IRS Direct File was just a free government-run alternative to the tax filing programs like TurboTax.

You can still do your taxes by hand without the help of any software for free, but they've killed the website that fills out the forms automatically and the manual process is significantly more complicated.

I feel like the stress of being perceived is exactly what drives me to need to be masking all the time, but when I am able to start my hyperfocus I stop noticing the perception as much. I think it's moreso the actual masking that drains me. But now that I think about it, I remember living with my family and how I would get stressed when other people were awake because they might come to my room and try to talk to me so I ended up doing most of my work at night so I wasn't keeping my mask on standby to use your words. I ended up being pretty much nocturnal. I don't think my awareness of the sounds in the house were quite as acute as yours but it was definitely a Thing for me to be bothered by noises in the house when trying to focus, especially when near burnout. And honestly I feel drained just by being in public, even without interacting with anyone. It's probably a mix of both.

I can relate to a lot of what you've written here though. I mask all the time, I don't really know how to stop, but it just leaves me completely wrecked after just a few hours of doing it.

I'm working on finding ways to maybe not unmask, but find more sustainable lower energy masks with safe people. Part of that I guess is finding more safe people. I can pretty much unmask with my partner, but that's taken a long time to get there. I'd like to be able to spend time with more than exactly one person without burning all my energy on my dumb mask.

Tailscale is just a bunch of extra fancy stuff on top of Wireguard. If you don't need the fancy stuff, using raw Wireguard can be more lightweight, but might require more networking knowledge.

The biggest thing Tailscale brings you the table is NAT traversal. On top of that it uses direct Wireguard tunnels as necessary instead of creating a mesh like you usually would if you were using raw Wireguard. It also offers convenient bits of sugar like internal DNS, and it handles key exchanges for you so it's just generally easier to configure. When you do raw Wireguard you're doing all the config yourself, which could be a pro or a con depending on your needs—and you'll be editing config files, unlike Tailscale which has a GUI for most things. It also supports some more detailed security options like ACLs and I think SSO, while Wireguard is reliant on your existing firewall for that.

Here's what Tailscale has to say about it: https://tailscale.com/compare/wireguard

I've messed around with Tailscale myself, but ultimately settled on running Wireguard. The reason I do that though is because I trust my LAN, and I only run Wireguard at the edge. Tailscale really wants to be run on every node, which in turn is something that raw Wireguard theoretically can do but would be onerous to maintain. If I didn't trust my LAN, I'd probably switch to Tailscale.

I prefer to stick to uncontroversial works made by politically conscious creators, like H.P. Lovecraft!

But no, I get it. I like art made by people who are or weren't great. And that's before considering my participation in the vast system of capitalism which necessarily involves systemic evils far beyond what JKR personally is capable of.

It just hurts to have a person who is loudly transphobic like JKR, who uses all support of her IP as support of her views, and then all the majority of society has to say is "I love HP tho". It hurts especially when society is increasingly hostile towards trans people right now.

This works because block devices like /dev/sdX are just files. If you cp a file onto another file, it overwrites the data of the destination with the source. A block device represents the device itself, not the filesystem; if you wanted to put the ISO inside the filesystem, you'd have to mount it first.

A lot of Linux ISOs are hybrid images which can be booted if flashed directly to a USB stick.

I've never had that problem, I play Tactician and I consistently have a ton of food in my inventory, but then I'm a loot gremlin that picks up everything that isn't nailed down. I have more trouble spending all my food than picking it up. Even my max STR char was somehow always overencumbered :'(

Well, the question still remains of "symbiotizing what"? Fungi on earth range from saprophages, which decompose dead matter into nutrients, to mycorrhizae, which form symbiotic relationships with plants which produce nutrients. In either case, they're feeding off of things, it's just the source that varies. All living things need to gain energy somehow.

The mycelial network is spooky and probably feeds off something more abstract, since sci-fi and all that. That said, maybe it's in some sort of symbiotic relationship with the multiverse itself? There's so much energy in a galaxy, let alone a multiverse worth of galaxies, that it's not hard to imagine a fungal network feeding off just a tiny fraction of that energy. And interstellar space has relatively low energy, so it makes sense the network wouldn't build hyphae there.

You're right that they never said it only works in the Milky Way, I had just assumed that since it peters out at the border of the galaxy that it ends there. And if it resumes in another galaxy, it seems like it would be discontinuous and thus a separate organism. But I suppose if you imagine it as a wholly separate subspace realm, with hyphae that connect out wherever there is sufficient "energy" of whatever sort it feeds off of, it makes sense. And jumping to another galaxy could be a cool twist indeed!

~~I would give anything to be an astromycologist~~

I don't get why they call hosting a mail server being your own ISP. It's a very very loose definition of the term "ISP" there. ISPs may provide mail services on the side, but that's not what makes them an ISP imo—its providing internet access that makes them an ISP.

On looking it up, apparently some people consider email providers ISPs in their own right though? Seems like confusing terminology.

No one was saying that you should follow a story exactly. That wouldn't be very interesting imo, even if it was possible.

I feel like the most interesting way to do it would be to have it very explicitly in an alternate timeline. You could do this by killing a main character, or by otherwise having a major divergence. Then it feels less like just stealing ideas and more like a "What If?" story, and would help nip the urge to follow the story too closely.

I seem to recall a podcast or comic or something that was this but in a Star Wars universe, that opened with Luke Skywalker dying and the podcast/comic characters taking over for him. I tried to look it up but I can't find anything about it now. Wish I'd remembered the name.

As long as you have access to a a command line, you can install it manually. It's worth noting though that I did a cursory internet search, and it seems like the developers are strongly against installing AGH on IPFire directly—plus it would take some hackiness to even get it installed on IPFire directly. That said, IPFire supports VMs, so you could run AGH in a VM on IPFire.

How does moderation work in this scenario? Does it fall to instance admins to moderate, and defederate/ban anyone who is causing problems for the global community? That seems like it would amplify the moderation burden significantly