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> I can't get anything back as the court owns all the identity documents that I have and won't let me have them. In fact, when I asked a couple of weeks ago they said they have no idea where they put them all.

This is perhaps not what you were expecting to be asked about, but I’m curious nonetheless. So when you reported to prison you had to hand in your passport, driver’s license etc? And now when you were released they claimed that they have misplaced them? How do you get new documents, family members vouching for you or something like that?

Everything except my passport was taken either from my person or from my house. My passport had to be handed over in order to get out of jail. Actually my passport was handed over to the prosecutor years before I was released. The judge wanted the prosecutor to have it because it normally is held by the court, but they had sold R. Kelly's passport when they had it. I ended up spending three extra weeks in custody because the passport needed to go to the jail and the prosecutor's office refused to walk it the 100ft from their office to the jail and made my family come and get it and walk it over themselves.

This is all sorts of messed up. Sorry you’ve had to deal with this.

Surely the prosecutor's laziness keeping you in jail for an extra three weeks is something you can sue somebody about? That seems like a huge violation of your rights.

Yeah, I thought this over and over. It's actually hard to figure out exactly who to sue and for what. I've done a ton of litigation and at the end of the day this case just seemed too difficult to pursue, even though I had mountains of documentation and even the British embassy got involved at one point. I just have to suck it up like a bitch and accept I lost another three weeks of my life.

Did you notice the reduction of information density on web pages? I think that would be the biggest immediate difference. Old Reddit vs. new Reddit as one prominent example. The dominance of responsive designs now, as compared to the old separation between main site and mobile site, as another example. I guess hamburger menus weren't a big thing in 2013? I honestly can't remember. Maybe time to hit the Internet Archive and look at pages from 2013.

It's interesting thinking of the changes. I guess many of the current trends were well underway by 2013 so the current state would be different but not too different to you. At any rate, I'm glad you're out and hope you can sort the ID mess.

I actually like New Reddit, except for the advertising.

Design is much more responsive now, I'll give it that. Lots and lots of huge photographic headers. Hamburger menus? I'm guessing that is the name for the 3-line icon? They were pretty new in 2013 on mobile sites on my iPhone 5. And the 3-dot thing for "extra" options ... I don't remember that existing back then.

There is a reduction in information density.. some of it is warranted by an increase in white space which is good. A lot of sites now have super-intrusive advertising posted all the way through the copy, which wasn't common in 2013.

The sheer amount of data I burn through just browsing the Web.. that's a huge change. Even my mobile plan with 100GB of data gets burned in no time just browsing around. Sites are so, so heavy now. I saw that post yesterday about Discord having an enormous favicon file and so I can see that people just gave up trying to trim their code. I look at some HTML source now and I lose my shit because it is literally megabytes of bullshit. People were more careful with their code in my time.

One weird thing is that my brain doesn't know it is 2021 yet. I saw a show the other day where a woman said her son was born in 2011 and I did the maths and my brain said her son was two years old. This happens to me constantly. It's like my brain stopped counting time as soon as I entered the jail.

Strong suggestion: uBlock Origin ad blocker, including in Firefox on Android.

Other options include the Brave or Duck Duck Go browsers - similar features built in, but possibly less bookmark portability, etc

Thanks. I have ethical issues with ad blockers. As someone who has built businesses based on ads it pains me to hurt these sites, even though the ad situation is really fucked up in 2021.

I just found out about Brave this week. It looks promising. I didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser. I've been using the search occasionally. People say they can't switch from Google, but honestly their search quality is over-rated. They are really sanitizing their results more than the others recently. Even Bing is bringing back more results from really useful obscure sites than Google is.

Adblock Plus might be an acceptable solution for you, IIRC it has an "acceptable ads" program designed to only filter out the heavier or more intrusive ads.

Thank you for the tip. Just installed it. Open source, and powered by donations. Awesome.

Wait till you get a raspberry pi and install pi-hole

I find it really interesting that you love TikTok.

> it's actually fucking awesome for those of us with "neurodiversity".

Can you expand upon that a bit?

How engaged were you with social media before your sentence, and has that (or will that) change now that you've had some space from it?

> we would see the occasional video on the news

How does the picture that the media paints of the internet & social media compare to your observations now that you're able to use it hands-on?

I was really suprised about TikTok. I did a lot of social media marketing for nonprofits before I was locked up, so I was very into social media.

The thing with TikTok is that there are tons of videos helping, supporting and bringing awareness to issues such as ADHD, OCD, Tourettes, differing sexualities, gender identity etc, that are really refreshing and have really helped me to understand myself and my neuro-problems that caused me to get locked up. No other social network has that type of content.

Facebook was huge in 2013 and still relevant. Now I barely use it at all. I think Facebook has some big problems. I don't want to say it will go the way of MySpace as Facebook has been much better at adapting than MySpace was, and Facebook has some way smarter people and more money. It might even come back into trend again in the future if their "Meta" projects take flight.

The media only really shows the goofiest or cutest videos from social media. Nothing of any real worth. So my view of TikTok was very fucked up. TikTok is different for every person that uses it since your For You page is based around how you interact with the videos it gives you. I get zero people dancing on my page, and a lot of really smart content.

Also, for the first five years I didn't have any access to the news, for security reasons, so I was very cut off.

> Also, for the first five years I didn't have any access to the news, for security reasons, so I was very cut off.

What did they get you for?

The War On Redemption sucks so much I don't even want to know anymore. The past was better when we left it in the past.

I'm just curious about what warrants a 5 year news blackout for security reasons.

It's just standard policy at a lot of detention facilities in the USA.

That doesn't explain what warrants it tho.

Oh, nothing warrants it at all. The jails just like to control everything, even if there is no reason for it. Their policy is basically restrict everything and then dial back once sued.

What is the war on redemption? I have never heard this expression before and cursory searching does not yield anything.

I have an inkling of what you may mean, but I'd like to know more.

It's not the same person replying to you.

It's a label I use to group together the ways that society continuously ruins a transgressor's life, long after they've paid their penalty.

By moving the goalposts further and further away, we've made redemption effectively impossible & wiped out the strongest motivations for people to learn and improve from mistakes (penalized by justice systems).

Amen, brother. 90% of the people I saw in jail were there because of this. Once they had a black mark against them society would not let them reenter and they were forced onto the margins where inevitably something would happen that would cause them to reenter the justice system. Sometimes something as small as not being able to get to an AA meeting because they had no transport. Maybe 25% of the jail population were those who had made a minor transgression while on an ankle monitor awaiting trial and were rearrested for it. The lawmakers in Illinois recently passed a law allowing you to be able to buy groceries while on an ankle monitor, but just before the law became effective it was rescinded.