Thank you for your kind words, my friend 🤗

You’re definitely right that I was depressed at some point. There are months of 2024 that I don’t have any recollection of. Those months scared my boyfriend more than after I snapped and I was full of negative emotions. At least by then, I was present and feeling things. During the blackout months I just sat in the same corner and stared into space when I didn’t work or sleep. Almost like I was a tool that was left in a corner when it wasn’t being used.

I’m very lucky I have my boyfriend. You’re completely correct that he’s a good partner. He is fantastic and one of the best human beings I have ever known.

I do think I’m better nowadays. We moved to a bigger and better place recently and it’s so nice to finally have a home and not just be in some temporary location while life tosses you around. I think that within the next year or so, I’ll be back to myself and be more creative again. It’s already happening a little bit even though I still don’t have any energy to enjoy my passion. I feel inspired and that’s a massive step compared to where I was only a few months ago.

I’m also sorry to hear that you have struggled with depression, my friend. And a bad case by the sounds of it. And your description of anti depressants is very relatable. I was on some of those way back in my youth when I was struggling way more than I am now, so I know how much they can just iron you out for better and for worse. I hope you have good people in your life too, who have your back. I’m also genuinely happy to read about how passionate you are about your job/hobby. That’s the kind of life I wish every person was blessed enough to get to experience, because man, when things are good, it’s just the most enjoyable and fulfilling way to live. ❤️ I wish you nothing but the best!

Sometimes it’s not the fact that you make your passion your job, that kills the spark. It can be a series of very unfortunate events happening in quick succession that dims what makes life so much fun.

For me it was a culmination of changes at my job that saddled me with too much work and the fact that several people in my personal life went through big crises all within the same period of time.

I worked close to a 100 hours a week with barely any breaks. No downtime, no weekends. No vacations. What little time I did have was spent being a therapist or mediator for people in my life who were very unhappy.

I was given promises at work that kept my spirits up, but when it was time for them to be kept, I was let down. Not only that, within the same week we lost all our clients due to budget cuts because inflation kicked everybody’s asses.

And then I snapped. I’m lucky I have an amazing and caring boyfriend because that shit could have developed into a serious mental health crisis. It had just been a full year of trying to stay positive and being let down over and over and over and over while everybody I cared about were suffering.

Things kept being fucked for another year, but it felt less extreme because the workload was more normal by then, but also because we made a lot of good changes at home. We moved into a place that was better for us. That helped a lot.

I’m still not doing my passions at home despite having set up an entire room for it. I know it will come back at some point. When I’m ready. I try to treat my creativity like it’s a wild animal. You have to let it come to you and you can’t chase it.

I think I will be like you again sometime soon. I used to be until 2024, when it all happened. I have also gone through much worse crises before this one where my passion went away for a while. This too shall pass, as they say.

The Julekalender

This is a Danish advent calendar that was released in the early 90s and making fun of different Danish dialects and especially making fun of Danes who were splicing more and more English words into their Danish vocabulary at the time.

The story is basically about three gnomes or nisser, who crash their airplane in Jutland, Denmark and they are stranded there until they fix the plane. They have to get back home because their old papa is dying and needs to read from a very special book to get better. This book is wanted by a copenhagener stereotype by the name of Benny who turns into a goofy vampire when he drinks alcohol. He’s stuck with a couple of jutlandic farmers who are completely oblivious about everything going on.

I was 2 years old when this show first aired on TV and I remember we were watching it together as a family when Benny turned into the goofy vampire and I started screaming. The scariest part was the fact that my family was laughing at the TV. I guess the adult version of that would be to witness a horrific car crash or a violent crime and everybody around you is just laughing. It was such a surreal and terrifying experience and I was way too little to understand the context of why this scene was so funny and why my family was laughing. All I knew was that I had seen danger and evil and that those who were supposed to protect me weren’t reacting the right way and that made it so much worse.

I had to sleep with the lights on for a long time after that because I was so scared the goofy vampire would come and hiss at me and kill me in the dark.

This is the exact scene that sent me into a fit of fear all those years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D1Cnf5OFdc

And yes, I probably shouldn’t be able to remember stuff like this from the age of 2, but I have several verified memories from my earliest childhood that I can’t really explain. I guess the trade-off is that my short term memory is shit and I cannot remember verbal instructions without visual aid.

The Julekalender is great, but it is impossible for non-Danes to fully appreciate since it’s so specifically making fun of Danish language and the differnet stereotypes attached to differnet dialects.

Yeah. I just remember whenever their show was on when I was a kid, I just didn’t find them funny at all. It’s not that their jokes offended me or anything. I was too young to care about what was and what wasn’t tasteless. I just didn’t think they were funny. I thought they were extremely lame.

On the other hand, I remember that I did enjoy Linie 3 and had a casette tape with various live performances with Dirch Passer whom I considered a comedic genius as a kid. Still think Dirch is great, but I have no idea whether or not Linie 3 holds up. I remember enjoying their dynamic and how they kinda represented the superego, the ego and the id when they were performing.

Probably that Ørkenens Sønner was never funny.

You’re welcome! I’m legit so jealous xD

Have a lovely day, friend.

You have very pretty handwriting.

True. I remember two ads specifically in my country that pissed me off so much I vowed to never purchase anything from their company. Both were phone service providers.

One was an ad where the guy gets the message of the ad out in 5 seconds and then the rest of the ad is him sitting in silence for 25 additional seconds, eating some food. That ad pissed me off enough to contact the company and let them know what I thought.

The second was this stupid bint sitting in a pink room, smugly wringing her hands and going: Oooh, you really want to get to your video, don’t you? Here it comes! 🤪

I was like: I don’t give a fuck if your phone service provider is the best in the galaxy. I will never use it ever.

Technically I have a third ad that made me despise charity for life, but that was before the time where ads online were what they are today and this ad did not show up online. I’ll tell the story anyways because this is the type of ad that every charity should avoid if they want people to donate:

Rewind to 2012. My boyfriend and I were dirt poor. Literally had to borrow money from our parents to have enough for food. He was a full time student and I was sick with a mean depression at the time.

We get some birthday money. I forget who it was from and who it was for. Normally, we would spend birthday money to pay bills but this time there was a tiny bit left over and we decided to go to the cinema for once. Have a date night. We only had enough for tickets. No snacks. No drinks. Just the tickets, but we didn’t care because the fact that we got to go to the movies felt like a massive luxury.

Ads pop up on the big screen. One of them is this close up of an African child with flies on his face, looking real sad. Across his face a text appears: “How much was your movie ticket?”

That singlehandedly made me boycott that specific charity for life. Fuck them forever. Worst part is that i used to actually volunteer for that charity and help them collect money by going door to door once a year with a friend. We collected so much money for those assholes. Haven’t bothered with volunteering since. It wasn’t solely that ad that turned me off charity, but a series of gross experiences that just made me fucking hate charity and the vultures who use it to scrape money from normal everyday people who think they are helping little impoverished children in third world countries.

I have seen similar charity ads on social media after the terminally online realized that there is a neverending war in Gaza. So many ads with obvious scammers prematurely blaming you for skipping their ad and leaving them to suffer. My reaction? 🖕👁👅👁🖕

There for sure are good and honorable charities out there and I have no ill will towards them, but I see the vast majority of charities as guilt tripping scams where they try their best to make people feel ashamed for being born in a privileged country and wringing money out of them while exploiting children in poor countries who will never see a dime.

In short: I hate ads too and the more they annoy me, the more their company or charity ends on my permanent shit list.

Yeah I agree. It’s really brutal. As a kid I was especially heartbroken over Fox’s son’s storyline. The one with the wounded leg who goes to the city for awhile. His story was so friggin tragic, omg.

The Animals of Farthing Wood was a banger show. It’s because of that show that I began drawing as a kid. I love how epic it is and how it comments on deeper themes that are still important today. Among other things, it’s all about how the animals are forced to immigrate to another park after their forest is turned into a highway for humans. That even after the arrive after a horrible migration, their presence isn’t welcome because they disturb the old ways in the new park. How wars break out, friendships and alliances are formed and how everyone has to find a way to coexist and also keep the ever looming presence of humans at bay. It is truly a brilliant show that teaches you so much about life, death, nature and tolerance. And you know, you can also just watch the show as an entertaining epic for kids about animals without looking into all the political stuff, because it never really tries to cram all it’s themes down your throat in the annoying way that a lot of media does nowadays.

Maybe hold off on showing the little one this show until they are at least kindergarten age. It’s a bit rough sometimes, but it is not damaging.

Also, congratulations on becoming a dad! Glædelig jul ❤️

EDIT: FRIENDS! I LITERALLY JUST FOUND A REMASTERED VERSION OF THE WHOLE SERIES ON YOUTUBE!

GO WATCH IT HERE❤️

I currently watch YouTube with the Wcosia browser on my phone and have barely gotten any ads since I started using it for this purpose. I dunno why it is like this. I think I have gotten one ad in months and all I had to do was refresh the browser and it went away.

Used to use DuckDuckGo and their video player which also works fine. No ads.

It probably won’t last forever. YouTube seems hellbend on becoming AdTube, but for now, this is a fine alternative. I dunno how watching YouTube works with ecosia on the computer, if there are ads there, but on the phone, nothing.

And that is fair. If he’s the type to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks before he goes into making more detailed plans, then cool. But him sitting and getting pissy about people who criticized him and calling them names is a very unselfaware move. Of he’s a throw shit at the wall guy, he has to deal with the fact that people can’t read his mind and that he will have to clarify like an adult and talk to his critics with respect. If he can’t handle valid criticism to his poorly communicated video, he should probably change tactics and not be a throw shit at the wall guy anymore.

Again, I wish him the best of luck with his movement as he seems to have the drive to actually getting things done. I just don’t respect his attitude about the criticism he received.

Good on him that he’s actually planning on doing something more than just have ppl change their avatar. Maybe he should have put that in the original video instead of getting mad that people are calling him out for slacktivism.

Also, I have not argued the choice of symbol at any point. I don’t care what image people put as their profile pic. What I was arguing was that it is weak to change your profile pic for a cause if you then keep using the products you’re protesting against.

If he and the people joining his movement actually manage to make positive change, then I’m all for it. It just wasn’t clear in his first video that he had ambitions to actively have laws changed. It sounded like he wanted people to change their pics that that would somehow make everybody rebel against their corporate overlords. If he didn’t want people to think that was his movement, he should have elaborated in the same video instead of playing coy and splitting it up into two videos where he gets to call the critics of his movement apathetic idiots.

Good luck to him and those who join the movement. I hope they manage to make some changes.

Hold on to your optimism! We need people like you.

I consider myself a pessimistic optimist. Things probably aren’t gonna happen the way we hoped, but we will adapt and make some lemonade with what we are given.

It’s so rare that hyped movements go anywhere because the focus is always on the wrong things, but in the long term, if companies make it increasingly obnoxious to use their services, people will most likely silently make the move to open source through word of mouth. It isn’t as sexy and bombastic as making clippy your avatar and doing armchair V for Vendetta protests, but it’s through people’s silent choices that change will gradually happen. Whether or not this change will be felt on a grand scale, I don’t know. I also don’t really care. I just believe that over time, more and more people will eventually turn their back on the big tech companies while the rest will stick around either out of indifference or ignorance and that is their right too.

Problem is that the majority of people are not going to do any of that because it takes work and people either don’t want to let go of comforts, they don’t care enough or they don’t have the energy to be digital activists after they have finished a day of work.

It will probably only gain traction if it becomes the cool thing to do among young people and even then, it will most likely be a smaller number of young people who will bother doing all of this.

The rest will become really good at prompting their way through life because its easier, more comfortable and takes the least effort.

Lol, did people do that? I only remember the black square for the blm movement, but I have also never really been on Twitter, so most of what I know about trends on that platform is what has been shared on other platforms.

The real question is of course whether or not anyone is gonna do something past changing their profile pictures.

I give this trend a couple of months. Maximum a year and then a bunch of people will have clippy avatars and everything will go back to normal.

Something like Stop Killing Games was an initiative that only survived because one man dedicated a good portion of his life to get the issue brought before the eyes of actual politicians. Even before the pirate software drama, Ross had been talking about this issue for years and many people agreed, but nobody did anything except for Ross. Maybe the petition would have reached its goal without piratesoftware’s initial meddling. Maybe it wouldn’t. His subsequent sperging turned failure into success, but the issue is still in process to be reviewed and maybe it will be a win, maybe the lobbyists will shut it down. We don’t know yet. But without Ross’ stubbornness, nothing would be done.

Imagine if Ross had told gamers to change their profile pic to pacman to show game companies and consumers that "we dont agree with the companies’ practices? That would be a total joke.

Personally, I have more of a “I’m not alone” feeling when I actively leave services that I disagree with and through word of mouth find alternatives where I can talk to people who seem to have the same base values I do. Even if we disagree on other things.

It’s the laziness of this initiative that drives me up a wall. People want change but they don’t want to work for or sacrifice anything for it.

Thank you. I needed that chuckle 😂❤️

Pff. This reminds me of the This Is Bob protest against the forced Google+ accounts that were the beginning of youtube enshittification. It didn’t do shit. Anyone who wants a profile on youtube nowadays has a Google account. Google+ may have failed but the intent and mission behind it didn’t. Google has total control over anyone who wants to use YouTube now.

You can set clippy as your profile pic and feel like you have done something, but it’s not gonna change anything.

If people want to actually do something, they should abandon these predatory services and go open source or maybe become anti tech as much as possible. It doesn’t matter whether or not you signal to the Zuckerburgers on top how you feel if you’re just gonna continue to use their products.

The only thing that would scare them would be the numbers plummeting if they saw a mass exodus from their platforms and services and people actively began looking for alternatives. But most people can’t be fucked to do that because they are too enmeshed with these services that it is easier to stay. But putting clippy as your profile pic is super easy and costs you nothing so yay. You get to feel like you did something without actually sacrificing anything to make change and the Zuckerburgers will look at you and shrug. “Ah, the peasants are blowing off some steam again”.

Sorry for being so negative, but this is honestly so fucking weak. I may have missed something, but when has slacktivism ever changed the minds of these companies?