AnarchistArtificer @ AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

Moissanite is extra sparkly compared to diamonds too

Just chipping in to second the recommendation for ACT. I haven't have ACT delivered by a therapist (yet?), but I have had a heckton of other therapy (mostly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which seems to be what they offer by default). CBT helped in some ways, but I found it pretty lacking in many others, especially in areas where my life circumstances were just objectively shit (disability and living with shitty family at the time, for example). I've been reading through one or two of the ACT books lately, and I find the approach refreshing compared to other therapy I've got experience with.

What's bogus about this?

I have known some wonderful people who have helped me to grow into a person I don't entirely hate. Most of the time, I'm depressed, but I feel privileged to know people who remind me of things that are worth fighting for.

The best thing that Truss gave us was the Lettuce that will go down in historyl

Hello, fellow human!

I hope your day has been full of the various human things, such as eating, and sleeping. Certainly I have been enjoying those things; as a human, I get plenty of sleep and food and other human things.

This isn't even an Android One thing, but this post made me nostalgic for my Nexus 6. That was my first android phone, and I had a lot of fun tinkering with rooting and custom ROMs. The codename for the device (used for ROM stuff) was shamu.

I miss my magnificent whale

I don't have one because I'm bad at note-taking

I pay for Bitwarden, because the pro version has a few features that are somewhat useful, but also I wanted to support the software.

Obligatory evangelising: If you don't already use a password manager, I am urging you to start. Not because it's something you should do, for security purposes (though that's definitely true), but because using a password manager has been one of the single greatest quality of life improvements I've made for years. I used to have a system where I had a few stronger passwords for important stuff, and I reused old passwords for services I didn't care about, but that always caused problems when stupid password requirements would mean I couldn't use my regular variants, and I'd forget about these requirements and aaaaaaa.

Give it a try: You don't have to switch everything over all at once. It has browser extensions and apps. You can make a super strong master password with four random words (write that down on paper and store it somewhere secure (not your wallet)). Bitwarden is open source and free

Okay, evangelising over

Other subscriptions I have include VPN, and I think that's mostly it, since I tried to cut down on subscription stuff

I find perspectives like yours interesting because I experienced something similar when I was a closeted bisexual, and working through internalised homophobia was necessary for me. However, I have gay friends who are icked out by heterosexual PDA, and so I don't feel comfortable assuming that what you're experiencing is homophobia without applying a similar lens to what my friends feel (which feels wrong, because as a bisexual, I find both The Gays and The Straights deeply confusing)

It probably is irrational, but humans are pretty irrational.

I think this kind of tension is inevitable when so many people say "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". Many people with work burnout tried that, and found that they came to hate the thing they love.

Often, when we get stuck in that rut, we can't undo the harm that it's done to our passion, and retraining in a different field may be difficult or impossible. Maybe there was a period where it was possible to toe thelp line and make a career out of a hobby, and an attempt to regain some elements of that. In many cases, it's dumb as hell to keep throwing oneself at the same thing that made someone burnt out in the first place but sometimes, reclaiming something they love is liberating and healing.

I say this speaking as an academic who has always found it hard to separate my work from what I love doing, because even my "extracurricular" projects tend to have a fair bit of overlap with my work. I sometimes wish that I was someone who could have a clear divide between work and fun, but to do that, I'd need to find work much further away from my passions.

For recommendations and discovery (which was a large part of what kept me with Spotify), I'm a big fan of https://listenbrainz.org/ In the time I've been using it, the recommendations have gotten way better, and I appreciate their efforts towards transparency. (Yay for open source)

You can import listen data from music streaming services, so if anyone is curious, I'd recommend setting it up and seeing how it goes; I only recently got round to cancelling my Spotify, but before then, I had it set up so my Spotify listens would show up on my listenbrainz.

You're quite right though that there aren't any straightforward replacements for Spotify. Personally, I'm returning to the seven seas, which is why I'm so appreciative of listenbrainz — that discovery stuff really was the last big thing chaining me to Spotify

Thank you for the succinct explanation

The rear view mirror thing is a good tip. You've made me realise I sort of did this somewhat without being aware of it (I tended to be attentive when adjusting my mirror, so more often than not, it would be set in accord with good posture). Now I am aware of this, I can be much more deliberate in making this happen.

I know I'm just a random person on the internet, but I'm super proud of you for this. Like, making that decision and turning a serendipitous situation into an active choice takes a strong sense of will. Congrats

I have a couple of friends who smoke and I really enjoy heading outside with them when they go out to smoke. I especially enjoy it when it's very cold out, because nothing makes me appreciate the cosy warmth of my home more than a brief spell of bracing cold.

Shame about the passive smoking though

The British didn't create the caste system from scratch, but they had a huge role in shaping what became the modern caste system. I'm sleepy, so I'm going to quote direct from this BBC article (though it's a good amount article, if you have the time. It does a good job for a summary, imo)

"[Britain's reshaping of Indian society] was done initially in the early 19th Century by elevating selected and convenient Brahman-Sanskrit texts like the Manusmriti to canonical status"

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" [The caste] categories were institutionalised in the mid to late 19th Century through the census. These were acts of convenience and simplification."

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"The colonisers established the acceptable list of indigenous religions in India - Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism - and their boundaries and laws through "reading" what they claimed were India's definitive texts."

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"There is little doubt that the religion categories in India could have been defined very differently by reinterpreting those same or other texts."

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"In fact, it is doubtful that caste had much significance or virulence in society before the British made it India's defining social feature."

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"The colonisers invented or constructed Indian social identities using categories of convenience during a period that covered roughly the 19th Century.

"This was done to serve the British Indian government's own interests - primarily to create a single society with a common law that could be easily governed."

"A very large, complex and regionally diverse system of faiths and social identities was simplified to a degree that probably has no parallel in world history, entirely new categories and hierarchies were created, incompatible or mismatched parts were stuffed together, new boundaries were created, and flexible boundaries hardened."

"The resulting categorical system became rigid during the next century and quarter, as the made-up categories came to be associated with real rights. Religion-based electorates in British India and caste-based reservations in independent India made amorphous categories concrete. There came to be real and material consequences of belonging to one category (like Jain or Scheduled Caste) instead of another."

Apologies for just quoting at length at you. I fear that presenting info this way will give the sense that I am lecturing you, but that is not my intention; a large part of why I share this info is because I learned of this relatively recently and I was astounded by how significant Britain's role was.

Subvert expectations by being normal. It's diabolical.

This comment is for Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who was abducted by the Chinese government after he was selected as the 11th Panchen Lama. The Panchen Lama is the 2nd most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama.

He was 6 years old when he was taken. He and his family have not been seen for 29 years. I think about him often.

I feel quite anxious trying to make sense of geopolitical events like this, especially given I'm ashamed of how little thought I gave to Palestine before Israel escalated from apartheid to all-out genocide; as you say, this is a ridiculously complex situation, and the snippets we get on the news are ridiculously oversimplified at best, and egregiously biased at worst.

Syria seems like a far away, foreign land where conflict is the inevitable norm. But it feels like that's something that I'm meant to think, because it's politically useful for people like me to think that way. Unfortunately, simply knowing that you're subject to propaganda is far easier than actually gaining a more full and nuanced understanding of a conflict.