Notices by timberwraith (timberwraith@mastodon.social)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@timberwraith/115617309675893002

Quite often I provide personal background as to how I've wound up with the perspectives I have. As the old saying goes, "the personal is political" and I try to be upfront about the personal.

Everything I talk about in this thread, I have lived through, to an extent.

The cis world tried its best to shove me through masculine social training and I remember A LOT. I remember its failure points and I remember its abusiveness.

And at 17, I figured out on my own that it was incredibly toxic.

And the same stupid spectacle of watching two teen boys beating the shit out of each other for ego and a pissing game of dominance behind the school looked a lot like two nations ready to fry each other in a radiation soaked global conflagration.

I've talked about this so many times. I grew up in the Cold War. I grew up with the ever present fear of impending nuclear war.

A spark of recognition fired off in my mind as I observed my male peers and their over-aggression and over-competitiveness that played out every single day in my teen kid's life.

It might not explain everything but I could see how those patterns were entwined in how nations interacted with each other.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@timberwraith/115607654736085935

I say this with a bit of sad personal experience.

There were so many second wave feminists who I admired from my women's studies classes in the 90s.

As the decades passed, I came to learn that most of them were anti-trans bigots.

My heroes were bigoted assholes.

Humans make shitty heroes. That's what I've concluded.

Give your cat friend (or someone else) a well deserved treat and let them know you love them. That's far better than giving some human asshole hero status.

All I can say is that the manufacturer didn't have Linux drivers available and I was on the verge of ordering a new wifi card. On a whim, I rebooted the machine one more time and tried to install the drivers that Linux Mint provided, yet again. It finally worked.

As for Linux drivers, I just installed Linux on an older HP desktop because the Win7 license on that box didn't survive an upgrade to Win10.

The recommended drivers for the GPU and the network card failed. I went with the generic drivers (not recommended) and after fighting with the machine after a few reboots, the network card driver mysteriously installed itself. Why? Beats the hell out of me.

Yes, I know that Linux and its various distros are works in progress, that it doesn't have the pile of money, software engineers, and corporations backing it up like Windows, or Mac.

You get what you get when that's the case.

But it's free. And you can fuck with Linux in ways that you can't with proprietary operating systems if you know *how* to fuck with it, and can, no doubt, do wonderful things.

That's nice.

IF that's your sort of happy place.

But it's not for many other people?

So, I bought a few texts on Linux and I'm slowly refreshing my memories of navigating the command line from 15 years ago when I last ran Linux regularly on my computers.

I shouldn't *have* to do this but that's what I'm doing.

But I like to tinker? So, it will be fine in the long run.

But for users who *don't* like to tinker? This is bullshit.

Again, the advocates of Linux tell happy stories of its greatness but roadblocks like this get hand waved away.

The other problem, is trying to get this machine to recognize shared drives and various sources of data in my home network, which is mostly Windows boxes.

Samba has always been a friggin' nightmare. I got it to finally work on a Linux Mint installation a few years back. It took forever to figure out how to fix the glitches. There were no straight forward tutorials that worked as presented.

I thought maybe this has been fixed?

Nope. Still obscure.

"Steam" is rather exciting for me but only in the context of hulking metal behemoths perched atop steel rails with pistons, boilers, and fireboxes driving them through the night.

I'm not so sure about the other usages of the word.

I mean, the universe fucks shit up and it fucked my body up when some shitted up genetic code and various conditions in my mother's body glitched.

And here I am, as a product of the universe and its chaotic fuckery.

That's reality.

I've done what I can to make the best of this bullshit but on some level, it's still bullshit, you know?

I'm a hard nosed realist when it comes to what I've experienced as a trans person.

Being transgender usually comes with a mound of suffering. That's just the way it is. Being born into a body that feels wrong fucking HURTS. There's no way around that reality. It just does.

With HRT and other forms of medical intervention, that suffering can be lessened to a considerable degree and I'm alive because of it.

If this were 1925 or 1825, though? I'd be dead. I would have ended my life long before.

I stayed in Stillwater, MN for a few days this past week. I never noticed this before but the town looks like it was placed at the bottom of a large bowl that has one side chopped off and replaced with a river.

It's rather odd and fascinating to see.

With further revelations from the Epstein situation, it appears that we've hit MeToo, The Pedophile Edition.

I think it's safe to say that we can put much of the the wealthy and celebrity classes of the world into the same generalized class of evil that Catholic priests occupy.

With great power comes great irresponsibility.

Depeche Mode predicted chatbot Jesus.

https://youtu.be/NoPFB8h2-Sg?list=RDNoPFB8h2-Sg

Chatbot Satan is literally worth more than chatbot Jesus.

Nice.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hf7ezrajxadu7v3tzcyij424/post/3m5mxjwqxf22g

It's interesting that some people think it's unacceptable and immoral to question a government's right to exist after it has resoundingly proven that it exists to pour brutality, misery, and mass murder into the world.

People have a tendency to wrap themselves up in the trappings of a nation state, associating their very sense of self with a government, a flag, and all the imprimaturs of power.

And those things matter ever more to their sense of self than brutality, misery, or mass murder.

There are 3 things which drive my misanthropy:

1) Homo sapiens' unmitigated cruelty toward each other and other living things.

2) Homo sapiens' active and willful destruction of the planet and everyone else living here.

3) Being a member of a tiny marginalized group while being very aware that 99% of humanity is either largely neutral/unconcerned about destroying those like me or is actively, maliciously engaged in that destruction.

Those make a fairly potent mix in disliking the species.

It's a pretty natural response for me to look at humankind and say, "Gosh, I just don't fucking like you. You're not likeable. I want to put some kind of emotional distance between you and myself because you are profoundly broken and toxic."