The feeling of isolation is something that I have experienced throughout life. I can only attribute it to the norm that men should not talk about their woes, lest they be seen as weak.

My upbringing was a bit different, as my brother and I never had male role models growing up and we were never encouraged to confirm to those norms.

For me personally, the feeling of isolation occured and eventually compounded after the birth of our son. I did not cope well with the lack of sleep and the immediate loss of personal space and time. I felt like my feelings and experiences could never compare to what my wife was going through, and I had no right to complain. This led me to nearly a decade of depression, to the detriment of my wife and son both.

What has helped me over time, is the acknowledgement that my feelings and experiences are valid, and I don’t need to compare them to others.

I love steamed clams!

I have over 1500 cumulative hours invested in No Man’s Sky and Minecraft respectively. I am a casual gamer. I started playing Minecraft in 2012 and NMS in 2017.

Never get into Modular Synthesizers.

I have been laid off from every job (5 in total) since the pandemic. We are a subhuman commodity. Companies that are hiring now are exploiting the market by offering lower salaries.

Meta and Amazon are in their hiring season and they’ll start their layoffs again next spring or summer. And somehow, everyone forgets this fucked up cycle keeps happening in perpetuum.

We need to stop being afraid of mentioning the U word. We need better protection and rights as employees.

Engineering is a skilled trade. We need our own union like every other skilled labor group.

Let us not forget Clinton’s cigar.

Have you tried VPN?

That’s by design. uBlock is blocking ad and spyware network requests. It’s common for sites to crash or error because of this. They’ll depend on a call to Google or Sentry or DataDog to succeed before continuing with their initialization. As a platform engineer for several web properties, I die a little inside every time I see this happen.

My work blocks all kinds random software, Firefox included. My workaround is using Brave browser and a service like NextDNS either as an app or as the DNS provider for my home network. It’s not perfect but it’s flexible enough.