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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • May be not the worst, but as I grew up I start to see my mother as a prima donna with anger issues. Though we have a good relationship now, my childhood had always been at the mercy of her anger and ego. All my failings were about humiliation for her as a mother and all my success (what little there was), was her doing. She showed very little affection. I remember one time being sick as a kid and hyperventilating on our way to a clinic. I was scared and try to cling to her as we wait for the doctor. She seemed more annoyed than worried at the time.

    She’s also a typical asian parent, driving academic success at all cost. I think her being a somewhat busy single mother is what kept me kind of sane throughout my life. If she’s a typical middle-class asian housewife with all her time being dedicated to me, I think I’d be a lot more messed up. I know that single mothers tend to have to struggle a lot, we do have a lot of support from my aunt and we didn’t have to worry about food and a place to stay. We lived comfortably.

    Some of her physical disciplinimg includes typical cane lashes, face slaps, hair pulls, making me kneel on prune seeds, twist pulling my skin and ear, etc. But I think it’s her verbal abuse that really gets to me to this day. It was always about how other mothers with high achieving kids have good karma (lucky) and she doesn’t because of my mediocrity. I get compared to other kids a lot and sometimes she said I only deserve to eat other successful kids’ shit so that their success might somewhat rub off on me.

    As I grew older and became, well… not rebellious, but indifferent to her outbursts, she started to play the victim. A mother at the mercy of her kids’ “deliquency”. The last time we fought was while naming my new-born son. In my country, it is somewhat of a tradition to approach fortune tellers to give names according to the weekday the child was born on. I didn’t care for that and gave him the name my wife and I agreed upon before he was born. Us having a child, a wonderous occasion, became about her and she started playing the victim with all our relatives.

    Well, she had mellowed out a lot since then. I think it’s because she started reading a lot of educational posts from facebook and the country’s general shift toward more progressive child nurturing attitudes. I had gotten over a lot of what happened, but sometimes I still struggle with showing affection towards her.









  • Where I’m from used to be pretty much a backwater country without any official access to western software. No credit card to purchase online, nothing. So we all use pirated software. 2000s were like the golden age of pirated softwate. I messed around with pirated/cracked software a lot when I was in uni, then I got hit with ransomware and lost all my assignments.

    So I started giving opensource a try. I didn’t know before that open source was actually a thing until I overhear some of my friends arguing about windows and linux. This was around 2007, so linux desktop is still a bit abysmal. I think tux guitar is probably the first opem source I used because pirating guitar pro starts to get too tedious. I started replacing pirated softwares I used to have with open source alternatives. IE with firefox Internet Download Manager with jDownloader. Guitar Pro with Tux Guitar. Some text editor with the name I forgot with Notepad++ Then I eventually moved on to linux, which took quite a bit long though, since I used to be a .NET developer.

    Honestly, a lot of third world countries could benefit tremendously from open source software but we were all mentally locked in to windows, since youth. Most training center here only teaches windows. Even recent school curriculum seems to be focused on windows. We got so used to pirated software that’s actually quite expensive to buy legitimately and people gets fussy if they couldn’t use it. Such a shame…




  • This is the reason I have a lot of respect for people who are not in IT or Tech field, career wise, but still managed to deep dive into linux.

    Even will all the ease of access that the current linux ecosystem offer, linux still is a tinkerer’s OS. You have to deep dive into the basics for some problem. That’s hard, even for someone with tech background.