(Advice at the bottom.)

I’m so sorry that you’ve lost your friend. When our baby girl (cat) passed away, we sobbed and sobbed. Losing a pet is sometimes harder than a family member because the pet is there EVERY MOMENT. Literally everything reminds you of them and how much you miss them.

But hang in there. The final form of “grief” is “appreciation” and having a friend that you feel that kind of appreciation towards is one of the deep joys of life.

We lost our girl in March and only just last week I saw a picture of her and shed a quiet tear thinking of her (this was after a couple of months of feeling really great and having “moved on”), but I was thankful that I could cry and knew that she still mattered to me. It’s hard, but also deeply beautiful to love so much.

Now for some advice: when we lost our girl, doing a “ritual” to honor her was really important for me. In the days after her passing, I stayed up late into the night going through every picture my SO and I had of her and found the ones I felt like captured our pet the most. Once I had those all together, I went online and made a picture book from Google Photos and ordered a printed copy to keep on the bookshelf.

The hours and hours of gathering photos really helped me to process the grief. Then, about a week after I ordered the book, it arrived in the post and I looked through it and cried some more.

Afterwards, I really felt like I had honored her memory and had cried about as much as I needed to.

Wishing you well on your journey, and thank you for making the hard choice to shorten her suffering as much as you could — that’s the burden that pet parents carry for our pets.

Blessings!

Man, I don’t know why, but I remember the animations from this game. I think maybe my dad had an old demo of it?

This article sounds a bit like a press release, but the documentation for the tool itself looks good.

“Twenty” seems a little basic so far, but “Salesforce” is such a far-reaching platform it would be hard to compete across the whole landscape. Salesforce’s CRM functionality is a lot easier to copy tho.

I think the more valuable features of a platform like Salesforce are the WYSIWYG automation builder and the fact that it’s running on someone else’s processor (cloud-based). Excel only has VBA, Macros, or writing out functions for building automation and then slows your computer down to a crawl to execute them.

Of course I know him: he’s me!

Check out “The Storyteller” on Amazon Prime for some well-told German folk tales.

Nicely done.

Giftcard to good favorite shop is a gimme.

Apart from that… get him a hammock! If he’s a little extreme kiddo, he’ll probably love hanging it up between trees and climbing into it.

You talking about shooting a gun up your own butt?

LOL! They voted for Jill Stein!

Audiobooks, baby. 1.75x speed (1.25x speed if there’s a heavy accent involved or it’s information dense).

I try to never do chores without an earbud in and a book or podcast going. (Makes dishes so much more enjoyable.)

Edit: spy books by John Le Carre really revived my love for books in older age.

This is a great commentary to me. I think it shows just how much of an appetite we currently have for a curated space. It’s almost like Mastodon is a service that’s about 15 years too late.

I remember going around to older forums and sites looking for specific content when I wanted it, and I wasn’t always guaranteed to find something I liked, but I would often see something interesting.

Now, though, I really want anywhere I go to knock me off my feet with good content because that’s what I’m conditioned to. Isn’t that what makes me an addict, though? I’m wondering if that chance of dissatisfaction isn’t a virtue to ensure no one platform takes control of all my attention.

My interactions on Mastodon are far fewer than on Lemmy, though.

IMO, Lemmy is like a CoOp video game where you’re supposed to interact together, and Mastodon is like watching someone else play a solo video game.

Both can be good, but they serve different purposes to me.

My sister once put some dog doo in a paper towel tube and wrapped it as a present.

But somehow I don’t think that the kind of prank you’re looking for.

A lot of practical steps, which is nice to see in an article like this.

Oh, me too. I hadn’t thought of that, but that would be terrible if it happened

I’m actually a bit surprised… my stock is pretty down from selling you so much over the past weeks.

It doesn’t matter, though; I have enough for the festival and I’m planning to rake in the big bucks like I usually do.

I think that’s a good sign tbh

You sound well adjusted.

I do one to probe one point, though… Coukd your motives for living this way be pride? A feeling that you being able to live up to your own (self-described as “high”) moral standards is something that makes you better than others?

The reason I ask: it’s not a bad thing to feel a sense of pride for having control over yourself, but it can be a weakness to obtaining true happiness because it also depends on the performance of other people. (If someone else exhibits more self-mastery than you, would that make you feel less happy about your own performance?)

If pride isn’t a factor, it sounds like you’re in a good spot.

Fucking awesome, it is. When I travel, I take 1 laptop power cord. Charges my phone, laptop, Switch, and backup battery. (The backup battery’s output ports are USB-A, but it’s got a lil converter cable that stays in the lil bag that the backup battery is stored in.)