TheRealKuni

As shameful as it may be, I’m reducing my stress by reminding myself that I, personally, will be fine regardless.

But I fear for many friends, loved ones, and strangers who may not fare as well.

It is but no educated person qualifies themselves by that name as it means nothing.

People seek to label themselves in the most accurate category not the broadest one.

I’m not sure that’s true. If you ask someone what they do for a living and they say, “I’m a doctor,” you don’t say, “I doubt it. A real doctor would say, ‘I’m a cardiovascular surgeon,’ or ‘I’m a pediatrician.’” We adjust our labels for our audience.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find a biologist or a climatologist who might just say, “I’m a scientist” to a broad audience. Not that they couldn’t use the more accurate label, just that they don’t necessarily have to.

Scientist is the broader category though. If a square says “I’m a rectangle” they aren’t lying.

The way I handle this is to parse them differently. They mean the same thing, but “I couldn’t care less” is sincere and “I could care less” is sarcastic.

Sort of like, “I suppose it’s possible that I could care less about that” reduced to the phrase.

Because both phrases obviously communicate the same meaning, a lack of care, the issue for me isn’t in the understanding but in the parsing. So I had to come up with a way to parse it as sarcasm so it doesn’t bother me.

Like when someone says, “I’ll try and be there” my brain, mildly traumatized by really good English teachers in my youth, screams, “YOU’LL TRY TO BE THERE.” But lately I’ve been making an effort to interpret the “and <verb>” following “try” as an alternate form of the infinitive, since it’s so readily accepted and common in spoken English. We already construct other verbs that way anyway (eg. “I’ll go and do that”).

I…might have a touch of the ‘tism. It wouldn’t surprise me. 😅

lol I feel like I’m living in a different planet.

😂 Are you just now learning that people experience different things in life?

I don’t use a shoehorn, and I’ve finally embraced the Skechers Slip-Ins lifestyle and loving it, but shoehorns would definitely have made my life easier in some respects.

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Diablo 4 and Hi-Fi Rush

Hi-Fi Rush is amazing. Such a fun title, great story, great concept, great art style, great music.

Diablo 4’s new expansion is fun, I’m really enjoying the extremely broken, unbalanced new class. The game is a great companion to audiobooks or podcasts.

Oh I’ve not been on the Starcruiser. It was like, $6k for two nights. Screw that.

I’ve been to Disney World though. The Star Wars area (in Hollywood Studios) is really cool. And Animal Kingdom is fantastic. The whole place is fun, but not everyone’s cup of tea certainly.

It’s way better than Disneyland, IMO. Which is underwhelming in comparison. Although the Star Wars areas are essentially identical, which is nice.

On the other hand, road bikers are fucking annoying, stay in your goddamn lane and stop slowing down traffic. I’m not reading your dumb hand signals, either!

I sometimes road bike. If there’s a bike lane I’ll stay in it. But I am entitled to a lane if there isn’t a bike lane, so on a four-lane road with no bike lane I will not go to the shoulder, I will ride in the center of the right lane to maximize my visibility. It’s infuriating how many dickhole drivers give me like a quarter of the lane when they pass me unless I take the center of the lane.

(It is legal for me to ride on the sidewalk in my county, but I cannot maintain my preferred 40kph (25mph) on a sidewalk. Too bumpy, and too many pedestrians. It is also legal for me to ride on the road.)

Hand signals aren’t hard. There are, as far as I know, three important ones. Arm straight out means I’m turning that direction. Arm bent up means I’m turning the opposite direction. Arm bent down means I’m stopping, though my bike has brake lights so I don’t usually use this one.

Well, “Starcruiser” was a massive flop. Far too expensive, underwhelming experience, terrible execution. Jenny Nicholson has a surprisingly compelling four hour review of it that covers part of why it flopped. Worth a watch.

Also, the extendable lightsaber is pretty fragile. Only really able to be used for the extending and maybe a bit of swinging it around. Essentially it’s like two half-cylindrical measuring tapes with an end cap that extend together, with an LED strip inside. You can’t hit another blade with it. So when they had lightsaber fights the actors had to quickly swap from the extendable lightsaber to the fighting lightsaber out of view, like crouching to run and swapping behind a railing or something.

The extending lightsabers were for the star cruiser thing, and they don’t do that anymore. But maybe they’ve moved them into the park proper.

But yeah, Disney World is a pretty amazing experience.

Florence Pugh has never been shy about her body.

Parshendi, if they can be called a monster race.

Having completely different forms they take for specialization depending on task is fascinating. And I love the way rhythm is baked into their being so innately, how every Parshendi can hear the same rhythms and attune them to express or mask emotion.

And I would remember the dream in that moment and think ‘deja vu’

That’s just Deja Vu. A common interpretation of it is that you dreamt it, because how else had you already seen it happen before? Your brain rationalizes it by telling you that you had dreamt it.

But that’s almost certainly not what happened. It’s the brain making a mistake recognizing a memory as it’s being stored. These types of mistakes get rarer and rarer as the brain learns to not fall for this, which is why Deja Vu becomes less common as we age.

(As I said in another post, I am not a doctor or a psychologist, this is just based on my experience and what I’ve read. But the idea that you’re remembering a dream you had and it played out the same way as what’s happening is a really common interpretation of Deja Vu. Our brains are really really good at rationalizing and inventing memories. And our memories are very flawed. So, Occam’s Razor, it is far more likely that your brain came up with a reason for what you were experiencing rather than that you predicted the future in your dream.)

That’s exactly what Deja Vu is. You’re convinced you know what is going to happen because you’ve seen it before. And when it happens you’re think, “I knew that was going to happen, it happened exactly as I had seen it!” So you remember it that way.

But in the moment you wouldn’t have actually been able to say what was about to happen. Your brain confirms that you did know what was going to happen when it does, because it’s essentially “reading” the memory as it “writes” it.

It helps that our conscious experience of the world is lagged a few milliseconds behind our instinctual reactions. So you actually did see it before you processed it happening, just by fractions of a second.

(NB: I am not a doctor or a psychologist or anything, this is just based on my experience and on what I’ve read. Human memory is very very flawed and we’re prone to remembering things differently than they happened, and be extremely confident about that misremembering. Especially the more times we go over that memory, rewriting it every time.)

If it makes you feel better, I used to have similar insights when I took ambien to help me sleep. I would be so confident that the ideas were world changing tech, or fantastic ideas for a book, or whatever. Sometimes I would be smart enough to write them down.

The next morning, they were almost never actually good ideas. I can remember exactly one book idea that is actually vaguely interesting.

When under the effects of certain types of drugs, we’re far more likely to think of ideas as brilliant. It doesn’t mean they actually are, though.

When he comes to big cities his crowd isn’t from the cities. That’s just where the venues are. The crowd comes from the surrounding suburbs and rural areas. People in rural and suburban Michigan are terrified of Detroit.

I used my Vitamix to make a “Chicken Caesar Smoothie” by blending the ingredients of a chicken Caesar salad, topping with some crushed croutons, and garnished with a large romaine leaf.

People were rightly disgusted, but when they tried it they had to begrudgingly admit that it was delicious.

I was able to make them feel better about themselves by telling them to think of it as soup in a glass rather than a smoothie.

Don’t worry. I’ve had a lot of work done on my front teeth due to an accident when I was a child. Eventually needed root canals on both.

Honestly those root canals weren’t even as bad as cavity fillings.

Most painful part, as others have said, will be the numbing injections. If you still feel pain, let them know and they’ll give you more (different people have different levels).

Make sure to ask for a bite block so you don’t have to hold your mouth open, that’ll help a lot.

They might even let you listen to music, audiobook, or podcast, depending on your dentist.

Here’s what you’ll experience:

They’ll put you in the chair, and they’ll use a q-tip to apply some local anesthetic to your gums. They’ll give that a bit to kick in, then they’ll inject your gums with a tiny little hypodermic needle to really numb them. This is the only part that hurts. I find if I grip the arm of my chair and focus on that, I get through it easier.

They’ll likely do 2-3 injections around the area, depending on the tooth and where the nerves are located. But the first is the worst, because the numbing agent will start to take effect for the others. Also your body is gonna flood with endorphins because of the pain, so the injections following the first won’t be nearly as bad. Then the dentist will probably leave the room for a few minutes while they let that kick in. If the assistant is there, strike up a conversation! In my experience, the relief that the injections are done, along with the aforementioned flood of endorphins, almost feels like a mild high.

The dentist will come back and ask how you’re doing. Your lip will feel huge right now (though it isn’t, it’s just the way the nerves interpret not being able to feel what’s going on).

Here, if they haven’t given you one yet, ask for a bite block. Seriously, it makes the process so much easier.

They’ll start working by drying the area with some air. Then they’ll probably begin drilling. If you feel any pain at all, let them know. They’ll be looking for it, and may even ask you. I’ve only ever had to get an additional injection once or twice. By this point, the injection won’t really hurt because the area is so numb.

When they’ve drilled in they’ll begin using tools to clean out the inside of the tooth, clearing as much of the infected tissue as possible and removing the nerve. The work and the drilling all feel kind of weird, because the area is numb but you can still sense pressure in other parts of your mouth. You can also hear it, unless you choose the music route. I actually find this kind of fascinating.

Once they’ve cleaned the area, they’ll put in what’s called gutta percha, which they use to plug up the canal. This will feel funny, you’ll definitely feel the pressure. It won’t hurt though.

Then they’ll plug the hole with some bonding material or cement or something. This will probably be UV cured.

And then you’ll be done! Unless you’re having the whole tooth replaced with a crown. In that case, they’ll have made a mold beforehand for a temporary and permanent crown. They’ll drill away more of the tooth and put a post in to hold the crown in place. Then they’ll put the temporary crown on while they send the mold out to make a proper one.

Then you get to go home. Take a sick day if you get them, not because you need it but because it’s a good excuse and your co-workers will all feel sorry for you. 🤣

Don’t fret! You’re gonna do great. If you have any questions or concerns don’t hesitate to ask!

I don’t assume they are perfect. But I do absolutely believe they are significantly better on privacy than any other major player in the smartphone space.

Even if you don’t pay any attention to their policies and programs, the mere fact that iPhones aren’t running an OS owned by an advertising company should be enough to demonstrate this.