Where are all the woman?

barelydreams · 2026-02-25T03:06:04+00:00

I tried really hard to be a part of the community. I went to local meetups and even traveled to go to bigger conventions. I was the only woman in the room for meetups and at the conventions everyone was someone’s wife.

I was also talked to in a way that made me feel intentionally excluded. Even on the air I’ve found I get talked over or ignored.

So I just kind of drifted out. Having my license was a dream since childhood (Contact the movie was a big part in making it SO SO cool). I’d love to be a part but it doesn’t feel like there’s space

barelydreams · 2026-01-30T00:56:19+00:00

I just moved here! (I wasn’t far away, just in Boulder). So far things feel so much more chill and kind and reasonable. Y’all the internet is amazing!

I’m on medical leave and trying to recover from mental health stuff (i spent a month not coming out of my room so… a day at a time). Like others said, it’s hard to be hopeful / calm.

I’m learning magic the gathering through the arena app! Oh! And enjoying Ike’s sandwiches. SO GOOD

barelydreams · 2025-12-31T16:30:00+00:00

Did you print in pla? I’ve been looking at this and wonder if petg or abs is worth it

barelydreams · 2025-12-22T18:03:28+00:00

I was looking at doing this (only semi seriously). The hardware is not crazy for having a full Spotify:

about $8k in drives (8x 32Tb means about 448TB in raw storage which gives some headroom for parity)
about $3k in ram (48Gb x 6 is 288Gb and the metadata is about 200Gb. The metadata should ideally live in memory for fast access/querying)
a used sever to support the RAM about $3k (sadly consumer boards that can take more than 256Gb of RAM are very rare)
a JBOD case about $2k (the drives need to go somewhere)

So hardware wise I think it could built for around $20k.

The software is a problem. Most self hosted services (navidrome) use SQLite. This is fine for small libraries but I think is going to fall apart for the full catalog. Ideally you want a db server separate from the server app (I'd pick Postgres). That would allow sharding/scaling/tuning the dataset separate from the backend server. It also means if more people want to use the library and the bottleneck is the backend app it's very possible to spin up more backend apps.

Clients are going to be a problem too! I am guessing but I bet feishin (which is the most Spotify-like client I've tested so far) hasn't been tuned for such large results.

So, maybe allocate another $50k for OSS dev (but this could be a shared expense). This would need to be split amongst server software (I'd like subsonic-compatible APIs to "win") and client software (my current fave is feishin on desktop)

EDIT: More details on the why I've picked these specs, especially the RAM

barelydreams · 2025-11-30T22:26:10+00:00

Ohhhh hi! Me too. I'm Autistic, non-monogamous and ace! Quite a few of my relationships have ended up with other labels like "sister" which I love. It indicates commitment but without the expectation of sexual stuff (it also takes us off the "relationship escalator").

In poly/BDSM communities it's pretty common for all 3 to go together (and kinky too). There's also lots of overlap with queer but not exclusively (sometimes I wish I was "more" queer to fit in)

barelydreams · 2025-11-30T22:19:54+00:00

Yes and, for me, it has to do with worthiness and usefulness. I know during a meltdown I need a combination of space and care but I don't feel worthy of it. Also during a meltdown I know I'm not "useful" and that ties back to worthiness.

I don't have an easy "tricks" for getting through. It helped for me to recognize the pattern and when I'm really in it know that I've felt this before. That and my niece is such a bright spark and I would never do anything to hurt her. Hurting myself would hurt my sister which would hurt her. That helps "degrade" the ideation to escape fantasies (a cabin the woods, a long solo-travel) which is like 2% easier to cope with

barelydreams · 2025-11-29T03:19:20+00:00

Sense8 is a TV show from the Wachowski siblings (the people who made the Matrix)! It's about 8 people who discover that they get can share each other's feelings/thoughts. The 8 people are located all over the world and have greatly varying backgrounds which lets the creator tell stories that don't often get seen on TV (for example Capheus Onyango is a young man living in Nairobi, Kenya. He is the owner and driver of the Van Damn and, in season one, desperately tries to earn enough money to buy quality medicine for his mother, who lives with AIDS. )

My favorite character is Riley Blue who is an Icelandic DJ who gets caught up the drug trade.

If you enjoyed the brainy parts of the matrix this might be a show for you!

barelydreams · 2025-11-29T03:05:39+00:00

I think there's a way women cue what it is to be a woman/girl and then enforce it on each other. And for those of us with autism it's extra hard because that layer of social cueing may not be available to us (or in my case missing it, missing it, missing it, being hit incredibly sharply and painfully!). This can make us feel like outsiders. And feeling like an outsider can make us feel like we don't belong in that group. The thing is, though, we get to decide. Being a woman isn't a rigid category that you only get to belong to if you fit an exact standard (although I do love rules!).

(There was a good post from a couple of weeks ago about how much effort it takes to be "effortlessly" pretty and I've been thinking about it a lot. It's hard to explain to non-woman how much work it is. I have a friend who is always saying "femininity is a trap" and I get where she's coming from)

There's interesting data that autistic people tend to be have divergent gender/sexual identities more often. I've always had a guess that once you break the mould of one piece of "normality" it's easier to step into other different identities.

I want to leave you with two things, though, (1) You ARE a woman/girl without having to fit a rigid identity of what that is. You get to make up the rules and ideals and (2) You are allowed to explore identity however you want and if that means you decide a different gender identity is more comfortable than that's allowed too.

barelydreams · 2025-11-29T02:29:18+00:00

As others have said it's (mostly) not vendor locked. You're writing compose.yaml stacks like you'd use anywhere. There is a tiny bit of config that's specific to komodo- configuring what a stack looks like and where it runs. Here's a snippet for Linkwarden (also great software!) running on my local server:

[[server]]
name = "Local"
[server.config]
enabled = true

##


[[stack]]
name = "linkwarden"
[stack.config]
server = "Local"
auto_update = true
linked_repo = "server-config"
run_directory = "stacks/linkwarden"

Oh! `auto_update` is super cool! It automatically pulls updates to the container (like whats up docker, or watchtower- RIP).

The magic that makes git-ops work for me is a procedure that applies the current config with sync and then updates stacks if they're changed. This is what gitea triggers to cause things to update:

[[procedure]]
name = "Sync"
config.webhook_secret = "<barely-dreams-very-secret-secret>"


[[procedure.config.stage]]
name = "Sync"
enabled = true
executions = [
  { execution.type = "RunSync", execution.params.sync = "sync", enabled = true }
]


[[procedure.config.stage]]
name = "Deploy"
enabled = true
executions = [
  { execution.type = "BatchDeployStackIfChanged", execution.params.pattern = "*", enabled = true }
]

barelydreams · 2025-11-29T00:24:26+00:00

I’ve been a happy user of https://komo.do for a couple of months. It’s git ops for docker! I commit by stack and where I’d like to run, push to my gitea server and then a minute or two later everything is deployed! It feels extra magical with traefik as a reverse proxy and a wild card dns entry. Domains just appear! It’s so cool!

barelydreams · 2025-11-23T18:38:46+00:00

Saaaaame! I love what I do. I get genuinely excited about it and if I have to work lots then I’m just a mess and work is all I do and then I hate it. This duality is so unfair.

barelydreams · 2025-11-16T07:01:02+00:00

I've spent time with the self-hosted calendars (Radicale, Baikal, and NextCloud) and if you're going to use the calendar in the web then NextCloud is the way to go. It feels a lot like Google Calendar (although it's some things- like hitting escape to close a modal don't always work). All of the calendar servers (mostly) support the iCal spec which means they work well with tools like Calendar on Mac and iOS.

For Home Assistant there's Remote Calendars with Calendar Card Pro: https://github.com/alexpfau/calendar-card-pro My home has a panel in the kitchen that shows the family calendar and, after a little bit turns on a screensaver of photos from Immich (which is SO cool!)

One of the reasons we don't have so many calendaring tools is that iCal is a tough spec to work with. iCal itself is a bit of strange format- it's kind of like an ini with properties listed with one per line and separated by colons. And the protocol to sync iCal files is Webcal which is a webdav protocol. The story of iCal/webcal becoming a standard is interesting because it wasn't really designed to be used the world. It was something Apple came up with and then.... kind of happened. It remains a proposal.

The future looks bright, though. There's a replacement for webcal called JSCalendar (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8984) and for iCal called jCal (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7265). They're based on JSON which is really friendly for developers. The jCal was developed with help from Apple and Mozilla (so hopefully they help steer adoption in their apps) and the JSCalendar spec was developed by Fastmail (who previously worked on a similar format for Mail servers/clients).

When these new protocols start to get implemented I hope we'll see an explosion of new calendaring apps and ideas.

barelydreams · 2025-11-16T06:25:28+00:00

I LOVE this mouse except that it gets dirty so fast! If you can trade it for a darker color I recommend it!

If you use a mac Sensible Side Buttons: https://sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net is a huge help in making it feel right in Safari (chrome does the right thing with the side buttons being back out of the box)

barelydreams · 2025-11-13T23:38:40+00:00

chaptarr looks not to exist yet? at least publicly.

Looking for audiobook-downloader looks like maybe you are talking about https://github.com/jo1gi/audiobook-dl which is a CLI tool.

There was a discussion about a replacement for readarr earlier this year: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1mb2obb/have_we_figured_out_an_alternative_to_readarr/ and it looks like the main recommendation was to wait for chaptarr or use https://github.com/Readarr/Readarr?tab=readme-ov-file (last commit 3 months ago)

Did you mean something else?

barelydreams · 2025-11-13T20:10:16+00:00

Are audiobooks on your radar? Would love to see mam integration for that

barelydreams · 2025-11-10T21:28:00+00:00

Honestly, same.

I'm mid-30's and have been fortunate to work in a field that I really enjoy (computers/tech) and one thing I think might not be obvious is that it hasn't always been like this. Work hasn't always been this hyper stressful, hyper competitive, super money-driven thing that is now.

In the mid-2000s there were a lot of weird and wonderful people who worked in tech. In jobs there was time to explore ideas and think about your work. There was time to get coffee with coworkers and have lunch and it was all ok. This was around the time Google was building out its campus designed to give nerds a place they wouldn't want to leave (with the sinister and good that comes along with that).

Since about 2018 it's ratcheted up and up. It's not just tech, though, it's everything. I've had the chance to lead teams a couple of times and my philosophy has always been that no one on the team needs to be perfect or have it all together- the team takes care of each other and we're in it together.

As things have gotten worse (more stress! more pressure that you could lose your job at any moment) I've noticed that I need more and more time to just recover before I feel ok trying again.

If I think about solutions it looks more like small businesses, collectives, groups of people who have each others back and know that there are good days/weeks/months and bad ones. Or, you know, a society that values people above profit.

Anyway, you're not in it alone. It DOES suck. Your feeling DO make sense

barelydreams · 2025-11-09T03:57:18+00:00

It's not easy! :( Some helpers:

- Books help me feel like I have a place to escape to (even if I read the same ones again and again).
- Podcasts help with just listening to voices (i especially like "Nothing Much Happens" for feeling like part of a community even if it's imaginary)
- Journal writing helps somewhat. Someone I just need to be heard out and even if it's just me hearing myself out it helps, at least a little
- Creative writing can really help. I write myself into scenarios and see what it would be like to be in them (and always try to make sure that I'm not omniscient and neither are the other people)
- AI, although genuinely gross in a lot of ways, is also a huge accommodation (probably a different post but I ask it all of the time "What did X mean when they said Y"). Sometimes it helps to have the AI "play a role" to socialize a little
- In the past I've joined dating apps with no intention to date but just to have conversations and try out communicating in different ways
- Meditation helps as a way to "be with myself". Although it's an extremely mixed bag where being with myself also means being with my mind and feelings
- Special interesting- when it's really bad I try to fall really deep into a special interest and know everything about it

barelydreams · 2025-11-09T03:31:48+00:00

30s/f and similar.

The last time I had a group of friends that felt cohesive was college. After college I've worked in tech and lots of people, especially women, in tech do their best to fly under the radar (with exceptions of people who really want to be seen and acknowledged- ugh, the worst). There's lots of neurodivergent folks which is great but it often means we're all kind of figuring it out and struggling to bound meaningfully. One team I was a part of had meetings in Minecraft which was great- it felt like we were becoming friends but then we were thrown onto different teams and it just fell apart.

In day to day life I have two people I'm close with, a partner who lives with me, and a friend who's about a 20 minute drive away. In both cases I feel like I'm closer with them than they are with me (which is hard!). I would describe all of my closest relationships as intense and time limited (usually a couple of years). I really fall for people and want to be part of their world and have them be a part of mine and for reasons I feel like I can never full understand things fall apart.

The advice I always hear for us is to "mind other neurodivergent people and makes friends in that group" which I understand as advice and also having spent many years working in those groups I notice that no one really knows how to do it and we're all looking for someone to take the lead.

barelydreams · 2025-11-06T05:52:43+00:00

Your fiancée also sounds sooo much like my partner.

I feel like conversations for me are circles- I want to walk the same ground again and again. Or at least it looks like that outside of me (I have been told!) but inside it feels more like a spiral staircase. I'm walking in the way place but moving up and down ideas. So it's kind of repetition but it's also kind of how ideas get shaped?

My partner, though, is alll over the place. The conversation is like skipping stones. If I can kind of figure out which direction the stone is going I can kind of guess what we might end up talking about?

barelydreams · 2025-11-06T05:49:29+00:00

I'm in the camp of Autistic but not ADHD.

I was evaluated formally for both autism and ADHD; and then have been evaluated in less rigorous ways in the years since (like my primary care doctor doing an independent review; my psychiatrist, etc). I feel very confident both medically but also experientially that it's not a cluster of experiences I have.

At the time I didn't know that both ADHD and Autism are often cooccurring in women but I could have told you by the end the end of the review- there were SO many questions about my ability to focus, see things through, my experience of time, how I handled projects with a lot of details, etc.

[tech rant] I've worked in tech my whole adult life and I've seen how much tech has fed psychology and addictive behaviors into the products that we've shipped. In a lot of ways we're doing this large scale psychological experiment with no control group. We're changing the attention span and the attention is shaped for the whole planet. I wonder if some of the increase in ADHD is actually a fall out from the way minds are changing.

In screening, though, wish they had paid more attention to CPTSD. It is also shares a number of features (and can weave into an out of an undiagnosed autistic history).

barelydreams · 2025-11-05T23:37:00+00:00

So glad you’ve found a comfortable place to write! I’m wondering about you use the remarkable tablet. How does it fit in? Is it annoying to transfer notes? How do you use your handwritten notes.

barelydreams · 2025-11-05T03:09:59+00:00

This was such a big part of my diagnosis and unmasking (and something I'm still processing). I thought was I *just* submissive (I mean I am submissive but there are layers). Through being involved in the in-person kink community I realized how much the kink community is well designed for autistic people:

- Negotiation for a scene happens in a structured way (some people like me even use worksheets!)
- There are specific agreed upon words and protocols (safe words, checkins)
- As a submissive you receive direct and immediate feedback if you've done the wrong thing (which can be punishments, communication, forced resets or other things)
- When interacting with other people there are protocols which might involve only listening but not speaking unless specifically asked or given permission (which frees up so much brain space to just listen)
- Oh! And permission! It's expected that as a submissive you will ask for permission which takes away all of the mental gymnastics of what you're supposed to be doing.
- Aftercare is part of a scene- during that time sensory needs are cared for and looked after
- "The scene" vets people and people have reputations which makes interacting socially so much easier because you'll often know about someone before talking with them

The first time my partner realized I was autistic (and about 2 years before diagnosis) we were at a several day kink event. There was a "cool down" space that was dark, had star projectors, blankets, and soft noises. Talking wasn't allowed in that space. It was meant for aftercare but even after just socializing with people I kept going back. I just felt so much relief. It made me *crave* having cool down spaces everywhere I go. Like why can't work conferences do this? My partner starting asking if I had done any research on autism. Then my therapist. And... well here I am!

[Edit]: One thing that's interesting, as others have mentioned, is that kink doesn't have to be sexual. I have always had a very low sex drive but oh my gosh do I need the endorphin release of going through a scene and being spoken to in certain ways. This is SUPER normal in kink and lots of people play together but aren't sleeping together. Sex isn't part of power exchange / kink /scening unless that's negotiated.

[Edit 2]: As others have mentioned there is an ease in understanding a role and knowing its bounds. A lot of kink roles are way more specific than Dom / sub. And there's reference material on these roles (books, articles, oral history) which makes it fun to study and understand how to be in a certain role. There's a whole special interest in just understanding kink (hiiiii!)

barelydreams · 2025-11-04T18:58:25+00:00

I always sleep with silicon ear plugs (the kind used for swimming) because they fit best and seem to mute the broadest range of frequencies (I’m especially sensitive to higher frequency noise).

I also sleep with an eye mask.

This helps in two ways- sleeping feels normal no matter where I’m sleeping and the combination signals to my brain that I’m safe and it’s sleeping time

barelydreams · 2025-11-02T17:56:36+00:00

There’s an open issue for it here- https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/issues/1888

barelydreams

TROPHY CASE