• 10 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I would love for the day to arrive where Trump’s impact was so low that everything he said could be ignored. I really, really wish that day was today.

    Unfortunately, it’s not. He’s the Republican frontrunner for 2024 and even being indicted multiple times isn’t slowing him down. If anything, Republicans are rallying around him and claiming that him being charged with multiple crimes somehow proves that that Democrats are corrupt. (Did mean old Hillary force Trump to take those classified documents home with him?)

    Trump still has a following. If he tells them “X is corrupt and needs to be taken out,” you’re likely to have one or more idiots trying to follow Trump’s order with violence. Given that they are idiots, they aren’t likely to succeed, but throw enough idiots at “Trump’s problem” and eventually one might succeed out of pure dumb luck.







  • Same thing happens in the Jewish community. My father is a Republican and believes that Republicans support Jews because “they support Israel.” He doesn’t see that the only reasons that Republicans support Israel are because:

    1. The evangelicals want Israel to exist and be run by Jews so it can be attacked and Jesus can return.

    And

    1. So the right has a place to say Jews really belong (not in America).

    They’ll “support Israel” all day and night while actively pushing for a Christian Theocracy in America where Jews are (at best) second class citizens.



  • She would harass me for a few months and then move on to other targets before coming back to me. I believe that it took a year or so (going from memory) before I finally “let her win” by fooling her into thinking I took my blog down.

    She’s had some high profile targets too. She was convinced that Boy George was really dead and the person claiming to be Boy George was an imposter. She’d tweet at him incessantly to get him to fess up. She also targeted the then-CEO of Firefox.

    Oh, and she also thought I was part of some Uber hacker group. Her proof? Anytime she messaged someone about how God told her we did all these horrible things, they blocked her. Obviously, it wasn’t them blocking the crazy. Nope. It was us breaking into those people’s Twitter accounts and forcing a block even though those people actually believed her.

    I really didn’t want her to get arrested and just hoped that she’d get help. Sadly, I don’t think she ever did.



  • Yes. My son and I went to the IRS office and, despite my brain cooking up horrible scenarios (including us getting arrested - my brain apparently hates me), it went very smoothly.

    The agent there had no clue what the person on the phone was talking about. Her best guess was that the phone agent wasn’t trained well and looked up someone else’s information. After a few moments, everything was sorted out and my son will receive his refund.




  • I joined it to see what it’s like (and to keep my “TechyDad” name from being taken by someone else).

    It’s nice, but it has 4 major drawbacks that I spotted pretty quickly.

    First of all, your timeline consists of a random selection of people, not just people you follow. Apparently, this was a launch-day decision because they were afraid that people would sign in before anyone they followed was online and then they’d see no posts at all. I can understand this and hopefully they fix it quickly.

    Secondly, the timeline isn’t in chronological order. I’ll see a post from 2 hours ago, followed by one from 5 minutes ago, followed by one from 7 hours ago, followed by one posted 30 seconds ago. There’s no rhyme or reason and it’s annoying.

    Third, you can’t search for topics. Let’s say I want to see who is talking about LEGO. In Mastodon (or even Twitter), I could search for “LEGO” and find discussions to join. In Threads, you can only search for people. So unless the person’s username includes “LEGO,” then I won’t see them - even if they exclusively post about LEGO.

    Finally, there are no hashtags. This is another way of finding discussions and people to follow. Using the above example, I could look at #LEGO on Mastodon to find posts I like. With Threads, you can’t use or search for hashtags.

    It’s definitely got potential, but it needs some more development before it is a Twitter killer.


  • I’ve only gone to Reddit for 3 things since the Great API Crisis:

    1. A local subreddit to get information about a developing local story. There aren’t enough people on Lemmy right now to justify local communities. If I set one up for my town, I’d like just be talking to myself.
    2. To browse the LEGO subreddit. There’s a LEGO community here, but it’s still small and sometimes I want to look at the bigger subreddit to see what’s happening.
    3. The Politics subreddit. I got curious about what’s going on there. (I spent WAY too much time there in the Beforetimes.) Turns out, it’s gotten somewhat quiet. Either I went there during a lull in conversation worthy events, or the users are fleeing to other places.

    In all cases, I went to Reddit to view what was happening, but didn’t feel the need to comment myself.


  • I’m loving it except for one thing. I used Boost when I was on Reddit and loved it. The developer of Boost is working on a version for Lemmy and started up a community for everyone to congregate in. So I went to subscribe to it and I can’t.

    My best guess is that the instance that I signed up for (BeeHaw) defederated from Lemmy.world where the Boost community is. So my BeeHaw account is refusing to allow me to subscribe to it. If this is the case, I might need to consider moving instances.

    The multiple instances is both a strength and weakness of Lemmy. It means that no billionaire can buy Lemmy and gut it. At best, a Musk/Spez/Zuckerberg wannabe could buy an instance or two. However, users could easily jump to another instance and escape their grasp. On the flip side, it means that a user on one instance could find themselves disconnected from other instances for various reasons (which the user may or may not agree with). Of course, even if this case, the user could jump to another instance if they think it’s too big of a problem.

    Whether this is more strength or more weakness remains to be seen, but it’ll definitely be interesting.


  • I was the victim of a cyberstalker about a decade ago. This person was convinced that I was really someone else that she had a beef with. Her reasoning? We both like taking photos. (Apparently, I’m the only one posting photos online. All those pictures you see online? That’s all me. No wonder I have no free time!)

    I couldn’t argue with her to let her know that she was mistaken because she had it on “very good authority” that I was lying about who I was. Namely, “God told her.” And I’m not exaggerating here. She literally thought that God talked to her and told her stuff like who was committing crimes.

    Oh and I was guilty of those crimes according to “God.” I won’t name those crimes because they’re heinous, but suffice it to say she thought I was doing unspeakable things to kids. She was threatening to call my employer, the police, and everyone who knew me to tell them about what I was doing.

    Luckily for me, all she had to go on was “TechyDad.” I blogged at the time, but didn’t post my exact whereabouts or my real name. The guy that she thought I was wasn’t as lucky. She contacted his employer (a school in New Zealand) and everyone with the same last name as him that was on Facebook and near him. All to tell them what he did to kids. (Again, her source was “God.” He didn’t really do anything and he had to have quite a few awkward conversations to clear things up.)

    I finally got rid of the stalker by grabbing her IP address (from one of her comments) and modifying my htaccess file to report 404 Page Not Found for only that IP. She crowed on Twitter about how she singlehandedly took me down and then moved on. (I and her other targets would report her to Twitter, but she’d constantly have dozens of other handles ready and waiting and would switch to them the second her main one was banned.)

    To my knowledge, she’s still out there stalking people.

    Now, how would this have been different had she had my real name? Well, with a little work she would have been able to look up my location. (My name’s pretty common, but she’d find me eventually.) Then, she’d locate my employer, my address, and other information. She could send me packages or mail harassing me. She could contact my local police to swat me or just to report my “crimes.” She could contact my employer to report me and try to get me fired.

    Now, I eventually did tie my real name to “TechyDad.” I wrote a book and didn’t want to publish under “TechyDad” so I used my two name. That being said, it was my choice. I definitely wouldn’t want it to be required for me to use my real name everywhere.



  • I bought one with Bluetooth headphones built in. I have tinnitus and going to sleep was torture. I’d lay in the quiet room and be unable to sleep thanks to the loud ringing in my right ear. During the day, my hearing aid helps, but I take it out at night. With the Bluetooth sleep mask, I can put on white noise, drown out the ringing, and fall asleep.

    As a bonus, I made a specific white noise mix for sleep and I seem to have trained my brain to have a Pavlov-type response. When that white noise goes on, my brain says “time to go to sleep” and I’m able to quickly fall asleep instead of having my brain run a mile a minute in the dark. (At least, on most nights. The Pavlov response isn’t strong enough to overcome me being stressed about something if I go to bed.)

    The sleep mask with Bluetooth cost me about $30 and it was worth every penny!