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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.

    My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.

    A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.

    I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.


  • I’m a Buddatheist who grew up with both cultural Catholicism and later Christian Evangelicism.

    I like how this hints at the nature of the self. If I leave someone behind am I not also leaving myself behind?

    For me, ethical acts are those that increase the freedom of the self and others. We all suffer. That’s a fact of life. If we dissolve our concept of the self and acknowledge our link to others and the world itself we can see ourselves more as threads going through human experience. If we are kind to ourselves and “others”, we have a better chance at reducing that suffering.

    Imagine the time a stranger forgot their wallet and you paid for their coffee. A version of that experience could still exist in that person’s mind long after you die. It could get blended with other experiences and reinterpreted. It could be told as a story to a friend who was inspired by the act. The cascading effects of that person being properly caffeinated on that day could have world changing effects. In a similar way, I carry the shared experiences of my own ancestors and even strangers who have shared their stories with me. They are still alive as a small part of me because my true self is humanity or even some animating life force of the universe or something like that and the name that people call me just refers to the limited perspective and incomplete view I have of existence. Essentially I see existence as blinders limiting my perspective like a race horse, but the true self is a satellite view of the track. When I act, I do so based not only on my experience, but the collective experience of every perspective and experience that has been conveyed to me in every way, but I am still one human body, in physical space, subject to time. I hope that when I die, those blinders will be lifted and I’ll exist as pure conscious perception of everything that ever was is and will be. Able to see through anyone’s eyes, in any time. To feel any and every feeling felt my an animal or human. To view the entirety of existence as a completed masterpiece from outside time itself.

    You can probably see why I like the Buddhists.

    I find that when you acknowledge the interconnection of things compassion becomes easier.

    I hope that people rediscover that within themselves and others.



  • Valve could easily enter the OS space. They have hardware and a dedicated user-base. They’ve built some good will with the Linux community. They’re already doing the work to make other stuff work well with Linux. I’m not always a fan of walking too close to the corporate edge with paid software and DRM and proprietary blobs and whatever, but at this point we have to figure out how to get everyone out of Windows, even 100 year old Grandma Geraldine who plays bejeweled on Facebook all day. I probably won’t run SteamOS as a primary OS, but if I could dual boot it instead of Win10 on my gaming PC that would lesson the pain of MS’s betrayal and the loss of some Windows-only games a little bit.


  • It’s hard to find an ethical player in the media space, especially the streaming space. It’s hard to even agree on what that would look like and how it would work.

    Having said that, it’s clear that Spotify isn’t it. From the first time the client paused an ad when I muted my laptop volume I knew the enshittification was coming. I’ve been Spotify free for a few years now, but decline to recommend my current solution because it’s not much better. When I have time again, I’ll be sorting my local music library and physical media.

    ICE ads would have sent me over the top. That would be a FAST cancel from me.



  • Sad. There was a time when Reddit, despite all its flaws, was great for connecting with obscure interests and getting inside knowledge on niche topics. It made small communities feel big. I find myself on Reddit occasionally, usually just the "you’ve been blocked by network security ;-) page, but I don’t feel the same way on Reddit anymore. The more I hear about their behavior in the background, the less I want to read or contribute in the foreground. Lemmy captures some of the vibes of reddit, but the in-depth, obscure communites, were kind of shattered. I’m slowly discovering some cool forums and stuff that have weathered the web centralization era.




  • I started my Linux journey as a poor high school college student and while I got hand-me-down windows machines at home, I worried about breaking them fiddling with things beyond my knowledge level. A budget basement eeePC became my workbench and I started tinkering. I had to drive to the next city to find one in stock. Today the gas would cost more than the computer. :-D

    I’d still be running the eee but it got put in the closet when many distros dropped 32 bit support.