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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • After my mother passed, I spent more time with my father than before, just because I thought it was the right thing to do (and my siblings really did not care that much). I realized why I did not have a lot if contact before, he us a classic toxic boomer narcissist.

    Spending more time with him did not mean that we grieved my mother’s loss as a family, it was just him monopolizing the grief and needing an audience wallow in self pity. I had no say in any aspect of the funeral, he did not listen to anything I said, he never even once asked how I was, and when I talked about stuff from my life (because someone else asked), he started talking over me, making the conversation about him again. Classic narcissist parent playbook.

    At some point i was fed up, and told him as much, which of course did not go over well. Complete disbelief, he acted as if I had insulted him, yelling, accusations of being ungrateful, all the bells and whistles. Not a single thought that this behaviour might have been wrong. I just left and cut contact. After a week or so he wrote me what I think was meant as an apology. What he “apologized” for was that because of his greatness, he was always the center of attention which of course emphasized my insignificance, which he can see made me feel bad. It was so grotesque that I burst out in manic laughter, my wife was seriously worried.

    The good thing about this, it made me slowly unwrap what I now realize is a lot of childhood drama (which I thought was normal), and understand why my siblings basically don’t want anything to do with him. Still struggling to take the step to seek professional therapy (which I know I need), but I already feel better starting to understand that how my father treated me was not because I am worthless, but because he was a really bad dad.



  • As someone who travelled to the ZS for work (under different Visas(… Not really shocked. The shit some CBP officers pulled during immigration at the airport. “What do you mean, you are here to work, don’t we have Americans to do the job?”, " Why do we invited Europeans to America to speak at an American conference?", “You’re here because a Swiss company bought an American company? This can’t be right.”

    And this was mostly in California. During Obama. I can only imagine how these interaction would go now, when those notjubs feel encouraged by their leader and on the right side of history.

    Not going back there for a long time.








  • I second that. I travel a lot for work, sometimes a bit obscure places (as in not touristic destinations), and I always try to find the odd tap room or micro brewery. It’s often hit or miss, but stumbling upon the rare gem every once in a while always feels really good. Bonus points if the head brewer is there and it’s a slow day so they have time to chat beer and brewing. And even in the well known areas, it’s fun to sift through the touristy hipster “more-show-than-anything” places to finally arrive at one which has said vibe. Had a week in Portland, OR, and visited about a dozen or so places, and from the over marketed polished hip joint with mediocre beer to the “here’s a bar and some stools thrown into the brewery hall” with absolutely stunning brews it had everything.



  • In a former job, I developed “software” (I clicked together some LabVIEW…) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.