If the heat is running, we’re playing a dangerous game.

Removing all distractions, which takes a bit of work. Covering every single source of light. Little indicator on my charger? Slapped electrical tape on it. Blackout curtains. Noise machine. The hardest one: Never using the bedroom for anything but sleeping. Not even a little peek at the phone and YouTube for a relaxing video. I have an analogue non-illuminated clock for daytime, and if I need to check the time in the dark, a Timex I can hit the glow button on. If I really can’t sleep, I get up and go into another room to read or listen to something.

And that standby battery life? Sorcery.

Absolutely. Nobody needs an open-world Dead Space. I want 8-12 hours of intense claustrophobia.

It’d be a big spend, but you can get some Hue dimmable A19s with a bridge for your home and set them to whatever color temp you need. It’s not accurate to specific temps (I can’t ask it for 4000k) but with a little tinkering in the spectrums and sliders you could get it close.

A real tour de force of systems theory.

It’s kind of a joke, but ask about how they arrange their sock drawer.

Yeah, about that: I have a horror story.

Tl;dr Apple Store repair techs are crap, right to repair all the way.

I had an iPhone XS that was behaving weird. It was about 84% on the battery scale, which we all know is bullshit. I did all the usual stuff you can do before bringing it in (soft reset, hard reset, various settings, deleting apps, wiping and starting over, etc.). I was hoping their diagnostics would say something but would just as well get a new battery for a fee. They said it was perfectly fine, so they took it back to do a regular non-warranty swap. They said maybe an hour.

One hour later, “come back in 15 minutes.”

30 minutes later, “we’re still working on it.”

30 minutes later still, someone comes out and tells me that while they did replace the battery, they broke two screens trying to get it back on, and for liability reasons, couldn’t try again. They’d send me a refurbished phone. But they needed my fucking phone number so Apple support could call and set it up. This was said dead-faced, broken phone still in the employee’s hand.

They also needed a $1,000 hold on my card for a then-6 year old refurbished phone to be shipped to guarantee a return, and it would be 2-3 days.

Don’t get it done at the Apple Store unless you can afford the risk. Go support your local repair person who isn’t a fucking klutz.

It’s nothing. David Foster Wallace wrote in his novel taking place in the IRS: “Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting.”

Second Vinegar. It’s an awesome little add-on.

Greenville, NC in a Walgreens, around 2013. A man who looked like, or could well have been Gary Busey, in a leather jacket, in a pile of talcum powder on the floor, was picking up handfuls of powder and snorting them.

Steal his look at a reasonable price!

100% on the not forcing yourself on anything in a PhD. I was ABD and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. The whole thing was a disaster, committee was unreachable, department was no help, and by the time I was done, I hated myself for ever doing it. It was an exercise in completion. Absolutely be open to saying “this isn’t fun anymore.” There is zero problem with just getting a masters — in fact, I think you get the most value out of one because it’s a concentrated experience on what you want to do. There’s a stigma on “mastering out” but that’s crap. Know your limits and stop while you still love what you’re doing. I wish you the best in returning to school!

It’s like Ben Dreyfuss minus the ambien in there.

You need to take a risk on some level, which probably isn’t what you want to hear, but other commenters have said as much. I think that even worse than a solid “no” is just not doing anything and getting up in your head about the what-ifs, and missing an opportunity entirely.

I was offered $21/hr to remote work at some google outsourced company for one of their LLM projects. It was going to be grueling work, full-time, no benefits. It took about 120 applications (two responses) to even get there, and they ghosted me after a second interview. It’s awful out there and I feel for you 100%. Best of luck, genuinely.

Tradition dear boy

There’s a lot of good advice here already, so I’ll just add the potentially expensive (depending on insurance) next step: allergen immunotherapy. I’m about as allergic to dogs as you are, and some of the advice I got was “why not make them an outside dog?” — first of all, hell no, they’re family, and second, I lived in an apartment at the time, so that was impossible.

The immunotherapy, or allergy shots, starts with the tests others mentioned. They can do skin pricks or blood draw, and to save you a lot of misery, I suggest the blood draw. Then you get vials drawn up that effectively tincture allergens over time into your body for about three-ish years, so this is a time commitment.

Some advice on allergy medications I’ve received: avoid Claritin and Benadryl due to their links to dementia in long term use, try Zyrtec and Xyzal to see which works best (Costco/sam’s has the best value for these).

A higher MERV filter in my air unit, based on what it could handle, and an air purifier helped me a lot.

Because we need merchandising uwu

“Big man, strong man, he came to me, came to me with tears in his eyes…”