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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Well, it was most likely the indirect drop in core temperature, or a change in your nervous system’s detection of temperature difference.

    When you warm up the skin, all the little capillaries open up at the surface. It isn’t only at the source of the heat. So your body now radiates its heat through the skin, dropping core temp slightly.

    A decrease in core temp is known to be part of the normal sleep cycle. This is one of the reasons a hot shower can contribute to faster, better sleep when taken an hour or so ahead of the intended bedtime.

    However, another part of the sleep cycle, or rather how our bodies work leading up to sleep, is that when external temperatures feel cooler, the adaptations our bodies make promote sleep, and improve sleep. It’s why a common bit of advice is to keep the sleeping area cool. But, if you trick your body into feeling a different gap in external and internal temperature, it often serves the same purpose. Our skin isn’t that great at determining direct temperature, as in “the air is 70 degrees”. What it is good at it “the air feels 30 degrees warmer than me”. So it can be fooled sometimes.

    Add in the comfort of cuddling, with the full stomach pulling blood towards the stomach, and you’ve got a nap bomb.

    There’s been some good research into this, and if you look up thermoregulation and sleep, skin warming and sleep, as well as general information about the sleep cycle, you’ll run into at least articles reporting the studies. Most of the studies are paywalled, but if you’re sufficiently motivated, there’s ways around that.

    But, by all means, do the control experiment. I would predict that you’ll get a slower result than with your boyfriend, but not a ton slower. Assuming you make sure to eat the same meal, or very similar, anyway.

    Just remember that it isn’t 1:1. The air temp may be different by a few degrees, you may have had more or less sleep beforehand, time of day can make it vary. Clothing, textures of bed linens, etc. The boyfriend isn’t the only factor involved. So don’t expect a perfect result where the exact degree of reduction in time-to-sleep (aka sleep latency) is the exact same, or wildly different. You might not even be able to measure the difference since you didn’t actually measure the time precisely the first time. You’ll be relying on your perceived time to sleep unless you have the ability to read and record brain waves. Even watches and such with sensors aren’t precise in detecting sleep. They get close, but only to degree.






  • Degenerative disc disease ftw?

    Generally, it depends on what’s causing the pain as regards what reduces it.

    Booze is a CNS depressant. It puts a damper on everything in the central nervous system, and that includes pain perception.

    Heat typically works by improving blood flow to affected areas.

    So, most likely, what’s happening is that your muscle spasms are caused by the pain, rather than being the immediate source of pain. The tension does make pain levels increase, but stopping that without addressing the originating cause can’t and won’t eliminate all of it.

    So, muscle relaxers can only do so much. I would argue that they’re doing something, because there’s not been any cases of total immunity to any that I’ve been aware of, and they’re a first attempt for most chronic pain cases. But if they don’t target the actual cause, then they can’t do enough. In other words, if the pain is causing your muscles to tighten up, a muscle relaxer is only going to partially reduce that tension because only part of that tension is involuntary.

    It may not be conscious tension, but it isn’t something that is caused by the muscle itself. It’s a response to pain. So a muscle relaxer is kinda like a bandaid, not stitches.

    Booze, however, is going to work in your brain, blocking off the pain signals, or more accurately reducing your ability to perceive them. Once you no longer perceive the pain, that part of you that’s holding those muscles tight to try and prevent/reduce the oh-so-lovely pain from bulging, slipped, or herniated discs start to relax almost all the way, as opposed to the tiny bit that the muscle relaxers can make them unclench.

    Now, it’s important to note that the use of involuntary here doesn’t mean that the rest of your muscle tension is a choice. It just means that the part of your nervous system that is making it happen is a different section than the involuntary part. Now, you can actually exert conscious control over that kind of muscle tension, but it takes effort and practice. And, it probably won’t reach 100% release because your brain and body are going to resist it. Plus, pretty much the second you stop doing the methods that relax the muscles, they’ll go right back to trying to keep your back immobile. So it’s never a permanent solution.

    The key to finding a balance often means the long, hard road of physical therapy combined with training in progressive relaxation, breath control, and all the other tools that give you the ability to intercede in the process.

    Alcohol isn’t a long term solution. To the contrary, the longer you rely on it, the worse you’re gong to perceive the pain, and the more it’ll take to get relief.

    There is, however, some good-ish news. DDD is progressive. But! Most of the time it’ll reach a point of relative stasis. Things will bulge and slip more radically during the early part of the disease process. At some point, it’ll slow down its progression, and the changes tend you be more localized than along the entire spine. So you’ll reach a point where it won’t get worse fast, and will usually only get worse in small sections. I’m in that phase of things myself, and it isn’t exactly fun, but it means my pain and mobility levels are stable. There’s a high chance you’ll reach that point too.

    Once you hit that point, as long as you haven’t pushed things into addiction, stuff like muscle relaxers, Tylenol and the like can keep pain levels under control enough to get by.

    Until then, keep on your PT program. You want to keep as much flexibility, mobility, and joint health as possible. It really is one of those things that if you don’t use it you will lose it. But don’t make the mistake of doing absurd shit when you aren’t in debilitating pain. You can’t actually move normally, you just can’t perceive all the minor injuries you’re causing that make the pain worse once whatever you use wears off. That’s one of the reasons I quit accepting opiates. Yeah, I hurt less, but I couldn’t tell when I was doing something wrong, so I was getting worse, faster. I’m just now recovering properly from fucking my back up the last time I took some of my opiate pain meds. And that was in November ffs.

    So, if you need the relief to get by, use what you gotta. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that lack of pain means there’s nothing wrong.


  • Look, if I can’t slap my dick down on the table, life isn’t worth living. And, by definition, that is a form of dick measuring. Since it measures the dick against the table, the table is therefore measured against the dick.

    However! If someone would volunteer to be a flesh table for the period of the no-table-measuring, that would be acceptable. If I can measure my dick against someone’s shoulders or hips, problem solved, and I’m 200 mil richer.



  • Ngl, I wouldn’t use the rose scented stuff either, but mainly because my nose would clog up if I tried. Most fake flower smells do it.

    I’d just go ham and exfoliate harder. Soap isn’t actually necessary to be clean and not smell. It’s just much easier to achieve those goals with it than without. Hell, depending on where you’re washing on your body, soap can be a bad thing because even the stuff designed to not over strip skin won’t always live up to that promise.

    Legit folks, if you run out of soap, you can be just as clean (as in dead skin cells sloughed off, excess oils gone, and any odors from the bacteria on your body gone) with just your hands, short term. You’d need something better at exfoliating than bare hands if it’s going to be over about a week, but it’s still doable. Longer term, soap itself is just faster, not better, than any other product that can reduce skin oils and any clinging dirt.

    You’d be amazed how many people have strong sensitivities to most surfactants, or outright allergies to some of the more common ingredients. They can be right beside you in an elevator after years of not using soap, and you won’t know.



  • You think vance would be better? Or anyone else down the line? The entire line of succession is stacked deep with turds. They might be green or brown instead of orange, but they’re still going to stink.

    So killing Trump does nothing useful. At most, it might, might shift power structures within the GOP that could result in a better candidate next election, assuming we’re allowed to have one.



  • I dunno, it’s hard to pick a single actor because they don’t all do equivalent roles.

    I think it fair to say that Edward Norton is damn high on my list though. He does take on a wide range of roles, and I’ve yet to see anything where he didn’t just own the role he was in, even if the rest of the movie wasn’t as good. But he also doesn’t take on roles in shitty movies either. I can’t think of any where the movie wasn’t at least well made, even if it wasn’t super successful.

    I’m in the same place with Samuel L Jackson for similar reasons, though sometimes he does jump into bad-ish movies that are only watchable because he’s in it. Like, snakes on plane? If he wasn’t in it, no way would it be as fun as it is. But he’s kinda stealth despite his reputation. People know he can act, but then he pulls out something like black snake moan and everyone is all “damn, I forgot he could do that”. He seems like he enjoys taking on lighter roles just for the fun of acting, and then he finds something meaty he can sink his teeth into and goes beast mode. But I can’t think of any performances he’s done that weren’t worth watching, even the shitty commercials lol







  • Nah, it was my imaginary friend doing bmx tricks, we didn’t have parkour back then.

    Also, how could a person run fast enough to keep up with a motor vehicle? Sheesh, does your imagination completely ignore science? You gotta have at least a bicycle to keep up.

    Also, this is the first time I’ve ever seen or heard someone else talk about this kind of daydream. So, it’s pretty fucking cool, even though the details aren’t the same.






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