soli @ solitaire @infosec.pub

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2 yr. ago

My resume these days is pretty eclectic and I honestly think it's been a plus. Interviewers like to ask about it and seem genuinely interested in the different things I've done. It demonstrates a pretty wide range of skills and versatility.

Heat waves are basically the only serious thing here. There isn't really much to surviving them for the average person. Stay where it's cool, stay hydrated, don't over exert yourself in the heat. All really easy things to do if you have a reasonable amount of security in your life. Most don't bother except maybe making sure to contact elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives.

Preparation is needed if you're not financially secure. Maybe you're homeless, maybe you're too broke too cool your home, maybe a lot of things. I've been there before. To this day I'm still aware of places I can find shelter across the city and how to get to them, with and without public transport, in a hurry.

Mostly the answer is libraries but it depends where you are in the sprawl and how bad the heat wave is. They're great during business hours but they can close before things cool down. I learned to get really good at loitering in shops and other private places while expending as little as possible without them moving me on.

Also where to get potable drinking water for free, you'll be surprised how hard it can be to find in a pinch.

Edit: I forgot an underrated and personal favorite method from those days - trains.

Before everything went electronic it was really easy to travel free without the stereotypical methods of fair evading, so you could relax when inspectors were on. I'd find a train with functioning air conditioning on one of the 'safe' lines and just ride it for the whole round trip back to the central station then find a new one. Outside of peak hour it would be dead quiet and I could read or sleep in peace, and they go till late.

If you're curious about the fair evasion method, the old tickets were just small bits of plastic-y cardboard with a magnetic strip on the back. Ticket machines would read the magnetic strip, write to it and mark down a trip in ink on the front of the ticket. If the magnetic strip ever failed they'd still honor the ticket and use the marks on the front to determine how many trips you were owed.

All you had to do was stop it being inked (or remove it). The tolerances on the machines were quite large so you could easily just put a bit of tape on the front and peel it off after to have an unmarked ticket. If you were desperate, you could sometimes rub it off anyway. Then all you needed to do was run a magnet over the magnetic strip or bend the ticket until it was damaged in the right way for a "fresh" but broken ticket. You'd then exchange it as a broken one and have a new ticket. If inspectors ever came around while you had a broken one they'd just tell you to take it in and leave you be.

This way you'd theoretically only ever need to buy one ticket, though it was still advisable to pay when you could or fair evade other ways to avoid become a regular at the service stand. My mother was an alcoholic and my father a deadbeat so this was how I made it to school for years.

I'm sure there is some trick with the new electronic cards but I've been fortunate enough to not need to work that out since they came in.

Ah, you're right then. They are trying to skip the proper channels because, for a lot of office roles, you're trained to do exactly that.

A lot of my job now is emailing and calling people in different organizations and systems. For most of them, they'll technically have forms that look a lot like a ticket system but their purpose isn't organization - it's a filter. If you are in the know you contact them directly. This is true of contacting my department as well, if you're filling out a ticket you're probably on the bottom of the pile and if we've given you direct contact information we want you to contact us directly.

This leads to a habit of trying to guess who you're supposed to contact too. The worst that can happen is you just get linked back to the ticket system so may as well try. Being good at your job involves building up a whole list of people you contact to not be put in form purgatory.

While an IT ticket system superficially looks the same as the labyrinth of everything else we have to deal with, the difference is it's internal. Either everyone can contact you directly anyway or the 'wrong' people can, so it doesn't have the same effect of creating a curated list. It's also an actual system (usually) instead of just being an alternative way to send an email that gets dumped into a shared inbox.

So yeah, it's really easy to just assume IT is exactly the same as the rest of your communications if you don't know any better. They're just communicating with you how they would anyone else. It is insane and inefficient but that's just how it is.

Already came out months ago, it was terrible.

What? That's just a normal way of communicating anything via text in a professional setting. Neutral language, brief, with a generic but appreciative sign off.

usually either trying to skip proper channels for a request, or correcting someone while having no idea what they’re talking about.

I associate this with messages that are informal and overly friendly.

I came here to say this too. Lots of people buy expensive tools that they only use a couple of times. I respect the buy it for life mindset, but at that level of usage anything you can get your hands on will last.

Nope, just an LCD. It'll make you feel old but 15 years ago CRTs had already lost majority market share. Sony shut down its last CRT manufacturing plants in 2008.

I know, I'd kill to hear that sweet degaussing zap again.

My neighbour gave me a TV. To be precise, he rushed it to me unannounced at the exact moment I was leaving to go to a party. I accepted as quickly as I could in an effort to still make my train.

It turns out it's about 15 years old and I have no use for it. He's a lovely man but I intend to post it as free to a good home then drop it at an e-recycling station if nobody is interested.

I've unsubbed from any comms that had them. They all become ghost towns with zero discussion.

I've had fewer errors overall than I have Reddit, but your mileage is going to vary drastically based on your instance. I've briefly tried other instances, even fairly popular ones, and I'd describe the experience as nearly unusable.

I've had two work from home positions - one basically a call center position, the other was an admin clerk job. I got both through what is effectively a recruitment agency.

No, but as a hypothetical button I could just press sure. It'd allow me to take preemptive measures about my health.

I'd care even less about school and leave as young as possible. Then go for some vocational training and/or one of the alternate pathways if I want to go to university. Not once has how I did in high school ever been relevant to my life. My higher education has mattered, but dropping out doesn't stop you from going into it - though it can be more (or less) difficult depending on what you want to study.

The combination of puberty and not being able to date would suck though. At least I know what meds absolutely kill my libido and they'd be extremely easy to get prescribed. Problem is, even after I'm an adult it'd be a headfuck - I've always been into people older than me as is. I wonder if instead of chasing milfs and dilfs that I'd be adding a g infront with how long my lived experience would be at that point.

If it's time travel too all the usual bullshit to becoming filthy rich applies.

I doubt I'd notice.

LinkedIn isn't a terrible idea if you just want to come up in search results. It's quite useful for a lot of different professions for networking. You'd likely just make a profile and never look at it again.

Facebook can be almost mandatory depending on where you live. I currently live in a city where Facebook is the only meaningful source of networking, local news and information on events online. It's not uncommon for businesses, even quite larger ones, to have their only media presence online be a Facebook page. The city is also kind of infamously hard to break into socially so you want any advantage you can get.

I don't currently have any social media but it's become a hindrance and I might need to reactivate. I end up using social media by proxy through family and friends anyway.

Nah, you've fallen in to a classic trap for men. Even though the answer could be correct under different framing, it's not always okay. The framing matters.

So if she said would you still love me if i was the size of a whale

In this example, the underlying insecurity is about you. She's worried you'll leave her if she's not always at her best. Thus just saying yes provides helps solve the core issue. To be honest it's not a perfect answer, but it's fine.

gf saying "I'm fat"

In this one, the insecurity is not (just) about you. Most likely she's worried about how other people perceive her, or how she perceives herself. Men often assume any concern someone puts into their appearance is for their partner or for finding one, but it's not. Saying you'll love her even if she is fat does not address the underlying insecurity. In fact, it implies she is fat and heightens what she is worried about.

I would advise a hug or something for immediate reassurance and then asking her some gentle questions to gauge what she's really worried about if you're not sure. Literally, "hey what brought this on?". Maybe with a "you look great" leading into it first.

Although when she asks you would you still love her if she was a worm, the correct answer is yes.

Better to put it back reframed in more direct terms, showing you understand the underlying insecurity, but dodging having to be dishonest about the fact her being a worm obviously would change things. Then lighten the mood with a joke.

i would love you even if you were the size of a whale

Please for the love of god do not say this lmao

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I'm not sure how old I am, maybe three or four. It's the only memory I have from the first place my parents lived in. I'm outside the garage and I've got a hammer.

My mother is smashing computer components and I'm "helping". I remember being so fascinated with what they were and how they worked. I was particularly enthralled by what I now recognize were the internals of a hard drive. The platter is just so shiny! This memory sparks a long term interest in computers.

Later I'd learn my father had been caught consuming particularly violent BDSM pornography.

Yeah, I think he was one of the most unambiguously heroic characters I've played. He was always willing to sacrifice for what he thought was right and just, and constantly put in situations where that put him at odds with the lawful side of the good equation. The DM loved to throw us into challenging ethical situations and I always had so much to bite into having such a well defined and nuanced morality for the character.

For some reason when I write overtly heroic characters like that they don't seem to be that compelling, but then in actual play they really hit.

I played a sort of gutter punk druid once. He'd grown up in a sort of nature commune that had been wiped out by a magical disaster, and had lived penniless and transient on the streets of cities for years afterwards. There was a deep, empathetic anger at the injustices of how the world was structured I really enjoyed playing. Rather than just some reactionary defense of nature as something separate from people, he knew a better world was possible for the people who lived in it too by finding harmony with nature.