Who do you trust more, the neighbor who closes their blinds or the neighbor running around house to house trying to look in everyone’s windows?

Get a blue Mohawk and wear Hawaiian polos, cargo shorts, and tennis shoes everywhere. If you really don’t like what people see, change what they see. Or change the context they see you in. If you’re always hanging around a cleaners with other people who look like Italian mobsters and you look like you fit in then there you are. Whether it’s ultimately worth it to you to change your appearance or lifestyle is ultimately up to you. There are, ultimately, 4 ways to deal with a problem:

1. redefine / stop thinking about it as a problem
2. accept that the problem exists
3. be willing to do whatever you have to do to change the problem
4. be upset about the problem.

#4 is the only one I vehemently recommend against. 1-3 are all roughly equal in the amount of distress you will be left with in the end.

I love stuff like this. It turns out there’s whole hidden worlds inside all sorts of people’s average workdays and a lot of the time if you ask they’ll just tell you!

Yeah the switch was a slow one for me. There was a long period where I was using both but it slowly shifted from using reddit more to using Lemmy more and a big reason was the usability of the ui. They really wanted to push me onto the app but it was so sluggish and every bug I reported about the web ui was met with “but did you try our app?” and like yeah I did and it was shit! It was bloated down with so many weird internal video features I didn’t even use (and probably tracking) that it was barely usable! Meanwhile boost just gets it done, consistently, and with like 0 bugs.

I would be so hyped to see a true dual Lemmy mastodon service that fully allows you to browse and post to both Lemmy and mastodon style feeds. Currently even kbin is really more focused on the Lemmy / piefed end and the microblogging function still requires the posts to be under a magazine meaning masto posts aren’t really browseable and they’re not really fully interact able from both ends. I feel like a service fully compatible with both formats would give a broader reach that would really allow fedi to grow. You’d be able interact with like half of fedi at the same time which would make it feel so much bigger and more comparable in scope to traditional social media.

I think this is the best comment. It’s not impossible that they chose OP due to some demographic category but they had probably been annoyed at all the other people too. From what I’m reading in other comments about demographics they probably chose OP because she seemed less likely to fight back. So to sum up, the bus driver had a real gripe, but they took the coward’s way to address it.

This is largely unrelated to OP specifically but I’ve been thinking about the bus drivers a lot lately because I get on at the end of the line where they stop to take their break. There’s always someone standing there mad that the bus driver won’t let them on. And first of all break is sacred, but also specifically; having a public safety job myself though, I get it. My guess is that the bus driver is considered responsible for our safety while we’re physically on the bus and people don’t realize how stressful that is.

You just have this constant low level anxiety of “what are these people going to do that I’m responsible for trying to stop them from doing, and are they going to get violent with me for telling them to stop?” And that anxiety is mostly the good type that’s low level and just keeps you at attention but you can’t maintain that level of attention continuously. You have to shut it off at some point or it starts doing weird shit to your brain both on and off the job.

☝️

My thoughts exactly. She kept you in control of this. What you do with that is up to you, although it sounds like maybe this is gonna be awful whether or not the authorities are involved so maybe you should just stop trying to own his bullshit and focus on keeping yourself safe. Start by trying to record his threats or get him to text them to you in writing. Start building up any little evidence you can get. Make a protonmail and email all the evidence you can find to it so you have timestamps on everything. If you can get a long trail of evidence it should make it easier to both get him arrested and might make you more eligible to receive services. A sibling can also count as a perpetrator of domestic violence in a lot of places. Ask your therapist what tips they have for helping you work on securing safe and stable housing and having an emergency safety plan. Any therapist should know how to make a safety plan, they’re usually for the outpatient management of suicidal ideation but they can be used for other safety reasons as well. Personal and interpersonal safety can be pretty interrelated.

Boost hands down

My most recent meaningful conversations at the bus stop in the past year were:

• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a middle aged gentlemen who struck up a conversation having seen my work badge
• a guy who’d had his phone stolen reflecting on the ways it had allowed him to be more mindful of his own thoughts and disengage from toxic people
• a homeless woman who lived at the bus stop for a while with her husband discussing her personal safety as a homeless woman (her husband needed to go do something that wouldn’t take long, and he had waited for me to come out and wait for the bus to go do it, and came back before the bus arrived).

And I made friends with the homeless guys outside my last apartment by stopping to pet their dog (and later stealing wound care supplies from work for it).

I find other people interesting for the most part, and have a large enough breadth of knowledge to at least ask interesting questions about most things. Tradespeople in particular know some fascinating things

I once asked a man in a work vest who was marking the road what the colors were for and he said the different colors were different utility lines (water, power, etc). My follow-up question was how he knew where they were and it turned out the pole with the paint sprayer also had a special metal detector that could pick up on each line’s unique type of tag.

And the guy who fixed my dryer had an utterly wild list of things that he’s pulled out of vents and explained that the little vent covers on the outside of the building were specifically designed to safely prevent endangered birds from nesting in them since they like the warmth but can get injured or damage the vent in doing so.

I generally find that tradespeople like being asked questions about what they do. I don’t think a lot of people ask. And if they don’t I apologize and keep it moving.

And honestly a lot of these would probably need to be tested top see what works best, but the core point is that in an ideal world there would be an ongoing effort to make sure the worker is given as much power over the situation as possible.

And unionized, and the employer pays for (without touching employee pay):

• PPE (including gloves, dental dams, and male and female condoms, which are mandatory for any and all physical contact that includes genitals, mucous membranes, feet, or non-intact skin).
• regular STD testing
• vaccinations
• optional pharmacologic prophylaxis
• building security
• both bedside and wearable panic alarms
• identity monitoring and protection / assistance removing their personal information from publicly accessible records.

Every room should be required to have a poster listing employee rights.

Aside from pricing differently for specific services (handjob vs blowjob etc) tipping is illegal.

No employee (particularly owners or supervisors) are allowed to receive service at their own location or any owned by a same parent company.

The owner and any shift supervisors are required to take a class on these regulations and sit for and pass a licensure exam.

Independent workers can receive a special, less restrictive license (that includes basic sex ed but mostly focuses on informing them of their rights and that independent means independent not “your boss just doesn’t want to get a license” and keeping people with intellectual disabilities or low educational level from being misinformed of their rights as a sex worker).

They worker will never face charges for not having a license but their boss or any John (Jane?) / client who can’t prove the sex worker or company was licensed (or that they were significantly or intentionally misled) can.

Years ago when I first bought one of those multitool hairclips it mentioned it could be used as a trolley coin and I had to look that up. I discovered that in a lot of European countries it’s customary for carts to be locked together with a lock that takes a coin to unlock then returns the coin if you correctly return and nest the cart. Now, it does take a decently curated social milieu to design systems that promote prosocial behavior. That said, that particular prosocial behavior not only had to be mechanically encouraged, but has also led to the development of something called a “trolley coin” to circumvent the mechanism for people who are diametrically opposed to that prosocial behavior.

Who do you trust more, the neighbor who keeps his blinds closed, or the neighbor who goes around trying to look in everyone’s windows? What do you they have to hide?

You’re unlikely (but not impossibly unable) to reap the full benefits of that level of connection to a community completely without spirituality. There are many Hindus and shinto that are functionally atheist and I come from healthcare where atheist chaplains are actually a thing as well.

You are not separate from humanity’s history and attempting to separate yourself from it in this manner won’t by definition harm you, but will require a level of constant attention that I have not found to be worth it. It’s like trying to run the windows version of Firefox or Discord with Wine or a virtual machine just to prove you can. Just run the Linux version, or another program with the same function that is even better designed for the architecture.

I tracked my moods, bodily upkeep, and social tasks with DBT based spreadsheets for years but it eventually became exhausting. What it did do was give me a solid framework to redesign spiritual practices that work for me. Just use the software the human brain was developed alongside and use your processing power on things more useful than trying to feel smarter and more right about the universe, which is mostly just lying to yourself anyway.

This is something of the intention of a unitarian church. They use largely judeo Christian imagery but they don’t actually GAF what your beliefs are and are generally open to not necessarily debate but definitely exploration of non-judeo Christian theologies and / or philosophies.

Well tumblr and Twitter are the same way. There are no magazines / subforums / subreddits / individual communities (or weren’t last I used them). Your profile has your posts and people follow other users individually. You can tag your posts but you can use just about as many tags as you want the post isn’t bound to any one tag. The only specific thing they’re bound to is literally just your personal profile (or that of anyone who reblogs / retweets / retoots / reposts it to their own profile). A microblog is literally a completely different format to a forum / message board style post while kbin treats it like a forum post lite. You don’t microblog to an individual community you microblog as yourself to your entire sever (and beyond, if properly federated).

When you do use traditional social media, try to actively downvote and if you can justify it report engagement bait. People will intentionally do stuff like pronouncing things wrong or even just straight up lying about shit just to get engagement from people correcting them. Also do the same for people that add nothing but their facial expression to call something their own content or even another stolen video played side by side or who post still memes as video.

Federation has the opportunity to solve a lot of these issues but unless special attention is taken to create voting systems that promote healthy community engagement the corporate pressures will eventually push into these spaces as well. I’ve wondered for a while if there’s a good way to create an algorithm that would offer the comfort of a targeted media algorithm except readable, modifiable and executable only by the end user’s client. Piefed is probably the best push towards that kind of functionality currently, but very prototypically.

You’re probably not struggling as much as you think you are. Not in a “your problems aren’t that bad” kinda way but more in a "your responses to those problems aren’t as pitiful as you think they are. Just because the problem wasn’t 100% fixed doesn’t mean you didn’t deal with it like a boss. It’s not like everybody else is out there dancing through their problems with the grace of a ballerina. 90% of them have the fridge door open at 2am eating shredded cheese right out of the bag too. You’re doing great, don’t be so down on yourself.