megane-kun

Okay, so that’s like two-thirds of the earth’s surface (centered at the antipodal point), and it’s a random person. It’s almost certain that I don’t know this person (aside from the info just given to me), and that the easiest way I can help save them in 24 hours is to warn them online.

First off, how can I be sure that those premonitions are real? They’re of a random person that may or may not have an obiturary available to me after they’ve died. Worse, these obituaries might get published days after the death. Making sure that I’m not going crazy (or being driven crazy by those) would be pretty hard.

Listing the deaths (never in a computer, at least at this early stage) with all the details available to me would be a good start. The following details would be the most helpful:

• real name of the person
• the time of premonition
• date of the printed obituary (or the date of the newspaper where the obituary is printed on)

If there’s enough data to convince me that it is indeed real, and be able to tease out the rules of this power, I can start saving people.

First off, I’ll filter those forseen deaths. for those judged “bad”, I’ll keep the info to myself. I am assuming that part of this judgement is my morals, so I do have a hand in the deaths I fail to prevent, whether or not they’re judged “good” or “bad”. At any rate, this would likely be instantaneous, and would happen as I record the premonition and its details.

Second, I’ll create a website, a very secure one for obvious reasons, with effort done to isolate myself (any information that can lead to me) from this website. In this website, there’d be a page listing all the premonitions I decided would be published. Marked as “impending” (or something equally ominous) would be the premonitions I witnessed within the past 24 hours. Another page would list all of those ones (and where people could be alerted). Heck, maybe I can establish an RSS feed for this.

I guess, it’d be like techno Death Note, but I have zero control over the details.

Of course, that’d not be a very effective way of getting the information out. Relatives and friends of those people listed might even suspect the page has something to do with the deaths. I’d expect law enforcement to be on to me, tracing me via the hosting services, the ISP, etc. that I use to publish the website. And in the event they do get to me, and if I’m afforded any trial, people might not even believe what I tell them (even if I tell the entire truth).

If I do nothing, none of that will come to pass, but I’d be racked by guilt over the “good” deaths I am not able to prevent. On the other hand, even just getting that information out, even if no one ever benefits from it, is already putting myself and those around me at danger.

Personally? I don’t have the skills to create that website, let alone do it in such a way that it isolates me well enough to at least not get me arrested within a week of the site operating.

My closet has five drawers and an open space that has three layers next to it. The items in the drawers are arranged according to function.

• Drawer 1 (topmost): accessories This contains my handkerchiefs, face towels, bandannas, but also some headwear and gloves.
• Drawer 2: socks and underwear Pretty self-explanatory, I guess? I put this high up so that I don’t have to bend down, exposing my bare ass into the air when I need to get a change of underwear.
• Drawer 3: shorts Along with the next drawer, this is where I store my “housewear” which is just shorts and simple shirts (or undershirts)
• Drawer 4: undershirts Yep, undershirts and other simple shirts. This can also contain some old “outside shirts” repurposed to become housewear.
• Drawer 5 (bottom-most): cold weather clothes This contains my jackets, pajamas and other “cold weather clothes”. I live in a very warm place, so these see very rare use, hence, their position at the bottom drawer.

For the other space, it’s “outside wear” shirts organized by color for the top two layers. The top layer has shirts with simple, round-neck collars, and the middle layer has the shirts with less-than-simple collars. The bottom layer has my jeans, pants, and other “outside wear” clothes that are not shirts.

Five on Lemmy, one each on Mastodon and Pixelfed (techincally two each, since I moved instances). So that’s seven in total. More if other Fediverse services capture my fancy.

Yep, I tried it. It actually is good with the bun. It’s like a poor man’s ice cream sandwich.

Young coconut ice cream. It’s one of those flavors we can easily get from those ice cream carts that stop by the neighborhood usually in the middle of the afternoon. There’s also mango and avocado completing the usual three flavors the cart would have, and I would always buy all three flavors available (unless I really hate the flavor).

Some of the adults would opt to have the ice cream served in a bread bun (usually just repurposed hamburger buns, without the sesame seeds), but I always opted for the sugar cones.

A horrible accident involving a pair of eyeglasses.

I bet the views of the Alps are majestic from there!

And yeah! I imagine the trip would be so much fun (though a bit exhausting). It’d be combining two of the things that fascinate me: mountains and trains.

I sometimes fantasize going from the northern tip of Scotland all the way to Singapore on a train. Not non-stop, of course, but maybe going from one city to another, spending some time on a city until I get my fill, and then hop on the train to the next one. All the way until I run out of land. Maybe from there (Singapore), I can do island-hopping across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Then road trip in Australia. But that’s really stretching it, not just in terms of logistics and planning. At the pace I do things, do I really want to spend like five years crawling through Europe, Asia, and Australia? Even if money’s no object, I don’t think I can do that.

Sorry for the ramble. Given the scope of the question, yeah, a cross-Europe mountain train trip is perhaps my limit (that’d be like, two weeks? maybe a month if I take my time to really enjoy each place I visit?)

Switzerland. Having grown up in the coastal plains, I just have this fascination with mountains. I don’t t have the physical condition to climb one, but just seeing them up close already makes me feel things. Being on top of one, even more so.

Maybe I can do even better and do a train journey from France, and then Switzerland, then across Austria, all the way to Hungary and Romania, making sure that I cross as many mountains as I possibly can.

I’ve bounced around several clients (mobile) and frontends (web) especially when I first started. I’ve eventually settled on Voyager (mobile) and Alexandrite (web frontend).

Voyager has a lot of neat features that makes browsing Lemmy on mobile smooth and an overall nice experience. It’s got swipe gestures (configurable, but mine has long swipe left to upvote, long swipe left to save, short swipe right to downvote, and long swipe right to reply). There’s also a feature to tag a user, and to keep track of votes (in aggregate, so I wouldn’t know if I give a user an upvote in one thread, and a downvote in another, yielding a net zero, or I just haven’t given that user a vote at all). Still a nice set of features. There might be more that I have yet to discover and use.

Alexandrite, on the other hand, presents a really good desktop experience. There’s an option to have the posts (on my feed, or a community) on the left side of the screen and the post I’m reading on the right, which is great if I am just scanning a my feed, deciding if I want to take a closer look at a post. I end up mostly just using this mode most of the time.

Both Voyager and Alexandrite allow me to switch between my Lemmy accounts easily, which is a great plus if you’re having a handful of accounts (for different purposes, like one main, another for NSFW, etc).

IMO, the clients (for mobile) have a lot of competition going on, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I find a different one I’d like better. Just keep an eye out for those, I guess?

In most urbanized areas, even in suburbs, you can buy daily necessities (food, personal hygiene, medicine, etc) in just a short walk. If in a subdivision, like in a suburb, there would be some houses with an attached corner store. Failing to find what you need there, a convenience store would be a bit further (either still inside the subdivision, or just out the gate).

If you need to do your groceries, you can use public transport to the market. Even within subdivisions (with some exceptions, like those for the wealthy), there usually would be some form of public transport that could take you to the main highway, and from there, to the market.

That’s just one that immediately came to mind upon reading the prompt. Not sure if there are others, but it’s the most striking to me, and one that I’ve taken for granted until hearing about the US’ suburbs.

Nothing will get done.

Well, not exactly. My clones could probably make a decent guess on what to do, but they’d procrastinate on it and do something else given what’s available to them. Before long, everyone starves to death.

If Google decides to go full rogue and ignore W3C specs entirely and make up a bunch of their own shit, that devs then start to use because why not since the majority of their userbase use a chromium based browser, then Firefox can easily be taken out.

Which is basically the ending of the first browser wars, as far as I can remember. Internet Explorer had a little bit less market share than Google Chrome has nowadays, but still an overwhelming majority. Moreover, Internet Explorer had these IE-only tags and features, which further reinforced such things.

But here we are. Yes, Google Chrome and Google has an overwhelming majority right now, but so was IE (thanks to Microsoft’s practices) back then. Google Chrome came at the right time with what people actually wanted at that time, and so was able to gain the upper hand, and eventually a chokehold.

My response though is more about “keeping things alive for its users”, at least until such a breakthrough happens (maybe Servo has it?) or more pessimistically, until internet browsers fade away into obscurity (or perhaps just like IRC clients, it’s still a thing, right?)

I really hope that the forks coordinate for this to happen, soon, if not yesterday.

Maybe a group that keeps track what is to be done if Firefox development stops or if Mozilla folds or somehow abandons Firefox. Things such as:

• how to take over development from Mozilla
• the minimum that needs to be done to keep up to the standards
• the minimum that needs to be done to keep the (base) browser on par in performance with Chromium (and the others, such as Servo)
• coordinate developers and other people involved in the project
• manage donations and funding

Maybe I’m imagining some sort of a cooperative formed by Firefox forks with the main aim of keeping Firefox alive despite of (or after) Mozilla.

As I am right now? Hell no!

But there’d be a question gnawing at the back of my head: “If I am the chosen one, why?!” I’d probably hold on to that question as I try to do what I can to save the world. There must be a reason, right? There must be something that I can do.

Moreover, if it’s known to everyone (or at least to the ones that are powerful enough to make a difference), I’d leverage that fact to have them do something. Like, “Yeah, the Chosen One needs you to be his companion” or some cheesy shit like that. And in that case, I’d probably end up more as someone inspiring (or pushing) others to save the world rather than the actual person saving the world (not that I believe any one person can, tbh).

Petty and minor, huh?

• Dates are now YYYY-MM-DD (2025-02-25) for the short form, and dddd, YYYY mmmm DD (Tuesday, 2025 February 25) for the long form.

• Time is now written in 24-hour notation (14:44:41)

• The first paragraph in a section doesn’t have indentation, but all succeeding paragraphs do. For example:

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.  Vestibulum quis velit aliquet, accumsan eros id, tincidunt lorem.  Integer ac arcu elit.  Sed efficitur mi vitae viverra egestas.  Quisque sed varius nisi.  Vestibulum in cursus diam.  Ut pharetra quis nibh at semper.  Integer dictum leo eu velit condimentum, a varius mi tempor.  Sed at nunc lacinia, consequat eros sed, fringilla quam.  Proin pulvinar ante ac ipsum suscipit dictum.  In libero augue, tristique iaculis libero in, bibendum eleifend massa.  Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.  Suspendisse a risus non lacus pellentesque molestie congue non risus.  Quisque ut condimentum dui.
  
      Aenean dictum leo at commodo accumsan.  Vestibulum ullamcorper diam et arcu bibendum maximus.  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.  Suspendisse porta libero sed nisi aliquam volutpat.  Nam rutrum, odio quis ultricies blandit, elit metus pulvinar diam, non condimentum tellus arcu sed eros.  Praesent nunc tellus, aliquam vitae leo sed, pellentesque placerat ex.  Aenean tincidunt libero magna, sed sagittis neque facilisis id.  Vivamus quis lectus nunc.
  
      Donec lacinia, dolor sed eleifend volutpat, massa dui elementum risus, congue sagittis tortor sem sed neque.  Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.  Pellentesque tempor risus arcu, a dapibus risus tristique in.  Ut sapien est, placerat ac lectus non, scelerisque feugiat nisi.  Nam nec luctus nibh.  Aenean id ultrices risus.  Phasellus magna enim, sodales sit amet nisi id, interdum interdum neque.  Sed scelerisque scelerisque lobortis.
  

• There are two spaces after a full stop, except when occurring at the end of a paragraph where there should be none.

• They will be used as a generic non-gendered pronoun and will be the default along with one. For example:

  • “Someone sent me an e-mail, but I am not sure they meant to send it to me.”
  • “Really, one should make sure the e-mail address is correct before sending an e-mail.”

• Functions that are called in other functions will be declared before any function that calls them.

• Functions should be around twenty lines long, and at most have three levels of nesting. Functions that are too long or have too much nesting should be revised and broken up into two or more functions.

• Code indentation (tabs) should be set to four spaces.

• Code will be formatted as follows.

  function (params) {
      // code
      }
  

EDIT:

Formatting

incredible defense → non-credible defense → ncd

I reacted to a comment to a meme about parents having the power and the right to withhold what their children’s privileges relating to some trauma I’ve got.

The comment I replied to went:

We take away what each kid values the most. Works well. If they complain or don’t stop whatever got them in trouble we start adding days.

In hindsight, taking the context, it’s kinda reasonable, but I was triggered by the “what each kid values the most” remembering a painful part of my childhood, which lead me to be way less open to my mother.

I commented:

Wouldn’t that end up with a kid who values nothing, not even their own life?

My mom used a similar technique to get me to do what she wants me to do, and I ended up, well, the way I am right now. I hide a lot of things from her, and if necessary, only pretend to show interest in things I don’t give a damn about just to have a semblance of a personality. Worse, even if I‌ die right after this comment, I wouldn’t mind one bit.

Admittedly, that last part is totally unnecessary.

That response became my most controversial and downvoted for understandable reasons.

Saglit lang! Sino po sila? (A moment please! Who are they?)

Lol! Yes!! That’s exactly it! I never really thought much about it until this post. It’s one of those things people just do, without thinking much about it.

some cultures need visitors to declare themselves human when knocking at your door.

I didn’t think that much about it until this post. People here, me included, basically call out “(I’m a) human!” while knocking on the door.

I am still struggling with motivation, so I am not the best one to answer this question. However, I think just having a “minimal study session” helps.

Like, imagine your worst ever day: something like a day when things are hectic and you couldn’t even gather enough motivation to study. Now, try to make a routine that you can do even on such a day, and then promise yourself that you’d do at least that minimum study session no matter what it takes.

Of course, it’s too easy for that “minimum study session” to be the “default study session” so I’ve got other things that would at least make me do the “default study session” instead.

In my case, the “minimum study session” is just to do one Anki review for each deck I have. That’s it. My “default study session” would be “finish all reviews in all Anki decks”. I also have an “intensive study session” involving adding new Anki cards to my decks, as well as consuming stuff in my studied languages, but it’s been a long time since I did those.

TL;DR: Make it easier on yourself to stick to a routine; have something that you can do even on your worst days.