I mean, yeah, sure. …but I’m still conflicted about the local heroin addicts standing in the frozen aisle scarfing a bucket of ice cream.
I mean, I don’t really give a shit about the theft, but they tend to stand there with the door open and thaw the rest of the ice cream while they’re at it. It’s enough of an issue locally that a couple of local chains have literally started chaining up their ice cream like it’s the goddamn crown jewels. I just want non-crystallized ice cream!
Also… In my experience, people mostly don’t steal food outside of cases like having the heroin hungries. Food banks do an okay job at keeping people fed at least. (Aside: When you donate to your local food bank, donate money, not food! They can buy much more food in bulk - your dollars will go farther that way!) Mostly, I see people stealing things like resaleable electronics or OTC drugs that have useful precursor chems.
Don’t get me wrong - I know fuckin’ Krogers can take it. I just see this meme about seeing people stealing food and like… That’s mostly not a thing. Food banks and food stamps work okay. They aren’t great, the food often sucks - but generally speaking, you don’t have to steal food to survive when you’re poor in America. You might need to steal drugs and airpods though.
If it’s like a pleasant tingling through your head, it might be ASMR. It can be triggered by sounds (hence the bajillion YouTube channels), but for me it’s more often when I’m really enjoying thinking about something. It’s a weird sensation for sure.
I got the earwax but good. I usually abuse qtips too.
But.
If you want to really know what a clean ear canal is like, get a squeeze bulb. You fill it with hot water (hot like tap, not like boiled) and then hydroblast your ear holes until all the wax melts and runs out.
When you get rid of a real bad wax ball… Aww man, it’s amazing. It’s like you just removed earplugs. The world is suddenly so much louder.
There are a bajillion distros out there and you already have a lot of suggestions here, so instead, allow me to note a few things I think are handy while learning Linux.
Most Linux distros are customized versions of a few base distros. Once you learn how the base distro lays things out, that knowledge is transferable (more or less) to other distros in the same family. But solutions that work in one family of distros may not work on another!
Some common base distros:
Debian: Stability-above-all; all-rounder distro. Updates slowly, but provides a very-well-tested base that many other distros build on. Ubuntu and its derivatives are built on Debian.
Red Hat: A commercially-focused distro that I haven’t used in a looong time, so I won’t say too much about it. Slightly less popular as a desktop basis than Debian, perhaps, but also a solid all-rounder.
Arch: If computers were cars… Arch is for the Hot-Rodders. You have a ton of control to optimize and tweak Arch to precisely meet your needs. When you want to really dig into the machine and tune it to peak performance, this is where you begin. Fortunately, Arch-based distros often forego the detailed install of their parent and just provide a fast-updating, highly-tuned Linux experience. SteamOS is said to be a customized Arch.
Software installation / updating is simpler and more confusing than either the Windows or Mac worlds.
It’s very rare to have a Linux program require an installer like Windows, and it’s not as simple as drag-and-drop install like Mac. Linux has had the equivalent of “app stores” for a looong time, just minus the tracking and selling parts.
Most programs in Linux get installed via a package manager tool. There are various front ends, but under the hood, there’s usually a command line program handling installation and updates.
Generally speaking, Debians use “apt”, RedHats use “yum” and Arches use “pacman”. There are also “flatpak” and “snap” both of which are more recent managers that attempt to solve dependency hell.
The terminal is gonna come up. Love it or hate it, the terminal is still at the heart of the Linux experience. There are guis for pretty much anything you want to do, but because Linux is so highly customizable, help forums and such tend to give solutions in the one constant: bash scripts.
That said, you can get around just fine without it if you really want to. Just recognize that you might be swimming upstream at times.
You can customize anything! Your desktop environment is pretty much a given on Windows and Mac. On Linux you can install something comfy, like Gnome (customizable, lightweight, akin to Mac UI) or KDE (less customizable, very pretty Windows-style UI).
Or try something experimental like Ratpoison - a window manager that requires no mouse inputs!
Part of the fun of Linux is trying out alternatives and truly customizing your personal computer.
Gentoo is the og, “Linux from scratch” distro, where you compile everything yourself. Arch is kinda like that, except everything is compiled already. 😁
You still select all the parts of your Linux system, from the desktop environment (if any) all the way down to which initialization system you want to use. Along the way, you’ll dive into a lot of the various text files Linux uses for configuration and learn which files live where.
It’s a very thorough dive!
If you’re looking for reading material about Linux though, I don’t really have any books to recommend offhand… I will say that the basic tooling in Linux, the POSIX-standard stuff, like grep, vi, sed, and so forth remains mostly unchanged (at least in all the important ways) from year to year. Some of it has remained essentially the same since the seventies, so even a six year old book will still be able to cover all of that just fine.
The things that it would not be good for would be some of the more recent developments in, say, UI tech, like the slow, but ongoing migration from X to Wayland.
Command line scripts and config files are likely to largely be the same (though a few files have a tendency to move around depending on the distro).
Tools for administration outside of the venerable POSIX tooling is gonna be a crapshoot in book-form. Still, it’ll give you a place to start from!
Honestly, it depends on what you’re trying to do with your machines. If you are looking for a stable desktop environment, you don’t need to dive that deep. (At least, to start.) Just install the defaults, and read a basic tutorial on using the Bash shell. (Even if you move away from bash, lots of scripts and such use it by default, so a passing familiarity is highly recommended.) Especially learn about installing programs with the package manager. (‘apt-get’ for Mint and other Debian-based distros.) The defaults are gonna be generally sane, especially in Mint. If you want to get into deeper waters from there, you’ll have a stable base to start from.
But. If you want to configure your machine, top to bottom and really understand how Linux works… Install Arch. Not even joking. Arch installation docs are very detailed and walk you through setting up every part of your Linux system. Be prepared for your first time to take a few days to complete. It’s a lot to take in. Start with a computer you can leave offline for awhile.
I learned a ton by installing Arch. And then I went back to Debian-based distros because there was less active maintenance. (Note that this was over a decade ago, so things may be better now. YMMV). This is definitely Learning The Hard Way, but it’s honestly the most effective thing I can think of.
Linux is insanely customizable. You can swap out and/or customize pretty much every aspect of it. It can be overwhelming. I recommend taking things on a bit at a time, but I’ve rarely used software that’s as easy to find free support for.
“Mirroring” isn’t an insult, or necessarily manipulative. It is literally built in to us humans! Our brains have specific portions dedicated to imitation and empathy called “mirror neurons”.
These neurons help us feel what others around us are feeling. It’s why you feel sad when you see someone else being sad. Or why it can make us smile to see someone else having a great day!
The behavior of mirroring someone is a form of social bonding (“See! I’m like you!”) which is the basis of building human relationships.
Having in-jokes and picking up particular quirks of people around us probably has a special jargon to psychologists.
After the mildly stressful intro (which isn’t bad, just uses more sticks than carrots in the tutorial section), you basically just pick a direction and go.
If you wanna quest, there are quests available in (almost) every system.
If you wanna farm, pick a nice planet and get to building.
If you wanna fight, go find a planet with hostile Sentinel presence.
There’s always something interesting to do, but you can also just find a nice view on some planet, build a couch and just watch the iridescent grass blow in the wind for a bit.
I built myself a HUD using a VuFine LCD and a raspi Zero W. It runs a custom TUI I wrote for myself that provides an interactive terminal session surrounded by configurable text widgets.
Currently, I have widgets configured to display the date/time, the weather (near-term and week), and CPU/Mem utilization. With the main display running my combined to-do/calendar app to help keep me organized.
It’s tacky as hell, bulky and exposed wires, but I love it.
In fact, I made my own. It’s fugly and dorky as hell, but it’s everything I want and nothing I don’t.
I used a VuFine LCD eyepiece and hooked a raspi Zero W to it. Input via Bluetooth keyboard. Not a lot of screen real estate, so I went full CLI and wrote my own TUI with widget support so I can have an “active” app, plus a bunch of passive data widgets.
Plus one for prazosin. I have a family member with PTSD nightmares. Prazosin has made them able to actually sleep for the first time in their adult life.
The name of “Amazon” carries cachet. It sounds like impressive experience.
The thing is, Amazon famously treats its employees like shit - even the highly paid ones. There’s a sorta Stockholm Syndrome that develops, where you convince yourself that this misery is the cost of “doing great things” or you decide to bail while you can and go someplace that doesn’t suck.
Managers who spend any amount of time at Amazon tend to be the former. They end up with this mindset that if your team isn’t miserable, you just aren’t working hard enough and that having “tough” conversations means that you berate people until they break.
So beware Ex-Amazon managers. They’re not all bad, but a sudden influx is not a good sign.
(In fairness - One of the best managers I ever had was at Amazon. If he left that place, I’d be thrilled to work with him again. Just. Not there.
The hands-down worst manager I ever had was at Amazon as well.)
I’ve been at places where the corporate policies were just buzzword doublespeak and they are a waste of time. Everyone knows it’s bullshit.
I’ve also been at exactly one place where the leadership team gave serious thought to what their goals were for the organization. Then they wrote down a set of goals that were
simple
coherent
actionable And that actually made it easier to do our jobs. When we had to make a decision, we could actually refer to these principles and use them.
It was crazy helpful!
…And then they hired a fuckton of Ex-Amazon managers into high-level roles and they promptly drove away all the best people and replaced the helpful principles with Amazon’s work-or-die philosophy. So I bailed. 😭
Eating super refined sugar like candy causes a chain raccoon of events in your body to occur:
Your blood sugar spikes. Even in non-diabetic people, eating a sugary treat can cause a spike above 150mg/dL (healthy levels are usually below 100 when fasting and below 130 after eating)
Your body ramps up insulin production to help use the sugar.
Because your levels have (probably) spiked so high, your body produces a lot of insulin, but your digestion isn’t sending any more sugar - you already finished digesting it and got the whole load at once.
Your body burns through all the excess sugar in your system and your blood sugar levels fall… precipitously because there’s still a lot of insulin floating around.
Your blood sugar levels fall low enough that your system decides it must be time to eat.
You get the munchies. And since your blood sugar is now lower than your body wants it to be, you crave something extra carby. …Like more candy.
Repeat this process long enough and your pancreas (which makes insulin) burns out. Congratulations! You now (like me) have Type 2 Diabetes! 🎉✨💫
So… To not eat all your candy at once, do a few things to keep your blood sugar from spiking, triggering cravings for more.
Eat fibrous veggies. And eat them at the start of a meal. Getting the fiber into your digestion first slows down processing the rest, keeping your blood sugars from spiking.
Eat carby treats as dessert to a meal, not on an empty stomach. Same reason as above.
If you’ve really gotta indulge, try to drink a Tbsp of vinegar (diluted in a glass of water, so you don’t melt your teeth) just beforehand. The acetic acid in vinegar interferes with digesting carbs. It’s not as good as broccoli, but it helps. (Citric acid does not work like this.)
In addition to the other tips here (Especially keeping treats out of sight), keeping your sugar levels from spiking and crashing helps a lot to curb carb craving.