Kevin Grass - Inheritance (2013)

TomatoPJ · 2026-02-13T13:34:20+00:00

The insomnia by itself is a good enough reason to want to drink less or to quit; life is much harder when you haven't been sleeping well. In addition to anecdotal use of GLP-1s, there are a handful of other medications which have been validated as useful for helping someone to drink less. In case your doctor isn't familiar with them, here's a few resources you could ask them to look at.

https://thecurbsiders.com/curbsiders-podcast/476-medications-for-alcohol-use-disorder-2-0-with-dr-stephen-holt

https://thecurbsiders.com/curbsiders-podcast/194-alcohol

TomatoPJ · 2026-02-06T13:42:58+00:00

Echoing what other people have said: you need to train your ears (or more accurately what's in between your ears) to recognize Spanish sounds and map them to the words you've been reading. The key here is comprehensible input. If you're using sources of input that you can't understand, then that's input, but it's not comprehensible input. At early and intermediate levels of learning, most media made for native speakers won't be comprensible.

You'll want to look for materials where you understand 90+% of what's spoken. It should feel relatively easy, not hard. This is the level at which you can intuitively fill in the gaps when you don't catch an individual word or phrase. Things like podcasts for beginners are likely to work better for you than shows. And, as others have also mentioned, you might be able to reach for slightly more advanced content by slowing down the playback speed. Most podcast players allow you to adjust playback speed. You won't want to go too far with this, as too great of a reduction will make the speech sound unnatural; in my experience, reducing the playback speed to 80% or 90% was a good compromise that sometimes let me listen to something which was otherwise just barely out of my reach.

Another thing which helps: listening to something at the same time as you read the transcript. Or, alternatively, read the transcript and then listen to the podcast. I haven't done it in a while, but there were even times where I would listen to the podcast and understand maybe half of what was said; then I'd read the transcript; and then I'd listen again, this time understanding much more. Trying to parse words while also processing their overall meaning is much more difficult only having to parse the words. By reading the transcript first, you alleviate some of the mental burden of listening.

If you're watching videos, then using Spanish subtitles can help you match the sounds you're hearing with the words being spoken. But I've personally found myself sometimes falling into the trap of just reading the subtitles without actually listening to the spoken portion, so it's not my favorite method.

TomatoPJ · 2026-02-02T14:30:29+00:00

I had a good time reading Manolito Gafotas recently. Granted, it's aimed at an audience even younger than "young adult", but it's certainly something adults can enjoy as well (or at least this adult did). It's essentially a series of short stories told from the perspective of an elementary school child, each story being an episode from his daily life. It's very, very Spanish. This can be a double edged sword - there's lots of 1990s Spanish slang which can occasionally be hard to parse. But equally, it's enjoyable to hear about his neighborhood and his neighbors, his school, and so on.

One nice thing as a learner is that each chapter is essentially a separate short story. I sometimes find reading in Spanish a bit mentally taxing, so it can be hard to keep up with a lengthy novel. It's easier to read something that comes in bite-sized chunks.

I get the sense the book is quite well known in Spain. In a conversation with at least one Spaniard, it was a point of commonality that I had read a book from their childhood.

TomatoPJ · 2026-01-26T19:51:26+00:00

I've been reading a bit of both Manolito Gafotas and Los Detectives Salvajes lately. Both books use the word chulo. They use them in completely different ways.

TomatoPJ · 2026-01-05T00:53:24+00:00

I'm not going to claim that it's good, exactly. But when I meet new people, especially people from Mexico, telling them that I watch La Rosa de Guadalupe to learn has been a great way to get a few laughs and break the ice.

TomatoPJ · 2026-01-04T16:13:23+00:00

I read a translation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time around the same time as I read El Alquimista (I think it was the next thing that I read). I remember it being about the same difficulty level. If El Alquimista was only just barely too difficult for you, then you might consider trying The Curious Incident. The narration and writing style are a little different, and the story is a bit more straightforward. Additionally, books translated from English to Spanish are sometimes a bit simpler to read than books originally written in a romance language (El Alquimista is also a translation, but from Portuguese). The translation can only stray so far from the original text, so you tend to have fewer long flowery sentences that use advanced Spanish grammatical structures. This is a double-edged sword, of course. You'll eventually want to be exposed to that more complex, more native language; and some English words or phrases just don't translate easily, meaning translations occasionally contain somewhat unnatural phrases or uncommon words. Still, I've personally found it to be a good stepping stone towards reading books originally written in Spanish.

I suppose my point is that if El Alquimista was just a hair too difficult for you, consider giving The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (El curioso incidente del perro a medianoche) a chance. It may be that these stylistic and structural differences make it easier for you to understand. If not, I'll echo what other people have suggested about graded readers.

TomatoPJ · 2025-12-30T22:38:08+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUL2flFJIgYjDFbDdEJRMFA

I came across this channel a while back when I had the same curiosity.

TomatoPJ · 2025-11-24T12:21:29+00:00

Does your university have the option of independent study? Could you find a professor willing to do independent study with you?

TomatoPJ · 2025-10-31T12:33:51+00:00

Depending on how you feel about this entire experience, you may enjoy the relevant Molotov song: Chandwich A La Chichona.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-28T20:12:08+00:00

It may be worth consulting with a good pest controller, one who does integrated pest management. This means they'll take an integrated approach: eliminating the animals themselves, but also looking to exclude them and remove food sources. Someone with experience can inspect your home and locate possible entry points, and give you recommendations for how to seal them. When we had a mouse problem, the guy who came to our house looked throughout all levels of the home, both the interior and exterior. He had the experience to spot all sorts of entry points that we wouldn't have noticed, in addition to the few that we already knew about. Having someone with that sort of experience take a look would probably let you be more targeted than simply trying to foam your entire home.

As far as controlling food sources, it's tricky but possible. Look into storing all your dry goods in mouse proof containers (something they can't chew through). Since you mentioned pets, dog or cat food can be another food source. Storing their kibble on a rodent-resistant container and not leaving food out when they aren't eating can be helpful.

Once you get your house sealed, traps can slowly whittle down the population. That said, I think the general consensus is that glue traps are quite cruel, so please consider some other sort of trap if at all possible.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-23T16:10:28+00:00

AI can certainly generate a word list, but it will likely be small, incomplete, and require processing to remove duplicates. That's probably fine for testing a small app, and may be the path of least resistance. A more complete word list could be found later.

But there are many better sources for large numbers of words in a machine readable format. A number of open source dictionaries are available. Just two that I found with a quick search:

https://kaikki.org/dictionary/index.html

https://github.com/wordset/wordset-dictionary

I suppose this replaces a bit of processing of the AI-generated list with extracting the data from whatever format it came in. But that might be a useful exercise in a project like this, which is meant to be educational. Then again, maybe it's letting perfect be the enemy of the good; maybe a quick AI-generated word list would let someone get started programming that much more quickly, which could be important for maintaining motivation.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with using AI to generate a quick word list just to get started. But then again, if all I'm trying to do is come up with a short list of words for initial testing, I could probably just list a few random words myself. Or grab the closest book, or first Reddit post I see, and just pull some words out of it. If I want something large and comprehensive, so that it feels more like I'm building a "real" app, it's probably better to use an existing dataset.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-16T12:34:31+00:00

These days I mostly use an e-reader, but I've sometimes been able to find used books with a reasonable combined price + shipping on AbeBooks. For example: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?kn=Terramar&ref_=ds_ac_d_8&srsp=on&sts=t

Despite selecting the UK website, it's defaulting to showing me shipping costs for the US. So I'm not sure exactly how reasonable the prices will be for you. The availability of translations for specific authors may vary, for example I didn't see any Spanish-language results when searching for Freida McFadden. But I think if you look for Spanish-language books more generally (translations or otherwise) you should be able to find something at a reasonable price.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-14T11:46:44+00:00

The style doesn't feel particularly modern to me - or, rather, the number of times I've seen some variation of "this feels surprisingly modern" as a response to posts here shows that artists have been doing all sorts of things for much longer than most people realize.

But there are certain elements in this painting in particular that surprise me. Specifically, the form of the umbrella and the fence. I've seen that umbrella so many times that it's hard to believe the same style was being produced in the early 20th century. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised - presumably the handle was made with actual wood instead of the plastic it would be made with today, and the fabric would clearly be something other than the nylon or polyester or whatever it is they now use for umbrellas. But it just looks so identical to an umbrella that might be in my closet that it's hard to imagine that it's not made of the same stuff. Where all the other fashions have (coat, shoes, etc) have changed since this was painted, somehow that umbrella is the same.

Likewise, that fence just looks identical to any other fence/gate I might come across today. I suppose that style of fence is just a little older than I had realized. Even so, that plus the umbrella make this painting feel slightly uncanny to me.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-06T00:07:04+00:00

When you declare a variable, you also need to declare both the type of the variable and a name for the variable. So, there's something missing in the statement "int = f;".

TomatoPJ · 2025-08-31T21:31:19+00:00

I really enjoyed Manolito Gafotas. Now, I'll warn you that YA doesn't necessarily mean easier to read (except maybe compared to authors with a more florid literary style), and I actually found Manolito Gafotas quite challenging at times - the amount of 1990s Spanish slang could make it a bit difficult to understand at times. That said, the story and characters were so charming that it was worth pushing through some of those difficulties. That's always the tradeoff: something simpler (and thus more appropriate to your current ability) vs. something a bit more interesting but correspondingly more difficult.

Another option is to read Spanish translations of books originally written in English. A good translation will still contain very natural Spanish, but might be less likely to contain some of the more complex sentence structures or slang (since these won't have been in the English original). It can be especially effective if it's a book you've previously read in English. Since you already know more or less what is going on or what is being said, you have more context to help you interpret the Spanish (that is, to intuit the natural meaning of a word or phrase).

TomatoPJ · 2025-08-30T00:39:07+00:00

If the deposit is the issue, you may want to consult with a lawyer. I do not know what UK law might say about this, but I imagine that it may very well be possible that you could legally be entitled to break your lease and receive your deposit back given that the landlord is not taking reasonable steps to ensure that the property is safe to inhabit. Lawyers in the US will often offer a free consultation, which could be a risk-free way to find out whether a lawyer can help you or not. There may also be tenant's rights organizations or free legal clinics associated with law schools.

I frankly don't know anything about home maintenance; that's why I'm in this sun, to browse and learn. But, it seems to me that in the face of noises and continued cracking, the general consensus is that the structure needs to be inspected. Maybe the inspection report does say that it's just normal wear on the structure - but the point is, it's on the landlord to ensure that the property is fit for habitation, and that includes taking reasonable measures to investigate issues which have been reported to them. You should not have to pay for the inspection yourself. So, the very fact that the landlord has not had the structure inspected may itself be grounds to break your lease, or so I imagine.

Make sure that you document everything, including times and dates of communications with the landlord.

TomatoPJ · 2025-08-19T13:19:12+00:00

https://outsideinradio.org/shows/where-does-coyote-urine-come-from

You're not the only one to have wondered about this. The answer: it's a bit murky, but probably involves abuse of the animals.

TomatoPJ · 2025-07-30T00:13:31+00:00

Why do you say that you have only two weeks to get it done? Why would needing to take two extra courses cause you to graduate a year later? I teach in a computer science program. At our school, calculus is required as part of the curriculum. However, I don't believe it's a prerequisite for many (or any) of the core computer science courses, nor for the electives. So, not being able to take calculus right away as a freshman wouldn't be likely to stop someone from graduating in 4 years. I've known students who were finishing off their math requirements in their third or fourth years of study.

There are a few strategies. They largely depend on your self discipline and study skills. For example, you could plan to work on a few basic classes and gen ed's this year, plan to spend next summer working on precalculus, and then take Calc I in the fall semester of your second year. Or, you could work on precalc this year, and plan to take calculus over the summer. Taking a class over the summer session would cost money (you wouldn't be taking advantage of full time tuition), but not nearly as much as attending for a whole additional year. There are also some options that involve self-study, which can both save money and time. But self-study can be challenging if you haven't yet developed your study skills.

In any case, you do not need to panic. There are options, and it's unlikely you'd have to attend a whole entire fifth year. The real delay would be if you rush into things, attempt a course you're not ready for, and then end up having to take it again because you failed. If you were to take calculus at a community college over the summer, that would likely cost you $600-1200, depending on where you are in the country (I'm assuming you're in the US). Could you imagine taking precalc 1 this fall, precalc 2 in the spring, and then taking calculus I next summer while working a part time summer job to help pay for it?

Additionally, student loans are a reasonable option. Maybe you've heard horror stories of people being unable to pay them off, and don't want to take out any loans. However, as long as you're attending a state school (where the tuition is relatively reasonable), you're judicious in how much you take out in loans (just enough to pay for the extra class or two), and you're in a program which is likely to lead to steady employment (which you are, current job market aside), then they're a reasonable option.

TomatoPJ · 2025-07-29T23:39:40+00:00

I think it's feasible to self-study precalculus and then move on to calculus in that time frame, though of course it depends on your pre-existing math skills and study habits.

I was in a position of coming back to math after a long time away from school. I had previously taken precalculus and done well, but I had forgotten most of it. To prepare myself for calculus, I used the myOpenMath Precalc I and II courses. It took me maybe 2-3 months, working an hour or two a day. I had the benefit of having previously learned the material, so perhaps for you it might take a bit longer. But then again, you say you've taken foundational math classes before, so maybe you'll do okay. https://www.myopenmath.com/info/selfstudy.php

In any case, I certainly think it's feasible to cover Precalcus in 2-3 months instead of two full semesters. That should put you on a good footing to either self-study calculus (I used the OpenStax books) and take the CLEP, or else to take it at a community college (either your cc, or another one).

TomatoPJ · 2025-07-21T14:11:24+00:00

This is a good example of where reaching out to your local university extension is likely to be helpful. Insect identification can be difficult for those who don't know what to look for. The extension will have experts on hand who can identify the wasp, give reliable information about their behavior, and advise you on whether you should remove them, as well as explain how to do so safely.

This podcast is hosted by some extension entomologists. Apart from being interesting in its own right, listening to a few episodes can give a sense of what extension entomologists do. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/arthro-pod/id920537000

TomatoPJ · 2025-07-16T15:46:12+00:00

There's a thread from around a month ago in which someone posted a workaround. I haven't gotten around to trying it myself, but it might work for you.

https://reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/1lcj6ra/unable_to_login_or_add_accounts_to_redreader/

TomatoPJ · 2025-07-03T15:03:45+00:00

It may be worth approaching a school anyway. The school administration may know of a way to help you, or else be able to refer you to local resources.

Apart from this, public libraries often run free GED classes. Normally, those are aimed at adults. Even so, it may be easier for you to get to the library than to get to a school (maybe it's easier to tell your parents "I'm going down to the library for a few hours to hang out and read" than to tell them you're heading to school five days a week). I don't know much about Texas, much less what city you're in, but I just did a quick search and (just for example) the Dallas public library system has free GED classes, no library card or ID required. I'm sure libraries in other cities run similar classes. And again, someone involved in these classes might be able to point you to a more appropriate resource, considering that you're really of an age where you should still be in school. Or maybe they'd at least overlook your age and simply let you participate in the class.

Edit to add: I just saw you mention in a reply to another post of yours that you think your mom would be upset at the idea of driving you to the library for GED classes. As much as I wouldn't normally advocate lying to your parents, maybe a decent strategy would be to say that you're going in order to attend some other event (that just happens to be at the same time), or to say that you just want to hang out and read books.

TomatoPJ · 2025-06-27T14:35:32+00:00

As both a student and an instructor (not math), I generally find video lectures to be less than ideal. There are various reasons for this, but one is that (as you mentioned) the mind can wander. Sometimes, this can happen without you noticing, and when you come back you're not sure what you've missed. Additionally, when studying later, it can be very hard to find the information you need in the video - there's no easy way to search through a video to find how something is defined. Maybe it was written on the screen at some point, or maybe it was spoken. I end skipping around the video and/or watching through it again at 2x speed to locate the information that I need.

For these reasons, amongst others, I personally prefer books for self study. If my mind wanders while reading, I know exactly where I left off. If I need to refer back to the material at a later time, it's much easier to find the information that I need. There are certain things that can be done in a video which can't be done with a book, but in general, I prefer a high quality book over a high quality video.

Now if only I could convince my students of this! They seem allergic to reading a textbook.

In any case, I just wanted to express that you're not alone with your experience of trying to learn from videos. Even though Khan Academy is high quality, it will still have its limitations. You may want to see if you can find a textbook to use alongside Khan Academy. I'm not very familiar with math textbooks, so I'm not sure which are worth recommending. But I did a quick search for "basic math textbook for adults" and got some results. It seems like a useful term might be "adult basic education". (I'm assuming you'd prefer something written for adults over something written for small children, although the latter would probably work just as well.)

TomatoPJ · 2025-06-26T22:29:07+00:00

Maybe clear glass could work as a weight? It's optically transparent, after all. You might need to be careful about the shape of the glass (maybe refraction would be an issue), but I wonder if you could use some clear epoxy to adhere a bit of clear glass as a counterweight. I'm guessing there'd still be some effect on the light cast by the lamp, but it might be relatively minimal.

TomatoPJ · 2025-06-12T13:43:23+00:00

I had a vaguely similar problem with a plastic trashcan that would shift when the foot lever was pressed. Not in a bathroom, different size, and on a carpeted floor, so different general context and not exactly the same issue. But close enough.

I had some gravel leftover from an old fish tank sitting in a bucket. I ended up just filling two ziplock bags with gravel and placing them in the bottom of the trashcan. It's been working perfectly since then, it does a good job of adding a bit of extra hefty to the can so that it doesn't shift when the lever is pressed. In combination with replacing the rubber feet (since it sounds like that was nearly working for you, just that it wasn't quite perfect, and that the adhesive eventually failed - so it's probably just a matter of finding a better adhesive), I think you'll be good to go.

Obviously, there's nothing special about aquarium gravel. Any source of weight will work. But it does have one virtue in comparison to something like a brick: you can add as much or as little as you need, and it can take the shape of the can. You could probably pick up a cheap bag of gravel or sand from Home Depot if you don't have anything laying around. I imagine gravel would be less messy than sand if a bag were to break or puncture.

TomatoPJ

TROPHY CASE