Finally a voice of reason - I don’t know who the psychos are who give up screwing for a whole month, but I have things to fasten.

• If you’re the owner of the home, know what bylaws there are regarding snow removal near your home. Where I live you can get a fine + snow removal costs if you aren’t reasonably prompt getting snow off the sidewalk.

• Snowy surfaces (sidewalks, driveways, roads) are often icy surfaces = slip and fall hazard. This is especially serious for older folks but it can hurt/injure at any age. This gets worse if it snows then melts then refreezes. Don’t run if you don’t have to. Sand/grit on these surfaces can help, and in my area you can get sand for free at certain town facilities.

• Frostbite on exposed skin is a genuine hazard. Look up the weather forecast when it’s cold and take time-to-frostbite warnings seriously.

We are sorry to hear you are disappointed with the Canadian gender identity. Please hold if you wish to express your concerns to one of our agents. Alternatively, courses on the benefits and challenges of being Canadian and what it means to be hockeysexual are available in English and French. Completion of the course grants access to free-but-slow healthcare and a $25 Tim Hortons gift card.

I’d find it odd if I enjoyed the same things as much now as I did when I was say, 6-12 years old. Games and shows for kids are meant for a child-like mind. You can still appreciate them for what they are - I’ve watched Lazy Town with my nieces and enjoyed the quality of the music and Stefán Karl Stefánsson as Robbie Rotten. But I’m not sitting down to watch it on my own.

Plus game design and definitely graphics can improve over time. E.g. I loved Golden Eye on N64 as a kid, but if I replayed it I think nostalgia would be doing a lot of heavy lifting. I replayed FF7 Classic a year or two ago and did not find it nearly as compelling as I did when I was 16. It was still alright, but it didn’t amaze me the way it did in PS1 days.

What’s a can opener? Kind of NSFW - like not really, but if someone walks in on you watching you’ll have some explaining to do.

Get either a piercing weapon to exploit weak points or a bludgeoning weapon to transmit force through the plate, because she’s clearly here to do battle. Dinner can come AFTER I’ve defended my honor.

Reddit:

• It has a much larger user base and many heavily specialized boards that nevertheless stay reasonably active.
• It’s a collection of echo chambers. Dissent is usually stomped out by mass downvoting and heavy moderation/bans. It’s rare to find a board that allows arguments for a long period of time. Agree with the board’s users/mods or get silenced. Posted rules do not matter, and you can definitely be hateful in ways that violate posted rules so long as that type of hate is acceptable on that board.
• So many users mean that getting content to succeed is a crapshoot. Often posts become lost in the noise, especially on busy boards.
• I left about a year ago, but apparently there’s a lot of bot/AI slop on boards now.

Lemmy:

• Much smaller user base. Heavily specialized boards move slowly if they exist at all. It’s not unusual to see boards where it’s just one/a few people posting with days in between new content.
• More ability to have disagreements. Whether it’s because moderating a smaller # of users is easier, the mods are less authoritarian, or whatever you are more likely to be able to disagree. Don’t be blatantly racist, celebrating violence, clearly trolling, etc. and you’ll probably remain able to participate. I’m sure this isn’t universal on all boards, but it’s my experience on many boards.
• For all that I believe the above point, there are still “echo chamber” moments on Lemmy. Sometimes it seems people may be downvoted simply because they are already downvoted. It’s still way less egregious than on Reddit, and such is human nature I suppose.
• Fewer users means you are more likely to get some engagement on your post, at least in my experience. I never sorted my feed by new posts on Reddit because it was an avalanche of posts of questionable quality, so I only saw whatever content had already succeeded. On Lemmy I can look for new posts and see most if not all content on the boards I enjoy.

• Take time off from social media once in a while, or at least avoid doomscrolling all day. Bad stories generate FAR more engagement than good stories, and every form of media knows this. If 100,000 people in your area have an average-to-good day and 5 people have terrible days, all 5 stories presented to you will detail how things are in your area are terrible.

• Physical health affects mental health and vice versa. Eat healthy (or healthier). Stay hydrated. Get 7-9 hours of sleep regularly and use sleep hygeine. Get 90+ minutes of exercise (anything that raises your heartrate) a week which is like 15 minutes/day. Don’t worry about doing it all immediately - if you try to change everything at once you’re more likely to get overwhelmed and burn out. It’s way better to make slow, sustainable changes over months than it is to do a difficult crash course for a short time and get fed up with the process.

• Do thankfulness exercises. When I go to bed at night I think of 3 things I’m thankful for in the day. On average or bad days it may be that I wasn’t in constant/chronic pain, that I got to eat and drink, and that I’m in a safe place and a soft bed. Just remembering those basics (that many of us take for granted) helps keep me aware of good things in my life.

• Find ways to enjoy hobbies that require participation - arts, sports, board/video games, whatever. Just something other than passively taking in TV/online media. This will help you feel engaged and double points if it’s something that allows for improvement because you’ll feel rewarded as you get better.

Occupational safety may be punk rock, but breaking forklifting rules is early-2010’s dubstep.

No worries friend.

Dammit, Lemmy says you beat me to the joke by literally 30 seconds. Which is the time I took to look up this:

Great minds think alike.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a nunya.”

“Do you mean a nun?”

“No, I mean nunya goddamn business.”

I like that it’s moderated fairly lightly but reasonably. Often I can have an actual discussion with someone who doesn’t agree with me without either of us getting banned by a mod who likes one side or the other. From what I see generally a user needs to be very obviously abusive/racist/violent before a mod steps in, even if the content is controversial.

I dislike that I’ve needed to heavily restrict my use for my mental health until after the election. A lot of people (not all by any means) believe it’s ok to bully and abuse other users because their cause is righteous - it’s already shown up in this thread. E.g. the daily posts and comments, with a lot of upvotes/support, that label anyone who disagrees with or criticizes Kamala (used to be Biden)/Democrats a bot, idiot, worse than useless, foreign agent and so on. I’m not talking about downvoting which is just expressing disagreement - I’m talking about outright insults and upvoting those. The attitude of “vote with/support me or else” has no place in a democracy founded on free voting without persecution, even if the bully is sure they’re right. If I didn’t mention it, perhaps even though I have, we might see a version of “but it is actually ok this time” and reasons why. It’s happened before.

Guess what? Very few “policy bullies” think they are evil - they’re positive it’s justified. Christians demand abortion bans, Muslim deportation, religion in schools/government and so on because they truly believe they are saving eternal souls. I was raised in that environment. That a sizable amount of Lemmy users believe it’s correct/admirable to insult others into “proper” behavior makes them very similar in character to those religious extremists IMO. Apparently when the issue is really important abuse is ok.

I’ll end by saying Gaza/Palestine is incredibly important to me - I am legitimately very upset frequently by the stories and media. However, Bernie Sanders convinced me to support Biden and then Kamala. Bernie laid out his argument with logic and facts and did not once insult my position. I also doubt the aggressive posts/comments are winning over undecideds. “I wasn’t sure if I should vote Democrat until I was called a harmful idiot and had my concerns dismissed as being in bad faith”.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert, just an interested amateur wanting to chat and drawing comparisons from past leaps in tech and other conversations/videos.

For a time expert analysis will probably work. For instance, the “click here to prove your not a robot” boxes can definitely be clicked by robots, but for now the robot moves in detectably different ways. My guess is that, for at least a while, AI content will be different from actual video in ways like code. There will probably be an arms race of sorts between AI and methods to detect AI.

Other forms of evidence like DNA, eyewitness accounts, cell phone tracking etc. will likely help mitigate deceitful AI somewhat. My guess is that soon video/audio will no longer be considered as ironclad as it was even a few years ago. Especially if it comes from an unverified source.

There are discussions about making AI tools have a digital “watermark” than can be used to identify AI-generated content. Of course this won’t help with black market-type programs, but it will keep most people out of the “deep fake for trials” game.

When it comes to misinformation on social media though, well…it’s probably going to get crazy. The last decade or so has been a race at an unprecedented scale to try and keep up with BS “proof”, psuedoscience, etc. Sadly those on the side of truth haven’t always won. The only answer I have for that is making sure people are educated about how to deal with misinformation and deepfakes - eg. awareness they exist, identifying reputable sources and expert consensus, and so on.

“Hang loose” is what you tell someone who needs to chill out and let the waves carry them away from their problems man. Align your chakras with the Earth and so on.

Seriously though, the reason I wrote like that is I’m using the slang of roughly 90s/2000s-ish California surfer culture, which is where the hand signal was used to tell people to relax and be happy. Or say hi and let them know you are relaxed and happy. If you imagine it as a gang sign for surfer hippies you aren’t far off.

Dude, radical emoji. That’s just a gnarly way of tell someone to hang loose, bro. I’ve usually seen it done left-to-right instead of up-and-down, but the universe is infinite so if you wanna flip it that’s totally copacetic.

Edit: I started thinking about surfers and it dragged up memories of this legend on Tosh.0

I have zero proof of this so take it for the musing it is, but the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine can be used to view articles that have been taken offline (sometimes for political reasons). The IA is a very accessible way to prove that once something is on the Internet, it’s out there forever. I used it in a recent post to show an Israeli newspaper article that argued Israel had a right to not just Palestine, but Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and other territories. It was taken off the newspaper’s website a few days later, but IA had it.

This may explain why no one is taking credit, and there are no demands. Or it could very well be another reason, including people just being assholes.

Yeah, and what kind of psychos would want to restrict public access to books in libraries?!?! I’m not on the conspiracy train until there’s proof and I agree with your post. Just saw a bit of irony there since a lot of North Americans are currently in the process of dismantling libraries.

I almost never buy multiplayer-focused games anymore. Of course not all gamers are shitty, but enough are to matter. Having left those games behind I can see how they were taking more joy from my life than they added. If friends want to do private co-op that’s cool, but it’s also rarer now that we’re all older.

As far as sales go, I love playing a year or two behind new releases. Patched games at a discount ftw and timing doesn’t matter in single-player games.

Generalizations like “All X are Y” should be used VERY sparingly if ever, and are almost never correct or helpful when talking about large groups of people - i.e. an entire ethnicity. Jews are people like any other ethnicity, and as such span the whole range of ethics and personalities. I personally know a very ethical and kind Jew who does not deserve to be labelled as an asshole or anything similar, and I know of many more who also prove that claim wrong.

Moreover, being abused is not a valid excuse to be an abuser. A lawyer tells a story about his client who tried to justify his domestic violence by saying he was abused as a child. The judge responded to the effect of, “then you should know even more than most people how very destructive and wrong it is”.