Barbarisms by barbaras, with pointed heels

I’ve heard Iraqi Kurdistan is a nice place to visit and is relatively safe compared to the rest of the country.

This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.

We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.

Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.

Everyone would likely defederate from them, much in the same way that you all rushed to close the shutters upon Threads.

I also don’t ever see this happening, unless Spez fucks up with Reddit so badly that it sparks a mass user exodus, much in the same way that Digg v4 sank any hopes of Kevin Rose remaining a successful tech entrepreneur.

I think it says a lot more about how much recent versions of Windows have bogged down the whole gaming experience.

Microsoft seems to have forgotten that people want an operating system that works, not something bloated with bullshit like telemetry, advertisements, tracking cookies and artificial intelligence. The only reason they even have a market lead in the desktop space is due to marketing and monopolistic practices.

I used to work for a small PPI claims management company. Our accounts team had a WhatsApp group for social discussion outside of work.

All of our internal work comms were handled through Slack.

I have a hypothesis that all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes, and effectively being forced into using the official Reddit app. What remains of Reddit are the sociopathic assholes.

Disclaimer: I work in accountancy (Commercial Finance) but my advice should be taken with a pinch of salt.

1. Diversify your investments. Have savings across multiple bank accounts so that the unlikely event where one bank fails doesn’t wipe out your financial wealth., and overall don’t put your eggs in one basket.

2. Currently, the best ROI/passive income you’ll get is from corporate bonds. A cursory glance at the Hargreaves Lansdown website shows me quite a few corporate bonds and gilts that have a voucher rate (% return each year) of over 8 percent. Do bear in mind that a bond is a loan instrument where the ROI is based on both the maturity date (the date you get paid back plus interest) and the overall risk of the debt.

3. Another good option is to invest in high dividend yield shares or ETFs. These can offer superior returns on investment to the interest you’d get from a savings account.

4. Avoid day trading or swing trading unless you 100% absolutely know what the fuck you’re doing. Unlike what many YouTube ‘gurus’ claim, making a living off the stock market requires a high amount of starting capital to see any kind of tangible ROI, plus sophisticated stock trading software and knowledge on how to exploit trends.

5. Same goes for penny stocks (i.e. the FTSE AIM All Share market.) You can make some rookie gains from it. Many of the companies listed on this index are oil/gas/mineral exploratory firms that are likely not going to see any kind of profit unless they strike it big, find a new oil well, lithium mine, etc and get the necessary contracts and investment to extract those resources. They’re penny stocks for a reason.

6. Side hustles. For example, I have two friends that are karaoke DJs and they get gigs where bars pay them to host nights. Bookkeeping is another one, but you really are going to have a lot of competition in that respect, and you will probably need the right qualifications to do it.

7. Screw crypto. At best cryptocurrencies are speculative assets that are scarce and expensive because the very nature of how their blockchains were designed make it take exponentially more effort to mine a new coin. At worst, they’re used to launder criminal proceeds (Monero is a good example of one where the blockchain is encrypted.) NFTs are even worse.

Nothing. I theorize that the good people who looked at Spez with disgust left Reddit. I’d rather not have the power tripping cucks who made Reddit bad come here

A couple of years ago i would say that a month of tinder gold or whatever isn’t the worst idea ever. Right now it totally is. It still probably maybe helps, but it’s just not worth the money. You can swipe more and get seen more and that might still be true, but your subscription doesn’t change the fact that the women you like get thousands of likes and you just go under or are lucky as fuck

I think it’s more like the online dating space has been enshittified by one company buying out most of its competition and then jacking up prices. Hinge are owned by Match Group, who also own Match.com, Tinder, POF, Okcupid, The League and a few others. All of these are now overglorified Tinder clones that adopted the same ‘swipe left/right to match’ formula.

Also I suspect there may be some kind of shadowban on my account. Apparently this is a thing frequently mentioned on /r/SwipeHelper, /r/HingeApp and /r/OnlineDating, and the only way people have gotten past it is fully deleting their accounts, waiting a few months and then registering afresh. If that is the case and my profile is being obfuscated for whatever reason (maybe because I recently reactivated it after going dormant), then that would make Hinge X blatant false advertising.

If i were you i would shoot my shot at karaoke, and just do dating apps on the side

I mean… I would, but I don’t really approach women that I find attractive (mainly fear of rejection, or worse, or I know for a fact that they’re not single), and the only attention I seem to get is from gay guys and the occasional lady old enough to be my grandma. As I’m not into either, it can make me uncomfortable at times.

The main group chat I’m in mainly consists of middle-aged men and women. I’m also friends with two DJs who host evenings at various pubs which I often attend. Some of our regulars either already are professional singers, or have the talent to be.

I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a good singer and when people say I’ve got a good voice, I feel like they’re either being nice, or they’re drunk and easily impressed. I’ve definitely improved compared to when I first started doing this, to the point where I don’t quite hate the sound of my own voice anymore and there are some go-to songs that I can sing somewhat well. I really do want to take professional singing lessons and improve my voice to the point where I could be like a siren. Maybe that would have been a better investment than a dating app.

Probably the best compliment I got was when I went to a Central Bristol pub for a Christmas karaoke eve. The place was packed and about half the pub was cordoned off for a pre-booked work Christmas party. I sung Poison Arrow by ABC (one of my go-to songs) and on a part of the second verse which I legitimately belted out loudly, I audibly heard one of the guys in the work crowd go “Fuck me…” in astonishment. I left that place soon after, both because they were inundated with requests, and to get away from an Aussie lady who I met previously, she was living in a homeless shelter and was spending her eves scrounging off other guys in that place.

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I mean… aren’t GNOME and KDE the two main GUI’s that you use?

Games have largely caught up. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted. With WoW, you had to manually copy the files from each CD, save them locally and then run the installer because otherwise the installer would shit the bed and fail halfway through Discs 2 or 3.

The final hurdle for gaming on Linux is anti-cheat and that’s going to be a mountain to overcome. Only two solutions (to my knowledge) currently have native Linux support and those are Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) and Valve Anti Cheat (VAC.) You’re not gonna get anything requiring Ring 0 access (like Vanguard) running on Linux anytime soon.

Can’t say much about iPhones because the last time I used iOS was about a decade ago, but I’m not a fan of Apple for how often they ask you to sign in to your Apple ID just to do anything on the App Store.

As for Android, learning how to open an app’s settings menu to force stop it and clear its cache is a godsend. It solves about 99% of technical issues I may face.

For the record, this was for a customer service outsourcer I used to work for. I wasn’t directly employed by Associated Newspapers and I’d say a good deal of the internal managerial and pay issues I had were down to my employer, not the client. Only thing I miss about that place were my colleagues. I had made some life-long friends in that place and there were a lot of great people who came and went.

As for management, one or two team leaders aside, they were a clique of nepotistic assholes.

I was fired from that job nearly three years into my employment (long after we lost the AN contract and I moved to a different campaign) for ‘capability’ reasons, after they dragged me through a month-long PIP and disciplinary process for failing to hit targets. Our whole email team was failing to hit performance targets and I was effectively scapegoated and bullied out of the company by a team leader who didn’t like me. In retrospect it was the best thing to ever happen to me, because had I not been sacked, I’d probably still be there on min wage and not working in commercial finance today.

It’s absolutely the same mindset as boomers complaining about technology these days because they don’t want to learn how to download a mobile app.

I’m really not too sure about that.

Used to work in customer service for a major right wing (Daily Mail) newspaper, and that included tech support for their rewards club website, their newspaper reading Android/iOS/Kindle Fire app, and their bookshop website.

Pensioners struggle with technology and I really don’t think it’s just stubbornness and ignorance. I genuinely think that your ability to learn and remember things diminishes greatly as you grow older.

It was one of the worst jobs I worked in, not just because trying to explain how to do basic things like open a web browser, type in a URL or force stop and clear the cache on an Android app to a 90+ year old is like pulling teeth, but because we were paid like crap, treated like children by management, treated like shit by a lot of customers, and because we used to get a lot of editorial calls from people thinking we could put them through to a journalist so they could spout their often bigoted views. So glad I work in accountancy now. The worst customer support jobs are the ones where callers frequently go full Karen on you.

He could alternatively go to…

Stackoverflow or Superuser, where the answer will be “use the search bar you imbecile, locked.”

Quora, where every question is blatant rage bait like “my 14 year old son got a B in his test. I took away his PS5 and chained him in the basement as punishment but his grades aren’t improving. How can I make him better at math?”

Yahoo Answers which is dead, and was basically Quora before Quora was a thing.

Or Reddit, where you can’t even post on 95% of subs without hitting a minimum karma threshold and where some basement dwelling mod will likely ban you for breaking hidden rule #263, then modmail mute you for 28 days without reply if you try to appeal.

I think any Q&A site is absolute dog water now.

John McAfee would be spinning like a rotisserie chicken in his grave. Or at least he would be if McAfee Software hadn’t already turned to shit long before his death.

So the temp files are still identified, but anybody smart enough to figure out the code is also likely smart enough to know that calling the developer will not help get rid of the file.

Don’t underestimate the stupidity of your average person.

EDIT: Dr Disrespect has made a full statement.

THE TWITCH BAN

Hello, I’d like to make a quick statement…

Lets cut the fucking bullshit, as you know there’s no filter with me. I’ve always been up front and real with you guys on anything that I can be up front about, and I’m always willing to accept responsibility… which is why I’m here now.

First and foremost I do want to apologize to everyone in my community as well as those close to me, my team, and everyone at Midnight Society Game Studio.

A lot of people have been left in the dark about what happened yesterday with midnight society and I, and we made the painful decision collectively, to have me step down. Our team is full of incredibly talented and good people that have high career ambitions and families and i’d never want jeopardize the culture we have carefully crafted.

Everyone has been wanting to know why I was banned from twitch, but for reasons outside of my control, I was not allowed to say anything for the last several years. Now that two former twitch employees have publicly disclosed the accusations, I can now tell you my side of the story regarding the ban.

Were there twitch whisper messages with an individual minor back in 2017? The answer is yes. Were there real intentions behind these messages, the answer is absolutely not. These were casual, mutual conversations that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate, but nothing more. Nothing illegal happened, no pictures were shared, no crimes were committed, I never even met the individual. I went through a lengthy arbitration regarding a civil dispute with twitch and that case was resolved by a settlement. Let me be clear, it was not a criminal case against me and no criminal charges have ever been brought against me.

Now, from a moral standpoint I’ll absolutely take responsibility. I should have never entertained these conversations to begin with. That’s on me. That’s on me as an adult, a husband and a father. It should have never happened. I get it. I’m not perfect and I’ll fucking own my shit. This was stupid.

Now, with all this said, don’t get it fucking mistaken, I’ve seen all the remarks and labels being throw around so loosely. Social media is a destruction zone. I’m no fucking predator or pedophile. Are you kidding me? Anyone that truely knows me fucking knows where I stand on those things with those types of people. Fuck that. That’s a different level of disgust that I fucking hate even hearing about. Don’t be labeling me as the worst of the worst with your exaggerations. Get the fuck outta here with that shit.

But I think I’ve said what I needed to say regarding the ban itself. That’s it. That’s why twitch made the decision in 2020.

To my team, community, industry friends that have supported me, I apologize, I wish I could’ve said all this sooner. You guys have always showed me and my family love and support throughout all these years we love you guys like you can’t imagine. I have the fucking best community and circle. If any of this has made you uncomfortable, I get it. You don’t have to support me anymore but just know you have always been greatly appreciated.

But trust me when I say this…to all my haters that live and breath social media with zero real life experience, I don’t give a fuck about you.

Finally, if you’re uncomfortable with this entire statement and think I’m a piece of shit, that’s fine. But I’m not fucking going anywhere. I’m not the same guy that made this mistake all those years ago. I’m taking an extended vacation with my family as mentioned on stream and I’m coming back with a heavy weight off my shoulders.

They want me to disappear… yeah fucking right.

• Date that the breach occurred.
• What parts of the system were accessed.
• What data was compromised and if any of it is sensitive.
• If any of this data was encrypted/hashed and what algorithm was used (i.e. I’d be far less worried about having passwords that are bcrypt hashed exposed compared to ones hashed with SHA1 or stored in plain text.)