Victor Villas

Born at 356.42 ppm COβ‚‚
πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦ Living the good life in YVR
πŸ‡§πŸ‡· Inner voice speaks in pt_BR
πŸ’» Paying bills with software

    me elsewhere

    Latest Updates

    • Finished reading

      Feb 9, 2025, 12:22 AM

      finished reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ—πŸŒ‘
      I think there's a certain audience for which this book is very much necessary, and I hope this audience comes across this book and make good use of it, because there's much to gain. It's specially important and useful for those who had, still have, or are still at risk of developing toxic relationships with loved ones. A big part of the book is built upon this theory of internal/external pathways to dealing with emotional hurdles, and this is a model most compatible with relationships that are closer to one of victim and aggressor.

      For readers that have more nuanced relationships, I think this book still offers some nuggets of wisdom and a lot of food for thought, but not as much is applicable. It's still possible to try and re-shape internalizer/externalizer situationally instead of categorically, but then we're again just trying to learn how to be reasonable people and the framing of the book becomes a distraction instead of an asset.

    • Media

      Feb 6, 2025, 7:29 AM

      Me and Aline side by side smiling in Whistler Village, the sun is out and the sky is a clear blue

      Happy as if it's sunny in Whistler

    • Comment

      Feb 5, 2025, 5:26 PM

      Winter cycling can be amazing.

    • Comment

      Feb 5, 2025, 4:11 AM

      OK, kind of giving up on for videos for now. Video format hassles and UI complications aside, I just realized that video posts are not federating and are not visible in the RSS feed.

      This combination is a dealbreaker for an replacement for me, so I guess I’ll be dumping would-be stories into Mastodon directly for a while to see how it goes.

    • Comment

      Feb 3, 2025, 8:38 PM

      So today I was able to post a story using a video from my gallery. I thought shortcuts would give me an easy way to convert HEVC to MP4 but no dice (possible but not easy). Instead the lowest friction method is to send myself the video using Telegram/WhatsApp and save the output, which is H.264. Quality goes down but it’s the price for now.

      Hoping that HEVC support comes out soon so I can save this work and post crispy videos of snowfall ❄️

    • Comment

      Feb 2, 2025, 7:35 PM

      I posted some photos of my Garibaldi Lake last autumn on which is foremost a photo of the lake but also has some pictures of some pretty we’ve seen along the trail.

      The feed from Pixelfed includes only the first photo from the carrousel so the hashtags make it look like I was hiking high on mushrooms.

      Not a big deal but it’s a funny example of the design challenges for open platforms that have to support wild ranges of interfaces.

    • Wants to watch

      Feb 2, 2025, 7:06 PM

      wants to watch Come from Away
      Shared by Senator Paula Simons on Mastodon. I’m not big on musicals but this one being Canadian themed fits the moment.

    • Comment

      Feb 1, 2025, 12:34 AM

      Red flags growing tall and agitated. So strange to see a psychologist make such a strong case for binary-categorizing people as externalizers and pretty much giving them all flaws and sins of this world.

      The book is very light in citations, so it’s mostly a person stating things. Not just a random person, of course, a professional and domain specialist, but still. Suspiciously thin supporting material. Reads as if written by the kind of therapist that would never not side with their client narrative if said client is labeled β€œinternalizer”.

      β€”
      Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents 40%

    • Comment

      Jan 31, 2025, 4:49 AM

      20 years in the and it's all still so fragmented. ActivityPub is promising, but is it going to be enough?

      I have to convince my friends to join at least one of or to keep in touch. Until they make the crossing we're practically cut off. I'm seriously thinking of starting a ... the one open protocol everyone uses.

      Family, workplace, masters, college, high school. In all of my AFK social circles, I'm still the only one here. This is a bit depressing.

    • Comment

      Jan 30, 2025, 8:54 PM

      I've known several decent humans that ended up working at companies that are straight up evil (like me, if I can indulge in thinking myself decent)... and I can sort of feel the Corrosion of Character settling in.

      archive.nytimes.com/www.nytime

    • Media

      Jan 30, 2025, 7:21 PM

      A view of the lake under a cold and cloudy gray sky

      Garibaldi Lake Trail

      #hiking #mushrooms #coldweather #graydays

    • Comment

      Jan 30, 2025, 4:32 PM

      Not looking forward to the year 2035 when social media is inundated with astroturfing LLM bots specialized in quarrelling and they learn to gaslight us by accusing us of being LLMs.

    • Wants to watch

      Jan 29, 2025, 7:31 AM

      wants to watch I’m Still Here

    • Started watching

      Jan 29, 2025, 6:36 AM

      started watching Disclaimer πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ‘πŸŒ‘
      Recommended by a few friends. Interesting premise and trailer. Halfway through, I can definitely say that the directors succeeded in making me uncomfortable watching the emotional violence of young Catherine over Jonathan, but I think the same could be achieved with less explicit sex screening... oof, I'm not used to it.

    • Started reading

      Jan 29, 2025, 6:19 AM

      started reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
      A bit late to reading this famous one, got it as an audiobook loan from the Vancouver Public Library.

    • Finished watching

      Jan 29, 2025, 6:11 AM

      finished watching Shrinking πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ—πŸŒ‘
      Jimmy is more decent as a character this season and the story branches out to showcase the rest of the cast a bit more. The setting has gotten a little bit more... artificial? Sometimes the writing is trying too hard. I think they went overboard the character development of Paul, Sean, Liz and Derek. Brian had it better. Derrick is a good character but the Gaby ending didn't cook properly.

    • Comment

      Jan 28, 2025, 2:23 AM

      Is there an RSS/Atom feed for profile activity? and both have it for every profile, but I couldn't find any docs on getting one for NeoDB.

    • Comment

      Jan 26, 2025, 2:17 AM

      Instagram import fails silently for posts with videos. Can’t post a new video because it’s HEIC (almost everything on my phone is nowadays?), and the app doesn’t support videos at all yet.

      Pixelfed meets my photography needs - not many - but it’s really not there as an Instagram replacement for the social part. Hoping it gets there soon, don’t wanna see a β€œbluesky but for photos and short videos” show up. Maybe I should be trying loops.video instead?

    • Comment

      Jan 25, 2025, 9:27 PM

      The issue was that Safari unzips the export automatically, and simply compressing it back doesn’t perfectly reverse the operation.

      Downloaded the export with Firefox and things just worked.

    • Comment

      Jan 25, 2025, 6:28 AM

      might not be the among the most relevant languages of the world economy, but go hard on social networks so I like to think we're a meaningful audience to think about.

      With that in mind... I wish developers knew that "fedi" in Portuguese pronunciation sounds like "stinks", so a website like literally sounds like "pixel stinks".

      It doesn't sound similar to, it sounds exactly so. I will never not be embarrassed of saying Pixelfed out loud to family.

    • Comment

      Jan 24, 2025, 7:04 AM

      Found a clue here: github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/p

      "The export may contain files in the webp or heic file formats, this media is not supported"

      But looks like there are other issues involved: github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/i

    • Comment

      Jan 23, 2025, 3:20 AM

      Any wizard out there knows what's up with Instagram import? Can't make it work for the life of me, it's a fresh IG export, v0.12.4 Pixelfed instance. All I get is "Invalid import archive".

      Looks like this issue is common but I found no reproducible workarounds out there.

    • Comment

      Jan 22, 2025, 4:44 AM

      I was hoping to self host before migrating to minimize how many times I migrate accounts, but I can’t keep supporting Meta just because it takes me ages to figure out how to build Pixelfed images :-)

      So pxlfd.ca/victor is my new home for oversharing moments and amateurish photography πŸŽ‰ hit me up over there or reply with your profile so I can populate my feed with the right people πŸ™

    • Comment

      Jan 16, 2025, 5:49 PM

      Reminds me of β€œThe God that Failed” by Metallica, understanding its lyrics was a turning point in my teenage years mastodon.social/@antiquated/11

    • Comment

      Jan 15, 2025, 4:07 PM

      How much of a dirtbag you need to be to cause your lawyer to fire you as a client and smear your name?

      This guy probably has a hundred times the capacity for self censorship than that of the average human being and he still chose to lead with that. infosec.exchange/@kurtseifried

    • Comment

      Jan 14, 2025, 8:16 PM

      Ah yes the main quality of immigrants… the need to survive immersed in systemic oppression.

      And to this day this rhetoric survives in the form of β€œthey’re taking away our unskilled jobs!” mastodon.social/@antiquated/11

    • Comment

      Jan 14, 2025, 4:07 PM

      Six dollars was of course a lot in 1827 but it’s still funny to not do that math and read this as a lowkey insult mastodon.social/@antiquated/11

    • Comment

      Jan 11, 2025, 1:31 AM

      This week has been a big β€œI told you so” moment for all the admins that defederated from the get go due to moderation concerns.

      And it’s sad to think that eventually the naysayers will get the marks on Bluesky too.

    • Comment

      Jan 9, 2025, 12:05 AM

      sobre mudar de opiniΓ£o… 40 Ways To Be Miserable me convenceu que existe livro de autoajuda que presta.

      E Simple Path to Wealth me convenceu a parar de me achar esperto e sΓ³ fazer o que todo mundo deveria fazer com os investimentos. social.vivaldi.net/@quartacapa

    • Started reading

      Jan 6, 2025, 1:27 AM

      started reading Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
      Shared by a Vision Zero friend. The introduction set me up for curiosity by stating that this book is not anti-car... but three chapters in, I can't say I believe that to be totally honest - it's impossible to be this deep in the weeds of car culture and not harbour at least some disgust for the cagers the book showcases. Well, if that statement made a carbrain read one more chapter before tossing the book, I guess it's a win.

    • Finished reading

      Jan 4, 2025, 6:12 AM

      finished reading Crucial Conversations πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ—πŸŒ‘
      One of the few decent books for self-development and interpersonal skills. Reading the book won't make anyone an empathetic and eloquent leader, but it does provide a framework to think about conversations that went wrong. Building safety, a shared pool of meaning, identifying crucial conversations before they happen or as they emerge... it's mostly common sense or being a decent listener, but the merit of the author is in organizing and making you focus and think about several little confounding factors.

    • Finished reading

      Jan 4, 2025, 2:55 AM

      finished reading Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
      Shared by a Vision Zero friend. The introduction set me up for curiosity by stating that this book is not anti-car... but three chapters in, I can't say I believe that to be totally honest - it's impossible to be this deep in the weeds of car culture and not harbour at least some disgust for the cagers the book showcases. Well, if that statement made a carbrain read one more chapter before tossing the book, I guess it's a win.

    • Finished watching

      Jan 4, 2025, 2:49 AM

      finished watching Kim's Convenience Season 1 πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ—πŸŒ‘
      Lighthearted and mostly wholesome, though a few bits are excessively silly. A great series to just hit play and relax on the sofa.

    • Finished watching

      Jan 3, 2025, 4:04 PM

      finished watching Drops of God πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ‘πŸŒ‘πŸŒ‘
      The series starts with a psychosomatic superpower outage, which gets unreasonably resolved in a flash. I don’t understand why the series had to make Camille be so sensitive to alcohol that she bleeds like a fountain after a shot/kiss, proceeds to confirm this to be a result of trauma with a lengthy brain-doctor scene, only to resolve this major life condition in a single moment of clarity. The writers could not make up their mind whether her childhood was traumatic or not, and suddenly it does a 180. Instead of a major trauma, what’s left from her childhood is the bounty of all her training, exposed slowly in a sequence of β€œtime to unlock more true potential” episodes.

      This contortion takes nearly a third the series for no good reason other than an attempt to reconcile common East-Asian tropes (hard training, wisdom of seniors) with common Western tropes (rural rich, sacrifices for success, life scars, youth freedom). It doesn’t work well to me, and for the most part I was more interested in Issei as a character because he was made complex in a similar way but without glaring inconsistencies.

    • Started watching

      Jan 2, 2025, 6:52 AM

      started watching Shrinking πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ‘
      Season two, looking good so far. Jimmy is slightly more decent as a character and the story branches out to showcase the rest of the cast a bit more, even Brian gets a substantial subplot of his own.

    • Finished watching

      Jan 2, 2025, 6:43 AM

      finished watching Shrinking πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ—πŸŒ‘
      The main character is disgusting, but the writers do a good job of force feeding us some empathy towards him using increasing doses of relatable struggles, pure hearted decisions and context for how he came to be the current mess. The other characters bring good laughs and a chuckle here and there, which lightens the load. By the end of the season, I'm invested in getting to know more about Gaby, Paul, and even Derek.

    • Started watching

      Jan 2, 2025, 6:37 AM

      started watching Les Gouttes de Dieu
      Recommended by a friend, related to wine tasting so I'm curious to see how it's portrayed

    • Wants to read

      Dec 27, 2024, 5:37 AM

      wants to read Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
      Shared by a Vision Zero friend

    • Finished watching

      Dec 26, 2024, 4:46 AM

      finished watching Dear Santa πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ‘πŸŒ‘πŸŒ‘
      Like most Jack Black movies… his lines and acting are the pretty much the only qualities of the whole thing. The mom and dad dialogues are garbage and the ending is deranged.

    • Finished watching

      Dec 26, 2024, 4:43 AM

      finished watching The Wizard of Oz πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ—πŸŒ‘
      Re-watched this classic to have more context for the newly launched Wicked. I now remember why I disliked the lion.

    • Finished watching

      Dec 24, 2024, 6:48 PM

      finished watching Your Fat Friend πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ‘
      Much needed and a delight to get to know more about Aubrey Gordon, someone I encountered via Maintenance Phase much after her initial success as a blogger/writer. The family discussions were unexpectedly real and moving, I'm grateful they felt comfortable in sharing those.

    • Finished watching

      Dec 24, 2024, 6:38 PM

      finished watching Tangerine πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ•πŸŒ—πŸŒ‘
      Definitely memorable as a Christmas movie. While the plot itself could not be more un-relatable to me, all the details and exposed surfaces of our culture are a feast for thought.