Acamon

One one level, obviously you can never experience everything, the world is fricking massive and ever-changing. But you can feel like you've seen and done everything that interests you, and find it hard to remain curious and develop new interests. There have been times that I think the only interests and goals that will ever feel relevant to me are ones that I've had since I was a kid. But even "eating yummy food, playing games and reading fantasy books" is more than enough to fill my entire life.

When I've been lucky enough to have the time, I've filled many hours, day after day, cooking delicious meals and trying new things in the kitchen, and the list of things I want to try expands just as fast as I tick them off. Similarly, although I've read countless fantasy novels over the decades I've only just got round to reading classics like Conan and Elric, and there's so much more out there - and people write more books every year!

But there are times when I can't face new challenges, and I retreat to the easy comfort of things I know. This can be reassuring and restful, but if I get to the stage where I'm sick of watching the same show I've seen so many times, then I know it's time for me to start pushing myself to try new things and develop new tastes (even if it's just subvarieties of things I already like). And if I don't feel up to that, it means I need to get some support and help to improve my mood and clear my thinking.

If drinking less isn't actually your priority at the moment, it shouldnt be the focus of your therapy sessions. And if your therapist doesn't follow your lead, then you should get a different one.

If you find opening up and admitting shit in therapy hard, then make that your new focus in sessions. As someone who's seen my fair share of therapists, most of them are very thankful if you start with "I almost didn't come to therapy, because I kinda don't belive it works" (but maybe it's also that I feel hopeless about changing my life in general) or "I often lie in therapy because I want you to like me" (does that pattern appear in other parts of your life?)

Start with first obstacle, not the biggest or even the most harmful. Then you can work on those things first, rather than waste time, money and frustration pretending to be doing something else.

I think he's suggesting that if someone doesn't know their world ranking, then they might be quite good, but not seriously good. And if they are world ranked, they wouldn't claim "they could beat anyone" unless they were the world champion. In which case they would know.

Bur he can't really know anything about your skills from a comment, so who cares. Either way, you'd both certainly smash my sorry ass.

Got dialup as a young teen in the 90s - first with CompuServe, then usenet and the early Web. Usenet was amazing, fun communities, kibology, and great for dialup, and as someone who lives in the country, I still wish sites had more options for downloading stuff in advance to view when out of signal.

A less positive part of usenet was back then it was completely uncensored (or at least, that child me had unrestricted access) . At the time I thought it was normal and good to be able to get porn with people my age, instead of weird adults. But now I feel pretty sad and icky that this was my introduction to sex, and horrible if I think abiut the situations behind those pictures.

Pics or it didn't happen.

I agree with most of the other comments that labels aren't really important. But if you do want to think about and describe your sexuality for whatever purpose, go for it. And as a lifelong bisexual, self doubt is a common enough trope in bi/pansexual communities to get it's own label, 'bi imposter syndrome'. Some bi (or pan, I see the difference as mostly stylistic) people are equally attracted to all genders, some have a significant tendency one way or another, and some think they have a preference and then it switches, and sometimes switches back again and again. I've been in a relationship with the same guy for so long now, I sometimes wonder 'am I really bi? Am I just pretending? Maybe I just didn't know what I wanted when I was young, and now I can admit I'm just gay'. But then I speak to some girl, or see a hottie on TV, and realise I'm defitnely sexually attracted to them.

If bi is so broad to include anyone who has ever had, or could have, sexual attraction to anyone who wasn't their traditional hetero gender, is there any point in the label? Isn't almost everyone bi? Sure! I kinda think everyone is kinda bi on some level. But it's also about what purpose a label serves. If someone described themselves as 'pan', I would assume they woukd open-minded and nonjudgemental about people of different sexualites and genders. I wouldn't assume they'd automatically be attracted to everyone they met, even straight men aren't attracted to every woman. I use to avoid calling myself gay, because I'm bi, but I realised that insisting on that was sometimes kinda homophobic, and as someone married to another man, I have a lot in common with lots of gay folks. But I also sometimes refer to myself as a "straight white man" when talking about privilege, because most acquaintances don't think of me as gay so I've never experienced much discrimination on that front, and don't feel I can claim to speak as a 'minority'.

Looks interesting. Anywhere non paywalled to read this?

There's a fair amount of evidence linking wage stagnation over the last 50 years to erosion of collective bargaining and union membership. Unless there are very strong incentives companies are not going to pay employees more than they need to. Employees as a group have a lot of bargaining power, but as individuals, very little. Unless you happen to worn in a highly skilled, and high demand occupation, which are exactly the jobs that have seen wages remain comparatively high.

I don't understand how you link tones to the do re mi scale? Tones in Mandarin are about relative intonational patterns (rising, falling, etc), I find it hard to understand how you set the tonic note (the do) for a conversation, unless you are literally singing the entire conversation.

How not? Is it mildly infuriating that people keep posting actually infuriating stuff to the community. It's not a huge problem, but it's definitely mildly infuriating.

I've recently started using IP Webcam to turn an old handset into a camera. It's not open source, but it doesn't seem to be too annoying, and so far it seems to work surprisingly smoothly and has been up & stable for a couple of weeks.

Anyone got good suggestions for affordable cameras that don't require an app?