I went through a similar experience. I started transitioning “late” in life. I’ve never really had trouble getting interviews anywhere I’ve applied prior to starting my transition. Most of the time I could get hired, sometimes not, but getting an interview at the very least was pretty much guaranteed. I reached a point where hormones were making noticeable changes and I was updating my wardrobe to be more feminine so I updated my resume to include my new name/pronouns. I left my dead name on there because I’ve yet to really tackle anything to change my external, very male, appearance and I’ve made very little progress with my voice. I figured solely using my new name would leave whoever called feeling misled when they heard a deep, male voice on the other end.

Around May 2023 I was looking to make a move as I was unhappy with my work, which was a major disappointment because I was very accepted there for who I was. I just hated the work and felt isolated as I didn’t really feel like I connected with anyone. Plus my position was separated from the rest of the team due to building design so I mostly worked just out of view of everyone, but close enough that I could hear the constant chatter that I never got to be a part of. The most conversation I ever got with anyone was “good morning” and “have a nice day.”

I applied to literally hundreds of jobs. I applied to stuff that I had years of experience with and great references for, but my references have said they were never contacted… I applied to things that were mostly new and I’d write up a cover letter detailing how my previous experiences translated to this new field. I applied for positions that anyone with a GED should be able to get. Most of the time I just never had any sort of response. A few places emailed me months later to tell me that I hadn’t been selected. I got one in person interview and was turned down. They seemed nice for the most part but also seemed thrown off when they actually saw me walk in. The hesitation in their voices said “this isn’t what we were expecting…”

Life started to spiral pretty hard. I was stuck, alone, and unhappy at my job with no way out in a city I was barely getting by in. Every time I went to start a new application I felt defeated before I even started. Every time I submitted one and didn’t hear back I felt like a failure. I questioned if transitioning was a mistake and debated on detransitioning and continuing to live the lie I had most of my life. Eventually I broke and quit my job with nothing lined up and life got real shitty after that… In the end I decided staying the course was the best plan for me. Going back in the closet wasn’t even going to be a consideration and I’d hold out until I figured it out. I’m sure I will continue to miss out on opportunities due to this but as I continue to make progress with transitioning I also believe it will get better. I’m now rebuilding my life one day at a time, piece by piece, and will continue to do so until I’ve reached my goals or die trying. Life is tough but we are tougher. Stay strong out there ladies ❤️

Z-library was a massive pirate repository for ebooks.

I’ve been using this on and off for a while, since v1.3 in September (and swapping with InnerTune which seems to now be abandoned…) but I have a few glaring issues with it as a daily driver.

Downloads are a mess. Tap download and it may or may not download. The download notification frequently becomes persistent for some reason, even if the downloads have finished and you kill/restart the app. Restarting my phone will get rid of it. Accessing auto cached songs is hit and miss if you don’t have internet which completely defeats the point of it. Also there’s no download management so whatever you download is now what you have saved unless you delete the library and start over…

The library page is ass. There’s no breakdowns by song or artist or album or any other category. You have favorites, followed, most played, and downloaded along with a bunch of playlists under that and finally a recently added list. If I want to shuffle my library I go to downloaded (because I download everything) and just tap a song which will start playing but take the UI ~10 seconds to catch up while, I’m assuming, it builds the playlist.

When I connect to a bluetooth device and my screen turns off I immediately lose the bluetooth connection. Turn the screen back on, reconnect, start playing the music again and it works fine after that. This only happens with SimpMusic. Occasionally have had issues connecting to bluetooth and the app says it’s playing via bluetooth but when you change the volume it says it’s playing via phone while no audio is coming out anywhere. This is usually paired with a “something unexpected happened” error message and app restart (have had this issue loop before for hours, phone restart fixed it).

The music player notification stops working regularly and just won’t come back until I restart the phone.

Intense lag after listening for a while.

No dislike button to help avoid songs.

And maybe my last complaint which is relatively minor to the other things, but under some categories, like new releases, it will show the art, the name of the album/single and then say “Album” instead of the artist which probably annoys me more than it should and may be a result of the other issues adding up.

No, my last complaint is the copying of Spotify’s horrible UI, but somehow it’s even worse.

On the upside, sponsorblock works well, my YTM playlists are all accessible, even ones I forgot existed from the GPM days, and the app does work for the most part. Long listening sessions work better than Innertune or Vimusic did. Hoping to see this continue to be worked on and improved, it still has a long way to go though.

31.03

I know how much we hate Reddit here but I’ve had great success with meeting people through local area subreddits. Many will have a monthly meetup and you can just go hang out and meet people in a low pressure environment. Then as people get to know each other smaller groups can form. Some also have Discords which can be a nice way to ease into the group before getting out there in person.

I had GFiber for a bit and had no issues with torrenting via private trackers and no VPN.

Put the text you want to be the link in brackets then immediately follow with the URL in parenthesis. For example [your text](https://lemmy.world) turns into your text.

Not sure if that was a typo but OP mentioned OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. I don’t think OnlyOffice has ever tried to get me to make an account or do things on the cloud. I keep both Only and Libre installed. I like the UI of Only better, but Libre is more functional, at least as far as spreadsheets go which is my main use.

Or Nicotine+ (a great Soulseek client)

I can’t comment on questions 1, 3, and 5 but I have been using Real-Debrid for around four years now (through Kodi mostly because I don’t want to have to manage a huge server again, occasionally I download directly to watch later/on a different device/non-video stuff) and I’ve been pretty happy with them so I’ll answer from that perspective.

Quality is great. As you mentioned in Q4, it works via torrents so if a torrent exists you’re free to grab whatever you want. You can stream or download from RD once it’s been cached by them. Even 50+GB Bluray remux streams fine directly from them. As for file naming, in the thousands of downloads I’ve gone through, I think I’ve come across two incidents where something wasn’t named properly and I ended up with something I didn’t expect but I believe both of those were Kodi issues, not RD. One was a movie where I got a foreign movie of a similar name and one was a TV series where it kept trying to play the wrong season/episode. In both cases I was able to just manually add the torrent/magnet and RD had it fully downloaded basically instantly or I was able to manually select another file in Kodi. The file names are what you expect with a torrent though with the title/year and all the quality and codec info in the filename so it’s hard to get the wrong thing. I don’t think I’ve ever come across deliberately misnamed files. It would get nuked pretty fast, trackers usually take stuff like that pretty seriously.

Assuming something is relatively available RD seems to be able to grab it very quickly. Like as fast as the page refreshes after adding the torrent/magnet. You also download very quickly from them; I typically see over 100MBs down over my wireless connection in a house with several other people using our connection which is pretty much fully saturating our bandwidth lol. Occasionally I have had issues getting something, but like with most things, the older and more obscure you get the harder it is to find sources for. In that case you may want to be on certain trackers. This is kind of why I like Kodi because there are plugins that focus on different types of media and some may have better luck finding, say, old 90s cartoons while others are better for anime. Once it gets added to my debrid I can go back and grab it/rewatch later. But for more popular stuff, I typically just use one of the big name public trackers. RD grabs it and I get it securely and privately from them. I’ve never bothered with a VPN and have never had issues.

One thing that I didn’t see mentioned was downtime. Occasionally RD has had some downtime. If you’ve ever been on the addons4kodi subreddit you’ve probably seen the posts with people freaking out about it within minutes of it going down. Downtime is typically minimal and usually back up within minutes to a few hours. In a few instances (like maybe twice?) it went down for like 12 hours or longer? Not really sure, if it goes down I just find something else to do and check later in the day or the next day and it’s back up. RD has also been known to compensate days worth of service for hours of downtime which is pretty nice. I haven’t heard the same about Alldebrid or Premiumize.

RD also gives you tokens based on the service package you buy (called fidelity points). 1000 points will convert to 30 days of service. I buy 180 days at a time which is currently around $17.33 USD and I get 800 points, so buying a year (~$35) gets me an extra month with points left over. Then the next several 180 day purchases also get extra months with them.

I’ve been really happy with the Torras cases I’ve used on my P7P and iPhone 13 Pro Max. Will probably buy another for my next case.

Also a Control D user. OISD full has worked great for me!

their shotty ass methodology.

In case you didn’t know, that should be “shoddy” as in “made or done poorly”

Unsafe site: 1377
All-purpose: 1337

For my first name I went through every name list I could find. Trendy names, classic names, unique names, fantasy names, thousands upon thousands of names… I spent around a week of dedicated browsing and as I read them one by one, if I liked it, I’d try and picture my friends calling me by that. There were a couple that I liked but only one out of all of them felt right, so I went with that. My middle name was a split decision between a couple of the first names I liked, but I liked them differently as middle names so that was also a pretty easy decision once I heard them out loud after my first name. My new last name is a mix of a unique name and foreign word that I liked and also liked how they fit together. No regrets :D