southsamurai

I’m simple.

Mac n cheese for savory.

Dark chocolate for sweet.

Ahhhh, I’m old, so don’t hold me to the exact year or anything, but fifteen years? Ish?

We knew each other before we were friends, so the exact year is kinda nebulous in my head

Tbh, I’m not interested in the show.

However, IDGAF.

Hire a good actor, period. Nobody can top Rickman at all, so anyone taking the role on needs to be able to reinterpret it entirely, change the way Snape’s menace and arrogance are shown.

While there are physical descriptions in the books for all the major characters, the original movies didn’t stick to them perfectly in all cases. And I don’t think they did with Snape fully.

So why the fuck does it matter if the actor isn’t lily white (heh)? Can he act is the important part if anyone is going to watch it at all. If you’re going to turn a book into a show after it’s already been turned into a wildly popular movie series, you could cast everyone looking exactly like the books, and there’s still going to be complaints from the movie fans.

So fuck it. Make Dumbledore a trans man, or a trans woman. Make Mcgonagle Cherokee. Make Harry Xhosa, or a Southerner from the U.S. Give Ron blue hair, a septum piercing and dress him in leather. There’s always going to be pissed off existing fans of something that’s as huge as Harry Potter. It isn’t like some niche comic book where a character looking different is going to piss everyone off. The fan base will be split, period.

Shit, if I was going to watch it at all, an unexpected casting choice would make me more eager, because at least then I’m not going to be watching the movies dragged out over months.

Besides your list? Matrix via element or elementX. I’ve been test driving arcane chat, which is decent enough, but too new to be widely used enough to really say much.

I don’t disagree tbh.

However, in terms of ui/ux it is still the closest comparison that’s not wholly dominated by capital drives. Things like WhatsApp have better ui, but I don’t think anyone remotely interested in things like signal would use those at all if not forced to it.

Right now, matrix, arcane chat, xmpp, and similar options are better than signal under the hood (supposedly, I don’t have the knowledge base to verify for myself), but the ui is anywhere from outdated to outright horrible.

I’ve heard that from some code minded folks before though, so I don’t think you’re wrong. ElementX is better than regular element in that regard already. Been a while since I tried anything else since I only have one person that I communicate regularly with on there. Everyone else is more sporadic, so I haven’t had as much impetus to keep up on apps as much as I used to.

Yeah, it really sucks that the closest feature parity and ui/ux parity in messengers is proprietary services.

Even signal isn’t there. Mind you, they can’t offer all the same options by virtue of prioritizing encryption as the default, not afaik, with things like the easier syncing of messages.

I like matrix and it’s various apps fine overall, but they are definitely behind in polish and usability features. They just aren’t great as a primary messaging option. That’s ignoring the difficulty of onboarding people, which is tangential to this, but still relevant since it doesn’t matter how great a messenger is if you can’t use it with anyone. Since the lack of features and ui/ux issues prevent onboarding, it’s a real problem.

Hmmm, maybe not a rug, but new towels and such? Yeah, I’m that old :)

Clip ons, I don’t always remember they’re on if it’s bright out, but I usually take them off

Not because it’s douchey, but because it’s harder to see.

Most people don’t have the brain power to actually know what’s in their best interest.

At most, they can handle very simple situations.

To really make choices in own best interest, your have to think long term, at a broad scale. Unfortunately, we can’t see with certainty beyond maybe a few steps from our present time and place. So we would also have to think out layers of possibility with each decision.

If you can’t do that quickly, you’re fucked because you’ll always be reacting instead of planning. Since even the smartest people on the planet can still only handle as much planning as a chess game takes, we’re all fucked.

And yes, I’m including myself as not having the brain power to properly act in my own best interest long term. Being able to see the problem doesn’t mean you’re immune to it.

You gotta learn how to surf it as best you can.

I’m not being flip. Anxiety, depression and all the related issues, they have a certain tidal nature. There’s highs and lows. The key to living with it is to ride the worst waves until things settle back down a little.

If you ignore it, you get swamped.

Doesn’t really matter what methods you use to do it. Breathing, meds, exposure therapy, CBT, yoga, whatever. You practice them when things are good, so you can stand on them when things are bad and make it back to shore.

I gotta warn you though, anxiety that’s induced or worsened by chemicals is a shit ton harder to negotiate. You can’t rely on your normal inner perception of your self. Normally, once you’re used to anxiety, you can learn to recognize when it’s going to spike, and that alone gives you some empowerment. But when it’s external chemicals causing things to worsen, you can’t feel when it’s getting better or worse in the same way unless you also get used to that chemical and how it influences your anxiety. Which, seems like a pretty bad idea to keep using something that’s making anxiety worse.

I hope to fuck not.

Bob. We call him Bob

I dunno. I used to be flexible as hell, but was also too damn broad across the shoulders to get everywhere. That was even before I started lifting seriously; lifting just made the area I couldn’t reach bigger.

Somewhere around 16 I hit a spurt and suddenly couldn’t reach a zone between my shoulder blades. It was maybe hand sized. In my twenties, it was about an inch or two bigger, but I could still do all the stretches fully before lifting, and that included shoulder stretches where I could end up almost flat with my arms behind me.

Nowadays, I’m just old and stiff, and can’t scrub anything right on my back.

Big ol’ brush.

I also have long scrubby things. Don’t know what they’re made of, but I think nylon. Basically really long washcloths with a rough texture and strings to hold onto while scrubbing. But the brush does a better job, so I usually only use the cloth ones when I’m away from home because they pack easier.

That’s assuming I can’t con my wife into getting soaked just to stand there scrubbing me down for a half hour while I continually say “yah, right there, a little harder. Now to the left, oh yeah, that’s great, a little more. Now up some, fucking perfect, you’re awesome. Now down a little again” and so on until she throws the scrubber at me.

Well, it was most likely the indirect drop in core temperature, or a change in your nervous system’s detection of temperature difference.

When you warm up the skin, all the little capillaries open up at the surface. It isn’t only at the source of the heat. So your body now radiates its heat through the skin, dropping core temp slightly.

A decrease in core temp is known to be part of the normal sleep cycle. This is one of the reasons a hot shower can contribute to faster, better sleep when taken an hour or so ahead of the intended bedtime.

However, another part of the sleep cycle, or rather how our bodies work leading up to sleep, is that when external temperatures feel cooler, the adaptations our bodies make promote sleep, and improve sleep. It’s why a common bit of advice is to keep the sleeping area cool. But, if you trick your body into feeling a different gap in external and internal temperature, it often serves the same purpose. Our skin isn’t that great at determining direct temperature, as in “the air is 70 degrees”. What it is good at it “the air feels 30 degrees warmer than me”. So it can be fooled sometimes.

Add in the comfort of cuddling, with the full stomach pulling blood towards the stomach, and you’ve got a nap bomb.

There’s been some good research into this, and if you look up thermoregulation and sleep, skin warming and sleep, as well as general information about the sleep cycle, you’ll run into at least articles reporting the studies. Most of the studies are paywalled, but if you’re sufficiently motivated, there’s ways around that.

But, by all means, do the control experiment. I would predict that you’ll get a slower result than with your boyfriend, but not a ton slower. Assuming you make sure to eat the same meal, or very similar, anyway.

Just remember that it isn’t 1:1. The air temp may be different by a few degrees, you may have had more or less sleep beforehand, time of day can make it vary. Clothing, textures of bed linens, etc. The boyfriend isn’t the only factor involved. So don’t expect a perfect result where the exact degree of reduction in time-to-sleep (aka sleep latency) is the exact same, or wildly different. You might not even be able to measure the difference since you didn’t actually measure the time precisely the first time. You’ll be relying on your perceived time to sleep unless you have the ability to read and record brain waves. Even watches and such with sensors aren’t precise in detecting sleep. They get close, but only to degree.

Some, here and there. Not really heavy sobbing or anything, because there’s no real connection.

I think the two heaviest were Kurt Vonnegut and Kris Kristofferson. Both have been influential on me as a person and a writer.

But the suddenness of Robin Williams and Chester Bennington made both hard in a different way.

You think vance would be better? Or anyone else down the line? The entire line of succession is stacked deep with turds. They might be green or brown instead of orange, but they’re still going to stink.

So killing Trump does nothing useful. At most, it might, might shift power structures within the GOP that could result in a better candidate next election, assuming we’re allowed to have one.

I dunno, it’s hard to pick a single actor because they don’t all do equivalent roles.

I think it fair to say that Edward Norton is damn high on my list though. He does take on a wide range of roles, and I’ve yet to see anything where he didn’t just own the role he was in, even if the rest of the movie wasn’t as good. But he also doesn’t take on roles in shitty movies either. I can’t think of any where the movie wasn’t at least well made, even if it wasn’t super successful.

I’m in the same place with Samuel L Jackson for similar reasons, though sometimes he does jump into bad-ish movies that are only watchable because he’s in it. Like, snakes on plane? If he wasn’t in it, no way would it be as fun as it is. But he’s kinda stealth despite his reputation. People know he can act, but then he pulls out something like black snake moan and everyone is all “damn, I forgot he could do that”. He seems like he enjoys taking on lighter roles just for the fun of acting, and then he finds something meaty he can sink his teeth into and goes beast mode. But I can’t think of any performances he’s done that weren’t worth watching, even the shitty commercials lol