I spoke too soon

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Well, okay, my MSG tolerance is higher than it used to be but I still have a limit, as it turns out.

At least this reaction isn’t nearly as bad as they used to be. But yeah I’m not gonna start monching down on Doritos habitually or anything.

My kitchen before this mess

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Oh yeah, I neglected to actually take photos of my kitchen in operation before I’d cleared everything out on day 0 (where it didn’t look so bad), but I did just go back through my photos to find some examples of what the kitchen was like under normal circumstances.

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MSG observation

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So, in the past, the “Simply Cheetos” brand of Cheetos didn’t use monosodium glutamate in it, so it was a safe thing for me to eat.

Today when buying lunch at the grocery store, I saw that they had the Flamin' Hot Simply Cheetos, so I bought a bag, and did a cursory glance of the ingredients list and didn’t see MSG on them. Then I had a bunch with dinner, and noticed a rather strong umami flavor (but not the same one that I normally associate with MSG), and paid it no mind.

Later in the evening I started having a really bad bowel reaction to something and started looking at the ingredients listings of everything I ate today to see what it could be, and that’s when I noticed MSG on the Cheetos label.

However, I don’t think it was the Cheetos' MSG that did this! In fact I think I might actually no longer be MSG-sensitive. And looking back, I don’t think I’ve had an MSG reaction ever since I did the ketamine treatments in March (even though I’ve knowingly had MSG a few times since then). There have been a whole lot of unexpected neurological changes that did happen from the ketamine infusions; in particular, ever since those treatments, caffeine doesn’t give me a massive panic attack when I have as little as half of an espresso (I can now tolerate a large Mountain Dew with just a slightly elevated heart rate!), and sucralose doesn’t give me a headache anymore either, and alcohol doesn’t make my pain flare up either.

All of those food sensitivities are highly co-occurrent with people with fibromyalgia, which was the main thing I was trying to treat with ketamine. While the chronic pain and fatigue symptoms haven’t gone away (and those were the main things I was trying to treat!) it’s possible that ketamine at least did have some beneficial effect.

I’m still not going to rush out and like. Consume all the MSG, just as I don’t rush out and consume all the sucralose/Stevia/etc. either and still prefer decaffeinated beverages for a bunch of reasons (although it’s nice being able to self-medicate my ADHD again!) and still limit my alcohol consumption, but maybe I don’t need to worry about those causing unexpected problems anymore.

Anyway. All this is to say that I still absolutely believe that MSG sensitivity is a thing (based on my prior experiences) but also it might be possible to get away from it! I’m not sure undergoing expensive ketamine treatments is worth it for this effect alone, but it might be a nice side-effect for folks who are seeking it for other reasons.

Kitchen Remodel II, day 1

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I’m not sure why I’m calling this “Remodel II” because this is neither the second kitchen remodel I’ve gone through (it’s the fourth) nor the second I’ve had in this house. But it is the second one on this incarnation of my blog, so that’s probably it.

Anyway, today was demolition day.

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Kitchen Remodel II, day 0

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Today I finished clearing out my kitchen getting ready for tomorrow’s demolition. Thankfully I actually had a few days to get it done this time, unlike last time when the contractor only let me know the demolition was going to happen at 5 PM the day before.

Because I had time to prepare it meant I could also actually do it in a semi-organized way. Which is good, because I have way less space for “staging” stuff in this house than I did in my last place.

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Bracing for impact

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My kitchen renovation starts on Wednesday. Thankfully I have plenty of advance warning this time and have started to pack up the stuff in my kitchen; I need to spend a lot more time finishing that up tomorrow, though. I’ve only put a dent in things.

I hope that the end result of this is I’ll finally get rid of a lot of stuff I’m not using actively, or at least figure out a better way of storing the stuff I rarely use.

The new kitchen design is going to be the same basic layout, but there’s a few nice changes that are going to happen. The lower cabinet next to the refrigerator is going to be replaced with a drawer unit, which will be much more useful for me (I’ll probably move my pots and pans in there, and the rarely-used stuff that currently lives in there goes into the sideboard where those were kept). The weird, awkward storage cabinets that flank the stove will become less-weird storage cabinets, with a utility drawer on top (but still a door down below).

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Yet another kitchen remodel

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Very soon I will be remodeling my kitchen.

Why yes, it does seem like just yesterday that I did the last one, but that was actually two years and one house ago! That kitchen was mostly-completed right before the pandemic started, and then finally actually-completed a year later, just before I moved out to my new home. Which is a really stupid pattern, where three times in a row I’ve put off a kitchen remodel until it became unavoidable, and then ended up moving out soon after.

I’m hoping that this will not continue the pattern!

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The irony of “context collapse”

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So, I’m not sure where I picked up the term “context collapse,” but the way I’ve been using it is extremely different than how it’s defined in academic circles:

Context collapse “generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another” with that new audience’s reaction being uncharitable and highly negative for failing to understand the original context.

This is… sort of how I use it, but not entirely; Wikipedia goes on to provide examples which all involve text being meant for one audience and read by another for whom it wasn’t intended.

The way I’m using it would be better defined as: using terminology in ways which make sense in one context, but when taken out of context can mean something very different, often with the opposite of its intention.

Or, in broader terms, using information that makes sense in one context in an inappropriate manner for another context, often by chasing through a chain of linked contexts without adapting the underlying information based on its new context.

So, is there a better, more established term out there that captures the phenomenon I talked about yesterday? Because it would be incredibly ironic if I ended up causing even more confusion by using a term that means vastly different things in different contexts, when talking about that very same phenomenon.

The Dangers of Context Collapse

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Context collapse is a favorite tool of Internet trolls and other disruptive influences1, but it has so many other implications. It’s important to avoid it, and to recognize where context collapse is leading to incorrect beliefs or actions.

Context collapse itself is the phenomenon of highly-contextual information being used, purposefully or otherwise, in an ambiguous manner which leads to confusion. A pretty common example of this is the word “theory;” in colloquial speech it means the same thing as “hypothesis” in scientific speech. This leads to a very common chain of reasoning: the theory of evolution (in the scientific sense) becomes “just a theory” (in the colloquial sense), which then is purposefully used to sow seeds of doubt in people using the phrase colloquially, when scientifically-speaking it’s established fact.

This ends up being a huge issue in a lot of unexpected places, which can often result in extremely unfortunate results which can negatively impact peoples' livelihoods, even with the best of intentions.

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