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I mean, the guy handing out eggnog (with extra nog available) likely did lead to a hangover, but this is something different.

The burner warehouse offered an event last night (these sorts of things happen right under your nose, but as with a speakeasy, you have to know when and where they are) with food, fire dancing (because of course they did), some serious house and trance, copious amounts of alcohol and weed, and of course a few different fire pits.

There were three tiers for tickets: Free, $15 and $30. I opted for option 1.

The friend who introduced me properly to the burn scene felt inclined to come out last night, so we'd occasionally cross paths, and then once we'd kind of tapped out, we retreated to his van.

He has a dog that really brings all the girls to the ... drainage ditch. So we're drinking beers and shooting the shit while a woman plays with his dog a few feet away.

All in all, a wonderful night. I made new acquaintances, ate some OK food, heard some good tunes and hung out with the guy who's become my closest friend in the past couple of years.

But then, you wake up alone in a trash-filled van and realize that was fiction.

Quick backstory: He died Nov. 14.

I keep trying to feel something -- anything -- and yet my mind tends to wander to my ex-wife for that.

I very vaguely remember times where we'd have fun, as with me riding on his shoulders, but the final year Oma came for Christmas, all of that was gone.

A friend and I had split a beer several months back (I think we were 11) when my parents went out for the night and got us pizza.

As 11-year-olds are, we stupidly did not dispose of the evidence. My parents being reasonable people, the punishment was "don't ever do this again."

So it is against this backdrop that I'm sitting in my room, and my dad bursts in, furious. In my face like he'd never been before, and I was frozen in shock and confusion. I'd not done anything.

Over the course of the next half hour, the picture becomes clear: Oma had opened a beer thinking it was a V8.

What I never got was an apology. He knew damn fucking well that he'd falsely accused me and scared me, but apologizing was apparently too much.

There were nearly 35 years for that apology. It just didn't happen.

Just after my rent went up by more than my food and cat budget, I rehomed Clovis and bought a van.

I'd done quite a fair amount of research, having been dabbling in tiny-home living for seven years, so building out an off-grid system wasn't the issue it could have been.

I was not prepared for how things would transpire.

I selected my van based on the Cummins engine and Allison transmission, both of which are famous for longevity. Thing is, that covers nothing else, so when the starter motor dies, well, that's a replacement. Serpentine belt breaks on your way back from a build day? That's a $400 tow for five miles.

The electrical system was a high point early on. Everything just worked, and my laptop was happy to work with my 5G hotspot while the fridge actually kept ice cream cold.

Moving forward two years, my fridge has failed so many times that I don't even bother putting anything other than beverages in it. It's a cooler after having to throw out hundreds of dollars of food over several rounds of trusting it again.

The electrical system? Well ... you sign up for certain things when putting your batteries in series, and one is sudden imbalance. Which means the whole system is dead. This is fine when you can crash with a friend and charge there, but when he's down on the coast, this becomes a very expensive hotel adventure.

One other thing that made me feel good about this decision was my ex-boss was fine with me using the dumpsters (I park a few hundred feet away from those), but that lease ran out a year ago, and everyone else nearby locks theirs.

There is a lot of trash in here.

It's not all doom and gloom, but some days, it feels that way. For example, I never waste food anymore unless the fridge fucks me.

But slowly, normal human conditions change. I had a gym membership to shower daily and perform other bodily functions. Sadly, things did not go well at work, and now that was a $20 expense I couldn't justify.

I'm not a naturally stinky person, and I still had the nearby brewery to go to for indoor plumbing; so far, so good.

Obviously, I was still peeing in bottles when leaving the van wasn't really an option. There's a fair amount of grass here where I could dump them, so I wasn't being a bad neighbour.

Then, you have the first time you get sick. Even the 24-hour 7-Eleven an eight-minute walk away is not going to be a solution to shitting the bed. This is where a bucket comes into play, if you hadn't donated the bucket to the makerspace for an event and not retrieved it.

So, now I'm not regularly bathing, and that's the least of my hygiene concerns.

I share this not for sympathy, but because there's a strong sense overall that people become homeless and everything goes wrong at once -- and we just become degenerates. That isn't the case; many would like to bounce back, but as things continue to deteriorate, that simply becomes harder.

My dad dying means I'll have the funds sometime to file for bankruptcy and hopefully be able to get back on track, but that still looks like a long road.

I'm lucky that I have an exit ramp. Once one starts going down this rabbit hole, things just get more and more complex. When people talk about social services in standard media, this is all but ignored.

It's not just housing or jobs; it's literally needing to jumpstart your life with a dead battery. Bootstraps!

Throw in the increasing cruelty of services for the indigent, and you're creating the problem you're trying to scare people with.

Balance housing costs and wages, and I think you might be surprised how the homeless problem solves itself.

Maybe a few hippies want to be here, but the rest of us do not.

It was about this time 16 years ago that I started talking with my second ex-wife. We'd chatted briefly five years earlier, but she shut things down immediately.

And so when what happened happened, neither of us was in the mindset to fully process it. I was technically still married, and she wasn't exactly single.

As I've gone into excruciating detail before, no need here. The Cliff's Notes version is a lot of random shit happened in short order that rose to the level of weather causing us to meet.

Having spoken on the phone the night before, we confirmed my intent and need. I had an ex who'd gotten me a hotel room in Tacoma, Wash., but she reserved it starting Sunday night, and the friend I was crashing with moved the "out this weekend" goalposts from EOD Sunday to Friday.

I harbour no ill will toward him ... I'd overstayed the original "couple of weeks," so no issue there. I was able to crash with a former coworker for a night Saturday, which is where the phone call happened.

See, the issue was an ice storm on I-5. This simply doesn't happen; way too far west, but here we are.

So, driving up the 5 to Tacoma was unacceptably risky. And the woman I'd been talking to for a week lived on the South Coast of Oregon, which wouldn't be much warmer, but above freezing.

But what led to this improbable situation was how we immediately interacted. She was prickly for the first couple of rounds of messages, but then she somehow softened. I believe there's a term, tsundere, for this.

She was a hardened bitch (I don't say this derogatorily; she will happily admit as much herself) who didn't understand why she even said yes to my random ask.

One night. No funny business.

That fell apart almost comically in a few stages; needless to say, we ended up ... well, the first time was awkward because no one was there for that!

The problem is, we'd touched (her idea) while watching The Neverending Story, a movie her son was named after the main character of and also the first one I remember seeing as a child (it would later inform my preference for electronic music), and it happened to be in the place I would eventually come to revere to the point that it was my last physical address before everything fell apart and I was at her door.

States away.

I'll eventually write a book with all the details, but I'm not here to provide a history lesson; I'm here to talk about next Tuesday.

Because it is now tentatively planned, nine years after our divorce, that I visit for a couple of days. She brought it up this time, so my homelessness wasn't the motivating factor.

My dad dying a couple of weeks ago and her talking with my mom for the first time in years likely softened her stance.

I'm of two minds. At this point of mental chaos, between the death and other tangible problems, a couple of days with the person who knows me better than anyone else sounds really appealing.

Fiction, but we know it is. Her boys would not countenance me in her bed. And we have a two-day window, which she has opened.

It's a bizarre situation. Hell, just finally getting along for hours at a time on the phone after so many years was unexpected.

Graduated during the pandemic, got a good job right after graduation working in IT (I don’t have a degree in IT but I’m good with computers and learn quickly). I’ve been working from home since 2019.

My work just announced that work from home will be forbidden (no exceptions) starting January. My choice is to move to a high cost of living city to keep my job (which my current salary truly cannot afford) or find a new job. I live rurally so finding a new job is tough, especially in my field.

Not confident about my future. I (think) I have a wide breadth of technical digital skills (I can do parametric 3D modelling, video edit+colour grading, software and app mockups using Figma and XD, graphic design using vector graphics, anything M365 -tenant administration and deployment, digital training, PowerBI data cleaning and dashboards, powerautomate, blah blah blah).

I don’t even know what other jobs I can do. I’ve only ever worked at this place and I feel that on paper, I’m not very hireable. Surely though someone with my assortment of skills can find a line of work where I’d thrive and learn more.

I just feel stuck in a rut and have no idea what to do.

Because I do.

In 2003, I went to my college roommate's parents for the final time. I'd burned a bunch of new music on MP3 CDs, and this came on as I was driving through blinding rain in bumper-to-bumper traffic up the 205.

Now, if you don't like trance, this is unlikely to change your opinion, as it essentially goes nowhere for the better part of five minutes (curse of the genre). But if you do, here's my holiday gift.

It's basically my Alice's Restaurant, which I first heard in that house Thanksgiving 1997. This one is thankfully less than 18 minutes.

this week's reading is Zoopolis:

So, my dad died Friday. This is not your problem, but I navigate cacti while my mom and I wrap up what was not already arranged, while I enjoy acting like I'm the sort to be able to pay for a $300 hotel.

I have no issue with most cacti. What there is to deduce here is that I'm originally from Arizona, and if you'd like to jump in cholla, you're welcome to at your peril.

Some may note that was not accidental wording.

See, the thing about cholla is you really don't want to have gotten that close.

I always hate being back in Arizona to hear banalities about whatever the fuck it is now. Give me the 5Cs or GTFO.

No one is from here. So to attempt to speak as a native is generally useless. I fucking am. Sorry, Wisconsin and Minnesota -- you don't get it.

Yay! More saguaros. Tucson seems to prefer "sahuaro," as evidenced by street names and more than one school name. I won't speak to why I was ever here in high school.

I will tell you that the "g" was central to branding.

I guess this is my immediate reaction to being here for my dad dying. It also means the last time I have to come here.

Well, penultimate. I have to fly out here again for the spreading of the ashes, so we're not quite done yet. Death certificates can apparently be a bitch.

What's odd is I'm now spending my own money to be here. Mom kept reminding me as I was making decisions that related to my own possessions.

I'm not rich, and it will be a month or so before I can take control of what's left. But, you know, this is not my current worry.

Meanwhile, I'm in my room at the Westward Look. Don't assume what I can do thereafter, as I'd never like to be back here. When I fly out, I have zero intention to return.

N/A

I guess he really wanted to make it to 84.

One silver lining is my mom and I flew to Tuscon at the start of the week, so we got to see him only a few hours before he gave up.

He was in a vegetative state already when I first saw him Tuesday night, in bed, mouth agape, getting water via sponges, unable to close his eyes anymore, having trouble breathing and certainly unable to speak.

That was only 11 days after speaking with him on the phone to wish him a happy birthday, utterly unaware that would be the last time we spoke.

I'm still in shock, being less than two hours into getting the news. My planned Saturday departure has been pushed to Tuesday so we can tie up loose ends (thankfully, most arrangements had already been made in advance).

I don't know how I'm feeling right now, and I have the luxury of still being in my hotel room while Mom contacts people ahead of meeting up and actually having to face reality.

I can say that it's a relief that he's no longer in pain -- hospice upped his morphine frequency to every two hours just yesterday as he became "more agitated," whatever that means when you can barely move your hands and nothing else.

Mom and the care staff said that he hadn't so much as blinked in days, but he did upon seeing me, and then tears welled up.

You can't really prepare for the death of a parent, no matter how steeled you think you are.

My dad is about to die. My ex-wife wants to know if I need her there. This does not make sense. She's willing to fly out. I don't know what to make of this. I guess 33% fewer Hahnlosers.

first, i am not very notable so don’t bother trying to determine who i am lol. i am very close to 100,000 followers—just to demonstrate my minor success and relevancy to the topic.

i hate every algorithm-driven video sharing app. they are absolutely fantastic for the consumer; finding their likes and interests and exploiting them, but terrible if you are a creator whose content others regularly consume. i struggle to be seen by 10% of my audience. most days i wont crack beyond 400 views. Four hundred. And you might be thinking that’s 400 of my audience; maybe some new people in there as well, so at least a few are coming back regularly.. right? no lol. according to my analytics, about 98% of my viewers are not following me. they’re from recommend pages and outside of my followers.

…so… what the hell? these people followed me because they wanted to see what i had to make. these companies are keeping viewers distracted with their recommended feed so they never check out who they’re following and only consume whatever the algorithm demands be seen. 2% of my audience are followers. that’s about it. i’ve seen it as high as 3% but never beyond.

i make content because i genuinely enjoy it and always will do it. i love the art of comedy and spreading laughter. i want a big audience to make more people happy. truly, i primarily create for myself as personal enrichment. the money aspect is enticing and makes me long for a chance at making this work professionally.

but it’s so unreliable.. these algorithms are not rewarding, and they will zap you of your humanity and creativity. the cash i’m paid is like a reward i get for playing their game. it isn’t something i earn. i happened to do it their way accidentally to my benefit and theirs.

good boy 🙄

this week's reading is Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future

receipts. shit. justifying purchases is about to become a nightmare.

expense reports, credit card reconciliations, and bank account reconciliations are untrustworthy now. you have documentation? let me see the physical receipt. somebody with a receipt printer could easily get around that but ALL companies accept and likely prefer digital copies.

shiiiiiiiiit. piiiiiiiiiiiiiss.

can anyone in the industry confirm this being a problem/concern?

what’s your industry worry with genAI?

So, as this latest stretch of expecting conversations and offers for contract work falling through hits nine months, I thought I'd reach out about experience starting up newsletters, since that seems to be the post-corporate hotness.

The goal here would not be sudden riches, as I'm shit at promoting myself, so it would likely just be in my profile on BlueSky and here.

But if my understanding from the piece I just posted here having linked to actual rates from Substack, Beehiiv and Ghost is correct, seems like with the last of the three, I could dip my toes in for $9/month.

I'm assuming there are some asterisks.

I'm not under any belief that this would go anywhere, but I also didn't think that when I walked into my college paper. The difference here is I can curate and provide snarky context on news with a somewhat wider topic range than most options seem to provide.

Eventually, I'd bring long-form opinion into it, but you can't start there. This would in no way impact my participation on Beehaw, as I do real-time discovery here, though there would likely bee a lot of repetition the next morning.

Any insights would be appreciated. If I could actually get nine subscribers for a buck a month and break even, it seems low-risk, high reward. I don't even know what payment tier options look like on these platforms, but pay-what-you-think-I'm-worth seems a fair ask.

And from the direct mutual aid I've received off Beehaw in the past year, with and without asking, it appears there is some market for what I offer.

just wondering if anyone has thought this far yet because it's likely to happen imo. how long will it be able to hold things off? lol idk probably not long but it will be done a couple of times at least.

we will be ruined. will people start taking to the streets then? it should have happened long, long ago, but maybe then? i truly don't know anymore. events have passed that i thought would surely speak to and motivate Americans.. nothing.

it's a bunch of bullshit.

if you aren't aware, there has been a bizarre movement online involving several decentralized groups pursuing a shared ideology of chaos and violence. however, nothing truly unites them other than utilizing the same imagery, memes, and subculture. there's no leader, there's no official group.. you can make your own offshoot and recruit. that's really all it takes.

there are two big groups called 764 and NoLivesMatter. some of their members have recently been in the news for various violent crimes including murder and suicide. many members have recorded themselves engaging in extremely sadistic acts, some even involving animals. members have shared CSAM and often get young teens involved by manipulating them into sending their own pictures and videos for use as further CSAM. horrible stuff.

shockingly, these groups tend to prefer far-right imagery such as Nazi symbols and SS-lightning bolts or more obscure icons that pledge to a racist cause. there's tons of praising of Hitler and mass killers who went after minorities. these group members often discuss their hatred of foreigners and are largely white or supportive of white supremacy.

and the US government has the audacity to label them as "nihilistic" when they know far-right ideology is the basis of these groups and informs the members' moral outlook. labeling them as NVEs distances them from their actual ideologies. it is covering up for them, it is a disguise. the fascists-in-charge don't want the average person to know they are everywhere. if these groups are separated from the far-right glue that holds them together then the people will reflexively deny any connection.

this is what they want. hoping to make you aware if you didn't know. don't use this term. the NVE you read about is ill-defined and is covering up for aimless right-wing violence.

I'll admit, I've been using Reddit some recently for certain things. Some experiences got me thinking. Over the years I've noticed that any actually honest discussion about certain things seems to either get your posts or comments deleted, or you banned. Things that tend to be counter to the myth of the virtuous 1% or of say the Trump myth, etc. seem to generally almost always end in this result. I've seen many examples. You can't post a vodcast calling out Trump pocketing $230 million of our money from the US Treasury based a bogus lawsuit to r/Politics of all things, and there's not much media coverage on it. You can't post anything about issues with the business model of many optometrists in the US to the optometrists subreddit even if someone asks a question about it. You can't even have a side discussion about economic and social policy when discussing the ACA. This is not recent either. I used to use Reddit a lot before the big exodus, and some of these are from years ago.

It got me thinking. People say that social media is bad because people don't actually discuss things except maybe in their own silo. It seems to be that even if people wanted to, it is banned on at least Reddit. Is this common on most platforms, or is this just a Reddit thing.

I love lemmy and Beehaw, but there are a few issues here too. In particular, scale, and the other is it tends to be a silo. So it is not actually usable for some things.

Thoughts?

when i started losing weight in November of 2024 my last recorded weight was 363 lbs (165 kg). it was the heaviest i ever reached but i was not convinced it couldn't have been worse given enough time. having lost so much weight at this point i am noticing parts of my body i have no recollection of seeing until now lol. like.. what do you mean the tendons on my fingers are visible when i move them??? huh there's also the same for my feet, and then the are veins more visible as well??? it's freaking me out.. i'm feeling constant reminders that i am a meat machine with bones and blood and i exist inside a skull.

it's making me have to recognize my body as more than a depressed blob i piloted against my will. i'm starting to not absolutely despise what i see in reflective surfaces. mirrors are not embarrassing like they used to be. i expect to keep seeing my bigger self and am pleasantly surprised when i don't.

now.. i still have roughly 50 more lbs (23 kg) to lose before i'm at my target weight goal, and then i will reassess and decide from there to maintain or lose more. it's hard to believe that i am 74% of the way complete. i didn't think i'd be here ever and now i'm living it.

anyway yeah, why are human bodies weird? gahhhhhhHHHHHHHH

this week's reading is Filterworld

After getting laid off in January because covering federal green-energy grants became a non-beat on the 20th, this year has been hell.

I've networked as much as I can given zero resources for going out to drink after prior networking attempts were all about putting me down for not having some skill that's obvious to a 25-year-old but was never relevant to me.

I'm not in the technician phase of my life; I'm more of a project manager at this point, but no one wants heterogeneous skills.

Since the layoff, I've had 14 offers for contract work, temporary housing or both. Of those, 14 ghosted at the precise moment of finalizing plans.

Shit is breaking down in my van faster than I can address it -- I crashed with a friend for a night earlier this week just to charge 600Ah of LFP back to the point where the solar kicks in.

But the fridge controls no longer work, and as a result, it runs 24/7 instead of just when it needs to kick on. Despite this, it doesn't get below 50F (10C), meaning I can't store food for much more than a day, which makes getting cheap meat and cheese at the store a nonstarter.

So I'm having to find cheap meals where I can squeeze two rounds out of $4, as I can't buy shit from HEB and have it stay good for long enough that I'm not losing money.

Did I mention the ants have noticed the fridge is no longer cold? I had a burger in the fridge for an hour before going to eat it, and, well ... that didn't happen.

Then there's the matter of the 1200W of solar on the roof that now seem to top out at 280W. That's more than I draw by day, but I tend to use electricity at night as well, and a system designed to recharge by 6kWh/day that's instead producing 1.4kWh is a problem.

My replacement 5G gateway now draws 45W instead of the 18W of the older model. So that's 650Wh out the window for no reason atop 792Wh for the constantly running fridge.

And, hey ... look, the delta is 1.44kWh, meaning I'm only producing enough to cover the waste of my system.

I seriously don't know what to do here. I can't afford a room or anything, but I can't go without power. I'm trying frantically to network outside of formal events and maybe crash somewhere for a couple of weeks while I get used to hygiene again, but this just feels like a hole with no bottom.

There are charities around that do good work, but you have to be a good Christian (or at least pretend to be) to get assistance, and while I do consider myself a good Christian by virtue of following the teachings of Jesus, those are just too woke for Texas. "Love thy neighbour? Fuck off."