Different smokes for different folks

Mental healthcare provider hopping. You don’t really know what a good one is like until you’ve had one. A lot of people try one, work really hard and get nowhere, either because their therapist is a crank, or maybe they’re a competent professional that just doesn’t work for them for whatever reason, so they conclude that therapy is a sham and they stop pursuing it.

I think it’s good practice to evaluate whether what you’re doing in therapy is helping at regular intervals. If it ain’t, talk about it with your provider and if y’all can’t fix it, hit the bricks and find someone who can. If your therapist is worth their salt they’ll be happy to provide you with a reference if you ask. If they aren’t, all the more reason to find someone better.

I like them. I use them infrequently because they’re a bit of a hassle to use with the piefed interface, and I haven’t bothered to install an emoji picker on my desktop, because I use them so infrequently. But I am a big fan of how they augment written language.

I tend to use them as tone carrying punctuation if I’m making a joke or expressing a particular emotional meaning 🙃 It’s rare for me to put an emoji anywhere but at the end of a sentence 🧓 Emotions are hard for me to convey at the best of times, and text-only communication makes it harder 🤷 and emojis can fill in somewhat where tone and cadence would in verbal communication.

It’s not a perfect analog and the medium of emojis is still so new that the meanings vary a great deal, to say nothing of how different emoji “fonts” can convey vastly different meanings. For example, the emoji “😕” can express a wide array of emotional states with particular mouth and eye attitudes, the orientation of eyebrows if they’re included, etc. A comment that says one thing in one font can express something quite different in another. It’s a problem we’ll need to sort out, eventually, but I don’t think it’s anyone’s top priority at the moment. Emoticons suffer less from that problem because the glyphs are more standardized: regardless of font, everyone recognizes “:)” as “generic smiling face”. Between that and the fact that I can render text emoticons without having to open another dialog or application, the vast majority of my emotes are text-based :)

There are two types of passive income: the first is where through the magic of capitalism, you benefit from the labor of others; the second is the same but it’s someone else earning money off of you. Those internet survey things are the second type, as are all pre-packaged passive income type things. It is possible to profit from them, but that would involve you scamming others, so I advise against it. I think the better path in life is to try to make a living with your own efforts.

Learning new things is hard, and it takes a long time, longer if your schooling didn’t give you a strong foundation to build from. In that case, you’ll have to repair the cracks in your foundation as you find them, which can feel like going backwards. It isn’t, but I can’t deny that it sucks to have to go back and learn stuff you “should” have mastered as a child. But you can’t change the past, and your options are either learning it now or not learning it now. Might as well do now.

Learning is also work, because what you’re learning to do is work, and you learn by doing. If the work is fun that can be a bonus, but it’s not necessary, and it can even inhibit you from expanding your toolbox if you only ever do things that are fun. I would approach your practice with the same attitude you would with household chores or personal hygiene: it’s work that needs to be done.

As to talent: I have never met anyone who had zero talents, but they are rather beside the point. If you don’t have a talent you want to pursue, then just pick a thing and start doing it poorly. You have to actually do it, even if you’re really bad at it. The doing is the important thing. Since you’re broke, I would pick something where failure isn’t prohibitively expensive, because you’ll be doing it a lot. Music is very cheap to make poorly, as is software, as are garden veggies (some of them), as are knitted or crocheted garments. Pick a thing and start doing it. It’s ok to switch things, but don’t switch just because it’s not fun. Do it a little bit every day, and soon you will have a skill. More importantly, you will have developed your skill in developing skills, and you will understand your own learning style better, which will help you in the development of other skills. You may even come to enjoy the process in time.

I don’t have a ton of advice on making money, especially now. I’m between gainful employments myself, and I’ve yet to turn my own skills into sustainable self-employment, though I do make some cash with them at odd turns. The world never really has times where it’s easy for everyone, but this does feel like a particular hard time, compared with when I was younger. I think times will get easier eventually, but it will take time and work.

Well, I wrote more than I thought I would. I hope some of that is helpful.

When you’re bleeding out, the first step is to staunch the wound. You still have to do the other steps, but you gotta do the first step first.

I think we need more global holidays. Right now we have New Year’s and… I think that’s kind of it. April Fools’ Day had a bit of momentum at the start of the internet but I feel like it lost something as it got chewed up and digested by the corporations that control so much of the internet now.

Some ideas, off the top of my head:

1. Friends’ Day: tell your friends you care about them. An opportunity to message someone you haven’t talked to in a while, just to let them know you still think about them. A time to meet up with your local friends too. I’ve had a few Friendsgiving get-togethers over the years and I find them highly preferable to the born-into-family version of Thanksgiving Day.

2. Neighbor Day: Have a block party with the people who live around you, or get to know someone on the other side of the world. A time for the world to recognize that we’re all in this together so we might as well get to know each other.

3. Big Problem Brainstorm: we can’t all focus on all the big problems all the time. I think it’s good that we all take breaks. But, I think we should have one day a year where we all take the day, pick a problem, and try to make it better. We don’t all have to work on the same thing, but we all pick something. Energy crisis, food crisis, housing crisis, environmental crisis, just pick a thing. Maybe you pick a problem and find out you like working on it, maybe you meet some people and decide to form a group to work on it long term. Maybe you don’t, and you just spend one day more than you would have thinking about how to make the world a little better. I think it would be cool.

4. Carnival: I know we already have this one in parts of the world, but I think it would be cool if we all celebrated it all at the same time. Global Carnival. Sounds dope.

5. People who don’t usually post day (better name TBD): Everyone who talks on the internet the other 364 days of the year just chills for a second and lets the rest of the world talk.

So what does it mean?

I still want to know what your definition of politics is, because this:

I’m not talking about a political definition, more the raw human emotion of rejecting something for whatever reason they don’t like it

is baffling to me.

That’s a remarkably succinct definition of politics.

Of course we are. As Billy J put it: we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning.

What do you think politics is, exactly, that it can be so easily excised from… history, or whatever it is that humans do?

I don’t think there’s any point in human history that doesn’t have politics deeply ingrained. I don’t even think history as a concept can exist without politics. Someone has to decide what to write down.

Always has been.

We can’t. We never could, and never will. Art is inextricable from the context that created it, which includes the artist(s), the time, the place, the culture and acquaintances and ideas that are all woven into the fabric of the work.

When we say “separate the art from the artist” we mean we elect to ignore a part of the art that makes us uncomfortable, but ignoring a thing neither makes it not so nor prevents it from influencing us. Art has ideas and subideas the same way a musical note has overtones, but on a million different ontological dimensions. The artist is only aware of some of these; the others are assumptions, biases, cultural and personal blindnesses, prejudices, coincidences, and bursts of artistic genius.

Side note: you don’t have a one-way relationship with art. If you think you can experience art without that art changing you in some way, you are merely blind to its influence. Art changes you. Not always in big ways, and not always for the better. Your options are to either acknowledge and explore the nature of that change, or not. Even refusing to engage with a work of art is an acknowledgement of that work’s influence on you.

Back to the main note: even though it’s impossible to really separate art from its context (like where it came from), ignoring the context does flatten the appearance of the art and make some of the ideological overtones of the art invisible. We do this for all kinds of reasons: art as unchallenging entertainment is easier to consume passively, so ignoring the challenging parts of it feels good. Like enjoying the rhythm and melody of a pop song without dealing with the misogynistic lyrics, or the political affiliations of the artists. Thinking about those things is hard. Not thinking about them is easy, and it gets easier with practice. Practice ignoring the uncomfortable parts of art long enough and it becomes habitual. Eventually you ignore them without even thinking about them.

They don’t stop affecting you, though. Those overtones seep into your brain and influence your thinking in ways you will never be aware of, because you have lost the ability to detect them. It happens gradually. After ten thousand subliminal messages, you’ll hold beliefs you neither understand nor can even fully articulate, and you won’t know how to change them. It’s possible, but it takes almost as long to undo as it takes to do, because they’re hard to find.

Second side note: Propagandists are well aware of this property of art, which is why propaganda works, more or less, even when the audience “knows” its propaganda. It’s a quantity over quality thing: the overtones slip though unobserved even if you are aware of the main gist of the piece.

That’s why you don’t separate the art from the artist. You can’t, and pretending to do so denies what art does, much to your detriment.

The last time I installed Arch Linux (plain Arch, not one of the flavored varieties like Manjaro or CachyOS) on a machine I burned it to a CD-RW, if I recall correctly. I still keep up with it because I keep up with Linux news and it’s still one of the tentpole distros after all these years, and I think it’s a really cool project, but after getting a stable debian workflow I no longer felt the need for it.

As I write this it occurs to me that I have an old chromebook that’s still got GalliumOS installed on it, maybe it’s time to give plain Arch another spin and see how it handles. It’s been too long.

This area toward the end of Majora’s Mask has always stuck with me. I think it’s really cool storytelling about what Majora is, where it comes from, and why it behaves the way it does.

People are doing things. They aren’t all broadcast to the internet. Find a local group that aligns with your ideals (or the closest fit you can find; something is better than nothing in this case) and go to a meeting and meet people. You’ll get ideas about what to do from there.

One developer in the whole channel who actually read the requirements smh.

Someone help I’m being hacked!

Haha I started trying to format the text so that it was technically a valid ed25519 key, then it became too much work for a silly joke so I settled for filtering/replacing all the invalid chars and slapping the == padding at the end. Needs more AAAAAA strings to really sell it, I think, but I’m glad it turned out well enough to merit a second glance lol.

Edit: I swapped all instances of fuck|fucker|fucking with As, I think it’s an improvement.

I insert swears into all my ssh keys so they get censored out by profanity filters. Good luck hacking me now, squares 😎🏍️🛹