100%, but I think some of us are like “Why are you self-censoring? This isn’t TikTok!” Let’s not use seggs* and PDF files.

*Unless we’re talking about sexy eggs for some reason. Sorry, “seggzy eggs.”

Mostly FFXIV. I decided to try a new class: Rogue/Ninja. Kinda impromptu, but I needed way to sneak by some baddies in the new-ish “Occult Crescent” field exploration zone. And Ninja has an ability to slowly stealth walk, going undetected by mobs.

And Oh. My. God. I’d forgotten how awful it is to level a class from 0 to 50. I haven’t done this since I did my initial class as Thaumaturge/Black Mage. Which would’ve been like 3-4yrs ago? I have other classes – technically, Jobs – to max level (Lvl 100), but those classes all start at higher levels. FFXIV is weird like that; classes from expacs 3.0 and up start at higher levels. Like Machinist at Lvl 30, Red Mage (which is my main) at Lvl 50, and one of the most recent classes, Pictomancer, at Lvl 80. I was also playing those classes/job while going through the game’s Main Story Quest, so I didn’t “notice” the grind. I was just playing the MSQ, the game, normally.

As such, I’ve really not tried to quickly grind from Lvl 1 before. And the game doesn’t help. No access to dungeons and trials until Lvl 15. And overall a very limited selection until Lvl 50. No AoE attacks until somewhere in mid-30s! Barely any attacks in the kit, until Lvl 30 (when the Ninja job opens up).

For EXP, had to grind out leves, dungeons, FATEs, and random quests. I’m not against grinding, it’s just a boring-ass grind.

Anyway, I got to Lvl 50 yesterday, so now things should start get less boring. Lvl 50 on its own opens up like 30+ instances of various kinds. And there are tons more opportunities from there til Lvl 100. My goal is to get to 100 within the next two weeks. Could probably do it this week, but I don’t wanna go that hard.

I need to find me an accountant!

Gee, where I have heard that one before?

I have to wonder how many of these White South Africans (or South Africans, period) even want to come to the US, given all the bullshit going on here. Plus just having to start over. It’s not like they’re going to be given a house and tons of money and jobs and all that. I imagine they’re going to come here as any other refugee would and have to start over fresh.

I suppose this is just more performative BS for MAGAs.

So I’ve been a fed for nearly a year. It hybrid when I started, 2 days a week, til February of this year. Sigh.

My last job went full remote in April 2023. And was hybrid since Spring 2021. And it was pretty liberal hybrid, like sometimes I’d show up one day a week or every two weeks.

But I heard from friends still at that job that they recently got ordered to RTO. At least those still in the area where HQ was + the CEO. Though I think the staff is getting caught in a fight between the board and the CEO. Staff just happens to be collateral damage. Either way, seems like opportunities are fading.

Honestly, I’d even take one day of WFH per week.

Haven’t commented here in awhile. Week is going OK so far. Took Monday (and last Friday) off for mental health days. Was just kinda in a “blah” mood. Think it’s “emotional contagion” from listening to friends’ problems and such. Glad to do it, to be there for them, but every once in awhile, it makes me think about stuff and my own life.

But otherwise, I’m back to it. On a plus side, I get to work from home today (Thursday)! My apt complex is closing the streets to do repaving. Rather than messing around with temporarily parking my car elsewhere, I asked my supervisor and he’s like “Yup, that’s cool.” I work for the US govt, and regular telework is verboten. But here and there? It’s acceptable. Besides, it’s only the first time since February that I’ve teleworked due to a personal situation.

EGM will always be my favorite vide game magazine. I like Game Informer, had a subscription back in the day, even had a subscription last year before they shut down. But GI is no EGM. Wish they’d come back, too.

Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I’m a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?

These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn’t a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.

But the average person isn’t going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.

It’s not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and “gateway,” but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience (“Oh, my friends aren’t on this Mastodon server thing? And we’re not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh…”). Twitter and even Bluesky don’t require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.

The reality is that most don’t really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.

I’m sure they do, but I feel like even on r/datahoarders, I only ever see people talk about masses of HDDs, tape drives, or cloud storage.

I just don’t go outside. AC running throughout the day, though I do set max temps at different levels throughout the day to take advantage of lower electricity rates or avoid higher rates.

This past week I did have to do some rare outdoors work for work over a few days. My team elected to do it in the evenings and early in the mornings. Was still quite warm, but not sun glaring down on us, we’re gonna get heat stroke from this, afternoon sun.

Wow, I feel dumb. I’ve been here for a year and never looked closely at the bee (old or new). Never noticed the cowboy hat!

So I thought I was good to start a new job (though I’ve yet to set a start date), as the HR person assigned me said it was all good about a month ago, but then today he me tells me there was “a problem” with my drug test. A drug test I took 3 months ago. So I need to take another.

While I’ve only taken a few drug tests for employment during my career, they’ve never taken 3 months to get results. Like 2 weeks at most. Something tells me my HR person screwed up (which isn’t surprising), got this notice a couple month ago, yet just now noticed this. Hate to say it, but typical government. The irony is that I’ll soon be a govt worker. If we can get this straightened out.

On a more positive note, I just paid off one more student loan! After 19yrs of paying and thousands of dollars in interest on this one – more than the principle at this point – it’s finally done. I had to get a hefty loan from my parents, but their terms are much better: 0% APR at the Bank of Mom & Dad versus the current variable 10.02% APR with the bank. Though I still have lots more students loans to go. Such a shitty, shitty system. At least I’m lucky enough my parents can help in this manner.

Stay in school, kids. But only if you don’t fuck it all up like I did. I may be paying student loans til I die.

Maybe it’s my doomerism at play, but even one year house arrest I’d be OK with. Keep him in NY in his Trump Tower penthouse. Don’t let him go out to campaign.

Obviously jail would be better. I just don’t think fines alone are going to cut it. He’s not going to pay them.

It’s going. It’s been a very busy couple days already at work. But I talked about work last week, so I’ll give an update on something more interesting (to me): My homelab! 🤓

My UPS arrived like a week ago. I set it up and hooked up devices to it: server, router, and a small switch are on the battery backup. Which gets me about 17min of runtime on the battery if power fails. Pretty good.

I was able to install the UPS software as an ESXi VM. And I got that to communicate with the ESXi host. Configured some delays to ensure it didn’t try to shutdown the server due to a momentary blackout/brownout, and I even got the software to send me email notifications (thank you SMTP2GO).

Then it was time. I unplugged the UPS from the wall. And waited for it run out of battery. And guess what? It shut down the server! Even before the UPS completely ran out of power. That said, I didn’t take a stopwatch to it, or really get a chance to monitor how it was shutting down VMs. It looked like they were all shut down properly after I powered on the VMs again, but I can’t say for certain. I could tighten this up. Either way, it basically did what it was supposed to do.

Next thing I need to figure out is how to get it to boot the server back up once wall power is back. I have some ideas on how to do it manually (if I wasn’t home when power was lost), but I think it’d be neat to figure out how to do it automatically.

I think it’s worse here than on reddit when it comes to this. Redditors these days (*takes out the walker and cane*) are shitty, but I feel like I’m somewhat insulated from a lot of it due to where I lurk/participate on reddit. But on Lemmy, I see it pretty much everywhere. Smaller userbase compared to reddit, so maybe the rudeness is more visible.

Oof. Sorry to hear that happened. Vehicle repairs suck.

I do remember my parents talking about $800 for the windshield specifically, but maybe they were just simplifying out of anger. With the dealer, with me, whoever. It very well could’ve been the estimate for the total damage. I can certainly imagine some dents and scratched paint. And yeah labor is often the highest cost.

Like 5yrs ago, I took a drug test for a new job. A few days before they called me, offering me said job, I had taken a gummy or two. Because I didn’t think I was going to get the job. They scheduled me for the drug test, but I pushed it out as far as I could, like 3 weeks, and I passed. Now it’s not like I was consuming THC regularly. It’d probably been months since the last time I’d consumed any in any form. I don’t know what your habit is like, but if you’re in a similar situation, you might be OK.

And even if they do detect it, that could be a false positive. It happens. Then they make you take another, right? Maybe push that out a little, too, to give your body more a little more time to get rid of it.

Is the idea something to improve your and/or your coworkers workflow or processes? Because that’d be good at least.

Busy week at work. I took Monday sick as I was tired and just mentally not there. But that didn’t really change that I had a lot to do this week. At least I was able to get things done and make headway. My title has “manager” in it, but I manage no one but myself. But I felt like I actually did a lot of managerial and even pseudo-supervisory-type work this week. I’m starting to understand why my boss made me a junior manager at work. It only took me a couple years to understand it. That said, I still don’t want to be a director at this place. It’s not the right place for that level of responsibility. I still probably wouldn’t manage anyone (nor do I want to), and the pay wouldn’t be commensurate with what an actual director in my position would make. And I’m supposed to be leaving anyway…if the government would hurry the hell up with all the processing and checking for this job I was offered literally 10mo ago. My current employer knows about this new job, but thank god their cool with it and understanding of my situation.

Aside from work, not a lot going on. My dad suggested I visit my parents for Mother’s Day as a surprise for my mom. So booked tickets today. Decide to use points for once, so it only cost me like $60 RT on Southwest. Which is damn good, considering that’s only like two weeks away. I didn’t go anywhere this month since my Feb/March travel was way more costly than I expected, and I just zeroed out the credit card I used for that, so a cheap trip to see my family in May will be good.

For this weekend, no Formula 1, but there is an IndyCar race I’ll be watching. I’ve seen F1 communities on Lemmy. I assume there are IndyCar ones, as well. Anyone have recommendations on active communities for IndyCar?