

I was under the quiet assumption that America and Canada were already at war when the trade war began. A hostile act doesn’t have to start with boots and bombs for poor and innocent people to start dying.


I was under the quiet assumption that America and Canada were already at war when the trade war began. A hostile act doesn’t have to start with boots and bombs for poor and innocent people to start dying.


I hate labels. Nothing has ever fit me.
I prefer to briefly describe parts of myself over defining what each label means to me. It kinda sounds like the same thing but at least I worry less about being forced to fight against someone elses definition of the same word.
Because I don’t want to use labels, I end up feeling quite isolated. I spend so much time around people who use labels so much that even the smallest actions can unintentionally make someone else feel excluded. They don’t realize how a simple comment might actually be dismissive of someone else’s experience or point of view. They’ve spent so much time and energy under a specific label that it starts to narrow their world view.
I’m thankful my closest friend in this situation has been fighting for my inclusion in things long before I brought up this issue with them about our friend group. It’s still hard to be in a situation where you think you belong only to realize that you are being excluded because you don’t fit a specific label.
I do get that people can find community with labels. However, I think if shitty people didn’t label other people they don’t like then good people wouldn’t have to retaliate by reclaming or creating their own label for community and protection. To me it appears as an escalating war of made up words with no end in sight. When tunnel vision sets in, no one will ever win.


Answering from my own experiences, a lot of people who showed narcissistic traits tended to be very manipulative.
They always wanted something from everyone around them. Whatever anyone did for them, it was never enough. Never being enough seems to creep into other parts of a narcissistic person’s life. Never enough attention or never enough objects/wealth. Never satisfied with what they currently have and always wanting more but more is never enough. There seems to be a constant need to exploit everyone and everything for more.
When I compare that behaviour to people who are content and able to live in the moment, it becomes very easy for me to see who feels genuine happiness and who doesn’t.
People are complex and manipulation isn’t always going to be a thing that a narcissistic person does but damn it is common. Too common.


Not really, no. Although I don’t know if that is the result of ADHD meds, the antidepressants I used to take or just aging in general.
I love the smell of fresh coffee but caffeine just doesn’t agree with my body anymore. I’ve switched over to herbal and red teas now.


Every prescription ADHD drug I tried gave me anxiety and made me pee every 20-40 minutes. Then I’d get more anxiety because I’d have to pee so often. It also made all my normal habits into unhealthy habits. Ever since I took any meds, I’ve been unable to drink coffee now without the same issues.
Now I just raw dog life. People either accept me as I am or I just stop talking to them because no prescribed pill or social pressure is worth it for me anymore. At least I’m happier now.
I created a file tree that looks similar to my system’s file tree, except it only contains all the files that I modified or added and only their respective directories. From there I just use rsync to sync those files/file tree to the system’s /.
It’s convenient to see what changes I currently have but it requires a bit of manual maintenance. I only really started doing it that way because I was learning how to use rsync and I just kept going on with it because it was working for me.
I’m only working with my laptop, android phone and two Raspberry Pi’s so I can get with my little rsync based setup.


I had a website that was set up for only my personal use. According to the logs the only activity I ever saw was my own. However, it involves a compromise. Obscurity at the cost of accessibility and convenience.
First, when I set up my SSL cert, I chose to get a wildcard subdomain cert. That way I could use a random subdomain name and it wouldn’t show up on https://crt.sh/
Second, I use an uncommon port. My needs are very low so I don’t need to access my site all the time. The site is just a fun little hobby for myself. That means I’m not worried about accessing my site through places/businesses that block uncommon ports.
Accessing my site through a browser looks like: https//randomsubdomain.domainname.com:4444/
I’m going on the assumption that scrapers and crawlers are going to be searching common ports to maximize the number of sites they can access over wasting their time on searching uncommon ports.
If you are hosting on common ports (80, 443) then this isn’t going to be helpful at all and would likely require some sort of third party to manage scrapers and crawlers. For me, I get to enjoy my tiny corner of the internet with minimal effort and worry. Except my hard drive died recently so I’ll pick up again in January when I am not focused on other projects.
I’m sure given time, something will find my site. The game I’m playing is seeing how long it would take to find me.
When I was younger, I’d say “just one more thing” when asked about how much work I had left to do. There was never just one more thing… Only a bottomless bag of more things to do.
The problem was I was so focused on the current task, I forgot how much was actually left to do.
True, but there’s far more to this story than a few paragraphs can explain. She’s also very cruel and I spent far too many years in therapy because of her actions.
At least I have validation from my cousin’s recent interactions with her. He’s been unfortunate enough to see her other side and has shared those experiences with me.
He now understands why I have distanced myself from her throughout my life.
My sister has done a lot of good things for other people but I have an extremely hard time appreciating her actions. She spends so much time telling people on social media and real life all the good she has done. To me it seems like she is doing good to be seen doing good. As if attention to herself is a currency.
I rarely share the stories of when I help people because often when I do, I’m reminded of the privileges I have in life. That’s not something I feel comfortable bragging about. It feels like I’m using the situation to make myself look better than I actually am if I brag about helping another person.
I think one of the many reason’s she doesn’t like me is because I refuse her help. I deny her the ability to brag about helping her little brother. Doing good to bring attention to herself is far more important to my sister than doing good because it’s the nice thing to do.
A few years ago I was in a position where I was seeing two shitty, manipulative people taking advantage of three of my friends in three different situations. My three friends had all been warned about the manipulators but still felt the need to be nice, diplomatic and caring towards them anyways.
I ended up spending a lot of time talking with my friends, pointing out bad behaviour and encouraging my friends to put their own interests first. I never blamed my friends for their behaviour and instead tried to give them the tools for identifying and dealing with their manipulators.
Eventually they all came to realize of just how awful those manipulators were and I made myself available for my friends to vent when the time came. It sucked having to watch my friends go through all those emotions in the end. They all were really hurt.
I do think I did the right thing. They felt hurt but they did more than just get over it. They all learned from those experiences. We don’t talk as much as we used to but when we do talk, I’m always happy to hear that they are still putting themselves first and not giving any manipulators their time.
I also got to learn from all of that because too had been dealing several manipulative people in my own life at that time. Teaching my friends helped reinforce what I had learned and the results made me feel more confident in my own life choices that I had made in the recent past.
Goatse is now MCU canon.


I haven’t tried it myself but https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux:Boot seems to be able to start Termux and programs after a phone starts/reboots. It does require downloading an additional package https://f-droid.org/packages/com.termux.boot/ along with the main Termux app.


I’ve been working on a script for the past month which mounts and unmounts encrypted drives from a terminal command line. I’ve finally reached a state where I’m happy with it and feel it’s quite complete.
I made it to help safely automate the backup of all the devices on my home network while helping me feel more secure about my encrypted drives. Mainly by ensuring I still need to type in my passphrase for each encrypted drive and making sure my encrypted drives are reencrypted after the backup data transfer is complete.
I’m now tempted to rewrite my first script in the same format as this current script so that it would be easier to add more features to it that’s been sitting in the back of my mind.


It may be that people are bothered by seeing someone take decisions differently than they do, they might feel their own decisions being implicitly questioned, so they might be reacting in a way that reaffirms their own values.
In my last job, I rarely worked overtime. My coworkers always gave me a hard time about leaving on time. Always claimed I was leaving early. They had absolutely no reason to treat me the way they did because none of them were in a management position.
A lot of them gave me a hard time for doing a job differently. I was quicker, more organized and often my work quality was just as good or sometimes better than their work quality.
Reflecting on their behavior now that I’ve left, it’s quite clear to me that me prioritizing my personal life over work made them insecure about themselves. Not listening to their forced, unasked and unwanted advice made them insecure about themselves. Working in a way that made sense to myself made them insecure about themselves.
Guess what trend I started to piece together long after I left that awful place. When someone defies another person’s personal truth or reality, that has the potential to cause the other person to feel insecure about themselves. It seems like they can’t stand that someone else is able to do the things that they themselves are afraid of trying in the first place. Those people would rather drag you back into the same hole they are in. They don’t want your personal success or happiness to remind them of their own personal insecurities.
I’ve spent the last few years learning to be comfortable in myself when dealing with other people’s insecurities. Nothing I do will ever satisfy insecure people so I try my best to not let their words bother me. Their insecurities and feelings are not my problem. With those people, I end up giving them short and vague responses until they leave me alone. They don’t deserve anything more.


There’s a few things I backup from my phone.
I have an Android phone so I use Termux as a terminal emulator. I use ssh and passwordless keys to make transfers simpler and quicker.
Although this is closer to a backup process and not like SyncThing where it’s syncing a folder between two devices. I don’t believe rsync is capable of acting like SyncThing but I’m tempted to dig into rsync more and see if I can put something basic together one day.


I do something similar using only rsync. I’ve had nothing but headaches whenever I used automated file syncing programs. The bare bones aspect of just using rsync has made it a much more consistent experience.
I found using automated file syncing programs have too much complexity under the hood that just seems to lead to more time troubleshooting issues.

Aaah sorry, I thought the earlier comment initially came off as dismissive towards my friend. All good.
I don’t recall what my friend said but dude got kicked out of the glow-in-the-dark mini golf place and she got to have his drink for free before finding her safe friends again. Problem solved itself fortunately.
I’m pretty sure my hope in the Canadian government died with Jack Layton. My younger eyes viewed him as the most human politician compared to the others. I don’t know if it was true, I was only just becoming politically aware at that time but that’s how felt at the time.
Sadly my hope in this government and country has never recovered. All I see is a growing mountain of disappointments.