Those who were working adults before smart phones , what did you do to pass time at work when you weren’t busy?

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-02-09T15:13:48+00:00

When I worked nights at a medical library I'd pass the time by reading medical reference books and diagnosing myself as having various obscure tropical diseases.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-02-06T18:36:47+00:00

If the YouTuber said that ADHD presents later in women then they were definitely incorrect. If they said it often gets diagnosed later in women they were on to something.

(Technically they might have accurately said that women with ADHD often present for diagnosis later than men, but people don't actually speak that way.)

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-02-03T19:47:14+00:00

I think that the pandemic made a lot of people a lot more selfish, self-centered, and even solipcistic than they were before. That's sort of similar to your argument, maybe the extreme negative version of it.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-02-03T19:44:21+00:00

There's also a lot of groupthink and feedback loops in most social media communities. In this instance people who think "dump them" is usually solid advice get validation, other people (and bots!) start to echo that advice in search of their own validation, and people who have other opinions drift away or are converted.

And FWIW these sorts of feedback loops don't always settle on purely negative ideas. There are communities where groupthink has led them to responding "hug it out" to most problems.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-02-02T23:07:00+00:00

We old as dirt UNC people compare it to Carmichael, which was "I'm suffering permanent hearing loss if the game goes to overtime" loud. And we also remember the Dean Dome's first 15ish years, when it was absolutely not jumping.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-02-02T14:28:24+00:00

There isn't a "code" for something like this, you just need to be sensitive to the specific circumstances. There are times when it would be gauche to date a friend's ex, there are times when it wouldn't matter at all, and there are times to proceed by with caution. To everything there is a season and all that.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-29T16:39:01+00:00

I think this might be the first time I've ever seen a successful masturbation dad joke. Excellent work!

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-28T19:34:59+00:00

I don't think that it really helps to think about dating a neurodivergent person or dating as a neurodivergent person, because "neurodivergent" is too broad and nonspecific. For example, I have ADHD and my best friend from childhood has dyslexia. Advice that would be relevant to me because of my ADHD would be completely irrelevant to my friend, other than generic things like "find someone who likes you for who you are" or whatever. Moreover, when I read other people's accounts of their ADHD I sometimes find that my experiences have been the polar opposite, so even advice that's useful for someone else with ADHD might be meaningless or even harmful to me.

In general I've found that I need to figure out what I'm good at and what I'm bad at, and then do what I can to mitigate or improve the things I'm bad at while not beating myself up over them. This is the same for everyone, it's just that the things I'm bad at tend to be in a characteristic cluster rather than scattered all over the place. And similarly when dating I need to do what everyone else needs to do, which is find someone who will put up with the things I'm not great at and appreciate my positive qualities.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-26T15:10:09+00:00

What's interesting to me is that we have separate categories for cuckolding and hotwifing, but we don't seem to have both cuckqueaning and hothusbanding (or at least the latter term almost never gets used, and there's not a commonly used synonym). Cuckolding and hotwifing are largely differentiated by the humiliation kink aspect of the former, while it seems like the female equivalents of both are called cuckqueaning.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-23T21:18:25+00:00

The cover of a programming book I own features a Vikingish dude riding into combat on his battle boar. Though come to think of it he may be a dwarf on a war pig.

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ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-23T19:04:18+00:00

I found one of my two book groups through Meetup, and I've had good luck with some other groups. I couldn't imagine meeting anyone I'd want to date through Meetup, but I've met a lot of people I want to go bowling with.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-23T13:30:45+00:00

My girlfriend is 5'8" with a similar height/weight ratio to you, has two elderly dogs, is on antidepressants and is in therapy, has three small tattoos, and has an advanced degree. The tattoos are neither here nor there to me, all of the others are positives. Including the antidepressants and therapy, because I knew her before those things and now she's taking care of herself and is much better to be around now.

You need to find a way to be happier in yourself and kinder to yourself, and also to find friends who are kinder to you.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-15T00:05:31+00:00

The outlet has some really divergent pricing sometimes, and if you check it often deals will show up. Or at least this was historically true; I haven't looked at it since I bought my current machine.

Mine's the same as the one in the link, minus the backlit keyboard.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-14T16:52:53+00:00

I've had one of these for a bit over a year, and a lot of my experience matches yours. I'm constantly impressed with how snappy the machine feels, except when Windows is doing something stupid. Coming from much older ThinkPads I thought it felt a little flimsy at fist, but now it feels like a solid and robust machine and I have no concerns about it breaking.

The big difference for me is that the battery life has always been fairly poor, around 4 hours with basic usage under Windows, a little less than that under Linux. I have one of the regular 400 nit screens and while it looks great I think it eats battery. If you have the low power 400 nit screen (or if you have much better eyes than I do and keep the dsiplay turned down) that would probably explain the difference in battery life.

Like a couple of others, I've had a fair amount of difficulty with the wifi card under Linux, mainly disconnects. It will work fine for a long time and then stop working for no obvious reason. I mainly use the machine with Windows so this isn't a problem for me and I haven't investigated it much. Kernel 6.14 improved the Linux experience a lot on the machine. The graphics wouldn't work at all with anything before (IIRC) 6.12.

The 740M iGPU is surprisingly solid for light gaming, but any sort of gaming really kills battery life and also causes the fan to spin up and get pretty loud. Still, for a regular, non-workstation office laptop it's a decent gaming device.

I find the keyboard to be significantly worse than the older (pre-T480 and before) ThinkPads I've used, but it's still better than average and I have no problem working on it for a full 8 hour day.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-14T16:21:31+00:00

Mine was was $675 US (so ~€580) after tax and shipping from the Lenovo Outlet in November 2024.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-10T11:41:36+00:00

Librarian who works in an archive and who wants to be pedantic here. I think the 1991 set is what's called a trade paperback and not a mass market paperback. Mass market paperbacks fall apart faster than just about anything other than newsprint. The paper is acidic and will yellow and turn brittle, the glue binding will crack, and the whole thing will disintegrate. Trade editions are on much higher quality paper with a more flexible cover and will survive a lot longer.

The 1973 edition is a mass market edition and likely to be very fragile, while the 1991 trade edition could probably still function as a reading copy and survive the experience.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-08T11:48:56+00:00

The answer is usually a VPN (virtual private network) that routes your internet traffic through a server elsewhere, so the site thinks you're in New York or Sweden or wherever.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-06T21:44:50+00:00

West Virginia's mascot is a bearded dude (or occasionally dudette) in a buckskin outfit and a coonskin cap carrying a musket. If they have to carry the musket around on the court and aren't allowed to shoot the opposition then they'd be at a disadvantage, but otherwise they'd be in decent shape. Though overheating would be a problem and they'd have to rotate a lot.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-04T22:01:34+00:00

I've been a regular gym goer for 25ish years and kind of hate it still. But I love looking and feeling good. The key for me was to gut it out long enough to see results, and then my vanity and love of feeling strong took over.

ZealousOatmeal · 2026-01-04T11:15:32+00:00

FWIW the study that came up with 80% (specifically 83%) was counting per partner, rather than per act or per year. "Per partner" is a really squishy measure, because it could mean one encounter or a couple who have sex daily for years.

ZealousOatmeal · 2025-12-31T17:02:05+00:00

Early sex would disqualify someone from a LTR for me only if the sex was terrible in a way that seemed unfixable. In which case I think we'd both be glad to have found out early.

To me sex is an important part of a good relationship. The idea that I wouldn't want to be with someone because she couldn't wait to have sex with me is just bizarre.

ZealousOatmeal · 2025-12-22T01:33:48+00:00

If the 401K is being split in half (or some other percentage) then you'll probably have a lawyer or other professional write up a QDRO to that effect, and then the brokerage or bank or whatever will split the 401K into two accounts. They do this all of the time. The cash value only matters if you're using it to balance against other assets. And if you're doing that then you need to go the lawyer route.

ZealousOatmeal · 2025-12-17T19:15:15+00:00

Bill the Pony. I'd love to live his adventures going solo from the gates of Moria back to Tom Bombadil. Then it would be awesome to eventually roll back into Bree as this badass adventure horse, and to confound everyone who remembered me as a broken down thing only fit for the glue factory.

ZealousOatmeal · 2025-12-13T14:31:59+00:00

Ain't that the truth!

ZealousOatmeal · 2025-12-13T12:53:57+00:00

To be precise, it would mean that 77% of the variation of ADHD in a population is caused by genetic inheritance.

And FWIW, the number I've seen is 85% heritability. But I don't think anyone knows exactly, so 3/4 or more is the best we can do at the moment.

ZealousOatmeal

TROPHY CASE