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Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.

As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.

Thank you and happy chatting!

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I remember seeing someone mention there is a Mastodon instance for Hexbear, but I don't remember what it was called. I got kind of bothered by the one I was on (kolektiva.social has a lot of cool rad people but it also has too many unserious people with "tankies fuck off" in their bio), and someone I want to follow blocked the entire kolektiva instance because he was getting harassed by too many racists from there, so I'm looking to make a new account. Hexbear has proven to be the best part of the fediverse I've found so far and it'd be nice to make my new Mastodon account there too.

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Build-a-bear - yes the actual company and not a generic competitor - has a section for 18+ they call "After Dark".

Now this is all actually pretty tame stuff. They don't sell little accessory dildos. But they have some interesting choices.

Would you like your bear to have some exciting underwear?

Or a cute little crop top expressing a specific inner feeling?

Maybe your bear is a hot stylish mature bear.

And of course to help everyone relax into the evening, you could provide martinis, or maybe something for special occassions.

Also... I have questions.

But at least we can all engage in that greatest of nerd arguments, weighing in on a debate of leader versus leader.

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It feels incredible. With the organization for 10+ years, in the role for 6+ years. I got passed over for a promotion I was overqualified for because my shithead boss, with his beautiful mind, calculated that promoting me would mean twice the paperwork (having to fill my old position). Who cares that it would have meant a 20% raise and increased stability to me. Not to mention all the attendant exploitation in a anti-labor / zero social safety net state normalizing a continuous stacking of projects and responsibilities on people.... because "where are they gonna go?" The answer might surprise you!

To be fair, I have been feeling the unstable vibes here for a few years and been casually putting out applications for other jobs. Like maybe once every month or so, when some new fresh idiocy drives me to tweak and submit my resume somewhere.

Not even 4 weeks after my application was ignored, I got offered a job in a strong union state in the public sector. And not just offered, they said after the panel interview that I blew the competition away. The way my bosses and overseers have treated me here, alongside the limited bites in applications over the year, was starting to wear me down that I started wondering if maybe they had a point.... like maybe I'm not that valuable. So it feels nice to have someone interview me, look over my body of work/portfolio, and say, "Wow, yes please!" Not to mention, there's a real future for me in terms of formal professional development, job grade advancement, and time-in-position compensation bumps. Because, there's a union in a pro-union state! All shit my previous employer had foreclosed on, because no union and anti-union state.

Anyway, suffice to say, I took it and they are being super chill about remote-until-relocation, offering to help etc. I put in my official notice to my boss 24 hours ago (no response lmao) and workfriends/collaborators who are all sad to see me go, super happy for me, or some combo of both. They all get it.

I am doing what I can for the people I work with to cover their asses with their own bosses, but I know >80% of the plates I've been spinning are going to come crashing down over the 6 months after I'm gone. I tried for years to have get the bosses to support cross-training and redundancy, even under the principle of "what if I die in a car accident?" but they ignored me. One of the reasons I am going so far away from this organization is so the bosses will have no social capital to fuck with me at my new place of employment and try to backchannel / pull strings to get me to keep those things maintained once the angry emails and calls start coming in from stakeholders. Hell, I'm not even telling them where I'm going. They can ask their subordinates if they want to know. LOL

Anyway peeps. I know the job search is the worst, but I had a good story and wanted to share.

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It’s amazing just how bad the loneliness, the anxiety can manifest physically. It feels like I’m on fire. It’s not “real” pain but it’s almost unbearable. Holy shit.

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I'm feeling better now that I am doing drugs

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If you are white collar then it's going to "disrupt" your field.

I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn't at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI "optimization" has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.

In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn't a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It's a wasteland.

I've been told to "go back to school." I'll be 41 soon. I'm still paying off my computer science degree. It's worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don't care. They'll do it anyways.

When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It'll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.

What is to be done?

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So I've had it pretty good over the years. I've lived here and there for school and work but right now I live at home with my parents. I haven't really had to pay attention to money for a while. My life kinda fell apart during covid and my ability to maintain money has reduced dramatically.

I'm bleeding cash rn despite my advantages. I walk dogs for maybe 30-40 hrs a week. It does not pay whatever bills I have, and it does not pay for independent living (I live with my parents in a high cost of living area).

At this point I'd be good with anything except retail and gig work. I can to back to school/trade school to learn a specific skill. Personally, I hate all work. I'm looking at plumbing as a possibility.

I'm depressed and just opening a job board fills me with more dread and despair than anything I have ever experienced. This has always happened to me. (30yo).

Any suggestions? I don't need an extravant life. I just want to pay the bills without worrying about the next bill. My plan is to move somewhere cheaper, but also a state that isn't shit. Maybe Maine? Or Chicago IL.

233
 
 

I don’t remember the context. I believe I was getting ice cream when a man handed me a newspaper with a political cartoon of a fat Castro drooling with a knife and fork in each hand, while some scrawny, stick figure-like Cuban guy is cowering in fear

234
 
 

Anytime I start to feel slightly good about my future reality comes by to kick me in the nuts

I have not felt happy about anything in my real life in a lasting way for over 20 years now

235
 
 

Any dropout fans in the chat? The Circle is this houses guilty pleasure show, and this Game Changer finale had me rolling.

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My cause being collecting all the mtg commander decks. It wasn't exactly a voluntary donation but sometimes you have to help corporations be socially responsible.

237
 
 

Can't beat the cleanliness allegations now!

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I want to throw out a quick tactic in rhetoric for this particular line because it is so common but is often bungled by comrades online and in real life and the counter is easy. Allow me to illustrate through a hypothetical conversation between a comrade (C) and a liberal (L):

L: I don't hate immigrants, I'm against ILLEGAL immigration.

C: Okay, what if I could pass one law that would get rid of all illegal immigration overnight and there would be no more in the future ever again. Once you hear it you'll understand exactly why illegal immigration could be eliminated this way. Would you support it?

L: Sure, sounds great.

C: I would make ALL immigration legal. Every immigrant would from now and forevermore be automatically approved and put through the process to longer term residency or citizenship status.

Posing your fix to immigration like this immediately exposes the lie that they don't hate immigrants. The next sentences out of their mouths will be why some immigrants are not worthy or how this is unthinkable (even though it has been the norm for 99.9% of human history). It's such an easy retort. It's leftist. It jumps right into the contradiction their ideology holds.

Now of course they will try and dig into details but it's important not to ever get bogged down in details of how such a policy would work. Of course, as a mental exercise for yourself it might be fun to think about but the details of the policy are irrelevant. The point here is they hate ILLEGAL immigrants. You can propose to get rid of the ILLEGAL parts. Would they welcome all immigrants who are LEGAL? No, of course they will not. It is important to keep reiterating, "but they will be legal and those are the immigrants you like."

As with all rhetorical tools it will not convince most people. The goal with using rhetoric and responding to rhetoric is often not to convince the person you are interacting with. It is to put them in an uncomfortable position while appealing to an audience.

I like this one because it plays into everything most liberals and even many conservatives don't want to admit: their anti-immigration ideology is racist and they can try and hide behind the law all they like but they cannot once that shield is stripped from them. Of course, that means that this kind of rhetorical retort is useful in for some other policies as well. I often like to propose legalization when someone says they don't like the ILLEGAL aspect of something. They are almost always using that to shield racism, classism, or some other form of sociological bigotry.

Hope this helps.

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My dumb ass didn't back up /usr and lost some wallpapers, share your desktop wallpapers in this thread

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From 0-45 years of age, I consider anything that qualifies in that, young...

Further from that, and you're very old...

Other than that, it's funny to think that:

one, the leading figures of the counterculture were born from the Silent Generation (1928-1944), rather than the Baby Boomers (1945-1965).

i.e. Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale, born in 1936

Jerry Rubin, born in 1938

two, anyone I've known that was born in the 1970s, will soon be beyond over 45 years of age...

lastly, it's 2024, more than 20 years after the 2000s...

P.S I'm not that old, I'm just thinking of the timelines, yk...

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Basically people arguing on World of Warcraft LFG chat (on EU servers) about whether they should be racist to all Russians or just to hate the government, with people being like 'bUt I JuSt dOn'T uNdErStAnD wHy sO mAnY pEoPLe VoTeD fOr hiM'. I then chimed in and said all of the American war criminals running the country were also voted in, and then also said that 'if not for the balancing effect of Russia, the entirety of Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East would look like Cambodia, Vietnam and Iraq, and who would stop us? Western Europe? lol'

Lots of angry responses and whispers from Western European players ensued, it was hilarious

242
 
 

At first things made some sense. I was doing anything I wanted. It was basically a lucid dream. It was some weird resort or casino. But then quickly, as the hallucination (it was hypnagogia, not a dream), I start noticing weird anomalies. Like faces getting somewhat distorted, people’s speech being random word salads (not garbled gibberish, but just random strings of words that don’t make any sense yet people’s visible behavior indicate everything is normal). Then suddenly I realize all that events that had happened thus far is happening again but in reverse order. Although I still had autonomy to move on my own, I was compelled the backtrack through previous locations.

One location was some kind of flight simulator. The first time the aircraft crashed or some sort which released toxic simulated fumes. I didn’t think too much but when things reoccurred the second time, I started asking if this was supposed to happen and whether I can stop holding my breath. The people I was encountering again at the location with the flight simulator cubicle were not happy and began getting agitated, still spitting word salads, and walking menacingly towards me.

I start feeling this awful, painful, ambient static electric shock going through my body. Suddenly my sister barges into the room in the middle of the repeating hallucination. She starts yelling, and I suddenly became even more disturbed because I didn’t remember her being there at the start of the hallucination and she was the only one speaking coherently seemingly defying the logic of the world I’m in.

She was confused and angry and asking what the hell is going on in the dream scape. I told her I didn’t know but I was feeling an awful electrical shock passively building up in me. She dismisses it as nonsense and starts running towards her room to get something. Desperate to not be alone again in this hell world and wanting to prove I’m not crazy, I follow her and as she’s going through her rack of clothes, static starts making more noise, the pain becomes even more unbearable, and the clothes start moving around the way a plastic wrap or balloon moves in reaction to electricity. I back up from her room and suddenly the same electrical force starts moving the closet door, and my sister “oh hell nah I’m not pushing in that door” and runs downstairs outside onto our porch and sits down on the steps.

I follow her and as I open the door and try to call her, the house door separates and starts levitating and twisting in different directions. I see a man in a blue shirt in a wheel chair rolling across my lawn, and he stares right at me and says “LOOK AWAY FROM ME” so I quickly looked back at the floating door.

I tell my sister that the damn door is floating but she doesn’t say anything, just sits there. I yell something again, and she turns around. I couldn’t recognize her face, or if you could even call it a face, and suddenly she’s spewing a word salad like the other people I’ve encountered.

I woke up and realized less than 10 minutes have passed yet it felt like an eternity.

No im not high. Just extremely sleep deprived.

i think I just tapped into my subconscious being fearful of being unemployed as a soon-to-graduate computer science major. Perhaps it was also another Boeing whistleblower doing an SOS astral projection warning me that he’s in danger.

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This is a war on pride.

They'll literally tell you "Happy pride!" instead of "Merry Queersmas!" because they want to destroy our traditional queer values and I am not gonna take it anymore!!

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banger show

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Job hunting sucks. Got rejected for the one I was posting about after 3 interviews, but I did find a pet care company that needs a project manager. Had a screening call with them yesterday, hope to hear back soon!

Trying not to get too down or worry about things too much.

Whats some cool shit you have going on? Im hanging outside with the pup playing on my Retroid rn

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thanks so much for letting me into hexbear and I’m super excited to be here now so when we do revolution my hubby went to work I’m drinking wine and Im ready to do communism now

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work laptop lets me post you fuckers are in for me being mildly annoying

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I know a couple reddit mods IRL, and they're both business owners who can take time away and volunteer for hours a day on their phones. I've also seen enough Facebook mods, where you can see the uni and school they went to and its posh as fuck.

I'm definitely very supportive of modding. I think it's super that people volunteer their time to make communities safer. I just see that often those with the free time time have more income. One obvious example is Wikipedia, like the administrators are often there for much of the day. I know that there's a lot of Amerikan funding of Wikipedia editors, and this just makes it worse. I can't give up hours of every day to correct an obvious error, because there's some chud that's online 16 hours a day, who will revert any edit, and flood any noticeboard with tediousness.

I guess it applies to a lot of democracy "leadership" positions. Ideally workers would be filling those roles, but often we're too worn out to do much other than just show up.

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