coroxout

Yeah, with the problem Amazon US (maybe elsewhere too?) has with fakes which get mixed in with the real stock at the distribution centre, and the problem I have on Amazon UK where no matter what household product I search for all the results are from brands I've never heard of, many of which are obviously Chinese from the name, or I'd guess are Chinese from the weird English or the mystery chunky quotation marks all over the description, it's not so easy to know any more.

I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.

I've definitely noticed the rise in alcohol-free beers (normally only one or two per pub, but now usually prominently marked on the drinks list or blackboard), alcohol-free wines (only seen one once in a pub, but my local small supermarket has a couple of varieties - pleasant if rather sweet and Shloer-like) and "mocktails" in the pubs near me in the UK, and I hope the trend continues.

One of my favourite restaurants does delicious fruit-based cocktails, but has some mocktails and fruit smoothies which are just as delicious and half the price. However, I admit they are sugary and no doubt very calorific, so probably not good for regular drinking either, alas.

(And I'm afraid we tried Seedlip, which round here costs as much an alcoholic gin, and didn't enjoy it at all - but we liked the concept so if there's a market for it perhaps we'll like the next flavour or competitor...)

On one hand, I don't 100% miss those times unless I can have as much spare time as I did aged 14 to spend walking round a game without necessarily progressing.

(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)

But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.

I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.

I'd love that too - although I have to say I didn't really like the endings to MI2 or Thimbleweed Park, so I might love it even more if RG writes everything except the ending...

Another stereotypically-opposite but actually possibly related pairing I find interesting: the OCD stereotype is "neat freaks" (not all that accurately, because hoarding is also compulsion-related, and many types of OCD operate on a different axis to neat/messy anyway), and the ADHD stereotype is messy and chaotic, but in a way they both centre around not being able to control what your mental runtime is spent on.

This sounds disturbingly familiar.

You try, but it ends badly repeatedly, sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes suddenly and catastrophically and in public, until the memories of those times plus fears of everyone's second-guessed reactions put you off doing anything; you go so long without succeeding at planning and discipline that even trying seems alien and scary; add the two together and you're well into "learned helplessness" territory.

As you say, sampling the space of behaviours and getting apparently random, mostly negative results back and wondering why your mental map of cause/effect and effort/outcome makes no sense whatsoever.

So... what does one do, when in broken-EF state for so long?

I guess they mean that most people can smell freshly sprayed cleaning products but think the products don't smell of much when still in the bottles.

The aisle has a faintly bleachy/detergenty smell to me, but not usually oppressive, more just pleasantly clean, I suppose.

But I have noticed my hands/sweat smell different when I have a cold, and sometimes a day or two before I feel ill. I usually only get close enough to notice it on my own body, but I have a couple of times entered someone else's room/office and smelt the same smell before hearing confirmation from their croaky voice, snuffling, or them just telling me they have a cold.

(And no, it's not the smell of cough sweets or lemon/honey-based cold remedies, but it might be partly the smell of damp tissues and stale phlegm and other such nice things. Subtle but sickly sweet.)

Obviously this is neither particularly useful nor a superpower, but I'm glad research is going on into more useful applications of similar phenomena.

It went down and lost control of its domain, eventually reappearing at a different TLD. A lot of people probably got lost in the move.

I miss mp3.com and still have a few favourite mp3s by other people saved on a hard disk somewhere (or so I thought - doesn't seem to be on this hard disk so I'll have to check for them tonight).

I wish I'd archived the band bios too, because now they're completely out of context, just some band names and song titles which aren't Googleable in anyway. If any of the bios listed the musicians' names it'd be interesting to see what they're up to now, 20 years later.

(Ouch, that really was 20 years ago.)

"We're constantly thinking about all of the stuff that's gone wrong with our applications previously, what new things could go wrong with them now"

I really feel this. I'm supposed to be half coding and half support but the support has expanded to fill all my time and I don't write anything more than 30-line kludges that only I will see any more.

That's partly just the nature of support always taking up all the time, but also I feel really paralysed when it comes to coding, because I just think of all the stupid corner cases I've been bitten by and how bad it felt to lose data or cause downtime or just look stupid.

And yes, the answer might be "write more test cases, code review" but that little voice in the back of my head goes "you thought you'd caught all the edge cases last time, and it still did a dumb thing you'd never thought of". I find it really demotivating, and start to put things off until I feel cleverer (which I never do), and then my lack of productivity depresses me, perhaps to the point you'd call "burnout" even.

Well, glad I'm not alone. Any tips on thinking my way around it welcome.