Whaaaa?! I’ve always found Danish pastries to be much less sweet than American, though the American take is cloyingly sweet. Almond flavor totally tracks, though. Many I’ve seen are almond flavored or at least include almonds.

So now I have to wonder: what is he doing this to hide now?

Edit: also, can the aliens please take over now? At least just the US? I think us humans have shown we can’t handle this on our own.

It’s good science to challenge assumptions or previously accepted findings.

Usually these studies examine multiple factors for whatever context, then draw an overall conclusion based on the cumulative findings. This is then simplified by media, which then gets a bunch of “well duh” comments by people who don’t read the news article or the research report.

It is really silly that it’s not taught.

Physical Education? Check.

Academics? Check.

Emotional Intelligence? Whoa whoa whoa there, slow down now, that’s not for public education. That’s done in the home, with Jesus!

I know Serbia and rakija! It reminds me of grappa. Sorry you’re also stuck in a toxic society and have the curse of knowing it could be better.

I’m guessing you’re also an American. I feel you, friend. The US has a cultural toxic positivity problem, amongst other issues. Got a problem? STFU and turn that frown upside down! They’re not problems but opportunities! It could be worse! It is… what it is. 🫠

So people bottle up their negative emotions and don’t learn how to deal with them. They don’t know how to seek OR give support. Some feel threatened when presented with someone else’s negative emotions, and it doesn’t help that the other usually doesn’t know how to present them, so they try to make it go away.

I have no idea how to fix it on a societal level beyond learning to do better ourselves and setting a good example for others.

You can run Doom on just about anything.

I think I need to try to celebrate little wins more. I have celebrated these before, but it feels like my wins are so few and far between anyway lol.

You might be doing better than you realize. Change on this stuff is so slow that it can sneak up on you. Do you journal at all?

I’m also on the fence about if EMDR itself works or if I’d get similar results if I was doing anything else repetitive that also required my full focus. I think it just got my overactive mind to get out of its own way, but it worked!

DBT might not be the thing for you, or may be more helpful later. My early therapy was almost exclusively CBT, which is luckily what I needed since my internal narrative was real ugly. I picked up on DBT later and I think it would have been harder to learn and less effective early on.

I’m sorry you’re in the funk. A lot of us have been there, so we can relate and commiserate. I can assure you it does get better if you keep at it. The work may never become easy, but it does get easier as you do and learn more over time.

I can confirm: authentic Indian dishes are in fact not primarily based on premixed spices made into cream based gravies.

Indian migrants have made some pretty interesting dishes by integrating with local cuisine. Case in point: bunny chow.

Not my circus or my monkeys, but I can’t sleep so I did some cursory searching. I did undergrad research that was heavy into wastewater treatment, so this did sound a bit unlikely.

I found the biological secondary is pretty extensive and is being well utilized for energy generation, so the resultant level of treatment makes more sense. It looks like the claim is closer to “you could drink it if you wanted to, but don’t”.

https://envsci.ceu.edu/article/2025-02-27/turning-waste-power-visit-viennas-wastewater-treatment-plant

https://www.wte.de/en/references/wastewater-treatment-vienna-austria/

Thank you! I like Chicago-style stuffed, but no one on the West Coast knows what it is. Hell, most people anywhere don’t know what it is.

For those who have never had it: imagine a two-layer lasagna but the noodles are replaced with a flaky, buttery, yeast-leavened bread. It can be great, but it can also be a big pile of garbage if it’s not done right, worse than regular bad pizza.

Hi! CPTSD here thanks to untreated BPD dad. My partner also has CPTSD from an even shittier childhood. Between the two of us, we’ve done everything you’ve mentioned here and worked most of it out. I can write a novel - and I will, right here! Here’s what came to mind reading your post. Feel free to ask anything, I’m an open book.

It takes years to make the first big changes when you have a personality and/or trauma-related disorder, because you’re using your wonky brain to fix your wonky brain. It fucking sucks. And it’s never going away, just getting better managed. I’m over two decades in on treatment and I still sometimes do the same shit I did when I started. The difference is it’s very infrequent now, I can typically stop it immediately, and it’s comparably mild if I don’t.

You’ll make the slowest progress at the beginning, so it’s hard to see. I remember beating myself up because nothing seemed to get better, which was making it even harder to improve. I eventually moved my goalposts way back and learned to become my own cheerleader. I have victory conditions, really small achievements where I take a moment to recognize that I did something right and check in to see how I’m feeling. If I was upset, I’d find a mirror, make eye contact with myself, and talk myself down, comforting myself like I might want an ideal friend to do. Sometimes I’d just hug myself and say I was sorry I was upset and cry a bit (or a lot) until I felt better. The point was being my own best friend, even if I didn’t feel like it. Especially when I didn’t feel like it.

It’s all about recognizing incremental progress and heaping on the praise. I call the praise part “training my own dog”. Calm me is rational and can think through shit. Emotionally flooded me isn’t very bright and needs to be trained, so I give that “me” positive reinforcement when they do a good job. Just like a dog. I sometimes give myself treats when I do a very good job.

There’s much more, like learning to be better at emotional regulation so I don’t have to rely on dysregulated me being a good dog, but this is what got me over the hump of “everything sucks, I suck, and I’m never getting better”.

Edit: oh oh! Look up amygdala hijacking in reference to getting really upset and going on rants where you later look back and are like “…WTF?” My partner does this HARD if they’ve been pushing themselves too hard for too long. I at first thought they were delusional and, well… they were. Temporarily. Because their brain had mostly shut down.

The more you can learn about psychology and neuroscience, especially affective neuroscience, the more you’ll be able to recognize what drives certain aspects of your behavior, which will help you figure out what to do about it. Knowledge is power and all that.

Tell me about it, and there’s always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.

I didn’t know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.

We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I’ve acquired over my life. They’ve paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It’s one of those “having money saves money” situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.

Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

OR

DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

Nope.

Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.

Same with Wi-Fi being used to refer to Internet access in general. I basically lived on the phone with our ISP’s tech support for two days and one tech person even told me they needed to “reset our modem so they could get the WiFi flowing to our house again”. I died a little inside.

I worked for a call center as a stop gap when I was younger. The economy had shit itself and while this company was doing great, it was looking to save money because they knew they could squeeze desperate people. Annual raises were coming up. They were based on a system heavily influenced by disciplinary action, so many of my coworkers started getting verbal and written warnings for ridiculous things.

I finally got written up for not pulling up a reference before telling a customer about a past event. I didn’t pull the reference up because I already had it and other common topics open for easy access, which my supervisor told us to do.

I disputed the write-up but the department manager denied it as “the information could have changed between calls, so you should have looked it up through our knowledge base”. I asked how the past could have changed and was told it doesn’t matter: it’s policy. I asked to see the policy. The goalposts immediately changed: “disciplinary action is at management’s discretion and this was a serious error in judgment”. I told them that I was shocked anyone could say that and still expect to be taken seriously, even by themselves, and refused to sign my write-up. I was pulled into the HR manager’s office and given a “Final Warning” write-up for my attitude and not signing my initial write-up. I signed that one and got on a PIP, so they were happy.

Annual reviews were that week. I had extraordinary performance stats but got a $0.04 per hour annual raise - $83.20 per year! I walked out once I got a new job.

I just checked: my old manager is now a “boss babe” who sells essential oils and scented candles for MLMs. Sometimes a life well lived really is the best revenge.

I’m even the kind in your picture, though he’s not seeing anything in that microscope.

I agree, you just should tell people first! Unsolicited story time:

We had been dating for a few weeks. She was smart, nice, and very fun. I really liked her and had decided to consider getting serious. I thought she had ghosted me for our dinner date, though, so I had left and was feeling sad. She called over an hour later to apologize profusely and beg me to come back, saying she’d explain and buy everything that night as apology.

What she didn’t mention was that she was going to alternate between incoherent rambling and staring, silent and unresponsive, into one corner of the cafe’s ceiling. I had no idea what was going on. I got ahold of her roommate, who said she had eaten a bunch of shrooms and walked to her friend’s house. I left after he arrived and I learned he was her roommate… and her boyfriend. Fun.

I went full no contact. Years later, we worked together briefly in graduate school, where she pretended not to know me despite having already told our lab mates we used to be friends. Super awkward, maybe mental problems.

I am one, and it’s the closest you can get to being a wizard. You use the in-depth knowledge and tools of your domain to do things the general population often doesn’t fully understand and can’t do well themselves, if at all.

Sounds like wizards to me.