Mastema

Ooh! Which one? I'm now excited on your behalf!

Great minds, as they say! 😁 Once you read one of those, send me a message and let me know how you like it!

I highly recommend anything by Becky Chambers. Her Monk and Robot series is the definition of cozy fiction and the space series is also very low stakes, but engaging. I would also recommend the fantasy books, Legends and Lattés, about an orc who stops adventuring to open a coffee shop, and the prequel, Bookshops and Bonedust, which should actually be read after Legends.

Thanks for this! This is how I'm going to refer to the reddit incident from now on!

Getting back into weightlifting and starting to meditate. I highly recommend both things and I also highly recommend not stopping the weightlifting once you start. Everything hurts.

This is true, but on a personal level I have no idea how to do the calculus for, "My work is killing people, but it would have been worse if it hadn't." I think the show "The Good Place" got it right and it is just too interconnected and complicated to actually derive an answer as to whether an action is net negative or positive. That said, if I had to place money on a given action being negative, working for an arms manufacturer would be one I'd be fairly comfortable betting on.

I think this question boils down to this: Do your actions have a net positive or a net negative affect on the world? Does working at this company in some way offset the harm that the company is doing downstream? In this case I have a hard time coming up with a reasonable way in which this might be the case. Paying you and your family to have stuff doesn't offset causing actual death and physical harm.

Yeah... This one hurts to agree with. I'm going to go rethink my life now...

Astrill is the only consistent one and I have to server hop at times.

For commercial offerings this is probably true for at least some of them, but creating your own VPN isn't terribly difficult if you are serious about your privacy. I typically just use them when I travel to countries like China where I can't get to a bunch of necessary services, so I don't mind if they route my YouTube traffic through CIA headquarters, but if I was doing anything more than that I would just set up my own.

Wow! Thanks for this! I really enjoyed it!

Allegorical humor is the best humor!

-Plato, probably.