Most of all, lonely. My situation is rough. I’m a trans woman (some passing privilege), almost 40, and staying with center-right family in East Texas because I haven’t been able to work in two years due to mental illness. I have a very difficult time making and keep friends and the family I’m staying with doesn’t understand why I’m upset, doesn’t care, and think I’m overreacting (They are superficially supportive about me being trans, but also voted for this). I was going to therapy for a while, but I had to discontinue it because I couldn’t afford it any more. The only thing keeping me going is that for the last few years I’ve been able to feel more comfortable in my own skin, thanks to HRT.

I really don’t want to go through whatever the Republicans have in store for trans people in red states alone. The thing I am most afraid of is them banning HRT for adults (it’s already banned for kids). I’ve been on e since 2018. If everything were going great for me losing access to my medication would be a horrifying and soul crushing ordeal, I doubt I’ll survive it with how my life is now.

This last week I’ve been almost completely non-functional. I’ve been alternating between uncontrollable sobbing, hours long panic attacks, furious rage, and making half-crazed, poorly thought out Lemmy and Reddit comments.

tl;dr: not great.

It is! Or at least what a previous therapist thought.

Boredom is a lot more dangerous and potentially disastrous than most people realize, but it’s definitely not my only problem. I struggle with some mental health issues that make most things a lot harder for me than many other people.

I was tested as a child and had an iq of 164 at 10 years old. For my entire childhood every adult treated me like I was smarter than them and in most cases I was. I was in gifted and accelerated classes and excelled.

I know I’m not smart because from the headstart in life I got I went on to barely graduate from high school, drop out of community college twice, never hold a job for longer than 18 months, and have more gaps on my resume than experience.

New Zealand I’ve never been and know little about the day to day life of a new zealander, but it looks so beautiful and quiet there.

I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

For some women that would be a turn off for a romantic partner, yes. You don’t have to plan a future with everyone you have sex with. There are plenty of women who want something casual and low attachment and would not be bothered at all by anything you mentioned.

Women are not a monolith. Each one of us is different and have different wants, needs, and desires. Don’t let the bullsh!t about you not being desirable stop you from trying. Rejection sucks, but never trying is much worse.

I’m sorry you feel that way, but it’s not true. All you’re missing is self-confidence and self-worth. It may not feel like it, but you are worthy of love and validation. Love yourself because you are alive and trying.

It’s not easy, especially if you’ve built up a lot of myths about how you’re broken or unlovable. Find the things you like about yourself and go from there. All you have to do is keep trying.

The sensations of sex vary significantly between individuals. I could tell you what my experience of sex is like, but depending on your specific body, it might feel wholly different. The only way you’re going to be able to satisfy that curiosity is to engage in the activity yourself.

Don’t give up on finding out for yourself if it’s important to you. I didn’t have sex with someone else until I was 29 and then spent my early 30’s making up for lost time.

For me, I was my own worst enemy. I believe that I was unlovable and unattractive (and also had some queer identify related complicating factors). I thought that sex and intimacy were transactional and that in order to find someone interested in having sex with me required me to be a person I was not. The error in my thinking was that sex was a goal, rather than a side effect of building meaningful connections with other humans.

Your mileage may vary though.

Protonmail is great, it comes with cloud storage, a really good password manager, and a very fast VPN. The linux experience is mid for their apps, but great on MacOS or Windows.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

They did it on purpose and ended up conning me out of a few hundred bucks I didn’t have to lose.

My spouse became my ex.

Pet supplies for animals you don’t have. Things that don’t exist but sound like things you might find at a grocery store, like pot slippers from the kitchen utensils, vegan mangos, aged vermhölsterdoif cheese, or barkley salt. Rare spices the stores your partner shops at do not sell. I get a kick out of being macabre so long pork, stray child. Ingredients your partner hates. Confusing typos.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

That’s not a retrofit either. With a multi tool those can be removed with a few bolts. The ones on that bench are single mold cast iron. You’d need an angle grinder to remove those, not that any law abiding good citizen would.

So dumb. They could have spent the extra money helping the people they don’t want sleeping on benches not sleep on benches. Most people probably agree, just not in their backyard or with their tax dollars. The amount of work they’re willing to put in not to help someone is absolutely astounding.

The only hard requirements I have for a partner are that they are attracted to me and have reasonable hygiene practices. It’s a bonus if they’re a degenerate kinkster or are willing and able to deal with a half-feral, half-crazy, cat lady for any real length of time. But I also am totally fine with that person bouncing because that’s a lot.

The most important skill for driving is learning to observe your surroundings calmly, but alertly. The things you mentioned as distractions are the things you need to be paying attention to because those are the things you must navigate around.

It’s easy to get worked up about all the things demanding your attention. A lot can go wrong while driving, from road hazards, to accidents, to traffic, to mechanical problems with your vehicle. My advice, take it at your own pace. It’s a speed limit, not a speed requirement. Highways and some types of special roads have minimum speeds, but the worst that happens if you drive slow enough to feel comfortable behind the wheel is some asshole who is in a hurry is grumpy.

It just takes time and practice, just relax and keep your eyes on the road.

There aren’t many ways to organize raising the money required to build a better youtube or reddit. You could kickstart it, but you’d better hope whoever does the dev doesn’t sell. Another option would be a large open source ngo funding the development, but you’re still talking long timelines to completion.

There definitely is room for a more pro-social social media platform that isn’t a clone of something else. Paying for it is another matter.

Yes, but not in the way you mean.

The cybertruck is the most American truck because it was created by a narcissistic, political demagogue and built by underpaid, overworked, non-union workers in grueling conditions. The design is laughable and the functionality exists only in marketing material. The vehicle is manufactured as a single model and “optional” features are toggled on or off if the owner buys the upgrades or displeases Musk.

The cybertruck is the ultimate in performative, conspicuous consumption and reality-blind design. What’s more American than that?