Plume

"There you are, installing Arch Linux on your computer, and all of the sudden, you're a femboy. You didn't ask for this. You didn't choose this. Yet there it is."

I could come up with a thousand reasons as to why this would never happen. Hell, I could even argue that the whole Steam Deck's existence comes from a series of decisions that Valve made out of hatred for Microsoft. So, yeah, it's not happening.

Still though, as a thought experiment, imagining a world where tomorrow, Steam is owned by Microsoft, it's... interesting, to say the least. In the most horrifying way possible, but interesting nonetheless. Quite frankly, I can't imagine anything worse happening for video games. Like to me, this is what a video game apocalypse sounds like.

You know, there is a lot that is to blame for why Firefox doesn't get the market share that it needs, but I would blame a part on its community as well. I have never seen a community that is so reluctant to any change or basically any features being added to a product than the Firefox community.

Firefox developers:

Look! To try and make the browser easier to use for new users, we have added a pop-up remind you that hey, Firefox sync is an awesome feature of this browser. Because feature discoverability is hard.

The Firefox community five seconds later:

E N S H I T I F I C A T I O N

Mozilla isn't perfect. Far from it. I have a lot of things to say about them and features that were never added or removed years ago that I'm still pissed off about and will continue to complain about until it is resolved, like fucking PWAs for example.

But damn, being a Firefox developer sounds really hard. Like, trying to please a bunch of people who are always complaining about the state of this browser, but also will, without fail, always complain every time you change or add features sounds fucking exhausting.

We say this every fucking year! Come on, this is getting ridiculous! Stop it! There will never be a year of the Linux desktop and if anything, this post shows why.

So much of the Linux community is utterly detached from what really matters to most users and focus on things that 80% of people won't ever understand, care about or even use.

We focus on this and meanwhile, little quality of life features constantly get ignored when these are the real things that users will encounter and that will piss them off. They get treated as trivial. They get ignored in favor of other things.

Somebody mentioned it here. I saw it and I didn't need them to mention it to want to say it. It's already something that's pissing me off. On Fedora for my Framework Laptop there is no way to adjust the scrolling speed on my trackpad which is moronically fast.

We are on the 40th release of Fedora, the 46th release of GNOME, and somehow this still isn't baked in. I still have to go look around and use the fucking terminal to do something this basic. When some of them try Linux and will eventually push them to go back to Windows. And when users complain about this, what do we get? A bunch of elitists telling them to fuck off to go back to Windows, which I also saw as responses to this complaint about the trackpad.

Listen, Linux is an amazing project and I love it. I daily drive it. I don't use Windows anywhere in my life. I haven't touched OS in like two years at the very least. So many things that we are celebrating as brand new things that are finally working properly are things that already work by default on Windows and have been for years. We're not going to convince people by mentioning that, "oh, we fixed this thing that's been working forever on Windows." It works on Linux now. People need more than this.

You want to know the sad truth? Here we go. We, collectively here, users of platform like Lemmy, are a vocal minority who are detached from the reality of most users. We care about ads, we care about privacy and so on, but the reality is most that people don't. Most people won't even notice that those things are there. For so many people, Windows is just the thing that stands between them and launching Chrome. It already works for them. There's no reason for them to switch.

We are all way too invested in what runs on our computers and we forget that we are just us. Most people are not like us. Privacy scandals stop us from using stuff like social media and so on, but it clearly hasn't stopped most of the world.

People heard about the shit that Meta was and is doing. Did people stop using Instagram? No, they didn't. People know what Google is doing, how many of them switched to DuckDuckGo? A clinical moron turning the platform into a far-right haven didn't stop most users from using Twitter.

The API bullshit didn't stop most users from using Reddit. Sure there were protest, but I guarantee you that 99% who took part in the blackout just went back to it after. A lot of us didn't. We left. We're here now. But we're still a tiny minority.

Ask a Firefox user did telling Chrome users that privacy was important ever worked? I'm sure you will get examples of it working but it's a minority. Most people don't give a shit and they use Chrome.

I don't have a solution. I'm sorry, I made this long-ass comment but I don't have much else to say. I don't have a good solution to this problem.

This is a reminder that this guy has very large chances to go back in the office and be president of the United States once again. We are so fucked and I am saying this as someone who is not American.

Well, I've been on it for a while and it's kind of nice. The last time I was there I could notice that some of Twitter's toxicity was starting to take root because lots of people came from Twitter. But other than that, I am not comfortable using something that is not open source nowadays.

I'm done with this shit. I don't want proprietary stuff in my life anymore. I still have some, but the less I do the better, and especially when it comes to things like this. I don't want to sit around waiting for inevitable, greedy, shitty money-driven decision to run this thing into a fucking wall.

Blusky is decentralized-ish, but it's not open. And eventually money is going to be an issue and it's eventually going to be filled with ads or be an algorithmic nightmare or whatever, like everything else before it.

I am sticking with Masterdawn and I barely go there. I don't post regularly there, I don't have anyone or anything interesting to follow there. It's mostly a tool for me to follow software and everything. But I won't have it any other way. I'm done. I'm not moving anymore. I am done following and getting invested in the latest proprietary bullshit website or app that is cool right now, but is inevitably going to try and suck out as much money as it can from its users.

Look at BeReal. I love the idea. It's great. It's what social media should be. But now, there are allowing celebrities and companies on it. Sucking the life out of it. And I loved the idea but I never used the app. Why? Because they didn't have a way to make money! Of course this was going to happen.

Anyway. Is it open-source? No? Then I'll pass.

Loneliness isn't an epidemic, it's a symptom of a greater illness. That illness is called capitalism and it's slowly killing us all.

I'm not religious. I believe the universe is an accident, and we are a consequence of its randomness. We exist not for a higher purpose, we just exist because stuff happened and we came out of it, like the rest of the universe. Life is random. Nothing is written, none of it is happening for a reason. It's all chaos and we're part of it.

We were cells in the ocean, which, the ocean by itself was already a miracle so big it's basically a mathematical impossibility. And from these cells, we eventually became these weird, mostly hairless apes that are so smart that they can think about the fact that they're on a giant ball lost in space, moving at ludicrous speed through the vastness of space, kept alive by a giant ball of fire that will give them cancer if they bask in it's glory for too long or make them blind if they look at it too long.

It's absolute chaos. And I find all of this to be oddly comforting. I even find it to be beautiful in it's own way. Life is amazing because it's all an accident, it's all random and it's astonoshing to see the results. But I also get how absolutely terrifying what I just said could be to a lot of people.

Do they get Elon's dumbass tweets projected in their mind, now?

I know someone else already mentioned it but I'm going to do the same. Notesnook. I have been using it for around six months now.

I have been looking for the perfect note taking up for a long time. I have some of the same concern as you and Standard Notes looked like a promising app for me but it also looked really overpriced and kind of over complicated.

Notesnook pretty much had everything I wanted. The most important thing for me is that it is completely cross-platform. It has perfect feature parity no matter where you are, no matter if you're on the web app, the iOS app or the Android app, the Mac app, whatever. It has everything on all apps.

It's important to me because some apps are primarily developed for one platform and you can tell that while you pay the same price on another, you're still a second class citizen. And you also get some apps which are in general scattered around feature-wise. So some client gets some features and other don't. It's weird. I mean look at the whole Proton suite between iOS and Android.

It can sync with its own service, it works well enough, and it's end to an encrypted which I love.

And it's fully open source! Which is the cherry on top.

My only gripe with it is its editor. It supports markdown but it's not really markdown. It's a rich text editor with markdown support for formatting which is very different. The results are sensibly the same but more often than not if you copy and paste something that is already formatted from a markdown editor into the app, it won't format it. You will get # and * everywhere but they won't do what they're meant to be doing. Because it's made to interpret Markdown as you type it.

I wish we could get an actual simple, rock solid Markdown editor. But other than that? Notesnook is the nest Note taking app I've used and I've tried plenty.

Reminder that it takes much more effort to try and erase us from society, than to accept us.

PART 4: One Of The Worst Nights Of My Life

I don't remember how it started. I just remember what started happening in the middle of the night. I assume it started like every other with some bullying, the usual crap, whatever. But in the middle of night, I feel my bed moving. And mind you, this bed is suspended over Gabriel's, the other roommate, not Nicholas. I think in English it's called a bunk bed. And all of a sudden, I fell. I felt it lift up and then it suddenly like gave up underneath me. I fell on the ground and when I looked up again, the bed was on Gabriel, who was beneath me. It fell on him.

I was half naked on the floor. I wasn't panic. I was apologizing. And both of them were standing in front of me. Getting half mad at me. And I say half because they were trying to suppress their laughter because they clearly organized the thing this way. They ordered me to keep quiet because they didn't want anyone else outside the room to hear. They told me to not move, and to stay quiet for a while. I stayed on the ground, almost afraid for my life not knowing what the fuck was going on. I was in deep sleep when that happened. But no one came, so no one heard my fall.

After that they talked down to me, pretending that this was my fault as if they didn't organize the whole thing, I blamed them for it and they almost got violent because of it. So I backed down. I got docile again. I was laying on the floor half naked in front of these two guys. It was humiliating. That was the only reasonable thing to do. No one was coming to help. And I had learned years ago that asking for help from the school itself was just a shit idea, so I was on my own.

I fixed the bed. Gabriel also helped me. I mean, his comfort depended on it. And I went back to sleep. That would have been a bad night but that's it.

But the night wasn't over yet.

Did you ever woke up suddenly, panicked with like a giant alarm yelling in your mind "you are about to die"?

I don't know the hour. I don't remember this. I remember just waking up suddenly panicked. I had a strong smell in my nose. It smelled like pepper. Like it just took every thing in my nose. That's all I could smell, nothing else. And all of the sudden blood started coming out of my nose. And not just a drop like suddenly I had blood all over my face.

I have no idea what they did to me. I just don't. So I went down my bunk trying to just figure out what was happening. I went into the bathroom, turned the light on in panic. They both yelled at me because I turned the light on and I asked them for help. And they yelled at me some more, also while laughing, which confirmed to me that they were responsible for what was happening to me.

The bleeding stopped on its own eventually. And I just locked myself into the bathroom for the rest of the night. And I slept there on the cold floor. I spent a good part of that night trying to get rid of that smell in my nose. I mean, I tried to sleep, I mostly cried all night, I was freaked out and I was afraid of them. Because again, I woke up, and the first thing that came in my mind was, "You have to do something, you are about to die", which I wasn't, but that's just what my brain communicated to me. I figured out otherwise shortly after but I was freaked the hell out. I guess it was adrenaline or something? I don't know.

But the door had a lock so they couldn't get me there. When morning came and the surveillance came into the room, to wake us up she asked where I was and I put on my brightest voice and told her that I was up early and already in the bathroom.

To this day, I still have no fucking clue what is it that they did to me that night. What was that strong smell of pepper and why the hell did it burn everything up my nose and started to make me bleed like that. I have no idea what happened.

But morning came, but that night wasn't over for me because I really didn't have a night, to be honest. There was one more thing to come. Most people cleared out off the floor and I was left in the room with just Nicholas and me, which accused me of being responsible for his poor sleep, and me being stressed the hell out and having close to no sleep... I told him that he could only blame himself for what he did to me. We started to argue and I argued back. So he got violent and how did it ended? Nicholas went to his locker, which we had in our room, opened it, pulled out a massive knife, put it at my throat, pushed me on the desk, which was near a window, opened the window, pushed me on the desk to that window. He had much more strength than I could ever had and he was either going to open my throat or throw me down five floors. I don't really remember what I did in defense of that. I'm pretty sure I just got real quiet and just got as docile as I have ever been.

He let me go but made a point to threaten me again. Of course.

You know what's weird? I think I had a pretty normal day after that. Which is really weird now that I think about it. After all the shit that happened, I had a pretty average day. Nothing special. I think the effect of that day happened at first, days after and later, months and sometimes even years after.

At that point I had gotten used to having regular panic attacks. At night when I knew I had to go back up there, it only got worse and after that I begged my parents to take me home as I explained earlier, which they did. It's only gotten worse after this because now they didn't just threaten to beat me, to rape me, to do whatever. Nicholas threatened to kill me, and it wasn't just words. I had a knife put on my throat and I was held close to a window ready to be thrown out. Things just escalated massively.

I never told anyone. I finally talked about it to my family recently that I was years and years after but I kept my mouth shut during the whole thing.

And what was I supposed to do? Talk to the principal about it? They would have searched his locker, found the knife, expelled him forever from the school, and he would have come found me and gutted me somewhere in the street. At least, that's how I saw things back then. Nowadays, I don't know if it would have been that extreme, but I still think ratting him would've been a pretty fucking terrible idea.

One of the worst things that happened to me in that school was something that happened completely outside of it. It was in my home. One day I opened up about the shit that was happening to me, to my father, which I never got good relationship with. I don't know why I opened up to him. It was a bad idea. I remained vague about what was happening because I just didn't want to tell him in details the shit that happened to me. I was afraid he would do something violent or whatever. I didn't want it to make things worse for me. But his response is one of the worst memories I have of this place. He basically told me that if I was bullied everywhere I went, that maybe I ought to take a good look at myself and that maybe I was provoking it. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I deserved it. That I asked for it. That was after that night, too.

I have never felt so alone that in that moment. But also, even though I didn't have a good relationship with him, he was someone I still trusted. So I kind of got it into my head that all of those things that were happening to me, well, maybe I deserved them....

I didn't. Of course. But I didn't know that back then.

Anyway, there is plenty of other stuff that happened to me in that school. And I wasn't the only time I was bullied, of course. I also got bullied later in life in the wonderful work of employment. But that's already long enough. So, you know, I am going to end this by a very short story. The story of my last night in that god forsaken dorm.

I lied. Kind of. Bonus story (Bullying Free), below. (this is the last one, for real this time)