Before June 2023, I was a mod on several Reddit communities for about 13 years and outside of Reddit since the turn of the century. I just kinda stepped back once the Reddit BS happened.

10 months later, my happiness and over all quality of life has improved. Not only am I no longer stressed (bye bye moderation based nightmares!), but I have way more time to dedicate to my passions and goals.

I thought that dedication to holding together a few niche communities and battling the “bad guys” defined me and gave me a sort of immortality.

I was VERY wrong.

Our great grand kids won’t be trolling reddit archives, telling everyone how “cool” grandpa was.

The greatest thing I ever did to improve my QOL was step away from moderating and leading communities on the internet as a whole. Doubly so if they involve political talk.

I lived in both ‘French Canada’, and France at one point in my life.

In my experience, they all consider themselves the best thing France ever made and the other side are the equivalent of “rednecks”

To be fair, they both can be right.

Those are the only times when it’s appropriate to insert a 3 1/2 inch floppy.

I’d never go back to Reddit again if the several game projects I beta test for in my spare time would migrate over to lemmy.

I’d be very interested in your theory.

I thought it had something to do with the distance to the server or ping timeout, but that is more of a guess.

I’ve not experienced that problem again despite working as a network engineer for 20 years

I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.

The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.

There’s no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.

It’s as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it’s as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.

My alts are always on my same name. It helps me not have to remember, but it helps me to compartmentalize.

I have one over on lemmy.world that I made when RiF went down and it pointed to that instance. ‘Reddit is Fun’ was my trusted app of choice for so long that I figured that I’d go with their recommendation.

That mindset was apparently shared with a lot of people, and lemmy.world became overcrowded and unusable every other day for a while due to traffic. That’s when I read that one should get registered at a closer and/or smaller instance in order to have better service.

That’s when I moved over to SDF’s shockingly fast lemmy instance.

I’d love to see smaller game devs have a federated presence with their content.

Right now, I only use Reddit to keep up with game devs who only post game content and updates on their own subreddit.

Microsoft PowerToys is a fantastic program if you like to tweak your experience with Windows.

It lets you do things like set up individual zones within your monitor that act like picture in picture or another monitor. It has a robust color picker, which helps greatly when it comes to photoshop and template creation. I also use the text extractor very often to extract text from pictures, which it copies to the clipboard.

The best, and technically the worst, is it lets you change settings that you can’t normally do in Windows.

While it could get someone YOLO adminning in trouble, thankfully it has a lot of warnings before you mess things up too badly.

Those are the features I use, but there are too many useful features to name in one go.

Here’s the link to get it in the Microsoft Store

WUB or Windows Update Blocker.

It’s one of the first things I put on a new after the initial Windows update.

It safely turns and completely turns off Windows updating and the services involved with updates.

It’s practically a necessity if you use a metered or paid internet connection, or connect your laptop to a cell phone for an internet connection via a hotspot.

Windows doesn’t listen to its own settings about metered connections and if it deems something worthy of killing your data plan for the month, it’ll do so without your knowledge.

The best part is that when you’re ready to download critical updates or something from the Windows store (Whatsapp, Minecraft, Power Tools, etc.) then it’s as simple as a button press to reactivate updates without restart.

Random computer quirks always fascinate me. The strangest one I had involved a computer that shouldn’t have existed.

One time in the early aughts I had a patchwork computer that I put together from the junk pile of a local computer store that a buddy of mine ran.

It was barely holding together in a rusty frame, with zip ties and wood glue.

Its modem was temperamental as hell. It would only stay online so long as it was pinging a website via command prompt. It was only some websites, too. Like I could ping Geocities, but not livejournel.

I remember many weekends doing Mephisto runs in Diablo II, praying that my command prompt doesn’t bug out anytime I’d get anything worthwhile.

This is the truth. I was being abused by a boss of mine, with him demanding to know the whole of my medical history. He also demanded doctor excuses go directly to him, and not HR as I was told,

Needless to say, HR shared that I was bitching about him and he messed up my desk, breaking an ornament and a knickknack that was precious to me at the time (I got it on honeymoon). I took photos, and HR even saw him near my desk at the time of all of that happened

It took a major civil suit to get the video, but after the judge saw it ‘my case was won’ according to the judge. It was so obvious of evidence of him breaking stuff, spitting on my chair, snapping my laptop.

I even got special consideration because my boss then gave me a laptop that was so old that I couldn’t load the required VPN software.

I’m glad I got out of a corporate run tech field. It’ll eat your soul without you noticing until it’s too late…

I pay for Google premium and I support a few patreons, yes.

That said, I still use ad block, sponsorship block, and privacy badger

Stuff like YouTube content should be free to those who can’t afford it. Plus, my privacy is my own.

Those are the two major issues here

You may not be going to the right areas of youtube.

I’m kept highly entertained with “True Crime” shows, audio books, manga & manhua recaps, and long form documentaries.

I’m always able to have something on my second monitor doing SOMETHING entertaining.

Unless it’s something that you are a super uber fan, avoid buying a game before it comes out.

It saves a lot of heartaches and headaches.

Plus, in today’s world… why pre order? It’s not like a game will run out of copies…

‘Based’ means that you are very proud of what you have done and what you are doing and that you don’t care what anyone else thinks.

It’s like if IDGAF (I don’t give a fuck) was an adjective.

I used to not like to learn these ‘new’ terms myself, but this one is an objectively positive to the human language.

I don’t see the point of denying the growth of a language in my lifetime just because I become older. I hated it when my parents did it, and they hated when their parents did it… so I’m breaking the cycle

I didn’t realize until my mid 20s that having a house without pictures and wall hanging is weird. It was also when I learned that if you don’t have enough lighting it makes a home feel like a mausoleum.

The answer as to what a person should put on their walls depends on how based a person is or how much they don’t care about what others think.

If you want to get non-traditional with it, hang up movie posters, collages, video game posters, etc. Whatever you like and like to look at.

If you go traditional and normal, then art is a fantastic idea. Go to your local thrift store and find old art that they have. Local estate sales are also good.

Personally, I love to commission a painting or two from the artist themselves. Etsy and fiverr painters love to make custom art of whatever you want if you have the money. You’re looking at spending anywhere from $10 to a few hundred depending on the size you want.

It’s always fun having a painting of your pet remade in the style of Edvard Munch

Breakups will always hurt. Sometimes you can never get over a relationship fully.

As couples become as one, separating is always a life-changing experience.

All you can do is keep on moving. So long as you are able to put one foot in front of the other, you can keep moving on in a healthy way.

I learned perl to make IRC bots and to customize bulletin boards in the late 90s, early aughts.

I owe a lot to that language as it impressed a woman with my skills in it. I got my first marriage and eldest son out of it.

I just hope that Larian releases a campaign maker so I can make campaigns on the engine for my friends.