Note: this is a copy/paste because I am so incredibly worn out emotionally I've been sobbing since Sunday over the whole situation. But what use is having a gofundme if I don't get it in front of people.
I hate spamming this out, but it's the only way this works, especially on AP-Fedi.
Gist is I need to get out of the state for my safety, and that's easier said than done with my disabilities, debts, and other limits.
My lease is up in mid-October, I really want to be able to just go straight from here to Washington State and even 2/3rds of this goal will make that happen... but the clock's ticking.
I've got to move to someplace safer, but it means leaving behind most of my chosen family.
I know we'll stay in touch... but with everyone being poor that means the vast majority of them I'll never see again.
I don't want to fucking go... but I see the writing on the wall, and I remember all those stories from Jewish history of people who thought "It's not going to get that bad" right up until the gestapo kicked down their doors.
A part of me just wants to say "fuck it all" and stay, let them strip me down to nothing and kill me slowly and painfully... but for just a few more days with the people I love... but I also know they worry about me and it'll break them if I don't try to keep myself safe, so I've got to push through this.
I rely on them to push me to take care of myself often, I trust them and I know the urge to give up is partially rooted in my own fatalism toward my life... but dear god if this doesn't feel like preparing to amputate a limb...
If anyone wants to help make it a little easier... can't change the pain but can change how difficult the task is that I'm dealing with alongside this pain...
@cstross I was a student network tech at university and was helping a new student name T. Este get networking setup. Once successful, they asked if I could also do anything about their unfortunate email prefix, teste2 (they weren't the first teste!). I told them that I could not, but they were welcome to take it up with the university president, David Hardesty. Or... dhardest.
@justindz @cstross our student logins at my middle school were the first letter of your first name plus the first three letters of your last name, which was very unfortunate for C. Unterberger
@potpie @cstross @justindz In undergrad the default was first initial, last name, and you couldn’t change it. Poor T. Watkins went a couple weeks before someone told her. She ran into the IT office just bawling (I knew people there). They made an exception and changed it.
@justindz @cstross we did first initial last name, falling back to first two if there was a collision. There was already a cjones, so Ca... Jones got the fallback.
She did manage to convince them to use another username, though.
in the UK civil service, documents were changed/approved with the initials of the first two Christian names and surname. So my Dad (Henry William Preedy) signed HWP. His friend, Peter Ian Gowans, wasn't so lucky...
I hate spamming this out, but it's the only way this works, especially on AP-Fedi.
Gist is I need to get out of the state for my safety, and that's easier said than done with my disabilities, debts, and other limits.
My lease is up in mid-October, I really want to be able to just go straight from here to Washington State and even 2/3rds of this goal will make that happen... but the clock's ticking.
Since this is spreading pretty aggressively, just going to stick my gofundme here. I hate spamming it but I really need to get out of Texas for my safety: gofundme.com/f/assist-a-jewish…
I hate spamming this out, but it's the only way this works, especially on AP-Fedi.
Gist is I need to get out of the state for my safety, and that's easier said than done with my disabilities, debts, and other limits.
My lease is up in mid-October, I really want to be able to just go straight from here to Washington State and even 2/3rds of this goal will make that happen... but the clock's ticking.
All the constant of self absorbed people who are convinced that the ideal network is one hostile to regular people and considers bullshit ideological purity a higher priority than actual connection or accessibility...
I'm seriously considering just shutting down this server and moving to Bluesky proper because apparently a massive corporate network has a lower self-absorbed douche quotient than here...
I desperately don't want to be stuck on another fucking corp network destined for enshittification... but why fucking bother when every single effort to make AP fedi more accessible is met by mass hostility of people who are terrified that it'll become less of a social clique catering to their egos...
Seriously, AP-Fedi is democratically self-enshittifying...
@Cory Doctorow honestly, just curious what your thoughts are... I know you favor AP and pretty much for all the same reasons I do... but what about things like the hostility to any large entity connection, any large migration of users, bridges, and basically any effort to open up things so people can experience less friction in their connections when they join (ie. being able to just choose AP-Fedi platform over a place like Bluesky and not having to split their friendgroup because they picked one or the other...)
Like I feel like features are enshittified here by users who believe that the fediverse must conform to their ideals, that all new users even on servers other than theirs must bend to their expectations. Hell, the fact that there are many who will literally tell you they're actively against the network growing and they work hard to sabotage anything that contributes toward growth...
I know it's not quite the right usage of the word, but frankly it feels like a worse version than the corporate bullshit... fucking me over for profit honestly starts to feel better than fucking me over because of a demand for social control and ideological purity...
@pluralistic I don't think you can create a place according to your ideology of carte blanche openness without implying an equal amount of hostility. I'll take the fedi brand of hostility any day. People having great ideologies is attractive to me. Expecting everyone to love me is delusional IMO.
@rood @Cory Doctorow I don't expect people to love me, and it's not carte blanche... it's just an overwhelming amount of mass hostility to regular people being able to join.
Like the Bluesky bridge is the biggest example to me, the guy got dogpiled hard when he started talking about it even though he was building it using the same methodology of all other bridges pretty much as long as there have been bridges. He was outright bullied into making the bridge drastically worse by making it opt-in only... and all those people who dogpiled him? all those servers blocked it anyways because they weren't going to be happy either way... so the bridge became drastically worse for the people who wanted to use it and the people were upset weren't affected either way.
And their primary complaint the whole time? Their privacy... of their public fucking posts on a federated network. It's like putting a sign in your yard and getting pissed that someone driving by could see it.
So for me it's like pulling teeth to connect with my friends and family who went with Bluesky because of a bunch of jackasses who were never going to be affected by the whole situation anyway. And people I try to convince to join the fediverse? Bridge is basically useless as an accessibility tool... they go to Bluesky because that's where other people went and the bridge is a useless argument.
There's having differences of opinion, and then there's mass open hostility.
@Cory Doctorow @roodall I want is to just be able to not be fucking isolated from my friends and family and at the same time not be under the thumb of a major corporation.
I FUCKING HATE FACEBOOK AND ALL THE CORPORATE NETWORKS but they're infinitely more worthwhile because THAT'S WHERE PEOPLE ARE.
And any effort to get people out is met with open and broad hostility like the fucking fedipact bullshit.
@Cory Doctorow @rood also ftr, this is brought on by someone judging people still on facebook as supporting fascism... someone I know is one of those server ops blocking bridges and thus making it harder for people to leave fucking facebook...
I think it's fair to have strong ideas about design, and also to have aesthetic preferences for certain affordances, but the problem comes when people mistake these consumption choices for being matters of ideological significance.
It's the neoliberal fetish for personal politics, curdling in on itself:
*All those people having fun on Bsky are making bad consumption choices, and moreover, making good consumption choices requires them to have the same aesthetics as me. I may be a humanist, but people who make bad consumption choices due to their poor aesthetics are sabotaging our only hope of making things better (because things only get better as the result of aggregated individual consumption choices, not because of regulation or policy or power or politics) so they are the enemy.*
I think the answer to Bluesky being a fun place at risk of corporate sabotage is to remove that risk (by making Bluesky federation and bridging real), not by convincing people that they don't really like Bluesky and they should use the Fediverse instead.
@Cory Doctorow thank you so very much for replying, I really look up to you and your voice on topics, plus I know alot of people on the fediverse respect you... so it's really affirming while I'm in a mini-meltdown over the whole situation.
It's been really really hard lately being a disabled trans-woman in Texas whose disabilities keep her very socially isolated. And it's so painful and hard to push for better and seeing people rally behind "You're a fascist if you don't cut off your friends and family and everything that gives you a reason to live"... like I run my own server here because I believe in it that much...
So thank you very much for making me feel a little less alone.
PS: with the way things are these days, with all the fascism and likely holocaust 2 I'm constantly recommending Little Brother as an accessible introduction to secure connection and opsec.
So last night, for the first time, I've heard the label Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM), and through it also found Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory (OGM)... both of which are labels for something that's distressed me for a long time...
While it doesn't make it any less distressing, it does make it easier to communicate, find other people with similar experiences, and just generally make it less a vague thing I'm dealing with.
In my own words: I don't really feel like I keep my life... I struggle with individual memories, and where I do remember things it's vague and more a third person academic understanding that it happened. I don't relive those moments when I think about them, I just kinda know they happened.
It feels like every day is page one of the story and my whole life prior is exposition rather than something I was really there for...
Definitions as I understand them: SDAM - Memories are impersonal and without detail, described in some places as "third person perspective". This means you can remember an event happens, but when remembering you can't see much detail and can't relive feelings.
OGM - Instead of recalling specific events, it means you mostly only recall general memories like repeated events or things that span over extended periods. ie. with someone you talk to often being able to remember "how the conversations go" but you struggle to communicate specifics about any one conversation.
This is the first I hear of OGM.... and it might actually help explain the other side of my memory... I thought those 2 things would be the same but it's good to know they're not...
@Gwen, the Fops yeah, made last night into a double oof for me. At first I thought they were maybe different terms for the same thing but dug a little deeper and it's two completely different things that together basically leave you one step away from amnesia 😅
I have a task reminder on my phone for showers because I don't really feel it until it gets grimy (and my sense of smell is kinda broken). Plus I had to dish out a subscription to one because it's the rare task app that does relative deadlines (ie. instead of every 3 days for a task, it's 3 days since the task was last completed), because time blindness and memory issues means if I miss a reminder I can convince myself I just did it yesterday when it was actually a week ago. But a reminder where I actually did it yesterday just leads to me ignoring the reminder. On top of all that is the executive dysfunction where I can get distracted and just not do things until I don't have the spoons to do them.
State of my apartment is painfully shameful and is a reflection of my stress and depression... I simply don't have the spoons to keep up with all but the most critical of cleaning. It's a lot of executive function spoons to start cleaning in the first place, let alone juggle the array of things to clean. That's before even getting to the physical exhaustion and pain of standing and bending all coming from my physical disability.
... If you've visited me in my home, know that I'm ashamed and just swallowing it because the isolation is worse than the shame.
... I've got to love that I occasionally find myself in deeply technical discussions with people who probably make 2-4 times as much as I do doing just these things...
And here I am struggling because...
... it's a rare workplace I don't have a personality clash with, regardless of how hard I try to mask...
... I have no capacity for marketing and too much anxiety for the inconsistencies of contract work...
... and too much workplace instability trauma to move from my current job unless forced...
I wish UBI was a thing so I could just dive in to open source projects and not spend most of my time either working or recovering from work...
I've come to accept I'm a good, if unpolished, programmer. (Not that I have the confidence to feel like I'm good) I really only program in python now, but I used to routinely learn new programming languages.
I've come to accept I'm a really good linux admin.
... and I work in billing for a barely afloat trucking brokerage making $22/hour.
Why drugs are wreaking havoc on the prison system – Channel 4 News
Methods the drugs are coming in include drones & being thrown over the wall. I can see the possibility of prisons needing to be covered by netting. channel4.com/news/why-drugs-ar…
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new breakaway party will only boost Nigel Farage, Neil Kinnock warns | The Independent independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli…
When it's really bad... depression feels a lot like freezing to death...
Things becoming more and more sluggish, slowly shutting down... you start losing feeling in the outer edges of yourself.
Even if you're not suicidal... it still feels like it'll eventually kill you, like one day you'll lose everything you are and just become an empty husk...
Even the incredible love of my family feels like curling myself around a small candle for warmth at times...
And when it gets really bad... you're faced with the overwhelming urge to just lay down and fall asleep, regardless of the consequences.
I know I'll make it through the other side... but sometimes I wonder how many (metaphorical) fingers or toes I'll lose before I get there...
Access to Work: cuts to support putting employment out of reach – Channel 4 News
So disabled benefits that help disabled people to work (PIP) is getting cut to force disabled into work AND support in work to enable them to work is being cut. Make it make sense. channel4.com/news/access-to-wo…
Edit: because it seems like people are confused, I'm not asking for clarity in how to talk about these things. Just commenting on how much of our language is dominated by allistic norms and an amusing joking idea. I have no interest in "here's how to make it clear you're asking someone on a date" and any comments in that vein will just contribute to a now forming headache...
Random half-joking idea with my sibling when talking about how dumb the differences are between hangout and date are (pretty much arbitrary definitions).
Idea crossed my mind of, we need an explicitly autistic language. Y'know, one where intents are part of the conjugation.
Honestly don't talk about this much because I don't expect to get heard...
Almost no protest happening right now in the US is doing anything more than defusing protests that can actually work.
I'm not saying protests don't work, I'm not saying nonviolent protests don't work... I'm saying current protest tactics accomplish nothing toward the ends they're pursuing.
Protests work in one of two ways: * They draw attention to an issue people are unaware of * They are a threat that if things don't change they'll get worse
All we do is the first, and it doesn't work because everybody already knows. They either have heard the message and can't do anything or they don't care, alternatively they thing it's all made up/blown out of proportion/etc and there's no way to show them proof of that by showing up to a protest.
The largest protests of our time made for symbolic, but ultimately fruitless victories. They got so big that they accidentally crossed into threat territory and they sent in the cops to shut it down... and because they were met entirely with passive non-violence, the threat disappeared as soon as they had a symbolic victory. They threw a few token scraps and made a show of enacting changes that they gradually rolled back within a year or two.
The second option also doesn't mean we go out there throwing molotovs right now...
It means we go out there saying "stop what you're doing or we'll give you a real problem to deal with". And it doesn't just mean violence against people, it can absolutely be violence against objects and institutions. It means burning down cop cars, it means sabotaging ICE vehicles, it means smashing the windows of businesses that donate to or provide support to cops and crooked politicians.
And more important than the actual violence and harm is the simple threat... "Fix this, or we escalate".
I'll leave it there because I know I'll already get so many people preaching the propaganda that violence never solves anything, that all we have to do is politely ask loud enough and they'll turn from their evil ways like life is some saturday morning cartoon.
I hate seeing people calling current events "unprecedented".
What's happening is absolutely and horrifyingly precedented. If you think it's unprecedented you either know nothing of history, the meaning of that word, or you refuse to believe the reality of what's happening right now.
The celebrity Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors being some of the best ones is like the retail equivalent of having to go to a restaurant and order a rootin tootin yeehaw cowboy burger or something
Sharing again, Charlie is my sibling and has helped me through so much. And Lucy has helped them through even more.
Every life matters, and Lucy is my fur niece even if I've never met her in person. Please if you have the space help her get back her health and my sibling keep their home intact when they're already struggling before this.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Shiri Bailem • •If anyone wants to help make it a little easier... can't change the pain but can change how difficult the task is that I'm dealing with alongside this pain...
gofundme.com/f/assist-a-jewish…