Sleep has always been a challenge for me. Unmedicated I will either not be able to fall asleep until 2-3 in the morning, or will fall asleep around 11-12, and wake up at 4-5 am.

Throughout the years I’ve tried various modifications to my sleep routine, and am no stranger to medications to help me sleep. (Doctor supervised, while paying attention to all side effects and interactions. Do not try to manage your own sleep without significant research. Case in point: Long term use of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) has been linked to dementia.)

I’ve found that of the things in my sleep routine, the melatonin is the best tool I have to facilitate falling asleep, and having an outlet for my energy during the day is the best way to ensure staying asleep.

It’s also useful to note your surroundings. During winter I’m woken up a lot at exactly 4:40 am, because a neighbor uses their remote start, which causes their car to beep 4 times. (It’s very annoying, because they park on the street outside of my place and start their car as they’re walking to it, so it’s not as if the beeping is for a useful purpose.)
Is something else environmental happening?

A good day, I think. My wife’s best friend came over and the dogs love her. She sorta moved in with us, but she’s been crashing elsewhere the last week, so they’ve really missed her.

The dogs had their nails done, which is usually an ordeal. They are freaked out by the click of the clippers, and usually don’t like to be kept still while having their nails clipped.
Our anxious one was given trazodone, and then they’re snuggled on the couch with treats (my job) while my wife cleans their feet and trims their nails. Our non-anxious dog has hyperkeratosis and ingrown/impacted hairs around her paw pads, which both require extra maintenance.
Suffice to say, the dogs are not fans of nail grooming day.

Recently we started using this electric nail file thing my wife got for shaping press on nails. It’s like the Dremel pet nail file device, but smaller and with way less power. It doesn’t make nearly as much noise, and goes slower taking off bits of nail. The Dremel also freaks out the dogs (at least - the older one. We never attempted with the younger/more anxious one). It’s been a great experiment so far. Because their nails are too long/they’re awkward about clipping them, it’s hard to maintain the steady progress needed to get their cuticles to retract. For the second week in a row, we’ve managed to give them nicely rounded (no jagged edges from the clipper) nails that are slowly getting shorter. In about a month, if we can keep this up, we might be able to drop the frequency and still keep them at “fresh from the groomer” nail lengths.

This is a game changer for our anxious dog. He’s got black nails with long cuticles that are a real challenge to deal with using clippers. It’s hard to see the quick when he’s all wiggly and anxious - accidents do happen. He’s so much calmer with the little file. Between treats and his happy hoodie, he only let out a few grumbles this time — because he wanted to lick off the foot balm!

Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.

Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm it’s lost something that makes it meaningful.

And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.

I reduced max power, but keep my AP’s set to auto manage up to that max level.

There’s basically a plane of signal that bisects the house where the RSSI of each AP is the same. It intersects with areas where people commonly are on their phones. Depending on humidity, location of people and pets, or even just dumb luck, devices were just bouncing between the AP’s, fishing for whichever had the stronger signal. Dropping the power levels made it so the overlap between the AP’s was less, and adjusting the RSSI at which the AP would hand off clients upward made it so handoffs were less frequent. Small throughput sacrifice in the transition zone, but without the constant bouncing between AP’s (which has no throughput).

The advice I needed and have not been able to find. I could kiss you. Or at least give you a fond nod.

The first time I ever experienced this was in a printshop with a bunch of older guys who were definitely not computer illiterate, but all gathered around the monitor for the server that ran our RIP/platemaker to watch commands appear in the terminal when I remoted in from my computer to do something or other. (They would go into the room and work directly on the machine, but it was loud in there and smelled funny, so I remoted in.)

They made jokes about me being a hacker, and although being distinctly boomer-ish, it was high praise coming from some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
(I’ve worked with more accomplished people, and more highly educated people, but not with folks who had built a successful business that dealt with a variety of complex tech from the ground up with their own knowledge and effort. It was a bit charming to have them wowed by such a simple thing.)

My desk wireless charger is magnetic, and my keyboard is wireless and can be switched between devices. So I can switch to my phone and bang out a message on my keyboard while my phone is held up comfortably.

Yeah. No. I get that.

But the thing is - if they actually view your work as good, both in terms of quality and quantity, then the disjoint is the result of a comparison between your real self and some iteration of your ideal self.

Feeling bad about that is just an exercise in self-abuse. Minimally, you do enough that they see your value, and that’s enough, innit? Although, ideally, it shouldn’t matter at all what they think, but that’s easier said than done.

Nota good fit for the sub. They’d have to share it elsewhere, I’m afraid.

This might make me sound kind of shitty, and I don’t care, but I lie about my productivity.

Can’t harness the ADHD superpowers for a project that has a 4-month timeline until the last two weeks, then bang it all out to perfection in a frenzied mania?
Every status update is ‘I’m making steady progress. I have x, y and x done, but I’m having struggles with this part of it, etc.” I don’t lie or misrepresent the actual state of my progress, but I do downplay how much work I get done while riding the rocket of ADHD productivity. And I also play up how much work I do while I’m stuck trying to squeeze some dopamine from the rocks in my head.

If I bang out a project early, I guesstimate what should be done when, and reveal those parts at status updates along the way.

Sure - I still know that I’m inconsistent, and perhaps not living up to my actual potential in every situation, but I also know that I can outperform everyone I work with when the fire has me. So rather than show the gaps, I mask and don’t deal with the guilt.
Personal belief - work is about value extraction from you. If you show that you’re not maximally providing value at all times, you could be subject to judgement. So, show that you’re working steadily and avoid the judgement.

In other words: Set the expectation and roll with that expectation. But let the ADHDemon loose a month before evaluations come due. Your boss forgets too, but the demon likes raises and will definitely give you dopamine for that prospect.

I had this happen to me in my 30’s. (Sorta.)

Polyamory - a woman who hadn’t been taking on new partners started dating me. My other girlfriend’s husband began awkwardly pursuing her with no grace or finesse. It got awkward. An acquaintance learned that I was dating the second woman (who had also only recently gotten back into the scene), and began pursuing her.

It’s like some guys think that because a woman is available to one (well, two or three), she’s available to all. It felt very much like blood in the water to a shark.

That’s the most infuriating thing.

I’m trying to learn how to do new things, well, basically all the time.
Right now I’m stalled out on a sorta important personal project to teach myself about containers/micro-services/certs in a homelab environment. And what I’m discovering is that I don’t know enough to know I don’t know enough - it used to be that I’d take on an ambitious project, mess up, figure out how to overcome that, then learn by looking at what did work, and do better in the future.
But every technical project lately has gotten to the point where I’m trying to just get something, anything, to work or make sense, but every convincing enough AI generated page sets me back by several days as I troubleshoot the convincing enough steps and find myself realizing they’re referencing YAML settings from apps that aren’t part of the service, that every page directs me to install Python, Node, or whatever other helper app directly on my machine that would normally run in a container (which defeats the purpose of trying to containerize things - some stuff I want to use relies on non-compatible versions/configurations). There’s a very clear disconnect from what I’m seeing and what I’m understanding, and the utter lack of authoritative information/proliferation of useless info has just crippled my ability to identify and resolve the disconnect. It’s honestly soul crushing.

Not the person you responded to, but my actual answer is that’s because all of the national political parties in the U.S. are corporations whose business is politics.
They’re basically glorified staffing agencies that invest a lot of money into marketing. Instead of stocks, the wealthy buy ownership with donations or other arrangements coordinated via PACs.

This has been the approximate state of affairs for decades and became the de facto standard with Citizens United.

Re: The reception of your comments - I think people hate to see that reality. Facing it feels inescapably hopeless. Polite fictions are far easier to maintain. But in a brief skim of your comments, your positions align with me — even if now I’m angry and sad for the reminders of how dog shit this is.

Honestly, Tesla’s quality is far less than most vehicles.
Apple has a lot of fair criticisms leveled against it, but their products are at least built as well as their competition. Unless I’m woefully out of the loop. That’s also possible.

Thank you. Things are definitely better. I can’t say I’m normal. I mean, I trauma dump on strangers on the internet in the name of interesting anecdotes, but I think I threaded a needle that few manage to thread. I’m more or less financially stable, with a solid career, comfortable prospects, and a good home life with someone who grew up under equitable circumstances, and also managed to escape the cycle, so we have a good understanding/acceptance of each others foibles.

Oooh, boy.

Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom both fell more heavily into drug use and moved us (me, and two of my sisters) halfway across the country to the magnificent town of Throckmorton, Texas.
My mom found a dealer, who became her boyfriend, and they wound up spending a lot of time together. So much so that sometimes they’d take us to abandoned houses and leave us there for hours before they came back. My mom was going through a phase - she wound up dyeing her hair so much it somehow looked orange in the sun and green in the shade. But she also was sort of falling off being around the house. Sometimes it was just a day, then a day or two. We learned she lost her job, which was a problem - the house we lived in was provided by her employer. One Friday she left.
When Monday rolled around, we didn’t go to school. The school called that afternoon, and we were honest with them. Our mom was gone and we didn’t know what to do. By Wednesday, they had managed to contact our grandma, who had extended family nearby, and they swooped in before CPS.
We were eventually mustered back “home” to where more immediate family lived, and we floated for a long time. Not quite a year, but long enough that we moved up a grade and we celebrated NYE at my grandma’s.

My mom emerged from wherever she’d been. She convinced my family to bring us back to her, to come live in a battered women’s shelter in Abilene - not far from where she’d disappeared. She was in AA, and NA, and even briefly went back to college.

She never told us believable or consistent stories about what happened. It was always a tale of woe and coercion. Once she told us her drug dealer was an FBI agent that was using her to conduct sting operations and threatened to put her in jail if she stopped helping. In another, it was kidnapping. It was never that she got strung out and tried to run away.

And that may not have been it either. Because after my mom died a few years ago, my sisters, who stayed close to the places we mostly grew up (I fled half a country away), found a weird creative writing exercise: A mother’s letter to a son she gave up for adoption. Odd, but my mom was odd and increasingly tried to get into more creative pursuits as she aged. But then they found a police report that said she got arrested for attacking her boyfriend. The report indicated that she was pregnant. Then they found paperwork from a hospital - standard pregnancy stuff, dating to the time period she was in the wind. The last thing they found was another police report, this time from him assaulting her, indicating she was about 6 months pregnant.
And that’s all we know. We don’t know if this pregnancy came to term - my mom had 6 miscarriages that we knew about. We don’t know if an adoption took place or is she left the kid with her drug dealer - who is now apparently a church alderman (one of my sisters looked him up from the info on the police report).

My mom was both very prideful, and quite racist. Our working theory on why she took this secret to her grave is that it reminded her of her failings and, you know, that she boinked someone she was racist against.

Preamble: My parents divorced when I was young, my dad died a few years later, and I never really got to know him. Plus I have childhood trauma and ADHD, so I don’t remember a lot of my childhood. My parents weren’t great people, and life was pretty rough and tumble growing up.

When I was in my early teens, I found a newspaper clipping from before I was born in some scrapbook or memory box. It was a short little crime blotter story that indicated my dad had accidentally shot himself in the face, because he had mistaken a snub-nose pistol for a lighter while drunk.
I do remember that he had a big scar on his face, but I sort of assumed it was because he liked to get in fistfights for fun.

My mom, a serial liar, confirmed the story, and it’s what I and another one of my sisters have believed for decades.

I mentioned the event in passing to my oldest sister a few months ago and she balked, and immediately began laughing. After she composed herself, she explained that she was home when it happened. The real story is that my dad had ripped someone off in a drug deal, and they did a poor job of trying to kill him. The whole drunk/lighter thing was to avoid additional questions by the police.

So, you know. Gun in a thrown shoe. Sure.

At work I use tab groups to keep them organized by project, so I can tell just how far behind/how overwhelmed I am with a given project by the count of tabs in a given tab group.

It’s a highly effective way to quantify my work-related anxiety.

Dicks of Hazzard

🎵 Just good ol’ peens, never meanin’ no harm. Beats all you ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born. 🎵

And in a very real way, if you’re allowing customers access to source material so they can programmatically manipulate it at a time that online services are rapidly enshittifying, it’s contrary to their business goals. A ripper that upscales is probably trivially easy to use.

And plus, who knows what a client upscaler will hallucinate across multiple models and technology platforms. (Or may be intentionally configured to do.)
No one wants to have to explain to grandpa why all the faces in Dukes of Hazzard have been replaced by glans because he got a meme upscaler.