u/ZBLongladder

The whole family (other than Mom) agrees that she shouldn't be living on her own. But my aunt and uncle (her brother and sister) who do most of the caring (since I'm out of state and an only child) have just kinda given up on her. She refuses any kind of help, won't even discuss moving to a home, won't discuss having a nursing aide, and won't even go to the doctor...they had been making appointments for her, but she kept canceling them at the last minute. To add to it, Mom is a very negative person, and the fact she's having delusions or confabulations or whatever's making her believe these crazy things about family members (much of which is unflattering) has just sort of made the rest of the family throw up their hands and say there's nothing they can do.

I wish I could just move down there and take over her care, but that's a terrible idea and everyone who I talk to agrees. I have had treatment resistant depression and anxiety for the past 15 or so years, and moving to a different state to take care of Mom would mean getting rid of my whole treatment team and finding a new therapist, psychiatrist, pcp, etc, while also caring for mom, which would be a high stress situation in itself. Me moving down there seems like it'd be a recipe to end up with me in crisis, too. But it feels like she's got nobody else in the world who's willing to fight for her right now.

Like, this is a woman who gets lost in her own neighborhood, doesn't know where shopping centers she's lived down the street from for decades are, couldn't figure out her age last time she had a birthday (she thought that after 78 was 88), compulsively gets rid of stuff in her house for no reason, gets bizarre ideas on her head about family members (often involving them hating her or wanting nothing to do with her), etc, etc...having her live by herself with minimal assistance from relatives seems like a recipe for disaster, and everyone else agrees, but they seem to see no way out except to let disaster happen. I want to help her, but I have no idea what to do...I don't feel like I can just tell my aunt and uncle to start treating her less like an adult, to hide the appointments from her until the last minute or to claim they're just visiting Betty to have her move into the home she's pretty clearly going to move into sooner or later. The family's miserable, I'm miserable, Mom's miserable...is there any way out? There's part of me that secretly hopes she just gets into a car accident and dies, just so she's spared the long, miserable end of life without her primary support (my dad, who died a couple of years ago). (Oh yeah, did I mention she's still driving?)

There's been a lot of noise in my state (MA) about a (hopefully doomed and definitely unpopular) campaign to undo legalized recreational cannabis, so I figured I should see what it was all about before rec potentially went away. (I've had CBD before, but I'd never tried THC before yesterday.) I got a few things from the dispensary, including some 5mg 1:1:1 THC:CBD:CBN gummies. They claimed on the packaging that they were "fast acting" and kicked in in 5-15 minutes. So I took one, waited a half hour or so, and was asking my gf if it was normal just to feel a very mild buzz. She told me that was just how marijuana was, very mild. I figured I must've gotten the wrong thing and took another one, and half an hour later another one. An hour or so after that, I'm feeling damn near as out of it as when I was on ketamine for my depression, just without hallucination and dissociation. Fortunately, it was definitely fun and not scary, but I can assure you I'm not going back to 15mg for quite a while.

My 2026 Camry XSE Premium just came in today, but I won't actually be getting it till next week because I had to sell some stock to pay for it (I'm paying cash) and those funds won't hit my account till Friday at the soonest. In the meantime, the salesman asked if I wanted to come out to the dealership to look at the car and fill out paperwork, which I assume will include the finance office trying to sell me warranties and whatnot. I'm going in tomorrow--is anything they're trying to sell me worth it, or should I flat-out decline everything? Also, any gotchas I ought to know about in looking over the car or filling out paperwork?

I'm just looking to get started in 78 collecting, and I'm looking for turntable & cartridge advice. I've got my heart kinda set on the Waxwing preamp (I already have a DAC / headphone amp / headphones, so downstream of the Waxwing is already covered). Part of me really wants a Rega Planar 78, but realistically I know that something like an AT-LP120X is probably a better choice for a beginner. (Unless anyone has any other recommendations...I'm open to suggestions.) What I'm really clueless about is the cartridge...I've heard that 78s have different width grooves, so is it necessary to have separate styluses for the different grooves, or do you just pick something that's close enough and go from there? Are there any cartridges that are particularly recommended (or best avoided)?

Every time I've interacted with an LLM, the answer I got back invariably felt way too structured. Like a B/B+ high school student who had a solid enough grasp on writing to get their point across but wasn't actually a good enough writer to make it flow or sound natural. E.g., I've never had a human insert a bulleted list into a response to something I said in casual conversation, but bots do that constantly. Like, it really sounds like a student doing a miniature essay, just about, like, what to look for in a good tube amp or whatever I asked about. It can be practically useful to have stuff presented that way, it just feels unmistakably like you're talking to a machine. I even once tried to use Gemini as a chat companion when my anxiety spiked and nobody was available to comfort me, but I didn't find it helpful because its style just felt so unnatural, even though I sincerely wanted it to work at the time.