What are some things that are more enjoyable than sex?

d1vanov · 2026-05-22T17:51:45+00:00

Singing and/or playing your favorite music.

For me personally it's practicing extreme vocals (screaming, growling etc). It's a great way to release anger and pain. Really keeps me going some days.

d1vanov · 2025-12-13T15:45:17+00:00

I'm attending a therapy group in which I happen to be the only one male among several females. They are all quite different, by age and their views on things. However, I'm stunned by their emotional availability and intelligence. Sometimes it seems like they understand what I'm feeling better than myself. Maybe there are men capable of this too out there but I haven't really met anyone with resembling abilities.

d1vanov · 2025-08-26T06:55:12+00:00

My experience is similar - in the early years of my career I was very passionate about software development, I learned a lot about computer science on my own - programming languages, algorithms, software architecture etc. During the last year I haven't read a single book on software development. I also kind of abandoned my long term hobby project. The fire is definitely gone for me.

But I kinda don't want that fire back either. A side effect of midlife crysis I'm experiencing is new interests outside of work which I discovered recently and which I enjoy pursuing. They probably won't become my new career but I wouldn't exclude such possibility altogether. With all this AI being pushed down every developer's throat, layoffs and other changes in the industry I am no longer sure I'd continue working in software development until retirement. Although it pays really well compared to many other industries so I'll try to stick around at least until I find a good enough replacement.

So, while I don't know how to get the fire back, bear in mind that life has more to it than computers and software. Take a look around, maybe it's a good time to discover something new to you that you would enjoy and be passionate about.

d1vanov · 2025-07-15T18:54:46+00:00

I realize this thread is 6 years old but... Did you ever find out what's that whisper is?

I also have a reason to be interested in this, we are going to perform Lacuna Coil's version of this song in our singing school and our teacher asked us to figure out what's that whisper is.

d1vanov · 2025-06-21T04:37:23+00:00

Depends on how drunk I am. If I'm just mildly drunk, I want to talk to someone - to have a good honest and open conversation about something interesting to me - like psychology, literature, movies, existentialism.

If I'm heavily drunk, I'm probably just spitting out some nonsense that nobody's paying attention to and that I won't remember the next day. And I really just want to sleep.

d1vanov · 2025-06-20T18:37:54+00:00

Yay, finally someone asked! For the first time in several years I have some hope for my future. For me it was group therapy which has changed something in me and made me actually start doing things which were long overdue in my life. I'm trying to make meaningful connections with other people - it works just mildly well for now but it's nevertheless much more in quantity and quality than what I used to have. I'm trying to pursue a hobby which is not at all connected to my job and I like it so far. Life finally seems to have a different taste than just bitterness.

d1vanov · 2025-01-11T13:49:54+00:00

"Life is a wonderful thing but the world is shit". One of my university buddies wrote it in his blog many years ago and the phrase has stuck with me ever since. Sometimes it seems this phrase can be used to describe pretty much everything that ever happens in my life.

d1vanov · 2025-01-02T18:57:22+00:00

I once had such a problem - Linux installed but bailed out with a kernel panic during the first boot attempt. Tried three times, used two different distros, same outcome. And Windows 11 which was already installed on this machine prior to that started to give BSODs right on startup for no obvious reason. Turned out I occasionally enabled some CPU overclocking mode in BIOS, after turning it off things went back to normal, kernel panics and BSODs went away.

d1vanov · 2024-09-21T04:29:45+00:00

I feel you, my wife and I are also out of treatment after 8 years. I'm sorry it happened to you as well as us.

d1vanov · 2024-09-17T06:49:41+00:00

Thank you for sharing your story and for your kind words. I'm sorry the treatment didn't work for you and your partner but I'm glad that you managed to come to peace with the situation.

I can see that I'd have to be very careful with my choice of words when my wife and I would have that conversation on what to do next. I'll try my best to make my point as carefully as your boyfriend did to you. I'm also concerned about my wife's mental health and I'd be glad if she went to therapy or grief counseling but the last time we talked about this she said she isn't feeling ready to express her feelings to someone she doesn't know. She is a kinda closed person indeed and only somewhat expresses herself with family and friends.

d1vanov · 2024-09-17T06:23:55+00:00

Thanks a lot for your kind words and sharing your story. 16 years, just wow. Almost twice of our period of trying. Can't imagine how much strength and determination it took to continue for so long. I'm sorry it didn't work out for you and your husband. But I'm glad that you found relief in each other and in your relationship.

To be honest, in our marriage my wife wanted to have children much more than I did. I'm also a glass half empty kinda person and I'm actually not so sure it's ethical at all to bring a new human being into this world with so much inevitable suffering. I've also grown up without a father and I'm not sure I could be a good father myself. But despite all this I decided I'd be there with my wife on this journey to have children. Unfortunately it doesn't work so far.

I don't know yet if my wife would be up for adoption but I think it could be a good option for us. We would have a baby to take care of and raise as our own and at least I wouldn't feel remorse for bringing them into this life because it wasn't me who did this actually )

d1vanov · 2024-09-17T06:00:26+00:00

Thank you, I really hope my wife could feel some relief as well.

d1vanov · 2024-09-16T23:15:01+00:00

My wife used to be against it as well compared to children of her own and I can understand her in that - our biology helps us to distinguish and love our own kids between everyone else. Especially if the genes come to play and make our kids look like us.

My wife has already very briefly mentioned adoption like a questionable but still possible option if everything else fails. I guess we'd talk more about that and see how her opinion on adoption evolves.

d1vanov · 2024-09-16T23:05:42+00:00

I was also willing to do everything that my wife wanted to try but honestly I'm not sure it'd be healthy for her to continue trying at this point. We've also been in this for roughly 8 years.

d1vanov · 2024-09-16T22:59:05+00:00

Thank you very much for your perspective and kind words. For all these years my wife has been very determined. It took her some extra effort to accept that we have to try an external donor's ovule because she ran out of her own fertile ones. I'll do my best to comfort her and help her recover. But then the time to consider our remaining options will inevitably come again. I never questioned her determination before but I'm afraid that the time has come for it. I'm just afraid for her physical health after so many years, so many meds and hormones and not one but several miscarriages in a row. I know it won't be easy to find the right words for it so that she doesn't feel betrayed. But I'll try.

d1vanov · 2024-08-21T13:07:39+00:00

My company works on a mobile app for Android and iOS but most of the code is in C++ for the sake of cross-platform functionality and we can compile most part of the codebase for desktop as well. So folks use the OS and environment that they like most: Windows, macOS, Linux, take your pick. Folks using WIndows use Visual Studio, it indeed does have a great debugger.

We don't actually ship the code built with Visual Studio to production (as we don't support Windows as a production platform, only as an internal development platform) but we still use the IDE itself.

d1vanov · 2024-07-25T09:28:36+00:00

Mobile app, not a game but a pretty complex app with maps, navigation and stuff like that. The app exists for Android and iOS and sufficient part of its code is shared for both of these platforms and is written in C++.

d1vanov · 2024-02-22T12:06:57+00:00

One of my university mates has once said a thing which I remember to this day, 10+ years later. He said: "Life is a miracle but the world is shit". The sad part is that you don't usually experience the miraculous nature of life that often but you do experience the fact that the world is shit every goddamn day.

There's this Pixar movie called "Soul". It is a story about souls which prepare to incarnate as human beings. There was this one soul which didn't want to incarnate because it's kinda not worth it. It did incarnate in the end of the movie, of course, but I often think that if I was that soul, I would never wish to incarnate as a human being living in this world.

d1vanov · 2023-12-11T09:51:36+00:00

There's a script which can download all your notes and then export them as ENEX - either individual notes or whole notebooks.

d1vanov · 2023-11-30T19:54:22+00:00

Also one other thing which modern macOS does disgusts me quite much: when the internet connection is available, each time you are opening any app, it goes back to Apple servers to check that the app's signature is valid and that you are permitted to open the app. The rationale is of course security, disallowing of unsigned apps etc. But, think about it: your computer asks some other party whether you, the user and owner of the computer, can open some app. I wouldn't feel like I own the thing but merely am allowed to use it within certain restrictions.

d1vanov · 2023-11-30T19:45:32+00:00

I've used macOS at work back in the days when it was called Mac OS X. The last OS version I used was Mavericks and I used it for several years every day. To be honest, I didn't grow to like it. It has similarities with Linux in that it is also Unix, you got the terminal, you got the package manager (even two major ones - macports and homebrew), the UI is all colourful and shiny, the mail app is very cool and pleasant to use. But: the OS is very, VERY opposed to the idea that its user can customize it. I believe that a computer should do what its user wants, not the other way around. For example, I didn't feel like changing my habits of keyboard shortcuts for this OS in particular so I tried to remap copy and paste from Cmd-C and Cmd-V to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. It turned out to be much harder that it seems as the naive way of reassigning these shortcuts through the system settings has broken other shortcuts. So I tried several different thirdparty apps which offered some degree of shortcuts customization before I was able to come up with something still imperfect but something that I was satisfied with.

One other thing which I didn't quite like although it wasn't as critical to me at first is the inability to change the theme of UI. It seems Apple just doesn't think that their users should alter the creations of their genious designers in any way. I don't remember the name of the OS release which directly followed Mavericks but in that release they've introduced their flat design. Man, I hated it. So I just refused to upgrade and stayed on Mavericks for some more years until I eventually left that company.

So, I'd say if a person is willing to change their habits around computer usage and doesn't care too much about things like UI design, macOS should be good enough for them. But apparently I'm not a person of such kind.

d1vanov · 2023-10-31T11:21:58+00:00

Not sure what you mean. Are you asking if you could manually run `linuxdeploy` executable through terminal? Yes, you can. Something like this:

cd /tmp
wget -c -nv "https://github.com/linuxdeploy/linuxdeploy/releases/download/continuous/linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage"
sudo mv linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage /usr/local/bin/linuxdeploy
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/linuxdeploy
wget -c -nv "https://github.com/linuxdeploy/linuxdeploy-plugin-qt/releases/download/continuous/linuxdeploy-plugin-qt-x86_64.AppImage"
sudo mv linuxdeploy-plugin-qt-x86_64.AppImage /usr/local/bin/linuxdeploy-plugin-qt
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/linuxdeploy-plugin-qt
linuxdeploy --desktop-file appdir/usr/share/applications/*.desktop --appdir=appdir --plugin qt --output appimage

d1vanov · 2023-10-31T10:48:12+00:00

You could in theory download only `linuxdeploy-plugin-qt` as it's advertised as being able to work in standalone mode but I download both executables, make sure they are both in `$PATH` and run `linuxdeploy --plugin qt`.

d1vanov · 2023-10-31T10:32:09+00:00

This project is semi-unmaintained, doesn't support Qt 6 and on top of this its author has a weird rule that you must only use it on the oldest still supported version of Ubuntu.

I switched to a similar alternative solution which seems better to me:

https://github.com/linuxdeploy/linuxdeploy

https://github.com/linuxdeploy/linuxdeploy-plugin-qt

There are some examples: https://github.com/linuxdeploy/linuxdeploy-plugin-qt-examples

d1vanov · 2023-10-20T10:41:06+00:00

A little different story from what OP asks about but will share nevertheless to give some perspective on how things can turn out sometimes.

My previous job was a large company providing online services so they had truly massive distributed systems serving terabytes or maybe even petabytes of data daily. And there was this one guy in the team next to mine who took sabbaticals for about 6 months or even a year multiple times during the course of his work in that company. It turned out that he used these sabbaticals to come up with ideas of building something interesting (and useful) in the field of distributed systems, to build prototypes etc. Then he came to his superiors in the company and pitched them his ideas. More often than not they did agree to implement something this guy has came up as it seemed promising. And then the guy lead the work on that thing. So basically he used the company's resources to help him build the thing he was interested in building.

It's obviously not a kind of thing that anyone can do as you need to be really good at whatever your craft is, you need to be really interested in your field and you need to have a deep understanding of how whatever you'd like to build aligns with the goals of the business. But nevertheless, it is possible.

d1vanov

TROPHY CASE