Powderhorn

I feel a sense of dread every time I find myself holding an empty plastic container.

Niche thing to break out given the context, but the best purchase I’ve made in the past decade is a SodaStream, a couple of extra carbonating bottles and an inline water filter for the kitchen sink.

I didn’t realize how much of my aggregate shopping mass came from paying usurious prices to have water from somewhere else delivered via fossil fuel to a store so I could pick each bottle up once from the shelf, again from my cart to checkout, again to get it back in the cart, again to put it in the vehicle, again from the vehicle to the pile outside the front door, again to bring it inside for final staging, again to put it in the fridge, and finally, again, to drink it. And 99 cents for the privilege.

(It’s now two cents a litre thanks to a 10-pound tank + adapter.)

Being easier on the planet can save time, money and effort, even though it looks somehow less convenient on the surface.

My annual review morphed into a long meeting where the outcome was all involved realized the position wasn’t going to allow me any growth, and they can’t just create a higher-paying position for me (10 employees total), and they don’t really want automation because what they have requires no training.

On the plus side, no one’s really eager for me to go, so I have quite a bit of paid runway. I’d been thinking more over the weekend anyway about how I couldn’t honestly say I was enjoying my job anymore, and I guess I hadn’t been hiding that as well as I thought.

Now, all I need to do is find a new job while executing an even larger lifestyle change.

My first psilocybin trip was half a year into sobriety and made a profound difference. Not only did I lose interest in drinking as an activity, I also started being able to connect the dots on what was actually making me miserable in a way sobriety alone couldn’t provide.

I’d like it as an option to turn on for things like replies to posting an item for sale in my local community. I’m over any sort of thrill from my phone thinking I should interact with it more.

I only subbed to interests/hobbies and low-volume cute stuff, so I didn’t really get the full effect. I’ve seen it used to make a disliked-by-some valid point disappear, but maybe 1-4 times a year? It certainly wasn’t high on my list of Reddit vexes.

It still very much was solely within the scope of disinformation on subs I was on. It just also had unexpected consequences.

Hyperbole, but selected because Reddit is still on fire. Fires at the WTC were not completely extinguished until Dec. 20, 2001.

That is an extremely deep cut, but then I can really only hear two words of dialogue and immediately place them with the TOS movies and TNG episodes. The original trilogy feels redundant after 7-9 came out.

It’ll happen on its own. Right now, that’s sort of akin to asking New Yorkers on Sept. 15, 2001, why everyone’s still talking about the attacks.

I joined Reddit in the middle of an abusive relationship. I don’t even need “almost” as a qualifier.

“Look at all these nice things I’ll give you for the low, low price of making you feel like you can’t function without me through a series of increasingly hostile and degrading actions while making you believe that this is the best you’ll ever find.”

My first reaction the post was “huh, I don’t really know what they do … maybe this will educate me”!

One of our customers at work is Nerfherder Distribution. Thought that sounded familiar.

I’m a few miles up 35 and finding the only real utility Reddit provides other than killing time is /r/Austin, and even there … well, I get NWS alerts on my phone, take transit and don’t lose pets, so the level of usefulness may be more imagined than real.

At the same time, the initial reasons I joined Reddit other than link aggregation aren’t what they once were. I’ve found that DIY projects I learn about on Reddit and then have questions about details on get zero responses, and the communities I joined years ago have been so overrun by people who want karma over discussion that there’s not much value there, either.

Using Google to search Reddit can be useful, but then you get a great detailed post from four years ago and can’t do anything with it if you have further questions. The thread is locked on account of age, and people get pissed if you post a new thread on the same topic that links to the original.

What this API fiasco has done is bring into specific relief where Reddit has already failed and turned all of those into a cohesive narrative that was lacking up to this point. I’d heard of Tildes but not Lemmy until this week, and already my work internet use has switched from RSS then Reddit to Beehaw then RSS.

I guess I needed to get hit over the head with just how bad things had gotten via external forces to overcome inertia. Interestingly, two months ago, I was running Windows on all my computers, and I finally snapped on how invasive notifications and forced-app shenangians had gotten.

The stages of grief may end with acceptance where people are involved, but they certainly don’t need to with technologies and platforms. I’m starting to better understand the grousing I wrote off as narcissistic woe-the-hell-is-me was actually a congregation of coal-mine canaries.