Beautiful finish!

Sponsored monthly! Way to go everyone, this is awesome. Contributing feels like something good I can do in the face of a whole lot of bad in the world rn, and I’m grateful this instance exists and is so well supported. 🫡 🙏

I saw these a few days ago and they reminded me that I am a moderator of a sleepy little community. 😆

Thankfully the mod tools were very effective in banning the user and nuking comments.

Thanks for the summary. I signed up for it just in case, but don’t think I’ll end up using it. I have a similar experience with Mastodon, but then I was never really into Twitter, either.

I share your feelings on the importance of open platforms. While reddit may have been shitty for a while, the whole third-party apps thing was an eye-opener for me, and started me thinking about (and moving toward) open source.

My next big challenge will be to de-Google, but I’m increasingly up for it. Problem is I have a ton of site identities associated with my email address there, so we’ll see how that works out.

Looks like my childhood. Loved this cake!

All any of us can do, really. Awareness and perspective are often hard to come by, so congrats on that!

I feel for you. We have always had a lot of pets (4 cats, 2 dogs atm) and dealing with their end of life stage is heartbreaking every time. Just grieve your loss however you need to.

We always take comfort in knowing how much our departed friends brought to our lives, and, particularly for our rescues, how much love and care we were able to give them. Our relationships with them are a gift.

Take good care and trust that you will know if and when the time is right for another one in your life.

I agree that if you’re finding it hard to go in every day it may be time for a change. The main strategy I have used is to try to get clear on what you want, what you would consider to be need-to-have vs. nice-to-have. You can do this by making lists of things you like where you are now and things you don’t. The things you like are what you want to try to replicate somewhere else.

The main thing is to try to be more about moving toward something you want, and less about moving away from something you hate. Not always possible, but good to strive for. Otherwise you could end up repeatedly changing jobs to get away from bad people and drama, which, as many others have pointed out, will always be there to some degree.

I wish you well in your search. Stress is a real killer, and sometimes we don’t know how bad it is until we’re out of that environment. Trust your gut.

Like others here, I dumped Reddit and moved here (and to Mastodon) full time. I also moved to Linux full time on my home laptop and haven’t missed Windows one little bit. I’m looking forward to experimenting more with a couple of other distros of interest (currently Pop_OS) and am having actual fun using my computer again. Heavy emphasis on adopting as many FOSS alternatives as possible in ‘24, and starting to separate myself from the big G.

Sounds like a great experience! Congrats.

I switched from full-time windows to full-time Linux with Pop_OS and haven’t looked back. I’m very happy with it and enjoy finding FOSS alternatives to my former go-to apps. So far so good. I’m also keeping an eye on Vanilla OS as that sounds like a very cool project that is headed to beta by summer.

Absolutely worth checking into IMO. If your e-reader device does support library connections, so much the better, but if not, your phone/tablet will.

In addition to e-books, your library also likely offers access to other services including streaming. I have access to Kanopy, which has an interesting catalog of movies and shows that is well outside the mainstream. I’ve found some interesting stuff on there to consume even though I don’t use it as often as Netflix/Apple/etc.

Regarding Libby and the Palace Project, I used Libby for some time but shifted to Palace after reading (here, here) about the e-book lending market space and how ripe for enshittification it is at present. (Overdrive, the company behind the app of the same name and the Libby app, was recently sold to private equity firm K.K.R., notorious for horrible business practices. Overdrive controls about 90% of the library lending market, so I’m a little fearful for what might come.) The Palace Project is a non-profit, so I’m supporting it as a competing platform in case Overdrive starts to tank. The Libby app is more polished, but the search, borrowing and reading experience on Palace is largely comparable and still just fine.

Not sure if your device supports connection to your public library, but I have been reading literally hundreds of books since Covid on my iPhone using Libby at first, and now the Palace Project. I still purchase the odd book if it’s one I know I will read repeatedly but I haven’t bought an ebook in some time due to using the library.

Good list, btw. I loved the Arkady Martine books. You might want to try Gideon the Ninth and the sequels.

Agreed, great book. There is a second book in that series, The Boy On the Bridge, I believe. Also quite good.

I found the movie on Kanopy through my (Canadian) public library. I’m not sure how easy to find it is on other services, as it’s not exactly blockbuster stuff. I discovered it quite by accident.

The Girl With All the Gifts was pretty good, based on the book of the same name.

For comedy, one of my faves is Stranger Than Fiction.

Fucking criminals.

I used to be responsible for the app portfolio in a 1000+ user company, and every 3 years or so I would go back out to the market and try hard to replace Adobe, just for PDF operations. Couldn’t do it because so many products were integrated with them, often in ways we could not reproduce with other products. The best we could do would be to pay for a different product for 1/3 of the cost for Adobe, and then still end up having to carry a significant number of Adobe licenses for cases when integration failed with the other product. No-win situation, and just easier to stay with the evil we knew.

I hate them.

Fwiw, as someone also recently new to Linux, I thought this captured part of the experience brilliantly, and without malice.

Of course op probably went on to google (and find) the answer, so I agree with you that getting the answer with this post was probably not the point. But it’s a quality shitpost, and I endorse it! 😀

I’m glad to hear that.

I couldn’t figure out how to log out of the app. After the admins logged everyone out after the zero-day, I expect it left the login tokens kind of messed up. Uninstalling and reinstalling fixed it all.

You beautiful bastard! I had one of these and thought it was one of the coolest bits of tech I ever owned. Your post generated so much nostalgia over having to hold my watch in just the right aspect to complete the data transfer. I remember people watching me sync and being shocked (although that was perhaps at how much of a nerd I was to have one). I like to think they were reacting to the tech.

Very nice work! Now I just need to find my old watch…