Interestingly, my dentist, who also has a bit of a fixation on cholesterol on a personal level and is educated on the matter, has said that a heart calcium scan is the best way to determine what someone's target cholesterol number should actually be, and that it should not be the same from person to person.

This was after I voiced my frustration to him at having made lifestyle changes to get my cholesterol down in order to avoid getting put on statins (not wanting yet another daily drug if I can avoid it), getting the my number below the target of 110, only to shortly after that find out that they'd lowered it to 70. I talked to my endocrinologist about it, and she basically said "yeah, those numbers are more-or-less unachievable. But we want to be extra careful for type 1 diabetics, so we hold them to a higher standard. Either way, everyone gets put on statins at some point anyway, so who cares?"

I'm absolutely allergic to "everyone goes on x medication, so stop whining and go on x medication" as a medical argument, and will probably just deal with being labelled non-compliant over this one unless my cholesterol reaches a level I actually personally find to be too high at this point. Which sucks to have to do, but hey, it's my body after all, and so far doctors have failed to make a convincing case for me personally here.

- What are the sharps in the key of E? (can be derived using the circle of fifths, but is better to do that with random practice until it's deeply internalized and eventually memorized, helps memorize info on the circle of fifths as well) - What is the 5 chord in the key of G? (can be generalized to all chords in all keys) - What is the relative minor of A? - What scale is A dorian (or any mode) the ionian (or any other mode) of? - What scale degrees are raised in mixolydian (or any other) mode? - What chords are 2 5 1 in (key)? - What are the chord degree numbers for an F-turn in c? - What are the chords for an f-turn in c? - What are the numerals for the andalusian (or any other) cadence?

The more I think about it, the more I think analyzing common progressions and how they often fit together via flashcards would be huge for actual in-practice musicianship as well, but I on't belabor that by adding more here. Most of these can be derived from the circle of fifths, but building the connections from repeatedly doing that over and over again is invaluable and there's so so much more you could make just reviewing the relationships there than what I have listed here.

It would also be interesting to make flashcards for practicing audiation, I can pretty easily imagine how a major, aolean, mixolydian, or harmonic minor scale sounds but am not nearly as clear on all the other ones should sound and couldn't hum them on demand.

Edit: damn, bed length: 5 feet. Wonder if they could get an extra foot in the other direction as well, although I'm guessing all that would eat into range.

See the problem?

I said I hadn't and didn't know anybody who did. It's true that I don't and had not been around any and there's no way my car smelled like drugs. I think I was on the verge of heat stroke and basically didn't respond with any level of stress to anything he said. I was being pulled over for driving without a seatbelt, which I almost never do, but it was 95 degrees and my AC was broken and I couldn't bring myself to put my back against the chair (plus I was in the middle of nowhere).

Another cop also showed up reasonlessly to hang around behind the other one with his lights on after awhile (I'd pulled into a gas station), which I think was also supposed to freak me out. I ended up excusing myself to go stand in the gas station to cool down and when I came back they were gone

Thanks for the reminder! I need to switch my plan away from a TDF to avoid this.

Not disagree, but it is more nuanced than this I think. I spend a fair amount of money going to movie theaters, usually independent movie theaters but sometimes big ones, to see new releases. As I understand it, the production and funding model relies almost entirely on the box office numbers. I think when dealing with older releases, the waters are much murkier.

I end up seeing new things in person and paying a huge premium to do so. I won't pretend I do it for moral reasons or even strictly to support the creators (although I do it in part to support the independent theater itself). It does keep me from feeling bad for also running a media server, on which maybe 1% of the content is newer than 5 years old, though.

I have almost never bought a physical copy of a movie -- and in my mind the IP holders are usually terrible curators of their own content. Physical media is provided in a horribly limited and anti-consumer format, tied to ephemeral standards and technology and often embedded with advertisements and few subtitle options. Digital products are, somehow, worse. Tied to a walled garden, with no true 'ownership', sometimes platforms like Amazon video will even make their own edits to movies, removing crucial parts for no apparent reason (the wicker man, avatar) and without marking it as abridged. They often make decisions that scream 'cash grab' (i.e. years ago when TNG came on netflix, I went to stream it and was shocked at the potato quality. Later re-releases were released in an un-cropped widescreen that included things like boom mikes because of the original intended aspect ratio of the show.) DRM is a nightmare. The product I want -- a file containing the media and only the media, which I can view however I want without logging into anybody's servers -- does not exist. And if it did exist, well, I do also take issue with paying full price for a file of a 40 year old movie, for example. I know there are costs associated with remasters, etc, but most of these are not remasters (and those costs are also much much lower than outright movie production).

A notable exception is outfits like Vinagar Syndrome, who as a labor of love dig up lost media and often re-cut or remaster / distribute it, and due to the low scale and lack of demand likely do not make much if any profit off it. I often do see showings of Vinegar Syndrome releases at my indie theater though or rent them from the one remaining video rental place (I'm unsure whether or not that benefits the production company).

It probably gets more hairy for people who watch a lot of new serialized media, which I do not.

I kind of wish people would think critically about the gradient of potential consumption habits when making their media choices rather than separating into pro / anti piracy stances, because it's an interesting and multi-faceted topic with a lot of considerations to be made.

She then proceeded to say "well I'll just write you the prescription anyway and you can do your research later and decide to fill it or not".

I was actually shocked by this interaction, and think about it often. She's a regular family doctor with the local hospital system, and this was just a regular checkup. I answered one question with a "yes, but it's manageable and I think I can handle it with lifestyle change" and then said no twice to medication and ended up with a prescription, which I ignored but don't appreciate having on my record, since it's a false indicator for future prescribing physicians.

I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.

- Continue to take old-time music classes at the folk school, play more music with people that way

- Finally run some water through my hydroponic setup

- Finish electrifying part of the basement

- Play some noise shows with my friend and the synths I've built over the years (and make some recordings)

- Make a dating profile, setup instagram (which seems necessary for a successful dating profile these days)

- Actually catalogue, export, and post the extensive photography I've done of the last years and continue my black and white development processes

- Get back in the swing of eating from-scratch bread, fermented sauces, mayo, saurkraut, ginger ale, and home-cooked food in general

- Actually make blog posts, improve my web presence

- Finish my woodworking bench, tackle some of the woodworking projects I've had backed up

That's a lot of things, but I already have every piece of the puzzle to tackle all of them stored neatly in my house and the experience to do it all, which cuts down on a lot of it. I also really need to save money, so all that should dovetail nicely. I'm at a point where tech projects crop up and sort themselves out on their own regularly in my life so I'm not mentioning that here. Really, the 'skill' I need to learn is having the mental energy and drive to get things done as I go about my work week, or maybe to realize that I don't need perfect energy / motivation / clarity / whatever to work on something in the afternoon.

- Setting up importers in beancount for a retrospective on my last 3 years of spending and investment

- Getting ready to start a slow migration of some services from unraid to an argo/k8s cluster (starting with some services I don't use yet which are hard to keepup in clickops, immich,peertube, etc)

I'd like at some point to try to make an android app for personal use, but my strong preference for lean toolchains and non-ide-based development are hindering me there. It doesn't help that I'm using nixos, and the toolchain for developing even with gradle and kotlin is a nightmare. I'm not sure when I'll have the patience to approach that issue again