I have hobbies that are considered masculine and more popular amongst folks who lean to the right politically. It makes it hard to form any friends group. Hobbies are firearms, amateur radio, and cars.

Psych. A cliche “murder mystery of the week” show has no business being as wholesome, kind, friendly, and upbeat as Psych. I realized a few years ago when I was going through some personal issues and had started rewatching Psych that it was helping me deal with the stress, and it wasn’t the first time I’ve done that with the show.

Maybe a year ago I went to Psych’s first convention near Chicago. It was both surprising and reassuring to hear other fans go up to ask the actors questions and they all shared similar stories to me. People have used to show to help them briefly escape from challenging situations from dealing with the death of loved ones all the way to someone using it as background TV while trying to study in medical school.

One of the few things I miss from Reddit is the active Psych subreddit over there.

Also, the 80’s references are fantastic.

I avoid getting political news from social media, including Lemmy. I don’t subscribe to any political communities. Once in a while I’ll scroll through all active posts to find new communities. But when I do that I know I’m going to run into political stuff and skip over it.

While most of the political posts on both Reddit and Lemmy lean the same way politically as I do, they can often be sensationalized so I have a general distrust of those stories. If something does happen to grab my attention I try to look it up from a reputable news source.

I use Apple News to track current events. I even pay out money for their “News+”. It aggregates many news sources. I can block sources I don’t want to see, and more importantly I can add a list of favorites news sources for quick viewing and to encourage those sources to take priority in my feed. As for my sources I try to pick the most boring and bland news organizations available. Think PBS, NPR, Reuters, etc.

Nothings perfect but this has been working for me for over a year now. I feel reasonably well informed without a lot of the drama.

Apple News isn’t perfect. I still get pushed a lot of celebrity gossip news no matter how many times I click “suggest less”.

Yeah! I’ve been doing the same. I actually find myself thinking “I haven’t participated in a conversation in over a week. I better find something to comment on.”

Email, as a suite of protocols, was designed long before we thought deeply about encryption. In 2025, you can count on email encryption in transit and encryption at rest from providers, although try to verify it. E2EE like Proton and Tuta offer is severely limited. I was recently looking up if Proton and Tuta were even compatible with each other in terms of PGP encryption. I could find no confirmation that they are.

If you use Proton and you email another Proton user it’ll be encrypted with PGP. Otherwise your email is sent unencrypted, and email you receive is unencrypted, then Proton stores it on their server encrypted. All of this paragraph applies to Tuta as well.

You can get most of the same benefits from other providers by downloading your email locally and deleting off the mail servers. The benefit of regular email servers is open standards and compatibility with your preferred mail and calendar applications.

I use Fastmail and love it. I know many people mention using burner addressed with a custom domain, but I prefer generating a burner email with a FastMail domain for signing up to websites. Using my own domain would make it easier to identify me.

I use FastMail as well. I actually went from FastMail to Proton, and then back to FastMail.

I configure a lot of my home networking equipment and servers to send me emails for things like installing software updates, reboots, and any possible security issues. I couldn’t make that work with Proton not supporting any standard mail protocols (I know about Bridge, but it requires a GUI, and I didn’t want to use a third party program).

I buy those canisters of pizza dough at the grocery store. Make a simple sauce by warning canned tomato sauce, adding a little olive oil, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, and just a pinch of red pepper flakes. I spread the dough thin, add some olive oil and bake. After the doughs baked on its own for 5-6 minutes I add the sauce, spread spinach around and depending on the time of year some basil leaves from my herb garden, then top with mozzarella cheese. Continue baking until the cheese is melted.

Simple and refreshing.

I’d also be interested in learning about IRC servers that were more social and less technology driven.

I still haven’t been able to give up reddit but I have always been a lurker there. Here I’m trying to make a conscious effort to participate in conversations. I’m trying to be positive, kind, and thoughtful because that’s what I want lemmy to be.

I’ve found for the last 3-4 years I haven’t had to fall back to Google. DDG results have been good enough I can use it full time.

AI for me as well. I’ve played with it a little and it’s kinda fun. Every company is pushing AI now including in areas where it doesn’t make any sense or is many years away from being useful. I’m also seeing a lot of developers being assigned to use AI without any directions on what to use it for.

I’m far enough along in my career I don’t need to worry about being replaced by AI. If it’s ever good enough to take my job I’ll be happily retired writing software for fun and living my life without AI. I just don’t have any interest.