It feels like I accidentally my whole career. I'm 27.

tadrinth

I have absolutely no idea if this is relevant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/programmers-what-to-do-if-you-get-fired.html

tadrinth

My standard advice is to try the Feeling Good Handbook, which is pretty much a cognitive/behavioral psychologist in book form. I'm not sure it will be sufficient in this case, I think you may need to actually talk to someone. It may take a few tries to find someone that you're comfortable with. At least some of the time, this sort of thing is the result of a particular pattern of thinking, and a really good psych person can occasionally home in on it and suggest an alternate pattern of thought that lets you break the habit surprisingly fast.

I would get started on talking to someone, try and schedule an appointment, or get as far as you can towards that on your own. Then tell your boyfriend and ask him for some moral support and gentle reminders to actually follow through on it.

Avoid drugs unless you've tried at least a couple of counselors and the problem is clearly not responding to therapy alone.

Umm, if you had a bunkbed, you could hang a sheet or a blanket to create a cave. If everything inside the cave is locked down and you can't see the room, would that help?

tadrinth

Do you see and talk to human beings within the first two hours after you wake up? This may help.

If I had to guess, I would say that your job is sucking up significantly more brainpower than you're used to spending on your day-job, leaving you less mental energy to spend on your other stuff. Other stuff is what you usually rely on to keep busy/happy/sane, thus the issues.

I have a group of friends that gets together every Thursday at someone's house to do dinner and watch an episode or two of a scifi tv show. We watched all of Farscape and are working on Babylon 5. We rotate the host so that no one has to do too much work, and have a mandatory "you must cook real food, no Digiorno Pizzas or frozen meal-in-a-bag." The group is mostly girls and we're all in grad school; people can't reliably get together more than once a week, and if we didn't schedule our socialization we would all go batshit-insane from the stress.

There's a game store nearby that has an open boardgame night every Friday, where you can play with the demo copies of almost any of their games. It's a decent way to meet people, since you can start up a game with someone you don't know. Hell, tonight I played Munchkin with 2 friends and 2 total strangers. (And won by using Divine Intervention, incidentally, mwah ha ha). And if you just want to hang with your friends, then just play the boardgames with your friends.

We have a gaming/anime/comic book store nearby called Dragon's lair that has Warhammer 40k nights, Magic the Gathering nights, Dungeons and Dragons nights, you name it.

There's a MTG store nearby that hosts tournaments.

Lots of bars do trivia nights.

If all else fails, get a roommate. Or, you know, a girlfriend.

If you're uncomfortable hanging out at other people's houses, invite people to hang out at a public location or at your own place. Having people over is a good excuse to clean up your living space and practice cooking, as well.

Is there a subreddit for your city? There is for mine.

Ok, actually, I know precisely what you need to do but unfortunately not how to do it. Clearly, organizing social stuff is not your thing. What you really want to do is to glom onto an existing or forming social group that has a female mother/leader figure. The female mother figure is crucial. I managed to join one of these as it formed somewhat by accident, so I'm not sure how to manage it on purpose. Other than, find a geeky and sociable girl and suggest that you should hang out more and pray that she starts inviting you to all the stuff she organizes.

tadrinth

There's a whole chapter in the book on procrastination. One of the common reasons why you procrastinate on a task is because you just don't want to do that task at all. Once you realize that, you can then go do a cost/benefit analysis and decide whether the task is really worth doing in the first place. Ideally, you either decide not to do it and just stop worrying about it, or your list of benefits helps you stay focused and actually get it done.

Other chapters talk about social stuff, relationships, the latest meds, all kinds of good stuff.

tadrinth

Most of these responses seem to be the usual noble savage bullshit, but that probably stems from ignorance rather than idiocy, so I apologize. It could also arise from naivety or hypocrisy.

I think you are implying that in some hypothetical scenario where you had never known about electricity and we had never mastered it, you would be happier. I think that scenario is unrealistic in assuming that anything like modern society could have arisen without discovering electricity at any point. I have a very hard time imagining a society in which we don't use electricity for anything; we would have to burn fossil fuels at the point of use rather than burning them elsewhere and transporting the energy through electrical wires. This would be less efficient and the oil crisis would be worse. No computers means less science means worse medicine means you die younger. I dunno man, I just can't imagine this world being any better. Deaths from fires started from lamps ALONE scares me. Deaths from boiler explosions. Global warming would be so much worse because we'd be using much more coal.

I would very much like to hear your list of "setbacks and disastrous devices" which outweigh and outnumber the various technological advances. If you can name more of these bad things than I can list good technologies based on electricity, I will agree that you have an excellent point. I first point to air conditioning, MRI scanners, microwave ovens, radar, lasers, pocket calculators, matlab, the telephone, and wikipedia.

tadrinth

Diablo 2?

tadrinth

Feeling Good Handbook. Get a copy, do the exercises.

Among other things, the book explains how to train yourself to keep track of the distortions in your thinking, and then train yourself to replace those distortions with more useful thoughts. For example: you might think "I'm not compassionate enough" when you should instead think "I want to be more compassionate", and then you can think of ways to be more compassionate, or decide that you don't really want to be more compassionate after all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion

If it helps, your thought patterns are utterly normal and human. Lots of people have the same sorts of thoughts.

I'm not sure that isolation is the best response. Left alone, it tends to be easy to let those thoughts fester. You might be better off asking if a friend would be willing to help you get out of a funk by keeping you company. Does it make you unattractive to be around, or does it make you feel unattractive to be around? Do you have any evidence for the former, or is this another distortion?

tadrinth

Not actually from a video game, but in Farscape, at one point a device is used that opens a wormhole with one end adjacent to the target and the other end on the edge of the nearest star, causing the star to fire a gigantic fireball at the target. Used to destroy a ridiculously big ship.

tadrinth

Holy shit!

tadrinth

Which one? The monster or the lightsaber?

tadrinth

Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds is also quite badass.

tadrinth

One of the components of the male sex drive is a desire to have sex with as many different individuals as possible. It's not the only component and in most cases it isn't the dominant one, but that particular urge is present in nearly all guys, and it is literally insatiable; there is no number of different women that will satisfy it, given the opportunity, guys would literally sleep with a different girl every night and there are dictators/warlords who do just that. That does not mean he has to listen to that urge or that you have to live with him being unfaithful, but it does mean you need to set your boundaries and let him know that he may need to compromise.

GoneWild is an atypical place, where you can look at a variety of naked women who are actively seeking feedback and interact with them. "I want to have sex with you" is one of the higher compliments of physical beauty that you can give someone, so on some level, his comments may just be appreciative. Or, possibly he likes to talk dirty and isn't doing it with you for some reason, but I doubt that.

I think it's pretty weird that he's doing it on your laptop. He's either being retarded and thinking you won't find out, or he doesn't care at all, or he's hoping to get you to post on GW, or I have no idea what he's thinking. You absolutely have the right to tell him not to do that on your laptop.

If he is talking sexy to girls that aren't you, and you don't like it, then he is being unfaithful/violating the rules of the relationship. It's not porn anymore, its cybersex. He may just not realize that he's doing something that makes you uncomfortable, or he may insist that it isn't a big deal. Either way, at least make sure he knows that it bugs you, then to some degree its his problem whether he chooses to stop or just hide it from you.

My guess is that he's just doing it for fun and has no expectation of anything happening in real life due to these comments. He may ask for permission to continue since he isn't serious about it. You would be well within your rights to ask him to not comment or to limit comments to compliments rather than descriptions of what he wants to do.

Of course, if he is actually looking for girls to cheat on you with, get rid of him. I don't think this is likely, but it is possible.

tadrinth

According to Collapse, by Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, there are five factors that can contribute to the collapse of a civilization:

environmental damage
climate Change
hostile neighbors
friendly trade partners
society's responses to its environmental problems

The first four may or may not matter, but the fifth one always does. That doesn't bode well for us.

However, another theme of the book is that societies on average tend to respond similarly. A very important factor is the fragility of the environment. Deforestation, for example: The isolated island communities that had the worst problems with deforestation are those with the worst climates for growing trees. Easter Island, the worst-case scenario for deforestation where ALL the trees were wiped out, also has a terrible climate for growing trees. The US has a number of natural advantages: lots of land, areas of good climate, lots of rivers, etc. That suggests that we are more likely to survive any given amount of environmental damage, compared to countries which have less resilient climates.

tadrinth

I think you want /r/nsfw, which has 30x the readers.

tadrinth

Car alarms.

Every person who lists something that they personally use is an idiot. Without electricity, there would be no air conditioning, no microwaves, no internet, no wikipedia, no reddit, this post would not exist, no artificial lighting meaning there'd be nothing to do after dark.

Before agriculture, as a man, you had a 60% chance of dying violently at the hands of another man. Today, in the 20th century in the US and Europe, that figure is 1%, counting both world wars.

Humans have been destroying the environment since the day we walked out of the savanna. Consider the Fertile Crescent, where humans invented agriculture. The Fertile Crescent is now Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and bits of Turkey. Those are not what we think of as fertile, because early agriculture destroyed the environment through overgrazing, salinization, overuse of the soil causing loss of nitrogen, and the loss of good soil to wind and rain after we got rid of the native vegetation. The only reason Japan has trees today (unlike Easter Island) is because they had a series of dictators who expected their descendants to rule for hundreds of years, and those dictators were wise enough to impose incredible restrictions on logging, and they had a climate permitting enough tree growth for their tree stocks to recover.

Within a few hundred years of humans arriving on any continent, nearly all the large mammals on that continent went extinct.

The major form of pollution from cars are smoke, smog, carbon dioxide, that sort of thing. Cars replaced horses, whose major form of pollution is shit. That's right, shit. Before cars, walking around a city meant wading through horseshit. Imagine a six inch layer of horseshit on every single road and sidewalk you know of. Add summer heat.

Before modern medicine, child mortality rates were insane. Imagine marrying a beautiful, wonderful women who you love dearly. Now imagine her crying for weeks because your fourth child in a row died within a year of being born. Now imagine how happy you are because you got a new job and better pay/food and she's pregnant again and THIS TIME it will be different and then she dies in childbirth and you lose the baby too. That's what it's like, not having modern medicine. That's not even considering having a plague roll through and kill you, your family, most of your friends, pretty much everyone, leaving the survivors to clean up all the dead bodies.

TLDR: Technology is awesome.

tadrinth

Find out who the graduate advisor/secretary person is and ask them. I have never signed up for my classes myself, I just go to Barbara's office and tell her what I want and she registers me.

The prof is probably traveling.

I should note that I'm in a PHD program, so a Masters may be different.

tadrinth

In the bio program that I'm in, you spend your first year taking the 4 core classes, two per semester. I'm molec/cell bio, so those four were biochemistry, genetics, cell bio, and molecular bio. Second year you have seminar and track-specific classes, as well as prelims, but the classes after the first four are ALL jokes. First four classes are severe weed-out classes.

I didn't have to TA first year, no one in my program did, but a friend in a different program did TA his first year and still took the standard courseload. He did fine, but he's also pretty damn smart.

tadrinth

Probably the same root as piebald.

tadrinth

On one computer, this had no effect; Firefox still disabled Radialcontext upon updating and I had to override compatibility again. On the laptop, there was no compatibility option in about:config.

tadrinth

As a guy, I will make a profile and report back. I very much doubt they'll do any better than okcupid, especially since the kind of girls I'm interested in aren't likely to be messaging guys, but I'll give them a shot.

tadrinth

No, but if you're using Nightly Tester Tools to force compatibility with out-of-date addons, you'll have to go through and manually re-enable compatibility forcing for each one. grumble

tadrinth

You only need to be smart enough to pass the first year of classes as a PHD student, and if you have a solid undergrad education they probably won't be too bad. After that, the key skill is the ability to work really really hard without losing your motivation.

tadrinth

Only seek a PHD if you can work well when self-motivated, without structure, in the face of constant failure and frustration, with no signs of progress, while depressed and while surrounded by people who hate their job and life at least half the time. Expect to work at least 60 hours a week. Don't expect a job in academia afterward; there are vastly more people seeking academic positions than there are new positions opening or needing refilled.

tadrinth

Damn you, osuadh, I spent this entire week playing through Disgaea 1 because of this thread.

Getting the good ending requires having zero friendly fire kills, but is well worth it.

The invincibility levels are crap for leveling. Yeah, you can make high level enemies, but they tend to have such high defenses that you can't easily control who gets the kill.

Whenever you get items from the hospital, check the item and then go back to the healing screen and repeat until you get an item with a Statistician. Statisticians increase the amount of experience gained, up to a maximum of 300% increased xp gain at 300 levels of statisticians. By subduing statisticians in the item world, you can merge all the statisticians into one item with a huge bonus. Keep that on Laharl, mostly, except when doing specific leveling tasks.

The first battle of each fire zone is usually a good leveling spot.

The absolute best way to level is to find stages with enemies in convenient formations for AOEs, especially the Winged Slayer sword tech. Stellar Graveyard 1: Valgipus is perfect. Cast enough Bravehearts on Laharl that he reduces enemies to critical HP, then throw enemies together to produce a low-health, high level enemy, then put your combined statisticians on a character and have them kill it for MASSIVE xp gain. I've had characters gain 15 levels in a single kill that way, at level 55, killing a level 150 monster.

Braveheart is absolutely insane, by the way. Doubling your attack power (takes about 5 casts to do, and a cast per turn to maintain) allows you to get past high enemy defenses.

I like to make a mage of each element under Flonne, a cleric under Flonne, and a Star mage under the cleric for spells.

tadrinth

Disagree on Heinlein. Moon is a Harsh Mistress is fantastic, as is a lot of his stuff, but The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was awful.

tadrinth

TROPHY CASE

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