I looked over at fedinsfw and all I could think of was the titles' attempts at being provocative or enticing and how it just seems really...lame? I'm ace so this whole subset of the site really does nothing for me.

My shower thought is just about responding to the titles neutrally.

For examples:

"Just stretching, don't mind me";

"oh, sorry; as you were, then. Sorry to interrupt."

"If I sent you this by accident, what would you reply?"

"Hey I don't think I'm the one you meant to send this to"

Asian girl waiting for your orders...

"Can I get two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip..."

Do people really get turned on by such things, or is it more that the people posting them just have to put something in the title?

"Do you think my tattoo is cool?" No, I don't. There are no cool tattoos. "Check out my sleeve!" Oh god ew.

Tattoos themselves are stupid. Doubly so if it's some media IP. "I put Batman on my body!" "Look at this image of Goku on my calf!" I can't think of many things I'd want to do less than that.

There are a few narrow exceptions. Chances are yours isn't one of them.

If you personally like tattoos, fine. I'm not saying nobody should get tattoos because I don't like them. I'm stating my opinion that tattoos are stupid, and I am stating it here because it is probably not a popular opinion.

I do not drink and never have but the consistency of check in threads means they appear on my feed a lot and the positivity and support I see warms my heart.

IWNDWYT 😁

I filled out nine pages of bureaucratic Japanese nonsense, rewrote my entire CV in my 3rd language, formatted to the university's exacting specifications, and went through all the processes at the post office to have it sent by registered mail.

It has been a two week project because professor/university applications are stress tests designed to break you.

Let's hope that something good comes of this. I could use a major life change.

Anyone I could boast to is a coworker (that's how socializing kinda winds up going here) and I don't want them to know I'm on the way out the door. So you guys get it instead.

Explaining all the mechanical details behind why there would be a centaur choking out a gnome and talking about why amazing treasure gets her killed would be long and boring, so you can enjoy it at face value if you'd like.

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.

Specifically in Den Den Town:

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

Merry Christmas!

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.