15-20% of people in the Western world suffer from IBS. The good news is, just like hot chilli peppers don't actually cause any damage in your mouth, IBS doesn't actually cause any damage in your gut. It has been studied for hundreds of years and there is zero association with increasing the risk of any other disease. Your gut is not roughed-up or damaged and does not need to "heal", nor is it leaking. Leaky gut is 100% hypothesis and not recognized by healthcare professionals. It is primarily a gut-brain miscommunication. The pain is unreasonable for the situation (a tennis-ball sized balloon inflated in the gut of normal people causes only a mild sensation of pressure, but in IBS sufferers inflating that same balloon causes intolerable pain.. and BTW your gut can stretch quite a lot without rupturing) and they understand some of the mechanisms causing it (histamine and tryptase produced by mast cells adjacent to nerves sending an exaggerated pain signal when your gut stretches). The brain then reacts to the distress causing, for example, rapid transit and diarrhea which isn't actually useful but doesn't hurt anything either, as long as you are not suffering from malabsorbtion. And IBS is not associated with weight loss, so you aren't. But there are multiple causes meaning the solution isn't the same for everybody. Perhaps your bile acids are not being reabsorbed before they hit the colon. Perhaps you have a food sensitivity. Perhaps the microbiome is out of whack from antibiotics. Perhaps your stomach is producing too much acid. Lowering stress and eliminating FODMAP foods can lessen the symptoms (without FODMAPs you get less gas, therefore less stretching), but those are not the primary causes, which are complex and still not well understood. Also, interestingly, while SIBO is an actual medical condition, it is not associated with IBS, there has been no evidence establishing this. The health supplement industry has jumped on this and come up with products to sell you for a problem you don't have. This is according to Dr Steve Manor, director of gastrointestinal disease research unit and professor of medicine at Queen's University. I KNOW many of you subscribe to the functional medicine / alternative medicine stuff. You can shout at me now if you want, I don't care. As long as my signal is getting through to the few people who still trust the science and want to know what the researchers say, it doesn't matter that you personally don't believe any of it anymore. But let me say that I think many of you are over-reacting to the COVID deceptions. That COVID shit (which I admit was bad) does not IMHO implicate the entire medical field.

Meat drippings have flavor, but taste overwhelmingly greasy. Flour tastes bland. Milk is ok I guess. But combine these as gravy and it tastes far better than any of them do individually, better than it has any right to. #gravy #food

Initial report on pumpernickel: Wow. Most satiating food I've ever experienced. When health food promoters say food X does Y, I don't generally dismiss it, but I don't put much weight upon it. Usually such effects, while statistically significant, aren't actually enough to make much practical difference. Or it doesn't work on me. Even if the food promoter says something like "four-fold" I still don't generally get excited about something. So it was with "fiber" and "gut microbiome", and in particular "rye". Supposedly rye has a lot of resistant starch and digests much slower, especially whole rye, and feeds your gut cell walls with short-chain fatty acids which have a long list of supposed health effects. I read (or heard) that some of these effects including reducing your appetite for high-energy foods. In a post I made about a week ago, I baked 2 loaves of pumpernickel bread. Not for health. Just to try it. These loaves are massively dense, completely unleavened, but remain moist enough to slice thinly and they apparently never go bad (can store in a tin as emergency food). Note that there are variants of pumpernickel that are leavened and do not have quite the same properties... I'm talking about the stuff with no bubbles, just packed dense slow-cooked whole rye kibble. On the first day of eating this, I probably went in too much at once and it roughed my guts. But I kept eating it at low levels anyways since I had no other bread in the house. As of today I'm not even half way through the first of these 2 loaves. I've had no other bread or wheat-based product other than this bread. And what has happened has kinda shocked me: I'm not hungry for bread or carbs. I'm eating less than normal. And I keep getting up and doing things, even without the drive of being caffeinated. I've lost some weight, but not a lot yet, but really the appetite supression or let's say the satiety that this bread provides is unbelievable... I would not have believed it had I not experienced it myself.

The author of this image values alone time. I value social time. Because I'm almost always alone. It is hard to increase your "social" as an introverted single adult. But this isn't obvious because childhood and school throws so much social at you that you learn to take it for granted. View quoted note →

Aw man! I could have had a lap dance?

Real ID: In 2005, the US congress passed legislation for this, and it comes into force May 7 2025. It requires states to follow certain practices when identifying and giving somebody an ID. All the drivers licenses issued in all the US states and 5 territories qualify as real ID. If you have a recent valid drivers license, you arleady have a Real ID. The new requirements will be that to fly domestically, visit certain federal federal facilities, and to visit nuclear power plants, then you must show your Real ID. I don't think this is much different than it already was, is it?. I don't ever recall flying domestically "anonymously". The significant difference IMHO is that ID is becoming federalized (states still issue, but federal government oversees). For myself, I'll use my passport as always. You can still travel without ID by driving in your car. I would be much more worried if your country went cashless. In that case you have to use trackable payment mechanisms to buy your groceries. Here in NZ most supermarkets still take cash, but most checkout lines do not... you have to find the checkout line that still takes cash. I think they still have to take cash, but they just aren't setup for that at every checkout line.

Yesterday was weird. I kept thinking I need to check on the dog in case she needs something. I went to her grave like 6 times even though logically I know she's not going to wake up and need me. My brain just kept prodding me since she has needed me so much for so long now (even to walk to do her business) and it felt like I was disloyal if I didn't sit by her grave. Today the wind was blowing heavy, the winds of change. Everything I rest my eyes upon in my house and outside, it seems like I'm seeing it for the first time. I actually think about what I should do about that thing -- clean it, move it, etc -- things that haven't caught my attention in years. And all the "dog stuff" is being cleaned and packed into a big "dog stuff" box.... collars and leashes, toys, medicines, dog bowls, dog bed. I did sleep last night, but today is still not normal. I'm getting through it. I did even get some nostr work done, I finally got an annoying problem sorted, but the details aren't worth talking about. In a way, as much as I loved my dog, she was really holding me back. Taking too much of my time. Taking far too much of my expenses for medicines and operations. I couldn't travel anywhere. My ability to focus deeply (needed for the kind of programming I do) had slowly deteriorated for a long time due to the interruptions she needed and also the ones she didn't. And so had my sleep deteriorated, especially near the end (turns out she had a lot of nighttime activity I didn't know about and needed me to pick up and hold up her rump so she could get to the places she insisted on smelling... at multiple times during the night... else the barking wouldn't stop). It is just very different now without her, and I'm adjusting. 😢 View quoted note →

Rest in Peace Maze von Heisenberg ("Zoey") 3 Oct 2013 - 22 Apr 2025 "The best dog on the farm"

Chorus now supports terms-of-service and privacy-policy as multiline strings of text (not HTML). It serves the URLs itself at /privacy-policy and /terms-of-service and puts them into the NIP-11. I noticed that the icon and banner are URLs and you have to serve them from a separate website. I may change them to filenames and serve them from chorus.

I don't believe countries should allow (or recognize) dual citizenship, or at the very least they should not be allowed to run for public office.