When I recently committed to putting some of my hoarded stickers on my laptop, I got friends to place the first few, because I knew I would be paralysed with indecision.

Maybe you could use a similar mechanism of breaking the decision paralysis? If you have kids (plural), if one kid gives you a sticker, you could get another kid to suggest where to put it. If you’re feeling really wild, you could give the sticker to a kid and ask them to stick it somewhere (if they’re old enough to understand what kind of place would be bad/damaging)

I sympathise with not wanting to use up the stickers, but if you do use some of them, then as well as having this delightful stash, you’ll also have a few cute reminders of your family scattered about. And if you fear your supply is running low, you can give your kids a standing order of “if you see any stickers that make you think of me, I want 'em”. It’d make you easy to buy souvenirs for, for sure.

That’s why Vanilla is a great litmus-test flavour

You’re great at explaining this, thanks for giving these examples

I learned this a few years ago and my mind was blown because I’m autistic and this is indeed my instinct. I have also found that neurodivergent people are more likely to respond positively to an anecdote.

Neurotypical people tend to react better to “reflective listening” — basically the “it sucks” button, but more expanded. Like if someone is venting about something, I might say “That sounds really frustrating”, or similar. It feels like playing conversational ping pong where I’m not an active participant in the rally, but just reacting to my conversation partner’s shots.

I don’t tend to find reflective listening especially helpful if I’m the recipient of it (I cope with problems differently), so it blew my mind when I was trying to support a friend with these techniques and they ended the conversation by thanking me for the support, and they really needed that. It baffled me because I hadn’t felt like I’d said anything really at all, besides just reflecting stuff back at them, which felt sort of like small talk but even more superficial. But nah, turns out that different people find different kinds of support helpful. The_More_You_Know.jpg

I love that you did

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I think this Tweet is referring to carcinisation, if any of the nerds reading this don’t know what that is

That’s one beautiful teaspoon

Man, what assholes.

I was at a “know your rights” training thing for protesters and activists, and one of the things that they covered is that a super important and low risk thing way to support a large protest is to have people sort of “on guard” nearby the police station, ready to receive and support someone who was arrested, because the police like to release people at stupid times of night (especially if they’re salty that they don’t have enough evidence to charge you for a crime). In most cases though, (such as yours), there’s no-one to provide this support, and then you’re fucked.

I hadn’t realised how prevalent this spitefulness was until this part of the training , where multiple people shared experiences of this sort. I was already on team ACAB as it was.

I’m glad you made it home safe.

It sounds like you have this sorted now, but I will share my tip anyway.

My master password was a randomly generated pass phrase of a few words, such as what you can generate with Bitwarden’s password generator set to “passphrase”

Using an example I’ve just generated with that tool, if I had decided on a master password of “Daily-Exorcist-Nappy-Cornmeal”, then I would generate a few more passwords and write those down too. So I’d have a list that might look like this:

snowman

daily

uncanny

backer

exorcist

thinner

showoff

nappy

cornmeal

nifty

(I have bolded the words belonging to the actual master password from my example above, but obviously that’s not how it’d be written down. To remember that the passphrase has the words separated by hyphens, you could draw dashed lines around the list, like a decorative border. Here, I have also written words all in lowercase, even though the password has uppercase. (Though I would advise keeping the passphrase in the correct order, as I have in this example, because it’s easy to pick out the correct four words from a list like this, but harder to remember the right order for them).

I don’t have a safe either, but writing things down like this felt like a sufficient level of security against snooping family and the like. Though like I say, it seems like you’ve resolved this differently, so this is more for others who may stumble across this than for you.

I agree with you that the emergency access feature is great. A couple of years ago, my best friend died and I ended up being a sort of “digital steward” of all his stuff, because I was his tech guy and he had shitty passwords that I couldn’t convince him to change. In the end, his laziness meant we got to preserve some digital mementos that would otherwise be lost (such as his favourite decks on Magic:Arena). At the time, I was using a personal system to generate and remember passwords, and I was shaken to consider how much would be lost if I died. I feel far more at ease now with the Emergency Access feature from Bitwarden Premium (I also like being able to use Bitwarden for 2FA codes). I’m sorry that you had the unfortunate experience of being locked out of your stuff, but I’m glad you were able to secure yourself such that you’re protected from that in future.

“Eeyup, ars thar doin’? Ad be reyt, but av lost me notes of me password— tin tin tin”

(This was an attempt at transcribing someone saying in a heavy Yorkshire accent: “Hello, how are you doing? I would be okay, but I’ve lost my notes of my password. It isn’t in the tin”. (I had to squeeze in “tin tin tin” to this somehow because that’s one of my favourite mini jokes about heavy Yorkshire accents.)

Personally, I find him irksome because I get a strong vibe from him that he thinks of himself as a very smart person, looking down on the intellectual peasants. Part of why I perceive him that way is because this is how I used to think, as an autistic nerd who built much of my identity up around being smart. That’s also why behaviour of the sort that shows up on /r/iamverysmart (such as many of NDT’s posts) makes me cringe so much.

Dissecting this a bit further, it’s not necessarily that I think he thinks he’s better than other people — rather the opposite: some of the most intellectually arrogant people I have known are, at their core, deeply insecure and feeling the need to justify their interests by presenting themselves in a certain way.

There must not be much overlap in the countries we’ve visited then, because I’ve never seen this personally; one of the things I was glad for when I returned to the UK after while backpacking through Europe was being able to buy cheddar cheese in supermarkets again — it was non-existent in all the European shops I’d visited, and we usually settled for Edam or Gouda

Edit: I reread my comment and I realised it sounded super passive aggressive and that wasn’t at all my intention. My sample size of European countries is 5, which is far from representative for Europe, let alone the world

It was an obtuse, lazy and (in hindsight) now very funny joke.

“Neoliberal” because one of the key ideological aspects of neoliberalism is the emphasis on individual responsibility. The big example that comes to mind is how the phrase “carbon footprint” was coined and popularised by oil companies as part of an advertising campaign to shift responsibility for climate change from fossil fuel companies to individual consumers.

“Greenwashing” was getting at the bullshit around recycling (which you also highlight in your comment). Often this isn’t as blatant as it is here: even if there were two bags, it’s likely that very little, if any, of the “recycling” bag would actually be recycled, and that the effort spent in separating recycling from regular trash is wasted energy that only perpetuates the feeling of doing something positive for the environment.

I found the image striking because although it isn’t hard to spot that there’s only one bag and that it doesn’t matter which hole someone throws their rubbish, I think it’s likely that someone passing by quickly wouldn’t notice this (especially if opaque bin bags were used). This is offensive to me because I’m finding that many people nowadays are struggling with chronic decision fatigue due to being worn down by the modern attention economy, and I consider the “personal responsibility” facet of climate change PR to be a facet of this. That’s what caused me to comment, but I didn’t know how to capture what I wanted to convey in a quick and straightforward manner, so I went for the lazy reply that, in hindsight, didn’t add anything meaningful to the conversation. I hope this is clearer, despite lacking in brevity

This is one of my favourite xkcds because it made me more consciously aware of the peculiar intimacy of the situation in the comic. Furthermore, in addition to the link that exists between me and someone on a forum with my particular tech problem, it also made me feel connected to everyone who had a different problem to me, but were also desperately trawling forums for help

Neoliberal greenwashing go brrr

I am imagining Wiley Coyote being crushed by a large bundle of paperwork rather than an anvil or a piano

That doesn’t look like any cheddar I’ve ever seen

The way that I often hear it described is the spark that blew up the powder keg that was Europe at the time. Obviously a spark alone would do very little without the gunpowder there to be ignited, so there’re definitely different levels of causation, but I think there is a sense in which the assassination can be seen as a causative element