Recently my sleep has been completely derailed, I’m sleeping on strange schedules or more recently being awake for 30+ hours and only getting some base level sleep before starting again. I’ve got massive back pain from not being upright and no energy from not eating, partially because I’m on mainly rice with fish and partially because I just can’t be motivated to eat, let alone go make something to do that.
Weight wise I’ve been sliding hard since March, I rapidly lost 20kg between April and June, and since the 22nd I’ve lost 5kg, between that, the dwindling mental health, lack of sleep, going through a pack of snus like lightening, stress and financial chaos, I’m not sure what is going to take me out first but I have a concern it might be very soon if things don’t change and they don’t appear to be changing no matter how hard I try.
Because of all of this, I’m trying to find a mental escape route to at least not be stuck dwelling on things I can’t change, so the obvious way out is the Soaps. I already blazed through the East Enders Ballum storyline from 2019 onwards and now just catching up on the daily updates so I needed to find something new.
For some reason I have a life long vendetta against Corrie so I went for the next one, Emmerdale’s Aaron from 2014 onwards. Right now I’m up to 2017 and let me tell you I’ve been watching this brain crack for days non-stop, which helps because I’m not sleeping between days so might as well not just stare at the dark walls all night.
Before all of this I never really got the whole soaps thing but these wild fictional lives are great to escape into. One thing has to be said is that the stories are pretty repeatitive between all the soaps but there is always their own flare in the delivery.
Considering how volatile my mental state is in, it is a bit of relief to be pushed to tears with an off again on again storyline.
]]>The interviews for this job were going great, everything was super positive, and then after going through a marathon set of 30 minute interviews the feedback didn’t gel and in some cases didn’t really make a lot of sense. More so that we were even discussing start dates and how the transition would work, it was really really weird and a massive hit to my self worth (spoiler : I have none).
The feedback was basically on the lines of fit well in the company, would be a great consultant (freelancer) in the future (not now, not soon), but we can’t see him managing a team (I have more than 10 years experience managing small to large teams thank you) because of one misintrepreted response to a question with no follow up and some vague stuff. “Positive but not the news I wanted to give”.
Indeed it wasn’t the news I wanted to hear either after I spent weeks on this one and probably fucked myself over by not following other leads that weren’t as interesting as this opportunity was.
Now I’m well and truely back in the fucked with no hope or escape zone, I’m terrified on how I’m going to make it through the winter because I have zero leeway to have heating as I’m already struggling to afford to have the hot water heater on. I guess the only positive here is that our climate is so fucked it’s still 20° in to November.
I have my call with the Pôle Emploi next Tuesday after a year of being unemployed and constantly rejected. I don’t know how much more I can take of this lifestyle of just terror at the next letter or the next bill being forced out of my bank account, not being able to make the rent, losing something else because I can’t pay the bill, just loss, non stop.
Can’t even have nice things, I can barely afford to have things to eat and even still I’m now just playing meal roulette with the food waste apps.
I have no idea what to do, all the power I have right now is sit in the dark watching YouTube videos begging on the internet and sending yet another job application to be rejected or ignored while the planet burns and ignites in to war while rich fucks keep on getting richer.
]]>Anyways, one of the thing I’m doing is getting around to moving or redirecting my domains over to kevin.paris. Of course there are a couple exceptions for real reasons and I think you can probably work out which ones those are.
I wasn’t too sure what to do with it so I boinked it over to the french site and that made sense, until this evening (well I guess early morning if you want to talk the truth here), when I decided to put a little more effort in to the blog look and feel.
The main kevin.paris page is all about static things and the journal is more of what it says on the tin. If you want to know why it is this way, that’s a good question, I don’t know, it is what it is.
Photo de joe mcferrin sur Unsplash
The on of the many original reincarnations of ec.je was a blog, a very bloated blog, a blog that was never picked up by the internet archive. Fast forward to today and I was poking around my WP settings page and I spotted there is a way to use another domain for shortlinks and that gave me ideas.
I have two ec domains and a one letter IDN kicking around, so I got right on that and started my redirections.
ec.je is now pointing here, ec.gy points to kevin.barcelona, and ô.lu over to the French blog and as a side perk are used for the shortlinks. Let’s celebrate with this post’s short link https://ec.je/b/3AK
Take that wp.me
]]>I’m in a mood, the bins need to be taken out, and now my clothes will permanently be on the clothes line because that is the way it is.
Over the past week or so I’ve been moving around what’s left of my domains, having to scramble things off of hosts as the bills aren’t paid, and just in a constant state of having to react to things. I’ve had enough.
But in the endless turmoil of all of this late stage “no avocado for you” capitalism, I’ve been going through some old photos to try and revitalise older projects to escape the farce of reality.
Once life was full of tacos, now it sucks
In this process I’ve been grabbing old photos to use and I find fond times, fond places, fond people. It’s nice and nostalgic, unlike now that is harsh and infuriating.
Laundry bar was a vibe
At this point, I don’t even know what I’m writing about. Just in bed, looking at pictures, under the oppressive doom that was caused by a pair of McBitches who need some McKarma. Whatever, the worst people alive seem to be in charge of this shitty timeline and I’m over it.
Fiesta
So just going to be here, in my bed, with my cats, disenchanted, demotivated, and desperate. I’d normally ask for a donation but honestly, not eating and not heating is how this Christmas is looking already and this precarity is just beyond my ability to do anything about it or allocate any energy towards. Just going to sit here until everything gets cut off, and continue sitting here afterwards.
Nice days, nice weather, nice times are all of the past
]]>I’ve been poking around and was pointed towards the code for invite.delta.chat, which I borrowed to try and setup a nice little short link thing for Delta Chat users like myself.
Right now that is a bit of a manual process to create the short link, but I’m hoping to maybe be able to get a bot to generate and create the links automatically so people can easily share their DC contact or group.
If you’ve got Delta Chat or are just interested about this, check deltachat.me/kevin or if you’re interested in running your own delta chat mail server and need a subdomain you can use deltachat.me and afraid.org to do just that.
]]>After a tiny little scare that I was being MITM’d by Free, which in the end was just Free being shit and not say, upsetting Macron or being a journalist upsetting la Macronie, I made some fast movements to lock down some of my online conversations.
I temporarily moved my Delta Chat account to mailbox.org, they have the ability to encrypt to PGP on reception and just far enough out of the reach of stupid French Government ideas. I was previously using mailo for this but the only negative point I have to give is that their filtering isn’t too adaptable. It is worth noting that I still very much prefer nubo for my main mail needs but with the cut in income, I can’t afford the space I’m using so have had to reduce my dependence there.
Anyways, I’m a big fan of Delta Chat and that is where I do most of my chatting, while I’m not plotting anything illegal with the concerning level of privacy violating laws and Macron’s sweet embrace of authoritarianism, leading the way to a 2027 election that could be Marine le Nazi vs Gégé’s Police State because the left are busy bickering again, one really needs to make some considerations to these things.
For years I’ve been using Proton and I have previously moved back and forth from it, while recently it has got better, there are still some not so good blockers for my use case and needs. One of those blockers being the lack of SMTP / IMAP (because Delta Chat), header munging and loading everything locally when using the Proton Bridge.
That was until I decided to do something absolutely stupid and it worked. I managed to leverage Proton Bridge, mbsync, and a locally run IMAP / SMTP server to basically force it to work with Delta Chat. It isn’t perfect and there are the occasional issues, but for the most part it seems to be working and stable enough to use in production.
Chats and Mailing Lists being the two activities that generate a fuck tonne of storage space, I can now leverage the rather decent amount of space I have a available on Proton and the mailbox security. There are improvements to be made to this setup and a relocation once I can afford to replace a disk drive in the NAS (consider donating to help me from existing to living) and not have my internet cut off every month because I’m behind on my bills.
]]>Usual monthly post for assistance – I’m trying to figure out how to pay the electric, my phone, internet, food, you name it I’m already beyond the red since I was short of last months target. Bounced the tax bill too, so yeah concequences.
For the electric I’m praying they’ll be appeased by a token payment and not shut me off before the trêve hivernale where they’re stuck with me until April 2024 and legally can’t.
Taxes, I’m going to get fucked by that one hard which is something I don’t need right now. I honestly don’t see a way I can afford to exist if I can’t get a job that doesn’t pay the minimum wage before the end of the month.
I’m hearing back about two jobs over the next two weeks and I hope that at least one of these will pan out, the last one was dead in the water.
If you’re able to support you can do it through a few ways :
Via my bank bunq
EUR https://bunq.me/kcostelloe
GBP https://bunq.me/kcostelloeuk
USD https://bunq.me/kcostelloeus
Via Stripe
EUR https://ko-fi.com/kevinpointparis
USD https://donate.stripe.com/4gw17a1MCgvrejKeUU
CAD https://donate.stripe.com/aEUdTWdvk0wt4Ja4gh
Liberapay https://liberapay.com/ohmg/
This morning, I was looking for names for a server I need to rename under sus.fr, I needed some inspiration and I turned to science fiction TV series.
I came across the Farscape wikipedia page and remembered that Ben Browder, as John Crichton, was one of the few men who marked my gay adolescence, and that I loved the series.
As it’s 2023, I’ve been looking for a streaming service that might have the Farscape catalogue. You won’t be shocked by the results:
I asked ChatGPT to sell me the benefits of streaming because I must be misunderstanding what’s going on.
Here are the general benefits of video streaming services:
Convenience: With streaming services, you can watch your favourite TV shows and movies anytime, anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. You don’t have to worry about tracking DVDs or paying for cable TV, and you can pause, rewind or fast-forward your content at your convenience.
Variety: Streaming services offer a vast library of content, including TV shows, movies and original programming, which means you’re likely to find something to suit your taste. What’s more, streaming services often have a mix of old and new content, so you can discover new shows or films while watching old favourites.
Cost-effectiveness: Streaming services are often more cost-effective than traditional cable or satellite TV subscriptions. Many services offer monthly or annual subscription plans that are more affordable than cable or satellite TV packages, and you can often choose the content you want to watch and pay only for that.
Personalisation: Streaming services often use algorithms to analyse your viewing habits and recommend content that you are likely to enjoy. This means that over time, the service will be more tailored to your preferences and you’ll spend less time looking for something to watch.
Ad-free: Many streaming services offer ad-free viewing, which means you can watch your favourite content without interruption. This can make the viewing experience more enjoyable and save you time as you don’t have to watch adverts.
Overall, video streaming services offer a convenient, affordable and personalised way to watch your favourite TV shows and movies.
Stolen content regurgitated by ChatGPT
Even Jeff Bezos, a man famed for being an ethical being of God-like greatness, put it this way
Prime is a [part of Amazon] that hundreds of millions of consumers are familiar with. I think we’re living in a golden age of television. If you go back in time, even just five years, you couldn’t find great talent to make TV series or, if you could, it was a rare thing. But the situation has changed completely.
Jeff Bezos, rich jerk
The only way for me to watch this series is to get a pirate copy (that’s a sarcastic reaction if you’re reading this at Hadopi) because it seems the mega corporations have removed the series from the internet for tax deduction reasons. Fucking marvellous, we can’t even watch the series we love while corporations burn our planet 🫶.
Anyway, the server is named Moya, the name of the living ship in the series.
]]>I’m in a mood today because right now my 4G connection decided to be so slow that the plugs are struggling to ping home and TV has been cut off because zero bandwidth. I’m surprised I can even post this shit right now.
Anyways to the point, this was going to be a status entry but then it became too many words, let me run this down for you.
Last week I spent TWO WHOLE EUROS to get dressed up, get on the métro, and get to an “interview”. I use this term loosely because it was basically THREE HOURS of ice breakers with no substance and the observers dodging questions about the actual job, the pay, the deal, you know non-important things.
That ended with a “we’ll be in contact in a week”, yesterday was that day. I spoke with the guy who blew smoke up my ass for a few minutes and then got to the point.
Looking over our needs at the moment, we don’t need managers right now but would you consider an entry level job. I’m going to be transparent the pay isn’t great
Some guy wasting my time
He wasn’t lying, the manager job comes in to at 36k and you’re expected to work days, nights, and weekends. Nights being literally over night, which incidentally in this country means you need to be paid extra for that. They don’t obviously for reasons I’m sure. No bonuses either, just upselling legal requirement items as their BeSt PaCkAgE eVeR.
Because I really have no self respect, I enquired
What is the pay for this role then ?
Dumb shit that came out of my mouth
Hold on to your hats people, because what’s next will shock you
The legal minimum wage, no bonuses, no legal payments, a whole shift of gruelling labour on your feet (if you can lean you can clean), and a FOUR MONTH trial period.
It was a hard pass, take my name out of your mouth, never call again, blocked, deleted, unfollowed, fuck you.
The absolute disrespect to waste three hours of my time, plus the travel there, plus your own time, plus paying FOUR FUCKING PEOPLE TO DO THIS SHIT, and then low balling me so hard I should have got at least a glass of wine before those low balls slapped my ass so hard is UNREAL.
]]>Today was not a good day, as you see I had a course which I booked on to that was a rather obligatory one at France Travail by Macron (ex Pôle Emploi) because no matter what the content is they’re all obligatory.
You see, you can’t be unemployed if you’re struck off for something minor.
So I got up at 5h to get ready to walk over to the 12ème to go to this thing, because walking is the new being able to go anywhere. The walk over was quite nice since I had to leave around 7h30 and I didn’t hit the working crowd.
I got there like half an hour early and I remembered my two mistakes :
The 12ème is the worst ème because there is literally nowhere to sit if you’re say half an hour early to the Pôle Emploi that opens no sooner than quarter past 9
When I eventually got in we had the second problem
Annulé sur place, I do love making extra effort for nothing ❤️
]]>I also say annulé like it didn’t take 45 minutes for anybody to realise the prestataire didn’t show up
Photo de Tim Gouw sur Unsplash
I recently read a post from Chris Coyier who read a thing from Jim Nielsen, and honestly they both have a point. Getting nonsense domains for the lolz is literally my thing, here they’re talking about using them for projects, I have ideals of projects and don’t have the time to make them happen.
Right now since I’m suffering a slow financial death (please donate 🙏 I’d like to continue eating), I’ve had to part with domains en masse and that makes me sad. I don’t even know why, a lot of them I just had for the sake of having.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a shortlist of ones that I have a reason to love like sus.fr, oh.mg, and my on again off again relationship with kevin.paris (we’re back on again 🫶). Between all of them I’ve got this great idea for a mega archive, which is almost hilarious since I couldn’t pay for my DreamHost account any more and ended up losing a couple decades of data.
It is what it is and it means again I’m faced with what do I do and how I do. Answer is, as usual I don’t fucking know. The hosting for sus.fr is super overdue and between it and oh.mg a lot of the parts of it are hosted in at home on the internet connection that is always getting cut off and under the looming threat of yet another late electric bill being the final straw for my provider.
Out of necessity I start working on another domain that I’ve had for a long time and don’t usually use on a hosting account that has been paid for in advance when I wasn’t drowning in precarity so I can have something to do with my time and be creative.
Then the cycle restarts. Chasing that dragon. We are here with this blog.
So what now ? I’m just going to go with it, honestly I really love Plume and what I don’t love is that it gets firewalled away from me for 10 days a month and that I stupidly didn’t set it up with ProgreSQL. That is a problem that will be handled eventually.
I don’t intend to replace blog.sus.fr, I think its great, but at least for now I’m thinking of a mirror here on this right here website just cross posting. Not going to do the whole mega import again, just new stuff.
Header Photo de Sander Sammy sur Unsplash
]]>Hello kind internet surfer,
This post is honestly written like a mess right now, this is basically my mental state on your screen - a jumble of panic and dispair. I’ll edit this over the next few days when I’ve had a chance to have some kind of sleep and not so everywhere. There is also some more info in this thread if you have time
Right now I’m going through a huge financial death spiral that seems to get worse every day, equally my mental health is free falling downwards fast after being intentionally burnt out by an ex-employer, the stress of not eating while trying to exist, and the constant flow of rejections on a daily basis.
I’ve been forced in to unemployment at a time the economic powers have decided to ramp up prices and fuck literally everybody for every penny. I have no pennies and this is hurting bad. I’ve applied for a literal thousand jobs, ones I’m qualified for, ones that I’m overqualified for, ones that pay great, and others that pay a hundred euro more than what I’m on now.
I’ve used all the tricks in the books, pulling on my LinkedIn network, friends, writing every cover letter by hand with the right amount of keywords, getting ChatGPT to write cover letters with nothing but keywords, unique CVs per job, you name it, I’ve done it. Nothing has worked and I’m getting deeper into this hole I’ll never escape from.
This week alone after one of the creditors I owe tried to force my bank to give them literally all my money (this is a French thing and is shockingly legal) my bank charged me 105€ to write these people a letter to say I had no money, today I got my electric bill that is over 200€ (thanks again Macron for dropping the price shield), I still owe all kinds of debt, and right now the only place I can pay anything from is my food budget.
On top of this my rent guarantee insurance is up for renewal in September (512€ for the year split in two payments) to be able to remain in my house, my rent went up today, the tax office decided I owe them 600€ and these payments start this month. That leaves a gap of about 600€ of money I need to just exist in this nightmare until October. This is also compounded by the credit card insurance that determined that their unemployment policy doesn’t cover my particular flavour of unemployment, so I’m having to pay that back too.
edit: better detailed here
I have to pay exceptionally :
This is where this post comes in, I genuinely have no way out of this mess and right now I’m between not sleeping, over sleeping, hugging a cat while crying and having non stop suicidal thoughts. During all of this, I’ve been socially excluded, I can’t go anywhere since I can’t afford to take public transport, I’m exhausted physically from having to walk 10km+ to do anything and mentally exhausted since the harassment at work started over a year ago. Occasionally I do also snap on social media, which I’m sure is a great look for a job seeker who is a professional.
If there is anything you can do, no amount is too small and I’m hoping to raise 600€ if it is possible, the fastest way is via my bank Bunq in either € Euro or £ Pound Sterling.
Alternatively, I have a Ko-fi page or you can donate US dollars or Canadian dollars using Stripe.
]]>I’ve used generated.photos to generate some anonymised avatars of myself, and yes I know the irony of feeding an AI my likeness in the name of being anonymous. I’d be less inclined to do this if it wasn’t for the fact that many AIs have stolen my content and likeness already.
But they emailed me, they’ve created a new version of sorts and were asking for cartoons to make real. Most people sent standard fayre cartoons, but I went for the gift that adb sent me - my crudely drawn avatar.
The results took a while to come through but I was not disappointed.
Now after padding some time, I present to you the greatest gifts from AI - a dystopian hell of an avatar with weird nipples
]]>I’ve seen less and less relevant jobs and have gone full hog in to applying for things that I’m over qualified for, that of course means I get ignored more often now. Except by temp agencies.
I received two call backs, one ghosted me (why is this socially acceptable ?) and the other invited me to an interview. Great I thought, well it wasn’t.
The whole thing was a fucking joke and a half, they didn’t actually have the job I applied for (lol) and the interview was basically a bunch of people in a room explaining themselves to two interviewers like we were just cattle for the slaughter. Very much no fucks given kind of affair and super insulting to do this in a group setting.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to group interviews where the purpose was to work in groups to see your ability to do so, those are borderline acceptable. This was falling asleep on a night bus and waking up in a depot, exceptionally far off from that limit.
I then got a call back, after I had to walk all the way up there and back, with an offer for a entry level paid at the absolute legal minimum wage temp job in Customer Service.
It took me a day to calm the fuck down and ring them back. They explained the job and that actually management jobs they don’t have at the moment (double lol).
Considering that nothing is happening in the job market for nearly a year at this point, and doing the calculations I should theoretically see a little more income, I’m now debating if I want to (read : have to) accept this bullshit. I have until the end of the afternoon to decide.
Let me tell you how angry I am with this bullshit and this fucking economy of torment we seem to accept. Absolute fucking bullshit that we have to accept is unreal and our lives that are being wasted with these low ball bullshit activities to keep alive.
Can’t wait for the revolution, going to burn down some million euro apartments when it comes.
Edit 03/08/2023 - New Insults from Capitalism
Today I received an invite to an interview, except, this is unreal, the amount of disrespect for the time of the candidate is just mind blowing. No recruiter behind it, just computers making decisions and you can’t speak to somebody unless it decides on some basis that you are worth it for them.
We would like to get to know you better within this automated interview. This is the first step of our recruiting process. Following you will receive two questions. Please answer these questions by sending us a video. You have four days to do this. If you need more time, please contact me. We look forward to receiving your videos!
Much like the company that wasted three hours of my time to ghost me, this company is deciding that my time is worthless to them. If I had a job already I would have genuinely told them to fuck off and I can’t imagine I’m the only person with this level of self worth and awareness that would.
Jokes on them though, I just need a job, any job, and I will do it. I’m desperate and honestly if this is the only segment of the candidates you’re appealing to, you deserve everything you get as a result.
]]>Ever since my Plume instance went dark because fucking capitalism puts a price on everything, decided to create this space on a domain I meant to use for a lot of great things but actually just went with sus.fr because I’m that fickle.
I like my little .cymru domain and maybe it needs a bit more loving you know. Granted, WriteFreely isn’t the love it deserves but the need for a lightweight backup space when I’m running on hatred and 4G, that is what I need.
I also learned today that when my ISP locks my connection, they also lock communication between machines on the local network. Fully cutting me off from any kind of access to my own data in my own house.
Anyways, the whole purpose of this blog, nay, journal, is to write my entries to then import them when I get access back to my Plume server (and it is back online).
Annoyingly it does mean that I will have to do a manual import, which is kind of why I held back from writing too much. I did throw up a couple #TasteOfPoverty posts that are going to cause me chaos when I do the copy and paste via the Plume API.
The only real update I have is that I had one interview and a second one setup for Monday, other than that it has been outright rejections or the steady stream of getting ghosted. This is kind of damaging my self worth and also since my rent just went up again this year, my ability to eat food at a level that won’t leave me to die horribly very soon.
Speaking of dying horribly, I can think of two people’s obituaries I will masturbate to, may their end be violent and nothing but suffering as a karmatic return to the gift they have given ❤️
Photo de Neil Mark Thomas sur Unsplash
]]>