Part two of the Historian’s accounts
Entry 12/06/2025 10:05:47: Mentat 2613
And comes the rest…
Peace in the household was tenuous at best. Even after that row, I could tell he was plotting a whole lot of things, and complaining about me behind the closed door of the master bedroom… I tried to being as innocuous as I could about it — but the paranoia was clearly there. I wasn’t going to be leaving the house for any job that I was trying in the Metro Covington area… While my mother wasn’t able to hide her impending dementia, I continued to notice that her memory and her attitude was declining.
So while I was able to get a job remotely for the bank that I used to work for — all of that money was going to where it could for the rent and utilities, but never to the food as that woman was determined to not use the check card for anything related to food stuffs unless absolutely necessary… So when I saw cards beyond the Discover card (which she forged the douche’s name for) along with at least three other cards that he forged his name to in order to pay for the ever present needs for his always hungry gullet.
I confronted her on a number of occasions that the spending needed to stop, and to actually use some of the money we accumulated or else he’ll eventually find out about it and there will be hell to pay. Which she always said to me that she’ll handle it when the day comes.
Eventually that money which I had been giving her dried up as the contract expired, and I didn’t want to leave her side because I noticed that she was looking more like an ancient set of skin and bones than she should have been looking since the last time she was inpatient for malnutrition. I was becoming more and more concerned because her walk was becoming more unsteady. So unsteady that at first it became necessary to walk with the cane that she had when she had broken her hip…. And continued to get worse until she was using a Zimmer frame… That’s a walker for you folk that don’t actually know it’s name.
I was trying to ensure she was eating during this time… Practically forcing her to eat beyond the less than 1,000 calorie intake she was doing, yet what a fight that was!!! “this gives me diarrhea….” Or, “it upsets my stomach…” or she would just tell me to leave her alone she’s eating something… It was getting so much that during one of her more shaky times I had told the douche about her constant fad diets growing up, and how she would go on these starvation binges in order to lose weight…
But alas, it went in one ear and out the other.
He tried a few times to push things with her to eating more during supper, but he rapidly gave up and let her eat what she did instead of intervening much — and simply worried more about what he was eating more than what she was (no doubt because he’s the man of the house).
And her health continued to fade…
I thought her BPPV returned as she was having problems with it when she was first hospitalized for her malnutrition. And I also noticed that whenever she would bend down and back up that she would almost immediately fall. So I tried to get her to doing her BPPV exercises more to see if it would help her with her issues with her — what I thought was her vertigo.. But it wasn’t helping.
Honestly there was another fight with the douche. This one was a double doozy. Apparently during this day, my mother was escorted by the douche after they finished their supper and she wanted to have her time playing various Facebook games from her PC in the Office. Maggie — the dog — was following them. It wasn’t raining and there were no thunderstorms, but the dog had been disallowed for being in the office area because she has a habit of chewing holes in the rug out of nervousness.
I commanded the dog “no” to stop her from bum rushing into the office to scoot under my mother’s seat as a means to setting up territory because the dog — once she’s there — will viciously growl at us to prevent being removed from the room.
I was having none of it. She had already ate one hole in the rug under my mother’s chair not to mention at least 7 holes in the master bedroom because the dog has completely scratched off the paint down to the dry-walls around the doors to the room along with throwing up under the bed which no one but me routinely discovered and cleaned up when the douche wasn’t in the house.
But getting back to it — when the dog started the scoot to underneath the chair of my mother’s desk, I tried to grab hold of her collar to stop the trick she routinely pulled, the douche said like he’s king of the household, “don’t you fucking dare lay a hand on the dog!”
Yeah, I stopped and launched at him. I punched him to the wall, and forced him to go down again. But because my mother was present for this — she thought it was in her best interest to try to stop the fight. She didn’t have the weight, and she didn’t have the leverage and she went down in the process as well.
There was a screaming match that went on, and the douche threatened to call the police because it was assault, but instead my mother once she was righted, and he disappeared to his room to talk him down and leave things alone with that. Ironically, it was also the first time the dog disobey any of the commands that I gave from that point for the next three months.
My mother came out of the bedroom about 45 minutes later, telling me that he had calmed down…. And after that she use the words she always used when she thought I would be cowed through guilt that she used when I was growing up, “I alone prevented him from throwing you out of the house and getting me arrested…
It was then that a realized that her dementia was advanced, because she used the same tone then as she did when I was 17…. Like she alone could make the house work.
I submitted to her even though I knew then she was farther gone than I thought she was.
Fast forward a couple of months later. Maybe a year. Her health was failing.. She was back under 90 lbs (40.8 kgs). She had routinely fallen around the house about 8 times and the frequency was getting worse. She had defecated in our bathroom (the guest bathroom) and I remember cleaning it up because she missed sitting down when she started to move her bowels.
The next day she had fallen with the walker, badly too… She was a mess of skin and bones and the walker. The douche and I performed an intervention that after she recuperated from that fall in her bedroom, she was going to the hospital. She gave in to our intervention and after that time — she was whisked to the hospital. I stayed home to watch the dog as always… And the douche and her headed to Tammany Hospital.
A couple of days later, the douche came home and told me the prognosis. Her blood pressure was tanking. She had broken two ribs from the fall and that one of the ribs had punctured her lung. She was being transferred to hospice care because there was nothing that they could do to recover her blood pressure, and that there wasn’t all that much left to do other than to make her comfortable.
We waited… The douche never asked me to go with him to perform a visitation. Didn’t even consider that as the son, I should have been allowed a moment to see her before she went. I didn’t ask because the fuck would’ve probably said no because of the dog.
A couple of days later. My mother… at 82 years of age… Died restfully…. At least I hope she did. Her mind had been completely gone by the time he lasted visited her, telling me about some of the stories of her making spaghetti sauce for a dinner she wasn’t cooking.
I made all the arrangements to finding the burial papers and the arrangements for her passing. I tried to get the house back in order while the douche was out of the house and once again — not allowing me to visit the crematorium to see/confirm it was what she wanted.
As far as I know, the remains have been given back to the douche — but I’ll be damned if I knew where they were in the house. Or even whether he was telling the truth about having the remains.
But then that was where the real fun started.
I tried to warn him that what was going on with her and the family I come from which are a bunch of alcoholics, thieves, using people, manipulators and I was the only one that didn’t participate in those habits.
But he didn’t want to hear any of it because he knew her better than I did growing up under her and them for the last 60 years.
At one point he accused me of taking cards that he left out like I was interested in them. He accused me of fabricating lies and being the culprit of “his wife’s” attitudes.
I wasn’t listening anymore to it. And that’s when the new piece of information came to me… He walked to the office and said to me… “Come the first, I have removed your name off the lease…” And all I could say was, “fine… no problem…” And that’s when I realized it was time to move out and on as quickly as I could.
At 3 AM on Monday, the 24th of November. I left the key on the table.. No note… And walked out of the house to find a way to a halfway house or shelter in New Orleans…
This is where I am at the moment. Laptop adapter died this morning and I still have a ton of things to do to try to contact my family in Rhode Island. I have more to say about this.. But I need psychological help first. And then a replacement adapted on top of that.
I’ll be back eventually.. I just don’t know when. I don’t even know how. So until the next time. think good thoughts for me as I’m trying to make things work here in New Orleans… Someway…
The Historian in me Comes forward
Entry 12/05/2025 11:23:48: Mentat 2612
All right, this was a rough couple of days landing in NOLA. While I’ve been getting more than my fair share of sleep thanks to being up and down for almost 11 hours; it seems to me that I’m going better than I did when I was living in the house that the douche now owns has exclusively under his name. But there’s moments when I wake up late at night (time unknown because we don’t have public access to clocks) where I’m facing the demons I’ve been fighting through with my 6 years of silence and not being able to vent through any and all of it. It doesn’t look promising at the moment as there’s nothing in regards to public therapy of any sort at the shelter, so I’m going to have to sit here and work through everything one bit at a time while I take some off time until I can get to the thing rolling…
So first thing, telephone… Something I need to work on when it’s less cloudy and even less rain…. Annoying I know — but things are the way the are…. Neither here nor there until I see the shady setups along the street, at the homeless shelter, or along the places where there are courts and municipal buildings — including the library — and talking to the people there. There’s more to this, but I’m going to have to wait until I can take advantage of being more me, and less a historian of things long since passed.
The good news is that I was able to get some information on the various resources available in the area, so I might have an idea to take advantage of when the weather gets less…. well… stormy.
I’ve tried to reach out to Tracy and Tracy is of course hesitant and in her own world since I dumped a lot on her about my situation. If I don’t hear anything from her sometime today (or tomorrow), I’m going to tell her that I’m not looking for a handout from her anymore. That’s pretty much water under the bridge. And all that I have left from her it to remind her of the friendship we had for the last 29 years.
Tried reaching out for my aunt, and unless I have a phone number — she’s probably going to be another dead end — but there will be typical Frenchwoman/Frenchman (yeah, my uncle’s included in on this) because what I have to tell them they will have a shit fit.
OP ED: Sorry folks this is going to be a bit of a whirlwind because I’m going through a butt-ton of information and don’t have the time at the moment to be as much of a story-teller that I’m capable of…. So grin and bear it as best as I can.
Shit fit? Yeah, it’s going to be a shit-storm. As I’ve said yesterday (and this is definitely going public because I can’t hold it tight anymore). My mother’s health was failing for the last 4 years and try as I might — by hook and by crook for me riding her constantly, trying to get her to eat, and to maintain a healthy existence — she was having none of it.
Four years ago, when I wasn’t actually paying attention because I was too busy laying low because of the amount of criticism and nitpicking I as receiving from both my mother for what I was typing in my journal, coupled with trying to network and be friendly with people online — the douche that’s her husband was constantly complaining of the noise I was making because of his precious watching television. Of course, this excludes the amount of noise he was making when he was on the phone; as he was louder than me…. it was just logical for him to cast blame on me that I was the problem.
So this was the first time my mother was diagnosed with malnutrition as one day when she was taking a nap, she was unable to get up because her energy was shaky at best and her equilibrium was completely whacked out. An ambulance picked her up and the her and the douche were en route to Tammany General to diagnose for other potential problems.
The diagnosis? Malnutrition.. She hid this from both of us with her weight getting down to 89 lbs (40.37 kgs). Her magnesium count was completely shot and she was suffering from dehydration. I never once did visit her at the hospital because her dog — Maggie — had serious separation anxiety and without anyone in the house she could easily wreck it.
No problem, I thought. This is something that she could bounce back from including being able to eat and take care of herself through the help of me as I’ve been doing the nutritional thing since I was diagnosed with Hypertension back in 2015, and was slowly losing weight from 225 lbs (102 kgs) and was about 175 lbs (79.37 kgs) at this point.
Man, what a fight that was even with the Visiting Nurses that we had coming over for a month or two after her discharge… but with a lot of Stubborn French negotiations and her near incessant nit-picking of something being “too salty”… or “too bland…” or a simply not liking it — we were finally able to get her up to 115 lbs (52.16 kgs). Not only was she steady, but she was also pretty much back to normal physically if not mentally….
Mentally was another story. My mother began showing symptoms of Sundowner’s. Enough for me to be showing concern even though she was vehemently denying it the entire time. Every time I brought it up, and every time she denied it — she was showing the symptoms more and more evident. So much so, I watched her slowly try to change her patterns based on the things I told her. Sure more of them were true — but sometimes I would throw one in that wasn’t remotely — and she began changing them to the opposite of what I told her.
Douche and I were having our typical passive-aggressive fights. Basically his nitpicking…. And my bull-headed “I’m tired of your bullshit” attitude. That’s when…. Well I don’t remember the details… A friend in discord heard me as we were chatting (and I was a bit louder than he liked). He began making threats at me (with the attitude I’m a pansy little faggot to his “I served in the marines”attitude. And just like my brother he came at me with the scowled look and a first up like he was going to punch me.
The Douche didn’t realize I was fed up with his empty threats. The douche didn’t realize I remembered the time in 2017 when he threw a serving knife and fork at me because I didn’t tell him precisely the size of the piece of pork I wanted leaving it to “his judgment, I was happy with whatever piece he gave me… (yeah, that was said three times before the knife and fork flew… The douche totally forgot in his attempt at intimidation that I was a Southpaw. So pinning just my right hand is useless when my left has been left free. It took him more than a bit to realize I wasn’t a right-hander like he is….
But I’m going down the rabbit hole a bit too much with this.
So he was coming at me first with the veiled threat he was going to punch me for my surly faggot mouth…he didn’t say that F word, but his attitude was clearly implying it) Yeah, he’s 6’1″ (185 cm) weighing in at a a mere 250 lbs (113.4 kgs), and I’m 5’9″ (175 cm) and about 170 lbs (77.1 kgs). He got pushed to the wall with more force that he thought I contained. After a bit of working leverage, I pinned him to the ground and yelled at him, “I win.. And don’t think I don’t know how to do worse…”
What did the douche do, you ask? When my mother woke up and came out of the room he looked at her and like my youngest brother did said, “he started it. I didn’t do anything to provoke him…”
I’m honestly not sure whether she believed him (although she definitely acted it for his benefit). But at the same time she either remembered or didn’t how Jon (my brother) used to do this sort of things to me for decades when we were growing up. She gave me the routine scolding I got when my brother and I were growing up, in spite of the protests I made that if you threaten me, I’m not going to permit it or else it’ll get worse…
In her mind it was settled. In my mind, it was far from settled as I knew what sort of energy the man had and he holds a grudge in ways that only the youngest sibling does when it comes to being bettered.
And still, her dementia was getting worse…
The next part covers her deteriorating mental state that followed her health once again… Until the next time.
T-Minus 3 Days and Counting
Entry 11/20/2025 15:29:33: Mentat 2609
T-Minus 10 days and counting..
…Or in my personal case — it’s 3 more days before I leave in the dead of night and head for the homeless shelter I checked out in Ponchatoula… Now granted that’s only 20 miles (32 km) from here and I still haven’t called there yet to confirm they’re not going to pull the bullshit that the homeless shelter tried pulling on me in Slidell during my Trail of Anger in 2020. I’ll be attempting to call them or the Northlake Homeless Coalition to assist me along with this.
Christ on a crutch, I still have cold sweats when I realize that I dodged a bullet dealing with the Red American Bullshittery (also known as a the Republican Party) of that place trying to convert the homeless to a religion to help them find guidance in their lives — and all the while it’s nothing more than a hypocritical illusion feeding into a cult of personality that reads like a cult compound disguised as a homeless shelter for transient people that want to either leave the system or leech into it round robin between Slidell (and the mainland) and the peninsula of Orleans & Jefferson Parishes.
*Shivers* However, this isn’t what I’m wanting to write about at the moment, so I digress.
Why am I doing this? I need to break habits I’ve created the last 5 years living in this House of Hell™. Between my mother’s onset dementia — which of course she only started admitting to when her health was plummeting out of control — and her incompetent, back-water husband and his childish and never ending-whinging he’s done, I’ve had to shut down my inherent want to beating the ever living shit out of both of them. It’s not like — and nothing like — the time that the psycho in Atlanta made sure that 4.5 years later left me a soulless husk of a human being that I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror.
If anything, it’s so much worse.
How do I begin to unravel the fact that when I used to look at myself in the mirror in the morning, I was seeing myself sure — but the anger and the rage in my eyes used to make me look away not because of the depression that I experienced when dealing with the psycho more than 22 years ago when he left. No, instead it’s a laundry list of non-stop issues from both of them that for adults they stopped growing up sometime in their teenage years (and in my mother’s husband’s case pre-teens).
I’ve been trying to talk about myself one of the biggest problems that I’ve developed since the time I’ve had to bury my emotional states — including anger, rage, and disappointment continue to end up going into a laundry list of issues that distract me from dealing with them and thereby causes me to devolve to their immaturity levels both of them exposed to me to, since moving to Louisiana.
Needless to say, because of this constant immaturity in the household: I’ve changed. I’ve changed in a way that was infinitely worse than when I was a teenager. I avoided everything and just buried myself whenever I could — in games, in binging movies, television series, YouTube Subscriptions — basically anything and everything I could possibly. I might have had the self-confidence, but it was nothing like when I was living on my own… Not one bit…
And I know for a fact I need help. I need to let it out and talk about it to another human being. Professionally. I also need to get out of this house because of the memories. Some of the good, most of them bad… I also need to break many of the habits I’ve created since moving to Covington. And that means giving up most of them online in order to get out of these habits of mine.
Tomorrow, I might write about the laundry lists of bullshit that I had to deal with… Right now, I’m working on 6.5 hours of average sleep and it’s becoming difficult to staying on a subject without doing down rabbit holes…
Until the next time.
One Month In…
Entry 09/04/2025 10:53:33: Mentat 2572
Jeez, where do I begin…
In just over 6 weeks, as I’ve been here for the complete conversion of Linux to both my deskside and my laptop, and let’s quickly review the changes I’ve seen in that time.
- 2 Kernel Updates (3 for the laptop because I was running it on Linux Mint for two and a half weeks prior).
- Did I mention that the automation program for removing previous kernels stopped working in 6.8.0-72.72? I’m still not sure whether it’s working, but I will check it on next Kernel Update.
- 1 version updates (“Xia” or 22.1, to “Zara” or 22.2).
- 1 drive (Media) being converted from NFTS to EXT4, and then causing it to auto-mount on login.
- I can’t even count how many updates I’ve seen for the central libs for the OS… Gnome, Mesa, core stuff… the lists are endless even though it only see the information for the last 7 days as it’s auto deleted before that.
However one of the things that I find myself in conflict with — particularly given some of the communities that I’ve either flittered through or are involved with is the level of almost abusive attitudes that come from people that have gotten themselves situated and nested into the community for a number of years.
If anything I routinely catch from them the complete over-simplification of the reasoning, the complete lack of empathy in explaining that this has been going on for any amount of time, and more often times than naught get the impression that have completely forgotten what the changes were, so they stick to “it just works” attitudes and “don’t worry about it”…
Unfortunately these veterans forget that there’s routine influxes into Linux and the particular distro from Windows and Apple/Mac, are coming from a completely different mindset and quietly asking user to “research it themselves” as they often silently assume usually annoys the younger people off more and more the longer this attitude continues to be propagated. And they will either distrohop, or simply go back to their original OS, complaints and all.
That’s also the other problem. People are in such a rush to helping they don’t realize that their copy-paste go read this (URL inserted here) while it might be a gem that might have either worked on or found — without any interaction, let alone empathy — it doesn’t feel like helping. It often feels like I’m just a number in the deli queue, got my order and I should move the hell to checkout, and on out of the store.
No thanks. I’m here for the duration and I’ll be damned if I’m going to not become part of the group-think mindset clique bullshit of not being there to explain things. And I know what it’s like to be dealing with people that don’t have the expertise, the experience, or the mindset to want to research everything through AI or through URL when they got hold of a human being.
How am I feeling with the conversion?
Surprisingly well. While it seems odd that that I typically reboot every 2 days instead of 4 (or more thanks to it being Linux); reboots are surprisingly fast — even after a MESA (nVidia) update, and all the graphics caches need to be rebuilt. Otherwise when it comes to the near firehose level of of updates to be downloaded and install, a surprising few of them require system reboots (unlike Fedora which required it more times than I cared to count).
I did a timing for it the other week and I recall for a Windows Reboot (which was intentionally made slower and slower with all the updates), it took 10 minutes to get to login, and another 15 – 20 to get everything normalized, including the sysadmin server for disc-caching. And for Linux, to get to login (from the system reboot request put int), I can do so in about 5 minutes, and once it gets to the desktop after login and the disk-caching and services finalized another 3 – 4 minutes (6 minutes if it’s a GPU caching going on).
On my laptop which I had to update it with all the firehose updates on the laptop for the last month, it took all the updates and the Zara Update to complete in 100 minutes. As opposed to the monthly updates being between 90 to almost 160 minutes EACH. And I only had to reboot once (instead of some that could make the machine reboot 2 – 4 times).
Although I have two things that come readily to mind. The first is that I often find myself trying to fight against the “…well it works for me…” mindset that I used to have done on me in the Ubuntu Forums 17 years ago. I know I do it just to be spiteful. So instead I have to take a moment and explain something like, this is what I did and this is why I experience no problems running it.
The second is the fight for distro-hopping. Yeah, it’s beginning to become an itch sometimes. Part of the reason has to do to that spiteful feeling I get for not getting Fedora KDE to work properly. Part of the reason has to do with the thought of trying something different… But both of these feelings are easy to overcome when you realize I still have way too much to learn before I remotely think of distro-hopping. Not to mention that it’s going to take way too much to move the saved stuff to the media drive and I quickly get over all of it and like the fact that it’s Linux, it’s Mint, and it’s not insane with rolling updates.
It’s good, I’m good, my PC behaves, and I don’t have to deal with the bullshit anymore that came with Windows.
Until the next time.
Impressions of Linux in the First 24 Hours.
Entry 07/30/2025 06:42:39: Mentat 2537
Yes I installed Mint 13 days earlier than I said. Yes, it’s running (here’s the proof)
These are the first shower thoughts this morning that I had was this:
Microsoft Windows has made me lazy
Yes, I said it and I have to own up to it, and here’s the reason why I said this.
Yesterday when I pushed through the LiveCD try out on the deskside to ensure that the PC would be able to run and install Mint onto the deskside, I quickly discovered that while my MB does run on UEFI — I never set it up when I installed Windows 7 on it. Because of that, my BIOS had decided to to cable select my drives in the system where the Media Drive (used for games from steam, wallpapers and my MP3 collection) at 1 TB, was placed in the disk 0 position (it used to be in the previous machine, but was moved to the secondary position (D: drive) because I decided to make the 500 GiB Drive into a local system (C: Drive). The Local Drive was in the disk 1 position. As I was running through the wizard for the installation, I knew for fact that it would’ve chosen the Media drive to install Mint on it, which would then caused the system to being a dual-boot as Windows would’ve been left alone.. And it would’ve even created the dual-boot grub menu as well.
So, choosing the Something Else option instead of using the wizard, I was immediately hit with the fact that I had to do everything manually. Making the EFI partition for booting up properly, setting up the swap drive.. And finally setting up the EXT4 partition for Mint to getting installed. While it was a FAFO moment because the instructions for installation was extremely vague when it came to the steps for it. I messed up at first because I forgot the EFI Boot Partition, so instead of overthinking it, I waited to have a walk break and try again.
Sitting here now, I can tell you it was done that way intentionally because if you know, you know… It’s just not for the beginner to do on their own and without experience/supervision.
To continue though. After pressing it and going through the rest of the of the installation process, in 30 minutes I was able to successfully launch Mint from the desk side (without the LiveCD) and look at the long process of installing and tweaking the system to getting it running to my specifications.
Now… the made me lazy.
- The install made me immediately self-aware of just how much I forgot how to do things step by step manually.
- Converting over the media drive to EXT4 and then being able to use it for Steam and my personal use required me to take steps I haven’t followed since the days I was on an Amiga and working in a Unix workplace.
- Looking at the Samba and setting up a workgroup for the laptop and the deskside and it’s requiring a level of tweaking required to getting a machine recognized is something I never had to do. (I remember reading the manuals on Novell back in the day requiring this, but my token ring coding didn’t require it in Windows 3.x level of set up.
Currently I’m sitting here working on the thought of lunch and wondering whether I should work on setting up the workgroup for the Laptop and the Deskside (I just can’t be assed to use the thumbdrive for the music collection I have set up on the laptop to move it).
That’s about it for my first 24 hours experience. Off to think about it and make lunch.
Until the next time.
T-Minus 23 days & counting
Entry 07/18/2025 08:36:58: Mentat 2525
It’s time for me to start talking about the major gripes that I have not for the Linux Operating system, but instead with the community at large. This is going to be the breaking point for me to wanting to work not only with the operating system but also with getting the answers that I need for anything that’s going on with my system(s).
The first is that a good majority of the more experienced parts of the community lacks any rapport to the questions they encountered on the forums. You are either dealing with the experienced people that demonstrate a complete uncaring attitude to being nice to people — new, intermediate and veterans — in the forums. They copy-paste their answers which they have done ad infinitum (which is actually a sure bloody sign that if it’s **so** good, you’d think there would be a pin for it somewhere on the community boards). They don’t work on anything remotely demonstrating interpersonal experience. It’s like a race to get the most amount of answered like it’s an e-peen flex that they’re the ones with the most massive endowment for experience in the community.
Or… And these are my personal favorites. In order to prove their experience as they’re trying to prove their massive e-peens, they will use ad hominem build straw men against another posters comment in order to prove their superiority. They’re not helping either the poster or the contributors, and all they’re doing is creating a form of toxic environment that is neither supporting nor helpful to new users trying to get used to the culture they’re coming into.
Finally and my personal favorite are the worst of the community. They come in, drop a single comment like "well if works for me" (and yes. 17 years later I’m still seeing this scattered through more than just the Canonical community) and were positively no fucking help solving the problem. These people are in my opinion, the worst examples of last word attitudes that aren’t useful and create a more negative environment than humanly possible.
**THIS IS NOTHING** like the experience that I’ve dealt with from any Microsoft or Windows community where people answer the question, explain a little of their experience with it, and move on.
I often attribute this to the most negative parts of human qualities: arrogance, condescension, elitism/turpitude (at worst case), and the sort of community negativity that I often didn’t have to encounter with problems in the Windows or Apple Communities. In fact, they came in, answered the question, posted third party information and did what they could to create a positive experience before moving on.
The last thing I would expect from people that were outcasts, misfits, out-of-box thinkers, and the generally independent thinkers that often take abuses from others for being different. No instead they seem to be shoveling out the abuses they experienced onto people in the world. It’s the cycle of abuse that doesn’t seem to end.
The second gripe I have comes from the people that don’t remotely answer the question posed about a piece of software and instead foist another piece of software that has **nothing** to do with the question posed. Case in point, I was looking for answers to the questions I had when it came to KIO-drive (when I was trying out Fedora Plasma). Did they answer the problems posed about KIO-Drive and Dolphin? Nope! They ignored the OP’s question, and would then insist to the OP to install RClone, OCAMLFUSE. OverGrive, or InSync instead.
What the people insisting on alternatives didn’t explain is that RClone required excessive additional steps in order to operate properly… And it’s use is much slower than what Windows users are used to with Google Drive (which was also not explained). OCAMLFUSE has a small chance of working, yet more strongly on the not working at all (ending with a 403 "not authorized" issue and falls back on RClone’s part for setting up the cloud console to make it work). Oh and I forgot to mention, three sites that supported OCAMLFUSE did an extremely poor job explaining that you had to include another repository from the creator of the program to make it part of the auto-update feature. Bad move there, believe me. To continue, OverGrive can cost $5.00 for a license to make it work "conveniently" (read: set and forget), and InSync costs a whopping $39.99 – $49.99 (depending on whether it’s on sale or not) to use it past the try-and-buy time.
This neither answered nor remotely explained all the details of the alternatives leaving the person high and dry having to make decisions as to whether ANY of it is worth the effort.
By the way, I did find my solution: FreeFileSync. It works like SysInternal’s tool: SyncToy from days gone by, and with the necessary tarball only requires a minor check with Google turning the 15 GiB Drive/Cloud into a thumb-drive. The total time I had to take on this was 6 hours of going through.. Yes, RClone, GIO-Drive, OCAMLFUSE, OverGrive, all of them ending in either lack of proper documentation frustration or simply took too long to troubleshoot.
And this is one example of the way the community completely derails a question on software by pointing to another piece of software they personally like instead. If you can’t answer the questions — shut the fuck up and let other people answer it instead. If no one answers it — believe me — you’ll be given the opportunity when the person comes back and asks, "are there alternative to …"
The funny thing is that people laughed at me when someone asked the question, "what is one of your red flags when dealing with the Linux Community?" and I pointed this out first and enthusiastically. Yet they all knew from experience how often they encountered this in their wanderings.
With these two attitudes alone, it’s completely antithetical to the Windows and Apple experiences and with some of the people leaving both (Windows and Apple) because of being tired of all the bloat, the needless security that has nothing to do with the actual operating system and the needless levels kernel level securities (and security holes), that can leave the OS in an even more vulnerable state than being fixed.
The third gripe I have has to be the extreme cliquishness I catch from the community at large. Never in my life have I see so much elitism, cliquishness and insular attitudes from people using an operating system and finding programs to make the OS a user’s experience in free, alternative, and even productive software that meets the person’s needs. In the three weeks I have moved from Fedora to Mint, I have never seen to much ageism, CIS/Trans/Non-Binary disdain, accusing gamers of not being anything of the sort (yeah, I still remember that one because PVP has been excluded from my repertoire). I have seen elitism coming from people because they don’t run Arch, Endeavor, Plasma, whatever and even seen condescension from the e-peen flexers because of this.
People, this is an Operating System… People from 12 years old to 80 years old are using it. They are white, black, yellow, green, pink, orange… They are straight, gay, pan, trans, questioning, demi, polyamorous, whatever. They can be using any one of 600 distros and yes underneath the whatever UI you currently have, they still use the same basic core that relies on knowing the command structure.
When you’re having a conversation — be it with the OS, or outside of it — you’re going to be dealing with attitudes, understandings, perspectives and experiences that go well outside of your own. Don’t make them feel bad if it doesn’t match exactly what the fuck you’re looking for. Because more often times than naught you can learn something that makes your experience bigger than it was yesterday.
My fourth and final gripe sort of wraps up with the impression I get from the communities that I’ve dealt with since 2008 when is started all of this during my dual booting experience between Windows and Ubuntu (and later distro hopped to my dissatisfaction). The complete lack of help when it came to system maintenance and file trimming. I have seen so many complaints from users running out of space for their discs where logs have gotten to whoppingly huge and unmanageable sizes. Instead of explaining this to the OP, too often even the experience will tell them to **NEVER DELETE THESE FILES**.
Umm… excuse me this is unhelpful and doesn’t address the problems. How precisely does this hoarding fix anything?
It’s extremely rare to encounter someone trying to explain it’s time to look at your files to see what the errors are before deleting them. And ALMOST no one will explain to the person how to delete them/trim them/clean up the rotated files to make it more manageable. What’s worse is that they reinforce never deleting them — like it’s absolutely forbidden or something.
This is gamer hoarding: keeping things "just in case". Not to mention extremely detrimental when it comes to system operations and system monitoring as it clutters the hard drive with excessive amounts of files that do nothing but take up space. And it reminds me of this WTF I often encounter when watching other players collecting new items.
All I can ask is… Why? and What’s the point?! This isn’t remotely helpful, people! This isn’t remotely a free user experience. This is the sort of bullshit, secular and even parochial attitudes that we have to deal with constantly from the narrow-minded people in our day to day lives that put us down because we’re different from the pack, the clique, the social circles . Why bring it to an operating system that — depending on the distro in question — REQUIRES the end-user understand not only how to make it work for them, but also can end up going tits-up because of a system update. This is a system that REQUIRES the user be proficient and capable of tweaking and optimizing through routine maintenance and understanding.
This goes diametrically against my first concept about being human. I goes directly against my second concept of helping.
At this point, I’m realizing, I like the alternative for Windows 10 which is sunsetting in October. So far, Mint’s the way for me to go as it’s not causing me the anxiety and headaches Fedora Plasma did when I installed it on the laptop. It doesn’t feel like Arch, which gave me the distinct impression of not being ready for prime-time. Nor is it the most cancerous bunch in Ubuntu which is far too busy trying to be "cool". Or Debian which is more plodding about OS security and features than even I’m capable of being when it comes to slow moving and methodical.
Mint/Cinnamon does its best to not firehose me with updates, but instead updates based on improvements and code problems that weren’t worked out during the initial release. So far *fingers crossed* core fixes aren’t breaking things. And *knocking on wood* requiring me to roll back.
But the whole of the Linux Community? As Chris said in The Ritz, Screw you, honey. Boy, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a queen without a sense of humour. You can die with your secret… Miserable piss-elegant fairy. if you can’t get over yourself or your ego-centric attitudes, die in a ditch. That social cancer is tiring and drags people down.
I’m going to be staying as far away from them as humanly possible.
Until the next time.
The Emancipation Day Decision
Entry 06/26/2025 13:47:03: Mentat 2604
I believe I’m actually done installing Fedora Plasma on my laptop. Now I get to see if it behaves and how often I have to run updates with it to see whether it’s going to be viable for the deskside. Everything that I normally use my laptop for seems to be se up proper and running without issue, although there were moment where things were crashing for no apparent reason. However since everything’s been incorporated into the upgrades/updates schema, everything seems to be running properly.
As I said, now I get to see how often the bloody thing needs to do all sorts of core and software updates to maintain stability. Hopefully it’s not as insane as I remember Ubuntu could be. Or as much as I saw from Endeavor/Arch as I have read in complaints.
But, that’s not the reason why I’m here writing at the moment. It’s post Emancipation Day and I didn’t post/talk about what I’m releasing off my back…
The easiest and first answer is Nick and his addiction. I’m not going to sit here weighing down my life with the disappointment or could’ve beens/should’ve beens for someone ignoring their own addictions. However, at the same time, I’m not going to trust interacting in communities I used to be part of because I don’t need/want people to try to fix something I’m fully capable of fixing for myself.
It’s bad enough that it turned into a bad decision three months ago… But at the same time I’m not going to be guilted into nor accept condolences for how it turned out. And I’m not in any state to be dealing with being civil to the world at large. I already learned this the last week to week and a half when I was dealing with some of the fuckwits and window licking, short bus passengers on reddit telling me to “be nice”.
*snort* be nice. Compared to the amount of F-Bombs and R-slurs I can drop in a single sentence, trust me when I say: I am being fucking nice to you smooth-brained imbeciles and blunt force trauma head cases.
Yeah, this is a sure sign that when I get that annoyed, that irritated and that incendiary — it’s time to step away, take a breather, enjoy my own company and Moe’s presence and return to a “normal” I’m better with.
I know it’s time to completely reset. I also know I can do it. I have done it in the past. The problem is that being an intuitive empath it takes time to disengage and return to normal/sense of self. A state where I can like and be with myself without feeling as though I need someone I can connect to and trust more than self with my feelings. Of being able to be self-sufficient about it without feeling co-dependent. Sometimes it takes weeks. Sometimes it takes months. Sometimes it even takes years. So until that time it’s better to being able to walk on my own, because at this point in time all I’m going to do is try to connect to someone else I can feel and sense. And when I can’t trust someone’s — let alone anyone’s attitude — particularly when they’re completely and utterly obdurate, small minded, limited, or even short-tempered or short-sighted. This is going to cause me to being aggressive and extremely incendiary dealing with them.
This applies to family, friend and stranger alike.
However one thing that’s invariably going to happen is that when guilting me about my decision — especially friends — they are going to be less trusted than before. Sometimes severely less trusted. I’ve had a lifetime of family and friends that have abused this privilege off me; so much so that I have a knee-jerk reflex of attacking and being 1,000% more aggressive because that was the only way to make them stop (and yes, Freud would accuse me of having a mother complex because that’s where it started).
So this is my emancipation this year. I’m walking away from socializing, friends, along with networking and communities until such time as I can actually behave in mixed company. Until such time as things make sense without me being as incendiary and easy to rile as my uncle and brother (used to be).
Until the next time.
Day 4: Proof it’s been done on the Laptop
I even got Steam installed, running and loaded the first and easiest game I could from my library to the laptop: Stardew Valley.
It took a bit of tweaking for Steam to give me the windows, but it’s well on its way to working properly. And it’s about halfway done for operability.
Not too shabby for Emancipation Day. I’ll be writing my Emancipation Day Dairy Entry sometime this week when things are calm.
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