bizarroland

I don’t know, the only thing stopping me from getting 150 billion is the threat of having to pay an 800 million fine on it.

If it weren’t for that

I was going to say, it’s starting to sound more like the EU is just taking kickbacks in a circuitous legal manner rather than via a shady under the table deal with men and trench coats exchanging packages of unmarked bills.

I mean, in the last 5 months how many times has the EU fined meta or google?

If you really want to make a message that sticks, you ban the danger sites from operating in your collective and then fine them for their past misdeeds.

If you want to be seen as lenient, you then set down a list of objectives that the site must adhere to in order to be reinstated in the collective.

Anything short of that is just lining your pockets. I mean, what is the money being used for?

Remember, the rule is “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.

Threads is doing this. Kicking them to the curb regardless of the cost is the only solution.

What I would do is get a lot of experience with a lot of different systems.

If you’re enjoying self hosting and setting stuff up, go to something like TurnKey Linux and download a handful of applications that you’re interested in using.

Spin up virtual servers on a proxmox server, install the turnkey Linux systems, and then learn how they work. Get ldap running on your home network. Set up an nginx reverse proxy and get a certificate so that you can go to a duckdns internal name spaces instead of IP addresses.

Find use cases for your home network system and then find how to make the systems you have available work for those use cases.

And for the love of god, find yourself a cheap Windows server license and virtualize one of those and integrate it into the mix.

Host a WordPress or Joomla on IIS, set up a pihole for your home DNS on Ubuntu server.

Run a jellyfin server and download a bunch of public domain movies to it.

Hello, find yourself some Kiwix images that you like and figure out how to get https and nginx names running on them.

The more you play around with the technology, the more you’ll find out what you like doing and what you don’t like doing and what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and that will help you understand where you fit and wear your talents lie.

Once you know that I’m sure you can put those talents to use for gainful employment.

I used it for a while. It honestly was a really good browser for a long time but since everything started going this shit it quickly fell from my good graces.

The only time I even think of missing it is when I have to open a page that is optimized against Firefox on purpose because the developers decided to use some janky Javascript plugin and didn’t test.

I feel like you’re overlooking the death of the culture.

That’s what colonialism is really about.

If it were just sharing space and technology and advancement then nobody would have any problems with colonialism.

Colonialism extinguishes culture.

Every single space that has been monopolized by a billionaire has had its culture extinguished.

But it is colonialism. There are virtual spaces that are currently occupied by native inhabitants and deep pocket billionaires are literally bulldozing their way into the space, evicting the current tenants, and then exploiting that space for its resources.

I don’t think there is a better term for it than colonialism.

Would it matter if it were communist colonialism? I don’t think so. The result is the same. The space is disrupted, the native inhabitants are displaced, the resources are exploited.

They taste like candied styrofoam to me

I’ve never played any of them myself but my guess is that it’s the monster hunting.

Same. The instant it touches my tongue I’m transported back to being a kid and my grandmother thinking these were amazing treats and giving them out to us and then getting really upset if we didn’t finish them.

And then I remember I have to actually eat the rest of it. So I finish off the first one and then I see the tiny little 59 cent bag that’s only got four more of them in it and I feel like it would be a waste of my money and my effort in acquiring the circus peanuts and so I force myself to eat the rest of the bag and then vow to never eat them again.

Until I forget and get another bag.

Gave out a few full size snickers to adults today. Glad to have them come by!

How about circus peanuts?

The first bite of circus peanuts tastes to me like an alien artificial intelligence had to create a sugary treat and only had petroleum by-products to make it with.

The second bite tastes like accepting your fate.

Honestly it kind of sucks.

I always wanted a kid but it requires a partner who is able to be a parent and I have never had such a partner.

I had a pretty fucked up childhood and I wanted someone who could be a good mother to a child and everyone I’ve dated who had the ability to be a good mother was not capable of giving birth for one reason or another and everyone I’ve dated who’s capable of giving birth was not capable of being a good mother for one reason or another.

I know it’s not too late for me but it’s getting pretty damn close.

I probably go back to when I was a kid and my mom kidnapped me and since I look so much like my dad kick in the door and raise myself as my own father.

Use my knowledge of the future too make myself incredibly rich and give my younger self all of the advantages and opportunities of life.

Only everybody gets their pocket picked

I have a lot of vivid dreams, ranging from mad-dash musical romps through New York with a choir of choreographed nuns singing a song I’ve never heard before to epic space battles on a ship where in a laser sword battle I kill a knock off Vader that turns out to be my cousin.

My most memorable dreams are these:

1: First repeating dream:

In this dream I am standing naked on a platform hanging in infinite darkness. Leading away from that platform is a single silvery wire. I know I am supposed to tightrope walk across this to get away.

In the background, beyond vision, dozens of shadowy judges watch my every move.

I take my first step onto the wire. I take my second, and miss, and thanks to my failure I fall into the infinite darkness.

I hit the ground and in real life my body convulses, waking me from the dream.

2: 9/11 dream

This was a one-shot. On 9/11 my brother had his alarm clock set to the news. That morning I dreamed that cat aliens had crashed their flying saucer into the twin towers. I was there for some reason and the aliens asked me to help them get back before the various three-letter agencies catches them, which I agree.

To help us get there faster, I am given rocket skates and we zip through the streets of New York, (Always uphill for some reason, but the sparks and flames from the skates made it look really cool) as we attempt to get them back to the ship.

I woke up before the dream ended.

3: My most repeating dream:

I have a dream town. It’s a rural town, with acres between each of the buildings. It’s always morning in the late-spring here, beautiful countryside town with white buildings and smiling people, green, rolling hills and wooden fences.

I am in an old style 1950’s Chevy (with all the curves and wooden slats on the bed) light blue pickup truck driving sedately through the town, waving at my friends and associates who always smile and wave back.

Sometimes I see new buildings I’ve never seen before, or meet someone I’ve never met before, sometimes I am asked to fix things or to deliver vegetables for one of the farms, but everything is calm and beautiful and joyous in a way that doesn’t seem to exist in the real world. I’m always both happy and sad when I wake from these dreams.

4: Scary repeating dream:

This dream takes place in an area that seems like my dream town above, but it’s always trapped within the lawn of this scary house, which is my house, and it has many rooms and floors. It looks like a church from the outside, but not well maintained with chipping white paint and enough slightly rotted wood that anyone who lived there would say, “It’s time for me to replace these boards and re-paint this place”.

The house seems to be about two or three stories but it has a steeple, almost as if there is a full church build on top of a 1940s military town “four walls and a roof” style home.

I go into the house and the first and second floors are normal, but when you are on the stairs, there is a floor that can’t be reached up a long empty vertical chute, and that floor gives off bad vibes. Halfway up is a door with no stairs attached to it.

This door is always closed, and even if you shine a flashlight on it it stays dark.

Every time this house is in my dream, I am curious to explore what is behind the door, so I crawl up or get a ladder and somehow reach the door.

Approaching the door fills me with dread, as if something evil lurks there, and my heart beats harder and harder and I feel more terrified the closer I get to the door, as though something purely evil is watching my every breath with delicious anticipation.

Eventually the terror and pressure is too much for me and I wake up in a cold sweat.

Every time I have that dream it fucks with me for a few days. I don’t get scared at scary movies or startle easily, but that dream gets to me every time.

So yeah, sorry for the dump, I just have a lot of strong dreams that I remember.

They say scientists are saying this but is it like all scientists, the majority of scientists, a significant or intelligent minority of scientists, or is it just like this one person and because it’s an alarm worthy headline it’s being amplified?

I mean unless you’re sitting on an exabyte of spare storage you don’t know what to do with it’s a pretty hefty undertaking.

I feel like being spied on on the Internet is kind of like having a camera in your bathroom.

Sure they promise they’re only going to point it at the sink and just make sure that you’re engaging in proper toothbrushing habits.

Sure.

But they’ll set it at the point where the mirror shows the shower and the toilet and they’ve got smell detectors in there to determine how much food you’ve eaten and how well your digesting it and there’s a sensor in the toilet to check the content of your urine and then if you drink too much they’re going to tell your boss that you’ve been drinking because they detected the alcohol that your body flushed out in your urine when you peed.

And you have no control over who gets to see what’s going on in your bathroom.

It is morally wrong and psychologically oppressing to be spied upon.

And the powers that be are so focused on the benefits it gives them that they do not care about the negatives that affect us.

I’ve had the whole life flashing before your eyes thing.

The night I lost my virginity. Got high with this girl and watched a movie that was terrible and then we ended up hooking up and I’d put so much expectation into what sex was going to be like that when it actually came to it it just wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Couldn’t cum. So after doing everything I could possibly think of to do for about an hour I gave up and really shittily faked my orgasm and then I took the girl home.

Got back home and I blue balled myself so I took care of it and right after I came I had an epiphany. Being a kid and hyper sexualized I had messed around with my brother and sister, never going so far is actually having penetrative sex or anything but yeah. All of that shit flashed before my eyes and it hit me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue.

The stress was so much that every single bone in my rib cage right down my sternum cracked. It sounded like a gunshot had gone off. And it set my heart on fire with pain and misery and shame and guilt and an absolute detestation of my very existence that I that that I just I can’t express it it’s the only thing I understand in this universe to be “ineffable” is what I felt at that moment.

And I don’t know if it was a blessing or a curse.

I spoke to my siblings after I had recuperated some and apologized for my wrongdoing in our childhood and for the most part we worked all of that out but God damn. Like, I was not mentally prepared to get drop kicked in the soul on the same night that I lost my virginity.

There were other things going on at that time too. I had been writing poetry and sometimes when I would write poetry I would feel like this flash of fiery warmth and it’s like I would automatically know what the poem is going to be and it would flow out of me in this beautiful golden Rush.

I had books and books and books of poems I had written like this.

And I was attempting to write a poem when all of this happened and instead almost like I was possessed like it was automatic writing I wrote out all of my sins on several sheets of paper. My heart burned like someone had dropped an ember of burning hot coal on it as all of my sins were ripped out of me against my will.

It left me so shook that in all of the years since then I have only been able to kind of sort of cry a single time.

It felt like being abandoned by God, or rather it felt like suddenly getting caught by him and immediately thrown into hell for 5 minutes, only to be dragged back out with the fires still licking my skin from the inside and then being left to think about what I had done.

I’m talking about the bad side of it but there was a good side too because it opened my eyes to how I was living and what I was doing and even though I’m still horribly imperfect and terrified of being imperfect but helpless to not be imperfect, I am not as bad as I was I think.

And there were other times too where that same golden warmth would come up to me in the middle of a conversation and I would be talking to someone and all of a sudden I would know exactly what to say and in those moments where this would happen it’s like pleasure and joy and fire would rise up out of my heart and reach out to the other person and touch them and in those moments I know the words that I have said have made a positive impact on someone else’s life, but they weren’t my words, they were the words of this fire and spirit inside of me.

All these years later that fire still burns. It never stops. It cannot be forgotten for me. And no matter how many times I explain it, people just generally do not believe that this actually happened to me. They think that it is a mental break or a bit of psychosis or some self delusion that I have put myself under to deal with the trauma of the incest and unfettered sexual promiscuity of my childhood.

And sometimes I’m afraid that that event was my soul leaving my body. And sometimes I’m afraid that it was the sudden inrush of the inhabitation of God that I had been searching for.

And as far as I know no one else has ever felt the way I feel. I can’t find any literature on it. The closest I can relate to are those Christian iconographies of a heart with a crown on it and barbed wire and fire.

But you would think that if that was the inhabitation of God that the inclination to sin would have been driven away from me and yet I still sin just like everybody else.

So I don’t know. I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone else. Just wish I could meet someone who had been through that and knew what it was and could guide me.