Congratulations! I got my other ear pierced early in my transition (one was already pierced and just needed stretched). The best advice is to leave them the hell alone other than maybe saline solution. If you're like me, you're going to want to wear all those cute/dangly earrings you see everywhere now. Resist that urge as best you can. Give it time and let them heal. It can take up to a year for your piercings to fully heal and every time you change your earrings before that process is complete, you add time to the clock.

That's kind of a no brainer then. Amazon already has your money, might as well get something from it.

I try to avoid Amazon for my personal shopping, but I've bought literally hundreds of renewed/refurbished laptops and Chromebooks on Amazon for work. I have not had a single DOA or switcheroo in over 200 laptops from different sellers except one that has a broken screen, which was ready to return. You are very likely not throwing your money away by buying via Amazon, though that doesn't mean it's necessarily the best place to buy.

Arrrr suite feeding jellyfin.

Same here. Fuck the naysayers who say cold turkey or nothing. Do what works for you.

For OP: One caveat to the vape plan is you'll likely need to get a vape that's refillable so you can customize the nicotine level. Juul/vuse/disposables typically only come in one, or at best, 2 nicotine levels, which prevents effective tapering.

Also, don't fall into the trap of vaping places you wouldn't have smoked (e.g. in your house/car). That can increase your nicotine dependency.

Good luck!

If you haven't seen it yet, I can't recommend Midnight Mass highly enough! Probably my favorite horror/spooky thing ever. Best to go in blind, I think. It's not a mystery per se, but figuring out what's going on is part of the fun for sure.

OSes are for losers. Anyone who isn't braindead runs a homebrew array of 555 chips running handwritten binary. Fuckin noobs.

Here's the list of devices supported by fprint

For non -standalone readers, you'll have to look up the actual fingerprint reader embedded within it.

Edit: it looks like this is a Bluetooth keyboard. My guess is it's highly unlikely to work with Linux as a fingerprint reader.

Yup. I've gone unmedicated for 10+ years as a result. I'll take the highs/lows of hashimoto's over ending up in the ER with my heart pounding out of my chest any day of the week.

It's impossible for me listen to someone arguing in favor of eugenics without hearing, "we've gotta get rid of those people- you know the ones in talking about, right?" Fuck that noise.

It's always some narcissistic asshole who thinks they're the prototype for a new master race.

Two clicks away via the linked article.

It also has the benefit of being able to apply the vast majority of Ubuntu tutorials, etc. since it's based on it. Plus it doesn't force you to use snaps for everything.

It's no fun though. I had an old tracker that the clutch cable broke on. It was my only vehicle and it took a couple weeks for the replacement to come in. Switching between gears was okay once I got the hang of matching RPM. Starting, however, required me to turn the engine off at every stop, putting it in first, then letting the starter pull the car along a few feet until the engine was turning fast enough to run. It was a miracle I didn't burn the starter up. Thank god I lived in a pretty rural area and only had a few stops between home and work.

Overall, I'd rate driving manual without a clutch 1/10.

I have no doubt that China can and does buy data from data brokers. I think it's unlikely, however that any of the major players are going to be willing to sell all their data on anyone- being able to target ads to individuals is their entire value proposition after all. On top of that, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have fallen pretty heavily out of favor with folks in their teens/early 20s (i.e. the demographic most ripe to be sources of bad OPSEC).

But even assuming that an adversary could buy all the data they could possibly want, doing so could tip off anyone who cared to be watching about the sorts of data they're interested in. This is generally not something you want as it can reveal your own strategic concerns/intentions.

Having your own app that can collect whatever you want, where you can promote whatever information/view that you want is a pretty big advantage over buying data.

If the argument is about privacy, I think banning tik tok is complete bullshit. If it's about limiting intelligence gathering and influence campaigns, I think it makes more sense.

Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.

Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don't really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn't be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.

Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.

For a company, it's essential to be able to monitor/review employee communications for legal/compliance reasons. That said, while you should assume that any communication made with your official email/slack/teams/whatever can be seen by the company if it needs to be (e.g. somebody sues for something, even something potentially unrelated to you, that creates a need to search for relevant records), it's unlikely that Slack is actively reporting your conversations to your boss.

As others have said, if you don't want your company to see something you're saying, don't say it at work or on their platforms. In the U.S. at least, you have no expectation of privacy at work. If you're worried about something you've already said, you might just be screwed. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

At least among the folks in my circles, in addition to the many fine answers already given, it refers to an irl action that is completely idiotic/unhinged that you're doing for laughs (either your own or those around you).

It's worse than that. It's arguing that her estate and surviving husband can't sue because he had a trial subscription to Disney+. It's fucking absurd.

Obviously, you do it on the night of a full moon. Jeez, they really don't teach critical thinking anymore, huh?

Transphobes: You can't change your gender from what was assigned at birth. Facts don't care about your feelings.

Also transphobes: a person who was assigned female at birth, was born with a vagina, and raised as a woman in a country that is in no way supportive of its queer population... is not a woman.

If only mental gymnastics were an Olympic event.