Once I get Talarico’s face tattooed on my chest and fly a “Talafreako” flag on the back of my truck every day and wear a “Time To Start Flipping Tables” hat to every Thanksgiving with my family for the next ten years then maybe we can have a cautionary conversation about idolizing politicians.

I don’t have an end goal.

At my current stage of life I’m trying to have a closer relationship with my nieces and nephews who are entering early adulthood.

My early 20s were probably the hardest period of time in my life, and older adults were particularly critical of me when I looked for guidance. So now I’m trying to be a better listener when they’re struggling.

You should be open to the possibility that your habits are normal.

I don’t know specifics. I don’t really want to know specifics. But as long as you’re not doing it in inappropriate settings, harming yourself, or harming your sex life with a partner/making it so you prefer masturbation to sex then you should be open to the possibility that you’re a young man, and young men masturbate a lot.

Similarly you need to be open to the possibility that your ideas about masturbation are being influenced by people with ulterior motives. There are ties between far-right movements, manosphere content, and masturbation abstinence. Before you come to the conclusion that you are actually experiencing a problem, I think it’s really important that you have considered these angles and how those are influencing your goals.

If all that has been considered and you’re about to start masturbating on the train or something:

Start with small benchmarks, and be clinical about it. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t make it, just adjust the goal. Start with a day if you have to, “On Tuesday I won’t masturbate” - done. If you fail try again in a couple of days (while being kind to yourself about it, or at least neutral). As you do that you can expand that time to more of what you’re hoping for as a healthy baseline (again, keep in mind that masturbation abstinence communities are not a good source for this). Slowly expand from one day of abstinence a month to once a week, etc. Don’t tie it to gimmicks like NNN or go straight for a week or something, that’s never a sustainable way to keep something under control. It just makes you crave it and can lead to binges when the time is up.

The goal is to prove to yourself you can control it. If you are actually addicted then this is closer to an addiction like food than something like heroin. It needs a healthy, reasonably sized spot in your life. Not for you to try and quit entirely.

I was supposed to wash windows on a skyscraper but there was something wrong with the lift thing so I couldn’t do it until it was fixed, and I was really pissed because it meant I was going to be really behind schedule.

For reference, I have never cleaned windows for a living.

Not to be a doomer, but I think enshittification is basically a social form of entropy. It’s inevitable.

One avenue is preventing Lemmy from being commercialized. So far so good, the decentralized structure makes that difficult. But then what keeps it afloat? Does it have to run on the passion of its users? What happens when one of the users does something really bad and there’s calls from powerful people to block Lemmy? Or require an ID to view it. Can a non commercialized Lemmy stand up to that sort of pressure?

Or maybe something less official. Coordinated bad actors show up and errode the site from within, overwhelming the mods who aren’t used to cleaning up so much garbage. Can it muster a unified response as a decentralized platform? If one instance gets ruined can you just create a new instance and move on to the next? Or does that kill the traffic a little each time you split off until nobody’s there anymore?

Or maybe it happens on its own. Mods become too lax in some places, too strict in others. The site decays into a weird space for toxic, chronically online users and nobody really wants to hang out there any more. It becomes a place you go if you want your intelligence insulted for asking a Linux question.

I think eventually something will get it. I’m hoping some of the measures against things like commercialization, trolls, poor moderation or a general degradation of the user experience will be enough to give it a good long life at least.

Went with The Void. It was pretty fun! Good Halloween movie

I recently moved from a house to an apartment and I don’t expect trick-or-treaters this year, which is a bit of a bummer. I liked giving out candy.

I’ll probably watch a horror movie though. Haven’t decided which one, either rewatching The Thing or maybe something new.

I don’t remember any such reverence for Obama either.

Which TNG episode are y’all watching tonight? I was kind of thinking The Inner Light.

I’m not a big fan of Ethan but he’s the only one who knows how key aspects of our network architecture works and he does get back to his desk faster if you salt him.

I love how low effort this comment is lol

I’d need to completely own it. I don’t want my extended memory storage to now also include product placement in my childhood memories or the cops can make my bionic legs stop working or whatever.

However, in the hypothetical situation where I completely own my augmentations, 100% I’m getting enhancements. In fact I would question the efficiency of giving me implants, it might just be easier to copy my brain into a completely robotic body.