Having a really low day... I could barely sleep last night, struggling with insomnia, ADHD, and pain.

Pain especially... it's finally starting to cool off a little and my chronic joint pain is through the roof, and I just got off a week of being sick with a cold.

I'm really depressed right now and feeling trapped. My car has been out of commission since February and my joint pain makes it hurt so much to walk places (and taking the bus still involves a significant amount of walking/standing)... so I've hardly left the house all year.

I hardly see anybody and I'm really lonely, if I didn't have my sibling living with me I don't know how I'd survive.

Please send some kind words to fight off the intrusive thoughts.

#disability #depression #ChronicPain

I'm pretty sure even AI supporters can agree we really need to institute some sort of laws around mandatory labeling of AI generated content.

#ai

Dear lord... I feel the need to sit people down and do a Copyright 101 class...

I just saw someone call Creative Commons a "type" of copyright...

Only half joking, if people would actually listen I'd do it in a heartbeat.

New landing page text on my server, would love some feedback (this is the text shown at https://foggyminds.com when not logged in):

Welcome To Foggyminds!

We have open registration!

We are a leftist instance aiming to just be a nice space to occupy on the fediverse. We welcome temporary exploratory accounts and small businesses.

We try to listen to minority voices. The admin is Disabled Jewish LGBTQIA, but tries to recognize that they still have white privilege. Please report any instances of bigotry, hate, or trolling, even if subtle, to our admin at shiri (at) foggyminds (dot) com. Especially if perpetrated by our admin.

You can view our public feed here and our blocklist as well as enabled addons are provided here. While we do not permit subtle bigotry on our instance we do not block other servers aggressively for it. We are more inclined to block problem accounts specifically unless it is endemic to the instance as we understand most users on that instance are likely blind to this. If this is unacceptable, we're more than happy to be a temporary place to help you find a safer instance.

Nazi's didn't just kill the Jews, we were just the biggest target. The other targets continued to get persecuted afterwards (LGBTQ people in concentration camps were taken straight to prisons after the war!)

But by god I will use Jewish-Privilege on the topic to break down misuse of Nazi threats (ie. misapplying the Nazi/Table quote).

Reminded deeply today of the subtle insidious racism of leftists and liberals.

So many in our communities are prone to believe that they've gotten rid of their racism, and instead fuel it by demanding ideological purity and by ignoring inconvenient truths.

When a minority group says something you're doing is racist, take a minute to stop and ask yourself what you might not be seeing. And if you really can't find anything, ask for more information (but try to figure it out for yourself first, it's both polite and good exercise).

#racism #leftism #liberals

@Friendica Admins I'm curious for feedback about other admin's setups. I know the default choice is apache, but how many are like me running nginx + php-fpm?

I'm curious what tips and tricks people have figured out? Has anyone settled on a good stable caching config? (Last time I set up caching I tried to limit it to just static files and images, but it somehow cached some of the regular pages it seems wondering if maybe one of those css or javascript files is actually dynamic?)

As it stands my setup is two nginx webservers behind an nginx load balancer, both running php-fpm, a shared nfs media storage directory, memcached on the database server for php sessions.

Been seeing the "Nazi Bar" analogy in regards to Twitter lately.

To recap: it's the suggestion that people remaining on Twitter are fascists or tolerating fascism for remaining much like those who visit a Nazi bar.

This is a privileged take and not a clean analogy. The bar is a non-vital space with plenty of competition, you don't have to drink, you don't have to go to that bar.

Twitter may not be as huge as Facebook and a little easier to move away from, but no place has really solidified itself as the place to go instead (despite what many think about Mastodon/Activity-Pub), and the communities still take time and effort to move.

On top of that, these places (yes FB included) have always been fascist leaning. It's just you finally hearing all the dog-whistles. So many of these communities were hearing the dog-whistles from the start but didn't have anywhere else to go, so they had to fight to establish themselves in what spaces they had.

Don't judge them for having difficulty moving and re-establishing in a new space when every space is a huge effort to claim. The fediverse isn't immune to racism and fascism, there's absolutely whole new fights to be had here against bigotry, especially the privileged neo-liberal sort.

Got me a site icon now, taken with permission from my sibling's art!

I should nab a bunch of their artwork to share here, especially since they offer prints.

Original:

Piece: Sad Girl (modified)
Artist: Devin Bailem (they/them)

Source Link

Quoted from a facebook post by user Elraen:

I’ve threatened this digital essay for some time, and now I feel like my timeline could use some nerdom, so the moment has come: it’s time for my full defense of Frodo. 😉
I remember when I was younger, I struggled to accept and understand why a lot of my peers found Frodo either forgettable or material for mocking. I understand it a little better now: the movies DO often make him not particularly likable or watchable. The book portrays him as someone who doesn’t seem to be experiencing a reasonable range of human expression/emotion, which admittedly can make him less compelling to read about. I understand that. But I also think it’s integral to the point of the character.
Frodo and Sam are necessary for understanding each other. Sam was a character cast from the mold that Tolkien learned on the frontlines of World War I. Tolkien saw Sam as the everyday hero, the embodiment of the simple good-hearted courage of the men he watched die in the trenches. Sam’s obstacles are exterior to himself: the geography. The threat of enemy soldiers (orcs), of Shelob, of his companion's physical and mental difficulties.
By contrast, Frodo’s obstacles are primarily internal. He endured a lot of those same exterior challenges as Sam, but Sam did much to absorb their impact (see the Cirith Ungol rescue). Frodo’s challenges are the slow, steady erosion of a soul being asked to carry a tremendous internal darkness without being consumed by it. Everything he was became laser-focused on that monolithic spiritual and emotional task.
This is why, at the end, Frodo had to sacrifice far more than Sam. Because Sam’s primary struggle was against external forces, once those external forces were alleviated, he could go home, marry, have children, live as a functional member of his community. For Frodo, the cessation of exterior pressure could do nothing to mend the way his soul had been burning from the inside out.
This is a hard thing to portray in movie form (the greatest weakness of the LotR movies is their inability to portray subtlety and spirituality, two traits the narrative Tolkien crafted requires). We see Frodo’s neck chapping from the actual physical weight of the Ring as a representation; well and good. But it’s hard to truly convey the immense mental weight, the crucible of enduring without utter collapse.
If Sam is a kind of patron saint for the good-hearted soldier, I would posit that Frodo is the patron saint of the depressed, the suicidal, the addicted, the ones living with trauma. We see it best maybe at Mount Doom, where Frodo’s very self has been ground down to nearly nothing: “No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.”
If you’d ever been deeply depressed, ever lived chained in the prison of PTSD, you will have experienced that exact same thing.
And of course that’s not always the most likable thing to read about or to watch. Mental anguish has a way of stripping away so many of the human details about you, even your personality itself.
"Frodo is a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror— broken down, and in the end made into something quite different,” J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote.
In another letter (#246, for the curious), Tolkien addressed the concern that had been posed to him that Frodo was a weak and failed hero, that his decision at Mount Doom proved it. “I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure,” Tolkien clarified. “At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum– impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted… I do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the breaking of his body would have been– say, by being strangled by Gollum, or crushed by a falling rock.”
Tolkien built into Frodo a validation of the internal struggle, marking it not as weakness, but ultimately even as a special kind of strength. Through the character of Frodo, Tolkien displayed that internal anguish, fear, and pain were not moral failings. He might not have known it, but Tolkien was building an incredibly beautiful fictitious case study on the impact of trauma on the soul and the human ability to endure.
“Frodo undertook his quest out of love– to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task,” Tolkien summarized. “His real contract was only to do what he could, to try to find a way, and to go as far on the road as his strength of mind and body allowed. He did that.”
And for any of us carrying a weight of horror, trauma, grief, dread, anxiety, depression, despair— maybe our hope is the same. To do what we can. To know that, even when our minds give out under the tremendous weight, we are still enough.