CentipedeFarrier

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Fun fact about phobias!

You can frequently cure them with pills and a truly slight bit of effort!

Propranolol, a beta blocker that has been in use since the 60s mostly for blood pressure control, has few notable negative side effects, but it has the absolutely -lovely- side effect of blocking fear signals from the amygdala if you have the stones to expose yourself to your triggers while taking it. This exposure coupled with a totally not over-reacting nervous system, can mostly or totally cure phobias.

I watched a documentary about it, where they used it solely in conjunction with exposure therapy (not constantly taking the med), and they had amazing results on common fears like spiders and heights. I realized I had an old prescription, and went “well fuck, why not try to cure my social anxiety? That’s basically a phobia, anyway!” And so I started taking it again instead of the med I was on for blood pressure. The effect happens at doses too low to be noticeable if you don’t need the pressure reduction, but it also works when you have blood pressure doses.

Anyway after about a month of taking it and living life as normal I realized yep, it worked. I don’t panic about going out anymore.

So hey, if you have an irrational fear of something, talk to your doctor.

Here is a probably biased bit of info about it and how it works (it was the best I could find without doing tons of digging for the specific study on phobias, which used 40mg), direct from the people who make it.

https://propranolol.com/propranolol-for-anxiety/

My first one, which was downtown, did the exact same thing, but didn’t even have enough parking for the people with passes, so everyone parked juuuuuuuuuust off campus and didn’t pay. All the houses within a 3 block radius were owned by either faculty or people who rented them to students, so they didn’t care at all. The only students who really used the lots were either living on campus and had to pay to store the vehicle anyway, or disabled people who didn’t have to pay.

The second one I transferred to, however, was amazing. Every building could be accessed via tunnels, and was set up like a wheel with spokes so each building connected to the center as well as its neighboring buildings, iirc. You could navigate the entire campus without going outside (Midwest winters). Every building also had a huge parking lot nearby, which was free because the campus was not close to anything but residential housing; campus was completely surrounded by conservation study acreage, as ecological sciences were very important there. Busses came mostly as scheduled. It was a dream of a place to go to school, honestly.

I disagree that violence taints your soul permanently.

This depends upon your own morals, personal justifications, and probably a ton of other factors.

I think the idea is that it’s something you are going to have to live with, one way or another. You might hurt an innocent by accident, do more damage than intended (most people would struggle to live with having killed someone, for example), or even harm yourself irreparably. You might cause people to look at you differently, you might have the wrong information, you might change the course of your life permanently.

Violence is a very complicated subject, but perpetrators of it are, indeed, always marked in some way by it, just like every other experience you have.

We have supper clubs here, which are apparently highly regional… as in I never saw one when I was more than a few hours out of my region, and that was several years of looking. Meanwhile nearly every town here has at least one.

It’s mostly boomers, tho you’ll find considerable millennial representation these days as well (not typically much younger people). A nice low ceiling, dim light, carpeted place that expects you to sit for a drink or two and socialize before food, take your order long before you are seated at your table sort of thing. Slow, quieter, intimate, and so popular they are gathering spots for old people. Also the food is usually killer, and/or stuff you can’t get elsewhere, for decent small town prices. No poker machines tho.

Same, I get tons and tons of survey request texts for some reason. I report them as spam, block, and move on. Too big a risk that it’s a data harvesting front looking for targets or something, since the uptick in number of texts and groups sending them in the last two-ish years has been massive…

Depends who they define as “customers”, probably. The little people using the stuff aren’t customers, in their eyes.

I can be asleep at AN 8-o’clock, but will be neither falling asleep nor waking within at least an hour of either of them.

My man’s definitely got one of these bad boys clipped to his belt. (Yes, the blades fold up)

Not technically, but they got expelled for it, so yes.

As someone who wore nothing but superhero flip-flops through the entirety of high school in the Great Lakes region, yeah it was neither practical nor particularly socially acceptable. But they flashed lights when I walked. I never had light-up shoes as a little kid, and these were marketed for “kids at heart” so, tradeoff. 🤷🏻

I don’t know about this device specifically, since it seems a bit too specialized for plausible deniability and I’m not really sure what the regulations surrounding this specific market are, but a lot of times not being available through insurance is actually an effort to keep costs down for the uninsured and underinsured, as medical devices are regulated much more strictly than things which can be purchased by anyone who wants one, and meeting those regulations and undergoing testing and whatever else is super expensive.

All those weird “as seen on tv” gadgets are that sort of thing, where you go “who is that even for?” because they show able-bodied people using them so as not to imply the thing is a disability aid.

How awkward are they to use?

I tried to get security to approve using that or something similar for work, but nope. Too sensitive of a job to allow that much access, I guess.

I tried messing with the flags in chrome to allow dark mode default natively as well, but that broke a bunch of stuff, instead.

I do use that stuff on my own devices though :)

Very possibly. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be always, like there are medications that cause sensitivity to light as a side effect.

There isn’t really much to be done about it, unfortunately, other than learning to recognize what triggers it and doing your best to avoid or reduce exposure to those environments. But even that can make a huge difference. I try not to drive at night for the same reasons you do.

Maybe pay attention to the actual light levels from the window and see if brighter days are more headache inducing. In office buildings it could also be from fluorescent lights, those are horrible, especially if you can see the flicker.

I had a job in which I was seated at a computer in front of a window wall facing southwest. Like I was facing the window to see my computer. I wasn’t right next to said window, but it was the entire wall so it genuinely didn’t matter. There wasn’t really anywhere in our office that wasn’t looking at that window wall.

I’m photophobic (aka abnormally sensitive to light, it causes pain and headaches) and lemme tell you, I hated working there. Even sunglasses didn’t help in the afternoon, and I’d go home with the worst headaches.

I dislike light mode for the same reason even if it’s less extreme. It’s just so much light. I hate that it’s the default for websites and there’s usually no option to change it.

Got in a literal fistfight in middle school using that first one. Pretty sure they didn’t understand it, and lashed out from ignorance.

Oh good, I still have room for more! For a while I was caught up to my age and got a new one every year to celebrate, but then I got old and took a bunch of the more irritating ones out.

Edit: oops, it says nose. Missed that. Disregard.

I find it much easier to believe ICE are lying, and these things aren’t actually happening at all (which has been the case with the footage we’ve seen from similar claims) but that’s all good stuff too :)

I’d be happy if the narrative they are pushing was actually true, I just don’t think it is. It’s too consistent to be real.

It’s amazing how seemingly everyone got the memo to start ramming ice vehicles and targeting “officers” at the exact same time, like a coordinated organization or something. Like every single one of these allegations have been basically the same script, and they think it’s somehow believable when the follow-up of said offensive maneuver is to get shot while fleeing?

Make it make sense!