Hello, 30-years-ago me. My sister and I had a similar age gap. We had an amazing relationship/friendship throughout our childhood and it was really hard when she left for college. The good news is that we still have an amazing relationship and she is still the best sister I could ever ask for.

It’s a funny thing that when we are young, everything feels so permanent when in reality, your life is changing incredibly quickly. When you get hit by something like this, it’s uncomfortable as fuck to see that reality. Change is hard, but it also leads to and comes along with growth… and growth is good.

I don’t say this to be dismissive of what you are going through, only to say that change happens. It is a part of life that we learn to deal with because it can’t be avoided. What is happening in your life probably hurts. It’s probably scary. The uncertainty sucks. All those feelings are valid.

She will be farther away. You will see her less. She is going to be incredibly busy at times. But she is also there for you and you two will still have each other and have time together.

Of course, I have no guarantees — your life isn’t mine. But for me, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed (it’s easy to imagine the worst). Just like it was awesome having an older sister as your friend while at home, it’s really awesome to have an older sister in college to talk to and visit get to experience bits of that life with.

Close up

The OPCA document is fabulous. It drips with disdain for all of these wonky sovcit arguments while thoroughly dismantling them.

Wow. I just want to say thank you for such a thoughtful, informed, detailed response. You are an amazing person!

From the article:

There are some important things to keep in mind here, like the fact that 15 of the 17 studies were case-control studies. This kind of research cannot prove cause and effect, and it often does not look at things that might have affected both the exposure and the outcome.

A number of the studies that were looked at were of low quality, which is something that the authors also highlight.

Findings were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.

Oh hell yeah. I want to see a Dendy reboot.

I did the math for the interest rate since they didn’t bother to in the article. The article says she had paid $1400/mo for 3 years and had only paid 10,000 toward principal. Assuming that’s 36 months of payments, the interest rate would be around 15.5%. The payment term would have been 10 years and total payments would end up being $168k.

Predatory lenders and financial illiteracy; a perfect match made in hell.

I typed in the url and… yeah, that was A LOT of boobs and butts.

Came back here to see that I mistyped the url. Doubling the “O” results in many boobs and butts.

Yeah, it’s kind of a fun one to play around with when it’s broken. For a slightly different workaround, you can also hold down momentarily on the playback slider, then drag. It’s the quick touch and drag (from the left) that seems to trigger it.

A feature request: add a setting to disable swipe from edge to go to the previous screen. For me, it’s a feature that I only use accidentally when trying to do a different swipe gesture.

Love the app. Thanks for all your hard work!

Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.

Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.

I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.

Long hold on the account icon, bottom center.

A pop up will appear allowing you to pick which account you are using (you’ll only see one since you haven’t added a second yet).

Click “edit”

Click “+”

Edit: on that page “pick another server” appears to bring you to that server’s sign up page. If you’ve already created an another account, use the “log in” button, which is below “pick another server”.

Yeah, I did some searching and see that the painting is known by that name but didn’t find anything discussing where the name comes from.

Wikipedia states that the original title was “La Venus del espejo” which translates to “The Mirror’s Venus”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rokeby_Venus

Also why the fuck would they charge for it?

Because they have long since moved away from selling worthwhile products to selling anything they can trick people into buying. Providing value is no longer a concern, only short-term profit.

On this train of thought…

OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.

If the others suggested aren’t quite right for you, you might try looking for an interval timer app. These are generally used for fitness, but it seems to me that type of setup might do exactly what you want if you just set up a “workout” that has a single 30 min interval and repeats.

Or use a scale.

If you look for a “watt meter plug”, you’ll pribably understand what it is at a glance. It’s a device you plug into your wall outlet (or surge protector or whatever). It has a power outlet on it, which you plug your device into, and a screen that shows watts drawn and watt-hours over time. Super simple. I think “Kill A Watt” is the most well known brand.

Haha. Re: option 4, I was being glib. A more charitable way to say it is that they want to connect with you and spend time talking with you (and they don’t realize you are busy and want to keep working on your task). A lot of NTs will use time talking to coworkers as a way to recharge. To them it’s a nice break from what they’re doing.