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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Sounds like there might be a problem with your sinuses.

    My own sinuses are kind of messed up, and they get inflamed and swell up as soon as I get a cold which makes me stuffed up even if there’s no mucus. But all the mucus I do get doesn’t drain properly, so I have to obsessively blow my nose every 10 minutes or else it just gets packed up inside and I get a sinus infection. I also pay close attention to the color; clear or pale yellow is good, green is getting concerning, and brown means sound the alarm, sinus infection is imminent.

    Have you tried a neti pot? It works well to help irrigate my sinuses without feeling like I’m trying to force my brains out onto the tissue.




  • My first camera was a Voigtländer Vito 2, don’t know the exact age but it’s from the 1950s. My grandmother gave it to me when I expressed interest in film photography, she said she hadn’t touched it in decades so I might as well have it. As soon as I put a roll through it and got the photos back, I was hooked. Even though most of the pictures were underexposed, I knew I wanted to keep shooting film.

    After talking to my uncle about this, he rooted around in his closet and gave me my second camera: a Pentax K1000. Super chunky and heavy compared to the Voigtländer, so I felt more confident taking it with me places without breaking it.

    I just picked up a third, a Nikon FE along with some telephoto lenses. I haven’t put a roll through it yet, but I’m excited to try.



  • I watch long videos on my TV (45 min - 1 hr) and YouTube has the audacity to shove minute+ long ad reels in my face every 15 minuets, claiming “fewer ads for this long video.” Bullshit. I have learned however that if you go to give feedback on the ad and flag it as inappropriate, it skips all the ads in that reel and sends you right back to the video! I can get past unskippable ads in a few seconds this way.





  • In 2021, I was riding an Amtrak train when it derailed at 80 mph. Several of the cars, including the one I was in, fell onto their sides and slid a significant distance along the ground. Three people were killed.

    After spending the night in a hotel, they arranged for me and several other passengers to get on another train to get us home. I didn’t think much of it, I just wanted to get home, but the moment the train got up to speed I realized I had made a mistake. I spent the entire journey in a state of extreme stress, on the verge of crying. This train (the Empire Builder) is timed so that you get to sit in the diner car and eat dinner while passing through the most scenic part of the trip, the Rocky Mountains of western Montana and northern Idaho. But I didn’t enjoy any of it. I remember staring at my dinner, desperately trying to hold myself together, wincing every time there was a bang or jolt (and for those who’ve never been on an Amtrak train - there are a lot of those).

    I had never experienced an anxiety attack before, and based on this experience I never want to have one again. The train got to my home station at about six in the morning, and I didn’t sleep at all.






  • I was on this train. Amtrak paid me a settlement not to sue them, but it’s not Amtrak I blame, it’s BNSF, who owns the track. It’s very clear from the camera footage that the track was badly misaligned by the time the train went over it at 80 mph. That line is one of the busiest in the country, and if the freight locomotives (one of which had gone over that section of track barely an hour prior) had some kind of monitoring system, they would have alerted all the other trains to stop or slow down. I used to love riding trains, but our rail infrastructure is much too far behind places like Europe.