I’m super curious with what you roughly came up with! I never would have thought to look it up.

This is my experience as well. I was talking about it with some of my partners recently, and we all agreed we’d never go back to being mono, even if we were only with one person.

Also, the official poly flag

For sure! I think in a lot of ways, my first partner and I got lucky on the compatibility front. We’ve just always vibed super well, and usually come to the same conclusions about stuff, even if it’s by different means. I think we were also both pretty inclined towards multiple relationships, even though we didn’t really realize it until we’d been together for a long time.

Communication is definitely key, though. There are a lot of things that are kinda implicit in a monogamous relationship that you need to talk about more explicitly when it’s open. I think we’re also lucky in that we’re both friends with each other’s partners.

Honestly, the biggest hurdle was at first was insecurity, both about the relationship and myself (and herself as well). Getting over the idea that your partner may ditch you for another person they have NRE with is hard, despite assurances. Obviously, that never happened. These days, I’m so far from that version of myself these days that it’s kinda funny to look back on, at least.

My partner and I met as young, straight, and monogamous. We’ve been together for 18 years, and married for 13. We opened our relationship about 10 years ago, and now each have two other partners we’ve been with for several years (with some dating in between). We love where our lives have ended up, and are very glad we started dating multiple people. It’s definitely more complicated to manage multiple intimate relationships, but worth the effort if you’re inclined that way, I think.

Edit: just because I’ve seen other comments, I figure I should say that we tell people we’re polyamorous as shorthand, but we all mostly practice some form of relationship anarchy.

Here’s hoping they help! I waited until just last year to get diagnosed at the ripe ol’ age of 36. It took a whole to get the right meds figured out, but they’re helping a ton. They also have the side effect of severely reducing some chronic pain I had.

I will say that I kinda had to convince my psych that I actually had ADHD despite it being super obvious to all my friends. I scored too “well” on a computer aided test (oops, all video games). The thing that convinced her was making a spreadsheet of all the symptoms if both types and making a tick for each day they adversely impacted my ability to get stuff done.

As a bipolar II person, this sounds like the beginning of a round of hypomania to me.

I’ve considered it before, but maybe I should look into it a bit more concertedly! Every time I’ve gone into a doctor for a long term condition, they inevitably tell me to take B12 for 2 months and come back, and by that time I’ve usually lost my motivation for doing something about it. 😆

Yup, and that’s mostly what I was looking for. I just kinda assumed it was an autism-related sensitivity thing, but it’s nice to have confirmation. Thanks for sharing!

That’s a very interesting way to think about it, and as I think about an actual intense physical response like that, this kinda feels like a constant, low level version of that. Thanks for the articles! I definitely want to go dive into those.

Yeah, that’s kinda the vibe I get. It’s definitely a receiving instead of initiating thing for me, too. I don’t know that it’s worse (because skin on fire sounds awful), but it’s kinda different.

We think sand clocks have only been in use since the middle ages, and the reason they were invented is pretty interesting. (At least in Europe; I’ve looked into this before and couldn’t find any other sources, but I may just not have looked hard enough).

For reasonably accurate time keeping, people had been using water clocks since at least the 16th century BCE. Basically the same idea as a sand clock, but water, which was slightly easier to feed into a reservoir. We don’t think sand clocks really saw any use until the 13th or 14th century CE. Mostly, people needed to keep more accurate time on ships as oceanic voyages became more common, but the movement of the vessel messed up a water clock too badly to be useful, and pendulums had the same problem. So, enter a sand clock! Basically the same idea as a water clock, but way less prone to errors from the ship’s movement.

(edit: some spelling)

Fun fact: we’re pretty sure this is why hourglasses (or sand clocks in general) were invented! They flow at a pretty consistent rate even on board a ship, and were basically just a tweak on the design of a water clock.

That honestly sounds like the way to go, and I’ll probably look into it when I have more time. I’m more a software person than a sysadmin and I’m not wildly confident that I won’t accidentally close us down for a few days without a lot of prep. 😆

Inventory is through our POS/processor and production records are through Beer30 (though I have plans to write my own and open source it when I have time; we just opened and we’re all still running pretty hard doing new-open stuff). We’re also technically a nano-brewery, so anything we’re doing is a little bespoke (i.e., I think it’s a very situational setup) right now.

The biggest thing from a brewery-specific side that we’re doing is controlling the brewhouse. We’re running an all-electric system, and all the heating and cellar controls expose UIs over the LAN. In addition to being generally nifty, we’re using Unifi to separate brewery-specific stuff onto its own network and the built-in VPN hosting (I opted for the OpenVPN option) to expose that network security. This allows our brewer to do stuff like check the temperature from home or set the boil kettle to start running before he leaves the house. (The useful thing about the UDM (primary server) running Alpine is that I have a task that essentially functions as dynamic DNS and updates an A record with our domain provider so he can always log in at a known hostname).

It also integrates with cameras, phone, and menu boards, which are all useful for the FoH side of things.

All-in-all, we’re not doing that much with it yet, but it’s pretty nice to use so far, and being a software engineer, I’m excited for the possibilities of useful stuff I can host on it.

I’ve been using Ubiquiti/Unifi for my brewery setup (cameras, several private networks, phone tree stuff). It comes with some pretty solid management software accessible through the local network, but under the hood, everything’s just running Alpine. There’s a bit of a learning curve if you keep the management software installed (firmware updates wipe out the crontab, for example), but you can customize it pretty aggressively if you know your way around a terminal.