Big nerd. Big fan of cool open source stuff. Generally queer. (He/him)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Borderlands. Couch co-op with my brother was pretty much what videogames was to me as a kid, and borderlands was always our favorite. I can’t wait to have a platform I can play borderlands 3 and the tiny Tina game on with him over the Christmases when hes back in town (I know they’re not quite as good, thats perfectly okay)

    These days, hollow knight is also genuinely very special to me. I don’t think there’s any game I hold in the same kind of place of reverence






  • Every time I’m struggling to deal with greif, or someone in my life is, I always come back to this post from many years ago on reddit by a user called gsnow (it was in reply to a redditors friend dying, they were asking how they could cope with the pain of that loss):

    Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents.

    I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

    As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

    In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

    Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

    Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

    (Back to being written by me) aside from making sure you’re using healthy methods to cope (DBT has some really helpful coping skills in its “distress tollerance” section that I’ve used more times than I can count. DBT is a particular school of psychotherapy, like CBT), find yourself a therapist so you have some support with the process. I’m sending love from my corner of the world




  • I don’t mind a little bit of simplification, as the previous logo had a lot of little granular details that arent going to be as legible at different scales, but I’m not sure I’m entirely in love with the execution here. I like that they kept the nodes offset as opposed to the previous version for smaller scale applications, but the point where the left node originates from is too close to the base of the house, putting too many corners in close proximity for them to read clearly enough as separate corners and for them to not just merge into a bit of an organic wiggle if you’re not looking close enough.

    I don’t hate it though, and I think overall its a decent improvement in some respects. But I think the old one had more character, and was a bit better executed, even if it didn’t works as well at all scales


  • I agree. I’m not in a position to be vegan myself, but I have a lot of respect for vegan ethics and people who are able to make that sacrifice. But I think it would be a mistake for a government to mandate that you can’t consume animal products. Maybe someday? Not sure how I feel on that subject. But I think its appropriate for there there to be safeguards against unethical research, but I think the choice to consume an animal product or not still needs to be an individual choice.

    That being said, I think cannibalism is a bad example of something unethical happening in the wild. Cannibalism is taboo and considered unethical by humans because it involves killing a person, the eating them part is just weird and seen as desecration of a corpse in our culture. But its not any more unethical for a preying mantis to eat another preying mantis than it would be for it to eat some other bug. Perhaps a better example would be rape among primates or dolphins? since thats likely to create similar distress in the way it takes a way an animals autonomy as it does for humans. The concept of ethics starts getting a lot muddier when removed from the context it was created in- human society. Ultimately ethics is a manmade construct that by and large just describes pro social behavior, which is why I think rape among primates is likely to be a strong example of something unethical amongst animals: they are social enough have a concept of society and a level of expected behavior from their peers around them.

    Regardless, I don’t think using the government to mandate that people can’t consume animal products would be a mistake, as those who are currently too far from understanding your perspective would be radicalized by it and it would stymy cultural progress towards a more intuitive sense of animal welfare. (I understand that may not be an argument you’re making, I’m just kinda expressing my thoughts on the subject since its topical both to your point and the idea someone expressed that maybe eating them should be protected by the government also)


  • Protections seem probably more important for putting them through unusual experiences that may involve suffering than killing them for food, as that’s essentially predation which they experience as a natural part of life

    There’s an argument to be had that we as humans are intelligent enough to choose not to put animals through that which is why lots of folks choose to be vegan, but eating animals is more of a personal ethical choice, whereas funding research conducted on animals kinda needs to be a societal one given it’s funder by other parts of society, and research is generally for the benefit of society; so society needs to be the ones to decide whether the research is ethical. Not sure I articulated quite what I mmea, but hopefully what I’m trying to say makes sense




  • I agree with the other commenter, your question is more likely to be seen by enough people for you to get helpful answers if you post it separately (especially since lemmy is small and the coffee community is a very small subset of that) but thats a great question and I’d be curious to see folks’ recommendations if you do end up making a post about it :)

    I’m not very coffee knowledgeable myself so I don’t know that I could give a helpful answer, but I wish you well with figuring it out!