Dave Mustaine says a lot of stuff.

Jensen Huang out here cosplaying like Deus Ex-Husband.

$50 for now.

He should write a paper about it.

My friend will be devastated. Or maybe not.

Any idea what being a Quark fan means? Asking for a friend.

Dwyer tried to make art, but Grainger turned it into a movement.

Oh hey, it’s my old Imprezza.

Clone Tuvix, separate one clone, use phaser on Neelix. Best of all worlds.

First of all, if a friend makes you feel bad about yourself for being yourself, they’re not a friend. If a friend expects a one-sided relationship (you always pick up the check, you always host, you’re always are the one making time), they’re not a friend. If a friend is always taking potshots at you and then tells you to lighten up when you tell them you’re uncomfortable, they’re not a friend.

I was a pariah in high school so I can’t give a lot of info there, but cool adults will understand and give you some breathing room if you say you’re autistic. So if you stim or get hung up on something a neurotypical thinks isn’t a big deal, decent people will give you the benefit of the doubt. Uncool people do not deserve friendship. Better to be a mysterious weirdo than some narcissist’s new plaything.

I dunno, but see also: hardcore Limp Bizket fans in the late 90s.

Weird AuDHD bragging rights: Picked one of these for the first time and ended up having to completely disassemble and reassemble it. I wasn’t ready for it and over-rotated the core, which dropped pins into the lock body and seized the whole thing up.

Not sure how I pulled it off, but the autism and the adhd really came through for me. I’d never taken a padlock apart and I didn’t have a plug follower of the right diameter to take the cylinder apart. So I improvised with a hollow pen tube. I ended up dropping all the key pins (variable-height pins that match up with the key blade) in a pile, and managed to get them all in the correct chambers after a few false starts.

I couldn’t fit a shim in, so I used an allen wrench + tweezers + the hollow pen to put the cylinder back together; it’s basically putting seven tiny metal pieces into spring-loaded chambers that really don’t want tiny metal pieces in them. The padlock itself has two ball bearings that have to fit into the left and right of the chamber and roll all over the place and onto the floor, but I found a way to hold the lock body that kept them both in place long enough to put the lock cylinder back in.

It was a chaotic mess throughout and I shudder to think what any decent locksmith would think of the attempt, but I got it back together again before the anxiety completely seized me up. Now I’m afraid to pick it again, although I also want to take it apart about 50 more times.

Go to his graduation. Be very kind to yourself in the days leading up to it: get plenty of downtime, do comforting things, get lots of rest. Bring earplugs or noise-cancelling stuff. If you’ve got a favorite object you can touch or fidget with, bring that too. Afterwards, go back home and take care of yourself some more. You did a big thing and need to recover.

I’m gonna be at closet alcoholic my whole life and there’s nothing I can do.

This next part is just a story from someone that felt like they were trapped by booze.

I had a massive problem with alcohol. I think it runs in the family. My great-grandpa owned a bar before my great-grandma found Jesus for him and dried that whole branch of the family out. There was a lot of stigma around alcohol when I was a kid, and a lot of dark mutterings about relatives.

I always drank a little too much, but things got bad when I switched jobs into a company with a heavy drinking culture. The pandemic compounded it. I drank every single night and sometimes during the day (long team lunches, remote work at the bar, beer fridge Fridays.) They knew me on a first-name basis at the liquor store. I knew the backstories of every bartender around my office. And there was a period in the pandemic where, since I never had to go anywhere, I’d just wake up and start drinking. In retrospect, I was poorly medicating autism and both flavors of ADHD.

I didn’t even realize how bad it had gotten until I broke a tooth and had to have oral surgery. I had two procedures spaced across a couple months and a heavy antibiotic load to clear things up before and after both procedures. That meant I couldn’t drink, and it was hell. In the middle of freaking out, I realized just how much of my life was devoted to drinking.

One night during my enforced dry period, I made myself a glass of soda water and shook a couple drops of bitters into it. It flipped the right switch in my brain and I realized that I didn’t need heavy alcohol every single day. I didn’t even need a second drink since there was so little alcohol in the first one. I didn’t have to maintain a level of drunkenness until I crashed for the night. My brain just needed a little reassurance.

I tapered off the bitters and soda and spent the next six months terrified of taking another drink. I never joined a group because the idea of sitting in a room with strangers was overwhelming and horrible. I relapsed a couple times, but I realized that beating myself up about it just made me want to drink more; it was better to just analyze what had gone wrong. On days that I didn’t drink, I didn’t wake up with all-consuming anxiety and dread. I slept better, too, and started dreaming again.

Today, I have a glass or two of wine every few weeks. If I go out, I get one or two drinks and cut myself off. Every once in a great while I go a little further; wife and I are both on the spectrum and we spend all of December 26 at home with a charcuterie plate and a bottle of nice port to recover from the mandatory holiday socializing. I’ve flipped alcohol from a mundane thing to a novelty. It’s an occasional treat, not a reward for getting through the day.

Physically, I feel better. A lot of my digestive problems cleared up when I stopped drinking heavily. While social situations are harder for me to navigate because I’m not on easy mode, it gave me the ammo to pursue an autism diagnosis. A lot of the stuff I’d chalked up to alcohol craving were actually my body being overwhelmed in social situations and telling me to go get some space. I’m in a much better place than I was five years ago, and I have a hard time recognizing me from a decade ago.

Again, this is just a story from someone that felt hopeless. It doesn’t seem like it in the moment, but life can be better.

Maybe it was just my office.

I’d hate to see Creamy Baptist Church’s sign.

It’s good to see the old ways still being followed. We were calling them Microslop back when Windows ME released.

Downstairs toilet is leaking. It has, over the past week, slowly driven me insane. Finally went to the store and got a replacement fill unit and flapper valve.

Tried to turn the water off and the supply valve is stuck in the on position. So I can’t actually turn the water off. Neat. Tied the float in the up position so I can at least keep the tank dry.

Replaced the flapper valve and it still leaks. Realized the overflow pipe is probably responsible. Grabbed it to check for leaks and it broke off in my hand.

Went back to the store for a can of WD-40 and a replacement overflow valve. Store doesn’t sell them. I’d have to buy a whole new assembly, and installing it means pulling the tank off. Which I can’t do because I can’t shut off the water.

Fast forward to now. I’m regularly hosing down the supply valve with WD-40 in case it magically starts working. I’ve marine cemented the overflow tube back in place. It’s curing right now. The float is still tied up like some kind of plumbing David Carradine.

I’ll know whether the fix worked this evening. I still need to replace the supply valve and it would be nice to actually have a new fill unit.

I hate this toilet so much.

Keep going on it. We’ll need programmers when the bubble pops or Claude/Copilot/whoever pull a Broadcom and locks everyone into predatory contracts.

And, really, AI is not good at code. It’s good at mimicking stuff it’s seen before. That’s why most of the use-cases the AI heads at my company point to are things like REST servers or configuration files. You know, stuff that fucking everyone has in their 21st century codebase. Once you get into the weeds and start solving novel problems, AI just hallucinates a solution.

I started my career back when everyone said that Visual Basic would make most programming jobs obsolete. Spend your time building your craft. Spend a little longer learning why and how. Worst-case scenario, you can find the flaws in AI code instead of just shrugging and committing.

I’m AuDHD, so I have a set of hobbies I rotate through to keep from burning out. Lockpicking is my most recent.

I started this summer and it’s a puzzle and a fidget toy rolled into one. It’s helped with dexterity and fine motor control, too. I’m not fantastic at it, but it holds my interest and it’s fun exploring new locks and techniques.

The best hobby is something interesting and fun for you. You don’t have to be immediately good at it, you just have to get some dopamine from it. Every brain is different, and there’s no standard autism hobby. Just think about what you’d enjoy learning and get after it.

Hell of a day already. Phone buzzed at midnight and woke me all the way up and I spent the rest of the night listening to the 20+ mile/hour winds howling outside. Got very little sleep, woke up tense, and went to my daughter’s school christmas program. The chairs sucked; between them and the muscle tension I was in agony by the end of it.

Everyone around me was filming the stage, which was ok, but about half of them didn’t think they needed to turn their camera flashes off and the rest of them talked at normal volume during the songs. And then the 4th grade class came out with recorders and jesus herman christ it was like listening to someone play jingle bells on a room-sized Aztec Death Whistle.

And we’re supposed to get a massive dump of snow in about 45 minutes. Hoping to get some downtime before the big day next week, but holy cow today sucks.