Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023

  • 52 Posts
  • 2.63K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • My wife and I moved into our first house together on Halloween, 1995, so that night we drank a bottle of champagne, watched Young Frankenstein, and handed out candy. Every year since then we’ve done the same thing to celebrate our anniversary of living together, though sometime a different movie. This year, we couldn’t find our DVD, so decided to stream it and found what you did. Apparently Disney bought it and for some reason decided not to make it available. Very frustrating.



  • That’s a good theory. It’s long been held that the more population dense area of the country skew liberal because diverse people jammed together learn to understand and get along with each other. You could make an argument that growing up on an internet with unfettered voices expressing themselves would be similar.

    But the underlying racism that seems to fuel modern conservatism seems to be growing in all areas. I’m in California, which is about as blue as it gets, but like 40 percent of people voted for Trump.


  • I’ve been saying here for ages that the perception of boomers being overwhelmingly right wing and younger generations being overwhelmingly left wing is far, far from accurate. You can look at the demographic data from the prior two elections and see that, yes, there were more conservative boomers than liberal, but it’s not a big margin, and for younger generations it was flipped. Now it appears the younger folks are more conservative than liberal.

    As a very liberal boomer, it’s been frustrating to get so many truly hateful responses, even recently, based on nothing other than the year I was born. I kept feeling like that level of intolerance didn’t bode well, and now I’m thinking that concern was validated.



  • I read quite a bit, though it’s notched down a bit since my wife and adult son got me back into playing WoW in the evenings (we used to be away into it, then stepped away for some years). Like others have said, my book reading is 100% for pleasure, and I don’t feel bad if I don’t read, except that I feel reading is healthier downtime than WoW or TV.

    A key for me is having some consistent times that I read. Most important for me is that I read in bed for about half an hour before going to sleep, and I find that that routine helps me go to sleep (I have trouble shutting my brain off). I take the dogs for a jog/walk on weekend mornings, and also consistently read for a while after I get back.

    I read almost exclusively science fiction with a dash of fantasy. I’m an older guy, nearing retirement, and the only factor there is that our kids are grown and I can afford a gardener, so I have more free time than when I was younger.


  • Yes, Leckie writes SF. If you’re interested, I would start with Ancillary Justice, her first novel. It’s really good, and the first of a trilogy that’s all excellent.

    I think you saw a post by me long ago where I posted my short notes about the books I’d read in that time frame. If you’d like me to pass along those notes for any of the books we talk about, like Leckie or the more recent Gibson novels, I’d be happy to.

    And thanks for the offer. I’m good now, but who knows. An interesting time of change for me coming up: I retire in January after 39+ years at the same company, and sometime after we’re going to move from an area of southern California, where I’ve lived my whole life, to northern Washington State. Will be odd for sure.




  • I’m sorry to hear life is having challenges for you at the moment, I hope that resolves soon. A nice thing about a book is that you can put it down for days, weeks, months, whatever, and it’s still waiting for you when you feel like coming back to it.

    I’ve been reading more Gibson lately. I read the first two books of the Jackpot trilogy (the third hasn’t come out yet) and the first in the Blue Ant trilogy. They’ve all been very good.

    You take care and I hope things get better for you.




  • Farting as you relax and when you bring your knees up towards your chest (common when you sleep on your side) is pretty normal. It might also be a timing thing based on when you go to bed relative to when you’ve eaten.

    You might look into why you fart so much if it’s excessive. For instance, I have an odd food intolerance called fructose malabsorption - excess fructose doesn’t get digested, so it just ferments in my intestines. If I eat a lot of it, I’ll get massively painful diarrhea, but usually I just get some gas.

    The same thing happens with people who are lactose intolerant: they can usually have some amount of lactose and they just get gassy, so some people don’t even realize they have it.

    Other things can also cause unusual amounts of gas.