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  • You know when a friend's loved one dies and you tell them the usual sentiments about being there for them, anything you need etc? But there's rarely anything you can do, especially if you're not in their immediate circles where you could be making food or helping with estate etc.

    Friend needed to do some job applications quite urgently, but was obviously not in the right headspace to do a great job. Friend asked me to help review drafts (I write for a living) and between us we got out 3 very solid applications.

    I'm proud my skills had real and immediate use to someone. This white collar shit can feel pretty ineffectual sometimes, but this was a tangible help to someone so I'm proud of myself.

    • Words have power, when you use them to support others. After translating marketing lies for a living for too many years I'm always glad when my language skills can be put to good use to help someone.

  • Helping someone escape domestic abuse and care for her animals while her dangerous lunatic ex keeps wrecking her house and farm, actually risking to put the entire mountain on fire, and the police keeps typing a pile of documents about the ongoing case without actually doing anything. I'll keep doing it even if I end up tearing the 'Call us if you experience domestic violence' posters off of the police station walls tomorrow to shove them up the arses of the smug bastard clowns in uniform who are supposed to guarantee the safety of vulnerable people. Been a long week and no end in sight.

    • Wow. Awesome of you to do this…

      • No, really I just happened to have all the skills and resources needed (milk a goat, look like an at least vaguely threatening garden gnome when carrying a farm tool, have a spare rest room and some spare time etc.) and I'm glad I can. I've been in this situation without support and will try to help others get out if it's within my power.

        Yesterday I was a bit eaten up at the edges and flashbacking heavily after so much frustration with the aggressor and the police, thus having to write the above rant. We went and fed the animals today without more hassle and are all mentally in a better place.

        She's off to find a new place to live, and we'll make sure the animals get moved there safely. It more often than not ends up like this - victim has to leave, as authorities cannot protect them adequately or don't care enough to do so.

    • Couple weeks ago I helped a friend escape a DV situation too, although it wasn't a "house and a farm", more of an "apartment". Still, he had wrecked the place so my spouse and I spent a week cleaning it and organizing my friend's stuff (and my spouse continued for another week after I had to go back to work). We found evidence of a lot of horrible shit this guy did that he left behind, but our friend didn't want to harm him or something so we respected her wishes on that not going to the police. (Who probably wouldn't have done anything anyways)

      It was exhausting, emotionally draining, hard work but I was glad to do it, I imagine you feel similarly

      • I have accompanied my friend to the DV support office today and listened through a detailed account of what he did. It's tough to listen to. Tough to come to terms with the fact that there is so little actual help available, and all of it is excruciatingly slow to arrive and locked behind bureaucratic barriers. Tough to come to terms with the fact that so many women, myself included, easily fall prey to bullshit artists on a power trip, or man sized toddlers with puppy eyes, or a mix of the two. And it's always women who I would have thought far beyond such situations. I feel I still haven't understood what went on inside of myself as I lived through this shit and didn't leave, and I haven't understood what happens inside of these guys, how they can turn from decent person into absolute shitshow within days or months.

        I expect to see rather more of this as people get driven to the edge by the ongoing financial, social, political crisis all around us.

  • I was fired in June for a mixed non-descript bag of reasons from my previous employer of 8 years. The reasons they told me were not what they told the DOL. They told the DOL that I was fired for attendance issues, which is weird since I hadn't been absent since March, and the company's on-site nurse told me not to come to work. I used 2.5 days of my yearly allowable 6 days of sick time within 6 months. They also told them I falsified records.

    What's really weird is that it happened to coincide with my complaint of workplace harassment by a former boss.

    The worst part was they lied to the DOL and told them I admitted to falsifying records. Little did they know, I recorded audio of my HR meeting so I could prove that I didn't admit to falsifying records.

    Anyways, after months of fighting for unemployment benefits (they didn't even give me a severance), I won my appeal hearing. My previous employer didn't even give the DOL an in service phone number, so they didn't even attend the hearing.

    They really were banking on me not trying to fight them. After months of me sounding like an insane person to everyone I talked about it to, I finally got vindication.

    And before you think this must be some small operating business where my boss just didn't want to show up to lose, this is a large publicly traded company with thousands of employees and is an industry leader in the field. The site I worked for was a drop in their revenue bucket with a mere 70 million in net revenue.

    I may be jobless right now, with 5 kids, a mortgage, and had my name dragged through the mud, but I'm so fucking proud of myself for sticking up for myself and proving that I was fucking right the entire time.

    They still haven't been able to fill my position, have had more people quit and are in dire straights according to an inside source.

    Oh and the kicker? Turns out the last woman they fired complained about the same person, but they gave her a giant severance package even though she was only employed with them less than a year.

    Can't wait to see that place bleed itself to death.

  • Got an open source offline text to speech AI that can read me any text of any length, another that can convert my speech into text, and finally got another working directly on the command line using python.

  • Spent the "weekend" with my two kids (they are in the next city for university) and we got tattoos. all Hail Rat King!

  • I spent the better part of the last decade in a good deal of pain due to an undiagnosed spinal injury in my neck. In the 4-5 months leading up to having surgery, the pain and muscle spasms were so bad I couldn't stand or walk on my own, put on my own clothes, or take care of myself. I was severely suicidally depressed, extremely overweight, and jobless.

    In July of 2022 I was finally able to get approved for surgery (I had to wait 3 months for an MRI), my surgeon performed a corpectomy (removal of the vertebral body) of my C5-C6 vertebrae and fused C4-C7. I spent the next 3 months in a neck brace, doing rehab and physical therapy and decided that this was going to be the turning point in my life.

    In the 9 months since I got the brace off, we've been eating better (the hardest one) and I lift weights 2x per week for about 1.5 hrs and walk 3x per week for about 45 min. I've lost about 40 lbs so far and I can definitely see changes in my physique for the first time. I have a long way to go, but I makes me proud to see how far I have come.

    But to answer to question, yesterday I went on a 4.5 mile hike up a mountain with a friend and was able to complete it all. My feet are quite sore today, but I'm really proud of myself for being able to do something like that after being in such bad condition.

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