I was thinking a “poorly aimed” bottle rocket “from a neighbor kid”.

I’ll pit my Mario McRlwain against your Bobson Dugnutt any day.

There has been a lot of talk about their intent to change, but I fear I still see them leaning hard on the same maladaptive coping mechanisms that helped get us here. It’s still early yet, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned. I drew up a plan that I’m following, so I’m just waiting until I have enough info to know to continue or divorce.

I’m sorry you’re feeling frustrated and hopeless about your relationship. It’s really demoralizing when the other person doesn’t want to hear there’s an issue, or understands but there are issues with them working on it. I’ve experienced both from both sides and understand it’s often more complex than it seems, but it still comes down to if they have the commitment and follow through necessary to make positive, sustained change, because that’s hard to do. Really hard.

If I may provide some unsolicited advice, couples counseling can be great. If you go that route or have already and want to try again, I’d recommend seeing a therapist that specializes in couples and is experienced in providing therapy for any conditions present, like ADHD, borderline personality disorder, or PTSD. The Gottman Method is great. Couples counseling is also most effective in conjunction with individual counseling, so partners can really dig into their own experience and what they bring to the relationship.

Better! We’re working it out, so that’s good, but we have over a decade of things to go through, plus working on ourselves as individuals. It’s exhausting.

My partner was the one to pull the divorce card, actually with no warning whatsoever. It’s so appropriate for a relationship that turned out to be significantly defined by poor communication.

In retrospect, the critical signs were pretty obvious, but we both mistook them for other things. We had become very emotionally disconnected, but we were preparing for a huge move out of the country with a small pack of house pets so each of us thought that’s why the other was stressed. This actually was true for me while my partner was stressed because they wanted to run screaming but didn’t feel comfortable saying anything.

We had both been withholding some major concerns about the other throughout our relationship, so each had a second, secret narrative that wasn’t being discussed or challenged in couples counseling. Plus we both have CPTSD from shitty childhoods and have cross-reactive behavior. Lots of angst here.

This stuff can sneak up on you if you don’t have healthy habits that help identify and prevent it, but it’s clear as day once you learn. We’re getting there and we’ll be better people for it, but it’s brutal sometimes and we’re just at the beginning.

I highly recommend solving the important ones and learning to let the rest go, speaking as someone whose marriage just exploded over exactly that.

That sounds just like my ex. I remember our last flight together.

Flight takes off at 14:00? No problem, it takes 30 minutes to get to the airport and we have to check our bags in at least 45 minutes in advance, plus “undefined overhead”, so we’ll leave at 12:15.

What then happened is 12:00 hits. Nothing is planned in advance, so we call around to get a cab. Oh, none are available for 25 minutes? Shit. Cab shows up at 12:30. Late but still good. We arrive at the airport at 13:00, thankfully without traffic. We wait in line twenty minutes to check our baggage, five minutes late but they still take it. We hit security at 13:30, but luckily the line moves fairly quickly and we get through at 13:45. We run to our gate while the airline calls for us over the PA system, arriving at 13:55, just before they close the doors. We only made it because the flight was slightly delayed.

She couldn’t understand why this wasn’t good for me. We still made it, right? Yep. And that’s one of the many reasons she’s my ex.

Tell me you have a recipe. I need it. NEED.

Yes! This exactly. I’m learning Italian and having a dictionary open on one side would be awesome.

It’s an expression and might be an old people thing as I’m older. It’s something like “Cats are going to cat”, i.e., cats will do cat things as it’s in their nature.

Going, presumably.

I’m there with you. I’m properly allergic to a few foods I really love, including almonds and (non-celiac) wheat. My wheat allergy is just mild and I can avoid some of the fallout if I pop a Benadryl first. It’s likely an extension of my severe grass allergy, which also doesn’t kill me.

Many people don’t understand food allergies, thinking food allergy means instant anaphylaxis. That’s when you see these “purity test” bullshit posts where the waiter refuses to serve the person “faking” an allergy for their own safety (and I’m sure everyone claps). I can eat about a pancake’s worth of wheat once every week or two and just be a bit uncomfortable for awhile. If I ate like a whole pancake breakfast? It gets ugly and uncomfortable, sometimes for a few days.

So if I snag a bite of my partner’s pancake, I’m not faking an allergy. My self-control just sucks sometimes.

Same, it’s great. Battery life is extended, the fan isn’t screaming, and I have great process continuity between devices since I’m usually connecting to a central point.

Great article! I’ve been trying to explain VPNs to my family members for years and it just doesn’t stick. I’ll send this their way next time.

As far as I understand, a certain level of data hygiene will do wonders for even a basic setup.

For example, on our server, we have a container that maintains a kill-switched connection to a subscription VPN. Several other containers, including one with a browser, can only route their traffic through that container, and we don’t use any of them for anything personal or outside their intended purpose. We basically act as if there are completely different people on that connection, like we have a secret second family. Remote activity is done through a self-hosted VPN to the home network, then VNC to the containers.

If we want to use the subscription VPN on other devices, we connect to a different location and possibly use Tor browser for extra anonymity. No activity or information overlap, ever.

I miss the old days, when the opposite seemed true about every other major release, though the early bars were low so that was straight progress for 1.0 through 95.

Did you eat it? Because they’re delicious.

I assume the spiders would have died, and now you have delicious, brined cooking bananas!

Same, though mine wasn’t always like that.

I see the point being made; however, how the fuck else might I jam several clauses into one compound megasentence - overwrought and peppered with purple prose - if not with multiple types of punctuation? Should I summarize, streamline? Clearly not: all thoughts should be expressed in full, replete with all irrelevant details. Perhaps remove unneeded, intra-sentence explanations and asides (like this one, which I’m quite fond of) of details obvious to the reader?! Never!

No AI could write with matching convolution — especially when, unlike me, it cannot do so on the toilet.

Seriously! BoF 1-3 with modern graphics and controls would be great .