jaycifer

I’m glad that you enjoyed it, but listening to the audiobook was one of the most aggravating reading experiences I’ve had. There were cool bits, but every chapter or two my eyes would glaze over for a minute as Wil Wheaton read off a list of things from the 80’s for a paragraph or two, interrupting whatever flow the book had going on at the time to cram ‘memberberries down my throat. I prefer the movie because I can look at the ‘memberberry references without them interrupting the other cool bits.

I enjoyed it for the most part, but the scene that’s always stuck with me is when Antonio Banderas’s character learns to speak the Viking language. Hearing the way he said “I listened” made me want to listen more to see what I could learn.

I don’t remember the source, but I’ve read that, while getting a good night sleep for a couple days feels much better, it takes 9 days of good sleep in a row to recover as much as you can from sleep deprivation. If I recall sleep flushes out chemicals that build up in your brain, they can only build up so much before it’s saturated, and it takes the 9 days to fully catch up on flushing them out.

It sounds like the biggest thing that would help you is managing your caffeine consumption. I went through caffeine withdrawal a few times before deciding I didn’t like it and setting the following boundaries that have helped. First, no coffee/energy drinks after 12 hours before I want to sleep. So I go to bed at 10pm, I have all my coffee drank before 10am. This gives your body a chance to process most of the caffeine so it affects your sleep less. Second (and the hardest if you’re already used to daily caffeine) I try not to drink caffeine two days in a row. This keeps it from building up in your system, which keeps your tolerance low, which also means it feels like a super power when you do drink caffeine.

Are you talking celsius?

I'm guessing it's 20~25 degrees there?

It's an argument on the internet, there are never really winners. It seemed like backtracking because saying that a dissenting response is "actually the type of thing I'm talking about" carries an implication that the person responding misunderstood you, rather than acknowledging the possibility that you did not clearly/fully communicate your thoughts. As far as I and I assume the person you responded to could tell, that wasn't "actually the type of thing" you were talking about. Backtracking may have been the wrong term, but there was a level of condescension in your comment that was so close to being sincere that it rubbed me the wrong way. Combine that with me half-disagreeing with you and that made for a response with some snark at the front. I am a little sorry for that. Also, why would you write "because of your own life experiences and emotions?" Unless the discussion is focused on something related to how people become the way they are, that statement has about as much meaning as "this is an aspen. You can tell it's an aspen because of the way it is." All it says is that you assume there is something wrong with the person rather than actually say anything about what that person has said or done. At worst it's empty words and at best it's an empty ad hominem.

Nice backtracking on “some other event,” that’s better than what 90% of the internet would do!

I still think it’s fine to use external dates for self improvement. I’m not very religious, but I love lent specifically because it’s a socially encouraged time to change a habit that lasts nearly the two months it takes to make a new habit or break an old one.

One year it was soda because I drank a few cans a week, since then I very rarely have any in the house. Last year I gave up meat, which is something I would never have pushed myself to do on my own.

It’s just a lot easier to test a change when it’s not permanent. There’s certainly an argument to be made that a full year of change at new years is too long to successfully commit to, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be discounted.

Eric Flint wrote it. I don’t think I made it clear, but know that it’s a piece of fiction where a coal mining town from Virginia gets sent back in time to 1632 German Thuringia and brings American values to the Thirty Years War. It was written by a historian though, so the setting around the story is as accurate as it could be. A lot of the book has aged not so great in terms of what was progressive for the 90’s when it was written, but the premise is out there enough to make up for it, and I really enjoyed how the history is portrayed.

Oh, I just read a book called 1632 that touched on this. If I recall the term for them was Sephardic Jews, and due to prejudice large portions of them moved around until settling in England because the monarchy at the time promised protection. They still weren’t allowed real positions of power, but did fill many roles as financial advisers.

Of course the book was published 25 years ago, so some of that information may be outdated.

I’m a big fan of contronyms, words with two opposite meanings. I first learned looking for a word to describe the change in “literally” from meaning, well, the literal meaning of something to also the figurative meaning.

Another good one is dust. You can dust your house to remove dust, but you can also dust a cake with powdered sugar.

I interpreted “old reddit vibes” to be more about there being an actual discourse on posts more than being about the subject matter of the posts. If you look at the comments on reddit, they all just agree with each other because they’re the most popular opinions so they get the most upvotes. The thing I like about here is that I can still read that popular comment, but there are few enough total comments that scrolling down a bit leads to discussions that would have been buried in downvotes there. But since they didn’t define “old reddit vibes” I could be misinterpreting as easily as you!

If you haven’t read it, this blog post greatly increased my appreciation for mechanical watches: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/