Yep. Exactly this. I'm white and my wife is black. We live in one of the states where our relationship was a crime just 55 years ago.

Her grandfather has stories about what happened to people who crossed the race barrier (of course the law only punished minorities for it, not the white partner). We're not far removed from those horrors and lunatics are already trying to drag us back.

Thank you for these links. I'm looking over them. Hopefully I can implement some and see what happens.

And I'm very aware she wouldn't know better. It's just difficult to get her to recognize boundaries. She always wants to play or get in your business. And I understand. She's curious and I'm a lot more interesting than her toys.

But my issue is that while we're teaching her those boundaries, I have pretty much nowhere to go in the apartment to escape in the meantime. Just like she wants places to hide when she wants to be alone, I need that too. I get home from shouting matches with angry people in my industry to be pounced on for a while. I don't often have it in me to engage. I just want to be alone for a bit to recharge.

Cat tax:

Yeah, I really wanted to get an adult or senior cat if we were going to get one. I've had limited exposure to caring for cats, and kittens are challenging.

She actually tolerates her carrier, but our apartment doesn't have enough space for a large dog crate so we could put food and water in there with her if she needs it.

I'm going to mull over whether or not I can hang on that long. I'm not optimistic considering how tough 3 months was. That said, we're going to make sure she goes to a good home no matter what. She's a good cat and someone with more experience and a better environment would no doubt love her.

Yes, it's not only possible, but fairly easy to do! Depending on which registrar you purchased your domain through, you may be able to have them host your email. That may be the easiest option, but your registrar could suck so I can't recommend that off-hand.

Third party providers, like mailbox.org, mailfence, proton, tuta, runbox, zoho and others can all host your email. You just need DNS records and proof it's your domain.

Below is a link to mailbox.org's guide on hosting with them.

I read a few different guides and it seemed like the most comprehensive. The steps should be fairly similar for every potential email host.

https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/using-e-mail-addresses-of-your-domain/

If you self host? Absolutely. That's a nightmare. Paying a provider (like proton, for instance) to manage your custom domain email is easy. I haven't run into any issues having my email accepted, even by hotmail addresses.

You might run into issues with some newer TLDs, but that is slowly being fixed. Also .xyz domains get sent to spam a lot because they're usually used for malware.

If you're willing, I strongly recommend people get their own domains. That way, you'll always be able to change email providers without changing your address.

I ended up settling on Infomaniak's kSuite after looking around. They're a mid-sized registrar and hosting company.

They're partially employee owned (and I believe in the process of becoming fully owned by employees). I'll grant their privacy policy is just standard EU/Swiss boilerplate, though (stuff like no sharing your data, etc., that you always find in EU paid services like this). GDPR compliance was all I was looking for.

The web client looks nice and kDrive is affordably priced if you need a Google docs/photos/drive alternative.

Edits: clarity and me refreshing my memory on their privacy policy

Self hosted email is its own can of worms. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone outside of experienced IT people. You'll end up blacklisted before you send your first email if you do anything wrong (and there's a lot that can go wrong), and it doesn't solve any security problems email has.

Anything sent over email just isn't private. That goes for Proton customers when they send or receive anything from a non-Proton address too. The one thing privacy email providers can actually do is keep your inbox from being scanned by LLMs and advertisers. That doesn't prevent the inboxes and outboxes of your contacts from being scanned, though.

If you use email, the best thing you can do is be mindful of what kinds of information you send through it. Use aliases via services like simple login or anonaddy when possible. Having a leaked email is a security vulnerability. Once bad actors have your email, they now have half of what they need to breach multiple accounts.

I'm also sick of hearing about Swiss privacy laws. Their intelligence service got busted covering for a US and German spy front operation in Switzerland. If it happened once, I promise it has happened before and since.

Edit for those who can't click: a front company in Switzerland sold fake encrypted communications services around the world for years, possibly decades, with the assistance of Swiss intelligence agencies.

They aren't burning fossil fuels. They're burning CHOOH2, which is the product of a genetically engineered plant.

Everything else has already been addressed by others. It's a dystopia. Public transit exists in universe, but it's very dangerous (as is the rest of the city). The corporate solution is to upsell you cars.

When I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old, my family lived in this old house that used to be a Civil War hospital during a few battles.

All kinds of weird shit happened there, but one event stands out.

I was sleeping between my parents in their bed on the second floor. I woke up. It was late and very dark.

I looked to my right and saw the curtains blowing in. The windows were painted shut. I watched as the curtains start to slide off the wall. It looked like someone was holding them up. I shit you not. Like I could see feet just underneath the bottom.

The curtains moved to the foot of the bed, and fell.

I don't remember seeing this, but my parents swear I told them that when the curtains fell, a woman with a yellow dress and no eyes had been holding them up, and that she stood at the foot of the bed for a while.

The curtains, according to my parents, we're in fact on the floor at the foot of the bed. I can't vouch for that though because I was a kid and frankly, don't remember.

My best non-supernatural explanation is that I had sleep paralysis that night and hallucinated much of what I saw. I've had it chronically since, so it's possible.

I don't know though. It's one of those things I think about late at night when I have too much free time. What the fuck did I see?

I personally like Mailfence. But the others aren't bad alternatives either.

Fastmail is Australia-based, so it's a privacy nightmare. If you're okay with that, it's cheap and works. You get a lot of storage for what you pay.

Tutanota is a German option, but you have to use their email client. They use a custom encryption protocol instead of your typical PGP. They're good, but at the end of the day I like my third party email client.

Mailfence is Belgian and only has infrastructure in Belgium. So they don't even respond to court orders outside that jurisdiction. They offer PGP. Also support IMAPS, etc, so you can use your own email client.

I don't like ProtonMail, and I know this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I don't like them. They have been busted giving client data to law enforcement without a warrant, they don't encrypt the email subject line, they still log IPs like every other service, and they received a ton of venture capital funding. I fully expect their enshittification to happen soon.

Posteo and mailbox(.)org are also options. Never used them so I can't vouch. I hear good things about both though.

And if you're in Europe or have your own domain, Infomaniak offers a suite comparable to Google's at a competitive price. I haven't used it either but it could be good.