The abandonment issues are a huge challenge. Empathy by way of anecdote: my abandonment issues as a child were so bad that I couldn’t tolerate the idea of limited edition breakfast cereals. “What if I really like this cereal and they stop making it?!”

It took me a lot of time, professional help, and mindfulness. Understanding my attachment style helped a lot. The super short, abstract spiel: attachment style is mostly set in stone; we can only work on our reactions. A positive inner voice is a huge step.

Everything as it is, I’ve started having issues with feelings of being disposable… I can’t expect people to stick around, like they’re waiting for a reason to abandon me.

That shit is going to happen. Stick with me here, because this is going to take a dark turn, but I found what works for me. You are disposable to most of the world. And you absolutely cannot expect people to stick around. To wish otherwise invites disaster. Graveyards are full of irreplaceable people.

You can, however, be such a positive addition to your physical circle (with enough self-awareness and boundaries to prevent getting exploited) such that your circle regard it as unthinkable to be without you. That positive inner voice you’re working on… great! But it’s not going to be one big thing that makes everything work better. It’s going to be lots of little (and a few big) changes that turn the ship around. Give the self-work a couple years. You may not even notice the changes, but they all add up.

In understanding your attachment style, you can more easily find people who are compatible. Spoiler alert: avoidant attachment tends to trigger people with abandonment issues; anxious-avoidant attachment styles tend to burn everything down around them.

Calm your reactivity, improve your communication and self-awareness, grow your mindfulness and acting with intention. Non-violent communication (NVC) is the kind of thing that pays dividends everywhere in life. As is mindfulness. Develop a consistent meditation routine.

In my experience, very few people are looking for the relationship exit. Those that are, you didn’t need them around.

Edit: forgot a word

But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.

Nah. I used to think that GUI git clients were The Way. But they all fall short, especially when the ***slightest ***thing goes sideways. Once you get your head around the paradigm, the git CLI is how you get real shit done and quickly. If anything, the GUI clients are all sharp edges and half-measures; the only reason I pull out a GUI client is to get a visual on all the branches in progress/already merged.

This is also my understanding of “chav” from English and Scottish friends and relatives.

I’ll have some fever-dream solving a problem that has had me stumped

That’s happened to me enough to almost turn me to the woo side. :D “Answers Come In Dreams.”

I’ve had this run in both directions. Going through the repos a day later: “Holy hell, this solution is [utter shit || truly inspired || elegant AF || written by someone who should probably be fired]. Who wrote this? Me?! I don’t remember any of this.”

The compartmentalization/fugue state is real.

Gwenview is a new one on me. Thanks for the tip! Downloading it now.

Raster as background and marking up as vector graphics on an overlay.

There are lots of use cases for exactly that, like certain graphics tasks my partner does for her employer (flyers, t-shirt designs). with an existing raster image as background in Inkscape. For what I do, that workflow would be serious overkill.

Inkscape is for vectors and handles rasters poorly. I love Inkscape, but it boots slowly. Paint.NET is fast and light. Perfect for marking up screenshots for technical documentation. Pinta does okay in this role, but it’s no Paint.NET.

• Audio configuration: I just install DRS in Win10 and it works, as does all of the GPU integration*. My DAW also just works, no fiddling with the buffer to get rid of the crackling or to get it recognized.
• FL Studio: It’s not really FLS that I’m missing but rather I have a couple VSTs that absolutely won’t work in Linux, plus a huge amount of patches I built in those instruments. However, Bitwig kicks so much ass that it’s been worthwhile to try to rebuild those sounds inside Bitwig’s Grid.
• Inventor and AutoCAD: I hate Autodesk with the fury of a 1000 suns, but I know these apps cold and have a huge library of parts and assemblies. FreeCAD just ain’t there yet, and the new workbench menu has been an annoying learning curve. Inventor can handle enormous assemblies on my (previously running Win 10) laptop; FreeCAD still crashes when the object tree gets over a certain depth even on my burliest workstation. Assemblies in FreeCAD are a total mess too. I want to love FreeCAD and have great hopes for future versions.
• Suspend: one of my laptops won’t suspend correctly. Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it suspends, sometimes it goes into a weird middle state running at full throttle but the screen is dark and the keyboard is unresponsive even to REIUSB. I just always shut it down now, no BFD.

And despite all that, I don’t miss Windows at all.

*DRS was actually painless on Aurora Linux with my big workstation that only has a dGPU. All my computers with both iGPU and dGPU were more fiddly. I mostly blame Nvidia on this issue. I’m pretty sure the suspend problem is also an iGPU/dGPU thing and also blaming Nvidia for that.

This is me too. All the same t-shirts, pants, shoes (four pairs go to the cobbler for repair while one remains in use), socks, underwear. Getting dressed in the morning is zero-thought and always comfortable. My daily kit always fits on my person and I never have to fumble for anything. Pants repairs are consistent since they all wear out exactly the same way. The cobbler loves my repairs because it’s the same patterns for four left and four right shoes (just one pattern flipped).

I’m in Europe where restaurants and food are generally better regulated.

Ah, gotcha! That right there is an enormous game-changer, and I’m agree with everything you say here. The US food chain is straight-up toxic. You may know this already: the US allows food treatments that are outright banned in most other countries. My travels in Europe were a revelation; I can eat things over there that invariably sicken me here, most notably bread and raw eggs. I would probably dine out more too if I lived in Europe. :D

Totally fair and thank you for the elaboration.

Trying to learn by own practical experience in this day and age seems like a bit late to the party, though.

I’ll counter this point with: I think we’re in a golden age of home cooking. YouTube alone is a gold mine for technique development and refinement. That won’t do anything for your lack of interest though.

So tired of hearing this dumb fuck argument. Ordering food =/= fastfood.

Well that’s good, because I’m not talking about fast food; I don’t eat fast food. Ever. My point was about knowing what you’re putting into your body, knowing how it was sourced and prepped. Dining out is at least three layers of abstraction from that knowledge. I’ve spent a lot of time working in restaurants, including high end ones. Apart from zero-compromise, prix-fixe, tasting menu establishments, recipes are always built to a price point. More restaurants than not use Sysco, First Street, or other nasty industrial sourcing. Most restaurants source their meats directly or indirectly from IBP/Tyson because they cornered the market on meat at scale*. And that’s before factoring in time-saving shortcuts, like not washing produce and using Sysco bases. For just one example on the sourcing risks, at high end restaurant where I worked the pantry cooks had to wear gloves to receive and sort the produce because the pesticides and container treatment gave them rashes.

*IBP used to be a reliable, quality source despite being CAFO meats, and what I used in my own charcuterie business. After the acquisition by Tyson, shit went downhill almost overnight. I closed up operations because sourcing at that scale was no longer possible for me.

The amount of people that seem to think their little bit of homecooking can compete with professional chef’s is laughable.

A chef is a cost engineer and inventory manager. But I get your point: Sturgeon’s Law absolutely applies to most people’s kitchen results.

How does it not? It’s just a boring activity.

I sincerely asked, and I assume you are similarly sincere in asking.

For me, it’s an absolutely quotidian task, every aspect of which I approach mindfully and joyfully. Using a good knife, decent pans, a halfway decent grill/range/oven… the joy of using good tools skillfully cannot be overstated. I mean… where else in our days do we get to play with knives around people and they love the results? :D Woodworking, I guess, but you can’t eat those results.

I love everything about cooking:

• sourcing good local and seasonal ingredients
• prepping the ingredients properly and with the least waste
• layering flavor profiles
• creating a full sensory experience for myself and my circle
• understanding the underlying physics and chemistry at every step
• creating even a simple dish that appeals to all senses
• did I mention playing with knives?
• then getting to feed, nourish, and sate people with my craft… The experience of cooking takes the necessary and workaday task of sustaining ourselves and elevates it to an alchemical and spiritual level.

From a holistic, connected-to-the-land, tree-hugging hippie context, cooking takes the alchemy from Shit Wizards (AKA farmers) and transmutates those inputs into magical energy. Food nourishes the body; good cooking nourishes the soul. Gathering tribe around a meal that I made is even more fulfilling than the literal billions of people who, directly or indirectly, use the software I built.

From a biological context, knowing the provenance of my food is the culinary equivalent of using open source software. From an ethical living context, knowing that my food providers are using fair labor practices, compassionate animal welfare, and good land stewardship enables me to make food that I eat and share in good conscience. Also, garbage in, garbage out on every level. This is stuff you’re putting in your body. The body that carries around your brain, both of which ya kinda need to do other things you enjoy. Food is medicine, and so many ills I see, physical and otherwise, stem from poor food sourcing and prep.

From an efficiency, conservation, and creativity context:

• turning “waste” material into an amazing stock
• turning leftovers into an entirely new dish that utterly slaps
• that on-the-knife-edge, tuned-up feeling of bringing a meal together… it rivals playing live to a sold-out crowd
• doing more with the least amount of everything… give me a good knife, good cutting board, good produce stand, a saute pan, and a shitty butane burner, and I will crank out a meal for you that will get YOU laid :D
• the mind-body connection of skillfully wielding my tools in pursuit of an explicit and relatively immediate goal; it might take me years to build software, but it takes just an evening to make something that feeds my tribe

In the grand scheme of human experience, there are few things that everyone can do that fire on all sensory cylinders while delivering the spiritual high of creativity manifested. Cooking is something everyone can do.

Why does cooking suck for you?

Holy hell, I feel this viscerally. I recently inherited an enterprise codebase with a new job and that pic is exactly how I imagine the consulting company reacted after hand-off. The code is actually quite clean and mostly makes sense, but it’s completely undocumented (including a lack of specs and XML comments for endpoints). By and large, it’s mostly SOLID, but there are abstractions on abstractions, handlers for handlers for handlers. Configuring to run locally or against the dev environment is a huge rigamarole that I’m trying to simplify before trying to bring on any more SWEs. The bright spot here is that I’ve been given a long runway to come up to speed.

Government will always be abused and turned against the people so its power should be limited

Fully agreed. This is the nature of power. It is a problem as old as humanity, and there have been loads of attempted solutions to that end. Probably the oldest known is the Insulting the Meat Ritual in hunter-gatherer tribes to prevent hunters from becoming egotistical. Given the rarity of remaining hunter-gatherers, we can guess how that worked out.

Decentralization (why we’re here in the Fediverse, right?), social ownership of the economy, revocation of corporate privileges… all excellent goals to which we can aspire. It’s a bit hackneyed but the truism applies: think globally, act locally. On social ownership of the economy, may I suggest looking into timebanks? Join your local timebank if it exists; start one if it doesn’t. A lot of what timebanks (can) accomplish represents most of these ideals. Disclosure: I’m a founding board member and the treasurer of my local timebank, so I have a lot of bias for timebanks as one potential arrow in the quiver of effecting social change.

Does that answer your question?

Yes, thank you for the elaboration! I agree with your points regarding the police state. May I suggest Behind the Bastards’ 3-part on the history of policing (~2020 Jun 16)?The US has been a police state for more of its history than not. And the series underscores the Socialist tenets in your explanation: unions absolutely work. The police union in the US is ridiculously effective at protecting those “workers.” Too bad that union is protecting workers who stomp on the citizenry.

I will add that direct democracy prima facie sounds great, and I used to also hold this belief. We absolutely have the technology for a full direct democracy. The problems with direct democracy are legion, some of which we are seeing right now in the US with low-information voters. Now scale that up. The enormous volume of legislation and policy research on any single issue would stop most citizens dead in their tracks. Take international trade policy for example. My employer paid for me to study international trade compliance for five years. Ain’t nobody got time for that, and international trade policy hits all of us in the wallet, waistline, daily interactions, and health/wellness measures. We hoi-polloi still need to work, get dinner on the table, and do laundry. Voters should understand all of relevant issues at least at a cursory level, but wish in one hand, shit in the other… Hell, how many voters actually read the voter guides and research their local candidates? How many attend city council meetings?

If you want as direct a democracy as possible, focus your efforts at your local and state level. Small changes in your community have ripple effects. Get your neighbors and local social circle to educate themselves and attend. Connect with your local council and governing boards.

As @zxqwas@lemmy.world pointed out: don’t sweat the labels; choose the policies that appeal to your sensibilities. The labels and affiliations will shake out from there.

You keep repeating this, without going into any detail on what any of this means to you. How do you square economic equality with limited government? The former requires extremely strong and well-considered regulation with well-funded government agencies to stick it to corps and billionaires. Edit to add: also requires a strong, stiff-spined Legislative Branch, divorced from lobbying, divested from capital markets, with strict campaign finance reform. More regulation and agencies.

When someone says “I’m Libertarian,” the implicit translation is:

• I want to do any and all drugs I want (great, go for it; this is probably their only respectable plank, but enacted in isolation the consequences are dire)
• I want to fuck minors (eww)
• I don’t want to pay any taxes, but I still want all the trappings of a mutually beneficial society (“what do you mean my local roads are in disrepair, there’s no garbage pickup, and my neighbor poisoned my well with his unpermitted auto repair business?!”)
• AnCap FTW! (eww, again)

Libertarianism is an extremely naive political platform. Most people who subscribe to its ideals fail to investigate the history of Libertarian ideals in action. Speaking as a former, briefly Libertarian-voting individual, after diving into the planks of the platform, it quickly became clear that Libertarianism is antithetical to a functioning society.

Some people get their validation from sex. They might not even like the sex. In fact they probably don’t enjoy it but they do like that bit of validation.

It took me a few decades to get perspective, but then I encountered people with commitment issues, some of the more chaotic attachment style variants, and various traumas. “Ah, now I understand. You do you and be safe out there, neighbor.”

Oh, gawd, it’s a special kind of hell. My partner and I were ENM when we met, but mutually decided we preferred monogamy (long story). Over the past summer, we decided to dip our toes back into having sidepieces. And our tolerance for modern dating bullshit lasted all of three weeks.

We’re not monogamous because of societal norms; we’re monogamous because of zero tolerance for the state of dating. 😆

🤣 I swear, my double-entendre was completely unintentional. Thank you Internet stranger for the solid laugh!