Carl

My housemate didn’t believe that his TV whistled. It was so loud I could hear it inside my car as I was pulling into the driveway.

Beat me to it, except I’d do yyyy-mm-dd because some OSes throw fits about having slashes in file names. Way better than the “Group Project-final FINAL v3 PAUL USE THIS ONE.file” versioning system that people seem to use.

Shot in the dark here, but consider L-methylfolate supplements. It’s the methylated form of folic acid (vitamin B9). Your symptoms line up extremely well with someone who is suffering from non-methylated folic acid, due to a mutation on the MTHFR gene.

Your body can’t use folic acid as-is. It needs to methylate it with an enzyme in your bloodstream (turning it into L-methylfolate) before it becomes biologically available.

Your body uses this biologically available L-methylfolate to break down something called homocysteine, which is a byproduct of producing DNA during cell replication. So the symptoms are caused by a 1-2 punch of your body working harder to replicate cells (because it doesn’t have the folic acid available to break down homocysteine when it is produced) and having too much homocysteine built up in your system (because it isn’t being broken down over time with folic acid.) High homocysteine levels contribute to all kinds of potential health effects, ranging everywhere from cardiopulmonary issues to brain fog.

And there is a gene mutation that causes you to stop producing that MTHFR enzyme, the same way you become lactose intolerant when you stop producing the enzyme to break down lactose. It usually happens in your late 20’s or early 30’s, so you’re right in expected timeframe for it to happen.

It’s not on most doctors’ radars, and testing folic acid levels on a blood test won’t help, because you probably have plenty of folic acid. Your cells simply can’t access it. So it tends to fly under the radar. Properly diagnosing it requires a gene test, which most healthcare providers won’t even think about unless you request it. Or I guess you could always just try the supplement and see if your symptoms improve.

The gene mutation is especially common in people who are AFAB, autistic, or Irish. I know because my wife is all three, and has the mutation. You can buy supplements on Amazon. Most people with the mutation take about 15mg of L-methylfolate per day, but suggest starting with about half that in the morning. It will likely keep you awake (and maybe give you a headache, oddly enough) at first, so start with just taking it in the morning. Then once you’re used to it, you can take a second one with dinner. Then you can simply move up to taking the full 15mg in the morning.

Obviously don’t start taking supplements without looking into it first. But at least this might give you another thread to tug on.

Most of my reading is done via audiobooks these days, simply because I can listen while doing other tasks. I can wash the dishes, vacuum the house, etc, and those things would normally prevent me from reading. But with audiobooks, that isn’t a concern. Once I started listening to audiobooks, my annual book count went from ~12 to +60. Simply because I don’t have enough time to dedicate just to sitting in one spot staring at pages.

For visual reading, I tend to use my kobo. I got particularly lazy about bed-reading though. I got a gooseneck mount. It attaches to my headboard, and holds my kobo wherever I want. Combine that with a Bluetooth page-turn remote, and I can comfortably lay in bed and read without even needing to keep my hands on the ereader. In terms of comfort, the mount and remote are the two single greatest investments I ever made, and they fundamentally changed the way I think about reading in bed.

“Cashless” as in “the park and vendors don’t accept cash”. Meaning if someone wants to use cash, they need to use an ATM to deposit their funds onto a card. Pretty common these days in arcades too. You deposit funds onto a play card.

The point is that instead of maintaining cash for dozens/hundreds of machines, the company is able to consolidate all of their cash into two or three machines. So now the maintenance costs are drastically lowered, as you’re not constantly emptying and repairing dozens of cash handling mechanisms. In comparison, a card reader is extremely simple and will work nearly indefinitely.

1. No, you can’t. The rules state that you need to upgrade all of your properties in a given color at the same rate. For instance, if one of your green properties has two houses while the rest have three, you have to upgrade the lowest one before you upgrade the rest. Additionally, the rules specifically state that you must have four houses before upgrading to a hotel. Your post is a great example of one of the bad house rules I originally mentioned.

I mean, The Hobbit was primarily written to be a children’s bedtime story. The fact that adults latched onto it was sort of an accident. Tolkien was primarily a linguist, not a writer. He developed several fake languages, and wanted an excuse to use them. So he did a ton of world building, just to have a reason to write song lyrics in elvish and dwarven.

The scary part about this is that he likely has zero actual support from any kinds of disability, because chronic Lyme disease isn’t officially recognized in the medical world. Or rather, they recognize that there is a correlation between Lyme and long-term impairment, but they have no treatment nor palliatives for it. So they just sort of say “deal with it. Most people can return to work after a few weeks, so you can too.”

Sort of like how long COVID affected (and still continues to affect) a sizable part of the population, but government disability in America didn’t recognize it as official so patients with long COVID had to keep going to work even when they were dealing with debilitating long-term symptoms.

Most organizations in general. There’s a quote from a career congressperson somewhere, that basically paraphrases as “when I first got into office, I tried to find the big movers. The people who really knew what they were doing. I wanted to find them so I could learn from them. And all I learned is that nobody knows what they’re doing. We’re all making it up as we go.”

Monopoly isn’t an awful game if you actually play by the rules. It’s not great, but it’s not awful either. But most people don’t know all the rules, make up a bunch of stupid house rules, etc… And as a result, the game drags on for hours even after it’s clear who the winner will be. In reality, playing by the rules has each game lasting like 20-45 minutes.

For example, most people know that when a player lands on an unowned square, they get the option to buy it. Straightforward, right? But most people don’t realize that if that original player turns it down, it goes to auction. The players can submit bids to purchase the square, and they can start far below market value. Meaning that all of the squares should get bought relatively quickly, instead of taking like ten rounds. There is actually a strategy to refuse to buy a square, to intentionally send the property to bid, just so you can then potentially buy the properly below market value. Basically, Player A lands on a square. Player A refuses to buy the square at the market price of $1000. Player A then wins the bid at $800. Player A effectively got a $200 discount, simply by sending the property to auction.

Also, the bank can’t go bankrupt.

You can run out of houses to build. Know how you can upgrade four houses to a hotel? And the game only has 32 houses? The hotel increases the square’s rent, but returns the houses to the available pot. It’s actually a perfectly valid strategy to upgrade all of your properties to four houses, and then refuse to upgrade any of them to hotels. Since the game only has 32 houses, you can use ~7 properties to effectively lock out any hotels from being built. And since nobody can build any hotels while you’re sitting on all of the houses, your 4-house properties are effectively the most expensive in the game simply because nobody can upgrade their properties while you’re hoarding all the building materials.

Nope, I’ll spoiler the story (in increasing levels of graphic detail) below:

I can’t believe I actually typed that out three separate times… I suffered so hopefully some curious user can be spared.

Over 120 allegations found online during the course of the investigation, but this is four women who have recently come forward in person.

Also worth noting that each congressperson only gets a few minutes to ask their questions, otherwise hearings could stretch pretty much indefinitely. So a hostile witness can run the clock out by rambling, while avoiding answering the questions they don’t want to answer.

That’s why “reclaiming my time” is such a common thing to hear in these hearings: the congressperson is saying “they’re rambling instead of answering the question I asked, so I’m pausing my timer and reclaiming the wasted time they spent rambling.”

You may be dealing with vaginismus, which is a condition where the vaginal muscles involuntarily tense up in anticipation of insertion. It can make sex (or any other kinds of insertion, like tampons or pelvic exams) extremely painful, because you’re stretching the tensed muscles the same way a muscle cramp would.

It’s largely considered a psychological condition, because it is typically based on anxiety surrounding the insertion. And that anxiety can quickly become self-perpetuating, as pain from insertion will likely cause future anxiety. Therapy (and practice) can help alleviate that anxiety, which can alleviate the tensed muscles, which alleviates the pain.

I obviously don’t want to try to diagnose you over a simple Reddit comment. But it may be worth looking into, because that much pain during insertion isn’t normal. And it’s possible that previous doctors have simply brushed you off, because many doctors don’t tend to take women’s pain seriously.

Literally Poe’s Law in action, but applied to real life where the sarcasm is extremely apparent.

The post is very edgy

In the US? You can get fired because the manager doesn’t like the color of your shirt, or the perfume you’re wearing today. As long as they’re not being discriminatory against a federally protected class, (sex, race, religion, old age, disability, and national origin) it’s legal. Welcome to something called “at-will” employment. Meaning the employer or employee can choose to terminate their employment contract at will. They aren’t required to wait out the end of an employment contract, because the contract can be terminated by either party at will.

And even if they did fire you for being a member of one of those protected classes, (for instance, if they fired you for being a woman, or for being black), you’d need to prove it. And unless they were stupid enough to put that shit in writing, you’ll need to do a lot of investigative work to prove a pattern of discrimination.

Yup, proving things like protected classes usually requires either a super stupid manager (who puts it in writing, or says it in front of coworkers who are willing to testify for you), or proving a sustained pattern of behavior. Because a manager can just go “I didn’t like their vibes” and get away with it most of the time. Because disproving a soft subjective thing like “bad vibes” is basically impossible. Instead, you need to prove a pattern of behavior, like all of their “bad vibes” firings within the past two years have been black people. But getting access to that kind of thing will require a subpoena and lots of investigative work.

Retaliation only applies if the employee was engaging in protected activities, like filing a Department of Labor complaint, requesting a reasonable accommodation for a disability, refusing to discriminate against another employee, or initiating a lawsuit against your employer. And, just like the federally protected classes that would make the firing illegal, “making fun of a dude who drunkenly wrapped himself around a tree” isn’t a protected activity. So no, it’s not retaliation.

At-will only provides protections for specific types of discrimination. They can’t fire you for being part of a federally protected class. For instance, they can’t fire you for being a woman, or for being black, because sex and race are federally protected classes. But “making fun of a dude who drunkenly wrapped himself around a tree” isn’t a protected class, so the firing would be legal in an at-will state.

However, OP can (and should) file for unemployment ASAP. The former employer may try to contest it to get it denied, but that’s just to avoid paying extra on their insurance. If OP appeals the denial, they can submit a reason why they were fired. And as long as it wasn’t for cause (which basically requires something illegal like stealing from the company) then their appeal will be approved and they’ll get unemployment.

But unemployment only begins from the date that you apply. So OP should apply ASAP, so the start date is today. OP should also encourage those other fired employees to do the same. Because fuck that employer, they deserve higher insurance rates and we pay into insurance for a reason. Fucking use it.