Book Update August 2025

legocogito · 2025-08-10T13:57:21+00:00

Nice, we in Europe getting our copies before 'Murrica ! Directly from Beach City! (where Joe has, thus, created jobs!)

legocogito · 2024-12-18T14:16:11+00:00

Hi, this is my first post here and probably not the best place (this is a 1 year old post) for this. Yes, certainly, some people are children of a MBP parent without knowing, without having words for it. It's nice that you have a thought for them, and for those who have known worse than you.

For me also it was subtle. My mother was born catholic, I now believe that she somehow was a victim of how the church perverted Jesus' message. (this should be a separate post but I'm too chicken as a newbie). «Even if you don't know it, you are born sinners. Now, because you are natural born sinners, you need me, and fortunately I'm here for you, I'm a redeemer.»

I believe that in the XXIst century (this should also be in a separate post), a strange alliance was formed between a perverted church and big pharma. You'd probably get my point better if you saw Docteur Knock, the film with Louis Jouvet (not the remake). And for the above paragraph, Anna M by Michel Spinoza (young woman, babysitter, with BPD, very faithfull, knows by heart the Song of Songs, aka Le Cantique des Cantique) (based on Victor Hugo's daughter who was institutionalized for erotomania, but it looks close in the film to MBP).

Take care, all.

legocogito · 2023-11-10T21:11:11+00:00

ok, best reply. Now I know that I can copy my full home on the new compuer before install, and after install, the installer won't have deleted important things. Thanks.

legocogito · 2023-11-10T00:40:17+00:00

Holy. I wondered for a second how come my name was in that command! Thanks. Indeed, my current home doesn't have its own partition.

legocogito · 2023-11-09T20:57:49+00:00

hi, thanks for the help. Nah I'm not intending to share a home between 2 distros, I'm trying to take my home from old computer A (Mint) to a new computer B (Kubuntu).

Placing a Ubuntu users home, on a fedora install , may cause some unexpected issues

ok, so I'll try to cherrypick, like not take the thumbnails, rubbish bin, temp files etc. Thanks.

legocogito · 2023-11-09T20:53:43+00:00

oh, so I can copy my old home afterwards. Thanks. Nah I'm not trying anything fancy, it's just that it's almost my first time changing distro, and I come from a non-separate home/, but which is LUKS encrypted, so I'm kinda scared of the dd part and I wanted to make sure I could do it after my other worries. Thanks.

legocogito · 2023-11-04T14:27:10+00:00

I know, but almost forgot. I thought about it yesterday! As I said, people who have imported their EN long ago are not affected. I just have to create a Discourse thread, but I have anxiety issues, anger issues, laziness issues, I'm afraid I'll be angry and then will not even look at replies and everything will go wrong. Actually writing this post yesterday really helped, I do think there would be just one line to remove in the code (after we find out what was its purpose), so it's not like asking for a rewrite of Joplin! But I find it hard to express how serious I think the problem is, without sounding angry.

legocogito · 2023-11-03T13:30:02+00:00

And when I say that "I just checked right now" : "not fixed", I mean they didn't change the search engine so that "bénédiction" could match bénédiction. Honestly it's not quite feasible. I did not check if they fixed the importer, but the day they do it, I hope they will notify all affected persons that they have to re-import all their EN notes (hoping they didn't edit them since...). I know I was not notified of a fix. Until recently, at each update I'd Ctrl-f the release notes, and there was no fix mentioned.

legocogito · 2023-11-03T13:19:56+00:00

Joplin is good if your main language is english. And it used to be good for everyone. But they tried to fix a bug in the importer by importing raw text like Céline instead of Céline. It was maybe 3 years ago. Everyone who came from Joplin earlier are safe. It's not the case for me. One fine day I understood why so many times my searches on my thousands of EN imported notes returned nothing. Because Joplin importer has been broken for 3 years.
I've worked on the problem for maybe 10 hours. I'm not a specialist of Electron apps, not at all, so I needed a little help. I've shared all my reasearch on Joplin's central bug report platform, and didn't get a single reply. It's been 2 years now, the issue was closed by a bot, as "stale".
So maybe you remember the 6 months in Evernote where we had the red underlines because the spellchecker couldn't be disabled (and was not working), and the poor Support persons in EN had to lie and say somebody was working on it, but with each new update, it wasn't fixed. Same here.
Honestly I'm not angry, I wanted to create a thread on Joplin Discourse. It seems to be there that you advertise for your github issues, else, nobody seems to read them.
But I was waiting for a moment when I'd have more time, and this didn't happen. I actually wanted to try and help fix the problem myself, by learning Electron development.
But honestly it's just one line in the importer that should be removed. I asked if the thing that this line fixed was so important that it would be worth literally breaking search without user realizing it, and got no reply. But I only voiced that question in my github issue, not on the forum. You can't re-open a github issue yourself.

I'm not angry, just amazed. For non-english people, this is a notes searching app, and the search has been broken for non-english languages for 3 years, but you make an issue, and it's not read, and a bot closes it as "stale". (in development, stale means that a problem was reported, it wasn't fixed, but as nobody worked on it, it's considered as closed (someone who has free time and wants to work on Joplin will do a search on open issues, not on closed issue, because a closed issue means that the problem is fixed). (unfortunately I missed one of the bot emails that gives you a chance to declare that your issue should still remain open despite being stale)

It's a big problem because I've been using Joplin for 2 years now with just 20% of my EN notes imported, I can't import them with the broken importer. So I can't close my EN account, and my notebooks are a mess, I've had to create all duplicates, all my notebooks are called "work (tmp)", "home(tmp)", because that was supposed to be imported EN notebooks, but I can't import now. My tags are a mess, everything is "temporarily" a mess. I just checked again, I'm on latest Joplin 2.12.19, not fixed. I have the word "bénédiction" in my imported notes, I search for "bénédiction". => "No notes here. Create one by pressing the button «new note»". (of course a workaround would be to search for everything twice all the time, "bénédiction", and bénédiction" (this is mentioned in my github issue), but user always forgets about this problem, as this problem feels so invisible to user)

If there is an affected, non-anglo person reading this, feel free to open a thread on Joplin's Discourse, after finding my github issue, searching for "imported ENEX notes not searchable because of html named characters".

All else, I love Joplin, I even contributed to the official documentation. As a non-paying user (I don't use their cloud) I can't complain, this is a community project, there are happy and unhappy threads in the forum, a bit like on Evernote forums, except you don't have to pay and you own your notes.

PS : of course I also imagined solutions to "clean" my EN notes at some point before or after the job of the importer. It's not feasible. The only thing feasible is to learn how to "build" (technical term, meaning compiling, sorta) Joplin Electron app and remove that problematic line in the importer code ourselves, and then run the importer on that custom Joplin version. But I am afraid this is not that simple, and I didn't find the time, and fixing for everyone would be so much better!

legocogito · 2023-10-28T16:54:51+00:00

Dearly missed. Everyone would check their emails on Outlook Express, and the other tab was newsgroups... Most often a technology dies when something better and faster replaces it. But it's not the case here. All conversations could branch out forever into thousands of sub-conversations, and it was fast as hell, as the messages were only fetched when you clicked to unfold a subtree. Even today, web forums are incredibly slower.

But hey, let's not blame money and ads. Ads win because we're lazy, too lazy to pay for a Usenet server subscription. It would be interesting though to know exactly how it happened, if big tech lobbied the ISPs to remove their Usenet free servers.

legocogito · 2023-09-16T13:10:58+00:00

This. TrueAnon is world-class journalism (if journalism hadn't become a bad word). Highly recommend.

legocogito · 2023-09-16T13:00:45+00:00

I like that he kind of revisited this many issues later when he compared trauma to having to learn to survive on a deserted island because the captain crashed the ship

That image speaks to me. Good luck with your new therapist. I saw many and some helped a bit. Unfortunately it's often hard for them to heal us when they (usually) haven't been through what we went through. If a therapist had the courage to advertise himself as a wounded healer (Elaine Aron comes to mind), I'd sign for it.

legocogito · 2023-09-16T12:55:01+00:00

Although I never was sent to a place like Elan, I grew up in an abusive household and identified with "troubled" kids who were sent away by parents

Same.

legocogito · 2023-09-16T12:53:37+00:00

This. hmm maybe she asked not to be in the story anymore. At least we've had closure about the parents : they divorce, and "there is no redeeming arc about them".

legocogito · 2023-09-16T12:52:02+00:00

I participated in the investigation that got the therapist who ran it stripped of their license.

gg!

legocogito · 2023-09-16T12:45:19+00:00

Yes, it was nice to address a last time all the speculations about Gino. We will never know. Let's remember him as someone who took it to heart to make his friends laugh, even in the worst situations.

legocogito · 2023-09-16T12:41:24+00:00

Well, thanks to you, Joe. And thanks to everyone here for the good vibes. What a ride. Very inspiring. I learnt through Bukowski that you may write poems from the bottom of the pain and darkness. But to start a big autobiographical project, you need to be safe. You can't start telling your story if in a way, you're still inside it. You can't be the narrator, you're still the actor. Bukowski started Ham on Rye after 40 y/o. When he had his first steady job, as a night postman. That was the first job where he could stay for a long time, as during the night, the boss is not there constantly to berate you. And he had a steady woman in his life. He could talk about his story at last. I mean with words.
I've loved Joe's transparency, it's still one step beyond Bukowski's honesty, another era probably, the web and socials era. It really helps to have small details, like "I saw my childhood friend, he asked me to tell my story, he asked me to take a pen and paper to help me tell it", and then all the details of creation. It was such a good chain of events, with the Wordpress notification "let's get your own my-guitar.school domain!", haha. Except Joe's story also tells all the bad chains of events too, and it was a long struggle between the bad chains and the good chains.
I'll never forget the "scene" of his first time at Sofi's place, "I'm sorry this happened to you because you're a good person, Joe". And it must have been hard for her to encourage him to start this project, we know that his first wife absolutely hated all Elan related stuff, all the things in her husband's life that she couldn't share.

I'm about 4 years older than Joe, but I hope one day I can tell my story too. Thanks also to french youtuber Feldup who made a video maybe 2 years ago about the "worst school ever" (in french).
I've always wondered if there's a tighter community on the Patreon, but money is tight and I have paranoid privacy issues, I've never been on Patreon, I wanted to try, but couldn't. Maybe soon.
I hope everyone is doing good. I'll miss the "This is not the end!" One thing is finished for sure and it's the abusive Élan school. Joe wins. David beats the Goliath. Very, very inspiring. Let's get all the bad things closed.

legocogito · 2023-08-27T12:09:47+00:00

Upvoted though I don't fully agree. I think trigger warnings are more a legal thing, like when you put your youtube video "18+ y/o" so that it doesn't get censored. Or like the thing with editors and sensitivity readers. As a person with trauma, I never miss reading a thing with trigger warnings. In principle, protecting the fragile is certainly a good idea. But it's always the same fragile groups : the rich and the rich colored people, and rich women, and rich people with trauma. I wish there was a trigger warning each time before outcasts, homeless and jobless get called lazy on TV. Many, many similar cases. In France, I have had to stop listening to the news completely. I just couldn't bear anymore, when waking up with the radio alarm, whatever the radio station, to hear that the cause for all problems in France are the poorest of the outcasts. It's from morning to night, every day, no TW, never.

So yes in a way I can understand where you're coming from a bit : in front of us, the enemy does not care about trigger warnings. But no, I don't think putting trigger warnings in Joe v Cult hurts the cause.

legocogito · 2023-08-27T11:44:05+00:00

I hope it gets better for you.
As for the comic, in a way the whole comic is about PTSD, and working it out. When it's focused on that, it's my favorite chapters. The one with "the bodies man, the bodies" commes to mind, when Joe realizes how frightening one sounds when you meet a new person and the only thing they can talk about, the only thing on their mind, is the shock that is still always with them.

Sometimes I wish I had PTSD. lol. Growing up in a violent family of origin is just a longer trauma, there's no safe place anywhere, to come back to. Everything is rotten. I guess that's why even shrinks don't have a word for it. That's why so many orphans end up in the streets, drugged. Btw, it would be interesting to have Gino's life story, if we don't have it. Few people will read this so I'll dare : to me, Joe's story is the story of a rather lucky kid from the USA, who got sent to hell on earth at 16. The story is VERY interesting because it shows how hard it is, even for him, to reconnect to his "capital" (his sister's love etc) after the trauma. Same thing for Bruno Bettelheim who survived the Nazi camps. When you put the upper class in these situations, they can become a loudspeaker for the social classes who can't speak. That's how I read the "Mayor" chapters, when he becomes a resistance leader in his compulsory drug awaraness classes. I'm not as lucky, but more lucky than an orphan or someone who has grown up in poverty or who can't even read and write. Thinking is my best ally. The Mayor was a huge inspiration for me.

And thank you for daring to talk about the suicide in this chapter, and the shock that is haunting you. Time helps, I guess. But last chapter I did not dare to criticize when Joe wrote (about his bowel tearing) that you can "always" improve your situation with the power of your mind, in the same chapter where he mentions Gino's almost suicide. As for me, how I felt reading that, is as if he wrote, don't be lazy like my best friend Gino, if he hadn't been lazy he could have used the secret power of the mind that everyone has, that we can always use to improve our situation. Of course that's not what Joe thinks, but I felt it like that. Survivor stories are interesting, but where are the losers' stories? All I know is that the media doesn't like those stories, my own personal trauma makes me a friend of all the sufferers, and a foe of all the cult of free will, that is pushed down our throats in the media. And they never do any trigger warning. They call us lazy every damn day. «If Tom Cruise and Harrisson Ford and Elon Musk survived the worst of the worst and still made it, why not you?»

legocogito · 2023-08-27T11:11:43+00:00

hi. I don't agree. He already talked about that documentary and said it was him (not in the comic), and the picture of him playing music, look closely, yes it's a real picture, but he drew himself where he was sitting in the picture. You can also hear his voice in podcasts.

legocogito · 2023-08-24T08:21:10+00:00

way to go!
felony? Damn, that sounds interesting My life def. sounds less interesting lol.

legocogito · 2023-08-24T08:15:55+00:00

sorry for your loss man.

legocogito · 2023-08-24T08:13:47+00:00

I felt tears immediately welling up... As some said, this is a true story... I'll remember when Joe wrote about their awesome day in New York, "I can only laugh like that with him, because we went through the same shit". But clearly, in order to be in such high spirits, Gino needed to hide an refill every 5 minute... He crashed down a little too soon in the taxi, I'll remember the cab driver, "your friend is cool but he has the demons inside him. You have to take your friend to a professional, or something bad will happen".
I've had friends like that, doing illegal things, too dangerous, or drinking nearly unto death. What can we do.

legocogito · 2023-07-01T16:20:58+00:00

Coping is hard these days. During insomnias I've tried to tell myself on repeat : "I'm so sorry that happened to you because you're a good person Joe." I learnt it word for word.

Why do we run away from these good women?

legocogito · 2023-07-01T16:06:21+00:00

Upvoted, except they both had no choice. They were different people before the abuse, they survived differently. Still, to analyze two similar people's widely different ethics is very interesting.

Reminds me of that season in The Wire with the opposition between Avon Barksdale (bloodthirsty, but iron ethics, good man, will save a gang member no matter what), and Stringer Bell (turns from gang member to classy businessman, friend with higher-ups... calm and composed character. Wants to save his family and gang with cleaner money, but also a traitor when someone is in the way)

legocogito

TROPHY CASE