I can hold a shield up while still complaining about someone shooting arrows at me. The complaints aren’t suddenly negated simply because I got my hands on a shield.

Also, companies are actively and constantly finding ways around those blockers, and there are psychological and UX reasons as to why companies use tiny X buttons, or X buttons that are often very hard to see. Take a look at dark patterns.

Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, pretty much every member of the Knesset and the Israeli Government.

Mr. Wizard and MacGyver were big ones for me. They hit a curiosity and adventure sweet spot for me as a kid. Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross also helped teach me empathy and kept my artistic side interested.

I’m really grateful for the era I grew up in and the television personalities it gave me. It’s nice knowing that my influences have stood the test of time and I appreciate the foundation they gave my young mind.

If only I could keep that energy and inspiration going. Anxiety coupled with depression can really get you lost.

Christmas Pain in Christmas Town by Chowder Man.

If you haven’t played Hypnospace Outlaw yet, I highly recommend it.

Facebook. I never willingly go on it, but my friends all use it for events and shit. It’s funny hanging out with them and having someone mention things from a group chat I’ve never even touched. I absolutely refuse to install that fucking malware they call Messenger.

Other than that, anything Google. Have to use it all for work.

I just had to help convert an old undocumented JS project to TS too. Fortunately had some help from 2 other devs but it was still a nightmare. Tons of intertwined code responsibilities that we shaped up back into lanes, and broke out a metric ton of interfaces from.

It’s much better now and has comments everywhere. It’s also earned the company record profits recently, so now I can point to it for the C-suite.

Dude just flying the ship around with the landing gear down.

Hell yeah, collaborative invention 🤝

A scrubber that adheres to the shower wall would be neat. Clean your back like a bear scratching an itch on a tree.

Yep! I’m old too. I thought of those stories, learned the “.yachts” TLD exists, and the rest is history. It was nice to see nature fighting back and winning.

This is my avatar on a couple sites ❤️

Potentially, yeah, but they can also just go to the website themselves and read it since it’s public.

I LOVE IT.

Thanks! I think it’s among my favorite things I’ve done this year lol. I tried to get “destroying.yachts” but it was taken. Felt a little too obvious too; I like the added humor of “enjoying” instead.

Lemmy is a massive collection of separate servers and communities run by people. Therefore no government has a hold on it. I’m a guy that pays money out of his own pocket monthly to run a Lemmy server. If the government is controlling it, that’s news to me, and my comment history is pretty damn anti-government.

The whole point of decentralization is to remove control from the corporations and governments, and put it back into the hands of the people.

Thank you for reminding me of this amazing video! Such a great track too.

Had an anatomy teacher in high school that only gave a shit about students that did well. Everyone had a partner in the class so that no one had to dissect things or do projects alone. It was nice and helped a ton.

Part of the way into the year and my partner transfers out of the class. So now anything I worked on meant I fell behind by default because it was one pair of hands vs two doing the work. I was already struggling a bit in the class but when I was partnerless, my grade was basically in free fall.

I expressed that I was struggling to the teacher and then to my parents. We had a conference with the teacher and, this is the worst part for me, he said I was doing perfectly fine. He was not willing to even face the fact that one of his students wanted to do well but needed the extra help. He straight up lied about my performance, when I had the lowest grade in the class. Absolutely refused to acknowledge the problem so that he didn’t have to contribute anything extra. Even saying “hey, you might want to look into a tutor” would’ve helped, but nope. This dude offered nothing. Even my parents were taken aback by it.

I ended up transferring to another school entirely. On my last day, I basically had to go like it was a regular school day so that I could get my transfer paper signed by each teacher. When I got to the anatomy class, I asked the teacher to sign it, he did, I said absolutely nothing and walked out of the class. Not going to sit there and endure that insufferable twat any longer than I had to.

The shitty part is that I loved anatomy and biology. In my previous biology class, I regularly got the highest test grades and could name all of the various animal organs by heart. I was also an ADHD kid (and now an ADHD adult) that didn’t get anything of value from most traditional learning methods. So that teacher’s absolute shutdown was more of a blow to my self-esteem and willingness to give a fuck about school than he realized.

For me it was an array of events.

The war in Afghanistan (I was a kid but this was one of the tipping points that sent me down a hard leftist path).

GWB… just collectively. Freezing when told the towers were hit; lying about WMDs so he could start an illegal war.

Watching Obama get elected and then turning out to be a fucking fraud that built the drone program and carried on the US legacy of being the worldwide terrorist organization.

A big one though was watching the police continue to terrorize the Black community over and over. Years ago on Facebook I had a couple of old high school friends that argued with me that you should do whatever a cop tells you. My response was to tell them how utterly fucking idiotic that was and that cops will violate your rights if it means they don’t have to do any paperwork. They’ll illegally search your vehicle (like they did mine one time), harass you (like they did to my friends and I when we were skateboarding), and if you’re Black, they’ll shoot you in the back if you run.

Needless to say, I am not friends with either of them anymore. I think that’s when I really started to solidify who I was and have rejected absolutely everything that America is and does on the world stage. I’ve become known as the white guy that hates cops. I’ve worked with Black revolutionary groups, activist groups, written articles and tons of thoughts on police violence in America, and have marched against the police on multiple occasions. Hell, the police have surveilled me for who knows how long a few years ago, and I know people that have been under surveillance by the FBI. As an aside, you’d be amazed at the lengths this country will go to to keep eyes on peace activists.

Everything America does as a collective has brought me to the conclusion that we are in a failed state, capitalism-in-decay freefall that I’m afraid we will never recover from. We no longer innovate; we continue to loot other countries; we are all a captive audience hitched to whatever whims the capitalists and other ghouls want.

I’ve been laid off, had companies fuck me over for money and control, harassed by cops (all the way back to when I was 15 in the 90s), tracked by my own government for having a voice… there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me that the United States isn’t the enemy of the world and it’s citizens are nothing more than a disposable capitalist resource.

I hate to be a downer but my view of this country is a product of what it has done to both its own people and people around the world. I feel like a prisoner in the US.

My server has like 3 members and I’m okay with it. I like the fact that I am not beholden to a corporation or another server.

This isn’t really a demotion but more of me preventing myself from moving up. I’m a senior FE dev and have been senior for years. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to shift into a manager role with reports, but I don’t want to manage people, and I want to keep coding. I know it would net me more pay and probably more respect but I don’t give a shit. I’m trying to stave off burnout, not invite it in.