Yeah I should’ve written it as “It is not like that for me”. Though this is the first time I’ve heard someone who meditates compare it to doing drugs.

Well everyone is different. I practiced Zazen and nobody ever told me of experiencing a high or altered awareness. That’s only my experience though and I’m not trying to discount yours :)

Meditation doesn’t get you high?

No it’s a a fairly sober experience.

Drugs don’t alter your awareness?

Well I guess they can. I have no firsthand experience with psychedelics etc. but it doesn’t sound like the same kind of experience.

No, meditation is not like drugs. If anything it’s like exercise for a very particular part of your mind. It can train the mind to be calm, patient, observant and focused. I practiced for many years. In my experience it does not in and of itself bring any sort of feelings of happiness.

~$10/mo currently but since I recently switched to Linux, and it’s working very well for me, I feel like upping it a little.

I’ve long considered donating to Mozilla since Firefox is by far my most used open source software. But they don’t seem to lack money. So, huh.

Yeah, same. Previous years it was cars driving around with flags, posters for events, etc. This year I saw absolutely nothing. Feels a bit glum tbh.

I agree. E-mail is the original federated service. And 50 years later e-mail spam remains a big problem. I hope Fedi projects can get spam mitigations on-par with email before spammers start getting serious about this place.

“The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fresh clear water when you’re alarmingly thirsty.

Yeah, that must be it. It’s a real shame because the core technology seems to be solid. Streaming 1080p videos from other instances just works. But finding channels to follow seems impossible.

I was about to leave a snide “Eww, crypto” comment here, but this “Interledger Protocol” seems like the most good-faith approach to digital currency I’ve seen yet? I’m not knowledgeable enough to fully understand it, but I hope it will actually turn out to be a good thing.

Beer-drinking European living in 'Murica here. For certain styles, the US has fantastic beers available. In particular IPAs (which don’t always have to be mega hoppy!), pale ales, pilsners, amber ales, and stouts. Plenty of great choices to be found here, if you discover the right breweries. That’s key, because there are a lot breweries with imo questionable taste.

What’s harder to find are good beers of other styles, such as Belgian or German beers. US breweries try, sometimes, but they aren’t succeeding.

If you don’t already have some combat boots, look for some new or used ones at an army surplus store. They’re usually cheap and look great.

Vintage band shirts can often be gotten from Ebay

Put on Tom Lehrer’s We Will All Go Together When We Go

FWIW I have never been bothered by a little cosmetic wear.

And people pay extra these days to get a "relic"ed guitar. Make of that what you will.

I unfollowed Alec on Fedi because every other post would be him complaining about his interactions on there. Reply guys. Trolls. Lack of algorithms which raise some of the better comments out of the drek. Insufficient moderation. Etc. This got boring and depressing to read about honestly.

However I think he’s totally right. Mastodon/Fedi works well for certain kinds of people. People with limited engagement, people posting mostly uncontroversial things, and perhaps people who just don’t give a shit. But for high-visibility folks like Alec the old-school unfiltered discourse seems really uncomfortable.

It has little to do with federation itself, I think. But if Mastodon ever added the choice for users to enable “modern social media algorithms” for their view of their feed I suspect it would work a lot better for many people.

The same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world!

Commenting as a radio amateur. Carr is a proponent of handing over any and all public use frequency bands to corporations. This may not be relevant to most people, but it’s one more little “fuck you” to the American public.

Sleep - Sonic Titan. Put some headphones on and listen to the incredible bass lines.

Or anything else in their discography really

“Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?”