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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

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@rustingbridges​

​ replied to your post

“rustingbridges: brin-bellway: rustingbridges: rustingbridges: I…”

I think this makes perfect! I’m curious in what way this is surprising to you

Well, first of all the entire idea of balanced meals weirds me out. I eat in small-but-frequent quantities (you can see what a normal day looks like for me here), so to me the natural time unit across which one should balance one’s nutrient intake is the *day*. (Maybe even 2 – 3 days, since on any given day I often run out of appetite before covering all the categories I’d intended to.) I actually feel thrown off planning-wise when I *do* eat a balanced meal, because what am I supposed to eat to counterbalance it later? It counts towards a little bit of everything, which means it doesn’t *really* count towards *anything*.

(In fact, the entire idea of *meals* kind of weirds me out. My foods are generally much more atomised, and it never ceases to amaze me that there are so many people who go through meal levels of complicatedness and preparation almost *every time they eat*. I do that kind of shit once a day at *most*, and left to my own devices I make relatively simple meals at that.)

While my diet is quite rigid and has had some thought put into it, it’s not exactly *planned* in the same sense that yours seems to be. I don’t track precise nutrient intakes: I just try to cover a bunch of different kinds of food over the course of a time unit. The only thing I specifically seek out is fibre, as my body has repeatedly complained that [a version of my diet in which I do not actively seek out fibre] is not fibrous enough. I’ve also been eating fewer and less frequent high-fat foods, again because of negative physical responses rather than an abstract intellectual belief that they were bad for me.

 

rustingbridges:

so part of it is that it’s not a balanced meal – the dietary ‘goal’ of the yogurt is to meet my desired level of protein intake.

I want to be hitting a minimum of 80g/day, and ideally closer to 160g/day. plausibly you can’t usefully consume more than 30-50g of protein at a time.

this is kind of hard to do with balanced meals unless your whole diet is oriented around it. my diet is not and includes a bunch of shitty carbs, so I gotta make up the protein elsewhere.

the most straightforward supplement here is chicken. nonfat strained yogurt is one the next best things, the tier two of protein supplements if you will. fatty strained yogurt with add-ins is kinda down there, but still batting above replacement.

so the more skewed towards protein the yogurt breakfast is, the more room I have to eat cookies or something later. 160g/day is ~650 Cal from protein per day, which is 15-25% of my daily needs. a food which is ~30% protein by calories is considered high in protein, so either you need to eat exclusively that or you have to make up the difference with actually high protein foods.

 

brin-bellway:

Ah, okay. Pretty much the same reason I eat popcorn, but with protein instead of fibre.

What made you decide to seek out extra protein?

 

rustingbridges:

Want Beeg Mussels

 

brin-bellway:

#at greater length:  #higher protein intake seems like it has upsides in terms of maximizing potential muscle gains  #and minimizing losses if attempting to cut  #with relatively few if any downsides

@rustingbridges replied: also, popcorn is great

It *is* great in many ways, but I do find it a bit time-consuming to make and eat, and I worry it’s going to wear down my teeth (I *definitely* have at least one chipped tooth directly attributable to popcorn, and I wonder about more subtle wearing as well). I considered buying some psyllium at the grocery store yesterday, but apparently you’re supposed to take it several times a day and that hardly seems any better on the hassle front.

Mom just ordered another batch of high-fibre tortillas off Amazon, and I accepted her offer to throw in a bag of the smaller-sized tortillas: they’re lighter and less prep-requiring than popcorn, and if I don’t like them she can just use them herself. Next time I’m able to get to a bulk-food store I might try some flax seeds: they do *sell* them in the grocery store, but the packages I saw were 450g and that’s far too much for a test run. I’m also thinking of buying a *different* flavour of fibre bars for evening use, so as not to confuse my brain by eating breakfast food at night.

(FTR, I’ve tried prune juice, but it’s easy to overshoot the dosage on that and also it only lasts a few days once it’s open. Separating out smaller quantities and freezing them only helps so much.)

Tags:

#food #disordered eating? #reply via reblog #medical cw #replies

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Rustingbridges Icon

@rustingbridges​

​ replied to your post

“rustingbridges: brin-bellway: rustingbridges: rustingbridges: I…”

I think this makes perfect! I’m curious in what way this is surprising to you

Well, first of all the entire idea of balanced meals weirds me out. I eat in small-but-frequent quantities (you can see what a normal day looks like for me here), so to me the natural time unit across which one should balance one’s nutrient intake is the *day*. (Maybe even 2 – 3 days, since on any given day I often run out of appetite before covering all the categories I’d intended to.) I actually feel thrown off planning-wise when I *do* eat a balanced meal, because what am I supposed to eat to counterbalance it later? It counts towards a little bit of everything, which means it doesn’t *really* count towards *anything*.

(In fact, the entire idea of *meals* kind of weirds me out. My foods are generally much more atomised, and it never ceases to amaze me that there are so many people who go through meal levels of complicatedness and preparation almost *every time they eat*. I do that kind of shit once a day at *most*, and left to my own devices I make relatively simple meals at that.)

While my diet is quite rigid and has had some thought put into it, it’s not exactly *planned* in the same sense that yours seems to be. I don’t track precise nutrient intakes: I just try to cover a bunch of different kinds of food over the course of a time unit. The only thing I specifically seek out is fibre, as my body has repeatedly complained that [a version of my diet in which I do not actively seek out fibre] is not fibrous enough. I’ve also been eating fewer and less frequent high-fat foods, again because of negative physical responses rather than an abstract intellectual belief that they were bad for me.

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#rustingbridges #replies #food #disordered eating? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

rustingbridges replied:

regional municipality sounds sort of like unincorporated areas of counties, maybe? I don’t know the procedures for your area but official stats of 1/550 probably implies pretty high actual rates… shit sucks

I agree mask wearing probably has better uptake in NY than anywhere comparable in the US since we’ve had such a large volume of cases it’s got to be enough to convince almost anyone it’s serious

Tags:

#(update: I saw an article in the local paper recently complaining) #(that tests in our area are getting rationed even harder than in the rest of the province) #conversational aglets #replies #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #(oh also some good news: coworker-who-made-fun-of-me seems to be expressing interest in getting a cloth mask like mine) #(if I see her wearing one on multiple occasions I’ll remove the clip from my dirt file: sometimes people improve)

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

Tags:

#I’ve been thinking about this so much that it’s hard to keep track of #which of these things I’ve said publicly and which I’ve said privately and which I haven’t said at all #I hope I’ve included the correct amount of context‚ let me know if I haven’t #replies #rustingbridges #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #rants

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

Okay, we were talking and got curious, so I’m going to post this sample and ask for your input.

From what you can hear in this recording, where do you think this person is from?

(Apologies for poor audio quality.)

@injygo replied: ‘instinctively, I think “lives in Minnesota but family is Irish”’

Huh, interesting. That is not any of the answers I was expecting.

(Everyone else: please submit a guess first before reading below the cut, as there are spoilers.)

Keep reading

justice-turtle said: I couldn’t understand enough of the words to venture an opinion on the accent (probably a combination of poor audio quality and my known auditory processing troubles), but knowing you’re interested in the weird ways brains work, it might be relevant to note that the *tune* was immediately and obviously Irish to me (having scrolled down and seen that it’s Phil Collins, that makes sense), and that once I caught the line “we came from the north and we came from the south”, my brain decided (cont’d)

justice-turtle said: (cont’d) decided that was an extremely Canadian-folk-specific line and therefore you must be the singer. (I have no idea what song this is and therefore whether that assessment is true, though I assume I could google the line.) I don’t know if *you* actually sounded more Canadian once I decided that or whether my brain was just doing brain shit, but I’d suspect the latter on principle.

Tags:

#(February 2018) #conversational aglets #replies #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #accents #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #(it is not a folk song: he wrote it himself)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

I’ve been wondering this on and off, and I figured I might as well get around to asking:

Are other people’s imaginations shut down or impaired when they’re sick?

Mine is: I pretty much don’t have visualised fantasies at all when I’m sick, and what fantasies I do have are much fewer in number and much less vivid. I can think of possible explanations that lead to both “this is a very common experience” (maybe it’s part of the cognitive issues that come with the brain’s convalescence mode) and “this is a very rare experience” (maybe it’s my brain’s way of resolving the conflict in the instinctive How to Respond to Illness code between “get lots of rest” and “avoid getting pregnant”, forcing a loss of libido by rendering me incapable of sexual fantasies (and, as a side effect, non-sexual fantasies)).

Anyone know how common imagination impairments are when sick? Failing that, anyone have anecdotal experience about whether this happens to them?

Still curious about this.

justice-turtle said: I know my whole conscious brain always feels kind of slow when I’m sick, like it’s not getting a supply of spoons to do anything. I still have exhaustingly vivid weird dreams, though.

Tags:

#(December 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly working my way through the Red Panda Adventures. Recently I reached episode 100. Towards the end, our heroes are surrounded by a group of hostile sapient zombies (long story). There are too many to take them all out in combat, so the Red Panda uses his mind-control powers to put them to sleep. This being a Christmas special, he begins this process by calming them through evoking the joy and contentment of Christmas.

“You idiot!” I yelled. “You’re begging for an abreaction!”

(I managed not to actually yell this out loud. I was out for a walk, as is my custom when listening to the Red Panda Adventures, and I didn’t want the neighbours to get weirded out.)

For those of you who don’t speak hypnosis jargon, basically an “abreaction” is when a hypnotised person responds to a suggestion in an unexpected manner, generally because they interpreted it in a way the hypnotist didn’t intend, or something about the phrasing reminded them of something and sent their mind off on a different track, stuff like that. It doesn’t necessarily go badly 100% of the time, but–like all forms of miscommunication–it’s usually best avoided when possible, and this one definitely would go badly if it happened.

The trouble is, not everyone associates Christmas with joy and contentment. All it takes is one bitter Jewish kid (*ahem*) or something, one person whose associations with Christmas are negative, and the thing’s going to blow up in his face.

Now, hypnosis as practised in the Red-Panda-verse is very different from the real thing, so in the abstract it’s not inherently a bad thing to have this in-universe expert hypnotist doing things that even I, a person with no training who simply travels in the right circles to overhear hypnotists talking shop with each other, recognise as mistakes. But in this case, the differences between our universe and his make this worse. In the real world, if your induction backfires because it turns out your subject hates Christmas, you just feel kind of awkward and embarrassed and have hopefully learned a valuable lesson about not assuming everyone likes Christmas. But because he’s weaponising his psychic powers, his suggestions have to work, first try, without a hitch, without discussing it with the subject in advance, or he might die. It is, literally, vitally important for him to keep his inductions as generic and universal as possible, and not pull risky, your-mileage-may-vary shit like the spirit of fucking Christmas.

(For the record, he got lucky and it didn’t backfire on anyone. Still a stupid risk.)

To be fair, it’s easier for me to spot this because, as a bitter Jewish kid myself, I didn’t have to put myself in anyone else’s place to see why this was risky. I can tell you right now, anyone tries an induction on me based on the feeling of Christmas (foreignness and resentment and the particular type of loneliness one feels when surrounded by a crowd of happy people whose joy one will never share*), it ain’t gonna go well.

*You know what, Christmas could actually make a decent metaphor for being undead, or vice versa.

amango-tea said: Christmas for me was anxiety attacks and spending extra time with my abusive father because he was off work and you’re SUPPOSED to spend time with your family. If someone tried that trick on me, I hope they would be willing to deal with me being triggered as fuck! :Db

—

(There was also another reply, but I posted it at the time [link].)

Tags:

#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #abuse cw #Red Panda Adventures #reactionblogging #sexuality and lack thereof #rants

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

I was wondering today, how come I’ve never seen mind-control fetishists talking about BBC Merlin? And only seen one piece of erotic fanfiction set in that universe?

That show had such ridiculous quantities of mind control. When it wasn’t plain mind-control magic, it was zombification (in both the “resurrection” and “enthrallment” senses simultaneously, though–at least in the case I’m thinking of–not in the “non-sapient” sense). Or love spells. Or possession. Or mind-altering parasites. Or getting their wills broken the mundane way, with torture.

One time, in series 4 IIRC, there was a five-episode streak in which somebody got mind-controlled in every episode. Not a five-episode arc involving mind control: five individual plots. It was almost half the season.

(I started laughing at episode 4 of the streak, when they said the Lamia could control men’s minds. Mom asked what was funny, and I had to take a moment to try to see it from the outside, how suspicious it would seem that I was the first one to notice despite not really paying that much attention. *I* knew it was because my salience mechanisms were attuned differently than hers, but would she be able to work that out? I don’t want my mom knowing my kinks.

After a moment, I decided I could pass it off as coincidence that I just happened to be paying attention at the right times, and told her about the streak. When the “next time on” showed the abovementioned zombification, she was laughing too.)

Was I just in the wrong places at the wrong times? Is that why I never saw anyone discussing this?

navelgazed said: Tbh that episode where merlin had to make Arthur as buffoonish as possible (no clue when that was) was like…whoa.

Tags:

#(September 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #sexuality and lack thereof #BBC Merlin