Onii-Chan

Hell, I finished school over a decade ago now, but even as an adult, I feel like I'm being constantly watched. This kind of overreaching, omnipresent surveillance is genuinely not good for individuals and by extension, society at large. Human beings do not act naturally when they feel their every move is being watched. Anxiety, distrust, paranoia, depression, etc. can all manifest, and it scares me to know that this kind of "for your safety" surveillance has become so normalized.

It isn't normal. It is affecting the average person's mental health, even if they don't know it. It is affecting society at a very base level as a result. What a world...

InnerTune is what finally got me to ditch Spotify. It's free, no account required, uses YouTube Music (so imo, a wider range of content) AND shuffle is genuinely random.

Owned my current Pixel 4 since new, but I think it's time I actually upgrade. Been waiting for the 8 for a while, and as long as I can throw GrapheneOS onto it, I'll be happy to retire the 4. It's been an awesome phone.

Yeah same. A cheap little thing from Woolies does the trick. I just find it fucking disgusting that we have to go to such lengths to begin with.

Come to Australia if you want some dystopian surveillance state bullshit. The border force in the country have the legal right to force you to unlock your devices, or throw you in prison until you do. We have no rights in this country when it comes to privacy (just look into the recent legislation that was pushed through parliament during COVID - they can edit, delete, etc. any data on your device. It's absolutely fucked, and Australians being the apathetic bunch of cunts they are just couldn't give a shit.)

This country is just becoming more and more authoritarian, and I'm not sure how many Americans know just how many protections they have and take for granted. Australia is fucking suffocating to live in today if you value privacy and autonomy. There are almost no barriers at all between the individual and the government, and it's only getting worse. I wish I had moved stateside when I was young enough for it to be a possibility. I'm stuck here now.

DKC2 has one of the most beautifully-melancholic soundtracks of all time imo. I was enamored by it as a child, and as a young adult, realized how influential it was for me during the time in my life I made music myself. David Wise really is something else.

I never had any real issues with speed using Surfshark, the reason I made the switch was largely about trust. As another user said, as soon as I saw Surfshark start their YouTube advertising spree, and start to bloat their client with unnecessary features, I started looking for alternatives.

I'm iffy about any VPN company that uses YouTuber marketing as it is, and while my threat model isn't overly paranoid, I believe the VPN company someone chooses to use should have paranoid business practices. After I saw the news on Mullvad's raid, the authorities subsequently finding nothing, and the fact that a user's account is merely a string of numbers, I decided it was the VPN for me.

It's a good day to be a Mullvad user. Switched over from Surfshark a while ago, and I love it.

I'll stick to InnerTune. Got rid of Spotify over a month ago, don't miss it at all.

I have been thinking about giving cannabis a go again lately, but I'm honestly pretty frightened of the stuff nowadays. I was fine with it for years, but it slowly started manifesting thoughts of existentialism, consciousness, the nature of reality, and solipsism, among other deeply-unanswerable questions. It got to the point where almost immediately after the effects came on, I'd become paralyzed with fear over the fact that anything exists at all, but I kept using it because it helped my insomnia better than anything else.

I've only recently come out of that existential crisis after really having to work on myself to get back to where I was before that, which for the most part, I am. The only lingering change is that my firm atheism was shattered and I now find myself seeing the universe, consciousness and death very differently (largely in a good way.)

I want to get along with weed, but it's just too much for me. I have ADHD, and all it does is make me think even more than I already do, as one errant thought will always send me down a cascading sequence of increasingly more terrifying philosophical possibilities about the universe and nature of infinity. Alcohol manifests itself as pure bliss and anti anxiety. It allows me to actually switch off for a few hours and then sleep.

Trust me, I wish I could love cannabis, but I just don't think it's worth the risk for me personally. I've never had a drug fuck me up so hard mentally (and I've previously experimented with psychedelics and dissociatives as a younger guy.) There's something about THC specifically that fucks me up.