palordrolap

Looks like Guerilla Mail still exists. Been around for years at this point. No idea if there’s any controversy about them, but there are reviews out there giving them high marks.

I’m imagining that your first name is something like Vijay and your middle initial is J, and so no wonder you wouldn’t notice.

Funny. I had a boss who thought that use of initials was pretentious. Or maybe I’m putting words in his mouth and it was specifically my use of a middle initial he didn’t like. Harry S Truman’s name would presumably have given him a headache.

Either way, I countered that having a customised number plate on a car was surely just as bad, to which he had no answer.

• Partial tip: There’s often the suggestion of concentrating on breathing, usually with some kind of regular pattern. This is an alternative to try.

You’ll need to have been in bed for a while, mind racing. Take how extreme that racing is and then taking a similarly extreme, almost uncomfortably deep breath to match it. This requires having been in bed for a while.

Hold it for a bit. Don’t count seconds - avoid numbers. As soon as you get the vaguest hint from your body that you need to let it out and breathe normally again, do so. Try to relax as much of yourself as possible as you do that. This is not a “hold your breath till you pass out” thing. You want to go back to breathing normally.

If the breath was too deep and that freaked you out a bit, try going a bit more shallow on the next one.

This has sometimes worked for me, especially if I’ve been asleep already and can’t get back to sleep.

Sometimes I’ve tried a regular breathing exercise after that.

Other times I have got out of bed and done something mindless for a while until I felt tired again. No doomscrolling.

• More traditional tip: No caffeinated beverages for at least 6 hours before you go to bed. Yes, six. Nine’s even better.

Watched a few back in the day. Wasn’t really my jam - I was too old for it even then - even if the tangentially related _asdfmovie_s are somewhat entertaining when they appear.

Started by turning off adblocker, but not NoScript. Allowed everything except the obvious advertising domain “blogherads”, and no significant increase in usage.

Allowed that and it added a whole bunch of domains to the list, meaning that it polls all the other ad providers and tries to run their scripts. Tried enabling those a bit at a time and noticed nothing in particular. The ads did start taking up a small amount of extra memory but no runaway effect.

I didn’t get around to allowing them all, but I did notice that at one point I tried to scroll the page and it loaded ad section after ad section indefinitely as I scrolled.

If you have an extension that tries to load a page right to the bottom, then that would almost certainly cause a runaway effect. It would try to load an infinite number of ads below where you were viewing the page.

So what you’re saying is that in order to not be fascists, the Dems would have to pull out some actually fascist dictatorial tricks in order to reset things?

I’m sure you can imagine how well that would go.

Only one of the two candidates is talking about turning the US into a dictatorship with them at the helm.

Having read some of the comments from the interviewer perspective in this thread, I am glad they got you and not one of the yahoos other interviewers got.

Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.

ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…

The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.

If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

I strongly dislike being sweaty and, if exercising, even walking somewhere, outside, dislike being at the mercy of the elements.

There’s also that one cannot simply exercise. There are necessary activities that need to be performed afterwards if not before.

Some people take jumping into a shower for granted, for example; they don’t even think about it, and just do it and it’s done before their brain even engages. For me that takes a lot of mental energy, which brings me onto another point:

I do not know how much mental stamina I have for a day, so I could start an activity and run out of steam before I’ve had chance to get to the end of everything, making for a very uncomfortable hour or two as I drag myself miserably through whatever else needs to be done.

As such I tend to want to avoid that happening, and it’s on my mind the whole time I’m doing something that takes time.

Throwing exercise into the mix only guarantees less time to be able do the things I need to, even if there are still many hours left in the day.

I figure this could be a case of needing to somehow force myself to do it anyway, but I do not know how to do that. And there’s that I would then need to keep doing that every day forever in order not to fall back to where I am currently, which seems both unsustainable and unpleasant.

And if exercise makes you miserable?

For those interested in getting into listening to internet radio, see also: https://dir.xiph.org (Icecast network) and https://directory.shoutcast.com (Shoutcast network), both of which have been around for ~25 years at this point if the domain registry is anything to go by. Definitely in their current forms for over a decade.

Caveat: Lots of commercial content and stations, which is, of course, antithetical to Fediverse ideology. Still worth a look if you can’t (yet) find what you want in the Fediverse.

(There’s also http://radio.garden which has a very pretty interface but has multiple negative points: in-browser only, needs a lot of JavaScript access to station-associated domains on a per-station basis, is HTTP(no S)-only and may not work for stations outside your own country.)

Normal human man, just like every other day of the year.

Why yes, this is a very wide smile. Thank you.

Agree about soy. I’ve tried and liked rice milk on cereal, but it wasn’t as good as a milk substitute in hot drinks. Since I prefer not to buy a bunch of different things for both simplicity and storage reasons, I switched everything to soy.

That doesn’t mean that the different brands of soy milk are all the same though. Luckily I’ve found one that works for me.

It’s been a while, but one time I had almond milk in rooibos tea* and it made it taste like cake. Can’t remember proportions or how much extra sugar or sweetener I had in it but knowing me, the amount wasn’t “none”.

* tea-like infusion. Rooibos and tea are not related plants.

I mean, you could start almost at the very top.

Skip hydrogen which is an obvious need and we’re right at something that’s not particularly helpful with either the creation or the sustenance of life. Helium has advanced use in MRI machines, and is fun in party balloons and squeaky voice tricks, but we got by for millennia without any of that. Relatively harmless otherwise, but not necessary.

Lithium? It does find itself in biological places often in place of more important things like sodium or potassium, but it’s neither necessary nor completely worthless, I guess.

My vote, though, for the worst of the top of the periodic table: Beryllium. Toxic. No biological function except to cause problems. Helps make pretty crystals, but the same is true of lots of less harmful elements. In that sense then, completely worthless.

Apparently, in the underlying ActivityPub protocol, they’re called “groups”.

Usenet bridge when, smart people? (The cost of doing it properly might well be prohibitive though.)

The things that Tim had in his coat pocket that he was so delighted to rediscover that he swore about it.

And if you’re wondering “Who’s Tim?”, oh boy do I have the turn-of-the-century Edgar Wright miniseries for you to watch.

And I don’t even do the drugs that require munchies-curing sweet snack foods. I just [expletive verb] love [these particular confections].

Funt. Looks horrendously rude, resembles two terrible English words, but is completely without meaning in and of itself. Unless you let UrbanDictionary tell you that it’s the combination of those two words anyway.

It’s also the noise things make when launched out of a tube by compressed air, if not the noise made by lighting gases in a test tube, both of which are highly entertaining.

The spelling “phoont” may be preferable.