The Internet is populated by people who think English grammar is cosmic law, so it doesn’t surprise me that they think you should bend over for dogshit urban planning.

Ironically, none of them follow the rule of shutting up if they don’t know shit about shit.

Green spaces: Just for viewing.

What kind of dystopian hellscape do you want the world to be, exactly?

*devil ray pizza

Ignoring the world definitely makes you good global citizens and not problems to work around. Good job. Way to go.

NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.

Would you be surprised to learn that business is actually a network of cargo cults, where the thing they’re trying to superficially mimic is other businesses that don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing?

I work for an online edtech company that saw massive organic growth during lockdowns, and has been chasing that dragon since lockdowns were lifted. They spent millions expanding their workforce at the time, while they severely pared down their school outreach team. They made multiple moves that only made sense if you assume lockdowns would last forever.

I raised this with management a couple of times, and their only response was “everyone else was doing it, too”.

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”

“No, not like that…”

Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.

At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.

Ok, but hear me out. Have you seen most Python code?

No, they’re advocating for sensible defaults. Just because you’re an enthusiast doesn’t you’re the market. Being supported is great, but believing you deserve to be sppecially catered to at the expense of the maajority is real smug bullshit.

My ex is surrounded by support, from the same people who I thought were my best friends.

This is the reason why. Your ex has managed to control the narrative and has manipulated the social atmosphere to ice you out. Emotional abusers are often very good at this. They mamipulate everyone around them.

And they are really good at choosing their abuse victims. They know who they can love bomb, who they can isolate, and who will keep their mouth shut.

I have been there. Watched people I thought were friends just evaporate, choosing their relationship with my ex over me. Realizing they were never my friends, they were “ours”, and ij the end they stuck by her, the more openly social and boistrous one.

It’s taken a long time, and many different therapists, but I’ve come to accept my experiences as abuse, as not my fault, and… sometimes… that I am worthy of love, friendship, and happiness.

I have found the books The Body Keeps the Score and Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (available as audio books), as well as videos on toxic shame and attachment by Heidi Prieb, very helpful.

I know the words feel hollow, because they feel so far the opposite of true, but you are not alone. Many others have been through what you’ve endured, and have made it out the other side. There are people out there who will, one day, be so very glad to have you in their lives.

Some day, when you’re ready – and much earlier than I did, I implore you – you should join some activity groups. Take up a recreational sport, join a gaming group, take group acting lessons, join a choir… anything that is a) casual and b) a group activity. Bonus points if it’s something you always enjoyed, buy your ex tried to excise from your life. This will help you rebuild your social network, and let you reconnect with yourself.

Physical activity and a healthy diet is also important here. It may be the last thing you want to do, but it actively helps fight all of your worst psychic injuries. Not only is it physiologically good for you, it’s psychologicallly good for you. You know that it’s good for you; your brain knows it. Doing healthy things means choosing to care about yourself. You need to actively choose yourself at every step of the way. It trains your mind to see yourself as worthy of care.

Oh, and ritually burn things that were hers, or that were shared and tied to your relationship. You don’t need them. You don’t need her. You’re going to be better off without her.

“Look, I told you yesterday, I don’t care. Whatever I said the first time we had this discussion, today, on the 937th time, I no longer give a shit.”

JXL is my favourite squadron.

But I am home at 1pm, and they still didn’t actually deliver the package!

The reasons why the wealthy like liberalisation matters, though. The reasom the wralthy want more wealth matters.

Money is power. The wealthy are competing to have the most power. Eventually, that turns to taking control of the state. So, the wealthy will back free trade and deregulation right up until they, personally, are in a position to attempt a coup. After that, regulation and trade barriers work for the particular rich folk who have taken control over the state.

Doom 2 was the peak. 2016 was a strong reimagining of Doom 3, but it was already trying to be something Doom wasn’t.

Yes. It’s french for “boredom”, but the kind of boredom that’s results from life being too easy. It’s like being an over-achieving student in a class where the teacher is focused on the kids who are struggling to catch up.

“It’s chemicals!”

Technically correct, I guess.

As a kid, I could never trust adults who wanted to limit good things.

Guess what? This effect has been found in other experiments!

The marshmallow experiment is one of those that self-help gurus and LinkedIn ‘influencers’ love to peddle as being meaningful, in no small part because it tells people who had lucky upbringings that they are inherently better than others, and not just a product of their environment. But when it’s actually examined critically, it falls apart.

And if people would just recommend or advertise instances, and try to grow instances rather than the network directly, there’d be no problem. But every Fedi platform falls into this ptoblem of hiding the host and championing the platform itself, rather than powering independent social websites.

It’s so frustrating and sad.