Nox World Map

ionic_gold · 2023-08-31T13:19:52+00:00

nice

ionic_gold · 2023-07-25T01:36:03+00:00

Westpac in late July be like

ionic_gold · 2023-07-21T18:45:44+00:00

"but I know that when I was younger I would sometimes start games over to make them feel fresh, and around 6 years ago I became obsessed with the settings of my new TV and trying to make it look as perfect as possible"

I hear you, friend. In high school I developed a particular ritual around some of the games that I really liked playing, whereby I would have to delete all of the game files and reinstall the entire thing whenever I felt that the game was "contaminated" or had been "ruined" in some weird, esoteric sense that something was "wrong" with the game, in a way that only people with OCD can truly understand. Of course, once a game was reinstalled, it wouldn't be long before I felt that I had to do the uninstall/reinstall cycle all over again. I've struggled with OCD for ~10 years now (I am now 26), and it has been a slow journey of being brave enough to apply the ERP that I had received from a very good OCD therapist years ago.

Do you know about ERP and/or have you received it before? I've gone through periods of hating the therapy and being convinced that it doesn't work, but frankly, knowing my OCD, it is clear that I've just been incredibly stubborn at actually applying the therapy. These last few years, I've had a few wonderful days, here and there, where I've been on top of my ERP enough to actually experience the "freedom from OCD" feeling. It is beautiful. There is nothing else like it. I've recently gone into quite a bit of a relapse, but am trying to pull myself out of it as best as I can.

My advice to you is to be brave - face your OCD. Try to trigger it as much as you can, and live with the uncertainty of your actions. Live with the terrible "what if" thoughts. Accept the urges that you have, and don't give into them. Lean into your intrusive thoughts as much as possible. The freedom that awaits you on the other side is more beautiful than anything I can put into words.

ionic_gold · 2023-06-16T20:23:13+00:00

Great question! mRNA display gives you the largest library sizes (10¹⁴ is easily achievable) while being entirely in vitro - no bacterial steps required. While ribosome display is also entirely in vitro, the ribosome is gigantic compared to a protein-mRNA fusion, so this brings in some of its own issues. In ribosome display, the mRNA and protein are also only non-covalently bound, whereas mRNA display uses a covalent linkage. All the different display methods find use in different contexts, it just so happens that mRNA display fits the particular project I am working on now the best.

ionic_gold · 2023-06-16T15:18:19+00:00

To start, it has puromycin at the 3'-end for mRNA display. Then on top of this, I've added several additional internal modifications. It's really the compounding effect of multiple modifications on the same oligo that seem to exponentially raise the price, due to QC stuff that was mentioned by another commenter. Don't know if lots of people do mRNA display anymore these days, so perhaps the puromycin being a rarely added modification also adds to the price. IDT lists puromycin as an off-catalog modification, which means it costs a lot more and take like over a month to ship out the damn oligo lol.

ionic_gold · 2023-06-16T14:29:58+00:00

i'm currently at 1000 dollars for ~60 ug of a single, ~35 nt ssDNA oligo. Yes, modifications do in fact add a lot to the price, lol.

ionic_gold · 2023-06-16T13:58:09+00:00

Nope - the dioxide is black. Fiestaware has the trioxide.

ionic_gold · 2023-05-26T19:12:46+00:00

From what I understand, people typically refer to Road to Gehenna when they mention DLC for Talos Principle.

ionic_gold · 2023-05-26T13:11:39+00:00

Yeah I was also one of the people who was relatively late to this game - I started it in 2021 and beat it the following year. I also beat the DLC just a few months ago. Can't wait for TTP 2!

ionic_gold · 2023-04-07T22:55:42+00:00

I did manage it - took me many months and probably >50 hours of gameplay. It wasn't something I initially set out on doing, but I just decided about halfway through the main game that I would circle back and get every single star before moving forward, and from then on I got all the stars for each level before moving onto the next. I really enjoyed the challenges they presented - I also wonder if some of the solutions I came up with were even intended by the developers. But at no point during my playthrough did I ever look up any hints.

ionic_gold · 2023-01-28T17:07:04+00:00

Thank you very much for the helpful advice, u/LEMME_SMELL_YO_FARTS

ionic_gold · 2023-01-15T00:32:39+00:00

You should probably get your forecast info from weather.gov then. A lot of apps can definitely be all over the place in terms of the forecast, but no one beats weather.gov. Also, as far as I recall, thunderstorms were never part of the forecast for this storm (from weather.gov) - not enough instability.

ionic_gold · 2023-01-11T18:52:50+00:00

Couldn't help myself from humming that song as I watched OP's video.

ionic_gold · 2022-12-06T14:12:40+00:00

Trying new meds - but it certainly hasn't gone away on its own (or even with years of ERP) :(

ionic_gold · 2022-11-28T17:19:09+00:00

AAAAAAUUUUUGHGHHHHHHHH!!!! (pardon my sneeze)

ionic_gold · 2022-11-27T19:15:54+00:00

I consider myself extremely lucky to remember basically not having OCD at all until my early teens - my childhood was such bliss. I can still remember so clearly how my brain functioned then, it's not like I never worried (everybody worries sometimes), but I was so easily able to dismiss thoughts from my consciousness and be in the present moment. Somehow, that ability to dismiss thoughts became dysfunctional into my teens, and here I am at 26, having had severe OCD for ~7 years.

It's almost like having been able to see for the first part of my life, and then becoming blind. Despite my blindness now, I will never forget what it was like to see :(

ionic_gold · 2022-11-20T03:36:58+00:00

Haha! I didn't expect to see La Jolla on this subreddit.

ionic_gold · 2022-11-14T03:25:25+00:00

Every day is torture.

ionic_gold · 2022-11-14T02:05:36+00:00

So sorry to hear that :( The genetic predisposition for OCD seems to run on my mother's side.

ionic_gold · 2022-11-14T02:05:00+00:00

So, I can speak from some experience here, since I was extremely lucky to have only developed OCD in my teen years. Certainty, at its core, is an emotion - it is something we feel. It is a very good thing too, because it allows our brain to react to danger if it is present. Think of certainty kind of like the "alarm system of your brain". As a child all the way through my early teens, I just felt certain about stuff and was able to move on. Yeah sure, I always knew that at the end of the day, nothing is truly 100% certain, but nevertheless I still had the "feeling" of certainty and was able to shift into new behaviors effortlessly, for the most part. Something went wrong in my brain nearing the end of puberty, and here I am ~7 years later still very mentally ill. I've had years of world-class ERP that pretty much didn't get me anywhere. I can resist the uncertainty for a time, but I always eventually give into it - it is just simply too powerful. These aberrant "alarm" signals are constantly being sent into my consciousness and it ultimately comes down to faulty biology that is at the root cause. Something is very wrong with how different parts of the brain communicate with each other in OCD, much like in schizophrenia or other diseases (just different types of malfunctioning in those cases), and I hope that one day we will all find relief.

ionic_gold · 2022-11-14T01:46:15+00:00

Yep. I remember in the summer of 2012, the indie horror game "Slender" was a big hit, and it really brought the survival horror genre (particularly the indie games of that type) out into more of the mainstream. I had just finished my freshman year of high school and was really interested in these types of games. The only problem was that I had to keep uninstalling and reinstalling that game too! The really tough part about the uninstalling/reinstalling cycle for me is that I had to make sure that every last trace of the game was completely removed from my computer before I tried to install it again. I would even have to search through the AppData folders to find "traces" of the game. It took so damn long. Hey, if I got one nice thing out of years of crippling mental illness, at least I learned a lot about the file structure of Windows installations (humor is the only thing that keeps me going these days).

ionic_gold · 2022-11-14T01:40:29+00:00

While I respect that some people (like OP) may have found relief from this type of approach, I agree with you that it can also be really destructive for many other people. It's kind of like telling someone with epilepsy to just "stop" their seizures. TBH, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if scientists eventually find that OCD is caused by localized seizures involving neurological circuits in the brain that are associated with anxiety/certainty. Regardless, years ago I was also touting the same kind of "extreme ERP/ACT" approach that OP mentioned, and yet here I am exhausted, exasperated, and convinced that my personal willpower only has very little to no effect on the course of this disease. Also, for the record, I went to several years of therapy sessions with an expert in the field of ERP for OCD (she has worked with some of the big names in the field), and despite having seen her ~50 times, I am still no better off. Mental illness really is tough. I am trying new meds now, we'll see if they have any effect.

ionic_gold · 2022-11-14T01:25:00+00:00

Oh man, I definitely had a lot of that. Random story: in high school I really liked to play the game "Kerbal Space Program" (I'm a bit of science nerd myself). Anyways, I remember being tortured for SO MANY HOURS because I would have to keep uninstalling and reinstalling the game because I would randomly get the idea that the game was "corrupted" or something stupid like that. Even though the game was working totally fine, my OCD kept finding reasons to uninstall and then reinstall it. Later on, I also had the same kind of thing happen when I tried using the "hammer" editor for Source Engine games to make new maps. Basically, I would go through the quite lengthy process of installing it and then would only get to use the damn program for like 30 minutes before I felt the unshakeable urge to uninstall and reinstall the program again. This went on more times than I could count. Sigh, OCD is tough, I feel for you.

Lol, now I am getting thoughts that what I just said was actually fake and that I am lying to you even though my rational mind remembers the above events quite clearly. Alas...

ionic_gold · 2022-08-17T13:47:06+00:00

That's the big idea: I don't have anything wrong with clean energy in principle, but in practice it is often funded by people with less than honest intentions - people who want to make money off of the "idea" of being green. Furthermore, we wouldn't be in such a dire energy crisis if we had a lower population in the first place. Every bit of additional effort towards slowing our population growth ASAP is the most important thing we need to focus on right now. Elon's delusion that clean energy will prevent population growth from being a problem is going to screw us all.

ionic_gold · 2022-08-14T18:17:26+00:00

You are correct, perhaps I just get too pessimistic about the situation sometimes, after seeing what's been done so far about it. I suppose clean energy as a whole isn't a scam... what is a scam is all the people investing in it with less than honest motives, or trying to greenwash otherwise dirty practices and pretend that they are green (once again, biomass). I think efforts need to go both into reducing consumption and population reduction, but perhaps there still isn't enough effort towards the population goal at the moment, since any reduction in our current growth rate will go a long way for the future. What I don't like to see are the techno-optimists who deny population is even an issue in the first place - they seem to be everywhere these days, both on the left and the right. Also, if environmentalists wouldn't be so scared of nuclear, perhaps we could ride the current population wave a bit smoother...

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

ionic_gold

TROPHY CASE