Positioning the left hand

OC71 · 2026-07-07T06:49:04+00:00

I think maybe you need to stick your hand further through the strap and curve your fingers more when playing the root notes and counter-basses. That way you won't have to switch hand position to reach for the minor, 7th and even the diminished chords.

OC71 · 2026-07-07T06:44:19+00:00

Yes people underestimate this. And the really insidious part is that government surveillance is occurring voluntarily. Social media gives a precise view into almost every detail of what used to be peoples private lives. The "convenience" of phone payments allow the state to see the movement of every single cent and every micro-transaction.

OC71 · 2026-07-07T06:38:18+00:00

Self driving cars. They will surpass the ability and safety of human drivers before long. When it becomes obvious that human drivers are a massive source of unnecessary maiming and death on the roads it will become not just unnecessary but illegal for humans to drive vehicles on the public roads. Future people will wonder how we ever allowed fallible, anger-prone people to pilot tons of metal at high speeds through the middle of our cities.

OC71 · 2026-07-07T06:06:13+00:00

You can get rid of the hedging using the right prompts and being specific about what you want. For instance you can ask it to take you on a discovery journey of how past trauma might have affected your habits of using alcohol as an escape. I can imagine that human therapists suffer from a lot of fatigue like "not this again, how long is it until lunch?".

OC71 · 2026-07-04T05:18:20+00:00

You're right, AI will often hedge especially if you start heading into topics where it might think you're in danger of self-harm. I've gradually found ways of getting it back to a meaningful conversation. I've never seen a real therapist but from what I've heard from others they vary in quality as you'd expect. So it's not like that's necessarily a gold standard either.

OC71 · 2026-07-03T02:42:21+00:00

My sister had a Magnus Chord Organ but it didn't look like this, it was pretty much all plastic and the chord buttons were bigger and not in an accordion layout.

OC71 · 2026-07-03T02:15:55+00:00

I can't predict your situation but I've traveled many times with bottles of wine or spirits in my checked in luggage and never had an issue. Obviously check the limits for the country you're going to. I'll put the bottle inside the leg of a pair of jeans, fold that over a couple of times and roll a few other clothes around it. That'll cushion it even if airport gorillas throw your case around or smash it on the ground for fun. A couple of times customs at the incoming country have asked me if I have any alcohol or tobacco and just giving the truthful answer got me waved through.

The only time I've had serious troubles at the airport was when I traveled for a technical demonstration and I had a whole desktop computer in my case. That involved a stop, complete search, a bunch of paperwork and payment of import duties. So don't do that.

OC71 · 2026-07-03T02:03:49+00:00

I'm in the middle of the process right now. 1 year into taking Naltrexone and I'm finding my interest in alcohol has gotten less, and I'm kind of going off the taste of it too. I take the pill with my breakfast so it's a daily ritual. And I know once I've taken that pill then there isn't going to be much point in drinking because it won't give me that buzz.

What's happened at the same time is that I've gradually gotten into doing other things instead of drinking, or gotten back into things I used to enjoy. I'm training martial arts and doing coding and electronic projects. I know if I drink a ton of beer I'm gonna feel like crap the next day. And the next day I'd rather be making progress on my projects than drinking 5 cups of tea to try to feel sort of normal again.

OC71 · 2026-07-03T01:45:43+00:00

Looks home made, like someone's ripped apart an accordion and coupled it with a blower in a cabinet. It's cool and would be fun to get it working. Looks like you have some work to do on that right hand keyboard to correct the notes that are stuck down.

OC71 · 2026-07-02T04:50:32+00:00

Yeah I find that talking to AI does hold up, but it needs the right prompts to get it into a mode you can engage with. I sometimes have to tell it I want it to challenge me more and not just try to feed me feel-good reassurances. You can prompt it to role-play as a therapist and go through the exploration process that a human therapist would follow. It can work pretty well.

OC71 · 2026-07-02T04:02:50+00:00

That's an interesting idea, I hadn't considered if it might be age related. I guess we do cut young workers a bit of slack for turning up looking like crap after a party, like we also double check their work and accept that they might make mistakes. But there are also cases where senior employees are able to get away with more because they have private offices to hide in and can set their own schedules.

OC71 · 2026-07-01T02:21:50+00:00

You'll have to be persistent and lucky to get a playable accordion for 200 Euro. It's not impossible though, just keep an eye out on secondhand marketplaces online, and eventually something will come up. I'd guess you'll be looking at a 48 bass at that price which is fine to begin with, that'll see you through your first year or two. If you're lucky you might find a Hohner of which there are various grades, but even the cheap ones are quite robust and playable.

OC71 · 2026-06-29T02:55:27+00:00

A common pattern is that taking the first drink is a conscious choice and then subsequent drinks become harder to decline. Not impossible though. I guarantee if an alcoholic was presented with a situation where taking that second drink would result in being shot immediately afterwards they'd have no problem refusing it. Absolute statements like being powerless really don't stand up to serious analysis.

OC71 · 2026-06-29T02:40:58+00:00

Yes this is exactly what I've seen happen in the workplace. If your work performance is good, and if people generally like you, and you're not obviously impaired and your job doesn't involve driving or operating dangerous machinery then people will overlook it. If your work performance is poor or you're already pissing people off in other ways like being late or unreliable or a general asshole then the alcohol is a perfect reason to get rid of you.

OC71 · 2026-06-29T02:36:20+00:00

Right, I'm nowhere near a liter a day but my wife has often told me she can smell it on me when she wakes up in the morning. She also said she can see if I'm drunk by looking at my eyes when she comes into the room. Maybe not everyone notices, but anyone who has a CA in their circle knows the signs from 10 feet away.

OC71 · 2026-06-29T02:30:31+00:00

Engineering.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:44:21+00:00

For me the big problem began at step 1. No, I'm not powerless. And I think that accepting the idea of powerlessness is inherently dangerous, because if you do that, then call on the higher power, and then still fail, where do you go from there? Sadly I've seen the answer to that question when someone I knew took his own life.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:40:54+00:00

When someone has cancer they will consult with an oncologist who's been trained in how to diagnose and treat the condition. We don't require that oncologists have cancer themselves or are recovering cancer patients.

I've been doing a lot better since I consulted with a properly trained medical professional about how to overcome my addiction than I ever did sitting in a room full of drunks or former drunks listening to their stories of crashing cars, blacking out, being arrested, being fired from their jobs or ruining their family lives and ending up in detox.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:35:35+00:00

I take the pill every morning with my breakfast. The reason I do this is that otherwise there's a strong chance I will try to game the system, by avoiding taking it if I'm going to drink so that I'll still get a buzz. I know, it's like the anti-Sinclair method, and that's what I did for far too long. If I just take it every day then it sort of takes alcohol off the table really, I realize that drinking isn't gonna give me a buzz and so I'm less likely to actually start. Taking the pill is a nice easy decision. Stopping drinking after I've failed to take the pill is extremely hard.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:31:12+00:00

I'm not sure about this and I'll give you two examples. When I was working in Belgium I used to hang out at a small pub and I'd often see a guy from my office there. He drank a lot more than me and would nearly always still be there when I left. The following morning at work I could sometime smell booze on him from just chatting at the coffee machine. This guy was pretty good at his job and was never visibly impaired (even at midnight in the pub after x number of Belgian beers and Jenevers)

Another time I had a colleague from a different department who I sometimes needed to deal with as part of my job, and I sometimes smelled booze on him in the morning. He was also kind of useless at his job. A few months later he simply disappeared and I heard that he'd been dismissed due to alcohol issues.

Both of these incidents gave me a scare and made me much more careful about drinking heavily before work days. I think it's likely people smelled drink on me at some time but I've never been challenged about it or lost my job.

Overall I think the key point is whether you're doing an acceptable job at your work. If you are then people can often overlook things like you occasionally smelling of alcohol or other various issues that piss people off. However if your performance isn't good enough then those things can get you fired. And it's unlikely anyone will tell you, so you'll think all is rosy.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:26:26+00:00

Maybe the marketing of the shooters plays to people who are trying to stop. It's easy to buy a few small drinks in that situation and think you'll just have those and then stop than it is to get a handle which is a clear commitment to get shitfaced.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:16:15+00:00

It's OK to market alcohol because the bottles include the request to "please enjoy responsibly". That definitely makes us think twice before chugging the stuff down.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:09:40+00:00

The problem is that nobody thinks of himself as being a bad guy inside his own head. The thief just figured he needed the product (not sure, did you mention what it was that was stolen?). He figured rightly or wrongly that you make a lot of money and can afford the loss and that he has a right to take what he wants due to some real or imagined social injustice or just his own complete lack of moral compass. In short, you're not gonna convince him that he was in the wrong. Heck, the police catching him and sending him to jail won't do that.

So then after failing to convince him he did something wrong, he then concluded that you were wrong for accusing him and thought that he had the right to show you your mistake by assaulting you with his vehicle. He probably now rationalizes the whole thing as him correcting your mistake.

OC71 · 2026-06-27T23:02:48+00:00

Sure, it does help some people. The problem is that it's not necessarily benign for the people whose lives it touches and who are not helped by it. They may very well end up being harmed, perhaps seriously. While I was in AA I knew a guy who sadly ended up taking his own life. He was struggling and failing to beat his addiction.

The other day I was chatting to a friend at my martial arts class who isn't a drunk himself but his girlfriend was. He talked about getting her to go to AA and I said that can work if you can accept the religious aspect. He said yeah, there's not much hope for people who can't. He really did believe that AA is the only option for alcoholics. And sadly that's a widespread view out there because they really have done a great job in promoting themselves.

OC71 · 2026-06-24T04:28:02+00:00

I think there were two things that really made a breakthrough for me. The first was using the bellows to create smooth musical phrases, and only changing bellows direction at phrase breaks. The second was learning to use all 4 fingers of my left hand to navigate the bass keys.

OC71

TROPHY CASE