I've been having a difficult time recently, which has been leading to my absence here and a lot of crying in my real life. I don't deal with letting go too well. I keep texts and pictures and messages and every once in a while I like to look back at them and remember that somebody out there at one point was capable of loving me.

It's not like I don't have friends that love me either, I've spent days and days at other people's houses just crying, people have taken me out to eat and cry and just feel my feelings, and people have been reminding me about the things they like about me too. I mentioned it to a friend that I've been having trouble letting go and we dug into it a bit more, about why I want to keep these things. My friend asks why I need the love to come from other people first. Where is the self love?

My core issue has always been needing to be reminded that I am loved. It's really silly sometimes, because on some level I know that I am. But something is missing.

There's an old saying that we judge other people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just a bad person. Or if I think I am. Because if I didn't have that, why would I have such a hard time forgiving myself?

I don't really know how to self love, to be honest. I spent all day today barely working, just mindlessly staring at a screen playing a stupid game and not leaving the house. I dunno. Maybe I just need some ideas. I set up a couple more appointments with my therapist this week, but sometimes when it's 2 in the morning like it is now I just can't sleep and spend more time hurting myself in my own head.

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I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.

For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?

Was listening to a pod where one person shared a funny, and having fun is taking care of your ~mental.health

This is my kind of humour, an 'article' about it: https://pleated-jeans.com/2023/08/29/disappointing-affirmations-dave-tarnowski/

And a link to the instagram account https://www.instagram.com/disappointingaffirmations/ for those who use instagram.

The episode in question: Divergent Conversations: Episode 106(mp3)

Maybe this isn't really a good topic, but maybe you'd like to share what makes you laugh, good podcasts or how you use humour for ~mental.health.

I also wrote something related in one the monthly check in topics, so maybe @chocobean would like to give an update! (Sorry for calling you out like this, just trying to have some fun)

I'm considering installing some abandonware games, and, as anyone who trawls the internet for old executables knows: they are often rife with viruses/malware.

It's easy to avoid the ones that are clearly malicious using tools like VirusTotal, but it gets trickier when the "is it clean?" is more of a "maybe" than a "no" because you're not sure if something is a false positive.

I'd rather not take chances and will generally avoid anything I find even slightly suspicious, but it did get me thinking: if I ran the games through Linux instead of Windows (e.g. via WINE or Proton), am I equally vulnerable?

Does something like that sandbox the virus? Is the virus rendered ineffective by being in a system it's unable to exploit as intended?

Or is this wishful thinking and it's still risky no matter what?

I'm not asking this as a "help me play abandonware games" plea (though, if there are best practices out there feel free to enlighten me). Instead, it's a curiosity -- a "help me better understand Linux vs. Windows" from someone who's not super techy.

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I've been looking into installing air conditioning in the building that will eventually be my office and workshop. Local HVAC contractors gave me extremely large numbers as quotes. I've watched mini split installs and I'm pretty sure they're within DIY range for me. So I spent $10 and a couple of nights of reading, and took the EPA 608 type 2 certification exam today, so now (pending someone watching and approving a 20-minute video of me staring at a phone screen) I can legally install one myself for significantly cheaper.

I've also occasionally considered getting a ham radio license, solely because I like a bunch of adjacent electronics topics and it feels like the kind of thing I could be into. (So far, I haven't bothered because the vibes of the community around it don't feel right for me, but I haven't completely abandoned the idea.)

It occurs to me there are probably several more things like this that I'd never thought about. Small plane pilot's licenses are another, though those require formal training. But attempting to research this mostly returns lists of "you could be an Official Microsoft Certified Professional Excel User!". That's not what I mean.

What other useful licenses can one easily get without making it a whole career? "Useful" here means something like "having the piece of official paper grants privileges that simply learning the underlying knowledge doesn't".