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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Logically, I want to say no, not really, but I also would have thought the blackout and ongoing protests wouldn’t really affect Reddit and they’d ignore it. Reddit itself, however, seems incredibly determined to pursue a course of action which requires performing This Does Not Affect Us At All as dramatically and publicly as possible given the slightest opportunity whether anyone cares or not. This doesn’t even include the admins playing subreddit roulette that encompasses actively rebelling subs, subs deep in malicious compliance, and subs that have no idea wtf is going on they just want to talk about their weird NSFW fetish in peace.

    So no, I don’t think so, but I’m beginning to wonder if Reddit thinks there is and what they’re seeing on their side that I’m not.


  • I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It’s currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

    Reasons: 1.) It’s light on resources 2.) It’s very simple and clean. 3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine). 4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.


  • The only reason I have social media accounts under my wallet name is to avoid anyone wondering why I’m not on social media (also: grandparents). Everyone IRL who I care enough about to actually explain know I login once a year in a separate browser (under incognito) and check every privacy setting from my checklist and update if it’s important (like job change). LinkedIn I check regularly, but that’s because a.) I only connect with people from work and a lot of them do think it’s important to have strong networks (and they could be right, no idea) and b.) LinkedIn has an education section that my job really likes because it has free classes and when I get bored at work, I can do a quick class in something (nothing they actually want us to do; I have to work in the nightmare that is Agile, do not make me take yet another class about the benefits of this software development hellscape, thanks).

    Honestly, I try to give the impression I’m not into social media IRL; there are like, three people in my daily life who are allowed into my online life and one because we more or less both got the internet at the same time and started a mailing list together. Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of nice people IRL, but not the type I want to introduce to the friends I made online.


  • I kind of think that’s how it’s supposed to go in my made-up-right-this-second knowledge of the evolution of open source Federated social media sites. Pick the largest/most active/most variety to get your feet wet and make any weird mistakes you need to make in a crowd where you’re one of many and sheer speed of posting means you’ll be forgotten in like, hours. Then you get comfortable and see if this is a forever-fit or just a okay-right-now fit.

    I mean, I hard-bond to my first and pretty much settle immediately for life unless something is seriously awry, but even I made a backup in another one that I mirrored all my favorite communities in and I am seriously getting one more in a smaller, more specialized server. Yes, I do get the point of Federated, you do not need to explain, but here’s the thing: intellectually I know that actually, the population of the Fediverse is orders of magnitude smaller than reddit or pretty much any other social media site, but feelings do not agree: Reddit was like a large, slightly hostile country with a lot of states you avoided always but especially between dusk and dawn; the scope of Fediverse is like being on a very small planet in an expanding universe you can watch growing in real time and it never stops. It’s great, but there’s something very unsettling realizing you’re eight servers from home surrounded by kpop or wake up to find you posted in three communities in servers you don’t recognize at two AM and if you can get a reputation for that kind of thing.

    My ADHD is living the dream, let’s go, but I can see how it would throw people a little.


  • I started vaping seven years ago as a way to quit smoking; I smoked my last cigarette literally outside the vape store before walking in and asking what to I buy to pull this off as nothing worked. The transition was seamless; not only did I never even crave a cigarette again, I very quickly learned to loathe the smell of cigarettes once my full range of smell came back. There’s not even a temptation to start up again.

    It also helps that I choose vapes that smell amazing.

    I am still vaping, yes, but I’m stepping down my nicotine pretty much every two years. I started at 24 and am now at 15 (I was stuck at 18 for a while). Those transitions I can definitely feel, but I can start with adjusting my mod’s wattage, air flow, use different coils for a bit, and ease into it so once I step down, there’s no chance I step back up, and then reward myself sometimes with a new fancy mod with a touchscreen with more leds or a cooler tank or something. All that and I am spending an order of magnitude less than I ever did on cigarettes and I have the math to prove it.

    It’s certainly not ideal and yeah, it’s slow and basically only progressively reducing harm, but it’s a process that for me is guaranteed to work with no backtracking and progress is assured.







  • Both specific and in general 1.) Nectar mattress. The only mattresses i’d ever bought were from amazon and very on sale. Important Life Advice: whatever you have to do to make i happen, get a good mattress. Even my bed approves and it thinks everything is beneath it, including me.

    2.) My bed.

    Oh boy, here we go. This goddamn bed.

    I bought it roughly twenty years ago and it literally took my entire tax return at my first job and then some to get it and the very first piece of furniture I personally picked out and bought for myself which may explain absolutely nothing about how I ended up like this.

    It’s fairly straightforward, plain four poster queen bed but so incredibly melodramatic no matter the room I put it in, this thing will dramatically not fit and carry on like it’s actually in a castle tower in 1700s Frances waiting for a princess to sleep in it (it did not act like this at the store, okay). It has an unnecessary number of parts (some really could have been consolidated and a couple I’m not sure even have a function other than to add time to assembling it) every piece of it is awkward to move, even the parts that have no reason to be and don’t look like they are, and every single piece is ten times heavier than than look or is reasonable, sane, or really should even be possible. The wood is dark and does a very cool dark gleaming thing, and it takes hours to clean and oil it to a soft gleam (so. goddamn. many. parts). Twenty-four hours later it’s sitting there dull and dramatically telling everyone who sees it I never clean it and also use substandard wood oil

    It takes a very base minimum of two people to even attempt to put it together and you better not have plans for the rest of the day because it doesn’t matter how many times you have done this, somehow, you will always get six parts wrong because whoever designed this has another job making complicated puzzle locks that you will never solve and will die mad about it (this person is a sadist). Just looking at it in any given bedroom I live in, it makes me feel I should be wearing something long, white, and flowy while waiting for my angsty vampire lover to visit me in the dead of the night and not taking my night’s sleep shorts and a tank top.

    This bed is a snobby, judgemental asshole who acts like I didn’t buy it at the goddamn Roomstore at ten percent off because it was a floor model.

    But. it’s a goddamn tank that’s been in substandard moving vans and the backs of multiple trucks and dropped down stairs and sometimes forgets to at least look scuffed. It will survive all the wars and still give its occupants a great night’s sleep. Those deceptively slim posts are strong enough to joust with a burglar, beat him to death, and then put back and rehang my very melodramatic bed curtains on them (though I’ll need a little hysterical strength to hold them up for very long; I am not kidding how stupid heavy those thing are and should not be). I love this bed, it is my soulmate, and it is where I will sleep until I move to a convenient grave. I hope all of you are able to have one of these in your life and if you already do, you have my condolences; but it’s ride or die now.

    3.) The best headphones I can afford and a budget for potential upgrade/replace every two years (you don’t have to use that timeline,but it works for me). Related: Sonos speakers. No, they are not the best in any class but they are good to really good in multiple speaker classes and are affordable–if you budget strictly and buy a piece at a time or watch for amazon sales like it’s your job–for normal people.

    4.) Kindle may actually be the most important single decision I have made in my life. I like books; I didn’t want to use a screen. I did it and a decade and change greater with slowly degrading eyesight I bless the day I decided to try it every day. Currently on an Oasis.

    5.) Giving up and budgeting specifically to pay a ridiculous amount of money for my jeans. Sure, the receipts legit horrifies me, but they fit perfectly, are crazy comfortable, can pretty much survive anything I do to them (and I am hard on my clothes) and some have been with me since before the Obama administration and don’t even have a loose thread on them. I have literally every single pair i ever bought and they still look great (and I never add up the cost of them all and what thing I could have bought with that much money, God).



  • Legit and I agree.

    However, nothing in my experience with Reddit Admins has contradicted my impression that when they were five years old, you could give them a full screaming meltdown playing “I’m not touching you” in three minutes or less. Can I prove it if they aren’t melting down regularly over some of this where I can see it? No. But I know it’s happening, and that’s enough.


  • If the only reason you’ll fight is because you think you can win, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Win or lose or both or nothing at all, you do it because it’s worth fighting for. Sometimes this ends with Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges, but mostly, it won’t, so if the best I can do right now is give some people a very, very bad day, well, I’m in: let’s go.


  • Okay, hear me out:

    I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you’re going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don’t agree.

    Sure, it’s nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that’s not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn’t be decided on the basis of ‘can I win’; a much less restrictive–and very deeply fun–philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?’ If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen’.

    In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af…I am living for this.