I’m pretty sure I had my mid-life crisis at 25. I let myself get fired from my job. Then I donated everything I owned and lived out of a 34 liter backpack for a few years while I travelled and lived abroad.

My entire life is still a constant crisis but that’s just background noise ringing like tinnitus.

It wasn’t until my first job at a grocery store during Christmas time that I learned it was “Feliz Navidad” being sung.

Before that, I couldn’t figure out why the cheerful song that only appeared around Christmas time was saying “Police shot my dad”

Being forced to read between the lines because other people are afraid of being honest with themselves is exhausting, frustrating and confusing.

Often that dishonesty comes in the form of manipulation. They want me to continue treating them the way that I do while offering nothing in return except to tear me down for treating everyone else the same way I treat them.

At least that’s my perspective from my experiences.

The only people I want to be around these days are those that can embrace being honest with themselves and the people they surround themselves with. I no longer tolerate being forced to read subtle cues that conflict with what they say and do.

One of the many reasons I quit the trades so dramatically was because I couldn’t stand all the unasked advice coming from older men.

If I wanted to be old, miserable, full of hate for my wife and children, full of hate at other people for expressing themselves, full of hate for myself and own a giant savings account full of money I can’t enjoy because my body is too broken, then sure I’ll listen to what you will say. But I don’t want that. I want to be happy with all the nothing I own.

I even went and tattooed both my arms full just to signal that I am dedicated to my mistakes. I’d rather be broke and myself than to live the shallow, object filled existence that they want to live. Where these old miserable men see mistakes, I see experiences and the chance to learn.

Fuck 'em.

I once saw a pickup truck drive into the shoulder of a road to intentionally murder a mother duck and her babies that were just standing there.

I’m not questioning if what she did was right or wrong but I get it. I fucking get why she did what she did.

Frogcomposband is my favourite Angband varient. There’s a huge amount of classes to pick from, towns with quests and once you get a hang of it, most of the interactions can be done by the number pad.

A while ago I took the opportunity to go on a working holiday in Australia for 2 years. Somewhere in the first 1/4 of the first year I forgot my debit card’s pin number. I couldn’t get a new card because I’d have to go to a branch ATM to activate the card. Which was in Canada…

Fortunately I was able to use my credit card so I was able to survive the rest of my time there. As soon as I got back to Canada after my 2 years away, I went to an ATM and bam, remembered my PIN. I was able to get money. Which was great because I had my backpack stolen right before my 3 1/2 days Greyhound bus across Canada to get back home. I question how I’m still alive almost every day of my existence.

I met one of my now closest friends at the end of a Halloween party just as things were shutting down and everyone was leaving.

As she was walking by, she randomly announced that she was going to see a band next week. One that I had already bought tickets for. We talked briefly and exchanged numbers. We saw the band together and hung out a few more times but I think after the third time we hung out, we knew we were best friends.

We both weren’t even supposed to go to that Halloween party. Both of us had very different plans and somehow ended up at the party as something to do. The timing for us to meet was just so tiny and it doesn’t even feel real sometimes.

https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

It has a list of Text User Interfaces for terminals. Handy since I work in a terminal mostly with my network devices. A TUI for file management made life a lot easier for myself.

Sounds like what I’ve been doing manually for a while now as I learn more. For my desktop I have three scripts. One to install Alpine on full disk encryption. One for the initial setup up to the first required reboot and the last for the remaining setup plus transferring files.

I’ve been learning how to edit files with sed, cat, echo and tee commands to help automate everything from a fresh install.

Similar process for my Pi’s except I just copy-paste blocks of commands through a terminal instead of a script.

To transfer files to all their proper directories, I have a whole system for that using rsync. I basically keep a bare-bones directory tree with only the files I have worked on. Then I have an rsync command to send all those files onto the Pi’s file system in a way that retains all the files and folder’s attributes.

I wrote an rsync tool for myself to help me keep all these commands in files that I can neatly organize. I use that tool so much that it’s now my entire backup system. With a bunch of files organized with numbers, I can automate the backup of my phone, two pi’s and laptop to a partition on my laptop, then an additional copy to my external SSD in one command. And I have very high confidence in my restores since I do that frequently while testing new stuff. I also failed a lot before to get that much confidence.

I have issues with over organization if you couldn’t tell by now hahaha.

Container databases seem as simple as shutting down a container, running a backup and then starting the container again. Although my my experience is only from hosting a Lemmy/PieFed instance. I did make many backups and restores with no issues to the database. It all worked as I intended it to work.

I would imagine a similar process for non container databases. Stop, backup, restart. Although someone with more experience would be better to answer that.

I personally use rsync since I do most my work by command line these days. It’s taken nearly half a year really understand it but it offers the flexibility I desire.

I have a small network with only a handful of devices. I keep all my incremental backups on encrypted partitions and encrypted detachable SSD’s which I manually decrypt. Rsync is set up to use SSH so there’s some form of encrypted transfers but that’s not actually a priority for me, just an added benefit.

I also use rsync to sync files and directories while maintaining additional system attributes across multiple systems. That is to say, what’s root or user accessible stays root or user accessible after the transfer is complete.

If I desired more protection, I’d probably look into Borg backup. Currently I just use encryption as an annoyance deterrence method. I also stick to the base Rsync command because every other option I tried brought with it complexities which have all failed me. I at least have a high level confidence in my backup/restore process now.

My reasoning for seeking out that type of therapist came from a situation that happened about a couple years earlier. A former friend and coworker accidentally introduced me to a queer girl. Her and I talked a lot about mental health and became close friends over time.

My former friend was being a creep towards her and I saw how much it affected her when she came eventually forward to tell me about it. We no longer talk to him anymore. It was after both her and her partner asked me to come visit that I came to understand how caring and accepting queer people can be.

When I came back home, I realized I wanted to be treated like a unique individual just like how my friend and her partner treated me. What better place than a queer community where so many others have fought to be their own person. Especially when there’s so much social pressure to fit into a single lifeless mould.

Being surrounded by uniqueness gives so much colour to life.

My sister weaponized her pettiness against me. Even after a close call with death, I was still at fault for things that were completely outside of our powers.

She spent so much effort making me feel guilty, isolated and weird but she hid it all behind her outgoing personality and charity work. She couldn’t do a good deed without telling the whole world and everyone else things she’s heaven sent because of her constant self promotion.

But if she’s so great, why do we have no relationship at all? Why do I feel the absolute need to not share anything personal with her in order to protect myself? Why do my therapists, past and present, look at me in shock when I mention things she has said and done to me? And why do I and other men (mainly my cousins) in my family have to suffer from her pettiness and moral high positioning?

At least my parents learned to stop trying to blame me and control my behaviour, just not my sister. Nothing will ever be good enough for her.

All I ever wanted was a sister to talk to and help me through life as the youngest child in the family. Over the past five years I’ve found four sisters. And they love me. I know because they tell me and show me how much they love me. One of them even gave me a forehead kiss recently and that kind of love feels special. I love them all so much even if all they really did was just let me be me.

How do you think Ansible can help me? I’ve read about it a few times but it’s hard for me to understand it’s actual usage without spending time playing with it.

I can possibly look into it a bit more in the future. I’ve got a few things I’m working on like learning how to do TLS with Caddy so I can reduce my dependency with Cloudflare.

I haven’t tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.

It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.

I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that’s the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.

If you’re interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It’s about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.

From my experience, it’s hard to help others if I can’t help myself first. After doing some intense self reflection, it’s helped me to understand the type of solidarity I need to look out for in the future.

At the very least, I can be more mentally prepared to take future opportunities that rise up. Although deep down I feel that I’m going to have to a lot more to defend the vulnerable and those that I deeply care about.

If more people were willing to fight through the pain and discomfort of self reflection, solidarity against the powerful few wouldn’t seem like such an intimidating mountain. But that’s just what I believe.

I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.

Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.

I have pretty bad social anxiety but I also am able to let my adhd do the driving. I’ve travelled and live abroad in foreign places but to my friends and family back home I’m nearly non-verbal. All that to say I feel like I live a very hypocritical life.

I behave differently based on the situation. My first queer social meet up was a bit strange. It was 95% women and I felt completely out of place. I ended up just talking to a guy for most of the night and as I was leaving, ended up meeting a bunch of other people. One of them happened to be going to the same concert as me the following week. We exchanged numbers and now her and I are super close friends.

I generally arrive to these events with an open mind and a genuine smile and that’s enough for people to come talk to me. It can feel very intimidating at first but even getting out there at all is a huge step in the right direction. If you don’t meet people the first time, there will always be another event. Becoming a regular face also helps other people coming to introduce themselves to you.

I’m awful for going up and introducing myself to others so I look for ways to be more inviting for people to come talk to me. It’s not as direct but I’ve found some wonderful people that way. Whatever works is good enough for me :)

Now combine that with impatient people who don’t give other people enough time to process information or enough time to properly explain something.

That’s my whole family dynamic right there. Pure anxiety fuel :D