TitanLaGrange @ TitanLaGrange @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Dry cleaning fluid too!

If I hadn't already deactivated my account this would have been a good time to do it. I had like 135,000 accounts on my block list.

It probably comes partly out of the social dynamic that causes the tendency to value men primarily by their usefulness rather than who they are personally. Feeling gets in the way of me getting shit done, earning money to support my family, etc., so I turn feelings off, mostly. I could turn them back on and learn to manage them and whatnot, but if that doesn't make it easier for me to earn money, fix the house, etc., or worse, actively gets in the way of those things by taking more of my work time or making it harder for me to want to do those things, then I don't have an incentive to be genuinely emotionally connected.

Also, evident confidence in one's ability to handle shit helps to make dependents feel happier and safer, so experiencing uncertainty, fear, and other such emotions tends to act against one's own interest in getting shit done and avoiding drama that distracts from shit getting done.

So yeah, it's kind of a question of 'who do you want to be?'. Personally, I put a fair bit of effort into suppressing 'negative' emotions (fear, uncertainty, sadness, envy) and try to encourage positivity (curiosity, joy, whatever the word for the opposite of envy is (ChatGPT says 'mudita', vicarious joy). I figure this tends to blunt some of the more subtle and nuanced emotional states since I'm kind of artificially managing the states, but it is a practice that helps people who depend on me feel stable and safe so they can do the things they want to do, which is important to me.

Compassion is probably the hardest to manage this way, mostly because it is a response to sympathetic feelings of negative emotions. Like, if I see someone who is sad and I am suppressing my sadness emotions this also has a heavy damping effect on my sympathetic sadness which is what usually triggers compassionate behavior. So I have to kind of manually watch for situations where sympathetic responses are appropriate and ease up on the suppression a bit (but not too much) to allow the empathy to kick in.

If you want to grow the sport, you need to facilitate a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

Hm. In addition to a welcoming environment it might be fun to have a 'cutthroat' class with an opposite approach where intimidation, bullying, and over-the-top shit-talking is encouraged. They could have competitors come out in like pro-wrestling gear or something and have a stare-down at the beginning of the match.

Just to add a bit; I don't know anything about brain chemistry, but if I cast the subjective experience into these terms I would imagine that this filtering occurs at higher levels of abstraction than the mentioned sensory input. Meaning that you have conscious awareness of ideas that your usual habits of thought would filter out before they reached conscious awareness. The vast majority of those ideas are just fun, creative, silly bullshit that can easily take on a quality of profundity that it is tempting to take far too seriously, but sometimes they can inspire more long-term creative paths, or even just let you appreciate your sober experience of the world in new and interesting ways.

This is useful for many of us who spend the vast majority of our thinking time in very utilitarian goal-oriented patterns. These habits of thought, while useful for earning a living working in a kitchen or whatever, for example, can hamper our ability to experience other sorts of creative, playful, and novel patterns of thought that make life fun. Breaking out of those habits can help bring new, vibrant perspectives on our living experience.

whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them

Apparently ultimately this involves hitting the person hiding the encryption keys with a $4 wrench until they provide the keys.

need to be taught how to feel.

And before that you'd need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.

Thanks for this tip, very useful

I use a cheap paper notebook, like 5x8 inch size. Each day, first thing when I start work, I write the date at the top of the next blank page, copy the items from the previous page that are not done, and add new items at the bottom of the list as they come up. Tasks I haven't started have a blank box next to them, tasks I've started get a half-filled box, and finished items get a filled box. Anything that moves from one day to the next that hasn't been started gets a digit in the box that increases by one each day. If the number gets to 10 I cross the item off as cancelled. When I'm picking a new task I try to prioritize some the tasks with higher numbers.

If I need to take notes I'll use nearby blank space, sometimes a facing page. Generally I keep notes very short, long details go into whatever ticketing system we're using with the ticket number in my notebook so I can find it again. There are a few other habits I use that are generally in line with the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity techniques, like simple flags for what sort of action I can take on the item (completable (about half a day or less), needs more info, needs decomposition (more than half a day of work)), with the notable difference that I don't make any effort to 'capture everything'. I load-shed aggressively and early, which is in-line with the way I want to live my life.

Mostly I don't keep very many active tasks, so it's rare that I have to cancel items. If my list is getting long I stop putting new items on it and just tell people I'm too busy to accept new stuff. I used to try to track more stuff, but I learned that just meant I ended up with lots of notes about stuff that I never had time to do, so I quite wasting my time tracking them.

When the notebook is full I put it on the shelf and get a new one.

I keep the notebook next to me on my desk. If someone asks me for something I check the book, if it looks like I've got time, I add it to the book. When I go to a meeting, I take it with me. If I don't happen to have it I usually remember what's on the current page because I just wrote it there that morning.

It's low-tech, and I like it that way. Partly because I like to find nice pens to write with.

That's me! Moved to a very small town with fast internet so I could have a house for about 0.75x my annual salary. It's great, now we can almost afford to pay for student loans!

Your own hardware as a “service.”

TBH, if they could provide a high-quality piece of hardware that would just work for years on end and automatically reorder ink (at no additional charge, up to some reasonable limit) when it needed it for a low fixed price, maybe 50 or 60 bucks a year, I might be interested. If they added large-format print-on-demand service with quick delivery (same day in cities, 1 or 2 day elsewhere) I'd probably pay a bit more. That way I could print regular documents up to, say 11x17, at home, and have big stuff like poster-sized delivered quickly and seamlessly with the same printing system.

I just want to be able to print stuff without futzing around with a persnickety machine, and needing to replace the infernal thing every couple of years.

It's fascinating to me that there are people who deeply understand and can effectively apply techniques of sowing discord within and between groups and fanning the flames without also making themselves the obvious source of the strife. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

You might consider a vlog documenting your efforts. It's a fairly saturated market, but if you can put out content regularly and tell a good story about what you are doing with an interesting style you can turn a marginal business into money-maker with the additional income from viewers who are interested in watching your story.

It's not easy, and it takes a variety of (learnable) skills and some time to get going, but you can work on your own schedule from your house and potentially take advantage of your collection of random skills.

the fact that I didn’t come in 2 hours early and nap at my desk meant I was lazy.

I'm curious, if you were in the office but obviously doing not-work activities like playing video games or table-top games with coworkers instead of napping would that be seen negatively?

Oh man, The Orville would be a perfect series to do some kind of Farscape spoof episode. They need to visit a planet with a bunch of muppets where everybody speaks with an Austrailian accent, except for one guy played by Ben Browder.

I haven't seen any of season 2 yet, and while I agree that a few of the episodes in the first season are a bit off-target on the science fiction aspects, I think they are overall quite a bit better than the first season of TNG. I'm more than willing to give it, say, 40-60 episodes to really find itself and get into the meat of the story they want to tell with it.

That's how I feel about him too, but while the show is a bit on the silly side, the McFarlane humor is toned down enough to work reasonably well.

It's not in the same league with Strange New Worlds, but it's a nice change from awful, gritty, nu-trek.

perfect mechanical shuffle

What's perfect in this context? It's maybe a little counterintuitive because I'd think a perfect mechanical shuffle would be perfectly deterministic (assuming no mechanical failure of the device) so that it would be repeatable. Like, you would give it a seed number (about 67 digits evidently) and the mechanism would perform a series of interleaves completely determined by the seed. Then if you wanted a random order you would give the machine a true random seed (from your wall of lava lamps or whatever) and you'd get a deck with an order that is very likely to never have been seen before. And if you wanted to play a game with that particular deck order again you'd just put the same seed into the machine.

How do you know that someone on slack is not busy ATM and is available to chat? How do you deal with pings from slack discussion in some channel when you can’t chat and have to focus on a meeting?

It can take a while to get people trained and into the habit of communicating with tools like Slack, and to develop a style that works for your office.

At a previous company we were 100% remote since about 2013. We had meetings to develop a set of practices around how to use remote tools to figure out what worked best for us. We encouraged people to use their status indicators to show when they were open for chats, set DND if they wanted quite time, maintain core hours (we were distributed world-wide, so core hours were zoned), encouraged people to use named channels rather than ad-hoc groups or DMs whenever possible, and always when discussing anything work related (absolutely no private chats about work projects, everything work-related went in a project channel).

We also were careful to adopt an 'if anyone is remote, everyone is remote' attitude. This means that if any team member is remote, then all team activities are conducted with remote access. For example, if the remote tools for a meeting are not working, then the meeting is rescheduled rather than being conducted without the remote people.

At my current job most of us are flex, sometimes in the office, sometimes not, and they've only supported WFH at all since covid lockdowns started. Previously they were 100% in-office. As a result their remote work habits are relatively primitive, with lots of ad-hoc group chats, private messages, and occasional meetings that don't include the whole team (it doesn't help that they use Teams, which is relatively shitty compared to Slack). I've pushed for a better remote-work culture, but it's an uphill battle.

If you are running into communications issues with remote work it might be worth initiating a discussion about how you, as a collective, use the tools. Getting everybody on-board with a common set of practices that mostly works for everyone is important, especially if you have a lot of people who haven't already spent a great deal of time using remote communication tools (a lot of us IT folks have spent a great deal of our lives using these tools and can overlook the unfamiliarity some others have with them and the usage habits that make them effective).

I'd be ok with that. From home I'm probably only actually working 3.5 out of 5 days anyway, and I think it would be good to get companies comfortable with 4 day workweeks.