ValiantDust

You know how to can get turned off of eggs if you get the egg ick.

I don’t think I do know actually. But here’s an attempt at answering this question anyway:

And bonus, anybody know why that happens?

We are usually very quick at relating sickness or even discomfort to the food we ate at the time or slightly before. This is a very valuable trait to avoid food that is unhealthy or even poisonous. But it’s only based on correlation, so it can turn us off food that is not actually causing the sickness but we just happened to eat at the time.

To be fair though, there are way more cows than crocodiles, snakes, sharks or deadly spiders in the UK.

Adding to what the other comments have already said: Don’t bring an unleashed dog on a cow pasture. You’d think that’s common sense, but apparently it’s a bit of a meme in Austria and Switzerland that every few months some German get’s trampled by cows because their totally friendly dog ran towards the cows and they felt threatened.

They do things the way they want while I’m doing them the way I want. Which is clearly the superior way (though they disagree).

You’re doing neither yourself nor anyone else a favour by being overly shy and reticent. You yourself will enjoy life much more when you are yourself and while not everyone will like you, the ones who don’t often don’t stay in your life long and it’s easier to find people you vibe with if they can see you for who you are.

Granted, I very much did not take this advice as a teenager and even now I’m occasionally too shy. But looking back it was good advice and I really wish I hadn’t wasted so much time and energy on not being negatively noticed by people I didn’t really care about then and who haven’t been in my life for years.

I’ve wondered if there is any way to get an US library card as a non-citizen for a while and this thread got me to finally do the research. The Queens Public Library apparently issues cards to non-US-residents for 50$/year. I have yet to look into it more thoroughly and check out the catalogue. But considering the number of Audiobooks I listen to, it seems like a good deal.

My guess would be motion sickness.

Think about it like this: There is an almost endless amount of stuff around us at any given moment that we could be aware of. If we factor in the things that are not actually there but we can still think about, then there are infinitely many things we could be paying attention to at any moment.

But we only have a finite amount of energy to do it. The more energy we use to think about one thing the less energy remains to think about everything else.

I wouldn’t say that we are ignoring things when we concentrate. Because to me when you ignore something you are actually aware of it but choose to ignore it. When you concentrate, you just don’t have enough energy left to be aware of other things.

I used to have this problem, too. Both when trying to fall asleep in the evening and after waking up in the middle of the night for any reason.

What really helps me is putting on an audiobook or podcast that I like but already know (this part is important because otherwise I will just listen to it for the rest of the night because I want to know what happens) and setting the volume to very low. I set the sleep timer to 15 minutes and most of the time I’m asleep way before it turns off.

I had to experiment a bit to find audiobooks that hit the sweet spot of being engaging enough to keep my mind from wandering but not so much that I can’t drift of to sleep but once I found a few, it’s been a real game changer.

I can’t believe that no one has mentioned the famous shower orange yet. On Reddit there is a whole subreddit dedicated to it.

A cold orange in the shower is perfect – it’s refreshing, it smells great and you don’t have to deal with the usual mess of eating an orange.

• Fall of Civilisations
• The Thing About Austen
• Revolutions

Also: cleaning. I’ve had flatmates who managed to take the same time for cleaning the bathroom or the kitchen and yet it somehow still wasn’t clean.

When I’m stressed, I like to soak a washing cloth in hot water and then press it on my face with both hands, covering eyes and nose and slowly and deeply breathe through it. I don’t know why I find almost waterboarding myself comforting but it’s incredibly relaxing.
Also, lying on the floor in the middle of my apartment.

Well, it depends… Germany as one country isn’t very old. So the roots of the education system are certainly older than the country. But I’m not sure which parts should be included in this calculation. The education system was very different in different states that are now part of Germany. Then there are Universities that were (at least partly) German back in the day but are not located in today’s Germany. I’m sure the Romans had schools when they hung out here but that’s probably a bit of a stretch. But where exactly are we supposed to draw the line?

Abbreviate keeping the first and some random later consonants (and sometimes consonants that aren’t in the word at all) without using punctuation: Dr, Mr, Ms, Mrs

I think it’s usually the first letter(s) and the last letter(s). In older English handwritings I’ve come across M.ʳ etc. So I think that’s were those came from.

I have a poster from here with the text of one of my favourite books arranged as a picture. It’s quite the conversation piece. If books aren’t your thing, you could always go with the first million digits of Tau, the Streets of Portland, the Constitution of Dalaware or the Kama Sutra.

For a moment I forgot about the omnipresence of AI generated pictures and wondered what the hell the thing in the second picture is supposed to be.

I feel LLM created texts often use rigid structuring along with the fitting linking words and phrases – “on one hand…, on the other hand”, “furthermore”, “in conclusion”. Like a high school student writing an essay. Also the content may or may not be correct and is mostly just stolen from several sources and patched together without any thought and care – also like a high school essay. So I’m gonna go with that.

Stepping on single fallen leaves on the sidewalk. I’m also more disappointed than I should be when they are not crunchy.

I read Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain at some point during the First World War centenary. I’m also roughly 100 years younger than Vera Brittain, so I was very close to her age during WW1. I knew the facts of WW1 before, but it hit me really hard to think about a whole generation of young people (of the countries involved) having their youth drowned in a war. And the pointlessness of it all. It made me really grateful for the circumstances I was lucky enough to grow up in.