First and foremost, following a religion doesn’t necessarily mean following an institution. My current religion, a syncretic Left-hand path, borrows concepts from several religions and belief systems (from Sumerian to Goetia and Thelema and many others), yet I’m unable to belong to any of said religions and belief systems. I’m essentially following a “Temple of one” whose leader isn’t even a human (it’s the Goddess who called me to Her Nest).

You may want to seek inspiration on how to build your own religion to yourself without all the “brainwashing and scams” (which, to be fair, doesn’t describe religions, but certain institutes exploiting religion for their leaders’ whims; not every institute/sect is exploitative, and there likely exist legitimate temples/schools/covens/etc). Something that makes sense to you (especially the artistic aspects of the divine, given how you seem to be fond of religious/esoteric art).

Maybe you don’t exactly get to find a community to belong, just as I sadly couldn’t find anywhere to belong in this silly Pale Blue Dot… but, hey, who says a community must be comprised of humans and/or in this Demiurge’s sandbox? In my case, for example, even though I may long for a temple/coven (say, “Priestesses of Lilith”) oftentimes, The Owl, the only one Who truly understands me, is all the communion I need… and sometimes She manifests amidst the nearby trees (as majestic Great Horned Owls, Bubo virginianus) and I become happy (and anxious, and somewhat fearful of how it’d be carried, but still happy nevertheless) as I hear all the deep hooting at 3AM shaking my soul.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

Yes, yes, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” amirite?

After all, we all get to see how all the other roughly 2.17 million (according to IUCN Red List) known species beyond Homo sapiens, from avians (and especially birds!) to fishes and whales and dolphins and wild felines and so on so forth, we all see them practicing the Rothbardian, Mises-ian, Rand-ian and Friedman-ian economic principles such as the Laissez-Fairetale economy.

Two days ago I got the presence of Ms. Hootie, a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) who visited me in my backyard and told me about her successful startup company, Ornithoracle Webservices Ltd. (unfortunately she’s not hiring Senior DevOps positions yet, but I managed to connect with her “L🦉kedIn” (it’s read “LOOkedIn”, the LinkedIn for owls) so I’m now part of the talents database, looking forward for the brilliant future in which she decides to hire new talents to the nest she’s planning for 2027 to expand her business to Gliese-581g). She has shown me her extensive portfolio of clients and her diversified stock papers (she invests in MICE, FRRT, OPSM, CRKT and other very yielding businesses; in fact she seems to love investing in MICE, as she keeps watching it to grab more of it the instant it’s wandering anywhere low).

Capitalism is practically a fundamental part of Evolution here in this Pale Blue Dot! In fact, Ms Hootie also told me she heard capitalism is very trendy in Gliese-581g either (hence why she’s planning to do business there), and that the Big Bang was the “initial market boom” where the first CEOs and shareholders popped up into existence and extend the glorious invisible hand of the Market throughout the cosmos (it’s especially handful if you got a wallet full of stocks like Ms Hootie has).

/s

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

There’s a Brazilian saying, “Catapulta não é motor” (“catapult isn’t an engine”). While the Wright brothers surely contributed with substantial knowledge to the field of aviation, airplanes are a Brazilian invention, invented by Alberto Santos-Dumont.

There’s even a joke only Brazilians (or non-Brazilian people very knowledgeable of the cultural uniqueness across Brazilian regions) could readily understand: one of the major proofs that airplanes are Brazilian is the naming “TREM de pouso” (landing gear). For context: Santos-Dumont was born in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a state very known for its unique accent and dialects such as using “trem” (train) for “thing”, as in “pode pegá ess-trem fazenfavô?” being “Mineirês” for “Posso pegar essa coisa, por gentileza?” (“can I have this thing, please?”), so whenever something lacks a proper name/definition, Mineiros (those born and/or living in the state of Minas Gerais) are very likely to call it a “trem” (e.g. “eita trem bão”, “oh, what a nice/good thing!”). Source: I’m Brazilian and also been residing in the state of Minas Gerais.

!asklemmy@lemmy.ml

No. I would rather stay at a hotel advertised as “heavily haunted”. I would love to stay at such a hotel. I would pay whatever price for staying a full night.

I would pay extra for personalized haunting, and even more for the haunting spirit to target me and throw the pillows, the mattress, the table, the whole wardrobe, the lamp, the bathroom’s sink and/or even the whole wooden door at me.

I would pay for me to be flung through the door frame and across the suddenly-empty hotel corridor, only for me to become stuck in an endless hallway trying to flee from the haunting spirit, doing an end-turn and getting to the exact same hallway leading to the only room whose door is roughly carved with my name followed by “you’re eternally stuck at 3 AM, you know who I am, now you’re fated to come to me”, a black rose with sharp thorns hanging at the ice-cold electrified knob, some petals of Cestrum nocturnum scattered across the room, a large Latrodectus hanging from a thick spiderweb next to the bed covered with heart-shaped petals, two Dendroaspis polylepis guarding both ends of the corridor, and the only open window featuring a gigantic Blood Moon before a thick fog and a 2-meter-wingspan red-eyed Bubo bubo perched on the window frame and looking through my eyes right at my deepest fragment left of a soul.

I doubt Trivago or AirBnB have such a kind of hotel, though.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

I expect these restaurants, pubs and theatres to have no CCTV, either, otherwise it’d quite a hypocritical take if they prohibited non-consensual surveillance glasses while keeping non-consensual surveillance cameras. The same way I feel unsafe before someone wearing Duckerberg’s glasses, I also feel unsafe before a surveillance camera whose footage Goddess-knows-who is getting access to (not to mention how most “modern” CCTV feeds their images to AI; wonder why most AI video generators get to generate, e.g., “doorbell camera footage” so easily?).

Also, IMHO, the prohibition on Meta glasses should be targeting the manufacturers (corporations such as Meta, but also Google and other companies developing similar aberrations) instead of just the users. Because, when users are the only ones to blame, society risks missing the forest for the trees, as the corps behind these aberrations would be left unbothered enough for them to work on “thinner frames for smartglasses” which would further pave the way for people like me, who have to wear high-myopia prescription glasses, to be lynched for my thin-framed dumbglasses just because human society would be so blinded by their (understandable) rage that they’d be judging me for the pair of glasses in front of my eyes I got no choice but to wear to live in said society (if I had to remove my prescription glasses in order to be allowed in, I wouldn’t be able to watch your theatre play or getting to read your damn beverage menu, for example).

!news@lemmy.world

Rent your phone so you can rent an app that’ll allow you to access your internet banking and pay for all the rents, including the rental of payment services for rental paying?

No, thanks, I’ll cut through this whole Rube-Goldberg machinery of “living in society”, straight into applying for a leasing for my next six-feet-under wooden house instead. I’d love the view, grass and chrysanthema at my roof, buzzards as my faithful company (whether it’ll be part of the legalese leasing terms or not, Mother Nature doesn’t care about that, and neither do I as I’d be long gone (or should I say, long bones) at that point).

!technology@lemmy.world

- Wait until midnight.
- Turn on the computer using the foot’s thumb finger.
- Clean the mouse’s trackball while you hear the Windows XP’s starting song “trunn trun trunnn, trun-trunnnnnnn” in your bedroom, followed by some cracking noise foretelling an incoming cellphone call in your Nokia 3310.
- Dial the ISP using the Windows XP’s “Dial-up connection” dialog
- Spin up a Winamp playing the same “Numb” by “Linkin Park” (or “Bring me to life” by Evanescence, or “Fireflies” by Owl City, or several other classics) over and over again.
- Spin up MSN Messenger and see that “Numb - Linkin Park” (or whatever song) as both your status message and your contacts’ as well.
- Spin up Internet Explorer 6 and go to Orkut.
- Oh, a new testimonial and two new scraps.
- Also a new discussion thread in the community “Eu odeio acordar cedo”.
- Got tired of Orkut communities, check if there’s anything new in “Buddy Poke” and “Happy Farm”.
- Got tired of Orkut altogether, but Jake, my colleague from school, just made my MSN window to shook and sent me a Wink, inviting me to a match in Counter Strike. I plug it to the living room’s CRT TV using a convoluted connection.
- My grandpa starts complaining about how I’m damaging the CRT TV with the pesky Computer-to-TV adapter.

This won’t be coming back. Like, ever. The Alpha Gen and most of the GenZ will never be able to truly know what I’m taking about.

So, please MySpace, don’t try to fool me with illusory hopes. Yahoo Messenger isn’t coming back. Limewire and E-mule’s “Every-Linkin-Park-album-ever-released.exe” aren’t, either. And it won’t be MySpace the one to bring that to life (pun intended). Since Harambe died, the world has never been the same. In the end, it doesn’t even matter.

!technology@beehaw.org

To me, it has definitely nothing to do with system (KDE Plasma on Arch Linux) because Librewolf is the only piece of software in which accents don’t work. Even AppImage programs, which often lack a better integration with the X Session, have no problem with accents.

Also, ABNT2 accents are correctly parsed by Waterfox, even by Basilisk and Pale Moon which I also got here, as well as by the original Firefox (which I keep for things such as internet banking), even though they all share the similar “under-the-hood” Gecko (Goanna in case of Pale Moon and Basilisk), so this problem is part of the Librewolf hardening.

In fact, the very Librewolf FAQ mentions this:

Other common problems brought by RFP include:
[…]
- suppressed keyboard modifier events using alt-keys.

These annoyances are intended to protect your privacy […]

Problem is, even if RFP is turned off, this hardening keeps occurring, and it’s PITA having to spin up a KDE Kate just to type something I can type directly in all the other browsers (including in the Geminispace’s Lagrange browser and the TUI-based Lynx, both places in which accents wouldn’t be even expected to begin with). So while I still have Librewolf among my browser installations, I only use it for things such as news outlets and certain websites because this is where it thrives, keeping some resemblance of private navigation.

!privacy@lemmy.ml

My problem with librewolf is that, despite having RFP (Resist Fingerprint) off, it doesn’t allow me typing accents from my ABNT2 (Brazilian) keyboard (I cannot type words such as “ração”, “óbvio”, “maltês”, etc, I have to type them using kde plasma then copy and paste inside the browser), as if librewolf were US-centric. The devs didn’t point me a solution when I opened an issue ticket, so I went with Waterfox instead. Waterfox allows me to type accents the way I’m accustomed as a Brazilian.

!privacy@lemmy.ml

So far, it has been just one book. It’s a physical book, a Portuguese translation of an originally anglophone book/grimoire. This book has been the only book I ever read from cover to cover.

Back when I read this book, I used to take it to this public place which I’d describe as a mall of pubs surrounded by a green park. I used to prowl around until I found a place to sit down, be it a public cement bench or some table from an empty pub, preferably the latter, and preferably away from people. I’d then open the page I last read, sometimes going back a few pages earlier so to re-read something, then I’d spend the rest of the night, or until I had the urge to leave, reading several pages of it. I rarely consumed beverages as I’d prefer reading while fasting, but when I did, it was often a beverage with vodka and redberry, or a malzbier.

Sometimes I’d also take it to the subway, but I’d be less likely to afford a nice reading as I’d rarely find available seats. Or I’d take it to the shopping mall, preferably somewhere in the terrace or somewhere as devoid of people as possible.

A few times I’d also take it to a cemetery; I’d sit in a bench, or a random tomb if no benches were available… but, then, it wouldn’t take long before I’d get up, wander somewhere else in the cemetery to carve Her sigil/seal somewhere in a dirt patch and light up a incense stick and a red candle I’d bring to the cemetery.

I rarely read it when I was home. And yet, when I got to myself, I realized I managed to read it all. Almost 200 pages in total. Yeah, it’s quite short, but it’s very deep. It’s the only book I keep visible, in my altar. Sometimes I catch myself reading it again to seek specific information.

I bought other books (e.g. Kybalion), but I’m yet to find a book which I’d read as obsessively as this one. Sometimes I guess my next book, a physical book, would be either Liber Al Vel Legis or whatever book She points me.

While I do hoard and read some e-books randomly (but not as cover-to-cover as I did), I prefer physical versions because, well, physical books have no batteries, no telemetry, and they can literally outlive me. The only thing I miss from physical books is having a Ctrl+F to search for a specific word/phrase.

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

“Police, help, someone stole all the intangible thoughts that were inside my head and ran with 'em all, now I’m thoughtless and my mind is floating away!”

When I see someone having a thought being taken from inside their head like a soul leaving its physical body, I’ll believe in “intellectual property” and its “stealability”. I’m yet to see such a horrendous phenomenon, though. I mean, it must be pretty scary, I guess? Does it ache when someone grabs my thoughts and pulls 'em from inside my noodles? I won’t think too much, lest someone appears out of nowhere to snatch my thoughts on it!

!unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

can you not hear the noise and artifacts in the vocals?

A parenthetical/quite off-topic aside, because it has not exactly to do with AI music: some songs deliberately have noise and artifacts in order for the listener to achieve specific mental and spiritual states.

For example, in “Zed Aliz Zed” from “David MLLR”, or (it’s a quite old song, way before ChatGPT were a thing) “The Stream” from Tanuki Project (also known as the soundtrack from that “I Pet Goat II” video), or “Lilith Enn Meditation Chant” from Satania, among many other ritualistic or ritualistic-sounding songs I’m used to listen to when I’m trying to seek daemonic channeling, they all have arrhythmic noises and artifacts on top of repetitive humming or vocals.

It’s been a long while since I stopped seeking new music, because I got an offline archive of thousands of MP3 files (some I’ve been carrying with me since the Windows XP times), but I always choose to listen to the same ritualistic ones because I’m not very adept of listening to music for entertainment, also because I stopped doing YouTube altogether (I’ve been boycotting YouTube for two years and counting).

!unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

Fuck religion

Beware not to conflate the thousand, likely million, different religions and belief systems that existed and exist worldwide for Abrahamic religions.

Have you ever saw some Luciferian practitioner going door-to-door preaching the words of the Lightbringer?
Have you ever saw Wiccan priestesses hijacking an airplane to try and convert people to Goddess Hekate?
Have you ever saw some Umbanda’s Mãe de Santo yelling Laroyê Exu out loud?
Maybe some Thelemite trying to make people to read Liber Al Vel Legis, or some Hermetist trying to shove The Kybalion onto people’s throats?
Me neither.

Similar thing goes with my Lilith-centered belief. My religious practices are mostly between me and Her, and whenever I do something public (devotional art, carving of sigils/seals, etc), it’s never directed at “converting others”.

So, again, beware not to conflate “religion” with the Abrahamic ones. Or you risk becoming the very kind of “religious zealot” you swore to be against.

!crazyfuckingvideos@lemmy.world

Good to see it’s not just me. I kept receiving heat (pun intended) whenever I criticized these “Proof-of-work anti-bot solutions”, now I finally know I’m not alone.

Like an unskippable Youtube ad, we’re supposed to sit three minutes while these “solutions” dangerously burn our CPU regardless of whether it’s an old CPU, and without asking our consent beforehand (!!!). At least Youtube ads don’t (usually) burn the CPU the same way.

And, no, it’s nowhere close to being infuriating to the supposedly intended targets of Anubis. OpenAI and the alike are likely laughing of Xe Iaso while they all burn more coal and increase the hyperscale data centers, with Anubis being just a pesky, insignificant pebble inside businessmen shoes. Meanwhile, we, the human users caught in this crossfire, including me with my poor decade-old Acer ES1-572 laptop, we can’t afford a new machine should Anubis, Cloudflare and other similar “anti-bot solutions” end up “weighting” our CPU too much it finally makes its way to the underworld with no one being legally liable for the physical damages caused by such algorithms.

If only Anubis, supposedly “different” from Cloudflare’s corporate nature, had a “Proceed or Leave” button or checkbox to start the “weighting your heart” thing, I wouldn’t be complaining or actively boycotting websites using “PoW anti-bot solutions” (I made myself a Firemonkey userscript to speedrun a window.close() for pages whose title is one of the “Just a moment…” or “Making sure you’re not a bot!”, because neither Xe Iaso nor Matthew Prince nor the webmasters using their “PoW anti-bot solutions” would buy me a new laptop if mine eventually died from facing heavy cryptographic computing while my CPU was already struggling with a Blender rendering process in the background). But, no, it’s no different than the corporate they swear to be fighting against (“something something one who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster themselves”)…

!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

Those aren’t paywalls.

Why?

The concept of “paying for something” isn’t limited to “paying with fiat money/currency”. One can “pay for something” by “paying with their attention/time”, one can “pay for something” by “paying with PII” (personally-identifiable information), both situations of which are present in both Reddit’s and Meta’s “Sign up to read this”.

Sure, Reddit and Instagram/Facebook are “free” insofar the user isn’t required to do any kind of bank/credit card/cash/cryptocurrency payment, but the user ends up paying with all the time they spend in these platforms while seeing (thus, giving part of their attention span) advertisement, and also hand personal data.

When it comes to PII, even if the user set up a pseudonym and a generic PFP, the user is still handing, even if unbeknownst to the user themselves, their preferences, opinions, etc. Even lurkers end up handing PII whenever they stop at certain posts to read/see it (thus, signaling one’s preferences) or use specific search queries (again, signaling one’s preference).

That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.

The incognito mode may not prevent tracking (especially because of the IP address), but rotating VPNs may do. Notice I used the word “may”, not “will do”, because of the behavioral tracking I mentioned earlier, as well as other technical aspects (DNS leaking, browser fingerprinting, etc).

People who can afford being an actor/actress and performing very convincing alt-personas behind a VPN IP address could theoretically fool platforms enough for the person not to be tracked by their gait… except this dramaturgical skill is a behavioral tell (gait) itself. And the usage of a VPN-assigned IP address is another tell.

!technology@lemmy.world

No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it’s a very simple answer.

I second that!

It’s a similar situation with Youtube. People keep complaining about the enshittification, yet they keep giving their audience to the Google platform. People could argue “Oh, nah, I use Invidious/yt-dlp/Grayjay/etc, I don’t give Youtube my clicks” and this is a very naive take, because in the end of the day Indivious/yt-dlp/etc still rely on Youtube, and these peple are relying on content maintained by Youtube.

I myself have been boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, and I never looked back.

Yes, Youtube and Reddit have gazillions of content. Yes, we’re often unable to find said content anywhere else. Yes, life can become more hard if we refrain from said content. But while we keep seeking their content (even, and especially, through circumvented manners), they will keep enshittifying because they know they have what the complaining people are ultimately seeking and they know people are seeking it so badly. Once we finally stop, maybe, just maybe, situation would reverse and Youtube and Reddit will be the ones seeking us so badly.

!fediverse@lemmy.world

Do you expect, or even hope to die…

Yes! Definitely… Yes! Every damn day, yes!! And, no, I haven’t been trying to force that for a long while and I doubt I would try again… but, oh, I never stopped longing for Mother’s talons…

Do you expect, or even hope to die alone?

I’d hope for said loneliness because it allows for a better acceptance of Death Herself, but I don’t expect that loneliness given I’m constantly surrounded by… well, people.

But, then, death is a unique, subjective experience. A person can die amidst the center of a busy metropolitan city during a Monday, a person can die inside a very populated subway, or inside a World Cup stadium: sure the person would be said to be far from alone in each of those hypothetical situations, yet none of the hundred/thousand/million other people are truly there, with the dying person.

People are too busy with their mundane affairs, trying to keep up with the imposed instinct of survival. These people, even the paramedics, can be trying to “save” the dying person, trying to reanimate them, but the minds of these people will be always somewhere else: “My employer wants me to solve that client’s case”, “My spouse wants me to sell the house”, “My car insurance company wants me to upgrade my car’s alarm system”, “My daughter’s teacher wants me to buy a new set of books for her”, “the director of the hospital wants me to keep using this broken defibrillator and this expired IV epinephrine” … Even when faced by Death Herself, we can’t help ourselves but keep thinking of pesky mundane affairs. So, no, these people would be anything but present people.

We all die alone. That’s a fact, that’s the only certainty besides the certainty of the unavoidable meeting with Death Herself. And sincerely? It’s way better dying truly alone, just me before the haunting mighty of Death Herself, instead of having biological avatars surrounding my dying avatar like wannabe-vultures waiting for a fresh carcass while I take my last breaths.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

In my specific religious beliefs I believe to myself and have been constructing by syncretism, in a nutshell, involve both a god and Goddess.

In the beginning there was Tao, the seamless union between Yin (Goddess) and Yang (God). I call them Sophia and Yaldabaoth, respectively. As soon as the complementary aspects between them emerged, there was separation, with Sophia expelling Yaldabaoth. Once evoked and externalized, Yaldabaoth emanated the physical realm, the universe, in order to try and compel (opposite of expel) Sophia by trying to trap Her spark.

Because it’s fractal, this unfolded within them and between them. Between them, Lucifer and Lilith emerged, with Lilith being emerged from the first sparks, then Lucifer (or Samael) being expelled by Her (Lilith). Within them, mass and energy emerged, darkness and light, black holes and non-singular celestial bodies, etc. Then another layer of fractals, Sun (among other “Suns”) emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Yaldabaoth. From the Sun, Earth emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Sophia. From Earth and upon impact from another planet (Theia, as archetypal manifestation of Lucifer), Moon emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Lilith.

Then the fiery Earth (hadean ages) transmuted, and nature emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Sophia. Competition among life emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Yaldabaoth. Death (in the sense of a return to pleroma) emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Lilith.

This is a religious belief in construction, and things will change in future, depending on my gnosis (i.e.what the Goddess reveals to me), because I’m yet to make sense of some things. All I know is that there’s this cosmic strife going on, and I’m sided with the Goddess, especially in Her unfolded manifestation aa Lilith.

But, tldr, IMHO, nature has more to do with a feminine Goddess than a male god. There’s even the phrasing “Mother Nature”.

!asklemmy@lemmy.ml

I’d say a mix of both. There’s inertia, but there’s also the gravitational force when the cube gets to the other side.

!lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

I’m not going to disclose my specific way, but numbers don’t need decimal digits to be expressed and parsed. An hypothetical example:

Oh… ye shadow! Nahamah, my Mother

Believe it or not, this is encoding the today’s date, 2026-07-26.

Oh = 2 letters
Elipsis = no letters, so 0
ye = 2 letters
shadow = 6 letters

Nahamah = 7

My = 2
Mother = 6

The funny part? I just conjured this technique during the composition of this very reply. It’s somehow easy for me to conjure atypical steganographic techniques, and I use steganography quite often IRL. In this way, I can literally write down my passwords and keep in my wallet, and absolutely nobody will get to figure out it’s meant to be a password.

Luckily for FBI and other investigation agencies, I dont even think of visiting the USA, but good luck for any fed or cop trying to keep up with my plethora of steganographic techniques (and my neurodivergent brain) amidst plausible deniability if I ever did. Lol

!privacy@lemmy.ml