Completely frazzled right now. Trying to hold it together. I’m in the US, and to maintain my mental health I’ve sworn off news. Seriously, 10 minutes of the news and my heart rate is up and I’m genuinely worried about my and my wife’s jobs. Shutting it out has allowed me to focus on a Crit Sit at work while I have 3 other customers biding for my time. I know being heavily in demand doesn’t mesh with my previous statement, but my company could be heavily affected by cheeto’s current flavor of “foreign policy.”

We either fry everything or drown it in some kind of sugar. If we’re not doing that, we’re doing both.

Adding that all the older Stephen King books are worth the read. 11.23.63 was the last one I read, and I really enjoyed it.

If you’re into science fiction, check out the Wool/Shift/Dust trilogy by Hugh Howey. I also enjoyed the Lattice trilogy by Erik Hanberg. You’ve probably already seen some movies based on Robert Heinlein books. GS Jensen also has a bunch of fun series. Finally, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is what got me into sci-fi as a wee one.

Alternatively, head over to a book community, or the books community on BlueSky is pretty active. Tell them some things you really like and ask for suggestions. If you liked a movie or TV show based on a book, there’s a very good chance the book was a bit different and considerably more in depth.

VLC is pretty great. I would say IINA is at least a close second on Mac. Haven’t had a problem playing anything in it yet.

You really need the GIF from caddyshack for the appropriate tone!

Yeah, I don’t get it either. People who take joy in the anger of others are… a different breed.

Damn! I forgot all about that! Maybe cause I didn’t take it seriously because no real publisher takes the Chicago guide seriously! MLA all day every day m-fers!

Damn. This is perfect.

When I first got on Lemmy, there were a bunch of discussions about getting rid of downvotes, and I thought this was a bad idea. For the most part, they do a good job of allowing the communities to self-moderate. Sure there are trolls that downvote everything, and they can rot in Hell, but they’re a very small majority. Generally speaking, up/downvotes provide an easy way to sort the wheat from the chaff in both posts and comments.

As others have said, Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and Fedora are probably going to be your big three, though I would include openSUSE. All three are very well established and mostly stable (not Debian stable, but they all strike a good balance between stability and not running 2-year old releases!). All 4 of these will have extensive support communities, the SUSE is mainly popular in Europe if that matters. All of them are relatively user friendly for new users, too.

Personally, I prefer Fedora, but that’s mainly because most of my professional work is in Red Hat and it’s related distros. Finding a distro that suits you is part of learning Linux. Pick one and use it for awhile. Like others have said, separate out your home directory to its own partition so you can easily reinstall and keep your files. Distro-hopping is a time-honored tradition in the community! It’s unlikely that any distro will be “perfect” for you out of the box. You’ll have to make it your own, and that’s the beauty of it all: You can!

To be clear, I didn’t say people shouldn’t replace the default messaging app, I said do use Signal to do it. Every time I’ve tried it’s a shit show.

Edit to add, since SMS was apparently dropped, it might be better. I take it nobody uses SMS anymore?

I love signal, but I would add to tell Android users NOT to let it replace their default text messaging app. They will have a Bad Time. Other than that, Signal’s great!

For sure, but the cartoon specified a wrench.

Agreed! Love begins with self love. If you can’t accept and love yourself, you’ll never be able to love someone else.

That doesn’t mean you think you’re perfect. Far from it. It means you accept yourself, warts and all, for who you are without judgement. You look for ways to improve what you can, and work with or around what you can’t. Once you’ve learned to do this for yourself, you can begin to do it for others. But it must start with you. There’s no shortcut.

Also, virgins make a bigger deal about virginity than it needs to be. You’re a person. You’ve done some things with other people at some point in your life. Sex is just another thing you do with another person (or people I guess). Love is what makes sex special. Without it, it’s just another thing to do with someone else. Granted it’s a fun thing that feels good, but without love it’s just a thing. Don’t let it become this mountain you have to climb. It isn’t.

So basically something that should be commonplace to navigate the hellscape that is US healthcare.

I was listening to Behind the Bastards and the guest asked him why it seems like there’s a pattern of crazy wealthy people doing sex pest things. He said there was a study that related a certain level of wealth to having a brain injury. Basically, when you have a certain amount of crazy obscene wealth, the concept of value loses all meaning to you, and that loss affects other types of value as well - like personal value. Wish I could find more about that. Seems like it would be an interesting read.

That said, I would take my unlimited money and build an underwater Bond villain lair. From there I would do what I could to make the world better, but leave me alone.

Agreed, the first time I used it I think I edited my post 3 or 4 times before getting it right.

Tackling the real issues right here!

I’d imagine you could get a decent bludgeoning wrench for around that at a pawn shop. Doesn’t need to be super functional. A pipe wrench in need of some rehabilitation would work nicely.