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Cake day: January 6th, 2024

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  • I’m not sure what you are referring to, but that feels to me like a nonsense generalization. I’m no doctor, so my knowledge of back and knee surgeries is limited to my very own experience.

    First of all, I can’t see how my surgeries could ever be not successful. The operation in itself is pretty simple, but incredibly bothersome and it won’t fix my knees, it will just prevent them from getting worse with age. But still it would be hard to fuck it up when it comes to the surgery. But again I don’t know about others.

    And second, the doctor was absolutely awesome, although a previous one was a piece of shit that I should have sued for malpractice but I’m not from the USA nor was in the USA so sueing doesn’t come to me naturally and since nothing bad happened I let it go, nowadays I’d have been far stricter, but that was a bad doctor, nothing to do with low success rate of knee surgeries. But that made me abandon that asshole and search for a new doctor and I’ll just say he was incredibly nice, easy to deal with and very professional. And later on I discovered he is also a huge name in the field of knee health issues to the point where many professional athletes go to him when they have anything. Don’t know if that skews my perspective but its hard to think how anything could have gone wrong.


  • I’m not sure I catch your meaning. You think I copied this? Or that what I wrote is going to become a copypasta? Because the first one isn’t true, and the second one, I just don’t see it happening. It is just a personal anecdote that i doubt would ever really be of any interest for it to become meme material.


  • Indeed, you are absolutely right. But how do you compare what is like another thing? The original idea of homeopathy was more straightforward in this sense, it wasn’t “like cures like”, it was more “if you were poisoned with x, then a solution of that x element in really small doses will cause you to recover”. With all the shit I give to homeopathy (because nowadays anyone thinking homeopathy works has no excuse), I have to admire it just a bit in its historical context. At a time when “actual” doctors were trying to heal people with bloodletting and washing hands was not really a thing before stuffing them in someone’s wound… Someone came up with an idea that actually was causing less damage than the doctors themselves were, and the idea, ridiculous as it is with our current knowledge, is not far from the actual idea of vaccines. We just know that a small dose won’t heal you, but it might make your antibodies adapt and learn how to fight something negative. If you think it through, it is not entirely far from that basic starting point in homeopathy. Of course they took it to the limit and then became bullshit. I don’t remember who am I quoting but here goes “the alternative medicine that has been proven to work has a name, medicine” (I’m paraphrasing, can’t remember the exact wording, but I’m thinking maybe it was the amazing Tim Minchin in one of his songs/acts?)

    From that point it all went to shit and homeopathy became completely absurd because they started loosening the concepts. “Like cures like” ends up working as “I’ll make some shitty comparison and because it kinda works because I say so, it is similar and will cure you”.

    Which is how you end up with the real fun stuff in homeopathy. I’ll be talking from memory from many years ago, so take this with a grain of salt, maybe those products where fringe stuff but I’m pretty sure they were all real and sold.

    Are you feeling stuck? Maybe when you are working on something? Maybe your stomach? Maybe you are stuck in a bad relationship? Don’t worry, here’s the amazing homeopathy remedy, a dilution of pieces of the wall of Berlin. If they managed to break through, why wouldn’t you? (yes, there is a homeopathic remedy based on the wall of Berlin)

    Are you feeling sad? Glum? Unhappy? Is there an idiom for it? Like for instance “are you feeling blue?”… Don’t worry, here you have a dilution of the color blue in homeopathic pill form. (Yes, there’s a bunch of color based homeopathic remedies).

    OK enough funny shit descriptions because I cannot really see how I can even begin to describe the one based on dinosaur bones. Or my favorite, black holes. Yes, somehow they sell the idea that they have diluted a black hole effect in water… Don’t ask me. I can’t understand it either.

    So yeah like heals like… But when you can make up the comparison it really doesn’t matter.




  • I think I’ve heard more unhinged things that the one I’m about to mention, but the others are from drunk randos making shit up or over sharing I don’t know. The one that really hit me is not as crazy but it still pisses me off to this day and it is far more serious than that drunk guy telling me about how he used to masturbate on the backseats of all buses he could get into.

    I’ve had an issue with my legs since birth, nothing bad and in fact went unnoticed most my life. Just how my knees are built. Never caused a problem until in my twenties I started getting into the gym. A bad trainer (student doing practice) in a gym recommended me some exercise after I asked for something to change the routine. Long story short, I fucked up my knees, even longer story shorter, a doc specialized in legs and specifically knees told me my options, from which the most reasonable at the time was surgery. Surgery for both knees, 1 first, then recovery then the other. A total of two year plan for it.

    Mind you the problem was a physical one about the angle of the bones in my knees. A long time friend of my parents, who works as a researcher and teacher of biology in the university of my city called for whatever reason and my mother told of my leg problem.

    This person decided that it was excruciatingly important to ask that the phone is passed to me, to tell me not to go to surgery. Risky, dangerous, and completely unnecessary, when I can have a completely safe alternative. Take some homeopathy pills they said, that will get your knees fixed without issues. I was so shocked coming from that person… Mind you I was in my twenties, so not an entire idiot, and I knew a bit about homeopathy… Having read “bad science” by Ben Goldacre (highly recommended by the way) and got into a spiral of alternative shit and research on the stupidest things people get into. I even have an official diploma from Boiron that they basically gave to anyone who cared to answer some answers right about homeopathy back in the day and that it was incredibly easy to hack (wrong answer? Click back and you could try again, in fact the points for the diploma were stored in plain sight in a cookie that never got reset, I ended up with like 120 points out of 50, there were only 5 questions by the way). No security needed as it had no fucking value like the rest of homeopathic stuff. Or is it less security means more secure in homeopathic terms?

    Any way, I’m getting derailed, this fucking person tries to sell me into the homeopathic shit to fix the angle of my knees… I was so shocked I couldn’t even answer. Just said “okbye”, gave the phone away, and asked my parents to never ever put me in the same room with that idiot. It’s been manybyears now and so far I’ve succeeded in avoiding ever seeing or hearing of that person.







  • Yeah, and actually I would say with confidence we are actually better off. It’s true that unrealistic expectations is a big issue (well, might be more like, I think most realize that porn is not real after experiencing it so it’s not a big problem really for most), but at least we do have a good understanding of the possibilities and what is safe and what is not… At the very least we have a more openminded and informed point of view on sex and relationships. Which doesn’t mean either “let’s show porn to the kids” of course, but it’s such an overblown topic in society.

    Let parents be the responsible ones of what kids watch, not the webpages…


  • I’m near my 40s, and have been working as software dev since finishing my masters. Few years back I started to go in the direction of more management less dev in a previous company. Saw it wasn’t for me and went to work somewhere else working as a simpler dev role. A few years after and I’m starting to feel the need to change further even. I do love coding but the whole layer of tech debt and management and meetings is wearing me out and has made me lose my love for tech. I am just lost as to what I’d do instead. Cannot work on retail with my autistic ass and since WFH was allowed and accepted I am not planning to go back to an office anyway. Maybe woodworker or something would be enjoyable for me, but there’s other constraints that won’t allow me to change right now, lots of bills to pay and my wife is an entrepreneur so we can’t really risk losing my stable position right now, with two small kids. Once they grow and get out of the house we’d likely move more country side, get some chicken to care for (we love animals) or something like that and maybe I can get space to do some wood work or whatever come to mind then.

    So overall, no, you are not losing it, or maybe we are all losing it together. Same with depression, it’s such a tough shit to leave behind. I’m still fighting with it but doing better lately, the job doesn’t help at all…


  • I’m not a therapist nor an expert, just a dude with an opinion, so I may be entirely wrong. I largely agree with you and I think that’s a great way to see it but wanted to expand on it.

    If someone’s use of porn (or anything to that effect, videogames, tv, social networks…) affect those ADLs or IADLs I would say that it would fall under the category of addiction, which is worse than the loose and nebulous (that was a great way to describe it) “too much” from the question.

    I would rather say that “too much” porn can be way before the addiction point. I would consider that teenagers might easily watch too much porn due to the ease of access and the amount of content available while they are not really addicted. It’s just a reaction to the whole hormones changes and the increase need of sexual gratification. If someone cannot go even a day without watching porn, I would think that that’s too much. If their sexual relations are measured or thought of as porn scenes, that is an indication of too much porn too.

    I dont mean that watching porn daily means you watch too much porn, but if you can’t go a day without it, if you stop doing things you would rather do because you didn’t yet watch it, then it is too much. If someone’s idea of sex is lead by porn, then they probably watch too much (but in that topic there’s also the idea of how much real experience they have). In other words, “too much” depends on many personal factors that aren’t so easy to define, but could happen before we get to the point of addiction.




  • OK, I’ll recommend you a few that are all open source, simple, free, with no ads, and should be handled by just any phone. You can find the games in f-droid between other places.

    For those that are into crosswords: Forkyz

    A slightly different take on sudoku style game: Gauguin

    A game to place pieces removing full lines both vertically and horizontally, kinda like Tetris but pieces are not falling and you just put them wherever you want: 1010! Klooni

    A tower defense game using hand drawn graphics: Anuto TD

    And one I have from the play store, not open source, that is a clone of minesweeper, called… Well you can guess it: Minesweeper for android

    All of those I have used on my own device and have worked great, definitely good time killers if you are into any of those kind of games.



  • Yeah like no shit Sherlock…

    I am neither Norwegian nor young, but can only agree with the premise. We have been paying for Netflix for many years, Netflix seemed to be back in the day a company that understood what was needed to be done against piracy. A couple of years ago we thought of adding Disney+ to our subscriptions as it is great for the kids. I’ll pay happily if the service and content is worth it, but I can’t justify adding also HBO, Hulu, Amazon, Apple+… Guess what happens if I can’t watch a show because it’s not available where I live (happens too often) or it’s in yet another subscription walled platform? And that would be for content I dont even own and can watch whenever, it just might disappear… I also have what I consider a rather large collection of DVDs and BRs, at least I own those but I hate using them (too much unskippable stuff, warnings (threats) against pirating, annoying to use as I need to switch discs for changing content…), and that’s just not a good way of discovering new content, its only for those I really like and want to have and rewatch.