Proud of you.
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This isn't useful to me at the moment, but nonetheless, I really appreciate when people like you take the time to share knowledge in this way.
There is a special place in heaven for the people who do this, just as there's a special place in hell for people who reply to their own forum post about a complex technical problem.
(Side note: I tried the find the xkcd where he is yelling at his computer after finding a forum post from someone who has the exact same computer problem as he does, but the original poster hasn't updated it. Alas, I couldn't. If anyone knows which one I mean, I'd appreciate you pointing me to it, because it'll drive me mad until I remember how to find it)
That's fucking hilarious. Tell your husband that at least one randomer on the internet thinks that he's a catch
This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I'm glad that it exists; you're delightful
Damn, I didn't notice they were made out of lambdas. Guess I need to switch to NixOS
Yay, learning!
"TIL i do ~women~ people things. lol"
The point of "you don't have to hold your farts in to be a woman" isn't to suggest that only women fart, but that farting is a thing that people do, and that given that women are a subset of people, women fart (and that farting doesn't make someone less of a woman)
There's a balance. I have known plenty of women who felt it was not permissible to fart around people/in public ever. One would not even fart around her husband of 10+ years. Another would only fart when they were at home, in the bathroom. Another felt it was inappropriate to ever fart, even when she was pooping (as a result of this, she once was so constipated that she had to go to the hospital).
Whilst these are particularly extreme examples, they're just instances of a general trend where women farting is stigmatised more than men farting. I interpret the image in the OP to be resisting that excessive pressure and unrealistic standard rather than advocating for disregarding basic courtesy and farting with impunity
Biochemistry — specifically protein structure. It's so cool.
My favourite protein is Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). It was first extracted from a jellyfish, and it's super useful in research. The middle bit is the bit responsible for the coloured glow, and the rest of it (the barrel type structure) is basically just to stop the emitted energy from being immediately absorbed by the solvent.
If anyone wants me to nerd out more about proteins, hit me up.
I find it cool that Dolly Parton's stage persona is so thick a mask of glamour that when she's not "in character", she can go out and get to live like a normal person, who no-one recognises her. I don't know if this was by design, but it sure seems to be a smart choice
I agree that baby steps are important. So many of the less techy people I know have become so accustomed to being annoyed at tech that they just suppress it, thinking that there is no alternative. I've been told a few times that my freely incandescent rage at technology is validating because "if even [I] are frustrated at things, then it's not just a problem of [them] being bad at tech".
Step one is acknowledging the problem
Something that I find interesting with Rome is that arguably one of the ways it managed to keep going for so long is that it was continuing to push its borders outwards through conquest. Assimilating a land and its people into the Republic/Empire is one way of dealing with the problem of invading "barbarians" (even if that is just transmuting the problem such that your external threat is a new group of "barbarians", and the old potential invaders potentially pose a threat from within).
Continuing to push outwards is a way to continue developing the military though, and to distract the military from the potential option of seizing power for themselves. There's only so far you can push before the borders you need to secure are too large to do effectively, and the sheer area to be administrated is too large, even for Rome.
As you highlight, it's a common misconception that people don't realise that the Fall of Rome was far more protracted and complex of a process than a single event. I think that's a shame, because I find it so much more interesting that historians can't even agree on when the Fall of Rome even was.
"Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob."
I'm not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The "secession of the plebs" was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.
Commenting to echo my agreement. Rome was bloody huge, and it was hard to administrate. Things like high quality roads and advanced administrative systems help to manage it all, but when you're that big, even just distributing food across the empire is a challenge. Rome only became as large as it was because it was supported by many economic, military and political systems, but the complexity of this means that we can't even point to one of them and say "it was the failure of [thing] that caused Rome to fall."
An analogy that I've heard that I like is that it's like a house falling into disrepair over many years. A neglected house will likely become unliveable long before it collapses entirely, and it'll start showing the symptoms of its degradation even sooner than that. The more things break, the more that the inhabitants may be forced to do kludge repairs that just make maintaining the whole thing harder.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I'll check it out. I learned about a lot of this stuff via my late best friend, who was a historian, so continuing to learn about it makes me feel closer to him
I hope this doesn't sound trite, given that I'm just a random stranger on the internet, but I'm proud of you. Whilst I haven't experienced depression in the way that you describe, I know how suffocating of an experience it is. It takes a tremendous amount of strength to endure that, especially when there are concrete life circumstances exacerbating things, as you describe. I am glad that you get to be alive again; you deserve it.
I recently played Signalis which explored these themes in an awesome manner. (It's a survival horror game, but speaking as someone who isn't great with horror, it wasn't too bad on that front.)
Oh man, I relate to this. I have a somewhat similar experience which I have recounted in a long comment elsewhere in this thread that you may be interested in checking out.
My conclusion is much the same as your own. In some ways, I think I had to believe that I was the same person, because otherwise, I'd be living out the rest of my life feeling like an imposter who had stolen another person's life. I imagine it might've been harder to believe that I'm still me if I had experienced personality changes as people who experience head trauma sometimes do.
Story time!
I once bumped my head and got complete retrograde amnesia. I lost basically all of my episodic memory — that is, the memory of all my past experiences. My semantic memory appeared to be intact, which meant I retained my general knowledge of the world, such as who was prime minister. However, I basically lost all sense of my identity for a while. I didn't even remember my name at first. Honestly, I don't know if I can say that I ever truly remembered my name after the fact; I was fortunate that my memory did return to me gradually over the course of many days, weeks and months, but because I was told my name many times over that period, I never got that sense of remembering my name (I'm going to use the psuedonym Ann for the sake of this story)
Anyway, it was terrifying at the time, but now that I'm past the dread and trauma of it all, I can reflect on it as a cool experience. A few days after the accident, when I still had very little memory of who I was, I went to a Christmas party with many of my friends. However, it felt like being in a room full of strangers. It was awkward at first when I arrived; people didn't know how to act towards me, and seemed uncertain of whether I was still the person they knew. That was a fear I shared. However, they seemed to ease up quite quickly, because it seemed that my personality was still authentic to the person they knew, even if I had to start from scratch in getting to know them. It's a bizarre experience to reflect on, because now I have two sets of memories of meeting some of my dearest friends for the first time.
The most distressing part of it all was when I had gotten to know some of the people in my life, and had put together many of the fragments about who I was. I wasn't sure that I was that person though. I felt like an intruder in someone else's life, and I was terrified that I wasn't the same person. All the wonderfully supportive people around me — how could I call them my friends when I wasn't the same Ann that had earned their friendship. Apparently I still acted like her, but if I was her, why was there such a stark division between the two versions of Ann in my head: there was the Ann who existed before the accident, and the Ann that I was afterwards — I didn't know whether I could consider them to be the same. If we were the same person, why was I talking about "her" rather than "me"?
Some months after the accident, a romantic relationship started between me and my best friend. We had been close friends for a few years prior, and he later confessed to me that a part of him was anxious that maybe we wouldn't have been together if not for the bump to my head. I was surprised to hear this, because my friend was a super charismatic guy and this kind of anxiety seemed out of character for him. I understood where he was coming from though. I told him that it would be nice if I could tell him that his worry was a silly one, and that of course the amnesia wasn't the only reason we were together. However, I didn't actually know whether I was the same person. By then, it felt like the vast majority of my memories had returned, and no-one reported any discernible personality change to me. However, I had no way to know what significant memories, if any, were still missing to me. I didn't think that his fears were true, but ultimately, I had no way of knowing, and I just had to live with that — and unfortunately, so did he.
One of the most disconcerting aspects of it all was how it felt to rediscover a memory. Have you ever had something remind you of a memory that was tucked away so deep in your mind that you didn't even know you still had it until something brought it to the surface? A foggy fragment from childhood perhaps? Well that's what regaining my memories felt like. In the early days, it was extremely vague bits that I remembered.
The first fragment was in the hospital waiting room, when I remembered that the friend who was with me was someone who reuses day old tea bags (they will take the mug they used the previous day and add a new teabag in with the old one, and pour in new hot water). Bear in mind that this was a person who I had initially thought had drugged and kidnapped me, because my first memory after the fall was feeling dizzy in a room, surrounded by complete strangers who claimed to be my friends. I was so overjoyed and surprised to have something come back to me that I loudly exclaimed this revelation in the half full hospital waiting room. The first thing I remembered of my best friend was snow, because of a road trip we'd taken together the previous year. The next fragment about him was barbeques (he enjoyed getting people together for one in the Summer), and the next bit was Lord of the Rings. At first, it felt like I was receiving loose, disparate fragments about a person, but over time, it began to feel more like I was filling in the final pieces in a mostly complete jigsaw. But then, that's not far from how it feels to be close friends about a person, and to discover new facts about them, despite having known them for years.
Nowadays, when I have that feeling of a long forgotten memory returning to me, I'm unsure of whether it's another fragment returning to me post amnesia, or if it's just the regular kind of remembering stuff. It's been around 6 years since the accident, so I have a heckton of new memories on top of that. A few years ago, I had that peculiar feeling of a memory returning, and I assumed that it was another amnesia thing returning, but then I realised that this particular rediscovered fragment happened after the accident, so this was just normal, run of the mill forgetting. That was jarring to realise that memory has always been fallible like this. Whilst yes, complete retrograde amnesia is a super rare experience, nothing had really changed.
Memories are always slippery things. I've read neuroscience research that suggests that when we remember a thing, we're sort of rewriting the memory. It's like if every time you checked out a book from the library, you weren't allowed to return that specific book, but instead had to write out the book and return a new copy of the same book. Even if you try hard to be accurate, there's inevitably going to be some errors in transcription (just look at transcription errors in manuscripts before the invention of the printing press). This means that the more you check out a particular book, the more likely it is to be changed. Trippy stuff, huh? That's what I mean when I say that nothing had really changed. The amnesia made me feel unstable because I didn't have my memories to rely on to build my sense of reality, but memories will always be fallible. We like to pretend they're not, but everything we perceive is filtered through our own subjective filters, and then each time we reflect on our recollections, we pass those memories through the filter again. Even before my amnesia, my memories were not an accurate reflection of reality — that's just a lie that makes us feel more at ease with the inherent instability of our own perceptions and experiences. That fact was brought to my attention in a rather abrupt way, but it's one of the reasons I'm oddly glad for this absurd experience. It was certainly philosophically interesting.
I could talk forever on this topic, because it was a hell of a ride, but I'll stop here, because this comment is long enough already. I'm open to answering any questions that y'all want to throw at me though, because God knows there aren't many people with an experience like this. You don't have to worry about being overly intrusive or about upsetting me, though be aware that I might not get round to answering your questions.
People have spoken a lot about how digestible the sugars are, but in terms of overall healthiness, the fibre is an important component even beyond its impact on sugar absorption. Many people do not get enough fibre in their diets.
A lot of them went into academia, the poor fuckers. My old university tutor comes to mind as the best of what they can hope for from that path. He did relatively well for himself as a scientist, but I reckon he was a far better scientist than what his level of prestige in that area would suggest.
There's one paper he published that was met with little fanfare, but then a few years later, someone else published more or less the same research that massively blew up. This wasn't a case of plagiarism (as far as I can tell), nor a conscious attempt to replicate my tutor's research. The general research climate at the time is a plausible explanation (perhaps my tutor was ahead of the times by a few years), but this doesn't feel sufficient to explain it. I think it's mostly that the author of this new paper is someone who is extremely ambitious in a manner where they seem to place a lot of value on gaining respect and prestige. I've spoken to people who worked in that other scientists lab and apparently they can be quite vicious in how they act within their research community (though I am confident that there's no personal beef between this researcher and my old tutor — they had presented at the same conference, but had had no interactions and seemed to be largely unaware of the other's existence). Apparently this researcher does good science, but gives the vibe that they care more for climbing up the ranks than for doing good science; they can be quite nasty in how they respond to people whose work disrupts their own theories.
I suspect that it's a case of priorities. My tutor also does good research, but part of why he left such an impact on me was that he has such earnest care in his teaching roles. He works at a pretty prestigious university, and there are plenty of tutors there who do the bare minimum teaching necessary to get access to perks like fancy formal dinners, and the prestige of being a tutor — tutors who seem to regard their students as inconvenient obstacles to what they really care about. It highlights to me a sad problem in what we tend to value in the sciences, and academia more generally: the people who add the most to the growth of human knowledge are often the people who the history books will not care to remember.