Imagine losing your father in a tragic fashion, only for Hollywood execs to make a marketable facsimile of appearance and voice. If they could store his corpse and make it dance like a marionette they would.

Talk about retraumatizing the poor lady.

I was a severe insomniac at the time, and this event lead to a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder. It happened a few times, but this was the worst. Got on meds and have been fine since. Enough prefacing.

I was at, for lack of a more specialized term, my cousins house. The oldest one of them was right around my age, but she was out of town for a competition, so I crashed in her room. At some point in the night, I’m full on hallucinating after not sleeping much in a while.

Dark, cloaked figures, in the corner of the room, chanting in some language I didn’t recognize. I don’t mean I didn’t understand it, it sounded difficult to pronounce with a human mouth. This went on until the sun rose. I’d check the corners, and nothing, get back in bed and there they go again.

For people wondering, yes, manic episodes along with their common presentations, can also present as hallucinations. It took 20 years, from a diagnosis and depression as a child, to bipolar diagnosis, to fine tuning meds, to stable.

I’m dealing with a person resistant to any kind of therapy right now and I just want to scream at them that if their docs aren’t helping, try a different one, don’t give up. 20 fucking years. Over half my life struggling for a solution. It takes time and work, both.

If you need mental health assistance, or even if you’ve just had a really tough patch, find the appropriate professional for you. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy, it just means you’re struggling. They help with tools to help stop struggling. Sometimes yeah, its pills. Other times its adapting your behavior and expectations to produce better more satisfying results.

As a person who sleeps through alarms and is approaching middle age…

It is a problem.

I wish I had some advice, but I am accepting advice lol.

Sole IT person for a corporation and was on call 24/7/365.

It was just supposed to be a help desk position.

It was for an MSP that… Well, the whole thing was a nightmare, but I had lost my IT hospitality job due to covid and the place shuttering. I was desperate.

My first thought was Grand Prismatic, just after dawn.

Cool enough that the thermal features create a fog over the water, and more importantly, all the tourists (I was a hotel employee in the park) were still in bed. Had the boardwalk area all to myself.

I think I just sat in contemplation for half an hour, which if you knew me would say is impossible. Very peaceful.

Don’t know much about my current neighbors and don’t want.

The people we used to live next door to were great. L came over as me and my BIL were handing out candy, and any adults got a shot if they wanted.

After the kids went to bed L came over to our place and we got ridiculously drunk. L passed out in the kitchen and we let him sleep some of it off before helping him back next-door when we met M, his wife.

Probably my favorite story is when M texted L and said she thought there was a snake in the backyard, and being drunk we went to investigate immediately. Not the expected reaction, so when I knocked on the back door (it was late-ish) I’m greeted with a double barrel shotgun. M apologizes and says its not loaded, at which point I drunkenly admonished her that if she’s gonna point a gun at someone unknown, it should be loaded in case she really needed it.

We got to be really great friends with that family, and then they moved for work. Still miss them years later.

I’ve developed some PTSD like symptoms for when my phone goes off.

Notification, call, whatever. Immediate panic and I have to remember to breathe.

Even trimming every notification I can, it still happens several times throughout the day, and my phone only has audible notifications when I’m at home, most from my wife.

I left that job over a year ago and still I can’t shake it.

I bought after it released.

So far I’ve seen a lot of Bethesda typical bugs, but nothing game breaking yet.

Yes the first few hours of a play through are a slog, after it opens up more it becomes much more enjoyable. A live another life type mod would make me immensely happy.

That being said, Bethesda does a good job of making a platform for modding, and thats the KEY thing that keeps me buying, and playing again and again, Bethesda games.

For that reason ESO just never had the magic to me, I understand a lot of mods found for single player games would be highly unbalanced and its not an option for an MMO. That said, without mods Bethesda games are lackluster and I quickly lost interest despite trying to enjoy it a few times. I like MMOs too, don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who only plays shooters being introduced to an MMO.

I’m excited to see what the modding community can do once the tools are released in 2024.

I found a script for bypassing captive portals on Linux back in the day…

The full functionality of how it works escapes me at the moment, but essentially it searches the network for a host that possibly already connected through the captive portal and spoofs their MAC address.

This isn’t the one I originally found, but its the same principal and a Kali tool, so it may be considered more secure than the original bash script I copied back in the day:

https://en.kali.tools/?p=724

Requiem for a Dream - Especially now, later in life when I see addiction in so many people in my personal life.

It is a powerful movie on the various ways addiction can take hold of your life, even with doctor prescribed medication.

That being said, unless you’re into the final scene with Jennifer Connoley, it’s not something you’d necessarily want to watch again.

Side note, if you did enjoy it and want a look into mental health issues in a similar lense, among other things, Pi is a great movie by the same guy.

Proprietary formats are certainly an issue outside of Canada.

Most of the reason corporations/governments stick with popular proprietary formats is actually money.

Developing/investigating an open format is expensive. and then there is the problem of people who have only lived in a digital walled garden.

If you have to train all of your new employees on how to use it the cost rises exponentially.

Then you have your IT support folks who probably just got it dumped in their lap at the last second, and have no knowledge of it themselves, because training wasn’t an option due to time or money.

As a person who handled (solo help desk for that shift) the change over of a health networks electronic medical records systems, I receive no training and was told that they had consultants on hand to transfer them to - yeah well in 4 hours over 2000 calls came in. And of course I got yelled at by a dick hole boss (if your adult children won’t speak to you, and you’ve never met your grandchildren, you are the problem) about people who didn’t want to wait in line for one person to answer the phone and dropped the call.

That boss was ultimately the reason I left that company in favor of a previous employer who offered a lot less problems. Stayed there until the pandemic (hospitality IT) and its been a shit show ever since.

I went from hourly call center to on call 24/7 and being the only point of contact.

When my phone notifies me, just any notification, I panic. The phone rings, I panic. Its been over a year since I left.

Yes, its part and parcel to other issues of mental health, but… Man, do you know how often you get notifications? I’ve turned most off and still some days I’m ready to smash my phone so it will shut up and I can breathe normally.

I had an issue switching away from Pop!, and it may have been a one off, but when I tried to install a different distro, and it wound up screwing up my boot partition to the point the easiest thing was just to run a live distro, pop open parted, and wipe from there before I could install a different distro.

Mostly mentioning it because it was annoying to figure out and remedy - the remedy was annoying because I only had one flash drive so I had to wipe what I wanted to install, and just wasting time regarding that.

I was witness to what burnt piss does on a hot muffler.

It stinks, for miles. And months.

Did the prick die, or just get a golden parachute?

That has become the primary use for my flipper, lol.

I wore vans up until my mid late 30s, but even with a desk job my feet killed after a day.

So now I have running shoes with more support and its helped. I also have a pair of combat boots, but they’re more difficult to get on when I’m half asleep and trying to get to work.

So yeah, you might just have enough youth left to get by with vans lol.

I started with Backtrack on a laptop, and I currently have Kali on a preserved USB; with endeavor as a daily driver.

That being said, my current “real” daily drivers in Win10, mostly for gaming - Not because proton doesn’t do a hell of a job, it certainly does, but it makes modding single player games more complicated. I will say that is absolutely my fault, I haven’t spent enough time to figure it out. But after work, and the wife, and the animals, and the alcoholic BIL who shares the house… I just want to use Vortex to add some simple QOL mods to single player games and play it.

I troubleshoot IT issues all day at work, at the end of the day, I just need it to work. I’ve hardened and removed as much telemetry type bullshit as I could, but I’m sure some slips out. For my threat model, on this machine, I’m fine with it.

On the aforementioned labtop I boot into Kali for… well, that has a different threat model.

Its all self hosted vulnerable VMs for the specific reason of education, but some activities may fall into a grey area, so better safe than sorry.

Tell that to, I dunno, everyone else.

They certainly think so.

I’ve been wary of corporations since I first read Neuromancer.

In my case, and this the US, I had friends who smoked.

I was curious, bummed one, and once I got past the coughing I really enjoyed the effects, that said by the time you no longer get the “high” (for lack of a better word) you’re addicted.

Fast forward 20 years and I’m still trying to quit.

Quit for 5 years cold turkey, but… Shit went down in almost every facet of my life, and I went back.

But I’m down to about a pack a week.

One in the morning, one on the road to work, and one or two during my shift if time allows.

Just need to kick it for good.

Edit: To correct typos