Agree, Facebook is not the platform fot creatives, especially not comic creators.

I was a huge Webcomic fan back in the days of things like Mega Tokyo, Real Life Comics, etc., and people used to make a living hosting their own content on their own sites making their own ad revenue and merch shops. Kinda hate that social media consolidation killed all that. I actually want to catch up with Something Positive since the creator has been making podcasts appearances and reminded me he exists and seeing his site still looking the way it did a decade ago is like looking into a time machine to when the internet was better.

Sorry for the rant, webcomics have just been on my mind and your comment helped open the floodgates 😅

John Stewart suggested Hogan would be secretary of ‘TAKE YOUR VITAMINS!’

I’m thinking something family related, cause everyone’s his brother

Reality keeps becoming satire.

Waiting for Steven Seagal to get some kinda foreign relations/military position

“Saving money by” vs “making money by”

That’s exactly where I feel I’m at. I’m no tech expert but I’m the guy family calls to help with computer stuff and I know enough to realize I don’t like the direction Windows is going. I’ve gone as far as to install Linux on a single device I use but now I just use that device less cause I can’t be bothered to figure it out when I’ve already got other machines that I’ve got working just the way I like.

Feel like I’ve come to a wall that yeah, I could overcome and climb, but this side of the wall is still livable and I’m not even sure the other side will be much better.

My intro to chip tune was a guy I met in the mid aughts whose hobby was using old electronics to make music, so yeah, I always thought chip tune was like ripping apart old toys and torturing them to hear their screams

Yeah, I imagine a lot of people alive during the world wars thought things were going to collapse any second as well. But I just feel the added background anxiety of the status quo causing the Earth to heat up catastrophically but slow enough to be ignored adds a novel layer of messed up to everything.

I honestly hadn’t considered that eBook licensing data could be used in the way they describe in the article. EBooks becoming part of big data surveillance somehow feels especially disheartening to me.

Lately I feel like I’ve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays you’re STILL the product…

But a pirate is always free 🏴‍☠️

I’m all for CEOs and executives limiting their pay, ideally based on what they pay their regular employees, but of all the companies in the tech space to get mad at, they choose one that’s actually doing a significant public service?

And I know people are gonna say it’s the volunteers that do the real work but people still had to build and run things. I dunno, I respect them getting luxury pay more than anyone at Facebook at least.

Was just having a conversation recently on whether things have always been this close to a complete existential crisis for humans or is the current global situation unique. Most people felt like things have always been bad but I still feel like, with everything going on in terms of global conflicts and climate change, things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past.

Where I’m living now in South East Asia I’m seeing so many little Chinese EVs, specifically the Wuling Air. Heck, I kinda want one myself but I don’t trust it to last since I never even heard of the company till a few years back. If a more established automaker made a good, cheap, tiny EV, I’d totally get one.

Best of luck! Not sure where you’re at, hopefully somewhere they got some kind of unemployment. In my country at least, there are no unemployment benefits that I’m aware of at least, so had to strictly figure out budgeting and luckily I had managed to keep some savings and was able to live with family.

I tried to do a bunch of personal projects, YouTube, a small company with a friend, but a lot of things just going nowhere. I pretty quickly got part time work to make ends meet, literally going to a place walking distance from my home that was related to but not quite the field I’m in, and while they couldn’t afford me full time that work got me into a financial position where I could keep my head above water, and I continued to do my own sort of freelance work in my field where I could get it

Honestly, I was really naive about how easy getting a better job would be. I had recently gotten my Master’s, had a good amount of experience from my previous job, so I thought I’d be in a shiny new job in a month or two. Month five was when I got the part time stuff going.

But I was kind of amazed at how, when I kept telling myself I got no money to spend, I found ways to not spend money, so I got WAAAAY better at saving during that time. But also, I don’t wanna go through that stress again where every little unexpected expense, car repairs, family emergency, etc, made me feel so hopeless, like if my value kept doing nothing but going down, what was the point of me doing anything?

Getting out of it was honestly a good amount of luck, my freelance stuff led to me meeting my next employer completely by chance and it just so happened they were looking for someone with my specific training. It was honestly kind of insane.

tl;dr:

Was naive, wish I had things planned better. Seeing all your savings drain away is soul-crushing. Think I learned about myself figuring out personal projects. Getting work feels like just luck of the draw in the end.

Legit, fear of being “killed” by the system stops me from slowing down. One time in my life I quite a job due to stress without my next move planned out and it was real rough. I’d love to be able to slow down, to the point I’m finding myself missing the pandemic work from home life. I wanna leave my current job, but I need to make sure I have something else lined up first, and who really knows if that will be better.

I wanna ignore all the noise around me and just find myself, but I’m afraid of the wolf.

Legit, why do simple apps like timers need updates? Makes me wonder what kind of bloat features (or spyware??) they’re adding.

It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it

There are a lot of VPNs and a lot of opinions, so hard to recommend specific ones. There was a site I used a while back with a quiz that helped suggest VPNs, I think it was https://www.vpntierlist.com/ but I’m not sure. I seriously looked into ProtonVPN by whatever site it was’ recommendation, but I ended up just renewing NordVPN, which I was already using, because of a special offer I got for ending my subscription in the first place due to privacy concerns. In the end, despite NordVPN having some potentially fishy business connections, it still suits my general needs, and with their various discounts feels like good value to me at least.

Completely stopping tracking for shopping especially is gonna be impossible, but since you say “least trackable” I think there is some obfuscation you can do. Keep in mind, I’m by no means a security expert or anything, but general paranoia at the state of the internet has made me interested in trying to obfuscate my online identity for a while now (I say as I post on Social media…), so I’ve got some things I’ve found helpful

A simple easy thing is to start using browser containers for your different identities, which is built into Firefox. This way, details of one identity are less likely to leak into another, as in, what you search for in one identity isn’t gonna end up in the shopping results of another. Related to this, I’d look at script blockers and other extensions that can stop trackers. My go to is NoScript but I get some people don’t like it cause it’s fiddly and can break sites. I’ve heard good things about Ghostify but haven’t tried it myself. Getting started with NoScript way back, it was crazy to see how many different useless trackers and scripts were loading in the background that you don’t even see and are apparently completely unnecessary to the functioning of a site.

Then I’d also recommend using a VPN. I love it when I see ads being served to me from completely random countries because of how often I change my location, confirms that whatever advertising service that for whatever reason slipped by my blockers still don’t even know my general location.

And that’s about it off the top of my head. If I can think of more I’ll come back and edit my post.

I am starting to make the effort in switching but honestly, it’s not going as easily as I hoped… I got my old Surface Go running fully on Mint now and I’ve got some frustrations trying to make it work the way I want. I’m sure I’ll get there, but what seemed like a fun project has become frustrating.

Next I plan on setting up dual booting on my gaming setup, which I suspect should be less frustrating than trying to run Linux on Microsoft hardware. If that goes smoothly I’ll wipe Windows on the machine and switch fully to Mint there.

Only thing I don’t think I can let go of Windows on is my work laptop. I use too much MS office suite stuff for work and have to move documents between people all the time. I already tried using Libre Office at work a few years back already and it just didn’t work out, especially Power Point / Impress.

Overall, yeah, I think we should all start making a move off Windows when I see the state of things, it’s just… not that easy for everyone.

That’s what I thought, but when I search for Onenote alternatives it’s always at or near the top of every list.

No, first time hearing about it. Every source I looked at talks about Zim or Joplin, but Xournal looks good! So far between this and Rnote I’ve got good contenders for my note-taking app.