Weirdly enough, the only game I tried to play that didn’t run was this random Indy game. Didn’t even have fancy graphics, it was one step up from macromedia flash games

The AAA games I’ve played are fine on Linux. Baulders Gate, No Mans Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, Crusader Kings III.

Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

Actors have unions. Actors also get royalties or a percent of sales.

Afaik video game workers have neither unions nor do they get a % of the profits.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

I second this. I’m a very light sleeper and earplugs filter out most of the small sounds so I am not awakened by them.

I’m skeptical too.

Lots of software is designed so the delete button just flags an entry so it doesn’t show to low privilege users on the front end, while the data persists in the database where database admins and the like can still access it.

Online it’s wise to assume every website acts like this if you don’t actually run the site yourself with full admin access to the underlying web server and database . Once what you write gets on a site it is permanently out of your control in most cases.

Then science better get going on artificial, external wombs. A lot of people would be overjoyed to be able to have kids without the physical risk of pregnancy, and the technology seems like it’d be mandatory for true colonization efforts

I ran into something like this from a company named Botrista who was supposedly hiring remote positions. I got suspicious before they got my personal info, dug deeper and found their site ran on wix, tried to contact them by other methods to see if I could get a real person, and concluded it was all a scam to collect the typical prehire personal info like bank accounts, ss number, home address, etc.

They took that X away from me a few days later. I've switched to Freetube and it's been pretty smooth.

I've been using it on Linux and it's pretty nifty.

2.The Power of Generosity: Generosity stands out as a potent ingredient for happiness, especially in wealthier countries. Once basic economic needs are covered, the act of giving seems to play a more vital role in elevating life satisfaction.

This surprised me, but then I thought back to the anthropology class I had that covered societies that had a "big man" structure.

Basically, the social status of the ones on top depended on how able they were to give generously to people in their community and redistribute wealth. So high social status came from not having a lot but being able to GIVE a lot.

My memory is foggy, but if I recall some Native American cultures from the pacific northwest operated this way or had elements of it, as well as some pacific islander communities.

Edit:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_(anthropology)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_exchange

The Moka is a highly ritualized system of exchange in the Mount Hagen area, Papua New Guinea, that has become emblematic of the anthropological concepts of "gift economy" and of "Big man" political system. Moka are reciprocal gifts of pigs through which social status is achieved. Moka refers specifically to the increment in the size of the gift; giving more brings greater prestige to the giver.

So, I’m uncertain if the parent’s behavior (screaming and throwing things w/ the mom) has been like this all the time and OP is finally getting fed up with it, or if it’s really a sudden change.

I’d definitely first consider the advice from others in this thread to check environmental toxins or health stuff with the parents, esp. if the behavior of mom is a sudden change–but if that checks out ok, or if the mom screaming and throwing things has been present OP’s life, it’s not a bad thing to consider this advice above.

How you handle parents who were good (or decent enough) parents when they decline is different from how you handle abusive parents. And this advice here is solid for if OP’s parents are abusive.

I imagine the people downvoting it are people who grew up with stable parents who maybe did descend into (normal) decline and thus are thinking of their own experiences and can’t imagine what it’s like to have genuinely bad parents one’s entire life, or the harsh boundaries one has to set to win yourself free of them.

But OP does need to take context into account (including stuff they might not have put in their story) and evaluate if the screaming/throwing things is actually new, or if it’s always been that way and they’re finally getting fed up enough to want to break free.

I stepped away and thought of more things–so a response to my own reply, heh.

As for learning where to draw the line…you need to take a pragmatic approach to your own past responses to things. Stop and look at them with clear eyes, pretend you are a scientist analyzing data both good and bad, and don’t cherry-pick your data, look at both sides of what happened…how many of your recent responses go overboard with “fight” in a way that doesn’t give a clear benefit or align with your ethics? (And how many likewise do “fawn”?)

Like, fighting just to fight drives people away so that’s not a benefit as you lose community and support, and fighting with (say) a customer service person you’ll never see again for $2.00 turns you into a Karen and wastes time so that’s not a benefit.

But haggling on the purchase of a house or a car might actually be a financial benefit (so long as you don’t turn it on the underlings and place it where it belongs and don’t go overboard with being mean just to be mean).

So look at your recent responses. How many fight for “bad” reasons that are small or petty or waste your own time, how many fight for “good” reasons?

Likewise, how many of your reactions people-please in ways that help you keep friends you actually want to keep, and how many start to be detrimental to you because people are starting to abuse your new habit of people-pleasing?

To learn where the line in your life is for either response, you need to look at what YOU’VE recently done, and figure out if that’s the person you want to be, if the benefits/detriments make sense.

For example (example pulled out of my ass), if you go out with friends and pay for stuff for everyone SOMETIMES, that is one thing. If you NEVER do it because you’re angry they’re taking advantage of you…well, if you never do it, how could you be paying for everything “all the time”? How could that even be possible? Sure, the anger is there, but is it based in reality? Might be you’re just angry to be angry–and it’s good to look at that. Fact-check emotions against reality to re-calibrate and see what’s going on.

But by the same measure, if you over-correct because you feel bad about being an asshole in the past and you desperately don’t want to be that person…you might be paying for everything all the time…which actually IS unfair to you, and if you examine a situation and find you’ve over-corrected and this is happening, an appropriate balance might be to scale it back. But you want to CHECK and look at your pattern across time to see if that’s going on.

(Patterns across time tell you more than isolating one event out of context.)

You’ll probably find instances where you FEEL one way and want to fight/fawn/(freeze/flee), but to continue to grow you probably need to stop and look at your recent patterns and fact-check your emotions against what really happened.

For me, since learning to “fight” was a part of my journey away from “flee/freeze”, I tend to reserve “fighting” for situations where either A) I’ll get genuinely financially fucked if I don’t (not just a dollar here or there, but something that’ll affect food/rent/real-life survival stuff), or B) I’m interacting with a community and there’s toxic folks coming in. Sometimes a community with toxic people simply need someone to stand up and call it out to counter the bystander effect, then people will rally behind you.

Also, a note: When you draw a boundary, even if it’s a very rational and reasonable one, it is not uncommon for SOMEONE to get upset by it. This is not the same as everyone getting mad at you because you’re constantly an asshole. Again, the proof is in the pattern…if no matter what you do people seem constantly angry at you, that’s probably you. But if that reaction to you has stopped, but a few people get upset if you actively set a boundary on something–that’s human nature. There are OTHER people out there who definitely want to take advantage of everyone around them, and that’s sometimes you, so if you set any sort of boundary at all no matter how rational that’ll still be “too much” for them.

That’s not necessarily a sign that you’ve “back slid”, it’s just that 20-30% of people are shitty people no matter what.

I also grew up in an abusive home–but I had a freeze/flee response to conflict.

So, there are several “defense” tactics when it comes to conflict. Fight, which you grew up with. Freeze (do nothing and hope they don’t notice you), Flee (leave the situation), and Fawn (people-pleasing).

When people say not to be a people-pleaser, they are generally talking to people who have an oversized urge to please as their defensive tactic. If you are a person where “fight” is your go-to, toning it down so you can properly interact with people isn’t a bad thing. It’s what YOU needed to do for YOU to gain necessary social skills.

But other people out there have “Fawn” as their defense mechanism. That is to say, whenever there’s conflict, they try to placate other people as their technique to de-escalate. And this becomes a situation FOR THEM where they erode their own boundaries trying to please other people whenever in conflict. It becomes a problem when other people take advantage of them because they tend to fawn and give other people things too much, and it causes harm in their life where work/spouses/friends abuse their placating nature. At that point, people who “fawn” need to try to do what you did with your fight response, and set more boundaries and say “no” more often without placating.

A good portion of “general advice” on the internet does not point out that “context matters”. But it really does, the patterns and personality and past of the person taking advice matters, and when it comes to someone who grew up in an abusive home learning how to master their defense mechanisms, different people will need different advice.

If you were truly as belligerent as you say before, I’d be honestly surprised if you over-corrected to the point of people-pleasing becoming a detriment, as it’s extremely hard to shake these things. They almost seem to be inborn personality traits that are ramped up into extremes if one is in an abusive situation. I have a friend who had a journey similar to yours, with a “fight” defense mechanism mode, and he’s done a TON of work breaking the “fight” response, but you can still catch him in moments where he goes into “asshole mode”.

And I’m the same, I’ve grown and improved, but I still default to “freeze” or “flee” in conflict situations that are especially stressful. (My growth has been embracing a “fight” response when necessary, and also a “fawn” response when necessary.) Him and I made opposite journeys…I learned to be more aggressive because it was necessary, and he toned his aggression down (because it was necessary to avoid driving away people he loved).

I’ve had good experiences with Namecheap for domains. Some of their support people are also in Ukraine, so if you’re of a mind to support them, giving them your business will do that at least a little.

One word of advice–it can be smart to have the domain name with one provider, and the hosting with a different one. That way if your hosting situation goes bad for whatever reason, you still have control of your domain and can point it at a new host as quickly as you can buy space and they can provision it (with time for DNS to propagate of course).

Basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When I did webhost support, I saw WAY too many small business owners get into pickles because they had hosting AND domain with the same provider, and when something went wrong with that provider, it was just such a huge PITA to get control of the domain.

No recs for hosting, I don’t currently have a webpage up (just email) and my knowledge is way out of date, from like 2008 when I worked for a webhost as support.

Internet Explorer tried real hard to do that. Pages were literally built only to run “properly” in IE.

Curious what round 2 would look like.

Always be suspicious if someone OUTSIDE of you–someone who is NOT you–is trying to tell you what you feel.

I have never found a case where that outside person was correct.

And they are often *especially * wrong when they try to “reverse” what you feel. Like, if you feel something good, and they say it is bad. Or if you feel something bad, and they say no, the thing that makes you feel that way is good. There’s usually ulterior motivations here. (And not necessarily well-thought-out evil mastermind ones…some people are very manipulative in a “cunning” or “canny” way, where they’ve learned such things work, but don’t actually think out their plans or motivations…they manipulate on instinct.)

I’ve always had much more success figuring out my emotions when I looked within and slowly picked apart what I felt and WHY I felt it, even if that way was much slower than listening to someone else trying to tell me what to think and feel.

Also–I’ve never personally been able to identify any difference between “true” love and other forms of love. As far as I can tell, love is love, and it’s very common for people who grew up with abusive family to later seek out “found family”, where people regardless of their blood kinship have proven they are safe for you to be around by their benign or benevolent actions towards you.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t grown up with tons of trauma that makes you question every little thing you feel because you honestly don’t know what’s normal or “good” or “right”. Bad people–especially abusive family–are VERY good at making you question natural inclinations, esp. if they are jealous that you might be finding something good that they haven’t managed to grasp.

I hope you understand–because I am telling you, right now–what sort of damage your comment can do to people who were not lucky enough to grow up with a solid, loving foundation at home.

They’re not super active yet, but I’m hoping abandonedporn, mushrooms, and frugal take off.

Yeah, it makes sense for those pages. I just wasn’t expecting it to apply to my own comments when I go to my profile page as those pages on most sites exist outside of the forum sorting preferences.