Oh no, you!

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2024

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  • Depends on where. I never do where I live. Not just beggars, but most charities that engage me on the streets as well. I just need to get through my day, and the money I have is already reserved for something, and anyone who knows me knows that the least enticing way to get me to do anything is to show up out of the blue and ask for something, or ask for something when I’m just moving through to some destination or purpose.

    EDIT: My GF reminded me of a major exception to the above: There’s this magazine often sold by people down on their luck. I usually buy it, even if I don’t always read it, because the ones selling it are usually in the beginning stages of (hopefully) turning their life around. People fresh out of rehab, etc. They’re making an effort, and I’ll happily support them doing so.

    I do support some charities, but none of the ones I support bothered me with expectations of social etiquette when I’ve got shit to do and places to be. I’ve finally reached the point in my life where I don’t give two shits about coming off as rude or unfriendly.

    When I’m somewhere foreign I’m a bit more nice/giving, though. For starters, I don’t know much about local circumstances to know which hardships and lack of support anyone I meet face. Secondly, I am usually carrying some local jimjam currency I won’t need once I leave. A prime examle of this is when I saw a beggar in Mobile, AL last year, and I walked past someone with that “default” sign of being a veteran et.al. I was leaving the next day and didn’t really need whatever local currency I had in my pocket, so I gave him 40$. If he truly needed it (which I assume he did), then I hope it took a load off his shoulders for a while. If he didn’t then it wasn’t that big of a loss to me.









  • My dad lost his arm in the late 90s in a work related accident. He described it as painful but was surprised at how it didn’t feel worse right there and then. Probably due to shock.

    He was working alone in the middle of the night with his tractor when it happened, so he picked up what remains of his left arm he could find into a bucket and drove to the local nursery home because he knew there were people awake there 24/7. I guess that’s one definition of grace under pressure.

    Upon arrival he got the emergency help he needed there and then and a while later he told us that while waiting for the medevac helicopter to be summoned, he was annoyed again about the pain, thinking “Isn’t this where I’m supposed to faint?”.

    Later he had the occasional phantom pain. He didn’t struggle with it that much, and it usually passed after a few moments, but he told me that the worst parts was when he had an itch, or a finger was Ina weird position, he could do nothing about it since the limb simply wasn’t there anymore.

    His arm was severed by a tractor-operated snowblower right below the elbow.

    Fun fact: When the thaw of spring arrived he was happy to learn that someone had found his wristwatch in the retreating ice. Still working just fine. A little later someone found a wedding ring and correctly guessed that it belonged to the guy who got maimed there a few months earlier.







  • bash setup/config/PS1 is your friend here. I frequently find myself with a myriad of terminals between a bunch of usernames and servers at work, and setting up a proper prompt is key to help you keep track.

    My bashrc makes my prompt look like this:

    username@hostname:/absolute/path
    $ inputgoeshere

    … with color coding, of course. Yes, I use a multiline prompt. I somehow never saw that before using ParrotSec despite being a bash user for 25 years. I modified the ParrotSec default to suit my needs better, and I like it:

    • Obvious which user I am.
    • Obvious which host I’m on.
    • Obvious which path I’m in.
    • It’s easy to copy and paste a complete source/destination for pasting into, for example, an rsync comman

    I pasted my PS1 config here: https://pastebin.com/ZcYwabfB

    Stick that line near the bottom of your ~/.bashrc file if you want to try it out.