megane-kun

Good points! I forgot to say though, I graduated from high school a decade ago and I still sometimes have those school exam nightmares for some reason. I’m guessing it’s because the trauma is real, lol! The pain of dying socially in high school stays with you.

For me, the first step is meeting people that I actually would not mind being around with. And people who are actually fun to be with, and do activities with that I want to do, but I can’t do alone.

And then keeping in mind that most people I’d meet aren’t really out to hurt me. Most won’t help me either, but either way, they’re just minding their own business and that I’m just another person to them, at least at the start.

And finally, learning the art of when not to give a fuck (and when to). I still suck at it though.

I’m not so sure about what my brain considers “combat readiness drills”.

I’ve had nightmares where I was woefully unprepared for an exam that I went to school, running late, without any pants nor underwear on. And as I sat for the exam, I felt so nervous I wanted to pee. And so I did, right in my seat. Thankfully, I was able to wake up before I peed in my bed.

And then I’ve had a recurring nightmare where I was exploring an endless staircase, with a team of like-minded people. We kept going down and down, as some of our teammates eventually succumbed to fatigue, and then thirst as our supplies dwindled. In some versions, we ended up in the same place we began. In another version, we ended up at some large underground facility, totally dark except for the staircase where we came from.

The only nightmare I could ever consider “combat readiness drill” is a nightmare where I found myself to be a civilian caught in a crossfire inside an abandoned factory, much like what you’d see in action films. How I ended up there, I have no idea, but I eventually got shot as I was trying to escape, and died.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Dammit!

I usually grind my own coffee (from roasted beans) before making my coffee in the morning, and I tell you, when I used a basic hand grinder, I can kill way more than five minutes. It’s really a meditative process though, and as a bonus, the aroma wafting from the freshly ground beans is really relaxing. Having said that, I bought myself an electric grinder since I just want my caffeine on most mornings. Still a meditative process though, just with less hand movement nowadays and more staring at the ground coffee falling into a heap. And then there’s staring at the drip coffee machine as the black liquid trickles into the carafe.

I had to look up what a “coffee pot” is, but I am still not sure if it meant what I thought it meant (a literal pot for coffee, perhaps a french press, coffee maker, or even an espresso machine if you’re really deep into it), which, if my guess is indeed correct… I’m sorry to say, it’s already a habit of mine to the point that I have to have my morning smoke with coffee.

But yeah, if you mean something else (based on the second word, it might be), it’s illegal where I live, not even for medical purposes (but I’ve encountered people who use it recreationally). Indeed, it’s said to be less addictive than tobacco.

This is true, I concur. However, I won’t last for however as long as extroverts being with other people continuously. Give me some time to breathe every once in a while, even if for short periods.

As an aside, this is also part of why I kept my smoking habit. I know it’s frowned upon by people, and I’ve got to stay away from other people to do my thing. The nice side effect is that it gives me a good five minutes or so of alone time, which in social situations, can mean the difference of me suddenly spacing out, and being able to last the entire ordeal. I haven’t really found a good replacement for this, unfortunately—of course, this might just be my addiction speaking.

My guess at that time is that it was an instance setting or something. That instances have a list of languages it supports. It makes sense given the admins have to be able to read and understand the posts in order to do their job responding to reports and whatnot.

But then again this was mid-June, there’s a lot of things happening, and I didn’t really explore the issue further, hoping that it’d be fixed eventually (once the more urgent issues got addressed).

I actually set-up my account to have a shortlist of languages to use (English, my native language, and a few languages I dabble on).

Come to think of it, I only see the language setting in the desktop/web interface. The mobile app that I am using doesn’t have it.

A handful of months ago, I tried to actively use that post/comment language selector. However I ended up giving up because for some reason, only English is accepted. The other choices just resulted in the loading ring spinning forever and ever and my comment/post never being coming through.

Sure, sure. Whatever you say.

I suppose that the vitriol surrounding this topic is tied to the innate biological pressures towards procreation. Life is supposed to the ultimate good. People like us who have doubted this assertion are not only fighting against long-held societal norms, but also biological instincts. It also doesn’t help that having a child (or not) is one of the most impactful personal decisions one can ever make. Having a child not only affects your life, your partner, but most especially, the child themself! It’s something that will permanently change one’s life, and those around them for better or for worse.

I’m not even against people who choose to have children (the so-called “breeders” in antinatalist communities). If their lives are enriched by having children and forming a family, more power to them! Even more so if they can provide the child with what they would need to thrive, or at least survive in this world.

Perhaps this trend of growing sentiment towards childfree lifestyles is yet one of those bio-sociological mechanisms driving us to having more quality children instead of just having more children. Children that would be able to live better, more fulfilling lives than I can ever hope for, and can thrive in the shitty world we’ve left for them.

I tried to give you an overview of how someone might be sympathetic to their views, but I should have known that you’re not receptive to such.

And yeah, if you give me money for the expenses needed for that all-curing therapy, sure, why not? However, you might need that for yourself.

This one, right?‌ https://micro-editor.github.io/

Reading about it, it’s to Kate what is Nano is to… hm… Notepad? 😅 Just looking at the screenshots, I could easily confuse it with something like VSCode.

I’m not exactly antinatalist, but I’m somewhat sympathetic to their position. The way I see it is this: humanity’s effect on nature is on the average, harmful.

We’ve been very successful as a species, but at the cost of a lot of others that weren’t able to cope with our success. Perhaps some species which are useful to us—sometimes just by being cute, have learned to live with us, or have learned to live despite us, have managed to thrive. But for one species that gained our protection, how many others have disappeared with no one caring?

If that’s not bad enough, I don’t think that the average individual human being is thriving. We’ve destroyed a lot only to build depressing cubicles for us to rot in.

I don’t think it’s worth it.

Having a child means condemning them into an ever worsening world. And I don’t think I’ll be able to properly equip my child to even have a smidge of a chance of being “well-off”, healthy or even happy.

However, our innate instincts, as well as societal and other pressures pushes people to have children even when it’s not going to end well for the children as well as their parents. Antinatalism is a counterbalance to this pressure.

I’m probably one of those weirdos who use VSCode, Kate, Nano, and sometimes KWrite all in their different niches.

I do most of my programming work in VSCode, but most of my shell scripting in Kate. When I edit configuration files, I’m usually using the command line and thus use Nano (sorry, I’m too stupid to use either Emacs nor Vim, let alone Vi). When I’m just looking at text files (or doing a quick edit) via my file manager, I use KWrite. With the exception of VSCode, they’re all provided in my installation by default.

Having said that, trying out different editors will enable you to pick the editor that better fits your requirements. Kate is too powerful for what I use it for, but since it’s already there, the additional features are nice to have. I actually had to explore a bit before I‌ settled on VSCode for my programming work, and while there’s probably one that better fits my needs, my workflow has already adapted to working with what I currently have.

Isn’t that making the problem worse though? If you have a tool that resolves your problem for you, wouldn’t that make you dependent on it, and thus, be even more helpless when moving to another ecosystem (like, yeah, Arch)?

Arch is built for a particular kind of Linux user though, btw. It’s probably the worst choice for a “not a computer person” move into, issues of dependency hell aside.

Having learned how to use computers via MS-DOS, then growing to mostly use Windows machines, and then moving to daily-drive Linux in the past handful of years, I think the problem is more about context. If I see an error message, it’s not that I don’t read them. ‌Rather, if I lack the context to understand what it is trying to tell me—and more importantly, what I‌ can do to resolve the problem I’m having, I’m out of luck and I’d have to ignore it.

It was when I switched to using Linux that I’ve picked up the habit of searching the error message online, and then browsing the various pages (mostly Stackoverflow, sometimes Arch Linux wiki pages) which might or might not lead me to the context behind the error message. If I get lucky, I could find a clue to resolving my problem on top of understanding what the error message is about. Other times, I end up being even more confused and give up.

And then there’s the monstrosity that is the logs. I’m pretty much illiterate when it comes to them, and reading them might as well be reading arcane records of eldritch daemons keeping my machine working (in a way, they indeed are). Copy-pasting some snippets from them into an online search is a crapshoot. I may find something that fits my context, but a lot of times, it’s for a different problem. It might not even be for my OS/distro/package/version.

Just to share a bit of perspective from the Philippine side here. The Philippine president before Duterte, Aquino Jr, was more proactive in advancing Philippine interests in the area. Then, Duterte started the shift away from the US and its allies to move closer to China. The current president, Marcos Jr, is way less pro-China than Duterte.

I suspect that Duterte and his campaign was funded by the Chinese to advance their interests in the country, including the disputed area. It’s also worth noting that during his administration, the Philippines opened a lot more to the Chinese, with locals becoming resentful of the seemingly preferential treatment afforded to them. If that’s not enough, there started popping up Chinese-owned (nominally Filipino-owned) offshore gaming entities which were manned by Chinese nationals (some of them were apparently housed in terrible conditions by their employers).

There might be more anti-Chinese sentiment here after Duterte than before him, oddly enough.

I was actually thinking of something like markdown or HTML forming the base of that standard. But it’s almost impossible (is it?) to do page layout with either of them.

But yeah! What I was thinking when I mentioned a LaTeX-based standard is to have a base set of “modules” (for a lack of a better term) that everyone should have and that would guarantee interoperability. That it’s possible to create a document with the exact layout one wants with just the base standard functionality. That things won’t be broken when opening up a document in a different editor.

There could be additional modules to facilitate things, but nothing like the 90’s proprietary IE tags. The way I’m imagining this is that the additional modules would work on the base modules, making things slightly easier but that they ultimately depend on the base functionality.

IDK, it’s really an idea that probably won’t work upon further investigation, but I just really like the idea of an open standard for documents based on LaTeX (kinda like how HTML has been for web pages), where you could work on it as a text file (with all the tags) if needed.

I was too young to use it in any serious context, but I kinda dig how WordPerfect does formatting. It is hidden by default, but you can show them and manipulate them as needed.

It might already be a thing, but I am imagining a LaTeX-based standard for document formatting would do well with a WYSIWYG editor that would hide the complexity by default, but is available for those who need to manipulate it.

My comment is self-documenting, I swear!