excel as an relational database

That reminds me of a story. I used to do IT consulting, years ago. One client was running their 5 person real estate office off a low quality, consumer grade, box store HP desktop repurposed as a server. All collaboration was through their U drive, plus every profile had their desktop folder redirected there.

The complaint was the classic “everything is slow”, which turned out to be “opening my spreadsheet takes 10 minutes then it’s slow”. Yeah, because that poor little “server” had a single 100 Mb jack and the owner had a 1.5 GB excel spreadsheet project where he was trying to build a relational database and property valuation tool. Six fucking heavily cross referenced tabs, some with thousands of entries. He was so proud when I asked him to explain what was going on there. He fired me when I couldn’t fix his issue without massive changes to either his excel abomination or hardware.

I had a serious love/hate relationship with that game.

Same with my partner and me. We met through mutual friends when they were visiting our area as they lived literally thousands of miles away. We hit it off and hooked up that night. We agreed nothing would come of it - we even shook hands on it!

Four months later we were a couple. A year later we relocated and moved in together. Now we’ve been married for 12 years.

Worst one night stand ever.

I really hope they make a Croque Monsieur with this pig.

I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. Unless a home is small, effectively airtight, filled with people, and the doors and windows are never opened, oxygen concentrations aren’t going to fall enough to be impactful.

Same! Mine have a passthrough mode that pumps through what the microphone picks up but lets you select how much. I leave a little on because I feel weird if I can’t hear what’s happening in my surroundings.

The screenshot or the last 11 months?

Cheaper manufacturing costs with the added “benefit” of making it hard to repair so users buy another one if it breaks

I inherited a 1960s MGB and this is absolutely true. It feels like you’re barreling around corners, but the speedometer only reads 10 MPH.

The scoring range of the RAADS–R is 0–240. A score of 65+ indicates you are likely autistic, as no neurotypical scored above 64 in the research.

My Score: 142

I’m laughing pretty hard over here. My next therapy appointment is going to be interesting.

Thanks! I’m actually kinda excited, it’s a new thing to explore!

Oh. Ohhhhh shit. I was joking around, then I read your first link out of curiosity. Then I started reading related articles.

That’s so me. My old psychiatrist and I were on the fence about if I was autistic or if we simply share some traits since I have CPTSD (thanks dad!) and ADHD, but eventually settled on the latter. This has me thinking I need to reevaluate with my new psychiatrist.

Why is it always trains?!

I love public transportation. Am I autistic?

Edit: Sorry everyone, I’m joking. Until I’m not in a following comment.

It claims to have 18k users. I didn’t see their criteria for “active”, though.

All men are people but some men are more people than others.

Yep, SDM has the right of it. One of the hardest things I had to learn is how to do nothing at all, how to be comfortable with discomfort. I always wanted to do something about intense feelings, something to act on them or make them go away. Once I learned to sit with my feelings, just seeing how I feel without any intent to judge, analyze, or do anything about them, the feelings became less intense and they’d fade much faster because I’d think about them so much less.

It’s investing in your emotional wellbeing: it’s hard at first, but future you will be happy you did as the benefits compound.

Hi! CPTSD, ADHD, and GAD here. You sound a lot like me in my early twenties, except you know you have CPTSD, maybe BPD-lite, and have the self-awareness and courage to ask for help. Internet high five, that’s awesome! Seriously, I didn’t get to where you are at for about another five years.

I’m going to call out some points of concern. I’m not trying to be a jerk or cruelly critical, it’s just what I’d worry about with myself or a friend. Feel free to ask questions: I’m about three decades ahead of you, so I have a fair bit of personal experience with working on these sorts of struggles.

we’ve talked about ideal futures and relationships and shes hinted that she wonders if she would be happier with someone whos more like her and talked about what it would be like breaking up with her bf.

Consider how you’d feel if she was your girlfriend and was discussing things like this or generally acting the way she was with you with another person. A person’s behavior in past relationships is a decent predictor of future behavior. In other words, she’d likely do it to you too.

Her bf got uncomfortable with the time she spends with me and ive noticed her pulling back

She’s changing her behavior but isn’t discussing it with you. I suspect that’s either her being uncomfortable talking about it and avoiding doing so, a “communication skills” red flag, or she isn’t aware she’s doing it at all, which is a “self-awareness” red flag. That’s two of the most important elements of any relationship: knowing what you think, need, want, and feel, and clearly communicating it.

shes literally perfect

I see multiple big warning signs about her just from what you’ve shared and I’m sure future you will as well. I see others have brought up limerence. Friendo, I am 99% certain that you’re limerencing hard. People like us tend to feel a LOT. There’s nothing wrong with that and when it’s healthy, it’s just the best! It’s something to learn to work with, though. I’ve developed methods to work with it as do many other folks like us. Lean on us some. We don’t want you to hurt.

shes the only person i talk to this much at all i dont have anyone to tell about these feelings.

I’ve been feeling really suicidal for the first time in a longtime and everything around this has been driving me to extreme emotional instability.

I just feel really alone right now and all i want is to know i matter to her like she matters to me but all my brain can think of is how worthless i am and that if i were better she would love me.

I dont know how i get through this im constantly facing abandonment fears and wanting to isolate myself to get ahead of them and have been wanting to die to escspe it all i dont know how to cope with feelings like this i just freeze.

As someone who has felt all of this, literally ALL of this, you DO NOT want to start a relationship if this where you’re at now. Why?

Cliche but true advice: you can’t be truly happy with someone else if you can’t be truly happy by yourself.

Add to this that it’s so, soooo difficult to learn to be happy by yourself if you’re in a relationship that’s acting as an emotional bandage over abandonment and anxious attachment issues (ask me how I know). It will set a tone of codependence, tying much of your stability into your perception of another person’s validation of you. That’s so hard on your mental, emotional, and even physical health, and it’s difficult for your partner too as that’s a ton of pressure for them, even if they initially enjoy it (ask me how I know. Again.). Having your partner as your primary source of support can be a nightmare. If something happens to them, that means you lose ALL that support. Had a fight and they’re angry? Support pause. She goes camping? Support be gone! You two split up? Massive, permanent support loss at the time you need it most. Plus being open to that level of emotional dependence makes you like catnip for abusers (ask me how I know. Again again. Yeah, mistakes were made.).

This probably isn’t what you want to hear, but what I think you need to hear is: please avoid serious romantic relationships until you feel confident in your psychological health. Until then, you’re much more likely to hurt yourself and others, and others are more likely to hurt you. Healthy relationships are built on stability and magnify that stability, whereas relationships built on instability will magnify the instability, and instability begets further instability. It’s a terrible cycle.

You’d benefit greatly by developing a support group that can give support equal to or greater than that provided by your partner. If you’re not seeing one already, make a part of that a therapist who can help objectively work things out with you, teach you skills to do the same on your own, and untangle some of your past trauma.

Read some self-help books, even if just to learn more about what you’re dealing with. I cannot recommend Pete Walker’s “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” and “The Tao of Fully Feeling” enough. They’re my two go-to books out of the literally dozens I’ve read. His Complex PTSD book probably saved my life and The Tao of Fully Feeling is great for anyone dealing with emotions.

I’ll end my novel now but know you’ve got this! You have at least a few internet randos rooting for you. If you have any questions, feel free to respond or DM me. Don’t be shy, I’m happy to answer anything I can!

You got it. Bears and dogs/wolves last shared a common ancestor around 55 million years ago, whereas lions and domestic cats had their ancestral split about 11M years ago.

And US society reinforces that behavior by shaming men for being vulnerable or showing weakness and teaching others that a crying or otherwise emotionally vulnerable man is something deserving of shame and contempt.

A great example is online advice articles about handling relationship issues: so much advises that stoicism is the only option, otherwise your girlfriend/wife will lose their respect and attraction for you.

I had an ex-girlfriend mock me for crying during our breakup and know many men who have encountered similar shaming treatment from other men and women. It’s brutal.

I’m a microbiologist. I can speak from experience (my grad research required attempting this a few times) that entirely sterilizing anything of microbes is incredibly difficult regardless of technology level. They are tenacious little fuckers. I’ll lay this out for anyone interested.

Gotta Kill 'Em All: Most microbes are fairly easy to kill using simple physical and/or chemical means. Some are more difficult, like spore formers, bacteria that produce little personal suspension pods when conditions are rough.

What matters is you start with huge quantities of microbes, they’re everywhere, and you can’t see them. All you need is one to survive to potentially reproduce into vast legions of descendants. Even NASA’s protocol is about lowering the total number, thereby reducing, not eliminating, the probability of causing an issue. Miss the wrong microbe in the wrong environment and you’ve inoculated a planet.

Checking Your Work: How do you verify that you successfully sterilized your tool? You might say culturing - swab it and grow that on some type(s) of media. That’s NASA’s protocol! It’s just not very effective.

Not all microbes grow on all media. There are an estimated one trillion microbial species on the planet and we only know how to culture less than about 0.5% of them. The rest are a mystery, largely uncharacterized*. Most sterility testing is for known microbes of consequence, not every microbe in existence.

Microbiology is very often a science of slapping your tool or workspace and exclaiming “good enough!”, not absolute precision and 100% efficacy, both of which are practically required if you want to be sure you don’t inadvertently pull a “smallpox blankets from space”.

*Fun fact: Sometimes people get sick with something atypical, that doesn’t get IDed through standard testing. I worked for a time identifying these pathogens via gene sequencing. There was a whole lot of “that’s a new one” out there.