I really like being able to do basic tailoring. Like, I grew up surrounded by media that made me view my body as flawed because of all the ways it deviated from the norm. The combo of broad shoulders and big boobs made it impossible to find fitting clothes that weren’t a tent on me. Being able to modify garments that I find, and repair the few items that fit me perfectly has been a big confidence boost.

Missing out on seeing this stuff on social media is probably for the best - a lot of craft content on social media tends to be very “influencer” shaped, where the goal is to make beautiful things look effortless, and that can be demoralising when it’s all you see.

I wish you well for whatever remains of recovering from the illness, it sounds like you’ve had a rough time.

I think you’ve excellently captured the difference here. I didn’t get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn’t discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn’t been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.

Even just the idea that my name would be on other people’s screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.

This is just needlessly hostile. You seem to dislike America, but imagine if the things that you dislike could change and America could be better. The article linked is a part of the process to understand and hopefully change things so that this kind of awfulness never happens.

Why be so unkind? You and OP appear to be on the same side, wrt being against gun violence.

Anti-paywall link https://archive.is/MfHFY

I’m doing my part!.gif

I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people’s varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can’t tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can’t really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there’s going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I’m not going to try and change mind, I’m just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There’s a lot of references I don’t get, but I don’t need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn’t shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn’t always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you’ve got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

In the past, with similar issues, I’ve had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

As someone who has been in that exact same position, be cautious about organisation choices that seem like they’d be beneficial regardless of whether you live, but actually make it easier to die than live.

For me, it was the way that I stored my craft and hobby stuff - I made them tidier and more but in practice, harder to access. I did it this way because I wasn’t actually using my hobby stuff, so they were just in the way. However, part of why I was so passively suicidal was because of the gradual atrophy of all the things that used made me happy, so by tidying away my tools, I was just digging myself deeper.

What I’m saying is that living, and life, is messy. Having a clear out can be good and productive, especially if you’re not in a great place, because it can reveal things that aren’t working for you now, but try not to make the same mistake I did. With the new space freed up by your organisation efforts, look over your stuff again and consider whether there’s anything you could put in a more accessible place to reduce the activation energy of starting. I put some of my crochet stuff near my computer so I can do it while I’m in meetings, for example.

This is a great list for ableist terms . https://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html I’m disabled in multiple ways and there were a few on here that caused me to re-evaluate my lexicon.

A list has limited use because language evolves, and so do people, and on top of that, context is everything — but it can be a good place to start

Ea-Nasir has got to be one of my favourite internet phenomena

Explainer link for people who are blessed enough to be hearing of this for the first time: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-is-ea-nasir-and-why-are-people-complaining-about-his-copper-the-viral-complaint-tablet-meme-explained

What section would you put it under? It isn’t clear to me where it would fit

My God, that’s hilarious, thank you for sharing it. I enjoyed “I am like the Statue of Liberty: I accept everyone, even the wretched and the huddled and people who enjoy Haskell.”

Because killing yourself would also hurt people, likely way more than your life ever could. I’ve struggled with something similar myself, and my conclusion was that if I truly felt bad for hurting people, the only moral answer is to try and do better and improve.

Often I would resent having people who cared about me, because it would be so much simpler if there were no-one who’d miss me, or be hurt by my death, but it’s too late for that because I have a bunch of wonderful people in my life who care about me, even if I don’t understand why. Sometimes I wish I’d never met them, because that would make things simpler.

A few times, I’ve had the idea that a compromise is to withdraw from these relationships and sort of wean them off of me. There’s a word that captures this approach, decathect: “to withdraw one’s feelings of attachment from (a person, idea, or object), as in anticipation of a future loss.” The logic of this approach was that if I can’t be a good person who deserves the love of the people I love, I could at least reduce their exposure to someone shitty like me.

It didn’t work out, because as I withdrew, living became more untenable and caused me to inadvertently hurt more people. It was the worst of all worlds - I wasn’t really living, but it was still hurting people similar to if I’d just died.

Quarantine doesn’t solve this and neither does suicide. Especially not suicide, which is often a selfish craving in situations like this. I don’t say that in a judgemental way, just straight up, suicide is the simpler option for people like us. It appears deceptively like justice, and there’s a nice closure to it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider selfish options when you’re struggling with life, but it isn’t solace or closure or justice or any of those things we wish it was. If it were so simple, you’d probably be dead already.

It sucks, and I’m sorry, but there is nothing that can undo the harms of the past. Sometimes putting in the work to do and be better can lead to some healing, but also sometimes bridges get burned and you’re trying to be better for the sake of people you’ve yet to meet. If you do truly believe yourself deserving of something so drastic as suicide, then surely the better “punishment” is to continue living through and past the consequences of your actions. Redemption exists in the better world that you stand to be a part of building, by being one more person trying to be better.

Unfortunately, it is as simple as just “do better in the future”, which is frustrating, but makes sense to me - if suicide is a not simple, but easy solution to the problem of harms caused, then redeeming yourself through life is simple, but fucking difficult.

I don’t know if it’s worth it. Sometimes I find myself thinking “I should have killed myself two years ago, and this wouldn’t have happened” when I fuck something up, and then suicide now is tempting in a “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now” kind of way, even though that’s twisting the analogy to hell. The world will not be made better by your absence - if you have any sense of duty to the world or your loved ones, then it’s necessary to live with the weight of your past mistakes and move past them. Dying just puts that burden with everyone else, condemns them to a life of wondering "what if I had done Xyz differently.

For what it’s worth (very little, I’m a random internet stranger who has no knowledge of you or your circumstances), I would rather be friends with someone who has hurt me, but knows they’re fucked up and making genuine, continuous attempts to improve than someone who is completely apathetic and hasn’t hurt me particularly, but by fluke only. I think that our actions matter much more than our (stated) intentions (especially in situations where there’s a pattern to behaviour - I have unfortunately lost a few friends in this way), but I do think the intention counts for something. The fact you feel bad about what you’ve done means something. The challenging bit is to prove it. It’s not easy, and it might not even be possible to do such high levels of self improvement, idk even in my own case. I do know that it’s always worthwhile to try.

If life were a game where you lose if your net impact on the world is negative, then it’s not game over yet. If you die, that’s it, you get taken by the score screen and you’d probably not be too happy with what you’d see there. And yeah, it’s possible that you could decide against suicide and live a long life and die of old age, and still lose the game, if the net impact comes out to be not great still, but as long as you’re alive to read or think about these words, there’s still hope of making it through and levelling up enough that you can rack up the positive impact points. Hurt and help don’t cancel out like points in a video game do, but it’s hard to not think of “net impact” when contemplating dying in this manner. This might not vibe with you, but for me, it was and still is insanely motivating to know that there is still a non-zero chance of me winning this game, and what’s more, the possibility of winning is exclusive to paths where I continue living (even if often, I would rather be dead), and trying to be better (even if often, it feels like it’d be better for others if I were dead). Suicide offers control, the ability to decide how you lose the game, but it will always be a loss.

Whatever your struggles or your circumstances, I wish you the strength to steer into calmer territory, and the wisdom to recognise change. It feels weird to give advice when this is very much something I still struggle with, but this is me trying to be better. I might not feel especially hopeful about my own journey, but I do believe what I’ve said here, that meaningful change is always possible

Yeah, it’s huge. I recently replaced the screen of a friend’s ThinkPad as a favour. I was a tad anxious because I’ve not done a repair on this scale before, but I said yes because of how famously repairable ThinkPads are.

The screen repair was way more involved than the upgrade you describe, but it didn’t take me more than half an hour, and that was me being extra cautious. The great thing about a laptop that’s known for repairability is the abundance of documentation you can find online, it becomes a self reinforcing cycle after a certain point

I work in science and at university, I was noticing that increasingly often, the kinds of computational work I was doing worked better on Linux. Often, there’d be software that would ostensibly run in Linux and Windows, but the Windows documentation and community would be pretty sparse.

The more I learned, the clearer it became that switching over properly to Linux was the way to go. It just provides better infrastructure. As an example, an area of science I feel passionately about is FAIR data principles, a list of guidelines on how we can make scientific data more Findable, Accessible, Interactible and Reusable. In practice, for me, this means I’ve gotten very good at using containers, which I found much easier on Linux