I just started working at a fast food restaurant and am really just blown away by how much rewarding it is that my last job working at a social welfare agency "helping people." There is almost ALWAYS something to do AND my work can be objectively measured, two things untrue of my last job.

I'm trying to figure out what I want out of life, and work, and career, and I think this is really important to me: I actually need to be DOING something, something that I have direct control over, and something that I don't NEED to say, "Look what a good job I did" because it is transparent.

Part of the reason I think this is important to me is if these requirements are NOT met, then the job is essentially convincing OTHERS that you are good at your job and/or that they like you. If what you do is opaque, unclear, or hard to measure, you have to constantly be policing the social narrative around yourself and your work--two things I have absolutely no interest (or ability?) in doing.

What's been your experience?

I'm always picking apart movies and TV shows for subtext, deeper meaning, Jungian archetypes, revelation of social patterns, inner psychology, etc., but it seems like there are two related trends that make the traditional, scholarly approach of a close reading increasingly unpopular:

1. The work is about whatever the author says it is about or could have intended it to mean. Literature can have a multipilicity of meanings, some of them deeply personal to the reader, and many of them unintended. That the fun of thinking about a piece and breaking it down an examining scenes and dialogue and symbolism can all be replaced by doing a search on the author's Twitter is deeply depressing and completely destroys the role of art--to be an ambiguous sounding board for our souls and unconscious reflection of our society.

2. A work is bad or good depending on the political messages it explicitly and implicitly communicates." and related: I'm more likely to agree with an interpretation if helps me politically. Stories with flawed characters are condemned in this system, because the point of literature isn't to explore the human condition, but to create propaganda for ideologies, and your role isn't too seriously examine the text but to create your own propaganda for your side online.

Examples:

• "300 can't have a gay subtext because that would mean Zach Snyder was woke!'"

• "The Matrix is definitively a trans-allegory because The Wachowskis said it was. If you disagree, you are stupid, because they said so." I love reading the Matrix as a trans-allegory, but it is not ever explicitly mentioned in the text so I chafe at it being definitively, or even obviously, a trans-allegory.

• Sex and the City is bad because Carrie has an extremely fucked up relationship with Mr. Big (ie, only positive role models are "good"--I'm absolutely OK with people pointing that out, but the problem is building a world where only "safe messages" are propagated and treating all audiences as uncritical 3-year-olds in front YouTube Kids).

The only real pushback against art-by-tweet is against JKR declaring Dumbledore to be gay. But, really, that's just politics taking precedence, because people don't want her in the LGBT tent exlcuding trans people.

There also seems to be a knock-on effect in writing rooms, where complexity and ambiguity are being sacrificed for clear moralizing and political point-making.

And as a long-time Star Trek fan, I'm not saying art can't be explicitly political! Of course it can! But I am saying it is increasingly not allowed to be anything else.

Is this a vibe anyone else is getting? My references are obviously seriously dated, but whenever they come up, I feel like I'm speaking Ancient Greek.

Bonus question: Who has a better story than Bran?

This has been on my bucket list for a while: I'd love to have a non-keyboard form of text entry that I can use on the go without a table or stable place to put things down. I just grab a bluetooth game controller for a few bucks, get something to hold the phone on it, and write from anywhere.

If it has a complex entry system that takes time to learn and would make me feel like Neo, even better.

People do sell these weird contraptions (https://www.mytwiddler.com/ and https://shop.tapwithus.com/) that you can hold in one hand to type with, but engineering and manufacturing them at such small scales is pretty damn expensive; over $200 last I looked into it. And I definitely don´t want to learn an input method that is determined entirely by a private company that could become enshittified or go out of business.

Bluetooth game controllers come in a variety of price points and have a stable form factor, so it's definitely a good option here.

Joytokey could be used as a base, but I think it is mostly made for quick gaming shortcuts and would´t be really efficient for exclusive text entry (?). Joytochord, which turns the controller into a chording keyboard, seems to be defunct.

FOSS to the rescue?

I've dabbled with multiple instruments in my life

It seems crazy to me someone would learn all the fundamentals of music and not at least be able to play rudimentarily another instrument. I mean, why not? You already understand music, you just have to figure out the instrument, which is a pretty small investment relative to musicianship, and opens up a lot more possibilities.

What have you learned from your different instruments?

On Mint. Tried installing Anki from the app store, but the web was unhappy with that version's time zone handling, so I couldn't sync.

I downloaded the tarball from the developer and it installed fun, but when I run it I get:

 Starting Anki 26.05...
Qt warning: From 6.5.0, xcb-cursor0 or libxcb-cursor0 is needed to load the Qt xcb platform plugin. 
Qt info: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found. 
Qt fatal: This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: linuxfb, offscreen, xcb, minimalegl, eglfs, vkkhrdisplay, minimal, vnc, wayland-brcm, wayland-egl, wayland.
 
Aborted (core dumped)

The Qt debug's only issue is this:

Qt debug: Got keys from plugin meta data QList("wayland", "wayland-egl", "wayland-brcm") 
Qt debug: checking directory path "/home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/platforms" ... 
Qt debug: "/home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so" cannot load: Cannot load library /home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so: libxcb-cursor.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory 
Qt debug: QLibraryPrivate::loadPlugin failed on "/home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so" : "Cannot load library /home/alex/Downloads/anki-linux/app_packages/PyQt6/Qt6/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so: libxcb-cursor.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" 
Qt warning: From 6.5.0, xcb-cursor0 or libxcb-cursor0 is needed to load the Qt xcb platform plugin. 
Qt info: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found. 
Qt fatal: This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

I've checked that location and libqxcb.so is exactly there where it should be, so I'm not sure why it can't read.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled and still have this problem.

Any ideas?

Edit: Solution:

Try installing the packages mentioned here: https://docs.ankiweb.net/platform/linux/installing.html#requirements

I lost a draft post in Voyager on Android while I was a few apps away doing research and looking for a photo to add to the post.

That brought to me an understanding that Android will just kill apps for memory purposes.

Then I thought back to Windows 98 and how it had a page file that would write RAM information to the hard disk and use it as RAM. It was slow af, but it worked.

So I'm wondering: it's 2026; why is Android just killing apps instead of writing them to a much faster drive for recall when needed?

I grew up with physical media--LP's, tape cassettes, CDs, videotape, DVD, then Bluray.

I, like a lot of other people, was amazed by the library a simple streaming subscription could bring. First with Netflix, then with Spotify.

I slowly lost track of my physical media and eventually became 100% dependent on streaming services.

I was happy. Netflix had a huge library, almost everything I'd want to watch was there. Spotify had almost every artist I wanted to listen to (except for Joanna Newsome, god bless her harp playing soul).

Then the cracks started to show: A movie I planned to watch was no longer available, a seven-season TV series moved to a different service while I was season five. A show produced by the company that owned the service moved that show to another service it also owned to encourage me to have multiple subscription.

Then the pattern emerged: low prices combined with a big library, and once you subscribed, things would slowly disappear, and prices would slowly rise. In short: enshittification.

I started noticing that DVDs at the thrift store were $2-3 bucks. What if instead of spending $15-$20/month for temporary access to a mercurial and mutating library, I bought DVDs that I could keep forever (?) and re-watch and share with friends.

That was about 3 years ago. I currently have 425 movies, 65 TV series of 819 episodes with a total run time of 54 days, 2 hours and 55 minutes.

Along the way, I've found DVDs that sell for as little as 2 for $1! That's 40 movies a month for the price of Netflix standard ad-free tier!

I've told myself to stop buying them, because, though I usually buy things I've seen already, I have a massive backlog of things I haven't seen at all.

It's kind of funny to me how upset people get when a popular show like The Office or Friends gets moved to a different streaming service. It's hilarious to me that people will spend $15 a month for years just to have access to a show they could buy outright for $39!

It's also nice to sit down with a friend and watch a movie with a curated selection of things instantly available without having to see what service its on.

And after a while, I realized that without streaming video, I didn't need a home internet connection--about $30-$40/month. Instead I could get buy with a 15-gigabyte mobile hotspot, which is about $15 extra to my cell phone plan.

I was talking with someone today and realized I did something I do quite often that might be a trait that gets me into trouble: I boldly state my preference for (or against) something.

In this case, it was being tired of classic rock from a lifetime of overexposure. I think I offended the person, but saved it by clarifying that I'm mostly tired that there is a play list of seemingly 100-songs that have been in continual rotation for 50 years.

Anyway, it occurs to me that I'm just stating my preferences and I personally thing that's fine and normal, but that people get personally offended if you don't like what they like; which makes no sense to me. It's like if you don't like bland food, I'm not going to get offended because I can't handle anything hotter than black pepper. It doesn't ultimately mean anything significant.

Thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

I just popped out to grab an image for a post, then realized I didn't have a photo app, then went to the play store to download Ente, then decided I should just download an image directly.... by the time I got back, Voyager had been closed and the draft was (apparently?) lost.

Any idea of how to prevent this from happening in the future?

And where is the draft supposedly saved?

I'm looking for an instrument to play on my phone that is designed for touchscreen.

Most everything is just a traditional physical instrument, usually piano, grafted onto the touch screen.

I thought a digital trumpet would be pretty cool, because a trumpet is just 3 binary switches plus your lips acting a slider that eventually locks into the next harmonic once it drifts too far.

I searched for something like that and all I found was a keyboard that sounded like a trumpet.

Play Store or F-Droid.