You’re right on the mark there: I missed the point, a good number of times, which sent me into a downward spiral.

It took a good amount of time and help to aknowledge I was responsible for 90% of my suffering.

And I was countering your reply.

So you try, you get turned down. Does it hurt? Yes. Is it the end of the world? If anyone replies with “yes” that is a serious issue because it is not.

Getting a “no” for an answer is almost guaranteed. What is there to lose? Perhaps the lost “yes” for not trying.

Bullshit.

It’s a social - stupid - standing that states romantic/social/sexual advances must be started by the male part, which automatically relegates the female part to a passive/subdued part.

If you want someone, be bold. Doesn’t matter how you define yourself either.

I don’t really care if you are shy and can’t speak or any coping mechanism you may have built to justify your awkwardess. Just try.

Write a note. Have a mutual friend act as a liaison to help the first step. Write a letter. Blurt out the most incoherent speech you can muster. Then say it all again, only ten times slower. Send smoke signals. Use a parrot or a crow. But try.

It hurts a lot more to punish yourself for not trying, later in your life. Failure and rejection are part of it. Get used to it. Learn from it.

And you are correct!

Okay.

Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?

I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.

What other options are there?

Edit:

For those who may be arriving now:

• Kagi seems to be a good option for an alternative search engine; it is a paid service, for which I don’t have the €€€ right now. Many speak very well about it.
• SearXNG is a thing as well, to my understanding a decentralized search system. Worth the try, in my opinion. If it’s something that is decentralized, it is worthy to support and divulge.
• There is mojeek.com, supposedly not very good but any option that goes against the monopoly is worth the try! I’m going to try this one.
• Brave.com is an option but is a bit shady.
• You should try Ecosia if you want to support reforestation efforts. Read somewhere in the thread it is part of the Bing ecosystem.
• Yep is a thing as well. Somewhere in the thread, a lemmy points they use the search results for AI trainning. So… That is that.
• And it seems there is a search engine by the name of dogpile.com.
• Startpage is another search engine (portal?) suggested by another user. I’ve used it before and like it. Read somewhere it somehow piped a standard google search but removed tracking and ads.
• and I just remembered Presearch.com. This is a really shady one (crypto warning!) that I suspect is a fork/collab with Brave Browser. I’ve used it, they have reward-per-search reward system (or had) where they give you crypto for every search. Good results, some that don’t come up neither on DDG nor Google.

p.p.s Should I start categorizing these from “shady” to “worthy”?

p.p.s 2 Does anyone remember StumbleUpon? I know it was never a search engine to begin with but it was the best source of good internet content I ever got acquainted to.

Can we get something like that back?

Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate.

Learn the terminology, Nate.

It’s obviously not a good thing but, in this particular case, it was the cheating promoting a very wholesome outcome.

The cheater got the boot. The cheated got ahead in life.

Game. Set. Match.

I do not care how true or untrue this may be.

Upvote for wholesome.

This thread gets crazier the deeper I read. And depth is the crux of this meme.

Yes, lets forbid people that still strive for self sustenance, with small scale farming and animal rearing, to make an independent living.

Get your head out of your ass for a moment and when the oxygen rushes back to your brain realize animals are much more than meat and are an integral part of well managed and sustainable systems.

Animals make use of crops by-products otherwise wasted, manage vegetation and provide fertilizers, just off the top of my head.

And there are regions where no suitable crops can be planted and instead animals are the only means of survival and sustenance for people.

Back off and let people live.

There are better hills to die on than to persecute traditional farming.

Thank you.

Just cutting back the subsidies would kill off a good portion of the industrial grade producers.

It would be, nonetheless, very good to actively support small scale family farms, where better practices are often used and simpler to implement and supervise.

So, basically, we don’t know that much on anything besides understanding it’s really complex and difficult to figure out.

Any smaller and it becomes a moped.

Stupid things like this still happen.

My kids go to school with a laptop specifically installed just for that purpose. It runs plain Mint.

I was dumbfound when a teacher complains they can’t install Scratch on the computer and if Scratch is not available, my kids will fail the class.

Install Scratch via Flatpak, which is a newer version that the school is running on its machines.

Linux. Not Windows. Get your dirty hands off the hardware.

I consider mummies a different type of lych.

I was never small enough to fit in one, nor fun enough to be picked on. Plus, I was prone to fight back; I had very little to lose.

This picture is incomplete.

You need another guy on the ledt side, just casually watching as the others fight. That’s Debian.

The poor dude being shoved into the locker is Suse.

The bully is Ubuntu.

Now we need a bigger guy behind the bully, waiting to get his hands on the bully. That will be RedHat.

Arch will be behind RedHat, getting ready to punch him in the face.

Gentoo will be right behind Arch, laughing like a maniac at the carnage unfolding.

And to the far right side of the picture you get to see this underrated guy, just shrugging his shoulders. That’s LFS.

BG3 is not even being considered as an option but a few videos on Youtube peaked curiosity about the genre and gameplay style and I’d like to explore it a bit with them

Can I share an episode?

We’re a Window$ free house; Linux is the daily driver on every single computer we have.

I have school age children. They have IT classes. I set up a machine with Mint, clean install, to serve has the school workhorse. Not one task assigned at school can not be done in the Linux box. My child came home a few worried a few times because the teacher disliked having a linux box in the room.

What happens is the teacher is terrified has they cannot load a single piece of software on that machine, as they do with all the other students, at will. The notion of explaining to all the other students they need to go to some site to download some program while my child just needs to fetch it (or already has it pre installed) from a secure repository is baffling. The knowledge that that humble and rather older machine can not be trivialy tampered with is mind disturbing.

At some point the teacher explained how to maintain the system (clean temp files and random junk Windows collects over time by just having programs installed and removed) and looked at my child and chidded that was something she could not do.

I taught my kid how to do basic system maintenance. Through the console. Like a boss. They upgraded the system while they colleagues were “busy” hunting down temp files.

It’s intriguing how everyone that views themselves as moderates/liberals forget (or are unacquainted with it) about the paradox of tolerance.

Tolerance implies everyone has a right to express their ideas and you want that. You want everything out in the open, so you can pick at it, dismantle it and render it pitiful, ridiculous and useless.

You want the intolerant crying out loud that you are intolerant as that means you are doing the right thing. The intolerant want silence, forced, while the tolerant want noise, anger, tension.

Remember that anything worthwhile needs to be fought for. Don’t regret being vocal and harsh towards intolerance.