There’s some reckless recommendations to try psychedelics in here; be cautious with things classified under that name, because there are some VERY nasty chemicals getting pumped out by mafia chemists (some of whom work for large pharma corporations) and pushed under the name of relatively benign substances.

So first off, be sure you know what chemical is actually in the specific pill/blotter/tab you are considering eating.

Second, once you know what you’re dealing with, understand the cautions and protocols involved in using that particular one. I won’t start rattling them off, the information is out there.

That being said, a gram of mushrooms is safe for nearly everyone of normal adult physiology, and it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re looking at and gagging on mushrooms.

I was severely depressed at one point a couple decades ago and a chocolate containing a couple grams of mushrooms at a Folk Festival pulled me out of it for a good while and filled my head with thoughts of what was possible rather than what was not.

If you don’t smoke weed, try smoking some weed, if it’s safe to do where you are. It’s more of a momentary thing and if you don’t like it, most folks can handle waiting it out. This video is perfect for that situation, IMO. It can definitely be a heavy thing if you go too far too soon, but you’ll come back fine with a story to tell, or to never tell.

The more general proposition, which is that these chemicals can kinda shake you loose mentally, is true, but whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on who you are, how in control and confident you feel about life and the world, your immediate environment when you are on them (many end up taking these drugs at noisy parties full of drunkards, which are not the best places to be tripping balls), and many other factors.

For instance, your talk of the adult mask vs the child you cannot find might be exactly what’s happening, or it might be words you’ve put on some other mental block or bit of cognitive dissonance which you do not yourself understand yet. If that were the case, it would be quite possible for a dose of psychedelics to cause your mind to completely drop the veil of delusion, and cause you to look at that reality in the flash of a moment, with no time to mentally prepare for it, and that can be a terrifying experience for some, when reality intrudes on something that they didn’t realize was foundational to their understand of the world, and vulnerable in that way.

The long term effects of such an experience can likewise be very good, very bad, or completely neutral. We all have these masses of jelly inside our skulls and actually we are those masses of jelly.

Freudian leak?

Crimewave. Many have not heard of it. It’s problematic in parts.

Writers: Coen Brothers. Director: Sam Raimi.

Yep.

Good thing they got rid of all those pesky regulations or the poors would be using the power.

I wish I could watch the exploding heads at the NRA right now…

As Hedberg said, say what you will about Hitler, he did kill Hitler.

Dude, from a much more privileged place, please, enjoy your movies and bring yourself all the happy moments you can get.

The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.

51, I can drive a semi, but before I took some training for that I learned on a standard from my grandma.

People can help you, but there is a way to ask, and learning how to ask is part of learning the OS. We are fascinated by problems actually.

The problem is that people come and say things like “I tried to setup a fleegbat server and it doesn’t work!” and so for the helper it becomes a process of pulling the information out of the asker in a long and painful process of interaction and we just move on. Users who say things like “here is the error message I’m getting when I try to start up my fleegbo server, anyone understand this?” get way better help.

Those who really want to learn it come to understand these things, those who just want to do something neat and not work their ass off will complain that it’s too hard.

Those who do the work are rewarded in many ways. I drove a dump truck ten years ago, now I make twice what I used to, working with people who aren’t racist sacks of shit. They were my motivator to learn, I was tired of being among pigs every day.

I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>

This is reach Kim levels.

I suppose I do complain when I have to use Windows lol

I hear you, and I have nothing against good graphical tools, for the record. Sometimes it is the quickest way when you’re already working in a gui context, which let’s face it, is most of the time, unless you run servers.

Which is the one case where I would double down on pushing you towards the terminal: Are you learning about Linux for the sheer joy of it and to be on the future-facing edge of things, OR are you hoping to improve your career situation? Brief self-bio: I am a lifelong geek, but in 2014 I was a trucker with a CCNA and a lot of aches. In 2015 I became a sysadmin for an animation studio based on that and my knowing Linux, but I didn’t do linux servers, I did FreeBSD servers, which at the terminal level is similar enough that I could handle it, because I focused on console skills when teaching myself more than getting my gui right. But I was intentionally seeking to make more money and stop torturing my body every day while surrounded by fucking klansmen. If you’re thinking about job at all, then I double down on the “stick to the console and get better at it,” because that will make you the wizard at your eventual job, surrounded by people enslaved to the gui. (puffs on a bit of the finest Southfarthing, which he frequently wafted an odor of at his coworkers after coffee break. People do not meddle in the affairs of effective wizards.)

That being said, you’re actually touching on the main reason we don’t have wider adoption (not wide, that is questionable if it will ever happen, but we’ll see how thoroughly capitalism implodes over the next few years, who knows) - in a nutshell, there seems to be very little active intention, and quite a lot of active resistance, to the idea of a Linux Desktop that “just works” for your grandma, as they say. I guess Red Hat was trying to be the Linux version of a Windows Server, but pretty soon they’re not gonna be much of anything if you ask me… anyways, I consider myself a native these days and let me say, Linux geeks are a bunch of fucking ASSHOLES. I try to be one of the ones who isn’t, but even I succumb to the urge to snark at lazy thinkers sometimes, which is not what is happening here and now for the record, I’m having a pretty good week and I’m hoping this all helps in some way. But I want to acknowledge the toxicity of this culture.

One might argue that Plasma or Gnome or Mint or whatever does a great job of crafting a smooth and easy UX. And that is true - I quite like the Gnome vibe overall. But let’s face it, Gnome’s bundled gui tools are indeed mostly second rate, and the devs have a bottomless well of cultural support for responding to complaints like yours with “learn the terminal then noob lol”. You also, of course, have the option to install the text editor or file manager of your choice, but then you run the risk of needing a whole bunch of extra dependencies and there goes your responsive desktop.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this culture changing until the general culture in tech changes, and that won’t change until the general culture of our economic priorities changes. Let’s see how far this implosion goes. It’s a very slow moving one.

Becoming a developer was a bit like walking into some pastoral fantasyland where everyone is extremely nice and endlessly seek to support and help you as you learn to milk the cows and such. I have experienced the extremes of workplace culture now and I never want to leave this role. If you are dissatisfied with what you do and are willing to work your ass off for a few years becoming good at things that not many people have worked their ass off to become good at, you can definitely make your life better, and I don’t just mean by having more money. I would do this job for my old trucker wage rather than leave the job. Don’t tell my boss.

I kinda said that too actually, just maybe in a little more of a supportive, you-got-this way. You came to Linux because you wanted something different, and while the Linux desktop does continue to improve overall, what you did is always where the action will be for operations like the one you did.

It’s not that it’s the easiest way, full stop - it’s the easiest way to do very complex and powerful operations on the fly, very quickly. If you lean into it for a while it does actually get easy, even.

What I find befuddling about this is, you figured out what you needed to do, ie, you had a victory and discovered something new, and you find that somehow bad. You just did some practical console magic. By design, GNU/Linux can do a whole lot more with just the console and piping. Dive in.

There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.

Oh dear, you have creeped my history and identified that I am neurodivergent, and therefore have identified the pretext to reject my thesis without bothering to really engage with its implications. Well played, you sure got that sucker.

I am afraid you are off base though, I have put bipolar in front of my various practitioners many times, and they tell me that while they do see things that resemble a cycle in the things I say to them, the problem seems to be that neither my manic phases nor my depressed phases (last one was about ten years ago and lasted twenty years or so) were sufficiently destructive to my functioning to be diagnosable.

That said, I am halfway through clearing a ~300m forest path on my property today, and intend to have a fence up a week from now, so who knows, maybe you and I are both correct and the doctors are wrong.