V17's recent activity
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Comment on "The therapeutic industry is platonic prostitution" in ~health.mental
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Comment on "The therapeutic industry is platonic prostitution" in ~health.mental
V17 LinkReading that feels like clearly you're missing something about yourself, but I can't say I know what it is. Despite that I can't say I disagree with many things you say. I have successfully used...Reading that feels like clearly you're missing something about yourself, but I can't say I know what it is.
Despite that I can't say I disagree with many things you say.
I have successfully used therapy in the past more than once, and I think it's true that:
- It doesn't work every time/for every kind of problem/for every kind of person
- Some people tend to recommend it too much without understanding it or your problems, it's trendy to do so
- There's a ton of mediocre or bad therapists, and finding a good one that fits you is both hard and crucial (true for some countries even more than others as local regulations differ, seems to be worse in the US for example)
All of those apply even more if you don't know what exactly you want from therapy. However, not remembering important issues in your life and feeling deeply impersonal, despite the neccessity of some professional distancing, do not happen with a good therapist.
I think it's also trivally true that long-term stable tight-knit groups of people can help a lot with all kinds wellbeing, we're probably evolutionally programmed to need them, and that industrialization and urbanization made those much less common.
I think it's still possible to build and have something like that, it's just not easy or automatic. "Have you tried therapy?" may be common, but it's certainly not something every friend is going to tell you when talking about your problems. I think it may be hard to build a group like that when you're already going into it full of your own trouble. It's different when you're already part of a functional group and you talk about it gradually, vs. when you're in deep shit and need to try to find new friends who can handle it.
That said, although I empathize with you in some ways, clearly what you say either isn't the whole picture or doesn't generalize, because there are many people who are reasonably content without living in traditional tight-knit communities and while living objectivelly difficult lives. Without understating the importance of social enviromnent, I think there's clear evidence that contentment may not be too dependent on external things.
There are two reasons why mindfulness became popular. The first is somewhat shallow similarly to therapy, it's where the term "McMindfulness" comes from and can be discarded, but the second is that it truly is a useful tool when wielded right, because it allows you to gradually uncover and understand your subconscious thought processes better and even slowly rewire them. People often stop at the fact that it can give you some grounding, calm you down and lessen the intensity of emotions, but you can use it for much more than that.
Of course, it still has similar issues to therapy - it's much easier to do it and it works better when you're not already in deep shit and when you kind of know what you want out of it.
But I do believe that some sort of metacognition, learning to examine and change how your brain functions every day, by default, is necessary to get out of a mentally difficult long term situation.
I've seen people who had issues that seemed broadly similar in magnitude and complexity to yours (it is of course not exactly possible to judge that over text), who had success with ketamine assisted psychotherapy. Psychedelics in general seem to function as a shortcut for rewiring your brain into less "difficult" pathways, when used properly in a controlled environment, and ketamine especially seems to be relatively low-risk in terms of difficult experiences compared to say psilocibin. Also more accessible.
That is the one thought I have in terms of potential help. Despite everything that you say I don't think the solution must be external.
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Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech
V17 Link ParentWasn't there recently an article about AI companies starting to be profitable because of different agent pricing models for end customers (subscriptions) and enterprises (usage tokens only)? I'm...But instead - even though they aren’t profitable as afaik don’t have a clear plan - they deliver an even more expensive model…?
Wasn't there recently an article about AI companies starting to be profitable because of different agent pricing models for end customers (subscriptions) and enterprises (usage tokens only)? I'm an end user and don't have a Claude subscription, so I never checked.
Also I think there's a good chance that in the background they're doing both.
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Comment on Proton sponsors far-right French YouTuber, claims lack of awareness in response to backlash in ~society
V17 Link ParentLike many things on reddit, that change was quiet, randomly enforced and annoying as shit. I remember when isthereanydeal.com started to be very useful, it is made primarily by a dude from a...Like many things on reddit, that change was quiet, randomly enforced and annoying as shit. I remember when isthereanydeal.com started to be very useful, it is made primarily by a dude from a discussion board I frequent, and I recommended him to start a subreddit to build a community. It was banned in a few weeks for being ran by the author of the product, but there were already a couple company-run subreddits at the time and later in that year the rule was seemingly thrown out altogether.
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Comment on A man died and all I've got left of him is a porn CD in ~life
V17 Link ParentPár pařmenů had some funny lines, but it was unbearably long for what it was, for me at least. Nice flashback though. I was quite surprised to find that Slovaks have their own Pár pařmenů, except...I still have Pár pařmenů - Lord of the rings re-dubbed into czech... what? Satire? Comedy? Just a bunch of teenage dudes doing funny [questionable] jokes and references. They managed to redub the wholr zhing though and it kept pace throughout the movie!
Pár pařmenů had some funny lines, but it was unbearably long for what it was, for me at least. Nice flashback though. I was quite surprised to find that Slovaks have their own Pár pařmenů, except it's Harry Potter and it was in my opinion funnier, or at least more condensed. It's called Dano Drevo a turnaj Mekyho Žbirku, the whole thing is on Youtube and it seems to have a bit of a cult following.
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Comment on A man died and all I've got left of him is a porn CD in ~life
V17 Link ParentInteresting! I think the important difference is that gaming consoles were rare here, we all used home computers and went from ZX Spectrums and rarely Amigas straight to IBM PCs. So we were used...Interesting! I think the important difference is that gaming consoles were rare here, we all used home computers and went from ZX Spectrums and rarely Amigas straight to IBM PCs. So we were used to sharing games on floppy discs (and tapes before that, but I'm too young to experience that) and so I guess switching to CDs happened naturally.
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Comment on A man died and all I've got left of him is a porn CD in ~life
V17 Link ParentAhaha, when you write it like that... :D I can't be sure since it's been so many years, but I think it was a short time period before DVDs became common, when most people still used VHS tapes...But I don't think I knew anyone who burned a custom porn CD/DVD like it was a mixtape, lol...
Ahaha, when you write it like that... :D
I can't be sure since it's been so many years, but I think it was a short time period before DVDs became common, when most people still used VHS tapes (perhaps due to cost?), but CDs and CD burners were relatively common, so warez in general was downloaded by one person and then shared with others on CDs.
I remember watching The Matrix from a burned CD, for example.
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Comment on A man died and all I've got left of him is a porn CD in ~life
V17 (edited )Link ParentWe were poor and dial-up was quite expensive here. You would 100% get busted by your father for downloading such large files until you got some sort of broadband (and even then the monthly...We were poor and dial-up was quite expensive here. You would 100% get busted by your father for downloading such large files until you got some sort of broadband (and even then the monthly download limits were quite small for a couple years at the beginning), whereas CDs were affordable, so that's what we used for all warez - sharing music and especially videogames was common as well, since it was all financially completely out of reach for kids.
After broadband connection became ubiquitous, p2p boomed here as well. DC++ was quite popular, which was not centralized, you'd have to connect to various "hubs", and those at the time were often truly local - you'd have your town's hub full of warez, ran by a few students from a local high school.
And I'm saying this because specifically in Nick's town those students were later busted by the police, their PCs confiscated. No idea how that court case ended, but at the time it was a bit of a shock.
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Comment on A man died and all I've got left of him is a porn CD in ~life
V17 LinkThis is basically a blog post, but I don't have a blog and don't write with any regularity, so I'm posting it here since the last time I did that it was well received. This time it's something...This is basically a blog post, but I don't have a blog and don't write with any regularity, so I'm posting it here since the last time I did that it was well received.
This time it's something like a eulogy for a childhood friend who died recently, and since then I felt a need to write something.
Feel free to share anything that comes to your mind after reading it, whether it's about dealing with loss, about covertly dealing porn CDs or something else altogether.
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A man died and all I've got left of him is a porn CD
As a kid and young teen I used to be the kind of smartass aspiring nerd that I assume some of you were as well and many of you encountered at some point: smart, interested in technology, cool...
As a kid and young teen I used to be the kind of smartass aspiring nerd that I assume some of you were as well and many of you encountered at some point: smart, interested in technology, cool music, and anything non-mainstream, but with less than stellar social skills, lacking the knowledge and wisdom that you get by actually doing things instead of talking about them, and with not many friends, because few people around me shared my interests.
I did have some friends in the offline world who were quite similar, but they each lived in a different town and we only saw each other a couple times per year. The upside of that was that we valued every meeting all the more, where we talked, listened to newly discovered music (this was pre-Spotify but also pre-Youtube), played video games either in splits-creen or just by taking turns in an interesting singleplayer game, rode bikes around and did lots of more or less dumb shit.
Most of us grew out of this phase and became... well, we became nerds, but ones who were more or less well-adjusted and social, with our own friend groups, girlfriends, interests and hobbies that we actually participated in and not just talked about.
Nick was less lucky. He was perhaps the most stereotypical of us all, both in the type and depth of his interests and in his inability to meaningfully participate in them or to participate in society in general, really. Looking back, many things about him make much more sense if I think of him as autistic - not something you grow out of. Perhaps a diagnosis would help him accept this and adapt, but he had a dislike of any kind of institutions and doctors specifically.
I didn't mind though. He understood some of the things I liked, much more than the average person, especially a person my age. I used to hate electronic music, and Nick was the guy who gave me a CD with some early jungle and drum'n'bass, which was my entry drug.
Of course, the file called something like "jungle <date> <author>.mp3" was actually terrible early drum'n'bass, and the file called "drum and bass mix.mp3" was actually a brilliant jungle set - I'm quite sure it was Kemistry & Storm, sounded something like this, only without the MC and even junglier.
He also introduced me to some instrumental hip-hop like DJ Krush, whose music I sometimes listen to to this day, and Art of Noise, which I'm frankly not a huge fan of these days, but it served as a great counter-argument in the early-to-mid days of online nerdom when many otherwise smart people thought that all electronic music is stupid.
Of course I gave him music that I discovered as well. And we also exchanged videogames, old DOS games, new releases, but also some great shareware and freeware games often meant for hot-seat multiplayer, with up to four kids sitting around one keyboard, which was amazing fun for many hours. Being twelve years old buys with access to a CD burner, we natually exchanged other things as well.
The interesting thing is that despite his in retrospect likely autism, he seemed quite socially resilient. When he was I think 8 years old, his parents travelled from a poor, only briefly free and democratic Czechia, to a large city in Texas for a year, where his mother was to teach at an inner city high school through an exchange programme.
That year brought a ton of interesting stories, it was a shock for all of them, but that's a different topic. He returned with drastically improved English skills, prejudice against obese people and mild racism towards black people. Hey, don't look at me, I'm just telling it how it is.
The interesting thing is that racism was very much alive and present in Czechia at that time, but not against black people. Our history is completely different in that regard, so it was very common for people to say "I hate Gypsies, but I have nothing against Black people, Black people are cool." This changed later as we basically imported American racism as a side effect of importing more and more American media, though we still neither commonly practice nor truly understand (likely applies to me as well) this kind of racism.
As we grew up and stopped meeting twice a year, for new year's eve and during summer vacation, we lost touch. The last good thing I did for him was sending him an invite to my favorite local discussion board, which is to this day the only general purpose discussion board I know of that is much better than Tildes.
I think I hadn't seen him for at least a decade when a friend of our parents', whom we also knew well, unexpectedly died. We all met at a memorial party some time after the funeral, talked and played board games. Nick was invited to play table football, but couldn't join because for some reason he was losing the ability to grip things firmly and accurately.
It was quite new, so he nervously joked about it. Some of the other people present tried to get him to a good neurologist early through their connections (and failed). It took I think about a year until he got his diagnosis: not a rare, aggressive type of multiple sclerosis, but ALS, the thing with the ice bucket challenge, the thing Stephen Hawking had. He was 32 years old.
To this day I have no idea if there's any medication that can at least slow it down, because his personality and "social resilience" meant that he rejected all institutional help. This made it quite hard for his aging parents too. He hated having his hair touched but also later couldn't really wash it or brush it himself. He hated getting help in general, so he dressed himself for as long as he could, even when it took him two hours to put on a t-shirt.
This is all irrational and stupid. It was also all granted to him untill the very end, and so untill the very end he was allowed to keep his dignity in that way.
The sad part is that I only know all of this from second-hand information. I can't say I was indifferent, but when he was diagnosed we hadn't been in any contact for a decade, we weren't friends anymore. And through all that time I have been battling a chronic illness of my own that is unlikely to kill me, but that limits my life a lot, and when it doesn't, I have so many things I want or need to do when I suddenly can. I also live on the opposite side of the country, however small it is.
That said, of course I could have messaged or visited him if I truly wanted to. By the time I thought about it, he was barely able to speak and at that point I frankly didn't have the balls to do it. Of course, he normally refused to see anyone, he did not want to be seen like that, but he did sometimes accept people he knew from childhood.
A few months ago, he started having breathing problems. It may not have been the ALS progression yet but an infection, so despite his hate of doctors and hospitals, his parents managed to convince him to get hospitalized. He was just barely able to swallow tiny bits of food at that point, so he still had something like a breakfast with his parents, very underweight but without a feeding tube.
During the night he died, aged 38. If you know about ALS, you know there is some mercy in this. Dying at home with your family is always preferable, but with ALS that commonly means gradually losing the ability to breathe and slowly suffocating.
The saddest thing about Nick is that his life was marked by unfulfilled potential. He was not very socially competent and very impractical, but also quite intelligent and undoubtedly capable... of something. But he never managed to find the something. Worked a basic tech job for which he was not overqualified exactly, but certainly sharper than the job required (though I'm not entirely sure how he felt about it). Didn't really build anything for himself. As far as I know he never was with a woman despite almost certainly wanting to. I don't think he was particularly happy with his life either. And he never got the chance to change that.
Seeing myself in the slideshow of photos from his life during the funeral only made it more apparent how important our group of friends was in his life. The funeral took place in a neighboring town because the town where he lived only has a church next to the graveyard, not a secular ceremonial building, and he wouldn't want to have his funeral in a church. We all came, his family came, and so did his work colleagues, some of whom cried as well.
After the funeral we talked and ate and drank in his parents' flat. One that they will be forced to leave soon after probably nearly 30 years, moving into a smaller one and getting rid of some of their stuff. Through a slit in the door I saw a glimpse of what I assume was furniture and/or machines designed to make care easier, obtained despite his hardheadedness.
Okay, wipe your tears.
When I was a kid, Pornhub didn't exist. At some point we got Shoutcast, online radios and TVs thanks to which you could literally watch porn in Winamp, but before that me and my classmates sometimes watched a porn VHS one of us found in their parents' bedroom, and we also swapped CDs with porn. Those were hard to come by (no, don't say it), so each was precious, and during breaks in school we would talk about who's hotter, whether Amanda or Natascha. We were probably 12 years old when this started and I think we all turned out fine despite that.
Well, the one thing I got from Nick and never returned is a CD with his handwriting saying "P.vids .mpg open". When the three videos he burned on the CD didn't fill it entirely, he didn't finalize the burning process so that more could be added later, he was practical like that.
After remembering that something like this probably exists, I went through a box of my old stuff at my parents' house and actually found it. I still own an old laptop with an optical drive, so I put the CD in, but it failed to read. I tried cleaning the laser lens with a q-tip just in case because it looked dusty, and it really worked. VLC, one of the best free applications ever, naturally came (no!!) through as well.
The "last modified" date on each of the three files said December 19th, 2003. Obviously I looked at the videos, and it turns out that we were completely normal heterosexual boys with completely normal tastes. Not surprising, but nice to have a confirmation. One of the girls had Garfield socks, something that I remembered and laughed when I saw it so many years later.
This CD truly is the only physical thing that I ever got from him, as far as I know. I mean, there may have been some small things we exchanged as kids, but those were lost to time, whereas the CD rested among CDs of 70s French avantgarde and old Manowar albums.
I really don't need to explain how sad the whole situation was. But this one stupid CD gave it a funny and honestly kind of cool twist, which also made it easier to share this whole situation with various friends of mine who never met him, and who very much appreciated the absurdity, wholesome and morbid at the same time.
So now you can too.
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Comment on Denmark wants to test whether weight-loss drugs can help get more people into work, adding a new economic dimension to the debate over obesity treatments in ~health
V17 Link ParentAre you from the US? I rarely see such hostility towards thinking about healthcare costs from countries with socialized healthcare, like Denmark. Healthcare is incredibly expensive even in places...Are you from the US? I rarely see such hostility towards thinking about healthcare costs from countries with socialized healthcare, like Denmark.
Healthcare is incredibly expensive even in places where it's regulated, state funded and overall much cheaper than in the US. Denmark spends over 10% of its GDP on healthcare. It's always going to be expensive, and in fact it's going to get worse due to aging population, because it's so labor intensive, full of complicated technologies with very high demands on safety and reliability and carried by expensive and complicated research. Unchecked capitalism (which is not a label I would use for Denmark) can make some of those things much more expensive, but it didn't create those realities.
We simply cannot afford to give whatever to whoever, the resources aren't there. This is a case of "we don't currently pay for this specific medication en masse, but maybe we could find a way to financially rationalize it". That's a good thing.
edit: also the article is behind a paywall and archive.ph doesn't work, so we're having a bit of a reddity "didn't read the article" discussion here
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Comment on Babylon 5 S01E14: "TKO" - Episode Discussion in ~tv
V17 Link ParentWere they really? I think the way in which they were done was a bit too silly and not sinister/selfish enough. Looking at Russia today, I think the stereotypes were too kind if anything. As a...Were they really? I think the way in which they were done was a bit too silly and not sinister/selfish enough. Looking at Russia today, I think the stereotypes were too kind if anything. As a previously invaded eastern european I am russophobic as fuck, but I don't think I'm wrong.
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Comment on Zoo CAD engine overview in ~engineering
V17 Link ParentThanks for bumping this thread, I may try it as well. I used to be a Fusion360 user, but started hating Autodesk since they did the bait & switch on that, so that's off the table for me, and...Thanks for bumping this thread, I may try it as well. I used to be a Fusion360 user, but started hating Autodesk since they did the bait & switch on that, so that's off the table for me, and despite all the improvements I haven't been convinced by FreeCAD yet. I'm mostly just a hobbyist, so their pricing model seems nice.
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Comment on Insomniathought: blocking people in social media can be a positive thing in ~tech
V17 Link ParentThis is literally only one anecdote, but I want to share it somewhere because it happened yesterday and I'm still bitter about it (for other reasons too). It's about a conflict in a local...That being said, I’m always on the fence about blocking. I do wonder if the ease of blocking has made us less able to deal with conflict (which is not abuse).
This is literally only one anecdote, but I want to share it somewhere because it happened yesterday and I'm still bitter about it (for other reasons too). It's about a conflict in a local hackerspace that I've been a long time member of, and with some dissatisfaction I followed the change of atmosphere as most of the old guard quit or stepped down from their positions (including me, to be fair) and were replaced by new people. I think it's relevant because obviously most of the members are nerds who spend unhealthy amounts of time on the internet, often communicating online more than irl.
Anyway, we were voting about kicking out a member, which is a rare and unpleasant thing, and before the vote a discussion took place. I noticed that almost none of the other members who fought for kicking the problem member out had the balls to be specific about their accusations, some of them rather serious. It was all just (serious but) vague accusations like "he does xxx all the time", and even several times said by a different person on behalf of the actual (anonymous) accuser.
This is a significant shift from the "old guard", dudes who are 10-12 years older and grew up mostly on IRC, capable of directly arguing (sometimes rather aggressively) both online and in real life. The separation by age was not 100%, but it applied to a majority.
I think this cultural shift has multiple causes - but then again, the blocking feature of almost all social media surely has multiple causes as well, it may both just be the result of some larger trend.
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Comment on There's a hundred illegal erections in the hills behind my parents' house in ~hobbies
V17 Link ParentThank you for the kind words. This is a good point. With regards to camps returning to the protected land I am skeptical, but surely it's going to survive in some way. To be fair I haven't thought...Thank you for the kind words.
I wouldn't worry too much about the "journalist", if this culture has survived Nazis & Soviets it will have no problem with a neoliberal state and one journalist on a crusade.
This is a good point. With regards to camps returning to the protected land I am skeptical, but surely it's going to survive in some way.
(If there is anything I can do to aid in the resistance I'm happy to lend a hand, but I suspect that drawing international attention to it might just make matters worse... (but again, what do I know?))
To be fair I haven't thought about that too hard because I don't have the energy, but yeah, I suspect that just letting it blow over and at most encouraging whatever relevant autority to drag their feet for as long as possible may be the best tactic here. It makes me sad though that it may take a decade or more till we get to the "quietly rebuilding" phase and many old tramps may not live to see it. Thinking about it rationally with some perspective though, that's just how life goes and there are much worse things than this that could happen.
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Comment on There's a hundred illegal erections in the hills behind my parents' house in ~hobbies
V17 (edited )Link ParentI think that this is the most solid case for libertarianism (as a general idea, not the libertarian party in the US) that exists. This overabundance of laws that most people break makes it really...Generally, you can break most laws here, as long as it's not too visible and it doesn't bother anyone. If I had to put a number on it, I probably break at least 10 laws a day. There's a red light I run literally every afternoon because it's stupid and is a massive waste of time.
I'd say anyone who goes out of their way to get people in trouble that are breaking laws that don't actually hurt anyone is a massive asshole. The cops think they're assholes, the judges that prosecute the cases think they're assholes, the general public think they're assholes, and especially the people getting in trouble think they're assholes.
I think that this is the most solid case for libertarianism (as a general idea, not the libertarian party in the US) that exists. This overabundance of laws that most people break makes it really easy for either the state (which happened commonly during communism) or as we see here even for one asshole to endlessly bully you. I need to say that I am not a libertarian and wouldn't want to live in an actually libertarian state, but I think this kind of healthy paranoia over regulating everything and its consequences is an angle that we should consider and think about hard every time we push for a new law.
It's too bad these tramps can't organize and get those laws changed so that this asshole doesn't have a leg to stand on, but I get that political organization takes a whole lot of time and effort, and visibility is probably the last thing a community like that wants anyway.
True, but also I'm worried there's not even any way to do it. I can't see a way in which you could define proper behavior in a law, in a way that can be checked and enforced. Tramping seems like the special category of "we need to regulate it on paper because if every common idiot did it, the damage would be too big, but a sane person doing it is harmless and even welcome". In an ideal situation the solution is obvious: decide it on a case by case basis and if a camp gets too popular among people who misbehave* and generates too much trouble, it can be removed. But in reality you get one spiteful person who creates a map of camps with the explicit purpose to make them all problematic in that way.
This I see as the biggest tragedy of the whole thing. Things that are not sanctioned by state or whatever regulating body tend to disappear over time because a portion of people is unable to participate in an acceptable way, and most of the time there's no way back. We rarely relax or prune old regulations, and so the continued existence of such things is often dependent on a few people in the right positions of power willing to take responsibility and even legal risk to themselves to defend them. That's a fragile system that often fails and so we very slowly move into a life more and more regulated and controlled. Is there even a way to go back?
* We call them "mastňáci", something like "fatty guys", origin is not related to being overweight but probably comes from leaving trash like oily sausage wrappers etc.
regarding gatekeeping
Honestly I don't get the hate for gatekeeping at all. I think that most of the internet clearly shows us that some sort of gatekeeping is necessary for good communities, reddit especially is a particularly bad example. I get that artificially restricting things is bad in principle and sometimes in practice too, I would never think of asking somebody who wears a shirt of my favorite band to name 3 songs (this is a meme, no idea how often it actually happens). But many of us talk about how great some aspects of the old internet used to be, and one of the main reasons for that was that it was all gatekept in various ways. My hot take is that the dislike for gatekeeping is a part of a broad trend of mainstream antiintelectuallism, but this is truly a hot take that I don't want to defend here, I'm sharing it to provoke a bit but not to pollute this thread.
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Comment on There's a hundred illegal erections in the hills behind my parents' house in ~hobbies
V17 Link ParentI do urban exploration as well, never been in a place as interesting and as dangerous as the Paris catacombs, but I definitely see the appeal. One thing that I like about urbex is that you go to...I do urban exploration as well, never been in a place as interesting and as dangerous as the Paris catacombs, but I definitely see the appeal. One thing that I like about urbex is that you go to places that may be quite near to where normal people commonly go, and yet most of them have no idea the place even exists, so there are definitely some parallels. But I enjoy how pure and idealistic tramping can be when compared to urbex.
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Comment on There's a hundred illegal erections in the hills behind my parents' house in ~hobbies
V17 Link ParentNot a devaluation at all! KC:D is the most accurate depiction of czech forests in a videogame that I know of. One of the reason why I love playing it is that the landscapes remind me of childhood...Not a devaluation at all! KC:D is the most accurate depiction of czech forests in a videogame that I know of. One of the reason why I love playing it is that the landscapes remind me of childhood summer vacations.
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Comment on There's a hundred illegal erections in the hills behind my parents' house in ~hobbies
V17 Link ParentI would have to double check, but from what I remember it is legal to camp in non-protected forests and also in the lowest form of protected land (CHKO, chráněná krajinná oblast), but the...You wrote that in Czechia and Slovakia "when you want to sleep in the forest, you can of course just use a tarp and a sleeping bag anywhere". I'm surprised (and a little excited) to hear this, as I was under the impression that wild camping is illegal in the two countries, like it is in most countries in the area. But am I mistaken here? Am I a fool to travel to the other side of the continent to get my yearly tramping fix?
I would have to double check, but from what I remember it is legal to camp in non-protected forests and also in the lowest form of protected land (CHKO, chráněná krajinná oblast), but the restriction is that it can only be wild camping with a tarp, sleeping bag, hammock etc., no permanent structures (which I think may include tents as well) and no fires, and it can only be for a limited time in one spot, I think like 3 days. The "no fires" rule is often ignored unless the weather has been very dry and forest fire warnings have been issued, but I believe the law says you have to be something like 50 meters from the edge of the forest to legally start a campfire. You can legally collect dry firewood sticks up to a diameter of 7 cm and collect berries or edible mushrooms for personal use.
It's not something I normally do and it's been over 20 years since I left Boyscouts, so do check those things if you ever come here - which I think is a great idea, both Czechia and Slovakia are quite beautiful. Czechia is more tame, no particularly difficut terrain and a high density of villages almost everywhere, whereas Slovakia has actual mountains. Slovakia also has some bears, around here the only dangerous animal is the tick, and possibly wild boars if you're unlucky enough to get between a mother and her young.
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Comment on There's a hundred illegal erections in the hills behind my parents' house in ~hobbies
V17 (edited )Link ParentThere are three camps in this image. Can you find them? I couldn't, and I know where they are - this is an area that has already been mapped and the maps published. I certainly hope so. Right now...With satellite images readily available how do these clearings stay hidden?
There are three camps in this image. Can you find them? I couldn't, and I know where they are - this is an area that has already been mapped and the maps published.
My hope is that your governing bodies also feel the same way you do and bureaucratically drag their heels long enough for the one guy to go away.
I certainly hope so. Right now he's winning, but so far that's two isolated protected areas, and it took him years. We can only hope that all the bureaucracy annoyments and/or court processes in other areas take him just as long and aren't sped up by what already happened, which is somewhat plausible since many of the other spots are not on protected land, so his case would have to be stronger.
The one guy is just doing it for clicks isn't here, just to create outrage and controversy and get famous and make money?
From what I know about him I believe it's truly just ego and a combination of spite and rationalizing yourself into believing you're the one person against all who's doing the right thing, without any other objective goal. He does have some background in ecology, but he was never really an eco activist. Back channels also claim that he lost his woman to a tramp, which I didn't include above because I have no way to validate it and it feels like a very cheap attack, but I wouldn't bet against it considering how personal this whole thing seems to be from his side and also frankly considering that he's an unattractive and not particularly liked middle aged man (and has been long before this battle).
Just want to say this is a very good observation. I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, which is a complicated illness that is not nearly about feeling tired, and aside from a couple big issues it is composed of twenty little things that are not a big problem on their own, but it is painfully obvious how together they make dealing with everything in life so much harder, whether it's big traumatic events or small nonsense.