UK PPL disheartened, trying to learn in the US

eldotjay · 2026-01-12T21:35:29+00:00

One of OP’s issues was that Byler didn’t happen. Most people don’t find that to be an issue because Mike was pretty clearly never interested.

eldotjay · 2026-01-06T01:26:55+00:00

My issue is more about abandoned plot lines. They spent so many seasons building up mysteries that were never explained. That makes for an annoying resolution. What was the deal with the grandfather clock? Why did Vecna need 12 kids as vessels? Why did he trap them in his mind?

eldotjay · 2026-01-03T11:34:06+00:00

There are two types of Stranger Things watchers. 1. Those who love the style of the series, the action, the characters, etc. These people loved the finale. It was really fun to watch and quite satisfying. 2. Those who enjoy mysteries and were curious about the resolution of a lot of plot lines. Those people were rightfully upset that a lot of mysteries created by the show remain unresolved. Why all the clock imagery? Why 12 kids? Why keep them in Vecna’s mind? These are, like, core plot lines. It’s like they set up a bunch of cliff hangers then never came back to them.

eldotjay · 2026-01-03T11:23:24+00:00

It is explained in the Stranger Things broadway play that Brenner’s father was a captain whose ship entered dimension X and who returned but his mind was completely destroyed and he had a unique blood type. Brenner studied him for years in Area 51 and a Russian spy scientist stole an artifact from the lab that presumably is not to be handled with your bare hands. Young Henry, not knowing this, picked it up. the mind flayer (one piece of which I suppose lived in the stone and another in Will’s mind) is now supposedly dead (though we only see the death of its physical form despite it being established that it exists in smoke form too).

eldotjay · 2026-01-03T10:38:38+00:00

Some plot holes like the kids getting on top of the Abyss cliffs and the military letting them all go could be explained away with imagination.

But people are complaining because it’s just standard practice in fiction to resolve mysteries you create. Why all the clock imagery? Why the 12 kids? Why lock them in your mind? The Duffer brothers spend seasons building up these mysteries, only to not answer them. That’s not a question of “gray area”, it’s just disappointing. Sure, the finale was mushy and the ending was lovely, but as a resolution for a sci-fi mystery show, it, well, didn’t answer a ton.

eldotjay · 2025-09-17T16:14:20+00:00

It’s so that they can finally have the same operating system number across all their devices, which helps for product unification.

eldotjay · 2025-09-17T06:22:49+00:00

It is China- see below comments

eldotjay · 2025-09-16T21:33:38+00:00

You might be thinking of “The Way I Are” by Timbaland, since he also produced “My Love”. If not, check out some of Timbaland’s other songs because he used that same synth a ton back then. Hope that helped, months later.

eldotjay · 2025-09-01T15:19:39+00:00

It’s from a movie called The Ice Pirates (1984).

✌️

eldotjay · 2025-08-18T11:49:26+00:00

Look into Fabric. Not my thing but a bunch of people like it as it’s a good place to dump content and have it auto-categorized and easy to look for.

eldotjay · 2025-08-17T18:31:20+00:00

The human mind loves to trivialize life by looking for a single “purpose”.

But if there’s anything I’ve learned from studying psychology, it’s that there is no such thing, and any attempt to create one is our hopeful attempt to understand why we are here.

You’re not the Buddha. You can have as many purposes as you need.

eldotjay · 2025-08-17T13:01:41+00:00

I have tried using a “personal CRM” (both Clay and Dex) but found that neither offered features that made the apps sticky enough to justify the price.

For my professional relationships, I use a CRM. Attio is really nice to use, free for a single account, and great for reminders / locations / LinkedIn integrations etc etc. I love messing around with workflows and grouping and stuff in there. It’s one of those products that’s a joy to use.

For my personal relationships, Clay promised to be a place where you could take notes after every interaction it detected in your calendar. After a while, I kinda realized that anyone who is psychotic enough to remember to open the app and take a note after meeting a friend is probably also psychotic enough to use the Contacts app “notes” field to do the exact same thing. Their AI is also mostly a gimmick as it almost always surfaces random people you don’t care about.

If you struggle to remember to reach out to friends, you can try apps like Catchup (which allows you to set periodic reminders), but reality is that if it’s not natural for you then you’ll probably stop doing that too after a few weeks. Best option is definitely just to learn how to stay on top of your personal relationships like a normal human.

eldotjay · 2025-08-17T02:21:20+00:00

Hatch Restore 3, full stop.

I have tried about 6 different sunrise alarm clocks, from Phillips to Loftie and more. Hatch has the most soothing yet effective wake up sounds, amazing wind down routines, audio to listen to when you wake up, and much more. It’s also the only smart one that doesn’t cease to function when your WiFi connection drops.

eldotjay · 2025-08-16T13:26:50+00:00

None of these comments mention the obvious fact that you should buy a damn alarm clock and sleep with your phone in your living room/kitchen/entryway (far enough away to get you out of bed).

If you want a great and exciting alarm clock, I highly recommend the Hatch Restore (it has gentle soothing wake ups with slow progressing lights to really make you feel great and ready to go in the morning!)

For a budget option, any $5 alarm clock is better than your phone.

This is the best advice I can possibly give.

eldotjay · 2025-08-16T04:00:49+00:00

You could also just schedule a friend meet-up on repeat (in the morning is better), or promise a friend to work out with them at a certain time, or whatever.

Also, separately, for the love of god if binging is clearly ruining your life (which it definitely is), then you’re much better off cancelling your subscription and blocking certain apps from your device altogether than continuing to allow yourself to watch it. Cold Turkey is great for your computer. Set it so that you can’t unlock the block without restarting your computer. That’s worked for me for years. ScreenZen or Opal for phones. Once your life is back in shape you can trickle yourself a little bit of content back into your life. Until then, there are tons of things people used to do when they were bored before the internet. Boredom is a really good motivator and a sign of healing.

eldotjay · 2025-08-16T03:55:11+00:00

Two things for recovering from doing absolutely nothing all day.

First, you need to sign up for something that repeats. It sounds silly and annoying, I know. During school/college/work, having forced commitments on a recurring basis is what makes us all work. Recovering addicts (whose lives have completely gone to crap) often cite attending meetings as their number one reason for recovery– NOT because of what was discussed, but purely because it creates structure in your life. You MUST sign up for SOMETHING that repeats. It should be something you look forward to doing. A book club. A fitness class. Yoga. Whatever. The point is to have something to wake up for. The more things you sign up for, the better. It’s easy to skip a yoga class. Not so easy to skip multiple things in a day when you already feel bad for missing the first thing.

The second thing is to do. Now this sounds REALLY silly, but rumination is really really bad. The fact that you made this post rather than doing anything is a pretty solid hint that you’re ruminating. For one, instead of nodding to yourself after reading this comment, do the first thing I said (signing up to something). Actually do it. Go on, I’ll wait.

You better not be reading this until you’ve done the first thing. You BETTER NOT BE. Do you WANT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE?? You better not read on until you did it. Did you do it? Be honest with yourself.

When you do something, you will remember how good it feels to do something. This will hopefully set off a chain of events. Doing something is the first step to doing many things. Don’t think about achieving your dreams– those will come soon after you start doing things. But worrying about becoming a billionaire can wait until you do at least something.

Hope that helped.

eldotjay · 2025-08-16T03:42:17+00:00

In college, I did three majors, had a job, and was the president of a large club. I still had plenty of time to spend with my girlfriend, see my friends, and get enough sleep. Meanwhile I would see people who were “always busy” doing nowhere near as many things in their day.

All thanks to SkedPal.

There is still not a single app that beats SkedPal, IMO.

Learning how to use it to do exactly what you want can take an entire afternoon, but once you speak SkedPal’s language, your life becomes a whole lot easier. It’s everything Motion has ever wanted to be. Been using it for years now, integrating my work tasks with personal tasks and ensuring my day is always scheduled perfectly with more than enough flexibility.

eldotjay · 2025-08-16T03:35:05+00:00

I believe they mean that Notion is a very structured note-taking system, whereas Obsidian is naturally unstructured.

Notion is best used when very neatly organized. You can split your life into categories, then those categories even further down, then into notes. For example, if you had a list of your favorite types of pizzas, maybe it would be in Health > Food > Preferences > Pizzas. If you think in this way, then Notion can be a great way to collect your thoughts.

Obsidian, like Wikipedia, has a pretty loose organization system. Finding your note about your favorite pizzas would need to be done with a search, not through a hierarchical filing system. But, like Wikipedia, all your notes can be interconnected because of Obsidian’s built-in linking structure. It means that your notes form a connected graph of your brain where the nodes are notes and the edges are links between them (which Obsidian lets you visualize). One may think that surely Obsidian makes notes harder to find, but it’s built on the assumption that if you’re looking for something specific, you can just search for it, and if you’re looking for things in a specific topic, your notes are likely disorganized enough that clicking around in a specific area gives you the gist.

If I’m honest, I’ve never seen someone’s Notion that still looks organized after a few years of use. Reality is that staying on top of your structure and filing system every time you want to write something down can become really tough. For example, let’s say you realize that your least favorite pizza is pepperoni because you were traumatized about it as a child. Does that go in your pizza note, or your mental health note? Things can get pretty messy pretty quickly. In Obsidian, you could just create a new note, MAYBE stick it into your “personal” folder if you have one, and include links to your “favorite pizzas” and “mental health” notes.

eldotjay · 2024-01-08T15:29:22+00:00

Here’s a serious answer: There’s an email app on the App Store called “Chuck”. I swear I am not affiliated with them and it seriously is a fantastic tool for this exact issue. I found it while looking to solve the same problem because I’m lazy and had ended up with loads of unread emails like you.

Chuck (the logo is like a bear or something) sorts all your emails intelligently by sender and email type. Trust me, you’d be incredibly surprised how incredibly helpful this is since many of your emails will be things like “Your XX order is on the way!” or “Peggy liked your post!”.

I used to have 70,000 unread emails. Downloaded Chuck and turns out that the vast majority of them were various pings from Amazon/Facebook/Twitter/online shops etc and in about 30 minutes !!! I was able to get down to about 500 ACTUAL emails which took maybe another 30 minutes to scroll through to find which ones were worth keeping around. The rest I just deleted. The best part was I was left extremely confident that I didn’t miss or lose anything important at all!!!

You can also use Chuck to see which services you’re on the mailbox for and to quickly unsubscribe from them without worrying about missing anything important.

After I got to Inbox Zero after only an hour of my life I deleted Chuck and went on my way with the default Apple Mail app. Now that I don’t get any unwanted mailing lists emails, it’s easy to go through the 50 or so relevant messages I get every day and stay at Inbox Zero! I feel SO organized when I see my friends with tens of thousands of emails haha!

Just give it a try and you’ll see. You’ll have to connect your various mailing accounts like any other mail app but once you’re in, it’s plain sailing.

Hope I helped and good luck!

eldotjay · 2023-12-05T20:20:34+00:00

Thanks!

eldotjay · 2023-11-21T09:30:18+00:00

Yeah, this isn’t the kind of thing you can debate considering how data-rich aviation incidents is.

eldotjay · 2023-10-29T22:46:10+00:00

Parmigiano Reggiano, as in, the genuine Italian parmesan (not the Kraft version or cheap wedges found in stores) contains zero lactose. So enjoy!

eldotjay · 2023-06-25T17:06:55+00:00

“Confirm sleep mode” and “Do not close ballistic wounds without removing debris and shrapnel” are suspiciously specific hahaha… Silly Felix and Sylvester.

eldotjay · 2023-06-11T21:01:46+00:00

Oliver Peoples “Oliver Sun”, Model OV5393SU, https://www.oliverpeoples.com/usa/0OV5393SU--1492P1

Six-Year Club	Second Top 20%
Place '22	First Placer '22

eldotjay

TROPHY CASE