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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Yup.

    But in the field of work I did, I had multiple advantages.

    First was the high turnover rate. Most nursing facilities and home health companies have trouble keeping staff. So, chances are high that if you apply, you’re getting hired unless you’re absolutely horrible.

    Second, I had experience out the wazoo by the point where I realized the above. Which meant not only did I have a good work history, it was also a history of sticking at a given employer, so I knew I could almost guarantee being hired even if there were applications stacked deep.

    Third, I was visibly strong. Men were much rarer in my area as nurse’s assistants back then, so we tended to get snapped up fast for what is a physically demanding job. Since I’m a big ol’ fella that looks like he can throw people around easily, I could have gotten hired most places even if I had a shitty work record and been an asshole to whoever was doing the hiring.

    Luckily, I’m not that kind of asshole (and was less of one in the ways I am an asshole back then), and I am instead charming as fuck in person. Which was my other advantage. It doesn’t show online, but if someone isn’t biased against sasquatches, they tend to respond well to me.

    So, after the main company I worked for folded due to the administrator embezzling it into the ground, the first interview I had when they asked that I was able to be honest and say “look, this is what I do. I take care of people. I want to get paid for doing it, and word is that you pay the best in the area. Hire me at whatever your pay cap is, and I’ll be your best NA. Might take a few weeks before you believe that, but you will.”

    On screen, that looks cocky and snide. But in person, it got a smile and an immediate hire. At the pay cap, and a promise of full time hours as long as I wanted them. Worked there until my body finally gave out.





  • Tbh, I’m not interested in the show.

    However, IDGAF.

    Hire a good actor, period. Nobody can top Rickman at all, so anyone taking the role on needs to be able to reinterpret it entirely, change the way Snape’s menace and arrogance are shown.

    While there are physical descriptions in the books for all the major characters, the original movies didn’t stick to them perfectly in all cases. And I don’t think they did with Snape fully.

    So why the fuck does it matter if the actor isn’t lily white (heh)? Can he act is the important part if anyone is going to watch it at all. If you’re going to turn a book into a show after it’s already been turned into a wildly popular movie series, you could cast everyone looking exactly like the books, and there’s still going to be complaints from the movie fans.

    So fuck it. Make Dumbledore a trans man, or a trans woman. Make Mcgonagle Cherokee. Make Harry Xhosa, or a Southerner from the U.S. Give Ron blue hair, a septum piercing and dress him in leather. There’s always going to be pissed off existing fans of something that’s as huge as Harry Potter. It isn’t like some niche comic book where a character looking different is going to piss everyone off. The fan base will be split, period.

    Shit, if I was going to watch it at all, an unexpected casting choice would make me more eager, because at least then I’m not going to be watching the movies dragged out over months.



  • I don’t disagree tbh.

    However, in terms of ui/ux it is still the closest comparison that’s not wholly dominated by capital drives. Things like WhatsApp have better ui, but I don’t think anyone remotely interested in things like signal would use those at all if not forced to it.

    Right now, matrix, arcane chat, xmpp, and similar options are better than signal under the hood (supposedly, I don’t have the knowledge base to verify for myself), but the ui is anywhere from outdated to outright horrible.



  • Yeah, it really sucks that the closest feature parity and ui/ux parity in messengers is proprietary services.

    Even signal isn’t there. Mind you, they can’t offer all the same options by virtue of prioritizing encryption as the default, not afaik, with things like the easier syncing of messages.

    I like matrix and it’s various apps fine overall, but they are definitely behind in polish and usability features. They just aren’t great as a primary messaging option. That’s ignoring the difficulty of onboarding people, which is tangential to this, but still relevant since it doesn’t matter how great a messenger is if you can’t use it with anyone. Since the lack of features and ui/ux issues prevent onboarding, it’s a real problem.




  • Most people don’t have the brain power to actually know what’s in their best interest.

    At most, they can handle very simple situations.

    To really make choices in own best interest, your have to think long term, at a broad scale. Unfortunately, we can’t see with certainty beyond maybe a few steps from our present time and place. So we would also have to think out layers of possibility with each decision.

    If you can’t do that quickly, you’re fucked because you’ll always be reacting instead of planning. Since even the smartest people on the planet can still only handle as much planning as a chess game takes, we’re all fucked.

    And yes, I’m including myself as not having the brain power to properly act in my own best interest long term. Being able to see the problem doesn’t mean you’re immune to it.


  • You gotta learn how to surf it as best you can.

    I’m not being flip. Anxiety, depression and all the related issues, they have a certain tidal nature. There’s highs and lows. The key to living with it is to ride the worst waves until things settle back down a little.

    If you ignore it, you get swamped.

    Doesn’t really matter what methods you use to do it. Breathing, meds, exposure therapy, CBT, yoga, whatever. You practice them when things are good, so you can stand on them when things are bad and make it back to shore.

    I gotta warn you though, anxiety that’s induced or worsened by chemicals is a shit ton harder to negotiate. You can’t rely on your normal inner perception of your self. Normally, once you’re used to anxiety, you can learn to recognize when it’s going to spike, and that alone gives you some empowerment. But when it’s external chemicals causing things to worsen, you can’t feel when it’s getting better or worse in the same way unless you also get used to that chemical and how it influences your anxiety. Which, seems like a pretty bad idea to keep using something that’s making anxiety worse.




  • I dunno. I used to be flexible as hell, but was also too damn broad across the shoulders to get everywhere. That was even before I started lifting seriously; lifting just made the area I couldn’t reach bigger.

    Somewhere around 16 I hit a spurt and suddenly couldn’t reach a zone between my shoulder blades. It was maybe hand sized. In my twenties, it was about an inch or two bigger, but I could still do all the stretches fully before lifting, and that included shoulder stretches where I could end up almost flat with my arms behind me.

    Nowadays, I’m just old and stiff, and can’t scrub anything right on my back.