I ended up getting fired for calling out all the sexism, racism, homophobia, favourtism and abusive managers. The then new covid policies ramped up everyone's negative traits and I couldn't ignore it any more.

I ended up speaking with the corporate HR about the situation and they made an honest effort to help me but I was fired before I got a chance to speak with a very high up person.

I got a lawyer involved and while not much difference was made after the settlement, I somehow forced the HR manager into early retirement. It amazes me considering my goal was only to get her into a work behavior training course. I never knew such pettiness could accomplish so much.

All my co-workers shat all over my efforts for the 10 months I was engaged with all of that at the workplace. Also received a fair amount of hate from my co-workers after I got fired too which was neat.

I don't believe I was advocating for everyone to grow a forest on their property.

Personally, I'd love nothing more to have a forest garden in my backyard since it's been brought up.

For those who are interested, here is a 20 minute mini-documentary about this individual that goes by the name of Mr. Swirl.

I also use task.org and have found a nice set of customization options that works for me.

Because I'm juggling different tasks with different priorities, I sort by immediacy and importance. Anything time sensitive has dates and alarms attached to it. Any tasks I wish to do currently or the next day is always moved to 'HighPriority' including any appointments.

Medium and low priority stuff are things that have distant due dates or no due dates.

I also use colours to visually show priorities I set for the day as well as adding comments to help add any extra context. Keeping titles simple is important for me to keep my data visually accessible.

Most important is that I keep a widget on my home screen so that I always see what my tasks. Any step between seeing my tasks and staying on top of my tasks is a chance for something to be forgotten. It took me nearly half a year to get into the habit of using this app to organize myself but has helped me a lot.

I also have a couple more lists for shopping and repeated reminders to help me stay on track too.

Hopefully this is a good example of how someone can use these tools for themselves.

I haven't listened to this artist (yet) but the article did resonate with me about feelings that have been brought to the forefront of my attention in the past few years. Particularly after the death of Queen Elizabeth. As people spoke out about what the Queen truly represented to them and their people, all the internalized and disconnected feelings I had been struggling to understand suddenly snapped together.

I am a Guyanese-Canadian. Both my parents came from Guyana and my sister and I were born in Canada. My father passed away before I could form any memories of him. My mom eventually met and married a Canadian with a Scottish background when I was about 8 years old. My first 8 years of school were in schools that were very mixed in a multicultural sense.

That shifted dramatically after I entered highschool where it was half white, half Indian/Pakistani. Where I once felt safe diluted in multiculturalism, I now was unconsciously forced to deal with what it meant to be a brown person in Canada.

My mom was quite young when she and the majority of her family moved to Canada and the United States. My mom had adopted the Canadian way of living more readily compared to her other family as a result. Which meant that I also grew up as a Canadian. She also did not want to return to Guyana after my sister and I were born due to the corruption taking place there. I do not have a sense of what it is to be Guyanese. By blood, I am Guyanese. By culture, I am Canadian and North American. By the end of highschool, I was more confused than ever before. And I only got more confused as time moved forward and I grew older.

The Queen's death brought a lot of discussion. For many people it was a sad time that saw a notable person with a long history come to an end. For others, it was the death of a person and history that represented colonialism. For me, it was that discussion of colonialism that became the final puzzle piece of understanding why I felt so isolated. Why a brown person who couldn't truly feel accepted by either white people or brown people.

If you are unaware of the country of Guyana, it is a small, English speaking country in the corner of South America. It is cornered by Venezuela and Brazil. Also in it's little corner is French Guyana and Suriname (or Dutch Guyana as I like to call it). The history of the Guyana colonies had a lot of back and forth between the British, the French and the Dutch before things settled. A lot of people who came to Guyana came as indentured servitude from India and other parts of the world. You can find black, brown and white Guyanese people.

Today, I don't really know where my true roots are but my best guess is that originally I am from India. Along the way, some relatives immigrated to Guyana to produce sugar. At some point in time, Canada offered immigration to Canada for Carribean Commonwealth countries and that is when my mom and her family made the move up north.

I had unknowingly been assimilated into whiteness. My histories and cultures slowly stripped away at each generation and I was oblivious to the effects of colonization on my personal life because of this.

Around the time of highschool and getting my first job, the question of who was and where I came from seemed to matter to a lot to people who weren't me. The question I hated more than anything was "Where are you from?"

Where am I from? That's easy. Canada. Afterall, I was born here right?

"No, where are you from?"

Canada.

"No, where are you really from?"

Canada. My sister and I were born here.

"Where are your parents from?"

Guyana...

"Oh, so you're Guyanese!"

But I was born in Canada..?

"But your background is Guyanese, so you're Guyanese!"

At this point, my mind is attempting to crawl into a hole. Winter snow, block me in, I'm done. But that's just my interaction with other Canadians.

Indian people would often come up to me and start speaking to me in another language. After a few confused looks and attempts to explain that I only speak English, they would simply turn and walk away. No attempts to speak to me in English. No care or bother for me after finding out I'm not one of them.

And then there are the Guyanese people. They love me when they hear that my background is Guyanese. They then start talking to me as if I had all the knowledge of Guyanese culture. Then they get mad at me for knowing nothing about Guyanese culture. Then they get really upset at me for never visiting Guyana. Then they feel it's their duty to force feed me Guyanese culture. Then they think something is wrong with me after I reject their culture they are forcing onto me.

These interactions are a pattern. Rarely do they deviate. It does absolutely no good for a person who just wants to feel like they belong somewhere and wants a sense of self. They would not simply accept what I said. In their eyes I am just too young and naive to know that I am actually Guyanese.

Today if you were to ask where I am from, my answer will be "I was born in Canada."

I'm not proud to be Canadian. Or Guyanese. Or Indian. I was simply born here on this land labeled as Canada.

It's taken me a long time to understand that I am who I am because of the experiences I've experienced. A country does not define me and holds very little value to me these days.

If I should be proud of anything, it's that I am who I am, and not what others say who I am.

Unfortunately, that's a road less traveled. I guess that's why I prefer to travel on that road with like minded people.

I've used linux sporadically throughout my life and only started using it daily in the last couple months. I've used ubuntu in the past but I can understand the reason to move away from commercial distributions. Since my knowledge of Linux is quite shallow, I have a ton of questions and a need to understand everything.

What is Debian and what makes it an appropriate choice for Linux Mint to switch over to this base?

Also, what values does the development of Debian have compared to Ubuntu?

I get the feeling that moving away from Ubuntu is a step in the direction of a more open source space away from corporate forced standards, is that accurate? If so, what development direction could this take for a project like Linux Mint?

I have this happen with my Beehaw account. Works fine with my lemmy.ca account. Probably just have to wait on the next Jerboa release for a bug fix.

I recently recieved a bit of offhand news that has made me a lot more relaxed about an important meeting I have at the end of September.

I was speaking with a person I used to work with about a trip he and his fiancé took recently when he caually mentioned out of nowhere that the HR manager at work retired at the end of July. That random little fact sent my mind into a whirlwind for a couple days.

Just over a year ago I had been terminated from my job as an apprentice at a place that builds automation assembly lines. That termination came after I had brought up concerns and frustrations with how the company had begun treating people after covid arrived. I also brought up concerns about workplace culture and how toxic it had become.

I had been terminated approximately 10 months after the monthly employee meeting where I first confronted the GM (General Manager) about how apprentices were being treated poorly and not learning the proper skills. This is important because once people start retiring, there is going to be a huge skill and knowledge gap.

After that monthly meeting, I had a meeting with the fairness committee followed by a meeting with the HR manager with the fairness committee member on "my side." That second meeting was basically me getting belittled and blamed for 3.5 hours.

Unhappy with the results and dealing with my declining mental health, I reached out to the corporate HR manager about the abusive management at my company and this manager made a huge effort to help me. She taught me all my rights as an employee, encouraged me to get help through the corporate employee hotline and when that failed, set up a meeting with me and her boss while beginning an investigation into the abusive environment at my company. Unfortunately before that meeting, my company terminated my employment.

I retained a lawyer and after about a year of some back and forth (things got delayed significantly because my lawyer got covid) I finally submitted my wrongful termination case against my company to the labour board. Up until this point I felt so uncertain and stressed about everything and was really doubting my decisions.

About a month after my submission to the labour board, my company replied back with 16 pages trying to have my case thrown out and attacking my character. They also responded through an outside law firm and not the corporate in-house lawyers. About 1.5 months after my submission, the HR manager retires. I found out she was scheduled to retire in 2024.

Suddenly my mediation meeting with the labour board and my company doesn't seem so intimidating. Corporate refused to legally support my company and the HR manager retires early and is now back home in Central America. A key figure in all of this who conveniently will not be able to attend the labour board meeting.

I have no idea if those two things are related to my case and I may never truly know but it sure is convinient for me. I did leave that company in good standing with corporate so I'm left to believe that corporate has been taking serious action with my company. Action that may have also included updating workflow, security and logistics (costing the GM and management huge money), and cracking down on workplace safety issues (costing the GM and management even more money).

After covid arrived, my dislike of corporations only grew but I think it's pretty humorous to watch corporate turn it's back on my company. It's beautiful in it's own bureaucratic-hellscape kind of way.

My goal at the labour board meeting is going to get my job back and hopefully getting a public apology at the monthly employee meeting while sending a problematic manager to a training course regarding abusive behaviour. After being forced to confront my own mortality through their abusive and negligent behaviour, money means nothing to me. No amount will bring back the dignity this place took from me and the others who work there. I'm hoping my actions are able to throw some power back into the hands of the employees and other workers there as well as bring more awareness to mental health issues.

And to think, I probably wouldn't have gone down this path if it weren't for the head fairness committee member telling me that I should just suck it up. That I should just wait for all these problematic people to retire. He told me I couldn't change anything. His attempt to de-escalate the situation by demotivating me may have backfired slightly.

I ran into an issue involving just this problem a few years ago. I met someone while I was living abroad. We fell in love but we both had to go back to our respective countries eventually. We tried a long distance relationship for a short whole but agreed it wasn't going to work out so we just remained good friends and spoke often to each other over video call for a number of years.

When we first met, I found it super easy to talk with her because I was able to read her emotions from her facial expressions. She had a very expressive face which made it easy for me to understand subtext with her compared to other people. When we started talking over video call, I was still able to read her face so the conversation quality didn't drop any noticeable amount.

About half way into 2020 she moved to another country and wanted to have voice calls as her living conditions changed. Between standard voice quality loss in modern technology, my brains voice audio processing issues (voices in noisy backgrounds are muffled or garbled but I can hear a coin drop in a noisy automated manufacturing plant) and the loss of using video chat felt like ~~I couldn't talk or understand her anymore.~~ I was using more mental energy to talk with her.

Without video, I could no longer read her face. I could no longer understand her. She did not want to express her feelings verbally to help me understand things which didn't help. It was a very confusing experience at the time because I didn't understand what was happening until I was able to piece it together at a later time.

Turns out I hate phone calls because I can't read a person's face to help build extra context about what a person is saying. I may not always get context right in face to face conversations but any little bit of information really helps. Facial expressions, body posture, tone and whatever else a person does while talking is all super useful information for me and a phone call strips all of that away.

Eye contact is pretty bad but I'm more self accepting of bad eye contact. The loss of all those visual cues due to a phone call is stressful for me.

The supervisor in question definitely trash talked all of his "subordinates" but I don't think it was particularly effective in this instance. He is past retirement age and his interpersonal skills are completely lacking which made him universally hated among workers and management. But he always said yes to management. So that makes him a useful idiot.

If I worked in the office, I could definitely see this tactic being more effective. It was very common to see trade supervisors battling it out with other trade supervisors. The workers were all united through misery.

The majority of the trades people I worked with were hyper focused on their masculinity by focusing their lives around marriage, children, cars, property and expensive things to express themselves. All those things require money. The people I worked with always needed money.

So when all the answers to your problems is more money, how do you understand and treat someone whose motivations are not driven by money? How do you react when someone challenges authority and is still not motivated by money? Even when I plainly tell them why I am acting the way I am, they truly have a difficult time understanding me because money is so important to them.

They also believe that change is impossible so I'm an idiot for trying. Personally, there's nothing more motivating to me than being told I can't do something.

I've always saw the bias against women on reddit until about a week ago when I got a chance to really understand that it's more like pure, unfiltered hate against women.

I rarely post to social media because it's a huge energy drain on me but I decided to make a post on a support subreddit regarding toxic masculinity. I talked about how I was a target for bullying and harassment for not being 'manly' and shared experiences of witnessing gross and manipulative behaviour against women and lgbt+ people.

I received a lot of positive feedback. Some men spoke up about seeing the same, unacceptable behaviour from their coworkers. Some women confirmed what I said was true and a few were happy just being validated.

My post had to be removed because the moderator of that subreddit had been receiving threats about my post. My post didn't violate any of the reddit or the subreddit rules. Some very angry individuals who couldn't read the nuance in my post had claimed it was hate speech.

The moderator contacted me and thanked me for talking about such topics. Ultimately she couldn't deal with the hate that was being directed at her, which I completely understand.

That whole incident really opened my eyes to just how much hate women get on that site. Leaving reddit for good got so much easier after that.

After playing Battlefield 3 and feeling an indescribable emptyness for AAA games, I turned to indie developers. The desire for more profits can really suck the uniqueness and character from a game when it's designed for accessibility to as many people as possible.

Bonus points if the game supports modding. It's a great way to extend the life of a game as well. Some of my first online gaming memories are from Quake and it's modding scene. Even Sven Co-op is still developing their mod for Half-Life to this very year.

Games like that seem to have a bit more passion behind it which gives it a bit more charm. It's been a bit sad watching old titles milked dry throughout the years in the name of the mighty dollar. Unfortunately the struggle now is finding those gems in a sea of mediocrity as gaming became more mainstream.