Just to start, it was definitely not meant as any sort of “fuck you”. Genuinely. Please reread with the opposite emotional valence as that was definitely not what I wanted to achieve at all. I honestly did want to say good luck and have fun, but not like some sort of sassy sign off, I will work on that for the future.

In my opinion, which you are free to dismiss, your previous language was somewhat aggressive and dismissive. Your conversational partner seemed to find it to be so and reacted to that, so I don’t think it is just my bad reading of your statements. It is entirely possible that you meant no harm, had no aggression at all, and your personal expressive language was just not a great fit for either myself or the other conversational partner.

When I said “Something you may find helpful” I meant those words, not something else. You may find a 10mm socket wrench useful, you may not, it depends on your current needs which I don’t have access to, but hey, if you need a 10mm socket wrench I have one, along with my opinion above. It is offered in the spirit of kindness and also a lack of obligation, you don’t have to take my opinion on or show why it is wrong, you are free to just ignore it and mark it as read.

I don’t have an investment in you beyond hoping things go well for any other person. I do have an investment in the communities I participate in, so when I see something like your previous conversation and think I can make things a little better, a touch nicer, I feel motivated to do so. Feel free to look through my history, I really do try to consistently explain things, make things clearer, and resolve conflicts with discussion. I try not to dismiss the concerns of other people and in this case I have failed to note and respond to your concerns effectively.

I do not consider what I was doing as mediating, but I can see how you would read it that way and I perhaps should have used a direct message to prevent that interpretation. Do you think that would have been better? A less public forum? Please do answer this, I actually do care about your thoughts here.

I don’t have any ego invested in this. I hope things go well for you, I have some tools it has taken a long time to acquire, they seemed possibly useful for you in this situation, so I tried to offer them.

Suppressing conflict is not the goal. The goal is resolving conflict, or at least for me. Agreeing to disagree is a perfectly good resolution. Finding a common ground and having someone expand or change their mind is a good resolution. Having someone change my mind is just as good as someone else changing their mind, and both are a little better than just agreeing to disagree. I am not trying to preserve peace at the cost of resolution, I believe that the level of conflict present was not conducive to a resolution and pulling back a tiny bit would make a resolution more achievable.

Anyway, I really truly hope things go well for you, no hard feelings if not, and feel free to ignore, reply, reply with a DM, or whatever else floats your boat, I genuinely hope you have a good day from here.

Just a quick clarification. This is a mouse study. This is not a study in humans.

What do mice eat? What do humans eat? Are we closely related to mice? Do we occupy the same niche? No. This tells us about mice eating a ketogenic diet, not about humans doing so.

Monkeys exaggerate, mice lie. Something shown in primates is likely, though not guaranteed, to be similar in humans, though the degree may be very different. Something shown in mice may or may not replicate in humans at all, and the degree is often very different even if it does.

Mouse studies are great in some ways. They are cheap, fast, and very well understood. You can copy the study design from someone else and save a lot of effort designing your study. You can control for really specific factors by choosing what specific mice you use. You can control their diet perfectly, use large numbers at low cost, and see their full life cycle in just a couple of years.

Mouse studies also suck in a bunch of ways. Humans are not mice, so translating the research is not easy or reliable. Something that causes an issue in mice may or may not translate to humans for a bunch of reasons. They make their own vitamin C for example, so you may have to knock out their genes for making vitamin C if you want to make them get scurvy. You have to humanise them and these changes are always approximations.

So this study does show that a high fat diet that causes obesity IN MICE does increase tumorgenesis in the small intestine. In mice. Not in humans. Every claim here needs that caveat to be made clearly and directly. If they do a translational study in humans I will happily read it, but this study? To me it is worse than useless. It is irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.

Largely correct. It is more about your body either holding on to body fat or using it for energy. There are various ways you can make the body hold on to fat or release fat. Some are more or less healthy depending on personal context.

Many psychiatric meds cause weight gain, specifically fat gain, by driving up insulin. Some others cause increases in appetite. Others cause a reduction in BMR which with no change in diet will cause more fat gain. Some psychiatric meds made getting enough food hard (I’m looking at your Ritalin) and thus have an opposing effect.

Most of the effects on body fat are mediated by hormones like insulin, grehlin, glucagon, and so on. GLP-1 (Glucagon Like Peptide 1) medications target the receptors for glucagon and activate them in a more sustained way that glucagon does, causing changes in appetite along with every availability. There are other effects as well, thus the side effects, but that is the basic mechanism. We actually don’t understand GLP-1 medications fully at this point so we can expect any current description to change over time, but for now that is basically how they work.

It is a little more than cutting sugar. If you replace all your simple sugar with complex sugar you will have an improvement in blood sugar control, that is true. You won’t reverse insulin resistance with that change because you will still have elevated insulin levels all the time.

What ketosis allows is a period of time where you are not using large amounts of insulin to push your blood sugar down to safe levels. Instead you use gluconeogenesis (making sugar in the liver from fat) to push blood sugar up. This means you don’t overshoot and have to push it back down.

If you stop using insulin all the time your body becomes less resistant and it becomes more effective, allowing you to actually push your blood sugar down when you need to. This is one of the core issues with diabetes and can actually be solved.

As for your wife’s mum, what she is eating is up to her. She is an adult and has to make her own decisions. If she chooses something you wouldn’t choose it isn’t an indictment of your and your choices. She can do what she wants and so can you. It isn’t a personal insult. If she chooses to take keto very seriously and won’t eat beans then treat it like you would vegetarianism, don’t be dismissive or rude, just be a supportive person and don’t make bean (or other high carb) dishes when she is around for dinner. Or make the high carb dish as well as something for her. Or just make parts of the meal keto and others high carb and mix and match on your plate. Or don’t have her over for dinner. Lots of options that don’t require you matching her diet or pushing back on what she eats.

Diet is personal. It is personal for her, and yours is for you. Her diet is not personal for you. You don’t need to concern yourself with her choice of food just like you don’t need to be concerned with her choice of underwear.

If you eat sufficient carbs yes, you will be knocked out of ketosis, but beans are not too high carb to have in moderation. You can’t maintain ketosis if you are having hundreds of grams of beans but if you have a small amount to make a dish more enjoyable you can get by and make food much more manageable if that I’d important for you.

Personally I have had a small amount of refried beans in my Mexican beef dishes because of the flavour and especially the texture. They do add carbs but they add something important in the texture and I find then worthwhile. I actually also add some black beans, but only a small number, and capsicum (bell peppers) as well.

Hey, just as an outsider to your conversation above, I don’t think the overall attitude here is super helpful or positive. That person read your post in a way you didn’t mean it, you bounced back a couple of times, and it ended in telling someone to take their attitude and shove it. That is a fairly aggressive response and probably not great for them or for you. Living with that kind of outward aggression is painful and not actually helpful for defending yourself.

Something you may find helpful is restructuring with the assumption that they have misunderstood in good faith, without malice or accusation. For example,

“Ah, yes, they did list psyllium husk as working, it is one of the raw fibres, but the refined and processed ones don’t work, they fail to gel. As for invalidating your symptoms, that wasn’t my intention, I was trying to provide useful information of what not to do. If I were doing the wrong thing to manage a health condition I would want to know. Good to know psyllium husk is working for you.”

It is much better for you and them, and honestly I have had a large number of interactions like this where the other person comes back and apologises for any confusion, seeing my tone and changing from defensive to conciliatory. It feels nicer than “winning”. Anyway, good luck, have fun.

On Pixel devices you can unlock and relock the bootloader as much as you like. Most other phones cannot do this because the manufacturer doesn’t want you to install custom software. If I relock my bootloader on my Pixel 6 Pro it protects from one risk, someone gaining physical access to my phone and booting another operating system to access my data without my permission. This is handy, but not really a big risk for most people. Leaving the bootloader unlocked makes sense for your device and shouldn’t cause any meaningful risk for you.

Conversation have a flow, and sequence of performances from each participant. Saying “I’m tired of classic rock” is a stop point for the conversation. If you use this wording you are not making a space for their next response.

Instead you could consider saying something more like “I’m not really into classic rock, do you have anything else?” Or even more directly just add “Do you have anything else?” to the end of your original statement. If you close the conversation around classic rock but open a new one about another genre or a request for their other preferences the conversation can go forward.

That said, this is all masking. If you are not interested in maintaining that relationship it may be more trouble than it is worth then ending things there may work for you. If someone required that level of emotional work from my end but did not reciprocate by adopting strategies that worked with me I would feel it was pretty unfair and not really worth my time. Being flexible and kind is something that should be reciprocal, not one sided. Masking costs you something and you not masking costs them something. Meeting them half way may make sense, but it may also be pointless if they won’t actually meet you there.

Hey man, that sucks. I won’t claim that things will be better because I can’t know that for sure, but it does seem times are changing. When I was a kid a trans person was a punchline. When my parents were kids a trans person was a pedophile and worthy of death. The kids I work with now are aware of trans people and just accept it as part of human diversity, like hair or skin colour.

If you can’t be out now then don’t be, you are the judge of that and nobody should be telling you what to do. That doesn’t mean the future will be like today. There may be a day where it seems more possible or you find a new friend group. You may find that you can be more flexible in that group and take the risk, making yourself more comfortable. I would recommend not closing yourself to the idea, just accepting that right now it isn’t working for you and you are putting on hold for a while. We all wait for things, that doesn’t mean giving them up or never trying again, it just means waiting and making the best of your time now.

The difference in cost for a black and white or colour ereader is fairly minimal now, mine was about $30 more than the black and white. I’m using a Kobo Clara Colour. I have installed NickelMenu and KoReader and absolutely love it.

The difference between that and my phone is significant. My phone has to be maximum brightness to be readable outside, but my Kobo is fine. Eink relies on reflected light so bright external lights like the sun don’t make it look bad, they actually make it look better. The size is also a bit more suited to reading, though you are correct that phones are often close to that size now. These are reasons, but they are not the main reason.

It can’t do music or web browsing, nor can it have much in the way of apps and games. It can’t get messages or emails, and notifications are not even supported. Why do I use it? To read. It is for reading while doing nothing else. I can decide that I will now read for an hour and just put my phone somewhere else, maybe on charge, while I do so. I can focus on that one task and smash it out without anything else getting in the way. It is glorious.

I am going to get an MP3 player soon given how great my experience of separating reading has been. Using my phone for everything is great for travel but the cost is the constant intrusions. I have notifications off for most things and that helps, but the availability of everything all the time is just not something I cope well with. I think my phone will continue to be my camera for the most part, and my communication tool as well, but moving music and reading off seems to be a good path.

I totally thought that would be about Blender, the 3d modeling application. Instead I found true joy. Thank you.

Did you ever watch Dragonball Z? All the scenes where Goku or Gohan are training to get stronger, building their bodies to be powerful? Piccolo wearing insanely heavy gear to improve his speed?

You don’t need to do sports to train your body. You are giving your body the opportunity to learn how to be strong, to learn endurance. You can’t do that without practicing those things, using your strength, pushing your endurance.

That said, I have found working with kids to be very helpful. I work with a particular young kid who absolutely loves being lifted and thrown about. I use him as my weight training and it is a whole lot of fun, not to mention rewarding making his day more fun. Maybe there is something you can find that is similar?

Options vary depending on your temperament and goals.

You could tell them no thanks, you are busy. Perfectly reasonable, it can be done kindly, and setting a clear boundary can work wonders.

You could also try managing rather than helping them. By this I mean helping them with the cognitive tasks of figuring out what they want to do and planning that out. This would mean finding a tutorial or video of a build, getting the summary of items needed, and then telling them how to go get those things and organise the storage.

If you go spelunking with them then having them come along as a part of the team and helping with something like strip mining can be very good. If they aren’t interested they can go do something else, but this specific task is something they can do to help. For example, I would make two long lines on the same level connected at one end to create a U shape then have them mine from one side to the other with a gap of two blocks. That simple mining is tedious but much better with extra hands, and the excitement of finding something good is enough to keep them interested often enough.

On your motherboard there is a bluetooth radio. That is what is being turned off and on by turning bluetooth off and on.

The USB receiver is likely not bluetooth but a 2.4GHz radio for connecting to the mouse.

Your mouse may also be able to connect via Bluetooth without the USB dongle, some mice can do that, but most just use their dongle.

Bluetooth is not great for low latency things like mouse input or game controllers. It also kind of sucks for audio but that is handled mostly by just buffering audio and having a slight delay in playback. That said, I love Bluetooth because I can have headphones without cables that get snagged all the time. Very handy.

I think this should be a thing. At the same time, I would also want something similar for funding or platforming fascists, but that is unlikely to end up being done. I think a simple tag, the [AI] one would work, is the best current solution. I think extra detail in the post is a good thing to do, for example AI assisted documentation, AI assisted bug finding, AI assisted vibe coding. They are all different and have different effects on the product and community. If someone uses AI to find bugs in their own code I am all for it, that is a great use if it. If they use AI to write their login system I am not keen at all given the likelihood of intense security issues and the low likelihood that they will ever fix it.

Cis guy here, but I work with a few trans people as a support worker and have heard a lot about their experience that may apply to you.

Puberty is dodgy for everyone. The levels go up and down over a few years for all of the growth hormones, not just estrogen and testosterone. The level of change this causes varies person to person and the timeline is not the same for everyone.

The same applies to behaviours. Some people become very interested in presenting as a given gender fairly early on, others start that later, and some don’t end up settling on a gender presentation at all or have multiple attempts to find something comfortable.

Voice training is a skill building exercise and it is really fun. Viewing it as a fun skill to learn will make it way less awful and may help to not generate dysphoria when it doesn’t make you sound fem in the first ten minutes. I don’t know how far along puberty you are and how much that has impacted your voice box but once you change the growth hormones the growth of your voice box will shift as well. It will take time for the physical shape to settle, so you need to learn how to use what you have to feel comfortable in your body. I would also recommend singing if you can as it gives you way more catchy ways of practicing a fem voice and is more fun than many of the more basic voice training exercises.

As for the fear of pushing yourself back into not doing things, yeah, it is hard. There will probably be days where it feels like that no matter what you do. There isn’t a perfect way to do it. That said, you are doing something way harder than typical puberty, you are doing puberty+, the extension course in growing up. It is harder and it will suck sometimes, but you can do it.

Resilience factors. Things like one supportive trusted adult, a good safe space, an interest that you can engage, these sorts of things can act to mitigate some of the harms of adverse childhood experiences.

Hey. Just a quick anatomy check here. A lot of women and other vulva havers have never actually gotten a mirror and image out and mapped their parts to their names. In some cases people have been mistaken, trying to push things inside their eurethra rather than their vagina. This can cause a lot of pain and does not generally result in sexual enjoyment.

Secondly, mechanically, this is supposed to be a fairly wet process. Dry fingers are really good for causing damage, but absolutely terrible for pleasure. They can cause abraisions in the soft tissue and even draw blood without any malice or significant force. Try using a lot, and I mean what feels like too much and then some, water based lubricant. I would recommend KY as a great starter as it is more jelly like than many others and lasts a bit longer.

Remember, if choosing between more lube and less more is always safer, more comfortable, and lower risk. It doesn’t reduce sensation, it increases it, so making sure everything is wet is important.

Water is not lubricant. Water removes all the gel features of lubricants and will dilute and wash away water based lubricants. Silicone lubricants are water resistant and can be used vaginally, but generally people find water based lubricants more comfortable and enjoyable for vaginal penetration.

Also, spend time yourself with the lubricants and a small dildo. Get to know how it feels on your own. A partner is fun, but learn singleplayer before joining a multiplayer game, you need to know what works because your partner can’t feel how it feels for you, it isn’t their body, they need your feedback. There is nothing wrong with enjoying your own body, it is natural and healthy and really enhances partner play as well. I guarantee you if you are with a male partner he knows a lot about what his junk needs, so it is a good idea to get that understanding for your own bits.

Other people have obviously pointed it out, but this is one of the many areas in Linux where the command line is so much easier than an interface that the people who write GUI tools just don’t bother. The tool you need for a command line approach is called dd (I imagine it stands for direct data because that is what it does). Using dd you can take data from one place and put it into another. This means you can put zeros all over a drive, wiping it in full, using

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/targetdevice

That will fill the whole drive with zeroes, but you could also do it with random noise first, using the below

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/targetdevice

In the case of your ISO image there is someone who has included all the options including block size and so on, but the step you really need is to be sure you get the right device. Execuse the command below

ls /dev

Then insert your device, wait a few seconds, and run it again. You will have a list of all of the devices that were connected before and after plugging your drive in, so your drive will be the new one. It will probably show up as something like

/dev/sdc
/dev/sdc1

Notice that there are two. The first is the device, the second is the partition on the device. If you tried to put the content of an ISO image into an existing partition it would look like it had all worked but it would actually fail because the ISO is a full rip of a device, not a partition. Instead use the device itself, in this case sdc.

dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync

The last bit will make your system write things to the disk and make it safe to eject it. Once that is all done it should work as a bootable USB.

It seems super complex but once you have done it a few times it becomes so easy you will regret the time spent getting a GUI installed.

If you still want a GUI you could try Gnome Disks, but I never enjoyed using it.

Yes and no. I had a heart issue a couple of years ago and stopped taking my meds during that process because they can interfere with heart function in theory. That said, I think I am living up on part of your anxiety. Are you afraid that if you get used to them, get used to functioning with them on board, and then they get taken away you will be unable to function but be expected to based on recent performance?

I have had some of that anxiety and it is reasonable. People do tend to see your “new normal” and “normal” after a fairly short time. Their expectations change and their tolerance for you struggling goes down in some ways because they start relying in your performance at that higher level.

It is really unfair but that is something that happens. I have however found some ways around this anxiety. I have built better systems while using my meds that work better for off my meds too. I have automated some things, make others easier to do, and honestly stopped doing a bunch of things I used to do at all. By doing this I have reduced the demand on me on the other days.

If you can use your meds to make life easier for when you are off the meds I think you will feel the anxiety lessen.

Also, depending on where you are and local laws, stockpiling a very small amount, maybe one month ahead or something, can be very helpful. I try to buy my next dose as soon as I can and have ended up with about one month of buffer. Now if my meds are unavailable at the pharmacy I can just not stress and use my backup. Because I rotate through they never get stale and I am never holding more than two months of meds, so I am not in a weird situation of having years of meds to explain away. Be careful of your local laws and so on, it is legal here but may not be there, so don’t get yourself in trouble.

Also, consider non medication supports. For me that is heavy work like weight lifting as well as eating far less sugar. Consider having a reasonable source of caffeine available and keeping your usage down so you don’t built a tolerance to it. If you are out of meds caffeine can help for some people such as myself, nowhere near as good as meds but much better than nothing.