Sentencing scheduled for July 11.

I grew up in an IFB cult due to my parents wanting to assimilate to American society. In the American South, you align to a church and people leave you alone, and that church provides everything for you. That church is your social network. I thought it was normal for church sermons to end up with the crowd angry, and everyone getting into their cars to go protest something together. We used to leave church to go protest other churches on Sunday. Yell at the people from other churches when they came out from their sermons of demonic teachings. Sometimes we would protest churches that spoke in tongues, other times we would protest churches that let gays in. We protested the church where the pastor had a ponytail. During the week, we would protest at the county courthouse. We would protest things that I don’t even remember. We protested Wal-Mart when they sold Power Ranger toys because they were demonic. Everybody was scared of my pastor. When we mentioned to people what church we aligned with, people backed off.

My parents were just trying to make it in the land of the free. It’s better than what they left in Southeast Asia.

Since I’m from the cult, even today I’m prone to evangelizing things and questioning consensus.

My parents left the IFB cult by the time I was 10 and returned to Buddhism. By then, it was more acceptable and there were a couple other immigrant families, but we still got swastikas on our house. People spread nasty rumors about us and in high school it came out. Girls were not allowed to date me, or were forced to break up with me. One time a sheriff’s deputy pulled me over, took my blonde girlfriend out of the car, and back home to her parents. She never spoke to me again, and married a boy from their church a year later. I saw on Facebook that she is now pregnant with their sixth child.

In the military, I practiced as a Buddhist for a few years due to heritage. I went back to Christianity due to convenience and wanting to fit in.

Even in my mid 30’s, I was trying to make extreme Christianity work. First I fell into the spiral that is the New IFB. I corresponded with Pastor Steven Anderson. He was always very cordial and we had what I thought were fair and respectful theological debates. What was different about him was that he was not a racist, which was a welcome change from the traditional IFB. He was probably the first religious person that I could talk to who wasn’t condescending, and who saw me as another person. I read a lot of scripture then, and found my way back into Christianity. Do you see how I’m still prone to cults?

I later studied LCMS Lutheranism since it seemed authentic with lineage and history. They seemed very knowledgeable and scripturally sound. I corresponded with Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller. I learned more about the bible from the LCMS than I had learned in 35 years as an IFB member. I was going to leave my career and focus on the LCMS. The LCMS members know the bible and the history behind it. They are the biggest bible nerds on the planet. Even Steven Anderson agreed to disagree on theological debates. He disagrees with but respects the LCMS. (this is a complication of conflicting passages in the Bible which they both view as infallible and inerrant) Again, he was always cordial.

[personally identifying information and stories paragraph redacted]

I went back to my old church, and tried to convince my wife that we would start attending an LCMS congregation. This was March 2020. Then the rest of 2020 happened and we found out that we don’t belong. As non white, non black people, we never did. Even my evangelical all her life, but still brown wife hates organized religion now. She is now an athiest. I’m not going to share those stories, you just have to accept it. We have distanced ourselves from all forms of Christianity. Our children, who as of 2020 were going to enter private Christian school, are being raised as skeptics and are in a very progressive and tolerant school. They cannot remember a time that they used to go to church, and find the teachings to be silly myths. I started wearing my Buddha pendant again in defiance of Christianity and in preservation of my heritage. But if I had to start clean, with no legacy, I would probably follow Taoism.

I still respect the ELCA, however. They are as close to what Christ preached as I have seen. It’s just the mythos of Christianity isn’t for me, isn’t about my people. There are no ties there and no reason for me to pretend any more. I am my authentic self.

I might delete this later.

Zero problems with Delta in many years of international flights with them. The best US based company, IMO.

My only problem is that their partner for Africa is Air France aka Air Chance, a complete shit show of an airline that never runs on time, has quite rude staff, uncomfortable seats, and makes travellers to its West African flights bus out to the tarmac to get on the plane in Paris.

I guess the world is about to find out about the dogshit that is Air France and CDG when the olympics starts in a few weeks.

No, Facebook and Twitter are still useful for the status quo.

Fox News isn’t rallying people to support Palestine.

Thanks AIPAC, for protecting Americans from foreign misinformation campaigns.

Ozzy the man was already in from Black Sabbath. But Ozzy Osbourne the band is in now. Their first six albums (through No More Tears) are as good as any other band in metal.

I assume this means Randy, Zakk, Jake E. Lee, etc are in.

Curious to see what they do about the bassist and drummer who sued and were subsequently removed from the reissue of Blizzard of Oz and Diary.

Guaranteed way for me to not watch a video is when the thumbnail shows the narrator doing their best Forky face.

Maybe SuSE?

Play Minetest.

I remember the last few versions of Netscape Communicator had a “Shop” button.

This was the sign that Netscape had lost the browser war and was giving up.

Never heard of this service. Thanks.

I’m still on a Fairphone 4 – in fact, in December it surpassed all my previous smartphones as the one I’ve owned and used the longest since smartphones became a thing. However, I’m on CalyxOS and have always used a GCam port for taking photos. So I’m not sure if I will get this camera software update or if I have to move back to the (buggy) stock Fairphone OS to see the changes.

This is a big complaint for me. I know that there is the official standalone APK, but if I am running a de-Googled phone, I want to be able to use Signal and have it update on a regular basis.

I mean licensing comes in here. The FOSS licenses allow this. Microsoft EULA and copyright almost certainly does not. But yes, I get the sentiment.

It’s almost as if all of the FAANG/Magnificent 7 market outperformance the past 15 years was built on the backs of the free labor provided by the FOSS movement. But then they will turn around and claim that non-western companies steal IP, etc and have US intervene to ban competition, or sue in courts. Kind of funny.

Back to the tech discussion, I’ve been using doas for a few years now instead of sudo. Even on my GNU/Linux machines. It’s a lot simpler to setup for desktop workflow machines.

Good post, my favorite Sabbath song and album.

I’m happy for them.

Was this the best metal album of 2023? Not by a long shot.

Was it the best Metallica album in 25 years? Absolutely. They tried new things and pulled it off well.

The Grammys have very narrow criteria. Basically you are going to get top 40 radio friendly songs and they choose from that. Looking at the list of nominees, they were the only metal band actually nominated in this category. The rest of the nominees are what people who drive in to “easy listening soft hits” think metal sounds like. 2023 was a pretty weak year for metal anyway.

In my 30s, I’ve come back around to appreciating Metallica. We don’t have many years left of them being around. Enjoy them for the time that we still can. One of these days, soon, they will play Master of Puppets for the last time.

And at least Babymetal didn’t win.

I agree. There should have been an official Firefox repo from the beginning.

I do remember twenty years ago, Firefox development was incredibly Windows-centric. At one point it felt as though Firefox for Linux was a second class citizen. This was a radical departure from the Mozilla Suite which was maybe the first major desktop software to go from close to open source. For many years afterward, as a BSD/Linux user, I continued using SeaMonkey for that reason.

I assume having an official repo was just never a priority in the early days.

Yes. I moved in third grade and I was the only Asian boy in a public school system in the American south, in a very small town of less than 250.

I got picked on relentlessly. I never had friends. Every slur imaginable from everyone. People ganged up and fought me on the playground. At least once a week. I got a reputation for always getting into fights in third grade and so I was always in timeout because I was new and obviously the problem. I gave up on teachers because they always favored the white kids.

At one point, they spray painted swastikas and KKK on our house. Then the sheriff deputy showed up, they said it must have been me, because I had a bad reputation. A black lady cop and a white guy cop. The lady cop took the lead and insisted because nobody had any motive to vandalize our house like that, we were not black. It must have just been me, the twelve year old who was in school when it happened. Case closed boys, pack it up and let’s head home.

I ended up associating with the kids who also got bullied for things far behind their control. Being poor, having bad teeth, ill-fitting clothes, for example. My best friend had a physical disability. Although eventually, he decided to pick on my ancestry when he thought it would make him friends, and so I stopped hanging out with him.

In high school, I was vocally mean to bullies because they picked on my friends. Bullies also had significant overlap with the “Young Life” crowd, and so I associated it with their religion. I did very well with grades so the teachers did not intervene. I bullied the bullies. People were scared of me. I was kind of like a stick of dynamite, I could go off on anybody. I did not care because getting in trouble was no better than not being in trouble. I was also very physically fit and played basketball, but I was not friends with anyone on the team and had no social life with them. They were greedy with the ball and when we lost in the tournament, I laughed because I thought they deserved it.

I do not talk to any of those people, except my girlfriend who is now my wife. She had a similar treatment being Hispanic, until she had her glow up and everybody who had picked on her started chasing after her. That is gross because guys thought they were entitled to her as a brown girl. That is her story to tell.

I never felt accepted anywhere until I moved to California and suddenly I was not always conscious of being the only brown guy, I was just another person, and I was like is this how other people live?

Our kids go to a very accepting school now and it’s different for them.

Honestly, that’s how it goes. And out of nowhere.

Like live and let live right? I am not vegan but I’m not going to complain about it, or equate eating meat with manliness. And even if I had issues with veganism, work isn’t the appropriate venue to be ranting about it.