[he/him]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I can genuinely point to Jupiter, any time, day or night. I may need to get my bearings for NSEW but assuming I have any point of reference I can just point at Jupiter. It is my favourite planet and since I was a kid I was a little obsessed and figured it out, now it just runs in the background like a little JPS (Jupiter Positioning System) all the time.



  • I’m 17 years without alcohol, 16 without “le drugs”, and 15 without smoking. I still have issues in my life and challenges to solve but wow, all of those would be harder and more numerous if I still behaved like I used to. I had a fairly short period of massive excess and had a few lucky moments of clarity which resulted in me quitting it all one after another. My partner and I have been together since just after I quit drinking and I am really glad they never had to see me being my worst self.

    My biggest takeaway is it really does get easier with time. The hardest times were within a short time of quitting. The longer I sustained the more ingrained the change became and now I would be stubborn and resist any sort of backslide.



  • The a fanfic author drops a new chapter my partner is at least as excited as I am when a new video game drops. There is nothing cringe about fanfiction, it is creative writing just as valid as writing a new piece from scratch, just with more context built right in. If you like fanfic then maybe writing it is a good idea for you

    That said, when it comes to writing, reading is the key. Read lots and lots and lots, then write whatever takes your fancy, but never stop intaking new works. All writing is some sort of remixing and that is OK, you just want to have a lot to draw from and then write a lot of bad stuff to learn how to write well.


  • Oh of course, I just find that having some weird needs gas made me seek weird solutions and I like to share them around. I definitely didn’t get anything malicious from your post? Not sure if my tone came across poorly, I was going for a cheerful and helpful response, not any sort of critical or nasty, sorry if I sounded harsh or anything like that, definitely not my intention.


  • A simple but honestly kinda brute force way around it is to replace the TTF or equivalent font file for their font with a copy of Comic Sans on your system. It will show as Comic Sans on your system but will actually be Arial or Times New Roman or whatever in the document, so it will be what they expect on the other end.

    That said, it is a simple accomidation, it should be manageable for them.



  • Yeah, they have a bunch of smaller creators there too. Honestly their internal business structure seems much more mutually beneficial than something like YouTube could ever be. All of the creators that I watch who are on Nebula I watch exclusively there now and that has taken a good 40% of my YouTube time away. My current favourite is Stefan Milo who talks about paleoanthropology, basically how we can know about human prehistory and evolution. There was a great video about tracing the genetics of South American populations to figure out when humans arrived on the continent and where from, such interesting stuff.


  • Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.


  • This reminds me of the Big Mac decision. I can’t remember where but there was a burger place that had a Big Mac burger but the name was not a copy of the McDonalds one, it was iirc because the owner’s name was Mac. Anyway, they lost the case and therefore lost copyright protection on Big Mac, so Hungry Jacks/Burger King started renaming all their burgers to something something big Mac, just to mess with them. Maybe Apple will bite of more than they can chew and end up losing protection for the Apple logo or similar things.


  • My hope is that federation will end up having a halfway setting, where content can come across but engagement is limited in some way. For example, you may see a post from lemmy.ml but you would only see comments from beehaw and the upvotes you give it will be calculated locally. This would allow content to be visible from everywhere but would keep the communities separated to some degree. Also having personal opt-in federation may work, just like with NSFW, you could on your account allow a particular instance to come through while someone else would not select that, leaving you with a fairly personalised experience.


  • That sucks, it seems to be a fairly consistently awful experience over there in USA land.

    Here in Australia it is really very different. I went to a GP and got a referral to a local psychiatrist who dealt with ADHD. The GP appointment cost $0, the referral cost $0. I have an appointment with a psychiatrist and the initial appointment was about $500. I got a script and took it to a random pharmacy and got a month of meds for $5.30. I tried that first set and it was obviously useful and a massive upgrade in my function. I went back after the first month to my second appointment and had my dose doubled. The second appointment cost about $350, the meds cost $5.30 again. This happened two more times and I ended up on a high dose of Concerta with supplemental Ritalin.

    Currently every 6 months I have an appointment with my psychiatrist which costs me about $150 and my meds cost about $15 per month ($6.30 per script, but two monthly Concerta and one 2 monthly Ritalin). So for about $250 per 6 months or about $500 per year I manage my ADHD. I don’t have any health insurance at all, I am on the standard government system called Medicare.

    Also, we don’t have the same restrictions as you, but if you have multiple repeats of a script then they all have to be dispensed through the same pharmacist, you can’t have it from one pharmacist one month and another the next.

    Honestly I love the Australian Medicare system. There are problems with it but I really appreciate it and I would not be on these meds without it.


  • It think we have cycles because people remember things that happen in their lifetime but fail to adequately instil that knowledge in the next and subsequent generations. The wealth inequality of the 1920s was the catylist for much of the economic turmoil of the great depression and laid some of the context for the New Deal era. The strong rules for antitrust and managing monopolies were put in place to prevent a repeat and while the generations who lived through the great depression were dominant they survived. As those older generations died out and as the following generations grew in influence those protections were weakened and eventually mostly dismantled, resulting in massive changes from the 70s onwards. Those protections were eroded and wealth and income inequality grew until we reached and surpassed the levels of the 1920s.

    I think the same happens for other things like the idea that Nazis are bad or must be resisted, or that religious ideologies should ve kept seperate from the government, or healthcare is something we can help each other to gain, or that workers can have power by working together. What I find hopeful is hearing discussion of all of these ideas in fairly accessible places and people do seem to be studying history in order to avoid repeating it.


  • bodyweightfitness - it was a great community, but I don’t know if it is a great fit here. The community was really supportive of people working on their form for movements and offered great critique without being mean, so that would fit, but it is very fitness focussed and I don’t know if that is a good fit.

    keto/carnivore/zerocarb/ketoscience - this was a set of communities all centered around the dissemination of information on very low carb eating, low enough to ensure ketosis rather than glucosis for energy. It is interesting to look at the resources they had and what sorts of problems you could solve by searching, but without that long term backlog of other people’s problems it would be hard to start up again. Maybe also a single community rather than 4 or more, but I don’t know.


  • I have ADHD and find that I either have very early rising or very late rising. I can’t do getting up a 7am very well, I feel sick and don’t really wake for many hours if I try to do so. But getting up at 430am? Sure, POP, I’m up, no worries. Or go to sleep at 9am? Sure, no worries, I will pop up at 5pm and be ready to go, no issues.

    I used to work a shift work job in IT and it was pretty awful because the roster rotated over 11 weeks. You would start at 7am for a week or two, then shift forward into a mix of 8am to 11am for a while, then shift forward to 12pm to 2pm, then everyone on 3pm, and finally the rotation back to 7am with a small subset of the team doing the 11pm to 7am shift. Just as you would get used to one sleep pattern you would have to shift forward so you could never really get used to anything. I also lived 2-2.5 hours away depending on the transport, so an 8 hour shift was a 12-13 hour day, along with me frequently taking overtime up to 65 hours a week.

    Now I work a more manual job driving a truck and doing multi-drop deliveries and I have found that much better. I start at around 530am, load a truck, drive around my town dropping off stuff, and finish around lunch time. The exercise is great for my ADHD, I have packed on muscle, and I have way fewer sensory issues with a supposedly loud truck (earplugs) than I did with an office environment (headset).


  • A note here about the context from near the end of the article, which is very worth reading.

    “This case is a trial for the Ministry of Interior, which aims to normalise this framing for repressive purposes. During a Senate hearing that followed the violent repression of protests in Sainte-Soline [environmental protests severely repressed that happened in France in 2023], Gérald Darmanin, the French Minister of Interior, implored the legislature to change the law so that it would be possible to hack into demonstrators’ mobile phones, especially those using “Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram”: “Give us the same means for extreme violence as for terrorism”. His justification was that “there is a very strong, advanced paranoia in ultra-left circles […] who use encrypted messaging”, which can be explained by a “clandestine culture”. In an attempt to demonstrate the supposed violence of Sainte-Soline activists, he also cited the 8 December affair as an example of a “foiled attack” by the “ultra-left”, in defiance of any presumption of innocence23.”

    This is not just about use of technology signalling terrorism, it is about repression of dissent from the current government. Environmental protests, protests against the changes to pensions, and really any other protests are a target. This is antidemocratic at it’s core and will be expanded unless resisted. This kind of authoritarian behaviour clearly shows the need for the very thing they are repressing, technology to maintain privacy and security for those the state disagrees with.


  • If nothing else this is a different way of organising than what has been tried on most other systems. Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. What we do know is other methods have been tried and had outcomes that this team does not want to replicate, so trying a different method makes sense.

    I am reminded of the difference between the spirit of the law and letter of the law systems. In letter of the law systems if something is not explicitly illegal it is permissible. It is the duty of the lawmakers to explicitly prohibit the behaviour by creating a prohibition and if they fail to do so correctly then the act is permitted. In spirit of the law systems things a little more interpreted rather than directly read, so if you have an act which fits very well the spirit of the law, being something the law was specifically intended to prohibit or limit, then the law will be interpreted as applying to that behaviour and that case will be used as an interpretation in future for other cases. This is actually what we use in most of the world and does make sense, even though it does mean that sometimes laws exist that are not enforced or some things that are not explicitly prohibited by law are prohibited by case law.

    I think in the case of a system that has to change over time this will inevitably happen. Something new happens, people figure out what they will do about it today, then that becomes the rule going forward.