Hmm… as a Buddhist, the goal is realization that every identity, including ‘human’, is not real. So, I think your first step is pretty spot on actually. Letting go of what is expected of me is certainly my biggest challenge. I am a caregiver by nature and place a lot of pressure on myself to take care of everyone and everything around me, often to my own detriment. Thank you for the reminder.

Hello, I would like to subscribe to your “dancing through the world with glee” newsletter. That is the ideal state, as far as I’m concerned, and most of my practice is focused on getting there.

I’ve sort of run the gamut, but I spent several years as a Hare Krishna that informed most of my current practice - I’m glad I did it and learned a whole lot but there is damage to undo.

Currently I practice my own homebrew blend of Discordianism and Buddhism. Since I came from a high-demand environment, I reject the idea of spiritual authority now - no teachers, no gurus, no organizations. My practice is not beholden to anyone. I also reject the idea of dogma, which is not out of bounds in Buddhism when you consider the hundreds of sutras that directly contradict each other. Buddhists know they cannot all be true, you take what works and leave the rest.

One thing that I heard at a dharma talk once was “write your own sutra.” Start with “This I have heard. One day, the Buddha was teaching…” this and that student was there, someone asks a question, the Buddha answers. The speaker encouraged everyone who had a question they were struggling with to write a sutra, ask the Buddha, and see how he answers. I liked this approach so I’ve written several sutras myself. I write, I meditate, and I do mantra chanting as my primary day to day practice.

I have been pagan in the past, before I came to dharmic practice, so I’m open to a lot of different ideas. I do sometimes do chaos magick in the form of sigils, and I do some deity work, mostly tantric. I read tarot, but only for myself. I’m very open, generally, to all forms of sincere practice, and when pressed on my beliefs, I paraphrase Robert Anton Wilson and say “I don’t believe anything but I can imagine quite a bit.”

Edit: It’s a little stream-of-consciousness and silly, but if you’d like an insight into my practice, https://chaosbuddha.org/.

Honest question; why would someone need a touchscreen, or a display at all beyond a battery indicator, on their earbuds case?

“That’s why we build the wall, we build the wall to keep us free!”

I use fish mainly just for the quality of life increase that its predictive features and command history give. I also really like that it uses functions to play the role of aliases, and it’s super easy to write and save new functions on the fly.

That said… I haven’t put in the time to really learn its nuances and I still write shell scripts using bash. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but it works for me.

It started off pretty well but all day today I’ve been fighting with my health insurance (again) because they have decided they don’t want to cover an essential medication that my partner has been on for years (again). Things are moving forward, our primary doctor just gave us over a month’s worth of samples so we won’t run out while we fight, and they are compiling documentation to make a case. I’ve never had to fight to have meds covered like I have with our prescription provider this year, it’s the worst. I had to fight them earlier this year to get them to cover long-acting insulin. Insulin! Ridiculous.

Other than that, can’t complain.

“How do you sleep at night? You obviously don’t own a My Pillow.”

Wow, that was cringe.

I did Startpage, then self-hosted searx for a while, then switched back to Startpage, and recently subscribed to Kagi, which I very much enjoy. I do not mind paying a provider for search built with the user in mind rather than their advertisers.

There’s a Firefox addon called “Add custom search engine” which will allow you to add a local instance of searx.

You’ll want to give it the full search query, with %s where the search string goes. for you, it’ll be something like:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/search?q=%s

This is really weird. The AI stuff is weird, but also, this zoo is local to me, and it’s weird that somewhere just up the road a bit is making national news because of this. I’ve fed their giraffes many times; I haven’t been there since the spotless one was born, though.

I have a pretty straightforward solution. I keep a text file called ‘todo’ in my Syncthing sync folder, and I added ‘cat Sync/todo’ to my Fish greeting.

I didn’t know, so I went and looked. There is indeed an option to record calls.

It’s an android, so yes. Spotify, Deezer, YT Music are all options.

Oof, yeah. The 3310s are basically bricks now with so many carriers discontinuing 3G service. Nokia makes a couple of 4G feature phones, the 225, the 6300, and the 2780 Flip. The 225 runs S30, the 6300 and 2780 run KaiOS so they have some app support like a web browser, but functionality is very limited. And you won’t get good photos out of any of them.

If you’re looking for privacy, look into the Fairphone. If you’re looking for a feature-rich phone that will force you to use it a lot less, look into Sunbeam. They run a stripped-down variant of Android with only the most basic functions.

I got a Unihertz Titan Pocket earlier this year, I highly recommend those too, though they run Android 11 so if you are serious about privacy you’ll probably want to do some degoogling. Its camera is… okay.

I have some stuff at work that requires 2fa too. I have an old iphone with no SIM in it in my office, I use it for authentication and that’s it :)

I used a dumbphone for quite a while last year and honestly loved it. I have a small collection of them at this point since they are relatively inexpensive.

Today I use a Unihertz Titan Pocket which is technically an android, but looks like a Blackberry. I’ve gotten a bunch of comments on it. It will certainly do more than I need, but I’ve disabled the play store and use it mostly like a dumb phone, with the exception of streaming music, which the dumbphones obviously wouldn’t do. I bought a dedicated mp3 player for that purpose, so that’s not the feature that brought me back.

I switched because while I could absolutely use the dumbphone to do everything I needed to do, group texts were ultimately the thing that brought me back to an android. Though it’s been a known issue for many years, group texting on Nokia’s feature phones is just bad… when it works at all. I still keep an eye on the dumbphone market and will absolutely switch back when group text messages are sorted out.

I left Thunderbird ultimately because of dwindling O365 support. How is it now? My work and school emails are all O365, because evidently companies think Microsoft is the only option.

“Dad, don’t call me Jeezy Creezy! Holy Ghost, this is not an episode of Scooby Doo!”

This may be true, but how much time does it take to surface to avoid decompression sickness if they are found? This, of course, assumes that the surface in the same vehicle.