There’s some reckless recommendations to try psychedelics in here; be cautious with things classified under that name, because there are some VERY nasty chemicals getting pumped out by mafia chemists (some of whom work for large pharma corporations) and pushed under the name of relatively benign substances.

So first off, be sure you know what chemical is actually in the specific pill/blotter/tab you are considering eating.

Second, once you know what you’re dealing with, understand the cautions and protocols involved in using that particular one. I won’t start rattling them off, the information is out there.

That being said, a gram of mushrooms is safe for nearly everyone of normal adult physiology, and it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re looking at and gagging on mushrooms.

I was severely depressed at one point a couple decades ago and a chocolate containing a couple grams of mushrooms at a Folk Festival pulled me out of it for a good while and filled my head with thoughts of what was possible rather than what was not.

If you don’t smoke weed, try smoking some weed, if it’s safe to do where you are. It’s more of a momentary thing and if you don’t like it, most folks can handle waiting it out. This video is perfect for that situation, IMO. It can definitely be a heavy thing if you go too far too soon, but you’ll come back fine with a story to tell, or to never tell.

The more general proposition, which is that these chemicals can kinda shake you loose mentally, is true, but whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on who you are, how in control and confident you feel about life and the world, your immediate environment when you are on them (many end up taking these drugs at noisy parties full of drunkards, which are not the best places to be tripping balls), and many other factors.

For instance, your talk of the adult mask vs the child you cannot find might be exactly what’s happening, or it might be words you’ve put on some other mental block or bit of cognitive dissonance which you do not yourself understand yet. If that were the case, it would be quite possible for a dose of psychedelics to cause your mind to completely drop the veil of delusion, and cause you to look at that reality in the flash of a moment, with no time to mentally prepare for it, and that can be a terrifying experience for some, when reality intrudes on something that they didn’t realize was foundational to their understand of the world, and vulnerable in that way.

The long term effects of such an experience can likewise be very good, very bad, or completely neutral. We all have these masses of jelly inside our skulls and actually we are those masses of jelly.

Freudian leak?

As Hedberg said, say what you will about Hitler, he did kill Hitler.

Dude, from a much more privileged place, please, enjoy your movies and bring yourself all the happy moments you can get.

51, I can drive a semi, but before I took some training for that I learned on a standard from my grandma.

People can help you, but there is a way to ask, and learning how to ask is part of learning the OS. We are fascinated by problems actually.

The problem is that people come and say things like “I tried to setup a fleegbat server and it doesn’t work!” and so for the helper it becomes a process of pulling the information out of the asker in a long and painful process of interaction and we just move on. Users who say things like “here is the error message I’m getting when I try to start up my fleegbo server, anyone understand this?” get way better help.

Those who really want to learn it come to understand these things, those who just want to do something neat and not work their ass off will complain that it’s too hard.

Those who do the work are rewarded in many ways. I drove a dump truck ten years ago, now I make twice what I used to, working with people who aren’t racist sacks of shit. They were my motivator to learn, I was tired of being among pigs every day.

I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>

I am Canadian, which means American Lite, and I currently work for a global company based in France, so lots of French people. The casual racism is often astounding and at levels that would get you seriously hurt in certain places on this continent. It’s not hate-based at all that I can see, just ignorance of what exactly is going on on the other side of the world is my assumption.

I suppose I do complain when I have to use Windows lol

I hear you, and I have nothing against good graphical tools, for the record. Sometimes it is the quickest way when you’re already working in a gui context, which let’s face it, is most of the time, unless you run servers.

Which is the one case where I would double down on pushing you towards the terminal: Are you learning about Linux for the sheer joy of it and to be on the future-facing edge of things, OR are you hoping to improve your career situation? Brief self-bio: I am a lifelong geek, but in 2014 I was a trucker with a CCNA and a lot of aches. In 2015 I became a sysadmin for an animation studio based on that and my knowing Linux, but I didn’t do linux servers, I did FreeBSD servers, which at the terminal level is similar enough that I could handle it, because I focused on console skills when teaching myself more than getting my gui right. But I was intentionally seeking to make more money and stop torturing my body every day while surrounded by fucking klansmen. If you’re thinking about job at all, then I double down on the “stick to the console and get better at it,” because that will make you the wizard at your eventual job, surrounded by people enslaved to the gui. (puffs on a bit of the finest Southfarthing, which he frequently wafted an odor of at his coworkers after coffee break. People do not meddle in the affairs of effective wizards.)

That being said, you’re actually touching on the main reason we don’t have wider adoption (not wide, that is questionable if it will ever happen, but we’ll see how thoroughly capitalism implodes over the next few years, who knows) - in a nutshell, there seems to be very little active intention, and quite a lot of active resistance, to the idea of a Linux Desktop that “just works” for your grandma, as they say. I guess Red Hat was trying to be the Linux version of a Windows Server, but pretty soon they’re not gonna be much of anything if you ask me… anyways, I consider myself a native these days and let me say, Linux geeks are a bunch of fucking ASSHOLES. I try to be one of the ones who isn’t, but even I succumb to the urge to snark at lazy thinkers sometimes, which is not what is happening here and now for the record, I’m having a pretty good week and I’m hoping this all helps in some way. But I want to acknowledge the toxicity of this culture.

One might argue that Plasma or Gnome or Mint or whatever does a great job of crafting a smooth and easy UX. And that is true - I quite like the Gnome vibe overall. But let’s face it, Gnome’s bundled gui tools are indeed mostly second rate, and the devs have a bottomless well of cultural support for responding to complaints like yours with “learn the terminal then noob lol”. You also, of course, have the option to install the text editor or file manager of your choice, but then you run the risk of needing a whole bunch of extra dependencies and there goes your responsive desktop.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this culture changing until the general culture in tech changes, and that won’t change until the general culture of our economic priorities changes. Let’s see how far this implosion goes. It’s a very slow moving one.

Becoming a developer was a bit like walking into some pastoral fantasyland where everyone is extremely nice and endlessly seek to support and help you as you learn to milk the cows and such. I have experienced the extremes of workplace culture now and I never want to leave this role. If you are dissatisfied with what you do and are willing to work your ass off for a few years becoming good at things that not many people have worked their ass off to become good at, you can definitely make your life better, and I don’t just mean by having more money. I would do this job for my old trucker wage rather than leave the job. Don’t tell my boss.

I kinda said that too actually, just maybe in a little more of a supportive, you-got-this way. You came to Linux because you wanted something different, and while the Linux desktop does continue to improve overall, what you did is always where the action will be for operations like the one you did.

It’s not that it’s the easiest way, full stop - it’s the easiest way to do very complex and powerful operations on the fly, very quickly. If you lean into it for a while it does actually get easy, even.

GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.

TLDR: You don’t need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.

I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn’t sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.

Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.

At some point I discovered that some record stores (I’m talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.

When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you’d even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore’s P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.

Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.

Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn’t I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?

And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.

So I got off. I’ve started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.

Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I’ve amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.

But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don’t stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you’ve got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn’t have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you’ve started to play the game of triaging.

In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don’t think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify “solved the problem” by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won’t believe (because someone’s been skinned to get that price, and it wasn’t the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).

Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.

What I find befuddling about this is, you figured out what you needed to do, ie, you had a victory and discovered something new, and you find that somehow bad. You just did some practical console magic. By design, GNU/Linux can do a whole lot more with just the console and piping. Dive in.

Lol I’m more into personal autonomy, myself.

Now, up here in Canada, we have some very gory pictures of cancer happening that take up like 80% of the face of the cigarette pack. I don’t see why we can’t have something a bit like that required in front of churches. Perhaps something from the surgeon general about what happens when you huff too much Jesus.

See, to me that sounds like “all drugs need to go,” and as it happens I use drugs. Religion is also a drug that people use to cope. You can’t ban drugs, it doesn’t work, you just need to help people consume it at non -toxic levels.

I’m mostly here to advocate for his cause rather than him, but I also won’t go along with narratives that serve interests that are clearly at odds with mine and his and yours alike; I made that mistake in the aughts when I was a New Atheist and thought that it was my solemn duty as a defender of truth and child brides to fight Islam with everything I had.

Islam’s fine, I was wrong. RMS was wrong, on this and on other things too. I know because he’s a man.

TLDR: I would friggin’ love to be back in the office for a couple days a week. Would probably never do onsite every day for any boss but myself again.

I’ve experienced both pure remote and hybrid remote, as well as existing for about 45 years in a world where remote work was a mythical thing you heard about but only saw on television. Even at the time that my office was 1.5 hours drive each way, I absolutely loved when I was a Sysadmin and spent three days a week at home and two at the office.

Covid came and I got full time remote for close to two years and I really did hate it, especially since when it started I was in the first couple months of a new role I had been promoted to with no experience - had I not built up a lot of love from my employer in the previous role (the promotion happened for reasons, basically I had scripted my job down to nothing at all so it was kind of a freebie for them) I would have busted out but they basically let me coast and learn whatever I could for the duration, before going under.

Had I been able to be in the office and work alongside my new teammates in that role, I would today be much further along in my career arc. I’m still doing okay, but it would have been so much better to have been in the same room with them. And as it happens, my current job is also fully remote and my employer is great but based in a different city, so at the moment unless I move halfway across the continent I’m stuck fully remote. And I like my employer, have no interest in leaving, and I think they like me, even in my current state, so probably I’m stuck there for good. Boohoo lol.

I do realize that my problems are non-problems, in actuality; I’m doing fine. But if I had my druthers I’d be going into an office and standing around the coffee machine for small chats and eating the free croissants they give out on Wednesdays. I’m not very social and those little interactions, from which one had a constant “gotta get to work” excuse to dip out at will, were just the perfect level of socialization for me, really. Going to the office is not remotely all bad, really.

But I also remember being power tripped on and micromanaged by various scumbags, so when I see these corporate fuckwits demanding everyone just make things like they used to be, I know what they’re trying to do, so in the end I think if the job is doable remotely, it’s up to the individual whether they want to go in, and in the long term employers are just gonna have to figure out how to handle that equitably. One instant thought I had was, pay a premium for onsite roles, or for hours done onsite. If it’s really that crucial to operations that will be a sound strategy, just the cost of doing business.

Your bedsheets thank you, if you believe the stories.

I don’t think it’s a case that requires special pleading, unless you exist in a mindset where some words constitute “mortal sins” that cannot be washed from the soul. I don’t believe in any such stuff, myself, and as I said earlier, there are very few men who would make it into the heaven I also don’t believe in, if that were the case.

You might wanna look into who he is. You use his work all the time. You’re using it now. He has a very large body of statements besides this offhand remark from a discussion list, many of which make rich techbros very uncomfortable.

You also might want to educate yourself on autism. He’s not public about it but it’s one of those very obvious cases. It’s all of a package, and a very unique one.

Kudos for providing full context. Respect.

That said, skeptical as to what? That his mind changed? Have you got any quotes after his public change of mind which contradict or “sorry not sorry” it? Stories from people who have had bad encounters with him of a pederastic or pederasty-apologetic nature?

Anything, basically, besides some old, excessively candid thoughts that have been directly addressed from a guy who once ate his own toe cheese onstage in front of an audience? I’ve heard stories about bedsheets from people who hosted him, but that’s about the worst I’ve heard as to his personal comportment, which is undoubtedly weird in a way that people with a certain type of neurodivergent mind find very familiar.

I know a lot of men who needed to have daughters before they evolved in how they looked at sexual assault; you can very legitimately point out that it’s quite shitty that a lot of dudes need to have some xx skin in the game before they give a shit, and I will heartily agree with you. I have no daughter, and indeed, I know some… males with daughters who have yet to do that self-examination. We’re pretty appalling on the whole.

Likewise, someone might need to have some uncomfortable and educational conversations with kind and patient people who have actually come up against a thing they have not experienced before their position evolves, and that, likewise, is far from optimal, and indeed, there are many dudes out there who would not evolve on the matter after that conversation either. Like I said, pretty appalling bunch on the whole.

And I’m not here to play male apologist, but basically, what you’ve got on RMS, you’ve got on all of us, me included. I’ve been on the internet since the 90s and you could find me doing all kinds of juvenile asshole opinionating on various platforms going back to the usenet archives. Not defending the concept that children can give informed consent by any stretch, but boy was I an insufferable New Atheist. We grow and we learn, and some of us have been doing so for over thirty years on the internet and there’s a long record.

So, I think that the ongoing campaign of character assassination against RMS is fueled by different, well-moneyed interests that would just as soon not have him saying a lot of other things that he does continue to say and loudly stand by, rather than those of abuse victims. He is not a crypto-nambla that I have ever seen or heard. Again, enlighten me if you have more than what is widely known already. I’m pretty sure that there are lots of better pickings out there for the folks who make fighting this particular social sickness their vocation, though - there is really nothing here for you at all, just a guy who is a bit too out there with his viewpoints and other things that come from his body.

Quote his actual words in context.