BougieBirdie

I’m constantly asking people to repeat themselves, especially at work. After two or three failed attempts people start treating me like I’m stupid.

I’m not stupid, it’s just that the radio, the equipment, the alarms, and the dozens of conversations happening around us are drowning out my tinnitus. And you want to mumble out a complex conversation without saying “hey listen” to get my attention first. Like a stupid person.

I need a better job. One that doesn’t make me feel stupid

The one I use is called Firefox

Jokes aside, they do not have an official app. There is an unofficial one on the play store, and they have a public API so maybe someone might make one down the line

“Let’s make litter out of these literati!”

“That’s too clever, you’re one of them!” POW!

Like so much of the simpsons, lives rent free in my head

I’m here to plug TMDB. It does everything I want from IMDB without being owned by Amazon

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss

You take a four panel comic, have one line stand up, two panels with two lines standing up, and one panel with two lines perpendicular to each other. Congratulations! It’s a joke about miscarriage

Well, it is and it isn’t
Understanding the date labels on your food

If the product has a shelf life of less than 90 days, it must have either a best before or packed on date with specific rules about how it’s formatted. If it has a shelf life greater than 90 days, the best before date is optional. Also a best before date has no guarantee that the product isn’t spoiled, but also may be perfectly safe to consume well beyond the best before date.

To further muddy the waters, there are actual expiration dates which must be included on very specific products. Mostly medical diets, meal replacements, and infant formula. This means that best before dates are not expiration dates, although most people use the term interchangeably. Indeed, even this article does because alcohol would have a best before date and the article is quoted as saying it’s expiring.

Anyway, apart from actual “expiration dates” which are serious business, best before dates do seem to be largely based on vibes and woo-woo

Edit: And you know what else, this all Canadian regulations. I have no idea how that impacts an imported product. I’m assuming an import has to follow our regulations in order to be sold, but hey, anything goes in business

Sometimes the best-by date refers to the packaging instead of the product. Plastic bottles in particular degrade with time and give you a whole bunch of microplastics.

Most booze shouldn’t go bad if properly stored, but exceptions might occur for lighter beverages like beer and coolers.

Aside, I think the best-by date is largely a scam and if it benefits anyone it’s either the manufacturer or grocer. I wonder how much perfectly edible food my family’s thrown away because someone saw a date that made them feel funny

If I have a train of thought, it keeps getting derailed at the station

My professor tried to teach us that one too, but a classmate came up with an unforgettable mnemonic. Very cursed

The professor hadn’t heard that one before

Quiddler is also the name of a card-based word game. It plays like Gin with a lot of Qs

I’m pretty sure they’re equipped with a wonderfully sophisticated logging facility that’s piped straight to /dev/null

In this case, you could upload it to YouTube where it will be taken down and seen by a whole no people

Tax breaks for tech bros

My pet theory: Radicalize the disenfranchised to incite domestic terrorism and further OpenAI’s political goals.

My level of antagonism depends on how self-destructive brain wants to be.

Brain wants me to eat a whole cheesecake even though lactose doesn’t always agree with me. Okay, well, Brain wants me to be happy and also acquire those sweet, sweet calories, I respect that.

Brain wants me to vividly imagine sticking a knife in my belly while I’m chopping vegetables for dinner. Sorry Brain, you’re kind of a dick.

I’ve heard of therapists recommending you name your brain - particularly someone you dislike - so that you can separate yourself from the part of you that runs amok.

Fuckin’ Greg’s at it again, won’t let me sleep until I check to see if the door’s locked for the seventh time. Boy, I hate that guy.

Too spooky for me

It’s either that or fisting

For me, the break timer is really just “take a few minutes to eat/hydrate/pee” and then resume the original task. Although when I’m depressed I often use one full 25 minute task to do the thing I dread, and then the next one is to play video games or watch a show - generally to do something fun to recharge my batteries. Sometimes I can’t even manage to do something fun for myself without timeboxing it, I hate that.

My wife has pretty debilitating ADHD, sometimes the pomos are really helpful for her and sometimes it’s the opposite. Without some kind of externalized structure, she can’t finish the tasks that she intends to start and it causes her a lot of distress.

She would want me to plug Spirit City LoFi. It’s a customizable task manager that’s very chill, and just gamified enough to keep her attention without being distracting

Not to be flippant, but if you want to alter the way you think, then therapy is probably the answer.

The good news is that in my experience, the valuable part of therapy is totally free and you could start today.

I’ve had success with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The model for CBT says that our automatic thoughts initiate our feelings, and while our feelings are valid, our thoughts can be bullshit.

Our brain is like an overgrown field, and each thought is like a person passing through it. Each time a thought passes through the field, it wears down a groove which will become a trail or a road. Our thoughts want to take the path of least resistance, so they follow the well-worn paths. However, we can create new paths with better thoughts that lead to more positive feelings, and eventually the negative paths have more resistance than the positive ones.

The key technique is recognizing Cognitive Biases, which are common ways that our brains lie to us, and then restructuring our thoughts through journaling exercises. Common biases include assuming other people think poorly of us, making predictions of the future with limited information, or thinking that because we feel bad we must be bad.

Now on the flip side, therapeutic techniques are not a one-size-fits-all solution. What’s worked for me might not work for everyone. And that’s okay because there’s plenty of tools in the toolbox left over.

I got a lot of mileage out of CBT. It’s logical, there’s a process to follow, and it improved the quality of my life to a point. It didn’t happen overnight, and I still have bad times more often than I’d like, but there was improvement

Whether you have access to a therapist or not, the greatest impact from therapy comes from doing the homework. It’s lame, but there it is. But if you really don’t vibe with a technique, the good news is there’s a zillion other techniques you could try a web search away.