I was hiking in a wilderness area...a very remote trail without a lot of action, and at one point I heard voices...I swore I heard human voices.

It was up in the mountains, too, so there wasn't much to make noise like that.

Obviously, I know it's my brain hearing trees groaning in the wind and quickly shortcutting to, "must be a human voice!" But it was just eerie.

I'm definitely a sensitive man. Like most sensitive men, I definitely find it challenging in the "yeah, you gotta eat 50 lb of bacon, pump iron 7x a day, never smile, and always take on a challenge" world of masculinity. I mean, we've definitely come a long way over the last decade making emotions something men can accept, but we got a long way to go.

Most articles I read about sensitive men are mostly about hiding it, how we're not supposed, to, and then when we do we'll feel better, blah blah blah. But I'm already expressive. I find it challenging, from both men and women.

From men, I don't feel like a man (I don't mean in the sexual sense...just from a psychological sense). In men's groups I get so tired of talking about work and (maybe) hobbies I just wanna run out of the room screaming. It's hard to find any other men who are okay talking about their feelings. When I do (I'm not afraid to), I find no one is able to relate.

From women, I think they often want to see me as a stereotypical stoic man. So when I do express myself, I'm seen as "not manly," which can be a turnoff, whether for romance or friendship.

So how do other sensitive men cope with expressing their feelings?

...except that Sam & Frodo get all the way to Mount Doom and Frodo realizes he forgot the ring back at home in the Shire

From what I understand privacy.com does not have a method of ensuring your identity is separate from your card, but IronVest does. Been using IV for a while now, but earlier this year they put their masked cards under construction

Which is kind of a shame because I had online purchases in mind.

Is there any alternative people have found?

Thanks!

Question should be self-explanatory.

My battery is only 75% effective. I came to the shocking realization my System76 is OLD! I can't seem to find a battery for it. Would a later-model darter battery be compatible?

My dream is to own my own business (just kidding--own several businesses), but I'm currently experiencing financial hardship. After frantically looking for work for over a year with a network that let me down, I finally managed to find part-time work at a local nonprofit.

But I want to keep the foot on the gas (quite literally). Looking for a good business podcast I can listen to on my drive. I've listen to some in the past, but the quality of them has gone down. Oftentimes the guests are showboating, with like 30 seconds of helpful nuggets in the middle. Or I'll roll my eyes when I see the guest is some Dr. Oz-like green juice prophet.

Yes, I realize podcasts need to make money. I fully accept that if a podcast is free, ads are unavoidable. I simply skip past them.

Previous podcasts that have fallen out of favor with me: University of Adversity, School of Greatness, Achieving your Goals with Hal Elrod, Mel Robbins, Entrepreneurs on Fire, and How I Built It (where each episode just sounded like a 50-minute commercial for WordPress).

Looking for ones that focus on becoming rich, but also ones that talk about how to bolster a network and overcome hardship. Somewhere along there.

Any ideas?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13583666

The plot summary is as follows:

Secret Service agent Rebecca Carter's world is upended when her husband goes missing in 2002. Two years later, Rebecca and her team are protecting the President during a high-stakes trade deal in China. But their mission is cut short when an assassin appears out of nowhere, kills everyone, and disappears, leaving Rebecca as the lone survivor. In the year 31,462, Xel-Na, a shifter (an individual who can move through time and space at will), receives no word from Thes-Omatz, the deep space research vessel carrying his wife and daughter. Upon launching probes to investigate, he finds everyone either dead or missing. Suspecting a fellow shifter, Xel-Na embarks on a mission to confront the perpetrator. In his quest he soon comes across Rebecca. Together, they face insurmountable odds, all while grappling with the weight of their personal losses. But as they delve deeper into the heart of the conspiracy, they discover that the murderous shifter isn't just after Rebecca, he's after power. And no matter what Xel-Na and Rebecca do, this cunning adversary is always one step ahead of them.

I finished the first draft of the novel, but being out of work I'm not able to fund it myself. I was kinda like, well, nobody's giving me a call, might as well write it.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Do you like it? I have a thick skin, so even if it's crap, go ahead and let a rip.

And before you ask, no, it was not written by AI 😆 (though I did use AI to assist in editing).

If you'd like to fund publication, I would greatly appreciate it. Or if you like and and don't like to give strangers money online, I'd be forever grateful if you share the post on social media.

Before you start throwing 💩 , hear me out...

I'm a huge fan of the fediverse...it's returning to the original design of the Internet...where everyone can communicate freely and openly and corporations have a very difficult time pulling anything creepy that LinkedIn/Twitter (yes, I'll still call it Twitter)/Facebook does.

But I sense a huge frustration with businesses that want to network with others but feel their hands are tied by these walled gardens.

I figure, why not make the fediverse business friendly?

Right now most people on Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. seem to be more of the anarchist/weekend hacker types. So part of my concern with this is that it would taint the fediverse with a bunch of spam. But by the same token it would also help grow the job market and provide opportunities for people that they may not have had on LinkedIn. Of course, I'd stress for anyone on the site to operate in a community-first mindset.

So, some question...

1. Would this type of instance be met with disgust? I mean, obviously the great thing about the fediverse is that you can block servers you don't want on the network, but having the instance blocked would kind of defeat the purpose. 😅

2. If you're excited by the idea, what things would you like to see? In my own armchair brainstorming, I thought joint accounts would be a good idea, as well as analytics.

3. Suggestion for already-existing platform? Can't find a good one that would be ready-to-go to build off of. There's friendica, but I'm not much of a fan of PHP, and it seems to not have great adoption, either.

Title says it all. Does anyone have any bosses you worked for where you felt they were the epitome of epic leadership?

As a Christian most of the circles I'm around are pretty chill...no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

The root of the belief is that rock music uses drums, which are used by voodoo tribes in Africa to entrance people.

Along a different track of thinking, from where did rock music originate? Slaves. They created the guitar because slave-owners didn't allow them to make music with drums.

So then is "rock music is evil" sort of an echo of that attitude?

Yeah, I'm a programmer and I've got the itch to create one. DEAL with it! 😝

That said, open to suggestions...I realize that most dating apps have--shall we say--less than desirable people on it, but I'm concerned more about the way the platform operates.

For me, I think the dating app world is a hodgepodge of garbage. I've been on a lot of the common ones (and I'm willing to pay for one), But most of them are strictly an app--no web interface, and fully closed source and a privacy nightmare...or online but they block you if you even think about using a VPN (because obviously only criminals use VPNs).

So from a technical standpoint REST-based dating apps are best, because it can start on the web (and remain on the web), then a smartphone app could be built on top of it. Then again, my aim isn't to digitally violate my users, so I've probably lost that game. 🤣

So, what about you folks? What would your ideal dating app look like?