NielsBohron

NielsBohron , 14 days ago

As someone who lives in this same town, black bears are more like overweight raccoons.

Fun fact, our "city hall" is at the tiny community airport, which also had a restaurant with the best chicken wings in town (salt and vinegar wings FTW). The restaurant was still going when this happened in 2019, so my guess is the bear smelled the food and went looking for the kitchen, only to get sidetracked by the city council meeting.

NielsBohron , 17 days ago

Not OP, but mine was really pretty manageable. 2 days of sitting in an easy chair and icing my balls, 2 days of "walking is fine, but avoid any sudden movements," and a week of "it's a little sore, but it doesn't really hurt." After that, it was about 2-3 weeks where I didn't really notice it unless I moved the wrong way too suddenly (whereupon I'd get a quick twinge, but nothing too bad).

Really a pretty small cost for the benefits. I don't really like painkillers, but I do recommend some THC gummies for the first week and a fresh series to binge

NielsBohron , 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago)

I used Sync at first because of the similarity to reddit, but I finally got tired of the obnoxious ads and the hypocrisy of using an ad-supported app to browse a completely ad-free service, so a month ago I switched to Voyager and I haven't looked back. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than Sync and it's ad-free.

NielsBohron , 1 month ago

I have tons of playlists and saved music on spotify; how is Tidal at importing data from other services? It's not really a deal breaker, but I'm really picky about my music (so I don't really care about "radio" features or curated playlists), so it'd be a real pain in the ass to start from scratch.

NielsBohron , 1 month ago

"No Skyrim until you finish your homework and finish your chores" is a fantastic motivator for my 10yo. When I can model that I can't play Rocket League with him until after I finish the dishes, it drives the point home that IRL responsibilities need to come before video games.

NielsBohron , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Depends. The cheap houses, yeah, there's as fair bit of noise, but you can't hear everything. From downstairs, you can hear when someone walks across the room above you, but not when they're walking in other upstairs rooms. And from rooms on the same level, you can hear if someone is talking loudly in the room next door, but not enough to make out what they're saying unless they're yelling.

Well-built houses or buildings made for occupancy by multiple families usually have better sound insulation between the rooms/floors/units, so it's not always an issue.

Edit: the plus side to that is I know all the noises my house makes at night, so as a light sleeper, I know when something is wrong in the middle of the night, and I only need one decent sound system for the whole house, which is great for listening to records while doing housework.

NielsBohron , 1 month ago

I'm approaching 40 and have three kids from 10yo to 1yo, and I'm still going to encourage them going to college, but in a way that makes sense for them. My wife and I both work at a community college, and there's no way our kids are going to go to a 4-year right out of high school (unless they get a full scholarship for something and already know exactly what they want to do).

Too many students don't know what they want to study, don't value the education, and drive themselves into too much debt. While I highly value the education and skills gained in a bachelor's program, there's no need to be going into debt at a university to take first- and second-year courses when community colleges are effectively free (in CA, anyway)

NielsBohron , 1 month ago

Have you tried a job that works on a more cyclic nature? I struggle with executive function, too, and I tried grad school and I could pass the classes and do the work, but I couldn't finish my dissertation for my PhD program. I eventually realized I did better on an academic schedule and now I teach college classes, so I get to work on the same 12-week quarter system where I did well as a student.

NielsBohron , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

It's more like a mutual friend. There's a connection to both reactants (aka "binding affinity"), but not as strong as the bond that is formed between the two substrates (if the reaction is forming a covalent bond between the two substrates, anyway)

Edit: I'm actually saving this meme to show my coworkers that teach biochem, because it's a pretty decent analogy. You can even extend it to other reaction classes, like a phosphorylase being like a friend who connects your buddy who is selling a guitar with your other buddy who wants to buy a guitar, or a isomerase being that friend who gives you a make-over so that another friend can set you up on a date.

NielsBohron , 1 month ago

I’ve heard from many long time users that those cravings never really go away. But I wouldn’t describe it as “cravings.” I would describe it as rose colored glasses.

I never really thought I had a serious habit, but I dabbled in uppers for a few years before getting diagnosed as ADHD (and then taking Adderall for the last decade), and your words perfectly describe how I think about cocaine. I really did enjoy coke, and I had a lot of good times with my buddies while doing lines all night, but I don't really "crave" coke. I miss the ritual of it and the rush as it hits your bloodstream, and if the right person offered me some right now, I'd absolutely rip a rail, but I know the experience simply will not be as good as it was then.

Once you know what you're missing, you'll always miss it, I think.

NielsBohron , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

As are the Ellis and Lemire runs. The Brian Wood run is better than most anything in modern Marvel, too.

Edit: reading Lemire's run a day or two after a decent psychedelic or dissociative experience will have you questioning your own sanity in a super fun and slightly terrifying way.

Edit 2: man, everything Warren Ellis touched was absolutely fantastic for a long while. It's a shame he wound up having more than slightly problematic relationships with fans...

NielsBohron , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they're not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath's first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet "media mail" shipping, it's not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I'm starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000's as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)

NielsBohron , 2 months ago

Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.

Give it time. I'm far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000's).

As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)

NielsBohron , 2 months ago

What the fuck kind of snakes do you have living around you?

NielsBohron , 2 months ago

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

NielsBohron , 2 months ago

I understand. I feel that way occasionally, too, but honestly, I think that's irresponsible. Apathy and an unwillingness to pay attention to injustice are huge contributing factors to why the world is as fucked as it is today.

NielsBohron , 2 months ago

I think it's Nic Cage playing Nick Cage (or vice versa, I can't remember), so he's not technically playing himself.

NielsBohron , 3 months ago

Except then you eat it and your mouth is numb for a bit and it helps the hangover

NielsBohron , 3 months ago

I think it’s safe to say that person was not arguing in good faith.

Or that they missed the obvious allusions as a child and haven't gone back and rewatched it with an adult's knowledge of context.

NielsBohron , 3 months ago

Fair. There's misremembering something from your childhood and then there's ignoring evidence that's right in front of you.

NielsBohron , 3 months ago

I came here for this. IT WAS RIGHT THERE, OP!

NielsBohron , 3 months ago

GOG.com had it for pretty cheap last year and it worked as well on Win10 as I remember it working on Win95 (or was it XP? I forget). Point is, yes, you can get it for cheap on modern OS's and it's just as fun as it was in 2000

NielsBohron , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I mean, who's to say whether xenomorphs perceive time and space like humans. Sure, they behave like animals, but they could still have evolved or been created in some strange part of the universe where space-time is shaped differently, making those horrible, non-Euclidean shapes look like home to them.

For all humans know or can comprehend, xenomorphs are tiny, eldritch fleas that evolved to live on Cthulu's pet, so while I'd still give the overall win to the Big Guy/Gal/Entity, the xenomorphs might be on his/her/its radar and might even be able to annoy him/her/it in a way that humans can't.

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

Just a reference to the way Lovecraft described the architecture of the ancient cities built by worshipers of the eldritch beings, especially in At The Mountains of Madness.

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

I've been thinking about this the last few days, and while it may have been easiest to explain the mechanics as "smell," the way it was implemented, you could also explain it as being able to faintly glimpse into the past to see where the humans/predators were several seconds ago.

Just a thought I had because I like thinking about this stuff

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

which ironically enough is the exact same thing that fascist right wingers do, but ofc it’s not the same thing

Middle Ground Fallacy. Just because two sides exist does not mean the truth is somewhere in the middle. There are issues where one side is objectively right. Supporting the side that is wrong does not make you a advocate for civility; it makes you wrong.

Now, could there be more polite discussion? Sure. Does that mean anti-theists should allow religion to further taint our politics, rights, and conversation? Absolutely not.

GTFO of here with this bullshit.

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

You didn't demonstrate that "all humans and all ideologies are capable of extremism." You demonstrated that Nazis are extremists. Do you honestly not see the difference or are you simply muddying the waters so you can argue in bad faith?

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

FWIW, in my experience as a scientist and science educator, "Darwinism" isn't a real term used by anyone besides religious nut jobs looking to create a straw man. Just so you know.

Scientific advances are not extremist. People who understand the scientific method and make use of scientific advances are not extremists. People who use scientific advances to commit atrocities are extremists.

Edit: and you still didn't demonstrate that "all humans and all ideologies are capable of extremism."

NielsBohron , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

What term do the people who aren’t “nut jobs” use?

Evolution. If we're feeling pedantic or spicy, "the theory of evolution."

And you still didn't address the fact that understanding and believing in a scientific advance does not make one an extremist. It doesn't place you in the same ideological group as people who use that scientific advance for a crime. People who believe the theory of gravity are not "gravitationalists" or "Newtonians." Moreover, if I use gravity to commit a crime, that doesn't implicate everyone else who believes that gravity exists. I understand how nuclear reactions work; does that make me a "nuclearist" and therefore complicit in the bombing of Hiroshima?

I’d love for you to point me to a community of humans who haven’t done something extreme.

Secular humanists. There are a number of others I could cite if I felt like pushing your buttons, but I'll stick with the single option so you don't get distracted.

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

Therefore adherents of a religion are also not implicit in extremism, right?

That's literally laughable. Religion is a conscious choice to believe in something for which there is no evidence (which is colloquially known as "faith"). Allowing evidence to provide an understanding of how the natural world works is not the same as choosing to be a part of a community that is not based on reality.

It seems that we’re mostly in agreement that it’s the broad category of humans who are culpable

Correct. However, we differ in our definition of extremism, which I define as intolerance of others, willful ignorance of the natural world, and desire to restrict the rights of others based on their interpretation of Bronze Age manuscripts.

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

A Last Kingdom meme in the wild? Truly the gods do have a sense of humor.

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

Is it? I guess that would make sense, since I can't place the two actors on either side. I thought that was Uhtred, son of Uhtred in the middle (and it's definitely something that he would say in the show), but maybe I've just been watching more The Last Kingdom than LOTR lately.

Thanks for setting me straight!

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

When I looked at it more closely, I don't recognize any of the actors, and the tent definitely looks more LOTR that I first thought, so maybe it's from the Amazon Rings of Power series? IDK

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

My wife and I just finished the last season and are now starting the movie wrap-up, and I've been pretty engrossed the whole time.

But it's definitely a little frustrating when the protagonist consistently gets either outwitted or otherwise trapped by a character with his own agenda, but I will say that I don't think the writing is bad, as the characters consistently act in their own interest and in the interest of the people/ideals they care about. And season 2 does introduce some pretty good characters and has some pretty good major plot points, so you might give another try if you liked season 1.

OTOH, it's your life; don't waste it watching a show that doesn't hold your interest!

NielsBohron , 4 months ago

As someone who lives in a place where I have to check any black spiders I see to make sure they're not black widows, that's the first thing I noticed, too. It's not like drawing the hourglass on the bottom makes it harder to see/recognize, especially when the text explicitly identifies it as a black widow.

I guess the artist has never seen an actual black widow and this is done out of ignorance rather than as a conscious design choice. It's possible that there are multiple subspecies of black widow, some of which have the markings on the top, but I've never heard of that. Then again, I'm no biologist...

NielsBohron , 5 months ago

Counterpoint: If you ask most elected officials edit: in the US (of either party), any two of those as policy goals would make you a socialist.

NielsBohron , 7 months ago

"Science deniers" is a better description.

NielsBohron , 10 months ago

As someone formerly in the same boat, I think belief in the Abrahamic religions makes it hard to identify with the plights of others, because if you believe in a just, loving god, then "those people" have the religion and hardships that they do for a reason (and the reason is usually either "it's part of God's plan" or "they made bad decisions").

When you base your entire worldview on a faulty premise, you can use sound logic to get all the way to libertarianism without a problem. Once I reexamined and discarded my belief in the Christian god, it was like flipping a switch; I went from douchey religious Libertarian to bleeding-heart socialist almost literally overnight.

NielsBohron , 10 months ago

As a college chem professor, the reason for this is nearly always cheating.

"Hmm, you got the right answer with the wrong method, and your friend that you sit next to every day used the right method and got the same exact answer as you, down to the rounding? Haha, what are the odds??!?"

Zero. The odds are zero (within sig figs).