down to 145 for the first time i can remember. progressing well with workouts. the tonsillectomy recovery was horrible for the first 5 or 6 days but then after that I've been golden. medication still working well. i made a whole turkey as practice for thanksgiving and it turned out perfect. life is good.

it turns out that if you constantly say that either you can't do anything about problems or that the problems don't exist, people view you as useless losers

the party of adulting strikes again

tonsillectomy yesterday after a night in the ER -finally

I've been exercising and dieting again and so far I've lost 10 pounds, hoping to lose 10 more by new years - I'm gonna be down for 2 weeks in november for a tonsillectomy but it is what it is

i screwed up the meniscus in my right knee when i was 16 and it's been giving me a little grief lately, but I'm just ignoring it for now and keeping at exercising and stretching until it starts interfering with anything important. i figure it'll be with me for the rest of my life and I'll be damned if i have surgery on it until I'm old and grey, so the only way out is through

we need better jobs and we need to get out of our college town otherwise we never will, and chicago is a good kick in the pants

i had to get the abscess needle drained and then cut open which was more painful than recovering from getting castrated to be honest, i took my first opiate the afternoon after they cut it - but hopefully it's all over

it'll be an adventure anyway

the plan is to move to chicago in the summer so wish us luck

we've had a car for 2 months and already we've fucked it up - i scratched the side paint on somebody's bike that was locked up next to a parking spot, and today my boyfriend had his foot slip off the brake and dented/scraped the hood on a chain fence in a parking garage. luckily both times there was no damage to anything other than our car, but it just sucks because it's a nice car that's only a couple years old, and it was in perfect shape when we got it. i hate the anxiety of having something that is so expensive and so easy to damage. i've been trying not to worry whenever either of us takes the car somewhere and it's not easy to do when stuff like this happens

i don't much like the line about him being "neurodivergent and doing naughty things sometimes" when he raped two women -that's not naughty, that's reprehensible. the overwhelming majority of mentally ill people are not rapists. i get the gonzo journalist impulse to write in this goofy way, but i don't like it here.

Why would you want to learn a language

joie de vivre. you play for the love of the game and not to win.

the only two things that can get you to learn a language as an adult is sheer necessity and love, and necessity only takes you as far as the grocery store and someday your kids might speak it. you need to love it because the more you learn, the more you discover you don't know. it's like the riddle of the hole: the more you dig, the deeper it gets. the stakes economically need to keep getting proportionally higher to justify the investment, but if it's not an investment to you, it doesn't matter

taking notes for legal hearings -not as a real court monitor, but verbatim notes. I've been doing it for a couple months but I'm finally getting more shifts and making good money

yes, of course - why else would I be here? he cites the same statistics (hosted on a different website) that i used.

to put it another way, when i hear people like mr. berliner talk about media trust and activism ruling over facts, the dogwhistles are too shrill to hear the surface message of "npr isn't very good", which i think we can all agree with. i view it as one of the best options available, but honestly that puts it at "fine" for me because most are just dreck

i am too used to this kind of thing being used as a shuttle for bigotry and polemics about people like me, and the response to the article has cemented that perception for me

well, looking at the statistics, there has been a dip in NPR's radio figures at least based on this back down to pre-trump levels -I've seen other stats on total platforms combined, so including podcasts, online video, etc, that pushes it up to 50 to 60 million weekly consumers. if you cut it to donating members ,i don't know how the statistics have changed because i can't find that data, but you could make an argument either way on whether subscribers would be more or less likely to abandon the station

anecdotally, I'm not sure how to respond other than that my experience has not been the same as yours. i think given our past conversations on the subject that you probably have some insight as to why that is.

i will say that my mother used to be an NPR donator but stopped because she felt they weren't left wing enough. i think the political and cultural war in america demands more partisanship than NPR can provide.

the meds are working and the job is going great

there's a quote i like from a ceo i read: "all the GenZ employees at my company are bisexual and they all have long covid. I'll believe long covid is real when somebody who isn't bisexual has it." in the same vein, i will believe that woke media has gone too far when somebody that doesn't post on bari weiss's website says it

there is no such thing as a news outlet without bias. there are no objective perspectives - even down to the AP newsline stories that are just "a train crashed in india today". you have to choose what to report on even before you worry about how to present it. there is no way to avoid it.

so how do you appear unbiased? you bias yourself to the status quo and the opinions of powerful people. you appear rational by appealing to whatever is common sense - which is the same thing as whatever is the status quo.

there's this weird self-flagellating antiliberalism going around that sees reluctant liberals disavowing their own political positions over and over. some people have internalized the idea that rightwingedness is of the people and leftwingedness is of the elite. it gives the senior financial editors and the oped columnists etc of the world so much airtime beyond their natural habitats.

people aren't turning off NPR, they were never turned on to it. there are better echo chambers out there for people whose common sense, idols, and overton windows are different.

I'm not a doctor, I'm not embassy staff, and I'm not a Russian agent, so my opinion doesn't matter, but this one has smelled to me like "Chronic Lyme Disease but for spooks" since it came out. the combination of symptoms that doctors can't figure out, the belief in a coverup, pinning it on secret russian weaponry - the whole thing is a tall claim with short proof.

the simpler answer is that like chronic lyme, it's a collection of psychosomatic symptoms and random other ailments that get unified and blamed with this label. that doesn't make the symptoms not real, and it's got no more weight behind it than the spy weapon theory, but you can't prove a negative except by showing what isn't true. none of the studies so far have found anything.

my views on this are colored by my biases, but without getting into any of the political side of it, i think that looking at the medical evidence and the announcements made by the US govt etc on this is enough to warrant caution at a minimum when things like this come out

just watched the redone cut of alien 3 and it was better than i expected - kind of odd compared to the other two and clearly the inferior to both, but it had its own something to it

honestly the biggest negative for me was all the stuff with the alien which is kind of funny - i liked all the convicts and their weird behaviour, and the little thing with the doctor and ripley was cute even though there's never been a lezzier character to make straight - but there's no mystery to any of the horror elements and the action is really repetitive. i feel like it's a knock on the movie to have the best part be the character interactions when the writing is not standout great at any point

the cgi and the compositing is pretty bad but it was the era for it and the practicals were pure and true like they needed to be

i dunno, people make it sound to be awful and the director hates it, but i thought it was alright. i guess if you're grading on the curve of the first two then it's not good though

while i travelled, my passions for to groom

i came upon a sentimental tune

it was not..

the vast majority of the growth in the arab population was due to natural population growth and not migration - and more jews than arabs migrated to the country in total. unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by net, you have it backwards.

the majority of the arab population was settled even at the time of the mandate censuses. the idea that palestine was an empty land is a colonial myth of convenience.

busy work day but it might yet end early. on any day i only work until 3 at the latest anyway. when i get home it's hot dog mac and cheese for dinner. I'm stuck on some kind of africa kick so i might make it a pdf dive weekend project so it's not just skimming wikipedia and public documents

the company that bought the old one is much better. i get paid more per hour and i can bill more time. it's only been since january but I'm averaging closer to 4 shifts a week so that helps a lot

mood stabilizers have been doing me good, and some of my various ailments are fixed from getting off the SSRIs. next week i start the process of getting a CPAP because apparently i had sleep apnea all this time. yesterday i slept 4 hours after work and another 7 that night. based on all that I'm off the thyroid meds now because that was likely a bugbear

got a new learner's permit again so me and the boywife can finally get licenses this year inshallah

passed the 4 year dating anniversary a few months ago. about to hit the 6 year transitioning anniversary. getting out of the covid timehole has been strange. every year is messy in its own way. doing the open relationship since last summer has been great i think -the actual process of meeting new people is a pain in the ass and effectively a lottery on whether it pans out, but i've made some close friends* out of it and it's done a lot to limit the cabin fever and that sense of being a piece of shit. I'm glad me and my boyfriend were able to be together all through the lockdowns but after being effectively unemployed, depressed, and spending all day together for 2.5+ years it's nice to remember how to be human