I don’t know if this is at all related, but I have found that I have to think of rest as being two different sorts: passive rest (i.e. sleeping, sunbathing, etc. typically “body” rest), and active rest (stuff that tends to use the mind, or are stimulating in some way). When I have been burnt out, I find it hard because I lack active rest, and it makes me super antsy. Sometimes I desperately need some passive rest (especially as I have some physical disabilities too), but my need for active rest can be so great that it feels torturous to engage in passive rest.

The worst is when I am too mentally burnt out for active rest, such as if I am ill, or if I hadn’t been having to spend all my mental energy on work tasks. I think, for me, brain fog is related but distinct. To use an analogy, brain fog is like the drain of a bath being blocked; lots of people can experience brain fog, it isn’t specifically an ADHD thing. The ADHD component here is like being unable to close the taps that are filling up the blocked bath. This means that ADHD + brain fog = the bath will inevitably overflow. This is what the agony feeling is to me. It’s not the brain fog per se, but the inevitable consequences of the brain fog.

You should do a version with a smiley face

I’m guessing that this question arose because you noticed that feeling full after eating is linked to needing to poop. This is because in an simplified model of your digestive system, there’s your stomach, your small intestines and your large intestines (which includes the rectum, where poop is stored).

Often, when we eat a meal, the last meal is still being digested in our small intestines. When we eat a new meal, it is likely to spend around 2 hours in our stomach, after which point the partially digested new food will move into our small intestines. So that this can happen, it’s necessary for there to be space in your small intestines, so eating a new meal sends messages to your digestive system to ensure the old meal moves along into the large intestines, where the final stages of digestion can happen and the mostly digested food is processed into poop, which gets stored in the rectum. Basically, you can think of it like a conveyor belt, that starts moving when something enters the stomach.

If you put poop up your butt and into your rectum, it would probably just make you feel like you needed to poop, especially if there was an old meal slowly making its way through your intestines. The short answer is that the systems that produce poop are connected to but distinct from the parts of your digestive system that processes food. Your stomach is the place where food goes, so parts of your body that are listening out for a message “we have recently eaten” are expecting that message to come from your stomach (or possibly your blood, because of nutrients being absorbed from early digestion).

That’s the simple answer, but the complicated answer is that feeling hungry is actually, weirdly separate from whether we are full or not. For example, there are receptors (special messengers that watch out for certain signals) in your stomach called stretch receptors, and they can detect when your stomach is full. They are one part of the system that helps you tell when you’re full, but it’s not a super quick system. This is why it’s possible to eat too much and notice until a while after, when you feel sick. It’s also why drinking a lot of water can make you feel bloated, but it doesn’t necessarily make you feel not hungry.

But feeling hungry isn’t just determined by your stomach. Have you ever eaten meals on a particular routine, and then switched to a drastically different routine? I started a job where lunch time was relatively early, and I didn’t have time for breakfast in the morning, so I decided to have my lunch be the first meal of the day. For the first few weeks, I was hungry all morning, but then gradually, I started to only become hungry when lunch time was approaching. Our bodies are incredibly adaptable, but they really like routine. This is especially significant when we look at hormonal control of hunger. I’m a scientist who studied some of this stuff at university, and the honest answer is that what makes us feel hungry is really complicated and we don’t actually understand all of the little systems that work together to coordinate hunger.

The short answer to your question is no, because the rectum being full isn’t what tells us we’re not hungry.

I think you have to want to quit smoking for it to work like that. I’ve found that because vaping is more accessible than smoking, someone’s vaping consumption can be far higher than what they were smoking. It can be quite easy to sort of absent mindedly vape in a way that’s harder to do when smoking.

But I do know people who have used vaping in this way. Someone I knew had tried to quit smoking before but they couldn’t go from one cigarette per day (and they needed to quit fully, or their smoking would inevitably increase during times of stress). When smoking, I guess you could roll a smaller cigarette, but this friend tried that and it didn’t work. Vaping allowed them to finally kick the habit for good because their vape allowed them to taper down the nicotine content per puff of the vape

Oh yeah, that’s one of the things that I’m tempted by. I just recognise that it’ll be a bit of a time sink (not necessarily a bad thing), and I should probably try it on a spare device or drive first. I’ve just been too busy to be able to sink my teeth into something like that, but hopefully some day.

A good guide or wiki makes a huge difference — I opted for Arch as my first Linux run, for example, because I kept seeing the Arch wiki be a useful resource when learning about general Linux things. Similarly, I have had a nosy at the Gentoo handbook and that too looks like a thorough and accessible resource (though it’s more Gentoo specific obviously).

As someone relatively new to Linux (been using as my daily driver for a couple of years now, but I still feel like a novice), I’ve been considering tinkering with Gentoo, and it low-key feels like considering starting using hard drugs.

There’s a phrase that I learned recently that feels relevant to this. “Hermeneutical Injustice”. It means injustice that arises when we are literally unable to meaningfully discuss our experiences with others. For example, “sexual harassment” is a relatively recent phrase, coined in the 1970s, a period when more women were entering the workplace, and employers didn’t have policies for how to respond to workplace sexual harassment. It’s a useful phrase, both legally, and interpersonally, and having access to this phrase that describes something that was previously hard to articulate (“you quit your job because your boss was complimenting you?”) has helped us to reduce hermeneutic injustice by helping us to better understand and respond to the underlying phenomena (for instance, we now understand that people of all genders may experience workplace sexual harassment)

“Hermeneutic injustice” is why I think the ridiculous prevalence of the word “enshittification” is a good thing. People have latched into that because although it may be a new word, the phenomena it describes have been happening for a while now. I’ve even seen less techy people using it. The anger I’ve been seeing extends beyond people who know about “enshittification”, but its spread and usage is a useful snapshot of how many are feeling. It makes me feel hopeful.

I’m sleepy right now so I’ll not attempt to discuss more concrete things driving this hope (such as “small web”, Fediverse etc.), but the short of it is that I have a lot of faith in people. Leaning on our communities is how we survive and resist this bullshit, and there will always be people who want to build things for the love of it.

Good word, I like it

Regardless of what your next steps are, I’m sorry for your loss.

Yeah, that is fairly consistent with how I’ve been feeling. It’s tricky because you have a huge backlog of things on the hypothetical to-do list.

I’m reminded of an essay I read concerning complex systems and how complexity grows in functional software — the essay used the phrase “habitability” to convey the idea of software that is functional and usable even as it grows. In practice, this means nailing down your core functional requirements and starting with that, adding more features in a modular manner that aims to avoid messing up that core functionality.

What this looks like applied to my agenda problem is that my backlog is weeks if not months of work for multiple people to get on top of, and I can’t pause my life in the interim. Even getting a thorough list of the tasks in the backlog is too overwhelming a task for me at present, in part because new tasks keep coming from just existing. In the past when I have felt swamped like this, I did a big blitz through and got my life in order, but the backlog blob is too large to do that. Realistically, if I can’t give myself a proper clean slate like I usually would, I need to give myself a virtual clean slate so I can at the very least stop adding to the backlog.

I know this is what I need to do, but it’s very easy to become too overwhelmed to do anything. I know what I need to do, I just need to have the fortitude to start small and ignore the backlog for a while. Tell you what, I’m going to try and set a super basic agenda thing up today or tomorrow, so I can capture incoming tasks or notes. I’m going to try and tackle this like I would a software project, which means trying my best to avoid unnecessary complexity, like often happens when I try to consider the backlog blob. Watch this space, I guess :P

Thanks for the prod. I know you didn’t say much and I mostly talked myself into this, but sometimes that’s what’s needed when you’re wise enough to give great advice to yourself, but foolish enough to not take aforementioned great advice.

Just chipping in to second the recommendation for ACT. I haven’t have ACT delivered by a therapist (yet?), but I have had a heckton of other therapy (mostly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which seems to be what they offer by default). CBT helped in some ways, but I found it pretty lacking in many others, especially in areas where my life circumstances were just objectively shit (disability and living with shitty family at the time, for example). I’ve been reading through one or two of the ACT books lately, and I find the approach refreshing compared to other therapy I’ve got experience with.

I have known some wonderful people who have helped me to grow into a person I don’t entirely hate. Most of the time, I’m depressed, but I feel privileged to know people who remind me of things that are worth fighting for.

The best thing that Truss gave us was the Lettuce that will go down in historyl

Hello, fellow human!

I hope your day has been full of the various human things, such as eating, and sleeping. Certainly I have been enjoying those things; as a human, I get plenty of sleep and food and other human things.

I don’t have one because I’m bad at note-taking

I pay for Bitwarden, because the pro version has a few features that are somewhat useful, but also I wanted to support the software.

Obligatory evangelising: If you don’t already use a password manager, I am urging you to start. Not because it’s something you should do, for security purposes (though that’s definitely true), but because using a password manager has been one of the single greatest quality of life improvements I’ve made for years. I used to have a system where I had a few stronger passwords for important stuff, and I reused old passwords for services I didn’t care about, but that always caused problems when stupid password requirements would mean I couldn’t use my regular variants, and I’d forget about these requirements and aaaaaaa.

Give it a try: You don’t have to switch everything over all at once. It has browser extensions and apps. You can make a super strong master password with four random words (write that down on paper and store it somewhere secure (not your wallet)). Bitwarden is open source and free

Okay, evangelising over

Other subscriptions I have include VPN, and I think that’s mostly it, since I tried to cut down on subscription stuff

I find perspectives like yours interesting because I experienced something similar when I was a closeted bisexual, and working through internalised homophobia was necessary for me. However, I have gay friends who are icked out by heterosexual PDA, and so I don’t feel comfortable assuming that what you’re experiencing is homophobia without applying a similar lens to what my friends feel (which feels wrong, because as a bisexual, I find both The Gays and The Straights deeply confusing)

Oh I struggled most of all on the sand twins. I’m mildly claustrophobic and those caves freaked me out (especially as I tend to think poorly under pressure, so running out of time made me panic and get lost more).

This quote is very funny. “Hypothetically, one might expect…”

I agree that season 1 is far more engaging but imo, that’s mainly because the level of intrigue that I felt at the beginning of the story was insane — they were great at keeping that intrigue rolling in an interesting way. But that kind of mystery can only last so long, because it grows weaker as the audience learns more about the characters and world.

I think there was a part of me that felt disappointed by season 2 simply by the fact it couldn’t give me what I felt during season 1, and actually, I wouldn’t want that — the final episodes of a series shouldn’t have the same kind of tension of the beginning of the story.

Overall, I’d say that season 1 is excellent (in particular, there were some visually impressive and stylish sequenced that I loved) — Riveting" was the word OP used. Season 2 is also decent. I don’t recall it feeling rushed, and it does end decently.