For the last few hours, I've been defending something I made from encroachment by another artist. I figure my (much) earlier claim to the space justifies me holding the line. Whatever the case, it's annoying!

Update: Looks like they've given up at least for the moment, so I'm systematically "bending" their work just a little further away from mine in a way that makes it still look pretty good/natural. Hopefully they'll consider that a good enough compromise for them.

Update 2: The "encroacher" made a "rat" who overlapped with my contribution, but later someone came along and removed the rat's head.

Update 3: Looks like maybe whoever removed the rat's head half-heartedly started putting the rat's head even further from what I did, but hasn't really followed through.

As I write this, I'm eating, for breakfast, a parfait made with (among other things) close to a tablespoon of cayenne pepper and 11 hearty shakes of 650,000 Scoville unit jolokia pepper hot sauce. (The cayenne pepper hits quick. As soon as it hits the tongue. The jolokia peppers take a bit before the heat starts. So, I like to balance the two.)

Last night I made a 7-layer bean dip also with cayenne and the same hot sauce. The day before that, egg salad with... you guessed it: cayenne and jolokia hot sauce. Most of what I eat, I add really spicy stuff to it.

AMA!

So, I was recently banned from a community for being a "serial downvoter". If the votes I've cast there were only downvotes, that surprises me, but I'm looking to gather more information about how, historically, I've voted in that community before I seek an appeal with the mods.

Being banned from that community, I can't see my my votes in that community just by sorting by "new" and scrolling through all posts in the community looking for blue (upvotes) here and orange (downvotes) there to get a rough idea of how much I've upvoted and how much I've downvoted specifically in that community. (And even that sounds like a pain.)

I tried lemvotes.org. It will give me every post and comment I've ever upvoted or downvoted, which is great, I guess, but it's not really easy to see which votes were for what communities. In fact, it's not really easy to see what votes are for what instances. Each vote has an associated link on lemvotes.org to the post (or comment) I voted on, but domain name of the link doesn't necessarily go to the instance that hosts the post. As in (for instance) a post I downvoted that shows up on lemvotes.org with a link to a piefed.zip may take me to a post that was originally posted to a programming.dev-instance community. So the domain of the link doesn't narrow it down any. As far as I can tell, the only option lemvotes.org affords me is to look exhaustively at all of my votes, click the link for each of them, take note of what instance/community the vote was cast on, and keep a tally of upvotes/downvotes only for the community I'm particularly concerned with, which would be super time consuming. And I haven't found any better options.

But I haven't really found any better options, and I'm hoping you folks might have an idea or two. I guess worst case, I can DM the mod without getting this information, but I'd really rather go into that conversation a little more informed. (And, I suppose, if I find out that the only votes I've cast in that community are downvotes, I might decide not to even pursue an unban. But I'll see what I can find out, at least.)

Sorry for the long story, here.

Yesterday, I fixed the washing machine. (Long story. Turned out to be the clutch, which is more of a pain to fix -- requires more disassembly -- than most other common fixes.) During the process, I jostled it and something metal fell out. A cotter pin sort of thing.

My mother checked on me while I was working on it and I mentioned the piece that fell out. She went and started researching about it. (Not something I asked her to do. I would have done the research myself had she not done so. But it didn't hurt anything to have her research. Or so I thought.)

She comes back 10 minutes later and says "this thing is a super important piece that holds something together somewhere. Better figure out where it fell out of." I looked her in the eye, knowing her penchant for reading Google AI overviews and asked "is that from the AI overview?" "No" came the answer. "Oh, some random forum or something?" "Yeah."

She leaves, I go back to the washing machine. (There was plenty I could still do even without an answer to the mystery of the random piece falling out.)

10 minutes after that she hollers from the other room. "Nevermind. It's packing material that isn't needed after the washing machine is installed." She'd found Reddit post where someone had a similar experience with the same exact kind of part falling out of their washer of a very similar model. Mind you, my washing machine is decades old, so I'm a little surprised it would still have parts that were only for packing/shipping, but whatever. Not really implausible at all.

Fast forward to today. She's telling me how she told her friend about the mystery part, and she let slip that "when she checked the references" she found on Reddit that it was a useless piece contrary to what it said first.

"References."

Random forum posts don't have "references." Google's AI overview pretends it can give you "references" telling you where it got the "knowledge" it used to generate an answer. (But it's bad about misinterpreting references, and I have to imagine when it provides references, those are complete guesses. Everything I've heard is that "knowing" where it got the information that went into whatever answer it generated just isn't how LLMs work.)

I brought up that she'd told me the first thing she saw that said it was super important wasn't an AI overview. And she admitted it had been.

And, honestly, I find it hard to describe how absolutely livid I am about it. I've asked her many times not to parrot AI overviews to me. (Whatever she wants to put in her brain is no business of mine, but I don't want her polluting my brain with that bullshit.) She regularly ignores my wishes and continues to read me AI overviews. It pisses me off, but I've learned to swallow it.

But I can't express just how huge a betrayal it feels like to be told AI bullshit and then lied to about whether it was AI bullshit. I'm a lot calmer about it than I was at first, but an hour ago, I was shaking.

I was very calm with her about it, though I'm sure my face was super red. I asked her pointedly not to lie to me about where she gets her information, but I don't expect any change in her behavior moving forward. 😐

I hope not very many of you are wondering WTF awkward interactions have to do with privacy, but hopefully the following examples make it clear to any of you who are wondering that.

Story 1

So, I go to sign up for a bank account at <insert big-ass household-name (in the U.S.) bank name here>. As soon as I walk in the door and tell the person I want to sign up for a checking account, they say "ok, let's get you set up with the app."

Now, I was running Lineage at the time with no Google apps. Just F-Droid and stuff I could install from there. I had yet to install any proprietary apps on my phone. (Not necessarily saying there was nothing proprietary running on my phone. I'd be surprised if Lineage doesn't depend on some binary blob drivers and such for my particular phone. But still, my rule was "no proprietary apps." And even if I decided to break that rule at the time, I kindof doubt the bank's app wouldn't just refuse to work without Google Play Services.)

My mistake was to say "it won't work on my phone" rather than "I'm not interested in the app; can I still get a bank account here?" They pushed it hard. "It's Android, right?" "...Technically, but not the way you're-" "Ok, go to the Play Store." "I don't have the Play Store." "Let me see your home screen." (My second mistake was not ending that line of conversation there with a "no, just give me a bank account.")

Before it was all said and done, I'd scanned their QR code and hit the "install" button so I could show them the error message that resulted. It wasn't until then that they dropped it.

I honestly wonder if they didn't get a commission when folks installed the app.

Lesson learned. Don't say "my phone's weird and it won't work." Say "I'm not installing the app. The only question that remains is whether that means I'm taking my business elsewhere or not."

Story 2

Much more recent. Same phone, but by that point I'd switched to Ubuntu Touch. My phone just stops working as a phone abruptly. No calls or texts.

(The astute among you may already be thinking "oh, probably the carrier dropped 2G/3G support and now requires VoLTE." And if you're thinking that, congratulations you get 100 internet points, but don't spoil it for the rest of the class.)

Now, I've always been really nervous about cell phones. About the time they started being ubiquitous (back in the days of Nokia candy-bar phones with black-and-white LCD displays), I had just quit Windows for OpenSuSE, and then not long after that, Gentoo. And when cell phones started becoming smart phones, stuck with the dumbest phones I could find in the used-phone bin at the phone repair place in the mall. In other words, I was (and largely still am) Amish for QWERTY.

So, I honestly don't know shit about cellular communication technologies because I've never really used them. I've literally never had a data plan. I'm still grandfathered in on a no-data prepaid plan with my carrier that isn't available any more.

Anyway, back to my current story where my phone wasn't working. I had gotten a message a while previous that my SIM card (a physical SIM) would stop working at some point and I had to get a new SIM card. And my SIM card was super old. It was one I'd had to cut down to size and everything. I hadn't followed through on the SIM card replacement, so I figured that was the issue.

I don't have an online/web account with my carrier. And I still have never installed any proprietary apps on any phone, so I didn't have my carrier's official app. The chat and phone support wouldn't help me because they couldn't get proof that I was me. (They required text-message-code authentication, but my phone didn't work, so I couldn't receive the text.) They referred me to the T-Mobile store to get a new SIM card that would ostensibly work.

So, I suppressed my gag reflex and walked into the T-Mobile store. At the door, they asked me some basic questions and entered me into the queue. They told me it'd be 15 to 20 minutes of wait time.

I went and had a seat to wait. Well over an hour later, I finally asked someone for an updated wait time estimate. I'd apparently slipped through the cracks because as a prepaid customer, I appear on a different wait queue in their software than other customers. But at least prompting them got me attended to.

I told them the whole situation. I was glad they didn't try to push me to get a new phone and plan. And they did give me a new SIM card. But when they found out I was running Ubuntu Touch, they referred to it as a "bootleg rom", intimated that I might be doing something shady (because custom roms can supposedly "break the rules" and... I dunno get calls for free or some shit, I don't know), and warned me strongly to be very careful with what data I store on the phone. (As if a stock-firmware phone is completely trustworthy. Heh.)

Not only that, but the new SIM card didn't resolve the issue. Reverting to the stock firmware did. VoLTE is the only thing Ubuntu Touch doesn't support on that phone. So now I either stick on the stock firmware until that red x turns into a green checkmark or try to figure out if Lineage supports VoLTE on the Pixel 3a as a stop gap until I can go back to Ubuntu Touch.

Anyway, those are my stories. I'd love to hear more such painful interactions with "normies" who don't understand why you wouldn't use Facebook or smart kitchen knives that won't work without WIFI or what have you.

My employer just laid off a huge amount of the IT department where I work a year or two ago. I survived it, but today they announced they're going to require everyone to come back into the office. And coincidentally they're opening a new office in India. (Their first office outside of north/central America. And they do no business/sales in India and have no plan to start. Pay no attention to the fact that the going rate for labor in India is a fraction of a fraction of what we're paid in the U.S.)

It's painfully obvious that they're just trying to incentivize people to leave on terms that aren't considered "termination" for purposes of... say... unemployment benefits payment and such.

So, now I'm in the market for a job. It'll basically have to be full-time remote for reasons. And I super don't relish the idea of becoming a vibe coder. Nor job hunting in the current market.

Stressful bullshit.

I'd never heard of this artist until today. This song wasn't billed as a "Nerdcore" song (but it totally is). I don't know if any of their other content is Nerdcore or not. But I'll be listening to find out.

It's just the sweet version of sauerkraut.

Is it a certain number of days? Until it smells off? Until it's got visible mold?

40, cis, never been sexually active.

I feel like I'm crazy for even asking this. When I try to google for anything about anxiety from not masturbating, all I get are a) results about anxiety/guilt from masturbating, b) articles about how women shouldn't feel inhibited from masturbation (which is great, mind you, but not what I'm looking for), c) things about social/relationship things with regard to masturbation, d) alt-right #nofap propaganda, and e) just stuff that seems completely irrelevant to what I'm talking about. I just generally haven't had any luck finding any similar experiences or information about anything remotely like this online.

But I feel like I've been caught in a vicious cycle for a while now. I randomly skip a day or two, feel demotivated, and end up not masturbating for a week or more just because I'm so depressed and anxious and completely not in any sort of mood to do so. A part of me has thought that maybe it's just natural that at 40 my sex drive should be lower, but every time I start masturbating daily again, my mood improves until the next time I skip for a day or two and the doldrums take hold.

I don't think this is any kind of OCD thing where I'm making myself anxious by obsessing that I'm not horny or that I'm not masturbating either.

This isn't new, really. I've known for many years that I get depressed if I don't masturbate. But it's much more pronounced now than it used to be by a long shot.

Another thing I wonder is whether this might be an indicator of low T. I've heard some sources say (though they're mostly drowned out by the cacophony of bro-science #nofap bullshit to the contrary) that masturbation does boost testosterone, at least acutely. Maybe (lots of speculation here, but) masturbating regularly keeps my baseline testosterone levels closer to normal than not masturbating does and if I don't masturbate for a while, my testosterone levels dip lower for longer periods, worsening symptoms. And if that's the issue, maybe TRT would be warranted. (IANAD. Can you tell?)

It's just really weird how the whole internet doesn't seem to know that's a thing that can be, but it's a major part of my day-to-day experience.

Is this anything that anyone here can relate to or give any insight into at all?

This actually happened a while ago, but it came to mind again recently. It was at the grocery store and my internal monologue thereafter went something like:

• "Oh I got a compliment! That's going to make my whole day!"
• "Wait, what shirt am I wearing again?"
• "Right, my Gorillaz t-shirt." (It's a... I think phase 6 shirt, so not a terribly old shirt or anything.)
• "Yeah, I like this shirt too!"
• "That guy was kindof old. It's cool that there are old people who listen to Gorill-"
• "Oh. Oh no."

I very much believe the world needs more DSLs for doing traditionally-point-and-click-adventure kind of operations in an easily auditable, reproducible, parameterized, precise, and programmatic way.

This is my first significant project in service of being the change I want to see in the world. (It's a few years old at this point, but I wanted to show/tell it anyway.) It's a DSL for making simple web comics and story boards.

This is a "scratch my own itch" kind of project. I was GM'ing a 5e game and I do my notes digitally. I have a system for managing my GM'ing notes in digital form that translates extended-syntax Markdown into HTML pages for me to reference at the table. (Yes I should open-source that as well, but I haven't gotten to it yet.) And my brain absorbs a story board way quicker than text. So I wrote codecomic and added some code to my GM notes system to let me just embed codecomic source code in the markdown such that it would render the comics to images and embed them in the HTML. That all took me from "ok, hold on everybody while I read the next paragraph of dense text about what's going down over the next 5 seconds of in-game time" to getting all the same information at a glance. (I still had bulleted lists of more reference information surrounding the story boards, but the story boards really improved the flow of the game.)

Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language for most things lately, and codecomic is written in Go. (I don't know quite what to call the codecomic program. "Interpreter"? "Runtime"? "Engine"? "Processor"? Maybe just "program".)