Heck, there is not much more to say than the title. But it has been a constant weight for the last month or so.

No, they aten't dead. They are just given to bouts of depression where they vanish for a few weeks. I was really, really worried the first time it happened, but this is the third, and so I am not exactly leaning on the panic button.

They have a chronic condition that makes them weak and requires lots of rest/energy management, and conversely they are not very good at managing their energy, and where I live, New Year's involves a lot of travel and celebrations and so on, so all of these factors combine to ensure that they'd be out of commission for a while.

I also made a mistake that left them locked out of their apartment for a bit and necessitated a lock change, at the tail end of a bunch of that travel and so on, so I am not blameless; an error on my part meant that they had one last hurdle to leap just when they were probably already running on fumes. I feel awful about it - apologized profusely and reimbursed all related expenses, natch.

Those are all details, though, side details compared to the main one that is the title of this post.

I suppose that I am privately worried that my key mistake plus the long silence equals "they have cut you off, you crossed the line", but there is a remaining bit of sanity that reminds me that given our long friendship that this is probably not the case. Still, silence breeds worry, however unreasonable that worry might be - maybe that's the other thing that I needed to get off my chest.

Anyway, that's basically all. There's not really anything you or I or anyone can do but to give my friend space. I send a little check-in message (along the lines of "hope you're doing ok" or a pretty picture of local scenery/weather) about once a week. Besides that, just have to wait, which I don't like, but it's out of my hands.

I miss my friend.

I just am mildly infuriated by this headline style. Obligatory SLAMS also.

Merry Christmas!

何級だったの?

どんな結果を期待している？

私にとって困った点、不明点もあったに違いない… しかし去年と比べると簡単だった感じする！

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Hello. I installed Linux Mint on a new desktop that I built about a week ago, and I'm starting to get used to it, so it's probably time to start using it for some actual life things.

A couple of these do involve talking with family members all in Facebook Messenger, as well as the necessity of using Google Workspace for some work-related functions.

I'm aware that using both of these is a compromise of privacy in and of itself, but I'm still interested in mitigating the damages best as I can.

What steps can I take to make the usage of these as private and non-invasive as possible? If it helps at all, the browser I'm using is Firefox and the operating system is Linux Mint.

I am not saying that more people using Linux is bad or that people shouldn’t use it (I mean, check my own post history; I am a recent convert myself), but if it reached the kind of saturation that Windows or Apple enjoys, it would bring not liberation but enshittification.

Nor am I trying to be some kind of elitist “the plebs don’t deserrrrrrve it” schlub; hell, I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and have to have a guide to handhold me through all but the most rudimentary, familiar-to-me-as-a-Windows-user tasks.

However.

A bar to entry (even such an ankle-high one as there is now) keeps Linux relatively off the radar of large, moneyed interests that would otherwise descend onto Linux distros and enshittify them in a heartbeat.

In other words, rather than “everyone who uses Linux will then see how bad they’ve had it under Windows and how anti-consumer certain software companies (let’s say Adobe for example) have been treating them!”, the more likely outcome would be “now there is Adobe Photoshop Linux Edition that is exclusive to the paid Adobe Linux distro” or other similar shackles and lockdowns and limitations (for which your credit card is the key), and the alternatives, not having ad money or corporate backing to prop them up, would be left by the wayside as other such enshittified distros/softwares gained users and traction.

Hell, just because a non-enshittified alternative to an enshittified software exists doesn’t mean people will know about or use it. To use an example, Excel is hardly the only way to make a spreadsheet. But it’s the one that is used, taught, known, documented, and widespread. It doesn’t matter that [some other software] is superior in every way if no one knows or cares about it.

Admittedly this is kind of my shower-thought guess and it’s not as if I have sat and thought through this thoroughly, but heck, here we are. Lay it on me.

That's all there is to it. I started planning my PC build a while back, maybe 5 weeks or so, and budgeted carefully around it. Everything was locked in. I'm on a tight budget so I had to be very careful but I managed. Was quite pleased with myself for putting it all together in my 3rd language. Bookmarked relevant pages.

Forced myself to wait until my birthday, today, to start to order it all, and praised myself for being disciplined and patient.

Today I went to start placing orders and found out ram has gone absolutely off the chain. I guess I shouldn't have waited, but that's what you get for trying to be mature and adult about this kind of thing rather than mad impulse buying.

And I realize this all sounds like a roundabout way of e-begging, so I'm putting the disclaimer right here that that's not what I'm doing. I am literally just getting this off my chest (as the sub name demands) because I have nobody else to complain to this about that would really get it.

"I'm not kink shaming..."

"Don't yuck someone else's yum..."

"Whatever floats your boat..."

Shut up. I don't care.

Your kink is gross and I don't have to be okay with it just because you're proud about it. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Some kinks are shameful. Hell, many kinks are shameful. And not just the obvious ones like pedophilia or bestiality or snuff.

I had more specifics drawn up but I figured it's probably safest to keep it kind of vague.

But it is my opinion that "don't kink shame!" should never have become the default.

That's probably the crux of the unpopular opinion here so that'll do.

Signed,

A sex repulsed and very annoyed asexual.

Yes, I know. Earth-shattering take. But I was only able to play it at my girlfriend's house at the time, and I was in high school then, and she thought it was corny and stupid, so I had to mask my admiration for the game behind a layer of "heh waow"

I had all but forgotten about it until something jogged my memory of it a few days ago, so I did a bit of a vicarious revisit via YouTube and so on.

That game was awesome and I had a blast with it and I don't care if it's uncool. Suck my ass, Bethany, Sonic Adventure 2 (Battle) is fucking cool, The characters are fun, the story is more nuanced, complex, and engaging (dare I say epic) than it seems, and yes, the chao are adorable and the chao garden is great, and "Live and Learn" is a banger.

I am no longer ashamed! ✊🏻😠

Originally it was going to be "over the last twenty years" but I decided to be more flexible.

A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, "no one talks to each other in person, they're on their phones always" and the like.

Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?

I've just finished my first week at a new job. I like the job, but it's the first time in several years that I've had relatively standard 8 hours a day, 5 days a week as my schedule. The last time I did was in 2019 or so, and then I went and got back into graduate school for the interim.

Now that I'm back to standard hours, the commitment of time and energy seems to be quite a lot, more than I remember from prior ft experience(It could well be that this job is actually mentally demanding, whereas my prior full-time job was pretty brainless) and I'm not sure how I will make room in my life for anything else.

I like the job I'm doing, and I don't feel as if I'm being unreasonably pressured at work (Boss even said to go out of our way not to work overtime, and it's a salaried position so I know they're not trying to skimp on hourly pay), so I guess I'm mainly wanting to ask how the rest of you full-timers do it.

And does it get easier to manage as you start to get used to it and make a routine?

Maybe it feels like quite a basic or rudimentary to ask... But these are things I've forgotten in the interim since last working 40-hour weeks.