Oh man, a friend and I were the AV crew for a while in high school in the late 90s. Basically we’d deliver these TV & VCR wheeled stands to the teachers needing them in the morning. If there wasn’t any need, we got to hang out in the equipment room instead of home room.

We got to use the elevators and even wield “the key ring” from time to time.

A wise man once said, If you choose not to decide, You still have made a choice

also privileged people who think that a Trump presidency won’t affect them

I’m a privileged person who probably won’t be directly affected by another Trump presidency. Probably. Hopefully.

But anybody who genuinely holds that opinion, and doesn’t care what happens to everybody else, may as well just be a full-on trumper.

Trump still got 72 million votes and counting this time. That’s with another four years of Trump scandals, revelations, criminal charges, insurrections, mental declines, and on-video insane statements.

The people who stayed home, or the politicians who failed to motivate them, sure they carry some blame. They could have helped. But they are not the base. The ones who followed Trump from being the outsider who is fun because he’s an asshole/racist like them, to the corrupt traitorous dictator-to-be who they’d like to watch hurt people. Blame them much more.

The steady level of Trump support unfortunately supports the fear that our culture is just garbage. We’re surrounded by it. There are plenty of proud assholes, sure. But so many people will legitimately be pleasant to everybody they meet and seem to function in society, but either believe horrible things or have a thick shell of indoctrination and ignorance around their brain.

Oh trust me, the watching with a mixture of fascination and horror is coming from inside the states too.

I wish you good luck as well. I hear the US is known to fuck around with other countries occasionally. (And that’s not supposed to sound threatening - it’s just a recognition that we fuck with other countries even during “good” administrations, never mind when we have a dictator-loving wannabe in the office)

Sounds like a you issue if you had trouble with Mint. Right click the desktop -> display settings and oh look, 4 monitors to easily configure. Sounds kind of silly without more information doesn’t it?

My hardware at work is all Dell stuff so good chance it’s their fault. But it still doesn’t affect the Linux side.

In windows I can only use 3 monitors. If I open up the laptop to introduce a 4th screen in windows, a pair of my monitors will Be duplicating the dang image.

In Mint I tried the same and it just worked, 4 individual monitors without issue.

My work laptop was your standard Dell with windows and M365. I am now able to dual boot Linux, which is what my computer boots into by default now.

I can honestly say that in the current day, Linux Mint gives a much smoother experience on the same hardware. It even supports multiple monitors better.

I will grant that I’m a computer nerd like plenty of others here, so there may be some speed bumps that didn’t even register for me. But everything from installation, to daily use, to updates, is SO much smoother and faster.

Definitely. And even doing the maintenance chores for pond upkeep is a meditative exercise most of the time. Things like cleaning filters. Obviously feeding the fish is an everyday positive. I keep the food container under my big chair out there.

I’m also in a similar situation where I have been in the same place for a long time, and I expect it to stay that way. It’s ideally located and we’ve made it our nice place to be, pond included.

This is an excellent one, and one that works great for my level of neuroflavor too.

In my case, in have a big sturdy chair in my back yard next to a pond I built. Having external stimuli to focus on really helps calm the mind and be aware in the moment.

That seems like it would only be a concern for people that need the new thing all the time, which is an expansive proposition when it comes to cars.

As long as the batteries and drivetrain hold up, the people looking to spend 10-20k on their commuter rather than 40-70k will accept things that are out of date.

I’m not sure there’s a good way to know without trying. I never even tried a short beard because it never looked right until I got past the “long enough to look good” threshold.

But that doesn’t mean never trimming a single hair, or anything extreme like that. I don’t like mine to grow out to the sides, so I’ve kept the sides trimmed.

I kept my face shaved until my 40s because my facial hair always seemed sparse and thin.

But then a few years ago I just let it go for a while, and now I have this big thick beard that is never going anywhere. Wavy hair plus length suddenly looks full!

Unfortunately many of us have been taught that being a good person and a good citizen equals being productive and accumulating resources. Things that are quantifiable and external to the actual person and their relationships.

Being productive and accumulating some resources can be good activities to spend time on, but they are practical necessities and not defining characteristics of existence.

W A LD O

Awesome to hear! It’s easier said than done (like always) because I think sometimes we don’t even realize when we’re doing it.

In the first year of COVID my position got eliminated at the company I’d worked at for 16 years. I’d had different positions within the company, but that place was basically my entire career until then.

That shock to the system, coupled with the fact that several months later I realized I was the same person with the same loved ones, finally flipped some switch in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there. Then the next job I got was fucking horrible and served to weld that switch in its new position, lol.

So now I have a good job with good coworkers, and I appreciate that fact every day, but that’s not going to erode the healthy boundaries and mental compartmentalization.

MacOS is literally certified UNIX though.

I’m not a Mac user at all, and I’m lucky enough to be able to run Linux full time at work, but it seems like macs should be alright in many cases.

What has been working for me is not trying to make software my life or my identity. I don’t get home from work just to work on my side project, or my app, or my Arch install, or even watch videos about coding and shit. I hang out at my pond, play with my pets, play with my son, chill with my wife, work on the yard, or just watch/play something that catches my interest.

It’s like we all have a unique user’s manual for our unique bodies and minds, but we don’t get a copy of it and have to do some reverse engineering to figure out what works. Then you have to have the compassion and empathy for yourself to do the things that increase your happiness instead of doing the things that you’re “supposed” to do.

An interesting data point in this discussion is to look at the list of countries in order of population density and see just how far down the list the US is.

We have a lot of people, some big cities, some major institutions, and a huge economy, but we also have a LOT of space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density

lol yeah, what’s next? Are benevolent pixies going to distribute it throughout the forest too?