I know it's a grating saying, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It's true.
You don't have to succeed, you don't have to enjoy it, it won't be easy, but you do have to keep trying. Try to do whatever single action you can get yourself to do in the given moment that gets you closer to your goal. Then do it again. And again. Again. Etc etc etc. You'll at least be closer, and that's something.
Buddy, empathy doesn't mean "allow someone to continue with plainly disordered thinking because it's what they know". I'm not the person you're upset with, but the first step in getting over any problem is to force yourself to take that first step.
You're welcome to hate it, to not want to. It will absolutely be hard, often to the point of feeling actually impossible. It is going to suck, potentially forever.
But you still need to try if you want any hope of getting out of it. Progress is almost imperceptibly slow, but you will make progress if you keep trying.
Expecting the planets to align and for yourself to suddenly not have this battle to fight with yourself through no action of your own is like expecting to win the lottery when you haven't even bought a ticket.
This is the difference between telling someone what they want to hear so they don't feel worse in the moment, and pointing them towards a solution that might lead to betterness longer term.
I am formally diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and anxiety. I was informally diagnosed with an autism spectrum "condition" (not sure the term at the moment) by a retired spectrum diagnostician I lived with for a few months. Don't try to tell me I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about here. I've lived it.
Yep, this has absolutely been what I've had to do.
No single one of us is the protagonist in some story where we'll be the ones to tip the scales in what's wrong with the world. Do what you can, where you can, and focus on the world around you. What directly effects you and those you care about.
There is not enough energy in any single person to be able to care about everything, and you'll just burn yourself out for trying. This is true even in neurotypicals. It's why people aren't running around screaming constantly about the shit situations going on. It's why people don't seem to care, they can't possibly care about absolutely everything.
So you, like them, have to at least try to exert some control over what you spend your time and mental energy on. It's sure as fuck not easy and it doesn't help improve shit in the grander world, but spiraling isn't easy on you either and it also doesn't help. It just makes you feel worse about everything.
I know this sounds just like someone telling you to "just focus more", "just don't be sad", "just don't worry". But that's not it. It's not that simple. Never will be.
Even though it will likely be astronomically harder for you, you can exert some will and effort against the roiling storm of your own internal state. Anyone saying that it is literally impossible is letting the bad inside them win. Sometimes it is truly too much amd you have to, but you shouldn't live in that space forever, and you need to remind yourself that it isn't impossible whenever other people who are in a bad place are letting it win.
That internal bad is the bad you most need to try and fight, not the bad effecting the whole world.
The bad inside you may win. It may win most of the time, sometimes you might have to let it win because it's too mich at the moment, but you need to try to fight it as much as you are able to. You don't have to win, you just have to keep trying, as much and as often as you can.
Like if you haven't eaten in 8 hours, and there's food in your house, just eat some of it. Doesn't matter what it is, if it's appealing (is it ever when you feel like this?), if you don't think it will help (do you ever think it will before you eat when you feel like this?), if you don't want to (again, do you ever want to do anything when you're spiraling like this?) Go shove some fucking slop into your goblin mouth. Something's better than nothing. Hold onto whatever tiny bits of progress you can grasp by the edge of your fingertips and try to keep moving forward.
The secret is that you can do this. It sucks. It's not easy. It may take years and external help. But it is possible. And it has been the most worthwhile thing I've ever done in my life to just keep trying.
There must be a way to stop this feeling.
Been there. I'll keep it short. The way is to get professional help. Therapy and/or medication.
Since you have no job, first step is to get on whatever low/no income insurance is available to you locally.
Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don't truly believe that we'll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You're asking people who don't care, who don't use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.
The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.
As well as predatory/not, there's also a trend with attention grabbing/not.
There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.
Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.
I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn't have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).
Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there's no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.
More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and "de-escalate" the obnoxiousness.
... not really though.
The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own. They uncapped that restriction, openly, and they admitted to it.
This is an incredibly open and shut case.
It's stupid as hell, and that law needs to die, but there was no corporations doing people dirty here. This could have ended so, so much worse for IA.
I miss the "Tales from..." subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.
More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.
In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular "event" posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it's a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.
A big benefit of the fediverse is that it's still so small that it's pretty easy to just block the assholes without a constant sea of new ones coming in to take their place.
Whoever the asshole you're replying to is, I already have them blocked.
Did the lemmynsfw instance die or something?
I've tried to do this a few times, and unfortunately it feels like you really have to go all in on managing your own content library.
Like many, I had stopped pirating shit when netflix etc were "good".
None of the streaming services want you to use them outside of their official sites/apps, so you end up being limited to like 720p when running them through kodi etc.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Dying Light, and Hades. $10 a piece on Steam.
I put a ton of hours into Bloodstained RotN when it was on gamepass, but never beat it. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a game I end up replaying every few years, so I really enjoyed its spiritual succesor back then (around when it first released), and they've only added more content (three new playable characters, a few game modes) to it over time.
For Dying Light, I love the Dead Rising series, but the moment to moment moving around is nothing to write home about. Dying Light has a focus on movement, and got a lot of good reviews, so I figured I'd give it a try.
For Hades, I've always loved Supergiant Games since their first game, Bastion, and I never picked up Hades because it was never priced low enough when I had money to burn. Now that Hades 2 is in early access, I watched some gameplay of that and the first shot up on my list to buy. I've been craving an isometric real time combat game too.