I was a severe insomniac at the time, and this event lead to a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder. It happened a few times, but this was the worst. Got on meds and have been fine since. Enough prefacing.

I was at, for lack of a more specialized term, my cousins house. The oldest one of them was right around my age, but she was out of town for a competition, so I crashed in her room. At some point in the night, I’m full on hallucinating after not sleeping much in a while.

Dark, cloaked figures, in the corner of the room, chanting in some language I didn’t recognize. I don’t mean I didn’t understand it, it sounded difficult to pronounce with a human mouth. This went on until the sun rose. I’d check the corners, and nothing, get back in bed and there they go again.

For people wondering, yes, manic episodes along with their common presentations, can also present as hallucinations. It took 20 years, from a diagnosis and depression as a child, to bipolar diagnosis, to fine tuning meds, to stable.

I’m dealing with a person resistant to any kind of therapy right now and I just want to scream at them that if their docs aren’t helping, try a different one, don’t give up. 20 fucking years. Over half my life struggling for a solution. It takes time and work, both.

If you need mental health assistance, or even if you’ve just had a really tough patch, find the appropriate professional for you. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy, it just means you’re struggling. They help with tools to help stop struggling. Sometimes yeah, its pills. Other times its adapting your behavior and expectations to produce better more satisfying results.

Don’t know much about my current neighbors and don’t want.

The people we used to live next door to were great. L came over as me and my BIL were handing out candy, and any adults got a shot if they wanted.

After the kids went to bed L came over to our place and we got ridiculously drunk. L passed out in the kitchen and we let him sleep some of it off before helping him back next-door when we met M, his wife.

Probably my favorite story is when M texted L and said she thought there was a snake in the backyard, and being drunk we went to investigate immediately. Not the expected reaction, so when I knocked on the back door (it was late-ish) I’m greeted with a double barrel shotgun. M apologizes and says its not loaded, at which point I drunkenly admonished her that if she’s gonna point a gun at someone unknown, it should be loaded in case she really needed it.

We got to be really great friends with that family, and then they moved for work. Still miss them years later.

Requiem for a Dream - Especially now, later in life when I see addiction in so many people in my personal life.

It is a powerful movie on the various ways addiction can take hold of your life, even with doctor prescribed medication.

That being said, unless you’re into the final scene with Jennifer Connoley, it’s not something you’d necessarily want to watch again.

Side note, if you did enjoy it and want a look into mental health issues in a similar lense, among other things, Pi is a great movie by the same guy.

Proprietary formats are certainly an issue outside of Canada.

Most of the reason corporations/governments stick with popular proprietary formats is actually money.

Developing/investigating an open format is expensive. and then there is the problem of people who have only lived in a digital walled garden.

If you have to train all of your new employees on how to use it the cost rises exponentially.

Then you have your IT support folks who probably just got it dumped in their lap at the last second, and have no knowledge of it themselves, because training wasn’t an option due to time or money.

As a person who handled (solo help desk for that shift) the change over of a health networks electronic medical records systems, I receive no training and was told that they had consultants on hand to transfer them to - yeah well in 4 hours over 2000 calls came in. And of course I got yelled at by a dick hole boss (if your adult children won’t speak to you, and you’ve never met your grandchildren, you are the problem) about people who didn’t want to wait in line for one person to answer the phone and dropped the call.

That boss was ultimately the reason I left that company in favor of a previous employer who offered a lot less problems. Stayed there until the pandemic (hospitality IT) and its been a shit show ever since.

I wore vans up until my mid late 30s, but even with a desk job my feet killed after a day.

So now I have running shoes with more support and its helped. I also have a pair of combat boots, but they’re more difficult to get on when I’m half asleep and trying to get to work.

So yeah, you might just have enough youth left to get by with vans lol.

In my case, and this the US, I had friends who smoked.

I was curious, bummed one, and once I got past the coughing I really enjoyed the effects, that said by the time you no longer get the “high” (for lack of a better word) you’re addicted.

Fast forward 20 years and I’m still trying to quit.

Quit for 5 years cold turkey, but… Shit went down in almost every facet of my life, and I went back.

But I’m down to about a pack a week.

One in the morning, one on the road to work, and one or two during my shift if time allows.

Just need to kick it for good.

Edit: To correct typos

Kali was built out as a penetration testing distro, though it does contain some diagnostic tools.

Not a bad place to start if you’re used to Debian, but it is a rolling release so it may break unexpectedly, or have new bugs introduced with each update.

A persistent USB with just Debian could have all the same tools installed but have a longer support scope on releases so you don’t have to update daily (bleeding edge) which is nice to reduce read/writes to the flash drive it’s on.

That being said, I keep a Kali live image (persistent) but thats becauae its home - my first introduction to Linux was 5 minutes with Red Hat, but aside from a brief intro in highschool, I really started with Linux in Backtrack, offensive security’s predecessor to Kali.

Yes, I have to learn things the hard way lol.

Maybe they mean they will dual boot between windows and a hypervisor? I’ve never considered if that’s a possibility.

Sounds similar to a job I had at an old folks home.

Throw wage theft and other DoL labor violations in.

I was happy to hear to hear when the state shut them down.

Just wish I had been older and less naive, I should have documented and reported myself, but I was a dumb kid.