[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

We need to look at this thing called 'adapting in place'. I think this is just such a complicated situation that people just need to figure out what's going on around them, at least for the time being. Radical simplification - corporate greed, yes, but it's still complicated as to what exactly we do about it.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

Yeah around there. I'll check it out.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago

If I don't starve before then.

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Fisherman75@lemmy.world to c/general@lemmy.world

Food bank only had raisins. My food stamps were cut by two thirds. Inflation is way up. Specific shortages. I asked some people around me and they're also struggling. No emergency announcements. Feels like a cover up. I heard US shale oil is peaking. All this and I live in the central valley of California, ag central. I should have food easily, instead it's a struggle.

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  1. I'm a 2 on the kinsey scale; people seem to think there is just gay, straight, and bi and are less exposed to the idea of a spectrum.
  2. I'm passing white; part mesoamerican, always grew up knowing I was part native american then took two DNA tests and it was confirmed at least that I was part native mesoamerican.
  3. I have always struggled with getting a handle on my gender and biological sex whether it was my year of identifying as nonbinary or people mistaking me for a female throughout my life or my body issues around whether I am feminine or masculine in one way or another; as I cover in another post I am currently trying to wrestle mentally and emotionally with my seemingly feminine pelvic bone despite being male assigned at birth.

These issues are obscure enough to be ignored by basically everyone, so with more conservative types I have to suffer gaslighting, covert and overt abuse, and interpersonal neglect, and with more 'liberal' types I have to suffer a different kind of rejection wherein it is denied that my issues qualify as oppression because there are simply limits to what any one liberal is educated on.

What are some good tips for dealing with this kind of life situation?

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

I have this pelvic bone thing. I'm 5' 10.25", I think average for men is 5' 9". A lot of puberty things have been lagging including my apache beard, virtually no hair on torso or arms, squeaky crackly young sounding half broken voice, and yeah exactly slight development of breast tissue. No one has ever said anything about my chromosomes though.

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I was assigned male at birth but have increasingly started to notice over the years that other guys don't have a big notch on either side of their torsos like I do. It's my pelvic bone. I would go to a doctor to see what they had to say but they've seen me plenty of times and said absolutely nothing about being intersex and now I live in a rural conservative area and they don't seem to diagnose the same way in hardly anything that is a conservative third rail. I just seem to have a really wide pelvis just like a female. Everything else seems male. I am a very normal weight so it's not fat tissue - its clearly bone. I just feel gaslit over it and have been trying to gauge perceptions people have of me in my life in order to get on with things. I hate to turn to the internet but this is driving me crazy. I need something to work with, somewhere to start.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Okay well I guess I wasn't being as technical as that. I meant like I'm worried the rain is now all toxic in one way or another such as being filled with microplastics even rain falling over the middle of the Amazon for instance because of urban activity everywhere else in the world. Not literal acid. Polluted rainwater.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

Yeah as I go read more it seems like what I'm more concerned with is OSAT (open source appropriate technology) where there is heavy consideration of sustainability. Also some of the things people are mentioning here which seems to kind of overlap - open source ecology, right to repair, etc. I think though I'm kind of wanting like a deliberate synthesis of all of this, the whole range of issues, almost like the intersection of 'green politics' and open source everything. I feel like that intersection doesn't get nearly enough attention. I don't know if it's because the 'science wars' make it a little awkward or what.

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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Fisherman75@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

Am I not understanding FOSH (free and open source hardware)? I have always dreamed of open source hardware but it has always seemed unshakeably and fundamentally reliant on for instance massive open pit mines mining all over the world in finite dwindling supply wrecking local ecosystems every element necessary for computer components, factories able to produce at scale fueled by an enormous amount of energy from god knows where, massive pollution and waste every step of the way, and every other ill of extraction and production which seems like it can only be handled by large scale industry almost entirely capitalist for the foreseeable future. Am I missing something? Is it a pipe dream? Even if we find a way to get to a point where we can sustainably and ethically develop any new hardware we need, won't that require persisting in the mean time in the present capitalist paradigm physically? Is this just kind of a microcosm and reification of the problem of democratizing the economy anyway?

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Well that's a good point. I used to live in an even smaller town and had to walk only maybe a block to get to a little hispanic shop with two short aisles of groceries where I got everything I needed about every other day. I miss those times. There were these feral chickens roaming the little park I had to walk through and where I lived was the first place of my own. Good memories. I remember getting pork rinds too from that shop.

Anyway now I go to a big box grocery store kind of generic but also has a lot of hispanic products and style.

There was a time I lived in a different small town in a boarding house and would get extra snacks and food from the dollar general which was like a mile away. Sometimes I would be carrying two or three bags. I remember rummaging through their movie bins every time I went there to see if there were any must-haves. When I lived there I would also go the 7/11 and do basically the same routine.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

I'm just really traumatized by Facebook and all that. Sorry if I come off as triggerhappy or abrasive. I did see much of your point. It seems like our lives are increasingly based in cyberspace now for better, worse, or neither; so I feel like I'm fleeing an abusive domestic situation (big tech platforms as a home) where there was extensive trauma bonding going on between me and the algorithms.

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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Fisherman75@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

My grocery store is 0.25 miles away. That's the farthest I go within a month apart from the bank. I realize that it would be ableist to expect everyone to carry two tote bags full of groceries back from somewhere that far regularly walking, but like what if there could be a service for disabled people to fetch groceries that way in the neighborhood? I saw some old people walking recently in my neighborhood and was considering doing that for them in exchange for some pocket change I needed for the laundromat right next to the grocery store. The farthest I go on a regular basis is a 25 minute walk to get my cashier's check my landlord requires for rent. The buses in this town are too slow and inconsistent for that to make sense for me. I'm actually very proud that I don't drive and wish I could make errands for physically disabled people given my fitness.

I find myself comfortable month to month staying within that 0.25 square mile area. I recently went about 100 miles west to a California beach for a day and night and I feel like my ordinary lifestyle made it that much more profound in contrast. It's strange how that sort of compression and expansion of a sense of everyday space can change the phenomenology of a place, make something feel bigger in an odd way. The ocean was so amazing.

And so it just kind of seems like there's no singular amount of minutes that should define your lifestyle but rather like maybe concentric circles with no absolute outer bound. And so this is very open-ended. Sort of musing here. I could be wrong. I work from home.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I've been all over the map on this historically looking at every angle - there's no understating that. After just such deep and broad consideration, at this point I think it is perfectly fair to be deathly concerned that big tech and the power structure of which they are a part do not remotely have our interests at heart. They have all of this psychological knowledge about addiction to which you refer, and they are using it to make people more addicted, more engaged, more dependent, all to make more money. It's actually simple in that respect. It is my old naivety to even begin to think again that there is something socially responsible left at the foundation of big tech. I am not a flawless specimen of mental health independent of big tech, but the economic model upon which they are based is an important aspect of my overall problem in life. There is more room to heal, more room to breathe and lick my wounds apart from them on balance, so that is where I am headed. I am surprised that a decade after Edward Snowden there are actually still people saying "don't be afraid" implying that the system is fundamentally good.

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I've tried getting into peertube to have something to watch. I'm exploring copyleft music on open audio / funkwhale. I'm on here in lemmy as of this week. I'm playing with mastodon and the fediverse. I've tried studying psychology and psychology-adjacent territory like Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault and Derrida so I can break down what the Facebook algorithms are doing to me, how pop and mainstream music is designed and produced in conjunction with advertising to screw with our heads and make us buy things, how YouTube music suggestion algorithms screw with my head and ultimately make me buy things, and I've tried to start learning to code on a basic level at least so I can convert my chromebook to Ubuntu and hopefully my android phone, which I've paid off completely, to some kind of fully open source OS.

I've let my Netflix subscription wither away after just not paying it and try to not care about it anymore. I have no idea what to do about Amazon or Amazon Prime. I have some very important movies like 'Unhinged' and 'Donnie Darko' on there. I need to buy certain things in the present framework of my life right now, things that, in a small town with a particular disability keeping me from driving, I can only get on Amazon.

I'm doing a lot. But I still find myself jonesing for that death consciousness of mindlessly scrolling through Facebook totally vulnerable to an AI superpower extracting maximum profit from me perpetually. Moderation no longer seems remotely realistic. I can't shut the machine out. Has anybody found anything else I could try? I'm trying to find as many little strategies as possible.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

When I lived in that nice middle class neighborhood growing up there was a drive-by shooting (which we all completely panicked about and made a huge deal), a meth lab that was discovered one day three doors down (the police came with hazmat suits and everything), my drug-addicted uncle was often wandering into the house drugged up on heroin, and there was this longstanding story about a guy a few houses down the other street who killed his wife then went up to a nearby mountain and shot himself. People had been warning me about poor neighborhoods all my life up until I was 21 saying they were even worse. But since winding up constantly in poor neighborhoods I've never been mugged, developed a generally thick skin, basic street smarts, learned who not to look in the eye, what not to do, how to react, how not to react, stay out of people's business, what situations lead to what other situations, don't be such a stickler about every little crime or suspicion of crime, listen to some gansta rap, know the greats, vibe, and everything is gravy. Seems simple to me now. Now I just enjoy the neighborhood. Birds chirping. Trees swaying. Haven't heard about any murders, meth labs, and I can afford a place of my own, or at least a room of my own. It's better than being a thin-skinned suburbanite who finds themselves walking on eggshells the minute a wild crime-ish energy appears.

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Being paranoid about getting robbed wasn't exactly my anxiety though. It was a lot more so the physical proximity to locally powerful people who make decisions every day that ruin dozens or even hundreds of lives in big ways with total impunity making me wonder how they are actually willing to entrap and hurt me or to have me be hurt. I hardly ever go to my dad's house anyway. Material possessions aren't a big factor in my sense of security. I have very little social competence in dealing with powerful people aligned for whatever reason in whatever way against me let alone physical competence (i.e. police), but there is a sense of social competence I have with people who would rob in a poor neighborhood. It's like a different bioregion and I feel like it is increasingly separating from the entire rest of America like a checkerboard. I have seen so few police cars lately, it's strange.

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Is it just me or do poor neighborhoods of the US have a safer vibe now and the suburbs like a distinctly threatening vibe? I live in a poor neighborhood and these days being somewhere like this and seeing like a gangbanger-ish car roll down the street doesn't make me nervous but a cop car definitely does kind of like how those same types of gangbanger-ish cars made me nervous when I was a middle class kid growing up in a nice neighborhood in the 2000s but police cars made me feel safe and protected. Like it's all switched for me. A few days ago I stayed a few nights at my dad's huge house in nice neighborhood and I was alone one night and felt extremely unsafe. I was so relieved to get back to my apartment alone in a poor neighborhood. Has anyone else had this experience of such a transition over the last twenty years or so?

[-] Fisherman75@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

Grandma died. I also kind of realized that my dad probably has dementia. So now the core of my "support system" has fallen apart. I have a theory about where my grandma got reincarnated to - somewhere good; but my dad I think is slowly taking on the life of a cockroach in an old trailer I used to live in. I have theories about dementia and reincarnation. That's what my grandma had. Vascular dementia. Anyway, with my dad no longer able to competently screw with my head I feel kind of liberated. My music finally feels like really good music. I'm like a really good musician I feel like now. Like I'm really confident all of sudden listening to my own music. I guess my dad, once upon a time mentally competent, always actively made me feel inadequate musically.

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Fisherman75

joined 9 months ago