It can be other things. Some of why I didn’t get stuff done when younger was actually a symptom of PTSD from unrelated trauma. Basically my stress response is messed up and so anything I could link to stress or shame can make me avoidant, which snowballs into not doing the thing and more stress.

When I unlinked daily tasks from shame and stress I could suddenly do them, as I actually have ok executive functioning when PTSD isn’t messing with me to cause avoidance which as I understand would not really be the case for ADHD. Although PTSD and the like can also pop up in ADHD people who were bullied for their symptoms.

Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

Yeah, people forget that form follows function.

The parameters for making a USEFUL plastic that ALSO degrades gives a narrow band. Too degradable, and the function of fulfilling all the areas plastic is currently used for can’t happen. Not degradable, and we have the current situation.

Plastic being is in use not simply to fuck the planet over or something, but because compared to other materials it has physical qualities that things like glass, wood, fabric, etc. don’t have, that’s why it’s ended up in so many things. It’s lightweight, strong, and “plastic” (that is to say, more easily shaped and molded than other materials, and I suspect there’s a labor component too where maybe it needs less labor to shape and form).

I’m eventually going to write a story about a sci-fi world that’s under quarantine because they successfully made a plastic-eating bacteria that never stops eating and breaking down plastic. Go there and most of your technology/clothes/etc. are eaten away. I might throw in wood, too…a world with no wood or plastic because the local bacteria is like, “Yum, yum, food!” and gets into every nook and cranny. I anticipate I’ll have to do a lot of thinking to figure out how drastically technology would change under these parameters…I imagine a lot of it would be very “brutalist” because you’d have to rely on heavy-as-balls metals and cement and stone and such. Unless there’s an Aluminum Future or something, where everything that can be made out of aluminum, can. Of course, there’s also the byproducts of intense metals mining to think about on a fictional world like that. Anyway, lots of details to pick apart for worldbuilding.

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

No, but knowing people and being so persuasive they’ll come do shit for you and your team is a skill.

I’ve had bosses that were very affable and able to talk just anyone around and it truly is a useful skillet

Edit…skillset, even

So, from a meta perspective, no real people died or were harmed. And the things real people get from a story are not a direct one to one analog to what goes on in a story.

Stories let people process things without actually having to participate in them. The fictional characters are not real. The person reading is, and generally filters what they read through a lifetime of experiences, picking and choosing what to integrate into themselves. Watching media or reading books and liking things doesn’t turn you into a bad person simply by exposure.

It’s true a story can spread a dialogue, but acting like someone is a terrible sinner guilty of the most horrifying thought crimes because they like the bad guy in a story isn’t really different in my mind that someone religious peddling nonsense like you’ll go to hell if you merely think a thought that isn’t in line with a holy book.

I think sometimes people raised in religious homes with all that guilt about thinking sinful things stop going to church, but sort of copy and paste the moral thought crime bullshit onto random things and pick that up as their replacement zealotry because it feels familiar.

I see it happening a lot in discussions of media with darker content.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

The reason dog food is a no for cats isn’t because it’s harmful if they eat a kibble or two, but because dog food isn’t fortified with an amino acid cats need, taurine, so feeding a cat exclusively on dog food will result in a type of malnutrition in the cat.

https://www.petmd.com/blogs/nutritionnuggets/cat/dr-coates/2014/december/what-taurine-32287

I’m skeptical too.

Lots of software is designed so the delete button just flags an entry so it doesn’t show to low privilege users on the front end, while the data persists in the database where database admins and the like can still access it.

Online it’s wise to assume every website acts like this if you don’t actually run the site yourself with full admin access to the underlying web server and database . Once what you write gets on a site it is permanently out of your control in most cases.

Aren’t there, in blind cave species where there’s no pressure to select for coloring to protect from the sun or to camouflage or display for mates?

My thoughts too. I’ve always hated pdfs because they struggle to load, while word opened fine.

One caveat… online browser based word processing can’t handle truly long docs, the browser chokes on it. Maybe people are running into that if companies take everything to the cloud with word 365 and google docs.

As a long form writer, I hate online word processors.

Uh, well…I grew up in a technologically-backward household. So the tech I grew up with was behind the times, even then.

Examples: in the 1980s/1990s, my household didn’t have a basic answering machine, when everyone else did. And our telephone was still the old rented-from-ma-bell rotary phone where you stuck your fingers in the holes and rotated the dial. Modern landline phones in the 90s were NOT rotary, and some were even wireless (the handset talking to the wired receiver on the wall attached to the landline). I think the rotary one we had probably dated to somewhere between the 50s-70s. Everyone else I knew had ordinary buttons on their (landline) phones, we were the only ones I knew with a rotary phone.

We absolutely didn’t have a computer. We didn’t even use the TV we had, it was banned.

My very first exposure to COMPUTERS was therefore at school. School had the big-floppy (that were actually floppy) type, the 5.25" ones OP mentions, and school also had the ones that used the smaller floppy disks.

But my first exposure to computers-for-fun were neighbor’s computers. One neighbor, a grandpa like guy who I think at some point worked trades but was retired (maybe disability), showed me how to make holiday cards on his computer. Like, dot matrix printer type of graphics, very very basic. Thinking back, I vaguely remember the command line, so I think it was a Windows DOS computer we used.

And another friend, a boy 5 years younger than me, had DOS computer at home, so we’d play things like Commander Keen and Lemmings. Since there was no Windows GUI yet, we had to use the command line to launch the game executable. This was like 1993, I think?

I also had a different friend and she had an Apple computer, and I remember King’s Quest.

The town library had computers too, and I played Oregon Trail and the first Sim City on it, before these computers had internet on them.

Later, by middle/high school though, the internet was taking off. And I was an ‘early adopter’ of that because I was a nerd and used it to find other nerds, and I would go to the library and basically do the then-equivalent of social media–individual niche message boards and email groups for my fandoms and interests–before I had a computer of my own. Those were usually Windows 98 or Windows 95 machines. I was even running a message board and website before I had a home computer or my own home internet, using library and the local community college computers to teach myself. It just sucked I couldn’t do it at home.

Oh, and most teens used AOL to chat, although MSN and Yahoo messenger apps also had their crowds. And ICQ existed too and was very popular, although more with the nerdy niche-topic crowd.

Finally, at 18 in 2001, I got my own computer, and that was Windows ME (a SONY VAIO) with one of the early flat-screen LCD monitors which was super fancy for the time. A few years later I upgraded it to Windows XP.

But I didn’t like that it was a propitiatory type that wasn’t easy to upgrade. I was trying to play WoW with friends and doing Wrath-era Naxx would cause my FPS to become utter dogshit because the integrated graphics and the shitty amount of RAM couldn’t handle it. It was a joke in the guild, me disconnecting in fights and my DPS being so spiky. So I eventually did away with that first computer because its poor performance would make me gamer-rage, haha. The first computer I BUILT myself in the early 2000s to replace it had an AMD cpu. I don’t remember what video card I chose, but ANYTHING was an upgrade over the previous computer, lol. And I got a lot more RAM, upgraded from MBs to GBs.

But anyway, since then I’ve mainly had desktops I’ve built myself, although recently I got a backup laptop. It came in unexpectedly useful when I broke my foot and couldn’t sit at my desktop without it swelling to high heaven, so while I still prefer a desktop, I give that laptop some grudging respect, lol. It saved my sanity.

The rate of improvement in computers has massively slowed down, it’s stabilized, so I’m not as interested in continually upgrading as I used to be. Phones and tablets are the thing that took over in the “rapidly changing” niche…but I have something of a phone-phobia, and as a writer can’t write effectively on a tablet, so I’m not much interested in phones and tablets from a tech perspective. They’re underpowered and/or expose me to phone convos which I hate and avoid whenever possible.

Utility locators.

Everytime someone digs a hole, whether to install a fence post or dig a basement, existing utilities have to be located so they don’t get hit. Its needed literally everywhere rural or city, and very understaffed.

But its long hours and outdoors. Less taxing than other trades though, and women can do it as it doesn’t require much physical strength.

And hormones in humans have severe life lasting side effects.

Not having hormones has pretty severe effects. Women who’ve gone through menopause (or had ovaries removed) and don’t produce hormones often get prescribed hormones to prevent things like osteoporosis. Men with low testosterone get prescribed it. Children who don’t produce hormones don’t go through puberty–in the past, they castrated boys with pretty voices so they’d never have their voice break, and that had severe health consequences on the boys turned into eunuchs.

I’m saying all of this because when it comes to “hormones”, you kinda have to be specific. You can’t just throw it out there like, “oOooOO! Hormones! Scary!” Otherwise you get into a realm similar to how people hear “dihydrogen monoxide” and don’t make the connection between the “scary science word” and the fact that dihydrogen monoxide is water and is necessary for life.

I’ve nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn’t have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.

I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I’ve mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam’s own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.

The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield–it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn’t have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III…but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it’s supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it’s been rock solid.

I’ve played No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don’t feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)

Thumbs up for the World Tree.

Your account has 4 posts over a few months and one comment. Maybe you have actually been using Lemmy for longer on another account, but we can’t see that.

I’m an Elder Millennial, used to admin/mod a fandom forum around 1999-2002ish. A small percentage of active users essentially carrying the content of small niche communities on their back until ignition happens has ALWAYS been how communities work. It’s like that in real life, and it’s like that online. It was like that when niche message boards and forums reigned in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was like that on usenet, in IRC, on email groups. It was like that on World of Warcraft, when you tried to get a guild off the ground for raiding or something. It’s like that here on Lemmy, because Lemmy is a social platform too.

The only real solution to grow a community is to jump in and create content yourself, to help communities along until one or two ignite and take off. You have to participate yourself to change the culture, not just bitch in a post that it’s “changed” and that you’re going to stomp off if it doesn’t “change back”. (Although, that type of post is, admittedly, also a tradition as old as time.)

Anyway. Communities starting small and needing people to grow is just…a thing. This is how volunteer organizations work in real life–why do you think they’re constantly pleading for other people to get involved? Because you need people who actually pull on their adult pants and get in and do the work of organizing things, doing things, instead of sitting about like a lump consuming it.

You can move back to reddit of course, if you want. That’s similar to moving from a small town to a big city for the night life, which people do. Maybe you don’t have the time or energy to essentially “volunteer” your time on a small community to help it grow.

But the thing you’re complaining about is…just part of how communities work. Communities have always revolved around a few people contributing most of the content until the community takes off (or doesn’t).

So, rationally, what’s the next step? Stepping up your own contributions, or going off somewhere else?

Only you can decide because only you know your IRL time commitments. But one action is going to be more useful to helping niche subs get off the ground than the other.

(Here’s something interesting: The Frugal sub has a shit-load of people subscribed who eagerly jump in feet-first if you start a relevant topic. Why doesn’t someone here with an interest in that sub go over there and start a post?)

We might need to define “unhealthy” here. Mine is going to be different from other people’s.

Regarding food, I believe the pop definition of “unhealthy” is wrong. As far as I can tell, after having worked in the food industry on the regulatory side, and after having tried to understand nutrition from a truly scientific standpoint, the biggest goof people make is portion size, and, less commonly, having too “small” a pool of foods they’ll eat so certain vitamins/minerals are lacking. The rest of it with added sugars or fat or this or that ingredient being “bad” is smoke and mirrors. Portion size is really, really, really fucking important.

You can be healthy eating just about anything (even McDonald’s) as long as the portions are appropriate for your size and amount of exercise, and so long as your diet is varied enough overall to bring in enough vitamins and minerals. So, eating 3 super-sized meals at McDonald’s might screw you up because the calories are too much for your level of activity, but if you scale it back to 1 a day and keep the meal size “small”, or even eat a happy meal as an adult, you’ll be ok.

Regarding vitamins and minerals…in the modern day, people tend to be deficient in vitamin D because they don’t get enough sun, so that sometimes needs to be supplemented. And individuals will sometimes be deficient in iron or vitamin C. I supplement with C because I tend not to eat many foods with it, and D because I’m a vampire-like nerd that stays away from the sun.

Anyway. To get back to the question, I basically eat what I want, without regard for whether pop culture thinks it’s bad or not, but I pay attention to portion size and I do not snack. I’ve sometimes fallen into keto behaviors or one-meal-a-day but I don’t follow either with any dedication, my natural patterns just fall close to those.

Do I sometimes buy and eat things that are unhealthy for me? Well, by MY standards…not really. I understand nutrition, and I understand portion sizes, and it’s not all that hard for me to eat appropriately for my size without worrying about whatever the latest health food fads are blabbing on about. And because I understand what I’m doing, and I have control of it, I don’t feel guilt.

I permanently lured my friend’s cat from sitting on her (warm) laptop power brick by getting the cat a heated cat bed.