From what I’ve been told, out of the three active subs I modded that got yanked and restaffed with whoever, only one isn’t a bot ridden mess.
And that one is kinda shit (again, that’s second hand) now.
Not that I was some paragon of modding, it’s just that you can’t have random assholes put in place after actual users are pissed off and expect things to work out well.
Oh man! Water exercise is so sweet when you’ve got a bad back and/or joints. Being able to get a decent workout without being laid up for two days is a beautiful thing for me :)
But, I feel you. I’ve got that same inner critic sniping away. As I’ve gotten older, it’s less about physical things and a lot more about mistakes made, things that were hurtful that I didn’t have the ability to see as hurtful when I said or did them.
But along that, I did figure out that the old truism about having to give yourself something first, before you can really give it to or get it from others holds up. If I’m not kind to myself, if I can’t forgive myself, and love myself (at least a little), it’s nigh impossible to genuinely give those things to someone else.
I don’t know if that actually applies to everyone or not; maybe other people can give truly of themselves without accepting good things from themselves first, but it seems to be the case.
No bullshit my homie, a good gym, one that’s more focused on strength training in specific, is the best place to start. I can’t promise there won’t ever be assholes, but even the fairly generic gyms that do more aerobics and cross fit type of stuff are good about it. And the typical weight room, even when it’s body builders rather than folks that are strength focused are often going to be more than welcoming.
You have no idea how many really big guys didn’t start out that way. A lot of them started lifting because they didn’t have a good foundation in physical fitness as a youngster (myself included). So I can promise you that assholes making fun of you are extremely rare.
So, if you ever manage to get past the self consciousness enough to try it, I think it would be the perfect start. Even if all you do at first is go in, do some curls on a machine and walk back out, I promise you that you’ll start to see improvement from it in a few weeks at most. And once you see that first little bit of change, it’ll help your brain realize that the rest can change too. It’s your body, and you can own it the way you want it. It’s hard fucking work, every single time, and it never really stops. But it’s there when you’re ready to do that work.
I can’t think of many things that shut up the inner critic more than physical fitness efforts. For me, it was lifting and then marital arts that made things work. Dealing with that kind of self esteem and doubt and fear is a giant barrier for sure (again, I’ve been there), but if you can get that first step taken, it’s worth it.
Dude! The gym I used to go to when I was still able to lift was brutal about that shit.
And I don’t mean towards the folks coming in to improve themselves. The guy that owned the joint was just a super gentle, kind person. But he was willing to make sure anyone there knew they could use the place free of bullshit.
It was a super friendly place for women and girls for one thing. The membership specified that as one of the things that was grounds for immediate revocation if membership. You didn’t harass other members, and it did apply to everyone. You know how some gyms get with women. It’s fucking ridiculous sometimes. But at his place, a woman could show up and know that not only would the owner and staff intervene if someone got annoying, that they’d never see the person again. Most of the regulars would step in as well.
He was also hell on wheels about people coming in that were out of shape, be it fat or really skinny. You do not fuck with someone trying to do better. It was printed out over the entrance to the weight area. Gym policy was firm on that, but you’d sometimes get some new meathead that came because it was known for having great support for power lifting that didn’t believe it.
And we didn’t stand for it either. It was always more of a low key , “not cool man, you can’t do that here”, and if they stopped, they’d eventually stop being watched like a rabbit in a wolf den. But if they didn’t, somebody would go get Paul, or whoever was on office duty, and any other regulars would be taking the beginner to the side and apologizing while someone else explained to the meathead that they just lost their membership and not to cause any shit.
Best fucking gym I ever went to. Everybody was super helpful and chill, but weren’t afraid to help hype you up for a big lift. And hype you up after one, as far as that goes.
Hell, when I first had to stop lifting heavy stuff and go for more of an overall workout, it was all support. And when I got hurt at work years later, Paul told me not to worry about membership fees at all. Just wanted me to know I could come in and do whatever my physical therapist wanted me to, no worries.
Loved that fucking place. It closed during COVID, and Paul couldn’t afford to open back up
Ya know, I don’t normally do this kind of “gotcha” thing, and hope you take it in the spirit of kind hearted joshing that it’s intended.
It helps, when pulling a Confidently incorrect summons, to be correct about what you’re accusing the person to be incorrect about.
And yeah, people that have no idea of the etymology of charcuterie might have created a usage of the word that’s both inaccurate, but still acceptable because enough people are using the word that way. This happens a lot in living languages. Well, except the ones that have the life beat out of them by some kind of repository of what is and isn’t allowed.
Which is still cool, because the word may be French in origin, and thus regulated in France, it is a borrowed word in English. It is inevitable that the word gain usages in English beyond what was originally there. I would argue that it has been in use long enough to have developed such. However, I would also argue that an anti-pasto plate is also sufficiently developed and used in English that the use of it for the pictured “porn” is not only at least equally correct, that it is also a better choice to describe the picture because more people are likely to know what anti-pasto is as a term than are likely to know what charcuterie means in any sense.
In other words, we’ve has anti-pasto as a term in English way longer than charcuterie. Well, at least better in the US; I don’t doubt that Canadians may have had exposure to the French term first, though I don’t know that as a fact. But, even here in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, deep in the southern mountains, I knew what anti-pasto was back in the eighties. I never heard of charcuterie until maybe five years ago, despite there being French descended families in our area.
And, yeah, that anecdote isn’t some kind of rigorous proof or anything, but it’s a general example of what I’m talking about re: language drift and borrowed terms.
When you got your first smart phone, be it android or iOS, you didn’t know where anything was, so there was a learning curve.
But, in the same way as phones, there are built in “stores”. Those stores are called repositories, and they’re accessible in more than one way. You don’t actually have to use the terminal, it’s just usually faster since you really don’t type much more than you would entering a search in whatever GUI interface comes with your distro. Indeed, you can actually set up the commands in a notepad, change the package name each time, and copy/paste the commands, and you’re only a couple of seconds slower than opening the package manager, searching, scrolling to find what you want, clicking to install… See what I’m getting at?
Windows isn’t really faster than that. You have to go to a site, download, find the exe or msi in your download folder, then click in the various pop-up windows. And you can find .deb files that do the same thing as an exe or msi, just not for every program, because they’re an unnecessary pain in the ass. It’s extra steps.
I promise you, comparing the way Linux works now, and the learning curve it takes to the learning curve on windows back when it was a new experience (and I’m talking windows 95, the previous msdos shells were worse than that), Linux is way easier. And don’t even get me started on how shitty a user experience DOS was. Jfc, I’m dyslexic, and it was a nightmare. Windows 95 wasn’t a big jump better in dyslexia land, but it was at least better than DOS.
If you were used to something like mac only, and had never used windows, the transition would be similarly annoying. And, for me at least, dealing with installs on windows is more of a pain in the ass now that I’m used to package managers.
I did a clean install of Windows 7 on my media PC (and yes, you valiant security friends, it’s air gapped) maybe two years ago. From start to finish, including programs, took me about five hours.
My laptop that I run Linux mint on? An hour, start to finish. The only differences in the programs installed are in specifics, not in types. I plugged in my live drive, hit install, and was ready to start installing programs in maybe twenty minutes. My media pc is an old gaming PC, btw. Tons of ram, ssd, etc. The laptop is an old thinkpad. So it wasn’t like the laptop was better hardware lol.
Which seems tangential, but it’s pointing to the underlying ease of use once you’re used to the system. I’ve being doing windows installs since the nineties (and a little before, but only in classes), so it isn’t like I’m not experienced. I’ve only been doing Linux installs since about 2015.
Hell, my very first Linux install was Ubuntu on my dad’s old computer just to make sure I didn’t screw a box up that was in use. Even that, going from Ubuntu being ready to go, and having the programs set up to use was only maybe two hours, and that was mostly looking up the very process that’s been described by others in this thread and copy/pasting things in for each program.
So don’t get discouraged. If you end up really not liking it once you get past the learning curve, that’s okay, windows will still be there. You can go back to it. But, if you’re like me at all, once that learning curve is past, you won’t enjoy the extra hassles windows puts in the way.
Which is great, but still does nothing for off-site storage.
You always have at least one off site backup of anything important. For most people, that’s going to be some kind of cloud service. What you use to access that can vary a good bit (as someone reminded me, nextcloud services you can use rather than have it all be on site exist), but syncthing would require that you have someone else willing to have a device at their house, always connected, for it to be a viable pick this that aspect.
Don’t get me wrong, syncthing is awesome, but it isn’t a total solution by itself. Hell, my redundant off site backup is less hassle, tbh. I just swap out external drives when I visit my best friend. I take the most updated one, leave it and bring home the previous one from his place. It’s always a little behind, but it isn’t reliant on connectivity lol.
That’s what I was getting at. If all of your backups are at the same place, physically, you don’t actually have backups, you just have redundant copies. A backup that can be destroyed at the same time as other backups or the original isn’t really a backup at all. It’s good enough for a drive dying, but not for bigger events.
That’s what I was getting at, I just forgot that nexcloud services exist.