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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’m personally all for it. I’ve never used tiktok before and never plan to, but I can see the negative impact it has on my peers. I can’t hang out with my friends without it turning into them just showing their favorite clips to each other. It’s just bad for people and relies of maxing out the happy brain chemical thing to keep people there. It’s like penny slots at the casino. There’s also the data harvesting for the Chinese government through tencent (who is also very heavily involved with epic games and reddit to name a couple others). If I’m remembering right, when the “head” of tiktok was testifying before Congress, he outright said he’s doing nothing different from Facebook or Twitter, and he’s right.



  • In highschool, back in 2007, I got my first taste of Linux in my highschool electronics class. The class was mostly focused on electrical engineering, however we had a computer in the room for research and for whatever reason, my teacher was a hardcore Linux guy. We talked about it for hours and eventually, I ordered a CD from Ubuntu by mail and installed it on my home PC, a computer that originally ran Windows ME. I’ve primarily used Windows since I do a fair bit of gaming, but I’ve always maintained a linux partition of some kind. On my laptop, I’m currently testing out the latest Ubuntu release, but before that, I was running Linux Mint DE in the Mate flavor with BSPWM as the window manager. On my main PC, I have a Windows 10 partition, and a Garuda Linux partition. Garuda is running Mate with BSPWM as well. The funny thing is, I’m not really a tech guy. I just like it and use it mostly just as a consumer. I can work my way around and fix most things when they break, but I’m more likely to just nuke my installation and spin up a new one when things get really bad. I’m planning a full PC upgrade soon and plan to go AMD instead of Nvidia so I can enjoy Wayland. The latest Gnome release feels really good and matches my rose tinted memories of Unity from way back when. Hoping to run that, but may still mess with a tiling window manager set up as well.



  • It’s definitely a very well made desktop environment. It’s what I started with back in 06-08 when I started using Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a pretty well built mate flavor, as does Linux mint. The Ubuntu mate flavor is a great one to see what’s functionally possible with mate. There’s a bunch of preconfigured set ups matching various other operating systems and some unique configurations. On my main PC, I’m running garuda xfce, but with bspwm as the window manager. For my laptop, I’m running pretty much the same set up, but with Linux mint Debian edition in xfce/bspwm as well. Your set up is still rad though, I really dig it!



  • It’ll take some time, but the more you do it, the more comfortable it gets. At first it’s going to feel kind of cringey. That feeling fades with time. Just gotta keep in mind that you’re writing for you, not for anyone else. Also jrnl is available through the aur and GitHub. I don’t currently run anything other than garuda so I can’t speak for how available it is on Debian/fedora/etc


  • I hope it works out for you! If you’re Linux based, I recommend jrnl. It’s a lightweight terminal tool that handles logging and accessing your journal entries and has an encryption option built in. Through the config, you can use whatever text editor you want. I’m using vim because I hate myself!

    As for the experience, it really takes some time to get used to. When I first started, I found myself “faking it” for lack of a better word. I wasn’t actually writing what I was feeling, I was writing what I’d want someone else to read if they found it. After a while, that became less of the norm and I started treating it like a pen pal that I never heard back from. It lets me kind of put things into perspective and really dig into why I think I’m feeling what I’m feeling. Writing that you’re mad won’t make you not mad. Writing what made you mad, why you think it bothers you, etc. Won’t really make you not mad. The latter helps you understand what’s going on better and then you can work on regulating yourself from there


  • I do. Not as often as I’d like sometimes. I treat it like I’m writing a letter to someone who doesn’t exist. It helps me vent whatever I’ve been struggling with, or take some pride in the things that have gone right for me. I feel weird talking about stuff like that with friends and family, so this gives me an empty void to talk into without worry of judgement. I started doing it a while ago after going through some therapy and it’s been the one thing that’s actually helped post-therapy. My journal lives in a Linux partition on my main PC through an encrypted file that has a different password than any I use elsewhere. No one that has access to that computer can navigate how I have Linux set up, nor would they know how to go through the terminal to decrypt the file. These protections are in place to ensure that no one sees anything they shouldn’t. If you do journal, I recommend taking similar precautions, but I’m also not mentally well and paranoid to boot, so grain of salt and all that