Have a friend who has raved about using these for cooking meet during the work day and pan searing it for a quick easy and delicious meal. Plan on doing that with steaks/chicken, but wanted to see if anyone else on Tildes owns one and has any tips or favorite use cases to share.

Did you or someone you know go to [edit public private, parent paid] school, esp if the students' parents can't easily afford it? Did their parents actually move to be closer to a prestigious school? Is it worth it for folks who aren't old boys/old girls and in general are neither new nor old money? Does it ever make sense to use the college fund to pay for secondary education?

I'm a pretty introspective person. I grew up with an emotionally abusive parent, struggled with my mental health from teenagerhood, and been to more therapy than I can remember since the time of my parents' divorce when I was eight. My siblings and I have done a lot of deconstructing over the years to figure out what the heck happened to us (the abuse was pretty insidious and, of course, we normalized it) and how it affected us internally. I'm also most likely autistic and have always struggled to socialize correctly, which led to a LOT of observation and imitation that was both conscious and unconscious.

Despite all this practice at introspection though, in the past few years, I've come to realize I am wildly out of touch with my own emotions. I am tempted to blame much of this on the fact that I was always collecting social "scripts" to follow, so that I could react appropriately to jokes, or good/bad news, or whatever. If you're acting, you don't actually need to know how you feel. And if you feel something different from standard, it's irrelevant because it's "wrong" to feel that way, so you ignore it. So it took me a long time to realize that my display for other people was actually pretty disconnected from whether I was actually feeling anything. I don't feel it was dishonest, though, because I still would have wanted to show sympathy, excitement, etc. for the people I care about. It just takes me so long to process things that I wouldn't have been able to do it within the same conversation if I didn't have a ready script.

I know that some autistic people experience alexithymia/emotional blindness, but it doesn't look terribly well understood. I know I should probably get back on the therapy horse, for a number of reasons including this one, but I'm pretty leery. I never felt like it helped me much. (Although most of it, at the time, was to help me with "depression". Which I certainly had, but there was no understanding from either my end or theirs that the cause was likely rooted in ADHD/autism.) And I did try to start up again last year; I found a psychologist who specialized in ADHD and autism, and although she seemed understanding at first, I felt like I couldn't establish any clear communication and we just kept talking past each other. At this time, I super don't have the energy to keep trying new therapists, and waste weeks or months on each one before I figure out we won't click.

So I ask: have any of you folks ever dealt with emotional blindness? If so, how have you learned to identify your emotions? Do you keep a feelings journal, and how do you even know what to put in at first? Any advice is welcome!

And that's a wrap on the WDC! Congrats to Max on his 4th Drivers Championship in a row!

So I need to rewatch the race. The race was at 1am my time, which isn't super late for me...but I fell asleep between laps 16-45. Oops.

Anyway, we are back in another triple-header -- anyone else think the schedule sucks this year? Only two more races left. Next weekend in Qatar, and then the season finale the following weekend in Abu Dhabi. The WCC is still in play, so hopefully we'll get an exciting end of the season.

Next race:

Qatar Grand Prix
Lusail International Circuit
Sunday, December 1

To me this is the best thing I've ever seen, movie or series or otherwise. Characters, artstyle, writing, animations, worldbuilding, character depth, mental issues and disability representation and the music.

It's bold, it's flashy, it's outright heartbreaking and earth-shattering yet comforting and soft when it wants to be and then totally can spin the story again in a new direction. Bravo.

And I've seen anything from the Shawshank Redemption and The Dark Knight on release to obscure anime and bad TV series these past 25 years.

I bow to the incredible talent that has made this possible.