Oh, and in case you’re looking for recommendations, my current daily driver is Blair’s “Ultra Death.”
To set expectations, Tobasco (a common North American vinegar-based chili sauce) has a heat rating of 7,000 scovilles, whereas Ultra Death generally measures over 1 million.
If you like heat, extracts are a cost-effective step up, since each bottle lasts longer. At first anyway.
Most of the gastrointestinal distress from capsaicin is the result of poison countermeasures triggered by contact pain signals.
But capsaicin is telling your cells a lie which fewer believe each re-telling, so it requires increasingly ridiculous doses to trigger those internal signals.
If you eat spicy food regularly, you likely won’t get any internal signals again until you graduate to a different category of spiciness, such as extracts.
Hot sauce nerds consider extracts cheating, since you can achieve heat that’s many orders of magnitude above what the hottest pepper hybrids can produce, but do what you must to feel alive.
I would say it’s absolutely normal and quite common to feel out of place, or like you don’t belong, and what fills in the blank of what’s on the other side is mostly arbitrary.
What’s more, having grown up in many countries and hearing something like this from other young people, I would say it’s not just normal in Germany, or even the West. It’s normal everywhere.
I think the easiest way to gain a fuller perspective of cultures you’re curious about is to live among them, and while now might not be the best time to visit the US, I think you can gain exposure to lots of new global cultures just by spending time in one of the many world cities, the closest of which is Berlin. From there, many others are just a train away.
Long short, it’s normal to wonder where you fit, and it’s a question you must answer yourself, but the tried-and-true method to figuring it out is to go and find new parts of yourself in these places. You just might find that, by the end, not only can you belong anywhere you choose, but those places also belong to you.
Sir Patrick Stewart: But it’s too late. I’ve seen everything.
If you keep pinging yourself you’ll go blind unless you enable spanning tree protocol
Ah understood. From the conscientious wording, I would guess that’s the sort of stuff they worked on quite a few years ago. But I’m wrong often enough, good looking out.
I get where you’re coming from, and we’ve all seen bad faith “advice” seeking (sea lioning), but also most of us have interacted with people who are well-meaning yet know they have tons of learned behaviors they’ve never needed to question.
For example, a friend had a boss in a male-dominated industry (construction) who, at the end of a client lunch with several cis men, bid them farewell with “bye ladies.” When they were back in the car she called him out on it “is ‘ladies’ supposed to imply something?” and he immediately admitted “dammit I know. I’m sorry.”
She knew he knew as he said it that it wasn’t the right thing and just hadn’t considered it before, but it took situations like that to make him consider it in advance. And it sounds like he did. She said he began to make eye contact to check his wording in meetings, which she took to indicate it being present in his mind, that he was actually trying.
I’m just saying asking and trying to consider little things in advance is ally behavior and should be encouraged unless it’s obviously in bad faith.
The relationship advice special is “leave him.” Without additional information I don’t think it’s responsible for anyone here to say that, but what you’ve described is clearly an untenable situation and relationship dynamic.
I think you owe it to yourself and your partner to sit them down, describe this situation as you see it, and how their behavior makes you feel, perhaps the way you have here. Their response to your feelings should, I think, tell you the next steps.
Whether that response is workable should, I think, be determined by its impact on trust in the relationship, because trust is ultimately the only fungible currency that differentiates a good relationship from a bad one.
Concretely:
In either case, what happens next is not something anyone here is equipped to prescribe, but I do hope you’re able to find a better relationship, with or without your current partner.
The difficulty was drainage. Isolated steam systems in steam era construction were designed to use gravity for condensate collection. It’s one of the reasons boilers are always in the basement of old buildings.
Steam system engineering was a well-compensated profession. A well-designed system would accurately predict the rate of condensate flow for every part of the building, prior to construction, and reflect these predictions in the slope/grade and diameter of the steam pipes. Inaccurate predictions resulted in problems like pipe knock (aka steam hammer) which you can often hear when you or a nearby neighbor partially close the shut-off valve of a radiator.
Since construction in the city had many elevations and could not be predicted in advance, there was no equivalent solution to facilitate condensate collection. The system had to be one way. And yes, it’s inefficient compared to modern systems, but was innovative in its day.
Yeet the heat or beat the meat
Wtf? Bad form, Peter Pan.
That’s a good idea! My understanding is that the old steam network is slated for decommission and replacement by this program, basically a large distributed geothermal heat pump network that also harvests from major heat producers like data centers and provides both heating and cooling.
It will end the era of the steamy-street Sin City aesthetic but should be many, many times more efficient than the old steam system. Phase-change thermal transfer in HVAC systems is nearing 400% efficiency, so 4 times more efficient than the theoretical limit of direct heating, because it only uses the energy necessary to move heat from one place to another rather than produce it, and it works for both heating and cooling.
Right now I believe they’re piloting the system in NYCHA buildings (public housing) of neighborhoods outside the old steam network, like Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, but supposedly the plan is to expand to the rest of Manhattan.
Edit: corrected coefficient of performance
Yeah it’s common enough I figured most knew, but a few years ago I went ice skating at the bryant park rink with someone who refused to walk anywhere near the steam. They thought it was toxic and didn’t accept my explanation, so we had to walk an extra few blocks to get around the steam work. Shrug
Old steam heating system. They vent it when they’re working on a section.
Side-note: surprised by all the fellow New Yorkers i’m seeing in this thread. I thought yous were still at the other place.
I delivered for two locations shortly after they fixed the pizza. In both locations, shift leads and managers came up with so many excuses for house pizza. More than any other chain I worked for. I didn’t connect the dots until later. The pizza must have been much worse before.
Edit: preemptive “no you”lol
To be understood, I’d probably just say projection, but if you need to emphasize a specific aspect of the behavior, we could break it down as:
Explanation: introjection refers to a mirroring behavior, the kind often seen in children. In this case, the accuser anticipates an accusation from you which threatens or hurts them. To defend themselves, they hurl the accusation right back at you. But of course the first accusation only happened in their head, so all we witness is someone wildly accusing someone else of having their own flaw without any justification.
YHWH (“Yahweh”) was the storm god of the Canaanite pantheon that was likely referred to as the “host” or “council” in the Old Testament book of Job. El was the “father” god or head of that pantheon. When gendered in the text, both El and YHWH were male, but are technically considered genderless. Some have speculated that the Shekhinah represents an expression of the feminine aspect of YHWH, but no Abrahamic religion officially regards either YHWH or El as gendered.
Judaic tradition championed the storm god YHWH above the other gods, perhaps due to the oral tradition of a storm parting the Sea of Reeds (Red Sea) described in Exodus. Other gods in the pantheon came to be regarded as pagan/false, and their worship was considered idolatry (religious infidelity) but the older religious traditions proved difficult to stamp out, with numerous examples of the Israelites turning to the old gods and being punished for it.
One such instance in the book of Hosea (echoed in Isaiah and Jeremiah) detailed an old tradition of offering “sacred raisin cakes” and “flagons of wine” to an unnamed god.
That god was almost certainly Asherah, aka Ishtar, Esther, “Queen of Heaven,” and “She of the Womb” in different surviving tablets. She is named many times in the Hebrew text, more often than Ba’al, another prominent god of the Canaanite pantheon.
Asherah was a fertility goddess, the wife of El, and sister to YHWH (sometimes consort; pantheons are often pro-incest). Asherah’s religious tradition featured the baking of raisin cakes in the shape of her body and the pouring of wine into the earth, matching the traditions described in the Hebrew text.
So to answer your question, while none of the Abrahamic religions officially worship a god with an exclusive female gender identity, their holy books technically do recognize at least one goddess, and that’s Asherah.
BONUS: her raisin cakes are still made in the Jewish tradition during Purim, though they are now triangular, contain various fillings, and are named after Haman, the villain of Esther’s story. They’re quite good.
And you assume this has intrinsic value?
I assume they’re making a point about hard assets versus pure speculation, like comparing real estate to crypto coins.
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First off, it’s OK. We all make mistakes and misrepresent our feelings sometimes, which can affect others in ways we don’t intend. The particular social accident you describe is also quite common. I promise she will quickly recover from the inadvertent rejection.
My answer is: practice. 8-9 years is a long time to be out of practice at anything of this sort.
There are a variety of ways to actively pursue that practice, some more creative than others, but the most natural way is simply to invite interaction with others in general such as, apparently, drawing on a bench at the park :)