathological thing where the bad feelings aren't helping me improve, just making me miserable

[dusty pollen]

from what I hear it’s a largely US thing because of how their coupons are structured tbh

[cinder karma]

See, I would refrigerate an ounce of steak

[devout vault]

Yeah, we sometimes got stuff we didn't use if they were money makers but we always gave it away or donated it to shelters and stuff.

We donated stuff we would use sometimes, too, since we were able to get so much.

[cinder karma]

I also, to the amusement of my coworkers, take the coffee grinds home with me. To compost

[rotund violet]

I can't imagine eating a microwaved steak. Has to be eaten fresh.

[dusty pollen]

sounds reasonable if you compost tbh. Win-win

[sand frost]

I would try to either stop before a fridge-sized portion or would take home the rest

[safe dragon]

it is definitely my impression that couponing as like an actual "Thing" seems to be american

[sand frost]

but I've definitely just eaten the last 2 bites against common sense many times

[safe dragon]

of course people trying to utilize sales is universal

[sand frost]

i wish we had compost

I live in an apartment and there's no municipal compost

[devout vault]

It was pretty well known in the couponing community that the stores mailed coupons to manufacturers for reimbursement.

There were even scandals where they would make coupons for products that didn't exist, and some stores would mail in the coupons trying to say they sold those items.

Now, publix's stoer coupons? That's on them 😛

[cinder karma]

Keep in mind I grew up poor. If it can be used I'll keep it and use it.

[marble jewel]

Late to this discussion, but I learned to cook because I have some weird dietary restrictions, and I wanted to try everything, but couldn't count on restaurants to accomodate me

[rotund violet]

Same with like, a rack of ribs, I just always eat the last two instead of tossing them in the fridge. And then can't sleep afterward.

[fleet wren]

fun childhood story: my mom once left out a bowl of delicious salad on the table. Thinking it was for me I ate about half of it, and went to drink some water.
My mom came to the table later, took the salad bowl, smelled it a bit, and dumped everything in the trash.

[marble jewel]

So I taught myself just about every cuisine (modified for my aforementioned restrictions), and actually got decent at it in the process

[cinder karma]

I remember an old landlord finding it weird I would keep bits from the repairs he made on our place

Just. In. Case

[sand frost]

this is mindblowing to me

[dusty pollen]

ofc - when I worked at a grocery store as a teenager our system didn’t account for the same coupon being scanned multiple times, so if people were nice I scanned it twice

[marble jewel]

This is me. I can't eat onions.

[rotund violet]

Kids can eat anything and be fine.

They have superhuman gut immunity.

[devout vault]

That's what most of the coupons were, you just had to actually have the coupon for the item and give it to them to use the discount.

Mainly for manufacturer ones - at some point when couponing got popular in my town the flyers with store coupons kept running out, so sometimes you could ask the cashier to run the coupon code anyways and they would pull up their flier and apply it manually.

[sand frost]

i've been working hard at eating an amount that I want to eat, but this means I do have 3 small containers of leftovers that probably are no longer safe to eat rn

[sand frost]

oh i interpreted the story as happening over like 2 hours

[rotund violet]

Totally feel that, I always have 2 or 3 science experiments running at the back of the fridge.

[safe dragon]

this might be a stupid question but what is a manufacturer coupon

[sand frost]

like if the soap is made by Dove

Dove may issue a coupon

[safe dragon]

like... dove themselves sends people coupons?

[sand frost]

but you buy Dove soap at Publix, who has Publix coupons

I tink you can find them online or in magazines?

[safe dragon]

I'm relatively certain that legitimately does not exist here and if it did we did not support it

[rotund violet]

It just means the manufacturer wants the retailer to move more of their stuff, so the manufacturer tells the retailer that they'll pay the difference for the discount.

[dusty pollen]

pretty sure it doesn’t exist here either fwiw

[rotund violet]

The retailer isn't eating the cost, the manufacturer is.

[devout vault]

Not me doing that just yesterday because it was so tasty. (Even starting that meal I knew I shouldn't have since I had eaten recently, but food yummy.)

Being on the lower end of BMI through puberty no matter what I ate definitely has caused a lot of problems for me after moving out the first time a couple years after starting college. 😅 But I've actually lost 10-15 pounds the past couple months, so maybe getting a little better

[rotund violet]

But sometimes the retailer will eat the cost themselves, with the expectation that shoppers will buy other stuff that is not discounted (loss leader).

[safe dragon]

we absolutely supported brand sales or product group sales but they'd be registered by the store themselves not the company who made the product

[rotund violet]

They might've been registered by the store but paid for by the manufacturer.

[safe dragon]

oh definitely

[marble jewel]

I was the scrawny kid who could not put on pounds no matter what I ate. I'd finish a large pizza on my own and it would all just vanish. My metabolism has definitely slowed a lot since then in my 30s.

[devout vault]

I think the manufacturer coupons had unique barcodes on them that prevented that at Publix. Or maybe they were just strict about it? I do know the system was careful about not letting you use more coupons than you had matching items for though.

[dusty pollen]

I really shouldn’t talk about cooking when I had spaghetti with pesto and hotdogs for lunch two days in a row now

[dusty pollen]

they literally just forgot to program that check in lmao, every single coupon could be scanned multiple times in the same sale

[safe dragon]

fun fact. A lot coupons just have the discount amount inside the barcode itself so you could in theory just modify that number and have a different discount without changing the actual verification part

there's no checksum or anything

[marble jewel]

I don't go out of my way to use coupons, but they are the right incentive to get me to visit a particular grocery store in my area since I have several options.

[devout vault]

Yeah, this exactly.

There were also sites you could print coupons from but it was limited to two per device for each coupon, so we often used every computer and phone in the house.

And of course there were sites (and ebay) where you could buy manufacturer coupons in bulk from people who got the magazines and stuff. It was a very weird ecosystem.

[safe dragon]

I think tesco had like some drama a while back where people were using modifed barcodes that gave 100% discounts using basically the same exploit

[dusty pollen]

also fun fact: if you have honey installed and tend to use affiliate codes for creators you like, you may want to uninstall it

[devout vault]

I miss these days 😔

[marble jewel]

It was nice being able to eat anything I wanted without feeling bloated or gaining any weight

[rotund violet]

Honestly, the cost of securing it would probably exceed whatever losses they'd take from anyone determined enough to do that.

[dusty pollen]

I wonder how they did the device checks - most mobile devices have mac address spoofing built in nowadays

[rotund violet]

It is after all a grocery store, not Google.

[devout vault]

Yeah, I remember reading about that back then. I was really curious about it but I'm pretty sure publix had some system that verified known ones or something from what I heard? Either way, I never tried abusing it (leaning back towards those unethical feelings)

[safe dragon]

a major issue with most store barcodes is also that they're incredibly short which can make it a challenge to fit in all information you realistically would want

[cinder karma]

Get into running

[dusty pollen]

I just always have this voice in the back of my head telling me that if I tried exploiting something like that, I would definitely be the one person that gets caught and gets in trouble lmao. A lifetime of adhd impulsivity has made me paranoid

[cinder karma]

Then you run into the issue where getting enough calories becomes hard

[devout vault]

It was amazing. We had jokes about us having a hollow leg to put food in, having a black hole in our stomach, etc.

[dusty pollen]

So now I see the exploits, make a mental note and ignore them

[rotund violet]

Diet is a lot more important than exercise. An hour of running is worth maybe a few hundred calories.

[cinder karma]

800

[rotund violet]

And yes, I know there's metabolic changes and everything, but a lot of that is also driven by body weight.

[cinder karma]

800 calories.

[devout vault]

Good question, don't know. For computers I think it was in the browser (we might've used multiple browsers? Not sure if cookie clearing worked or if we thought to try), but for the phones there was a dedicated app

[marble jewel]

Yeah, weight gain or loss is "simple" in that it's just calories in less calories out. If you can manage a deficit, you can lose weight. But it's much easier said than done.

[devout vault]

No, you don't understand. I could do all that while lazing around on my computer all day every day. It was glorious.

[dusty pollen]

I once nearly got expelled for reporting a network vulnerability to my school and since then I Do Not Trust I don’t think they ever did fix it

[marble jewel]

Since I do a wide variety of cooking, I've learned how to prepare meals that are filling, nutritionally dense, but still put me in a calorie deficit.

[safe dragon]

figuring out the calories actually absorbed by the body and the calories burnt is tough

[dusty pollen]

(fun fact: you can use windows shortcuts as a way to run arbitrary console commands without having access to the console or the ability to run batch files directly)

[rotund violet]

Anything with high fat and moderate protein is going to tend to regulate your appetite down to levels when you're in caloric balance or deficit.

But whatever, everybody's got their own "system"

[fleet wren]

regular people probably don't do it in any scale that's going to be a strain to the manufacturer
and anyone who can do so will probably have their pants sued out of them, so they don't

[dusty pollen]

(fun fact 2: some sysadmins think blocking the console is a valid form of access control and therefore do not protect any console commands on any other level)

[rotund violet]

Only time I cared about tracking calories was when I was actually trying to build a lot of muscle and maintain a surplus.

[cinder karma]

When my long runs were 20+ miles, yeah,

[marble jewel]

Probably the biggest thing I've got going for me in terms of diet is that I do not have a sweet tooth at all. Like anything sweet, I can only manage a single bite of.

[devout vault]

Yeah, and there's a genetic component at well. Before my mom had her weight loss surgery a year and a half ago (one of the ones where they alter your stomach so you can't eat as much and therefore lose weight easier, not actually removing the weight), they did some tests to determine how many calories her body consumed each day and it was surprisingly low.

At first they got like 300 or something, but they redid the test and it turns out they messed up the first time. It was still abnormally low, but not nearly that extreme.

[sand frost]

I love sweets 😢

[rotund violet]

Indeed, once you cut out the sugary stuff for a while, anything sweet becomes kind of offensive.

Some fruit is all I can handle, candy tastes gross.

[marble jewel]

What's weird is that as a teenager I had a major sweet tooth. Almost like I was so excessive back then that it's not appealing to me anymore now.

[devout vault]

I'm pretty sure my mom had some genetic testing done at one point (to try and figure out my twin's health problems, him and my parents did dna tests at one point) and she had this marker that was correlated with gaining weight more easily

[dusty pollen]

(fun fact 3: fun facts 1 and 2 combined allow you to see all files stored on the same network drive as your user folder, which can sometimes include all files for all other students)

[sand frost]

I’m allergic to a bunch of a sweet foods though

[dusty pollen]

allergies suck

I lucked out by being one of the very few asthmatic people with no allergies

[rotund violet]

I also drink black coffee and find it bizarre that almost everyone else needs to sweeten it.

Sweet coffee is nasty.

[marble jewel]

Same here, black coffee all the way

[sand frost]

I lucked out by not having asthma xD

[fleet wren]

I add milk, but I usually don't add sugar on top

[sand frost]

I can’t stand black coffee except in very very very small sips

[dusty pollen]

I… don’t drink coffee

[sand frost]

It’s so bitter

[fleet wren]

vietnamese coffee with condensed milk though, hmm

[sand frost]

I’ve cut out most caffeine so I only drink decaf but I’ve found some good decaf

[marble jewel]

I'm kind of a coffee geek though. I'll import from single origin sources, specific blends, and grind them on my own, as well as use various brewing methods.

[sand frost]

Still drink it with milk and sugar

[devout vault]

I've heard that but it hasn't worked for me. I cut back to just water instead of sprite all the time a few years back (I used to drink two cans of sprite each day and that was about it for liquid intake besides occasionally chocolate milk... I wonder why I got so many headaches back then? 😛 ), and still like sprite on the rare occasion I eat out or visit my parents in FL.

[rotund violet]

Apparently there is some genetic element to being able to taste certain bitter components - people with that affinity usually don't like chocolate either.

[dusty pollen]

my dad drinks turkish coffee though, so black coffee made with extra fine grounds you just pour boiling water over

[marble jewel]

So I drink black coffee, but I also am very particular about which ones I like.

[devout vault]

Though I guess to be fair I do get a little chocolate milk with grocery order still

[cinder karma]

Oh god, I used to drink undiluted cold brew

Worse

[rotund violet]

Dark roast all the way.

[cinder karma]

I would take caffeine pills with undiluted cold brew

We ask how I'm alive

[dusty pollen]

the thing that made me stop liking sprite was actually drinking it as my main beverage for like a year

[rotund violet]

"A while" does have to be a long time, at least a few months. And if you substitute it with other refined carbohydrates then it doesn't work, because those have pretty much the same physiological effect.

[marble jewel]

Soda has never been appealing to me. It's all 0-calorie seltzer with only mild sweetness.

[devout vault]

I have asthma but mostly grew out of it. I've never had an allergy test but am allergic to some cats. 😭

For a while I thought it was all cats but when one of my cats passed away I stopped needing to take zyrtec every day. No idea what breed she was, she was a calico longhair my parents found at a gas station or something. The other cats I grew up with were all persians.

[dusty pollen]

…atra, have you ever said or thought the sentence “caffeine(/any other stimulant) just makes me sleepy, idk what the big fuss is”?

[sand frost]

Some cats make me sneeze more

But they all make me sneeze

[devout vault]

Makes me think of how some people have cilantro taste like soap.

[marble jewel]

I used to be allergic to cats, but have desensitized myself over the years.

[sand frost]

They’re so cute though I pet them anyways

[rotund violet]

Hmm, not sure I'd describe it as soap, but I can't stand the taste of it.

[marble jewel]

To the point now where I have an occassional stuffy nose, but am otherwise fine living with two cats.

[cinder karma]

I also (still) regularly put instant coffee in my coffee

[devout vault]

Hmm, what about other sweet things (like chocolate milk)? I've definitely gone months without sprite since moving to Chicago (since I don't visit my parents every weekend anymore)

And I don't like any other type of soda

[dusty pollen]

interesting, persians should actually be relatively highly allergenic, and most cat allergies are to a protein all cats have unless they’re exposed to a certain food

[marble jewel]

Yo dawg, I heard you liked Coffee.

[rotund violet]

Sugar is sugar. Chocolate milk is full of sugar.

[devout vault]

(Besides sprite adjacents I guess)

[sand frost]

Ooh, do any of you also think lettuce tastes bitter?

[fleet wren]

so I don't have this gene thankfully, but I understand why some people think it tastes like soap. it's kinda weird heh

[safe dragon]

cilantro more notably smells like soap if you have the gene but smell strongly affects taste

[rotund violet]

Which type? Like the cheap iceberg lettuce?

[sand frost]

Relatedly, does water taste bad?

Any kind

[fleet wren]

it's like I can eat it fine, I don't feel like I'm eating soap

[rotund violet]

Water can taste bad, if it's bad water.

[sand frost]

Of lettuce

[marble jewel]

Yeah that's a fun experiment, try suppressing your sense of smell while tasting things, and the flavor can be dramatically different.

[dusty pollen]

weird, I have very little sense of smell and it still very much tastes like soap to me

[sand frost]

Most water tastes bad to me when warm

[devout vault]

I still stuff my face in their fur regularly no matter what. I wonder why even with zyrtec every day I still often had a stuffed nose? 🙄

[dusty pollen]

the more people say this the more concerned I am about how differently you guys experience food

[sand frost]

A complete mystery!!

[safe dragon]

it also very much tastes like soap to me but the compound that causes is actually an olfactory one also produced by stinkbugs

[devout vault]

You know I've wondered growing up why caffeine never made me awake like people say it does, wasn't until the past several years that I learned that was an ADHD thing.

[rotund violet]

We're probably all genetically predisposed to that. Warm water implies not-fresh water, and not-fresh water carries disease.

[marble jewel]

There is science behind it, certain particles impart flavor through receptors in your nose. It's been categorized and everything.

[rotund violet]

Running water "tastes" better even though it's the same water.

[sand frost]

I guess but my parents always denied it

[dusty pollen]

yup! one of the most interesting, definitely “not just in our head” things most people with adhd experience!

[sand frost]

They said it tasted fine to them

[dusty pollen]

oh I just mean that I have close to no sense of smell lmao

[sand frost]

Same for lettuce

[devout vault]

My sense of smell is weak too. I can smell very little unless my nose is right next to the source. Sometimes food being cooked is an exception though

[dusty pollen]

certain smells I can smell just fine, but most smells I can barely smell at all

[safe dragon]

caffeine doesn't do anything for me whatsoever as far as I know but I don't... think I have adhd

[rotund violet]

You can even see it on animals who obviously are incapable of deception. They won't touch the water bowl, but put the exact same water in a little electrical fountain and they'll drink up.

[marble jewel]

Onions trigger negative reactions for all of my senses. I don't know why, but it just makes me instantly nauseous.

[dusty pollen]

people keep mentioning certain foods have smells (sugar? hard boiled eggs? pasta?) and I remain unconvinced lmao

[rotund violet]

(I don't find iceberg lettuce bitter, although arugula and spinach are a bit bitter, and some greens like collard greens are very bitter)

[devout vault]

I have a little bit of a hard time drinking lukewarm water, it's annoying. It has to be at least a little bit chilled, but preferably in a fridge overnight on one of the coldest settings level.

It's kinda annoying because people will say just use ice... no, that doesn't work, that just makes my lips cold when the ice presses against it, it doesn't make the water near cold enough unless a lot has been sitting in it for hours.

[rotund violet]

Also I think lettuce tastes bitter-er as it ages. Browning lettuce always tastes bitter, I don't know if that's real or just preprogrammed perception again.

[marble jewel]

Does anyone else have a negative reaction to warm air? Like air that comes out from a heater?

[safe dragon]

I'm late to the coffee thing but coffee is so unimaginably bitter to me that it feels really hard to believe there's people who drink it (I'm not counting the modern coffee that 95% milk and sugar from some young adult/teenager oriented coffee place)

[rotund violet]

There is just nothing better than a nice freshly-ground black coffee in the morning.

[marble jewel]

Whenever I breath warm air, it makes me feel like I'm suffocating

[rotund violet]

Especially a winter morning.

[dusty pollen]

I’m weird about my breathing/feeling like I’m suffocating but for me it’s more of a mild phobia as a result of being asthmatic, I don’t think I have an actual reaction

asthma does often have temperature triggers though, so there’s a small chance it’s that?

[marble jewel]

For me it's when I inhale warm air, I just still feel oxygen starved even though my lungs are still doing their thing

[dusty pollen]

though it would be less suffocating and more wheezing tbh

[marble jewel]

I had asthma growing up, but it's been a few years since I've had an attack

[safe dragon]

I'm fascinated by some people's love for ice cubes. To me they just reduce the amount of drink I have. I'll finish the drink and look in the glass/cup and it's still dull of big ice cubes that could've been more drink.

I think they only make sense in place so incredibly hot that the ice cubes melt within like a minute

[devout vault]

I don't think I've ever smelled anything in a dream either. (I usually remember at least a little bit of a dream every night, practiced my dream recall for like 6 months when I was 13 for getting into lucid dreaming and it sorta stuck even though I don't try anymore).

My senses are kinda weird in my dreams though. No smell, no taste, hearing is always like telepathy almost? (or like you're imagining a sound for those of us who don't have aphantasia), my vision is always kinda fuzzy (worse than without my glasses, and 'spawning' glasses and putting them on only helps a little), and I usually can't feel anything with my sense of touch unless I really focus on it.

There's other things weird about my dreams too though, like the sense of time is very wrong for example.

But my dreams are almost always pretty nonsensical (more so than crazier anime, even), they're so much fun.

[dusty pollen]

cold air feels so crisp but has a tendency to give me asthma attacks (and also trigger like three other medical conditions lmao, they all conspired together to make being cold miserable for me)

[rotund violet]

Fun fact, "oxygen starved" is actually too much carbon dioxide rather than not enough oxygen. We can't really perceive oxygen deprivation that well, it just feels like... tired.

[fleet wren]

the trick is to put ice cubes in something extremely concentrated
that's how you make vietnamese iced coffee - before you add the ice, the hot coffee should occupy at best 20% of the cup

[rotund violet]

So if warm air triggers that reaction, might be because warm air reminds you of being in a congested area with a lot of people breathing out.

[marble jewel]

If you get one of those fancy giant ice cube molds, the surface area helps keep it ice for longer

[dusty pollen]

oh, I definitely don’t have a sense of smell in dreams either, you’re right my dreams have always been a little bit lucid for some reason though (when I have dreams I can remember)

[cinder karma]

Huh

I like lukewarm water

I'll drink either at a Chinese place

[rotund violet]

There's a difference to me between "lukewarm" (like room temperature-ish) and "warm" (been sitting out in the sun).

[sand frost]

You can shake the water with the ice to speed up heat transfer

[safe dragon]

dreams definitely don't have senses for me. It's more all strangely conceptual and just kind of happens as an abstract story. I don't even really experience sight in a dream it's just... something. I can't really imagine any of those things while awake either though so

[sand frost]

Convection helping out!!

[devout vault]

My only negative reaction is this apartment gets way too hot in the winter once they change from AC to heat (because chicago heating ordinances combined with their old air system or something). I sweat most all day, and especially at night.

I've always preferred below 70 temperatures so it's pretty frustrating.

(Thermostat? What thermostat? I've got this thing with a lever that you can slide between warm and cold. 😛 No way to view current temperature either. Atra has said it looks like it's from the 80s. They've sent out emails before during the winter saying to keep the temperature above a certain amount though, so I think they might've just not upgraded my apartment's in particular before I moved in.)

[marble jewel]

@devout vault Were you always in the Chicago area? I thought you were a PNWer at one point?

[devout vault]

Yeah, that's a big part of why I ask for drinks without ice too.

[dusty pollen]

by “a little bit lucid” I mean I’m generally aware in the back of my mind that I’m dreaming and that I can kind of change things, but am not actively controlling things, if that makes sense? usually it’s more like at some points I go “wait, that doesn’t make sense, we should do something else” or “I don’t feel like dreaming about this” lmao

[dusty pollen]

that sounds like textbook aphantasia tbh

[safe dragon]

oh yes definitely

[rotund violet]

I thought Casey was from Florida

[safe dragon]

don't ask me such bizarre impossible things like imagining an apple and the asking me if it has spots

[marble jewel]

I moved to PNW a few years ago, and the climate suits me well

[fleet wren]

aphantasia blew my mind when I first read about it when I was a kid
it was a lesson to young me that not everyone perceives the world the same way

[dusty pollen]

why would an apple have spots?

[devout vault]

I trained myself to be able to do lucid dream but I got bored of it (doesn't help that I don't have much mental clarity in dreams). 😅 Nowadays I'm still vaguely aware I'm in a dream but I choose to follow whatever the dream plot already is (while still pulling lucid shenanigans like pulling a sword out of nowhere - I just always do those things in response and along with the dream plot though)

[safe dragon]

they can... they're not all 1 equal color...

[dusty pollen]

so we’re pretty similar then, I just never trained myself

[devout vault]

Some of my dreams are kinda confusing in that it will only be a 2D game. Not like on a monitor or something, like the 2D game is all that exists.

Most common ones are SDV (clearly very modded or at least 1.123 or something) or Spelunky (some of the spelunky spinoffs in my dreams are pretty entertaining).

Sometimes I can imagine myself holding a controller to control it that way, other times I just my mind more directly. It's weird. Even when imagining a controller I can't actually feel a body or anything.

[safe dragon]

one neat but maybe weird thing about dreams for me personally that that I can just notice myself quickly forgetting the entire thing within the first few minutes of being awake. Often I like to just sit there and kinda experience all of it disappear from my memory

[dusty pollen]

I don’t think I’ve dreamed about balatro yet but let’s face it, it will happen soon

[devout vault]

Nah, I lived in MS through 3rd grade and then my family moved to FL. I moved to Chicago for a job a little over a year ago.

I have visited seattle a couple times though.

[sand frost]

Maybe it’s bruised

[marble jewel]

When I start to dream about modding SDV or playing Minecraft, that's definitely a sign of something... But I refuse to acknowledge it's meaning.

[dusty pollen]

I think that’s fairly normal!

[marble jewel]

What do you mean I should touch grass?

[sand frost]

There’s grass in SDV

[dusty pollen]

I have dreamed about discord before which just feels like a waste of a dream

[sand frost]

Maybe it means you should do more map mods

[safe dragon]

I used to have a friend who could have like a 30 minute breakdown of everything in their dreams down to details I would never even notice in real life.

They also suffered from extremely common nightmares though so I was definitely not envious

[devout vault]

Yeah, that first part of what you said is how I typically am these days.

While I don't get nightmares (since I associate those with fear in particular), I do sometimes get dreams that very clearly feel bad, where everything will go wrong even with lucid manipulations. I tend to force myself awake when those happen since I'm able to do that.

Usually when those bad dreams happen it's my sleep apnea acting up I think. I'll wake up with a headache, or sometimes one of my arms fell asleep for clearly too long (not even being in a weird position).

[supple ether]

I used to dream about club penguin a lot. I still do from time to time, if only rarely

[safe dragon]

[marble jewel]

I'd rather have dreams about video games than resurfacing trauma, yup.

[devout vault]

The funny thing about my imagination while awake is I can't really imagine anything detailed. I can only imagine details in like one small area, and the rest is pretty vague. Sometimes I can manage two medium detail things.

It's not just vision either, it's very difficult to imagine a cold left arm and hot right arm for example.

[dusty pollen]

I don’t really get nightmares either because nothing in dreams tends to bother me I get dreams that are the classic versions of nightmares people say they’ve had, but within the dream I feel very neutral about everything

[sand frost]

Unfortunately I tend to wake up and remember nightmares way more often than normal dreams

And my nightmares really bother me

They usually involve a lot of murder

[devout vault]

Another thing that blew my mind at one point is some people don't think with words, but more like images.

Like, I can do that, and sometimes do (sometimes in a pretty abstract sense, usually when thinking about programming stuff), but I typically use words.

[cinder karma]

I almost only drink coffee, energy drinks, protein shakes, water, and the occasional Gatorade tbh

[sand frost]

Our lists have so few overlap xD

[marble jewel]

Yeah, I saw something about that recently, where some people don't have an inner-head voice.

[safe dragon]

perhaps even more fascinating. There's people who don't think in either of those things they just... think

[dusty pollen]

I find that being bilingual made me realise I often don’t think in words so much as in concepts, though I can think in words!

[sand frost]

I drink mostly water, some fizzy waters (like bubbly or other generics like that), some coffee with milk and sugar, some matcha lattes, some juice, some boba as a treat

[dusty pollen]

I usually do both, I’ll have words and concepts lmao

[marble jewel]

I'm pretty sure all of my thoughts involve an inner-dialogue to some extent.

[supple ether]

I visualize almost exclusively. I basically never think with words unless I'm figuring what to say or write

[fleet wren]

also mainly a word thinker. I wonder when was the exact point I stopped thinking mainly in Vietnamese and switched over to English

[cinder karma]

Oh. Tea too!

Sometimes

[safe dragon]

I can't imagine images in my head but there's still something and I don't know how you'd possible describe it. It's like my brain still is acting as if the concept of an image was there or even a video

[cinder karma]

Rarely

[sand frost]

I definitely rely on words for speech but when I’m just thinking I’m not sure it’s words

[dusty pollen]

I can’t really turn the inner monologue off but I do typically also have a distinct other part of my brain that’s thinking more in concepts at the same time

[devout vault]

Yeah, that happens for me too. I think it's pretty common if you remember anything at all, your brain is scrubbing those memories away like the other dreams you had during the night.

Back when I practiced dream recall I learned about staying still with my eyes closed and sorta back tracking from the most recent thing I remember to try and remember more and solidify it in my memory. Back then I would also write things down after I did that and went as far back as I could.

Sometimes I still do that and fall back asleep and the dream continues. Often times I'm able to change the dream plot in ways I couldn't during the dream by directing the thoughts I go over before I fall back asleep.

[sand frost]

Interestingly I have a lot of trouble with words I’ve only heard, not seen written

[marble jewel]

When I'm cooking, I can sometimes think in taste instead of words

[sand frost]

(This is particularly obvious to me rn because I’m learning Russian)

(And if I haven’t seen it written or spelled, poof!)

[devout vault]

I've gotten mod ideas from dreams. I think Moon Misadventures might've been one of them - at the very least, I've gotten some future ideas for that mod from dreams.

[cinder karma]

Fun fact: I can have two separate independent thought streams

[devout vault]

I've had discord in dreams too, very strange. Especially since in most dreams text won't stay the same long enough for me to read it, but in those and a few other dreams it magically will.

[cinder karma]

I can also read a book and listen to a book

[fleet wren]

hah wow, you're getting valid ideas? I have received ideas (for mods, for my story, or whatevs) while dreaming, only to wake up and realize "wait a second these are trash"

[cinder karma]

There may actually be two of me

[dusty pollen]

and they’re both retired

[safe dragon]

in books I will completely forget any visual description you gave me of anything cause idk what to do with it

[marble jewel]

I've had modding dreams where I was able to wake up and jot a note in my phone to remind myself later. And there have been a few times my note was so vague that it doesn't even help me remember what I was thinking about at the time.

[fleet wren]

for anyone here who read SCP I once dreamt I wrote an absolute banger of an SCP article with tons of upvotes. then I woke up, remembered what I actually wrote in my dreams, and was like, fuck that's terrible, if I post this they'd eat me alive

[cinder karma]

Meanwhile I do valid work in dreams

[dusty pollen]

these ideas always seem so good while you’re in the dream as well. And then you wake up and realise

[sand frost]

Have you ever tried being in two zoom calls at once?

[marble jewel]

I hate actual work dreams, because then I wake up and still have to go to work

[cinder karma]

Yes

[sand frost]

How was it?

[cinder karma]

Terrible

[sand frost]

I tried it and went “oh FUCK no I can’t do this”

[devout vault]

I've never had trauma dreams but I don't really have any trauma. 😅

I didn't have any dreams where I was a girl until after I discovered transitioning was something a person could actually do. After that though, when it did happen, it would always feel so good and right, which kinda confirmed my suspicion that I wanted to transition (based on various experiences and thought processes growing up).

Even still, in dreams I have this distinct abstract feeling of it I'm guy or girl. It's strange. I've only ever had the girl feeling for a brief moment when awake once or twice, can't recall what caused those times either. Wish it was something that happened more when awake. 😔

[cinder karma]

A better way to think of it is that I have an audio stream and a visual stream

And i can process them independently

Two audio streams doesn't work

[sand frost]

Ah I see

[marble jewel]

One of my mod-idea dreams I just wrote down the words "Full House" in my mod note, but I can't for the life of me remember where I was going with that

[dusty pollen]

I have an audio stream and a kind of concepts/abstract stream ig? but they aren’t really fully independent

[sand frost]

I can’t process audio that well, I haven’t experimented with two visual streams xD

[supple ether]

https://tenor.com/view/full-house-bridge-gif-15539569

[marble jewel]

Yeah that seems like some sort of clue, but dream Matt has not revealed it to me

[devout vault]

I'm not bilingual (see earlier problems with foreign languages classes), but I've noticed something vaguely similar for myself.

Like, sometimes I'll notice I finish a thought before I finish thinking it. It's a very strange feeling, and if I think about it and pay attention I can notice it happening a lot.

I tend to describe it as a sort of echoing?

[dusty pollen]

exactly!

that’s the exact thing I have

[safe dragon]

I tend to simply think in whatever language I was conversing in

[pliant snow]

haskell

[dusty pollen]

like the words are a narration for a separate stream of concepts that happens much more quickly

[safe dragon]

I do not hold conversations in haskell

[dusty pollen]

I would like to

[supple ether]

I have essentially unlimited streams of everything except language. I can only process language one at a time and in only one direction, in or out. Makes transcribing text a pain in the butt

[sand frost]

I can handle some languages as subtitles with other languages as the audio but only certain combinations

[safe dragon]

my thoughts are simply a conversation that actually follows the cadence of natural speech with responses, rebuttals and everything

[sand frost]

Spanish subtitles and Japanese audio was wildly hard to process

[dusty pollen]

have you guys all seen that article about solving the four queens chess problem in haskell using only types?

[supple ether]

Yes

[dusty pollen]

it’s a great one

[safe dragon]

I think I have

[devout vault]

Yeah, I can't stop my brain from thinking. 😅

It can be kinda frustrating while waiting to fall asleep (it usually takes me hours), though as I get closer to falling asleep I definitely notice things slowing down.

The only thing that has ever seemed to stop me from thinking is music - especially if it has lyrics. (Similar problem with wanting to listen if I hear people talking nearby I guess.) (Honestly, I should probably try listening to music while falling asleep to help with that ) It's why I've never listened to music while doing schoolwork or programming, I just can't think with it going.

I also have a hard time reading ahead in a book or something if something is being read to me. Most recent example being online mandated trainings at work, so annoying.

(Since I'm backreading and responding to things I'm like 10 minutes behind in this conversation 😅 )

[dusty pollen]

to this day I don’t know why my uni thought the correct programming course for the first term, essentially serving as some people’s introduction to programming, was Functional Programming using haskell lmao

[devout vault]

(Also re: music while sleeping - not sure how well that would work for sleep since music I do at least like the sound of tends to be pretty upbeat)

[dusty pollen]

I can’t listen to music, it clashes with the thinking lmao

but with everything else, adhd meds in the evening are the only reason I can sleep now!

[safe dragon]

I have no idea what it would possibly be like to not have a conversation going inside your head at all times

[devout vault]

I read so much throughout pre-college school (mainly fiction) that there's so many words I know vaguely how to use but not how to pronounce or their actual definition.

I remember frigid being one particular case for the pronunciation.

[supple ether]

Sometimes I find music distracting, but I often use it to provide a minimum amount of stimulation, without which I find it difficult to focus

[safe dragon]

music also prevents me from thinking cause the lyrics clash with the conversation I'm having in my head so I turn it off when I need to focus

[marble jewel]

For any non-word thinkers, when you read text do you hear it as a voice in your head, or something else?

[sand frost]

I’m honestly not sure

I always thought I did, but I also read faster than speech by a wide margin

[devout vault]

I have a problem with books where in an exciting/tense part my eyes will dart further down the page or to the next one and spoil things a little. 😛

[sand frost]

Which sort of logically implies i don’t on some level?

But maybe my brain can just speak way faster than my mouth

[cinder karma]

When I'm reading it's vague feelings

[supple ether]

Usually, I just get imagery directly.

[cinder karma]

This was important in math competitions

[dusty pollen]

mine definitely can that’s why when I was younger I would get myself twisted when speaking so often

[sand frost]

In elementary school we had to write down “what we were thinking about as we were reading” and I simply did not understand the assignment

I was thinking about the story! Because I was reading the story!

[devout vault]

Are you saying riding cows and playing tennis (at the same time, the cow was part of the sport) while floating in an asteroid belt with no gravity isn't a good idea for a minigame for Moon Misadventures?

[cinder karma]

My dad used to say I had the answer in speed math comps before he finished reading the question

[supple ether]

Only rarely am I consciously processing the words, and usually when I'm doing that I'm not also absorbing the meaning well

[cinder karma]

So I just look at the words and gleen

[safe dragon]

this essentially means you are able to read without whats called subvocalization

[dusty pollen]

I never got into maths competitions which is sad because with maths challenges/olympiads I was pretty good, even got like 20th in the UK in the girls’ maths olympiad once

[cinder karma]

Tbh I can also "combine" both of me

[sand frost]

I have two reading speeds: fast (but reading every word) and faster: skimming the page

[cinder karma]

Ie, if I need more processing power than the two halves have

Then I hear the words when I read

[sand frost]

I got into them but was never serious about it, and as a result not that good

[cinder karma]

.... you may consider me insane

[sand frost]

It was fun to go places and do math with my friends!

[dusty pollen]

but my school never really did that stuff on any serious level and never had any practice/training etc so it was literally just whatever I showed up knowing/being ready for lmao. I never practiced for them or anything like that

[sand frost]

Too lazy to ever study though

My friends who were more serious definitely studied

[devout vault]

I can sometimes have multiple thought streams, but not going concurrently. The main case is branching off for tangents to add context before coming back to where I was before (sometimes multiple tangents to add context to a previous tangent).

I started an antidepressant for the first time a bit over a month ago, and for a couple weeks there I was having multiple times a day where the 'base' thought process would disappear from existing leaving me lost in the tangent. (I mainly noticed it since I was doing a lot of therapy at the time.) That seems to have stopped by now thankfully.

[dusty pollen]

I was just weirdly good at that stuff never really studied anything maths-wise until I went to uni

[cinder karma]

Lucky

I have to study

[devout vault]

Yeah, which is why when thinking about programming solutions abstractly I often will skip the narration step and form like a graph (CS sense not excel sense) of things, kinda hard to maintain as it grows though. Especially if I get interrupted, it all goes poof

[ivory shadow]

I was amazing at math in high school. Tested out of statistics and calculus at college pretty much. And then just fell off a fucking cliff because I had no use for anything advanced for years and years

[devout vault]

Like that one xkcd(?)

[dusty pollen]

you said you’re on adhd meds too, right? please read the symptoms of “serotonin storm”/“serotonin syndrome” so you’re aware of them, they say it’s rare but it ended up becoming relevant for me

[cinder karma]

Yuppppp

[marble jewel]

When school was the goal, I plowed through statistics, linear algebra, calculus 1, 2, and 3, and then... proceeded to forget it all.

[cinder karma]

Guess why I do my best work while swimming

[devout vault]

With programming I've transcended to the point of thinking in wider concepts instead of specific syntax, it's great.

I sorta do syntax sometimes, but only when I'm doing it with an IDE (since sometimes I partially think out solutions by coding them out and changing things as I go along).

[dusty pollen]

(tl;dr, combining SSRIs and adhd meds can rarely cause too much serotonin, which is SUPER dangerous)

[devout vault]

I have a much harder time with language as audio in general compared to text. I always turn on subtitles when I can, even for English (unless it's youtube's terrible autogenerated ones for example).

[devout vault]

Is this similar to the things people do with C++ template metaprogramming? I've seen things like calculating math algorithms, and even once somebody trying to run tetris purely at compile time that way.

[dusty pollen]

it’s a joke article but yes, same concept!

[safe dragon]

there's the guy who created doom using the typescript type system as a language

[ivory shadow]

Not to simplify matters, he wrote an entire virtual machine in the typescript type system, made a compilation target for it, and compiled doom to run in it.

[marble jewel]

What's even more interesting (to me) is just how absurd it is. Stats at the beginning of the video - 3.5 trillion lines of types, 177 TB, running for 12 days to produce a single frame.

[devout vault]

Funny enough, my old ADHD meds (non stimulant) helped my sleep apnea significantly.

My mom was baffled when I told her (found out because of a phase of not taking my medicine like I should, and then starting back up on them), but she ended up finding a Canadian study of that medicine (Straterra) being used for that specific purpose.

When I switched to Qelbree it did the same thing (I think it functions similarly to straterra, also not a stimulant). Ended up having to switch off it once I moved here though, since my new insurance made me go from 3 to 2 pills a day and it wasn't good enough anymore.

I'm on a stimulant now, which seems okay, think it needs to be a higher dose. Never been on a stimulant before, kinda avoided it since my mom's side of the family has had addictive tendencies.

[sand frost]

Same!! I do use the terrible autogenerated ones sometimes

[devout vault]

This is why meditation is baffling and seemingly impossible to me

[dusty pollen]

meditation is a scam invented by neurotypicals /lh

[devout vault]

I read about this once, maybe it only applies to word thinkers, but it's this thing called subvocalization where your throat muscles will move some as if you were actually speaking them. I think there are devices that can sorta transcribe your thoughts that way?

Once you learn how I think it's also easy to stop the subvocalization though

[devout vault]

Mood, this still happens to me sometimes

[ivory shadow]

What if I use subvocalization with threading

[devout vault]

Yeah, in calc classes I often solved things from a 'feeling' than actually going through solutions iteratively in my head

[devout vault]

When I worked at Kumon some of the graders were like that with some of the math. They graded faster without the answer book than I did with it.

[devout vault]

Yeah, I'm largely like that. There are occasionally times when I feel like I have to do the conscious processing, and when I do I often have to re-read sentences several times.

[ivory shadow]

Also that's not even a joke. I'm in a habit of subvocalizing when I read mostly because of fiction and vocalizing things in character voices. But when I speed up things just blur together and overlap. Hence. Threading.

[devout vault]

I remember doing this once in elementary school as part of the 'gifted kids' program. I hadn't learned about order of operations yet though and when one of the other students from my school told me about it I kinda rolled my eyes and didn't believe them. 😛

[fleet wren]

I just skip the middleman and voice my thoughts directly
literally cannot break that habit even when there are others

were you saying something? nah, just me fighting the mind gremlins

[rain apex]

Wait ppl move their throat?

I thought it was merely imagine the words

[fleet wren]

yeah I read about that as well, and i can definitely feel my own throat's micromovements

[rain apex]

Amaze

[devout vault]

Hmm, never heard of that. That'll be good to keep in mind, thank you. The potential seizures thing is probably something I should keep in mind since I have a minor form of epilepsy (not the flashing lights kind). Had two seizures when I was super young, they told me if I ever had a third one (which I never did) I'd have to go on seizure meds.

[rain apex]

I think i pronounce many words i only read instead of speak wrong bc it is usually first time i even attempted the movement

As a result i read fast

[devout vault]

One reason I never tried a antidepressant until recently is when I was young I was diagnosed as bipolar (which doesn't mix well with SSRIs) with kinda sketchy reasoning by a doctor that didn't seem to take it seriously (they kinda just assumed that my depression was that since my older brother (who they also diagnosed) had bipolar). I never really had any mania though, and 2-3 years ago I talked to my psychiatrist about it (since I just found out about the sketchy doctor stuff) and don't have that diagnosis anymore.

[devout vault]

I basically only remembered the stuff I've used my 2D game dev-ing (so just basic trigonometry really... but I guess that's more than what I lot of people post-highschool can say)

[devout vault]

Something something xkcd multithreading but with your thoughts instead.

I sometimes have this happen when speaking, pick one word to say and half way through my sentence I change the word I want to use and end up with some weird hybrid of the two.

[devout vault]

Yeah I was fascinated when I first heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

[rotund violet]

Do you get the recurring nightmare where you're back in school again and haven't studied for the final exam?

[dusty pollen]

a shitty mobile game I’m playing rn is blatantly using a sideways 8 as an infinity sign

[cinder karma]

Yes

I still get the nightmare

There is a course on my classload I forgot about