Super General Advice (the thread for advice without making a thread)

i don't know anything about smart cars, but on the scale of non-smart cars, that one is a spring chicken!! my 2009 car has 110,000 miles on it and it's running fine. my last car made it 21 years and 180k miles with no major issues until the body got too rusted to fix something minor.

 

It sounds a lot like your dad is hunting for any reason to get you to call off the trip. Get the tire replaced and you should be more than fine; I've made trips that are longer without thinking to get my car maintenanced first, and it sounds like you're keeping your safety in mind.

 

Our (my husband's and my) old 2003 Saturn L300 made multiple 12 hour trips in both winter and summer from IL to NY/NY to IL; our "new" Prius (2013, maybe?) has made the same trip at least 3 times now too, and I would imagine that that's a little bit closer to a smart car than a clunky old Saturn. If it hasn't had any issues, there's no warning lights of various sorts (engine, heating, fluid levels, ..., etc.), and you get the tire replaced, I don't see why it can't make it. If you can get up to appropriate highway speeds and maintain them, and the car is in good working order as far as you know, then you should be fine.

 

We finally came up with a compromise. They payed for half the plane ticket after they finally realize that I wasn’t backing off.

 

does anyone know how to mess with a pdf? like, what i have is a book scan that has the right and left page of the book on each page of the pdf. but that shows up really tiny on my kindle and i want to make it so that each page is its own page in the pdf. does that make sense? how do i do this?

 

i was actually able to figure it out - program is k2pdfopt, it's a free open source app for optimizing pdfs for kindle readers :D i thought it wasn't working but it turned out that my file was just crazy big, like 300 pages, so it was taking around 20 minutes just to preview and an hour to actually export it. i got it working tho ;w;

 

Does anyone know anything about party etiquette?

My friend is throwing a going-away party tonight because she's moving. I really want to go so I can say good-bye and celebrate her good fortune (she's moving somewhere nice with her boyfriend, and they seem really happy together - they're such a cute couple). The issue is I don't think I'm going to know anyone else there. I feel clumsy and dumb in groups where I don't know anyone. I was thinking about mitigating some of this by not staying super long. I want to make sure to see my friend, of course, and I know it's generally a social faux pas to just run in, say hi to her, and immediately leave. Does anyone know how long you should stay at a party so as to avoid seeming rude? I've already made up my mind to go, so just avoiding it altogether isn't on the table.

(obviously if I end up getting drawn into conversation or playing a game I'll stay for longer - this is just in case I have trouble finding people to talk with)

 

I think roughly an hour is generally considered acceptable? 15 minutes or less is definitely a no-go, but an hour is a good amount of time--half hour, if you can construct a viable excuse to leave. But in my experience, if a party's going to end up being over an hour long, that's about the point where it's considered perfectly fine to tap out.

 

An hour is actually what I was thinking! The party will theoretically be several hours long, but I think even if I fall in with a nice group of people to chat with I'll get tired and it might be best to leave before I run out of words. I think half an hour might be too short unless something actually happens and I have to leave for real (which I'm not anticipating being an issue).

Thank you - I'm not good at figuring these things out on my own, and I'd feel really bad if I was inadvertently rude.

 

Spoiler: blood, not gruesome

Could a round of nosebleeds requiring an ER visit (due to refusal to clot, not severity) be enough to cause iron deficiency anemia? (The clotting issue is due to blood thinners.)

 

On a scale of one to ten, is it dumb to use an 80W charger in lieu of a 60W one for the same device? My macbook charger stopped working again and my friend lent me one that’s got the same connector but a different wattage

 

I would say a lower wattage than your device came with is generally okay, but unless it's like, something specifically meant to charge fast (a fast charger for your phone for instance) using a higher wattage charger on a lower wattage device isn't the best idea bc the higher wattage could fry the battery.

 

yeah it's probably fine for the short term, but long-term use could damage the battery. you can use it to keep your macbook topped up for a bit, but still best to pick up a new charger of the appropriate wattage.

 

Welp, turns out to be a moot point because this charger doesn’t work either. Or possibly the problem is with the laptop itself. Oh well!

 

is projecting on characters bad if one's not being mean about it and/or insisting that one's headcanons are actually the only valid canon?

 

As long as you know that it is projecting and you don't have any particular difficulty stepping away from conflicts involving that character or differentiating fiction from reality, it can be a good outlet. My therapist encouraged me to externalize my feelings so I have an easier time processing them, and making them about someone Not Me and fictional is one of the best ways you can do that.

Caveat that there are some ways that this can go wrong - you can get too invested with your version of the character and get aggressive or can get so involved you miss out on your daily life - but it's not necessarily a bad thing to use a character to process your emotions. I've used that coping strategy a lot in my grieving process, for example.

Edit: tldr takeaway - any coping mechanism can be maladaptive but this one in particular does not have any more tendency to be maladaptive than any other

 

thanks. :D