I’ve tried for years to go to the gym regularly. I despise going to the gym. Putting on workout clothes, mindlessly trudging on a treadmill or whatnot before slogging through a bunch of machines then shower and going home. I loathe the idea of sacrificing 1+ hour of my precious free time just to feel miserable and accomplishing fuck all… Everyone claiming “just stick with it and you’ll start to enjoy it” lies. There’s no other way to say this. Lies. If you love it, good for you, but it definitely isn’t a universal thing.

Walks around town I do kinda enjoy but not enough to make me want to do it. But point me someplace new or nice to hike and I’m off to the races. I love being out in nature, taking in the sights and I don’t care whatsoever if I need to work for it.

The last few weeks I’ve also started to go swimming with my girlfriend. I’ve not been a fan of swimming as a child and basically never did it anymore since then. So I’m pathetic at it but to my huge surprise I do quite like it.

So my recommendation to you is: try loads of different things. Chances are you’ll like doing certain things way more than others. Ideally you’ll find something you love. Or at least you should be able to find something you don’t hate.

As a reader it’s vastly better than Jeroba but the notifications are hidden in a very awkward way and I haven’t seen access to the mod tools yet or figured out how to search for new communities.

To about 90% I have. Some communities still simply don’t exist or are essentially dead, so for the times where I need something really specific or just a general content fix I still wander over. But it’s been a fraction of the time I spent there previously.

Various degrees of niche-ness:

• modern boardgames. I’ve been fascinate by them since before I could write. I would draw my own roll and move boards and my mom would write down my instructions of what space would do what. From there it only grew and now I have more games I can play.
• rpgs. The most recent addition. I had always dismissed them as a potential hobby because it was advertised to me with videos of actors basically doing 99% improv and 1% gameplay. Turns out it doesn’t have to be like this.
• I also collect gemstones. Started as a kid when we came across an old quarz find on a hike. I was hooked by the shiny and have been collecting on and off ever since.

hurling

I rarely drink this much anymore…

Working on a one shot in Open Legends right now.

procrastination, video games and sex

We have more or less everything you’d want (pool, cinema, library, shopping, restaurants, a small theather, parties/events, decent public transportation, i think some sports too (i don’t care), some nice rewilded spots, walkable/cyclable dimensions) but it’s still pretty quiet.

“Numbers don’t lie” is true in the same sense as “guns don’t kill”…

Numbers don’t lie, but people lie using number all the time.

Same. When I first saw the movie it was just space action flick with blood and tits to me. I mean it definitely is that but also so much more…

You mean a shubmarine captain, right?

Relatively little going on so I’m still gonna go back to reddit occasionally because for example on the software development side I’ve found the reddit communities really useful and they simply don’t exist here.

Beyond this I’m determined to stick it out with lemmy. There are cute animal pics. There are memes and jokes. And a few other interests of mine are also reasonably active. It’s almost enough to satisfy my desires for “doomscrolling” without being a total time trap. So that’s nice.

Recently caught up with a former coworker. When we worked together the company was led by the founder who wanted to pursue other ideas and sold the company to some managers. The company had also grown a ton with a clever new product so the culture changes could easily be attributed to that.

But neither of the new owners were particularly high EQ people so to speak. I left because there was no room for growth and I had already put ten years into it. The coworker told me that they worked the remaining crew “to death” in order to inflate the value of the company to the maximum. Their best buddies got promoted and many others got eeked out. They cleaned out all the satellite offices by inviting them to an orientation meeting and sending in “hired guns” to just fire the entire management on the spot. A few years of this and they sold it to a big player and walked out without even saying goodbye to anyone.

I’ve been in the presence of lathes for a few months during my apprenticeship and I am entirely comfortable leaving it at that.

Leave a note: Your free trial of ‘Dubz the forklift driver’ has expired. Insert coin to continue

Oh boy. My current employer had an app built inhouse over 18 months I think. Nobody cared to be involved in the reviews providing nothing more than “good good” until the thing was done. Then suddenly everything was “ugly and not what they wanted”. An external company was hired who promised to rebuild it from scratch in 3 months. The internal devs were shuffled around, many quit. 2 years later the external company finally releases version 1 and celebrates themselves as absolute heroes. The were then set to work on taking over the current project the internal team had been working on… They again changed everything and made pretty much everyone on the team leave. That was another 2 years ago and they are getting close to release which no doubt will be celebrated again.

Luckily my work is a whole lot more specialized and the consultants we work with are actually competent and not greedy.

I believe that the lives we all lead are the only thing that truly matters. As such:

• we should be free to do what we want where it doesn’t negatively impact others
• we mustn’t be enslaved. Not literally and not by the limitations of our birthright, exploitative employment practices, arbitrarily enforced laws, forced childbirth, etc.
• we need to stand up for those who cannot: minorities, future generations, nature…
• we should follow the population’s consensus whereever possible
• states, corporations and any organisation in general should serve all the people and not just a select few.

I don’t care what label you slap on this.

Same here in Switzerland. After university I moved to my new job and for a good while I basically had no friends here. The vast majority of the people I hang out with are either family, are from a club I joined, from the club I started or came “attached” to someone from those categories.

I’m getting flashbacks to our family skiing vacations…

Parents: Kempeth, come spend time with the family.

Me: alright, we doing something? playing a game? watching tv?

Everyone: *opens a book and sits quietly in a corner*

Me: *goes to do something else*

Repeat from the top

Oof. I feel this one. I spent most of my childhood in - what we consider - a small city (10k people). My school class was like 20 kids with a few different ethnic backgrounds. Then we moved to a mountain town where the elevation (in meters) was a multiple of the population count, my class (including the neighboring villages) was 4 and there was exactly one family who didn’t look like they were at least 20 generations Swiss.

My dad is a very outgoing person, passionate volunteer firemen (most towns here have their fire department on a volunteer basis), contributed to the town council, was pretty religious (BIG up there, when there was a mass during the day then all the classes from school attended) - but they literally were just happy to take his work but not give anything back. The protestant priest from the neighboring village checked in on our family (protestant) and him (catholic) more often than our “our” priest. My mom befriended another “immigrant” family who had been there for 10-20 years and basically had NO connections in town. My father made 1 good friend and 1 good acquaintance at work.

For us kids it was a lot easier. The other kids were welcoming and friendly and even the adults were somewhat accomodating to us. But I was approaching adulthood and started to experience this myself. Town tradition was that for christmas the oldest kids in primary school would dress up as the 3 magi and lead the younger ones around town to sing christmas songs. And they would also participate in the christmas mass. They were in a pickle that year as from a class of 4, half were protestant heathens. I was still expected to stand in the front of the church as ornament but when the edible paper was distributed I was rudely shoved away.