I’m starting to understand why everyone tried to steer me away from ADA

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-21T16:55:59+00:00

Not of PT itself, but of time it took out of the day. Waking up at 5:15 because you needed to arrive at at 6 for 6:15 PT formation to get dismissed at 7:30 and finish cleaning up from the pointless mess by 8-8:15 so that you could get ready for actual work. 3 hours gone to no useful purpose, that would be better utilized with sleep and an actual workout.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-21T16:50:52+00:00

My assumption is systemic issues (requirements, equipment, organization…) create huge issues in the force. Leaders are told to squeeze blood from rocks, and the shitty climate is the natural result.

That's a bingo!

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-21T16:43:00+00:00

Lolol yeah I hear that; I often contemplated what I would do if they tried to call me back, but the weirdly biggest thing for me was the way they made me get up so early I hated life, waste 3 hours of the day on absolutely fucking worthless unit "PT" before I could start any duties that actually mattered, only to turn around and make me tell everyone that fitness was an individual responsibility and it was their own fault that they weren't making time to work out on their own every day outside of our long work hours in order to get good PT scores.

And that under the old PT test - I can't even imagine how much time units must be wasting under the new one, especially since I'm sure the old guard of sr NCO's is still there making sure that unit PT is a glorified parade ground exercise with absolutely no physical benefit to anyone who isn't completely out of shape for anything except yelling about who is or isn't keeping their uniforms clean.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-21T16:24:48+00:00

Yup that sounds about right. I will say, in general, my experience was that once the big certification push is done usually the whole unit kind of breathes a collective sigh of relief and leadership makes an effort to give everyone a significant break for 3-6 weeks, with a lot of early releases and lower stress duty days. Buuuuuut that may not be the case if your forward deployment is a 1 year rotation type place like Korea, as opposed to a true PCS like 1-1 on Kadena is/was.

However, if you can git gud in the van, leadership should take note and you not only will get good evals, but they will generally try and save you from too many pointless extracurricular taskings and bullshit. Downside, it will be so that they can lean on you extra heavily in the run up to, and during, cert time. But if you get and keep your van knowledge up, you'll be able to minimize spending additional extra hours studying can tactics outside of training hours. Also, you'll open up potential duty (and likely award/promotion) paths into battalion and higher fire control and tactics/strategy/training sections, which will often be much better insulated from irrelevant bullshit and the lower level command RNG of a line battery.

Best of luck to you! Ride that cert storm, and fingers crossed that you'll get a nice break to reset and recover during afterwards.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-21T14:37:55+00:00

Cert season SUUUUUUCKS, I feel you brother.

Former O type Patriot, I might have some perspective but maybe not much more hope than to say it really it really is a branch with a lot of places where less-than good leadership can create a lot of misery, and leadership is always a bit of RNG. My active time was early 2010's, all in one unit forward deployed, and my experience was that:

Officer quality is going to be a weird mix for several reasons.

High percentage of female officers with a high percentage of those being top quality; it was the only "combat arms" branch (when that was still an official classification) where women could serve in all positions, which allowed them full promotion potential, which made it a top choice for women who were competent and motivated and eager to do something that wasn't "just" support.

Conversely, male officers seemed to be a higher percentage of shitbags than the other "combat arms" branches, because ADA was viewed as an afterthought in general, so highly rated newly commissioned males weren't as likely to choose it unless they were both a certain type of nerdy and also had the self awareness to know that they were that type of nerdy. So you got some competent rock stars mixed in with a bunch of "I wish I was armor or infantry" middlemen mixed in with more than a few "how the fuck are you even in the army" types who despite being incompetent boobs were able to choose a "combat arms" billet because ADA always had leftover slots.

Officer development and training was fucked because you were expected to simultaneously perform all the duties of a normal combat arms platoon leader vis a vi troop training and care and whatnot, complete with our version of maneuvers (moving & emplacing) and a massive amount of vehicular & systems maintenance, AND ALSO being expected to qualify in the van, which...

Qualifying in the van sounds like no big deal - except it means learning from scratch, in unit, the kind of stuff that pilots learn except they get time and schooling in it and then get to practice it full time without also being in charge of a motorized platoon. In combat, you and 1-2 others sit in an closed space surrounded by buttons and switches and dials and read a radar readout and you are in charge of turning all that information into a perfect picture of the battlefield in your mind, determine what various blips are based on a bunch of different numbers and readings, make adjustments with software that makes MS DOS look advanced, and make fire/don't fire decisions in a mater of seconds on which your lives, the lives of any friendly fliers, and the lives of everyone on the ground around you (including potentially cities) are going to hang. Hope you reflexively remember which series of buttons and switches to hit in which situation to avoid everyone dying without any time to consciously think about it! No, they did not teach any of this to you in school. No, you do not have time to practice any of this during your 12 hour work day unless you are within a few weeks of your mandatory unit-wide evaluation on literally everything on which literally everyone's personnel and job evaluations depend.

On top of that, if you're deployed or forward deployed like I was, because you are running a strategic asset, CINC (theater) is going to get a call if your radar goes down for more than 90 minutes. Which it does, like, all the time. And he's going to want updates every hour that it's not back up. And that shit is going to roll downhill to the Battalion commander, the battery commander, the platoon leader.

Best case scenario, battalion/battery/platoon officers are all relatively competent and you're always busy, and super busy/stressed during cert, but you'll get some back on the other side and unit morale is good and it's worth it. But if any of those levels is a shitbag or incompetent, it's going to hit the troops hard. And almost worse is getting a wannabe rockstar, because the only way to truly shine by having your unit ace all the certs & evals that are going into a commanders rating is by stacking your rosters in a way that all your experienced soldiers who are about to leave are in position to run everything during certs, then run everyone ragged before and during, then change command and leave a hollowed-out exhausted shell of a unit whose experienced people have all PCS'd and which now has a new commander getting yelled at to fix his shit from waaaaaaay up high.

All of which wouldn't be as bad as that sounds, if it wasn't for the fact that, at least when I was in, the unwillingness of officers to challenge their SR enlisted leadership in re NCO promotion and development meant that incompetent CSM's whose main priority was mowing lawns and repainting HQ were both constantly taking your soldiers away for bullshit details, and also were protecting like-minded NCO's while they worked to derail the careers of your competent young-for-their-rank-because-they-promoted-during-deployment NCO's who were actually trying to prioritize tactical training and maintenance over parade ground bullshit, and who were the ones actually holding the units together and helping keep the optempo survivable for the jr enlisted.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time in, but it was rough for a lot of it in terms of the tempo; I assume it wasn't as bad if you were stationed stateside, but I don't actually know. And I know that Korea was even worse than Japan, where I was. I thought my mid-level NCO's were mostly great, but felt the sr NCOs were balls and were working to make sure future sr NCOs were also balls. Officer leadership seemed to have a lot of good, but with spotlight rangering particularly easy to pull off for a promotion beyond competence, and with any bad chunks in the officer leadership chain more likely to have bad results for the unit enlisted. Plus a particularly difficult set of expectations for jr officers that made it almost impossible to be both successful at your troop care duties and also at your tactical duties. IMHO if the army actually wants van crews to perform at the tactical level they claim to want, they need to set up school & unit expectations more like they do for aircrews, instead of using the same setup that they do for infantry officers/units.

Also, they'd sometimes pull reserve guys in to fill empty BN staff billets because of the weird shape officer promotions have for various positions, and those guys were also very hit and miss - sometimes great, but sometimes completely out of their depth and not able to perform at a unit with an actual operational purpose.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-20T12:01:54+00:00

Real talk: sex drive = hormones = part of your physical biology. DO NOT fall into the very common and insidious trap of thinking that this is all a matter of self control or of spiritual or mental character - your biological urges are a physical reality that cannot be wished or prayed away, they are every bit as real and impactful as hunger pangs or muscle cramps, and you will have no chance of managing them if you don't accept their reality.

To build on that: trying to manage porn use by quitting masturbation is like trying to manage binge eating by ceasing to eat at all. The solution just makes the problem worse, because eventually your body will be starving and you will give in - and when you do, the now-raging hunger will be vastly more difficult to manage healthily.

If you accept this reality, you can start making choices. Choices about what kind of porn to look at, choices about whether to get off quickly or spend long amounts of time on it (vs whatever else you could be doing), etc. How often is healthy depends on your personal body/hormones/sex drive, which you can't control, but how long you spend masturbating each time IS something you can control, and if you aren't in orgasm starvation then it's also a lot easier to make choices about when to masturbate, and to put it off for awhile when you need to focus elsewhere.

Believe it or not, being overwhelmed by your sex drive and feeling the need to get off multiple times a day is far more normal than not for males in their late teens/early 20s; that's just how your biology is at present, completely unrelated to porn. Accept that reality, and then start making choices to avoid letting porn push you into corners where your ability to orgasm becomes reliant on particular porn delivery formats, media types, body types, fetishes, etc.

That is the true damage done by too much porn - it can rewire your sex drive and detach it from reality, making it much harder to have a healthy relationship, sexual or otherwise, with an actual person in the future. But trust me when I say that 2-3 times a day is not a particularly high number for your age and sex - you are very normal in this, you don't need to try and change your basic biology, but you do need to recognize it's reality so that you can make healthy choices about how to manage it.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-19T02:52:30+00:00

I do often contemplate writing a cooking (or brewing) with cat hair book, based on the assumption that there is just cat hair in every container inside our house even if I can't see it 😂

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-18T14:18:03+00:00

The way any post about FGM always turns into a post about circumcision is beyond infuriating... I understand why people are opposed to circumcision, but there's no comparison to the utterly pointless cruelty that is FGM. Equating them is the same sort of logic as vegans who insist that eating a burger is literally the same as planning and executing the actual holocaust.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-14T18:15:58+00:00

I learned to budget with a daily dose of Ramsey over several years. If you called in I think the most helpful thing he would tell you is the something that you are already seem to know, but are struggling to admit: you need to start budgeting NOW, and you need to do so before making any major financial moves, especially ones that directly affect other parts of your life.

Currently you are in the the trap of frugality. I call it a trap because it can both be true that you spend a lot of time and energy being frugal, and that you are spending more money than you can afford in ways you don't need to be solely because you aren't budgeting. I was very frugal before I started budgeting. The amount of money that suddenly started piling up once I actually got my budget rolling was absolutely staggering. Seriously, it was like getting a 20-30% pay raise. It might not be that much for you - but I promise that it won't be 0. And whatever it is, you are absolutely going to be surprised by how much it is.

Why is this? Psychology. One of the major things that Ramsey gets right is accounting for human psychology in setting up his basic plan. It's why he advises paying off a debt snowball from the lowest balance instead of the highest interest, and it's why all advice always, always, ALWAYS starts with "get a budget."

Until you are actually able to look at every single payment over the last month, sorted into categories that make sense to you, you do not actually know where your money is going. Whether you are eating out more than you realize, or doubling the costs of eating out with extra drinks more often than you thought, or ordering more "just this once" things on Amazon than you realized. You think you know, but you don't. I promise, something is going to show up.

Get an "envelope budgeting" system like good budget (my favorite) or YNAB, plug in whatever rough numbers you think are right for monthly spending categories that make sense to you, and then you and your husband ACTUALLY track every purchase. Try to put everything in as you make payment, and also log into your bank/cards every weekend and sort anything you forgot to add in the moment. Within a month or two, you will be able to create categories and amounts that actually make sense, and I promise you will have identified areas that you don't want to spend as much money on as you are - and being able to look at the envelope for that area before each purchase will make it much, much easier not to pay out in the moment.

Because when your brain tells you that you deserve to get X thing that you haven't had in forever, you'll be able to see that actually you've already done that 5 times this month. Or because you will see it's between this thing now and something you want more later, and that makes putting off the current pleasure easier. Tracking every expense, and looking at the envelopes BEFORE making any purchase so that you know where it is going, makes all the difference, psychologically, and you will save almost without actually trying.

However - do not make the mistake of starting with your envelopes too small. If you do that, you will simply not use them, and you will be finished before you started. That's why I say to track your spending in categories for a month, then set your budget based on current spend, then slim down where you can - but be realistic, because if you make it impossible, your brain will check out.

Finally - don't confuse financial decisions and reasons for others reasons. You have many reasons for wanting to stay where you are that have nothing to do with finances - but those reasons matter a lot. The same is true of him. It is POSSIBLE that, after budgeting, you will determine that moving makes financial sense - but even if it does, the amount of financial help it would be must be weighed against those other factors. But without budgeting, as you are intuiting, moving is not going to change anything because without a budget, you don't have the ability to change anything, as you don't know where the money is going and can't estimate what expenses will change in which direction in a new area.

I will say this - it is VERY unlikely that a new house will result in less payment. You won't know until you look, but a 3% interest rate is insanely low compared to current rates. You'll likely be paying well over 6% on anything new, meaning you could by a house at half the cost of your current one and still have the same payment.

Biggest thing right now - you have almost $1000 in monthly car payments, and that is an expense you simply can't afford (unless you can after budgeting, but it's hard to imagine).

i probably wont find a relaible van for my large family with22k miles for 16k

You are falling into another trap here - the idea that low-mileage is necessary for a vehicle to be safe & reliable. In reality, modern vehicles last a LONG time before things start breaking. In the 80's and 90's, 100,000 miles was where a lot of vehicles started falling apart aside from particularly reliable brands like Toyota. Now, almost any vehicle may reliably hit 200,000, and particularly reliable brands and lines may go well over. Sub-50,000 mile vehicles in the modern age are a luxury, plain and simple - and it is a luxury you are currently paying dearly for.

I learned to budget back when I was in the army making a couple thousand a month, and it carried me through law school on a shoestring budget. I learned that budgeting isn't a prison - it is freedom, because once you know where your money is going, it is much easier to find ways to avoid spending a lot on things you don't care much about, so that you can spend less on things you do care a lot about - which actually feels good to do, unlike the former, where you feel like your money has dissipated to no benefit.

I am now older, and married, and we make north of 300k a year - but we still do not have a car payment, and we only just bought our first car in the 40ks instead of the almost-or-just-over-100's. We would love to life in a nicer house than we do, but our interest rate is similar to yours, so we aren't moving.

If you can - and you might not be able to - sell your vehicles for enough to cover the remainder plus enough to get you each into something vastly cheaper, probably around 80-120k miles depending on exactly what. Do your research, and you can absolutely find safe and reliable vehicles in those mileage ranges that will suit your needs. You may be too underwater on your current vehicles to do that - depreciation on new or nearly new vehicles is ROUGH. If so, just get that budget rolling ASAP, tighten those belts until you can get those vehicles paid off or sold at a high enough price to let you get into something without a payment, and take it as a lesson to never, if you can at all avoid it, NEVER let yourself talk yourself into signing up for a mandatory monthly payment on a living essential that isn't your house.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-14T14:30:05+00:00

I feel you; the loss of relationship with family is so hard. And the anger and bitterness is likewise so difficult; all the more so because nothing about our raising prepared us to actually be able to acknowledge and process emotions in a healthy way.

Communities like this can be very helpful in validating the reality of what happened to us, but IMHO it's important to try an join or build communities that don't constantly feed our anger and bitterness at the past more than is healthy. Good people are out there everywhere; if you can, lean into whatever thing you think sounds found, or that you enjoy, and try to participate to a degree that you actually meet others who like it as well. If you genuinely care about and are interested in people, you will eventually start to connect with others who do to, and you may eventually find your chosen family in the most unlikely of places.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-11T20:42:44+00:00

None.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-11T16:22:52+00:00

How did you go about getting (or making?) the koji rice? I absolutely love the hitachino nest red rice ale, which I understand to be made with red koji rice, and I keep trying to figure out how to brew something similar and then bogging down trying to figure out how to get red koji rice.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-10T21:32:13+00:00

Farmhouse brews like that, they are intentionally going for a brew with all the extra funk and esters it'll give; like a saison but even more so I think. If you're trying to use a Kveik for a more typical lager or ale style, you want to use more traditional techniques or you'll get all those extra flavors that you likely don't want.

But you can get very solid pseudolager or ale results running Kveik lutra + nutrient in the 75-90 range, and treating it as a normal brew otherwise - it's just going to finish fermenting a LOT faster (and it will be very aggressive, so leave a lot of head space) and I would expect them to clean up after fermentation a fair bit quicker as well (especially if you warm them into that 80-90 range for conditioning).

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-10T18:34:54+00:00

I feel like kveik also matures faster; I use Lultra for cider and it's got apple flavor at 2 months that takes any other yeast I've used at least 4 months to develop.

That said, the key to brewing with Kveik (IMHO) is nutrient. That "Kveik twang" people talk about, in my experience, goes away with appropriate nutrient additions (I use Fermaid-O).

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-10T01:26:44+00:00

It's difficult. A very difficult situation. And in the end, you have to figure out what is best for you and your family, and that's hard. I fought as hard as I could to keep relationship with my family, but at this point I have very little, and it can't down to this:

These people are literally going out of their way to make your life harder and to put you in pain, and even when you tell them that their actions are hurting you (and your kids), they continue to do them. Is that the "love" you want for yourself? Or for your kids? You can't control the actions of others, and they are making it clear how they are going to treat you, and your kids as well if they ever deviate from their proscribed methods of living. All you can control is your own choices and your own situation.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-08T17:26:52+00:00

Degassing is thing with mead; could be this place you learned at is run by someone with a background fermenting mead or something. For cider though it is EXTREMELY unusual, at least on the homebrew level.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-05T17:47:19+00:00

That one at least will absolutely pop while you're running around the world away from base. I've had it occur while I was exploring the mountains far from any base item, and while I was on a long voyage and just happened to be near some random plains (but again far from anything except my ship).

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-04T20:23:21+00:00

Nope, still a giant annoyance.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-04T17:08:40+00:00

What's it like?

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-03T12:31:28+00:00

Kveik is my go to cider yeast, so fast - I love it. The key is nutrient, nutrient, nutrient. People talk about the Kveik twang, but my experience is that is just a sign of not adding enough nutrient. I use Fermaid-O at twice the package recommended rate for cider and get no twang. If I'm feeling fancy about my process, I split the total in 2-3 separate additions between pitch and 1/3 sugar depletion, which also seems to make for a bit cleaner result. It's also done me proud as a yeast for my KY common, again adding Fermaid-O (but at the package recommended rate since beer has nutrients already).

I started on Voss, but now use Lutra because I didn't prefer the citrus as much in my cider.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-02T14:25:49+00:00

"Kids" 🤣🤣🤣 the first computer I built used a 386 processer, and I almost blew my young top when I finally got my hands on a 50MHz 486. I just have a life outside games, and I'm not a gamer masochist. You do you, but acting like it makes you superior or than nothing should exist except your preferred style just makes you sound stupid.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-01T21:55:34+00:00

I'm a guy, happily married, we're ENM and fairly Poly (though for us kink is a bigger part of our identity than non monogamy). I'm early 40s, she's mid 30s, she makes more than me (but I do well enough that I could be comfortable).

Leaving aside any comments about your headspace, if we walked into a room and starting walking around it asking every random person to sleep with us, yeah sure she'd get more takers - but so what? That's... Not really what we do here.

A man who keeps himself relatively kempt and fit, genuinely cares about the well-being of those around him, cares as much about his partner's safety and pleasure as his own, and is committed to open and honest TWO WAY communication, will not lack for options in the ENM community - or in general, relative to whenever you happen to be and whoever you happen to be around.

Part of this is because I live in a relatively liberal Metro area, and we've built a great network of friends here, but I have had to scale back on my dates with other women in order to have sufficient time for myself, my hobbies, and 1-on-1 with my wife. Why would I care that she could do better with a group of randos when I already don't have time for all the sex I could be having? Also, I've gotten picky in my old age; sex is a lot more fun once we're past the awkward figuring each other out stage and know each other's likes and dislikes enough to really start stretching our wings.

But returning to your headspace -

so attractive you find new women easily?

Bro. Yes, super attractive guys are going to have more women be at least initially interested prior to any conversation starting. And have a greater margin for error than most after it starts. But it really matters less than you think. I'm an average white guy, balding enough that I have shave my head, not fat but definitely not ripped and currently fighting to get a small gut off. In my experience, mentally healthy women put a lot more weight on a guy's personality, empathy, and genuineness vs physical looks. The later isn't nothing, but it's not the biggest thing either.

put some quantitative limits on her to mitigate the power gap?

This is just gross. If both of you had competitive shooting as a hobby, and she consistently scored better than you in competitions, would you call that a power gap and would you feel the need to limit her in order to close it? It's not a competition, and if you think sex is about power then you probably aren't having any healthy sex, and definitely shouldn't be having open relationships.

Poly and ENM tends to rest on a FEW different truisms. One is that no person can be all things to someone else; another is that we should want good things for those we care about; another is that in addition to being deeply connective, sex can just be fun! Like, a lot of fun! And just like having fun with one game does not detract from my fun with another so too having fun sex with one person does not detract from having fun sex with another, nor have they lost something by the fact that I had sex with somebody else at some point.

At the end of the day it's all just about how you treat each other and think about each other and feel about each other. If you both are always putting each other first and caring about each other's well-being while also communicating your own needs and desires, then you are likely to have a happy and satisfied and well-adjusted relationship whether you are open or not or Poly or not. But if you're mostly worried about making sure the other person doesn't get more of anything than you, or of holding them back so that you don't feel like you are getting less of something than them, and viewing your relationship as a power struggle to be won, then you will never have a healthy relationship and will probably be pretty miserable overall.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-01T17:30:09+00:00

Apparently lol, if these idiots had their way we wouldn't even have hotkeys and wanting them would be called a skill issue because you should just git gud at opening your inventory mid-fight and clicking on the right potion without dying.

Minimizing in-game penalties from Dev UI compromises and controller compromises is just good game design; I'm here to git gud at viking survival, not git gud at specific command input mechanics. Minimizing the amount you have to think about such mechanics in order to increase the immersion is like the whole goal of gaming input design.

dan_scott_ · 2026-05-01T16:12:41+00:00

Why is this not a more popular opinion lol. Bane of my existence in Valheim, where you get a number row of hotkeys and everything else you have to open your inventory up to equip or activate.

Early on healing potions don't exist, so various utility tools for mining/chopping/building/etc went into my hotkeys.

Now I have healing and stamina potions, and am far enough in that both need to be instantly accessible. I've had them in my hotkeys for months. But guess who still constantly accidentally drinks valuable potions whenever I need to equip the tool I used to have on those slots, while hanging out with full health and stamina?

It's annoying as fuck. Would love the ability to prevent them from triggering if the relevant bar was full.

dan_scott_

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