doors_cannot_stop_me's recent activity

  1. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (October 2026) in ~health.mental

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Thanks for this. Having decided (for now) that repeats of the same symptoms are likely to be the same thing, and thus that I am not returning to the ER (at least not this week), I've found that...

    Thanks for this. Having decided (for now) that repeats of the same symptoms are likely to be the same thing, and thus that I am not returning to the ER (at least not this week), I've found that the attacks seemed to subside more quickly. I've not had one in a week or so, but a few times I've felt one starting and just telling myself that I'm not going to the ER about it seems to settle it down. I see my doctor Monday, so hopefully I can get more than the shrug I keep getting from other medical professionals.

    It does help a lot, hearing your experience. Thank you

    2 votes

  2. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (October 2026) in ~health.mental

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Interestingly, the blood tests at the ER (I hadn't yet eaten that day, so fasting for well over 12 hours) showed my blood sugar very slightly elevated. Apparently that could be just having gotten...

    Interestingly, the blood tests at the ER (I hadn't yet eaten that day, so fasting for well over 12 hours) showed my blood sugar very slightly elevated. Apparently that could be just having gotten a bad night's sleep, but who knows?

  3. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (October 2026) in ~health.mental

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Thanks! I may have to try that, though the (hopefully) anxiety attacks seem to have subsided. The random-seeming chest discomfort could definitely be food-related though, so I'll keep this in mind.

    Thanks! I may have to try that, though the (hopefully) anxiety attacks seem to have subsided. The random-seeming chest discomfort could definitely be food-related though, so I'll keep this in mind.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on The return of phones with physical keyboards? in ~tech

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I was intrigued by the keyboard, but I'm more putting my money where my mouth is with regard to the things I've whined about not having with modern flagships: headphone jack, micro SD,...

    Yeah, I was intrigued by the keyboard, but I'm more putting my money where my mouth is with regard to the things I've whined about not having with modern flagships: headphone jack, micro SD, smaller size, removable back cover. Can't wait to try it out.

    7 votes

  5. Comment on The return of phones with physical keyboards? in ~tech

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I bought the Clicks, so once I get mine I'll try to remember to come back here and tell you how it works out.

    I bought the Clicks, so once I get mine I'll try to remember to come back here and tell you how it works out.

    8 votes

  6. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (October 2026) in ~health.mental

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Thank you for the response. I have been trying to eat less meat, more veggie-based stuff, and I've gone from walking a couple of days a week to walking/jogging about 3km 5-6x a week. I was trying...

    Thank you for the response. I have been trying to eat less meat, more veggie-based stuff, and I've gone from walking a couple of days a week to walking/jogging about 3km 5-6x a week. I was trying to work up to a consistent 5km, but took a break when this stuff started.

    I've been feeling mostly better the past couple of days, and just having decided that it'll take something new and worse to send me back to the ER has helped the anxiety a good bit. Hopefully my GP will have some more for me when I go see her in a week or so.

    But yeah, I appreciate the advice, and I think i might have to look into that book. Thanks!

  7. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (October 2026) in ~health.mental

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Thanks friend. The not knowing is definitely not helping. Deciding "I'm not going to the ER" can help if I believe it, but I've never been good at tricking myself into believing anything.

    Thanks friend. The not knowing is definitely not helping. Deciding "I'm not going to the ER" can help if I believe it, but I've never been good at tricking myself into believing anything.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (October 2026) in ~health.mental

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I've really been struggling this past week. Up until last weekend, things had been going great. If been exercising more and eating better in an effort to improve heart health ahead of a checkup...

    I've really been struggling this past week.

    Up until last weekend, things had been going great. If been exercising more and eating better in an effort to improve heart health ahead of a checkup scheduled for a couple weeks from now, and those had been going well. I helped my wife with a house project as well on Sunday, just feeling great.

    Went for a cardiologist visit Monday, got good news there, still feeling good. Has a great night Tuesday with friends. Worked Wednesday, no problem.

    But when I got home Wednesday evening, I was super tired. Didn't feel like doing much, so I ate dinner and hung out on the couch like most nights with my wife, having a fine time. Slowly, I started feeling lightheaded and anxious, could feel my heart pounding through my whole body, felt feverish. Checked temperature, normal. Checked o2 level, normal. Blood pressure was high, but not technically dangerously so. Cold sweat, nausea for a second or three. This took place over about 3 or 4 hours.

    I finally decided to lay down, fairly certain this was some kind of panic/anxiety thing. Slept just fine.

    I never used to have this happen, and I don't have any new stressors that I can think of, but the older I get the closer I am to the age my dad suddenly died of heart stuff and I think that's getting to me. I've had an ER visit already once this year for similar symptoms, and all tests came back normal.

    Anyway, the next day I went to work feeling ok, and while I was in front of class got a notification that I'd met a cardio goal on my smart watch. Turns out my heart rate was elevated. Then I started getting lightheaded again, and had to leave my class with an assistant while I went to sit down and talk to a coworker who has heart issues. He suggested that with the new lightheadedness I might ought to see a doctor asap. I ended up back at the ER, and once again all tests come back fine other than elevated blood pressure.

    I'm just so overwhelmed and frustrated by this. It's so deeply stupid that the symptoms of anxiety, or just working out, or just being tired, all fit under the umbrella of "well it could be a heart attack and it's best to play it safe." I can't afford to be in the ER every night, and it feels like I'm having to choose between that or going to bed wondering if I'm having a heart attack every single night now. I'll just be relaxing, feeling great, then I'll hear my pulse in my ears, or feel a twinge in my chest, and next thing I know my blood pressure is up and I'm getting lightheaded again.

    Is it acid reflux giving me mild chest pain, which then makes me spiral into an anxiety attack? Is it an impending stroke that I'm just barely holding at bay with breath exercises? Basic anxiety manifesting physically? No one seems to know! Yay!

    I already had a bad relationship with sleep before, one I've been rehabilitating for the past couple of months. But now sleep time is so stressful. I fear I'll give myself a stroke/heart attack just from the stress of it, even if there's no physical underlying cause.

    My poor wife has been dealing with anxiety our whole life together, and I'm just beginning to understand how terrible that must be. That itself is also making me feel like crap, like I've not been supportive enough, even when I've given more than I felt I had to spare.

    I'm just exhausted and needed to vent. Hopefully I hear back from my doctor soon. Sorry for the negativity. Advice/encouragement are explicitly welcome.

    6 votes

  9. Comment on Anyone have any ketogenic diet stories? in ~food

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I did keto for a while, got to my lowest weight as an adult for a time. I just couldn't hack it long term, it started making me feel really deprived not being able to have my sweet treats. I also...

    I did keto for a while, got to my lowest weight as an adult for a time.

    I just couldn't hack it long term, it started making me feel really deprived not being able to have my sweet treats.

    I also was advised by my doctors to stop keto due to my cholesterol.

    Good luck!

    5 votes

  10. Comment on Announcing the eighth annual Tildes' Make Something Month (Timasomo)! in ~tildes

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    Put me in, coach! (To the notifications list, that is. I'll see if I can come up with a contribution)

    Put me in, coach! (To the notifications list, that is. I'll see if I can come up with a contribution)

    3 votes

  11. Comment on What's the best Pikmin game? in ~games

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Same. Ingress was kind of like that, but the locations were real and you could end up meeting some less than friendly faces sometimes.

    Same. Ingress was kind of like that, but the locations were real and you could end up meeting some less than friendly faces sometimes.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Do you think you're special? in ~talk

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    Thanks for the kind words and perspective! The isolation is real for sure, I remember feeling it a lot in my youth. I think there can be a flip-side to finding a niche for your own giftedness...

    Thanks for the kind words and perspective!

    The isolation is real for sure, I remember feeling it a lot in my youth. I think there can be a flip-side to finding a niche for your own giftedness matrix at work, and that's finding a social/friendship niche. As before, it's highly luck-based and (depending on the niche available to you) potentially at a high risk of toxicity (see the incel community, which started innocently as a place for people with a certain type of perceived social deficit to gather and find friendship or commiseration, but turned into... well, yikes).

    I've lucked out majorly in both places, and I'm so grateful. I fell into a career that is shaped around my interests and skills, which is fostering new skills I didn't even know were within my reach. I also, through fortunate happenstance, have been brought into proximity to a couple of people who took an interest in me and keep me from falling back to my social default (reading at home).

    I hope you are doing well though the mental challenges, too! I'm still coming to grips with that part of things, I think.

    And the "potential" thing... Well, I've been disappointing people who could see my potential for decades, so at least that part is fairly well scarred over for me. Disappointing myself sucks, though. I have to make an effort to affirm to myself that, even though I'm not a rocket surgeon or whatever I could have been if I were, fundamentally, a different person with none of my deficits, I am pretty badass at what I do sometimes and I occasionally make other people's day better, which is all that really matters anyway, I think. I try to focus less on how far I am from what I could be, and more on how far I am from where my worst traits would like to drag me. I'm improving, I'm trying.

    5 votes

  13. Comment on What's the best Pikmin game? in ~games

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    That seems to be true. The game is relatively good about keeping information about your location visible to only you. Best I can tell, the only ways to reveal your location would be via postcards...

    my most likly walking areas are not sharable

    That seems to be true. The game is relatively good about keeping information about your location visible to only you. Best I can tell, the only ways to reveal your location would be via postcards (especially repeats or several different ones that come from the same vicinity) or mushroom battle invites. The postcards thing is entirely your own choice, so that's easy to avoid. Mushroom battles, on the other hand...

    Let's say you and I are in-game friends, but I don't want to reveal my location to you so I'm judicious about inviting you to only mushroom battles that aren't near my home. Over time, assuming I keep inviting you to other mushrooms, you could send friend requests to other people I battle mushrooms with, especially repeats. These people are likely also in my friends list. If I'm inviting them (our mutual friends, which i would have no way of knowing about) to mushroom battles close to home because I don't really care if they know where I live (since they don't know anything else about my life), then it's possible that one of more of them could start inviting you to those mushrooms, too. You wouldn't even have to tip your hand by joining them, you'd just be able to see that I keep joining the same mushroom battles in the same small town and not inviting you to them.

    Similarly, if I invite you to a mushroom battle and I'm the only one fighting it when you see it, then you can be fairly certain (unless I'm spoofing my location to get better access) that I'm physically close to that location, since it's incredibly unlikely that someone else invited me to it and then quit. This could give you information about my rough geographic location, maybe even travel habits.

    I'm not particularly worried about these things, as I'm unfortunately not as hard to locate based on information freely available on the Internet as I'd like to be, but it is the sort of thing I think about.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on What's the best Pikmin game? in ~games

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    I am! Been playing daily for just over two years, and it has certainly gotten me out of bed some mornings for walks I otherwise would have skipped.

    I am! Been playing daily for just over two years, and it has certainly gotten me out of bed some mornings for walks I otherwise would have skipped.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on What's the best Pikmin game? in ~games

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    /noise As someone who has only played one Pikmin game, I have to say Pikmin Bloom. It's Pokemon Go, but Pikmin and better.

    /noise
    As someone who has only played one Pikmin game, I have to say Pikmin Bloom. It's Pokemon Go, but Pikmin and better.

    5 votes

  16. Comment on Do you think you're special? in ~talk

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I definitely believe that I'm special, and I believe everyone else is, and I believe Syndrome can eat a big one. Growing up I, like many here, was told I was special. It was an explanation of my...
    • Exemplary

    I definitely believe that I'm special, and I believe everyone else is, and I believe Syndrome can eat a big one.

    Growing up I, like many here, was told I was special. It was an explanation of my school performance, good and bad. It was an expectation of future performance, which was equal parts inspiring, incorrect, and hurtful. It was true.

    It was also relative. When you're in a small town, a small school, a small world, it's easy to be not just special (unique in the universe, as we each are) but exceptional (above average, not falling into typical ranges), at least in some regard. There were things I could do that nobody around me could do so well. Few of them were socially valuable, like being good at sports would have been. Nobody "cool" cared that I could, before the age of 16, guess a grown man's pants size from 10 feet away to a high degree of accuracy. But it was something that made me exceptional. I was also academically gifted (for certain values of "gifted"), which didn't necessarily endear me to other kids, but impressed adults and could make life easier later. I was also exceptionally annoying to my teachers, but they tended to let that slide.

    But then I went to college. I met other exceptionally academically gifted kids, and they were more exceptional than me. It hurt. They were driven by the competition; I was daunted by the work of keeping up with them and gave up. My mind was accustomed to being a big fish in a small pond, and the ocean in which I found myself (in reality, another tiny pond - a small, private, conservative college nobody has likely heard of) broke me for a bit. I have a need to be exceptional, healthy or not.

    It took years to realize that the existence of people better than me at something did not negate my own exceptionality. People that score like me on standardized tests are a dime a dozen at universities. Not so at the hardware store I worked at after I dropped out of college. On the other hand, people who know how to change their own wall outlets, rekey a lock or properly use a glass cutter are common in hardware stores everywhere, but are exceptionally rare in the frat houses I've visited. Being exceptional doesn't mean being the best. It means being rare in context.

    I'm monologuing (dang it, Syndrome). But my rambling has reminded me of a scene from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, wherein the main character (an extraordinarily average man) finds himself stranded on a planet where technology is somewhat primitive. He doesn't know how to turn any of their resources into food, or how to build his own hut, or anything useful in his new context. But he finds a niche - he knows how to make a mean sandwich. His adoptive people have never seen such a thing, and he has tons of practice, so he becomes the closest thing to a restauranteur in that society. It's played for laughs, and at the time I first read it (as a still-academically-exceptional high-schooler) I assumed it was making a point about how unexceptional modern society makes us, that we become useless. Maybe that was the author's point, he was awfully pessimistic on modern society. But now I'm coming to view it as a demonstration that exceptionality is all about context.

    Sure, you may be a ho-hum coder at your big tech firm, but you'd be the best anyone's ever seen at thousands of small businesses. You might be so bad at your favorite video game that you can never get into competitive, but you dominate in your friend group. You might not be as funny as your friends, but you're the funniest dude at the office. It's all about context.

    And sure, some people derive their drive from being surrounded by exceptional people - they tend to gather, after all - and use that drive to improve. But if you're burned out, if you've hit your own personal ceiling in the skill, and you miss being exceptional, then try to find a new context. It's tough to do, and often very luck-based, but if you nail it it's so rewarding.

    But even if you don't find that niche, I think it's ok to believe you're special. We all are. You might just need to find the right people to recognize it.

    13 votes

  17. Comment on Fitness Weekly Discussion in ~health

  18. Comment on Fitness Weekly Discussion in ~health

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link Parent
    So true. I didn't mention this in my main comment, but there's a secret layer below all of the above that provided part of the motivation to go on all of those walks in the first place: Pikmin...

    So true. I didn't mention this in my main comment, but there's a secret layer below all of the above that provided part of the motivation to go on all of those walks in the first place: Pikmin Bloom. It's like Pokemon Go, but focused on planting flowers and destroying mushrooms. But most importantly, number go up is in full effect. There have been so many mornings where I would rather stay in bed, but if I don't get my walkies then number won't go up! I always say "If it looks stupid but works then it's not stupid."

  19. Comment on Fitness Weekly Discussion in ~health

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I've been trying to get a bit more fit lately, and I'm proud of my progress. I haven't run in close to 20 years (other than to chase the occasional nephew), and even when I did I was not fast and...

    I've been trying to get a bit more fit lately, and I'm proud of my progress. I haven't run in close to 20 years (other than to chase the occasional nephew), and even when I did I was not fast and hated doing it. For years I've been doing walks as my only form of real exercise, including a few 5ks.

    I recently started the habit of walking about a mile and a half almost every morning before getting ready for the day, which has been nice. Then I got a Fitbit, and started paying attention to my heart rate as I walk. That got me to try a bit of jogging to get that heart rate up, trying to get more cardio minutes. Maybe a minute or so at most.

    Now for the past few weeks I've been actively trying to improve my ability to jog for longer periods. I'm jogging very slow, barely faster than my walking pace, but it definitely gets my heart pounding so I figure I'm doing it right. But I've improved from alternating 1 minute jogging then 2 minutes of walking to 2 minutes of jogging then 1 minute of walking. I've also been attempting longer, single jogging sessions during a walk, and the first time I could only do 3 minutes or so. But the last time I tried I got to about 7 and a half.

    I'm not sure how I should feel about the fact that extremely slow jogging can get my heart rate up so easily, but I'm very happy that I've been improving and even (gasp!) wanting to jog. That's never been a thing for me I don't think. I'm excited.

    7 votes

  20. Comment on What do you listen to while you’re reading? in ~books

    doors_cannot_stop_me
    Link
    I listen to music if I'm drowning out other sounds (like someone near me watching tv), and it's usually EDM. I always opt for something I'm very familiar with and that doesn't have lyrics, since...

    I listen to music if I'm drowning out other sounds (like someone near me watching tv), and it's usually EDM. I always opt for something I'm very familiar with and that doesn't have lyrics, since novelty and lyrics tend to distract me while I'm reading. Lately I've been listening to some bardcore tracks by Perceval when I read.

    2 votes