Casual Conversation

In the final stages of moving from the deep south to a northern state.

I used to run a shop under a corporation. Long story, but I integrated the shop, and built something beautiful. I had to use a temp service to do a lot of my hiring, I hired lots of black folks because they were undervalued and I could give them a good environment and pay. Was just starting to hire women. COVID and Qanon blew it the fuck up.

Tomorrow I'll be having lunch with two of my former crew. One of them is the only man I've ever called brother. He was my neighbor and best friend for years. I would have trusted him to help me hide a body. The other feller was a kind and gentle guy, had a bad divorce but was a teddy bear, was on the road back up.

They both went down the rabbit hole real bad.

I miss who they were and the shop we had. It was fucking jazz. I protected all of them from corporate. We made shit happen. I fought to get them more money and got fucked over myself.

I've lost my parents, my grandfather, my aunts and uncles and cousins to the insanity. Thank jeebus my grandmothers and one grandfather are dead.

Tomorrow I'm going to hug my brother and tell him goodbye. He isn't really my brother anymore. I don't trust him. I love him. He's not the man I knew.

It hurts a lot. It broke my heart.

Especially if your don't care about going to the beach/swimming pool. Or being outside in general. Also I despise longer days.

We no longer say RTFM, read the fucking manual, anymore. I wonder why that is. Is it because more and more projects are moving all documentation to discord?

Some projects still have manuals... But there seems to be less expectation people will familiarize themselves with manuals anymore. I wonder why

Basically, title

Also, as a reminder, the third rule of the community is

Avoid controversial topics such as politics or societal debates

For places that can host political/societal discussions:

• !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
• !asklemmy@lemmy.world
• !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world
• !general@lemmy.world
• !goodoffmychest@lemmy.world

As always, feel free to discuss this rule in the comments if you think it should be reviewed.

With all the negative stuff going on (Trump's failed assassination) and everything, it is natural to get absorbed in the doomerism. Of course, pretending that nothing scary is happening isn't the best thing to do. Scary stuff is happening, and we need to take action.

That being said, I personally trust Americans to do the right thing. Trump won't win, and America won't go fascist. This is because good people will fight and win. Same goes with other countries (France and the UK for example).

Leaving politics aside, there's a lot of hope ahead. Science and Tech is advancing, life expectancy is increasing, investment in transit is increasing, countries r going greener, etc. Many cancer therapies r coming out (see the cancer vaccines for instance). Many cities have done some much needed land rezoning, due to which affordable housing will be a thing, 15 minute cities will be more and more common and so on.

The future is looking good, exciting stuff is happening and EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT.

Again, a little fear is good. Fear is what prevented early humans from being killed by predators, and it is what will prevent bad things from happening to us in the future. However, letting it consume our lives is a little counter intuitive.

Unless on usurped or deceptive pretenses, I do not encourage the act of circumventing bans, and other people in charge would say the same.

That said, if someone gives off the vibes that they're in the business of it, it cannot be enforced as if it were an exact science. It can only be dissuaded based on certain definitive details. We kindly ask if you may give the benefit of the doubt, and if people (not us) have the authority to do so, they will act.

Let people higher up take care of these matters. Do not harass people or vent at them over such matters, and report people cautiously, not based on whims. Or as a list of rules once said...

"Remember the human" is as good a rule here as anywhere. Thanking all for their patience.

!movies@lemm.ee !television@lemmy.world and !animation@lemm.ee

Alternatively, does the universe collapse in on itself because they’re actually the tripartite sonic manifestations of a single three faced god?

!canvas@toast.ooo for the details

https://canvas.fediverse.events for the link

Honestly, I will never wrap my head around how people can happily bring infants on any flight where you can expect people to try and sleep, it's incredibly lucky if they don't spend some of it screaming their heads off—I would be mortified if my choices were preventing hundreds of people from sleeping. But I'm not going to rant too hard about that.

Why on earth hasn't any airline started marketing adult-only flights?

It seems like a complete no brainer to me, I would choose it every time and pay extra for it.

Disclaimer: I may or may not be on a 36h day with only an hour of sleep right now

Right out of the gate: I am a lonesome person. I try to remedy this by going out, doing activities and be amongst people. For instance I went to the city to watch the soccer game between England and The Netherlands. I had no one to watch it with, so I figured I may as well just head into town and watch it in a pub or something. Lo and behold, I run into a guy I know. We get to talk and he asks who I'm here with. So I say to him I'm by myself. "By yourself?" he replies, genuinely perplexed. And I'm here thinking: Well what do you want to me to say?

Bottom line: It's already hard enough to gather the motivation to do stuff on your own, without people feeling sorry for you.

So my mom has been saying for awhile how she wished she could play Hogwarts legacy, and my older sister just replaced her gaming PC. So my sister sent her old pc to my mom. Nothing crazy, but meets minimum system requirements! My mom is now kind of speed running learning about gaming and it's been amusing. I just think these are adorable.

1. She complained that she couldn't find the game for sale for PC anywhere, she could only find it for XBOX and PS. She was looking on amazon, and I had to point her towards steam, and help her setup an account for steam.

2. She happened to purchase it while it was on sale and she was super confused why it was randomly on sale! Had to explain how steam works. She's disabled and the $60 was the extent of her fun money for the month, so getting it on sale was a huge deal to her.

3. Complaining at how long it took to download the game off wifi when she was ready to play RIGHT NOW. She kept asking if we could use an Ethernet cable to make it go faster, but her PC was like 40 feet from the nearest jack and we didn't have a long enough ethernet cable (No I wasn't driving home to my house to look for one, and no I wasn't buying her one. Love you momma! You gotta wait!)

4. She realized she hates mouse and keyboard, so used the money she saved from the sale to buy a little controller from walmart.

5. She talked about how much she likes that because she's on "story mode" she can skip puzzles/challenges she thinks are stupid. Considering there are games I never beat as a kid because of a specific mini game/challenge I couldn't beat, I resonated with that. Back when we were kids if there was a quick time event you couldn't beat, we quit the game!

6. A few weeks later she talked about how she was super happy to finally find a youtuber that would give walk through/tips/advice on how to do things in a not annoying way. The one she likes are basically "Here is a 30 second clip of doing this specific thing in this room". She is not a fan of 30 minute lets plays with intros/outros.

7. Complaining about long load times between rooms, and quests that make her go through multiple loading zones. No comment, she's just right to complain.

All her revelations were super relatable and I just thought it was cute that at an older age she went through modern gaming transition in a few weeks, and hit on emotions we all basically hit.

i really like the usa. it's the best place on earth!!! yes yes!! but well. i've always wanted to visit and look around every place and every state. it's the most beautiful country yes yes!!! but anyway. i'm from mexico. i have learned a lot of nice things about usa. history. rules. etc. but what are some other things that i need to know?? oh thank you so much!!

Get it together, Aussies. EDIT: Australias population is 5x higher too? Explain yourselves!

It's getting ridiculous. There's one youtuber that swapped the thumbnail 4 times this week just to make people look at it again and think it was a different video. The worst part is that it sort of works, I keep looking at it then remembering I saw something very similar from the same channel name yesterday.

I hate this so damn much.

TL;DR: In four weeks, I’ve cut my average screen time from 8 hours and 55 minutes to 1 hour and 28 minutes on average.

I know no one cares about this, but I still wanted to share it here just in case someone is facing the same problem and looking for motivation.

I recently finished my semester and got a summer break. My girlfriend and I planned our first big trip abroad, something we’d been looking forward to for more than a year. But after getting free from studies and exams, I got addicted to my phone, spending hours scrolling social media. My addiction started to ruin our plans and our excitement for the trip.

More than a month ago, my girlfriend spent a weekend finding resources to help me. She found an article with practical methods for different levels of phone addiction. Inspired by her effort, I decided to give it a shot.

Week 1 saw my screen time drop to 7 hours and 35 minutes on average, which made me very happy because I never thought anything would help me with my phone addiction. Even though I started with no hope, seeing this result gave me hope.

Week 2 brought it down further to 5 hours and 12 minutes on average. The key was a fun challenge my girlfriend and I did together to stay off our phones. Having her as my support system made everything so much easier.

In Week 3, I tried a $23 timed locker my girlfriend got from Amazon. It worked wonders, cutting my late-night screen time and improving my sleep. I ended the week with an average of 4 hours and 3 minutes on average. Despite a slight setback over the weekend due to feeling down, I’m happy with my progress, even though it was very little.

In the last week of this challenge, I kept up the same habits but added a new twist suggested by my girlfriend. We signed up for swimming classes and started going daily because we always wanted to learn swimming. It’s been fun, and I’m loving every second of it. I also started locking my phone for an hour in the morning using the timed locker. This helped me bring down my screen time to 1 hour and 28 minutes. While my initial goal was 1 hour or less, I’m proud of myself with my progress.

Honestly, I couldn't have achieved this without my girlfriend’s support. I’m incredibly grateful to have her in my life. Dating her was the best decision I've ever made. I want to write a big thank-you paragraph here, but I don't want to bore anyone.

Here is my screen time screenshot before I started: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JQVQaI1q7xgLUpojzx6osRci8zwwGWoJ/view?usp=sharing

Here is my screen time screenshot from the previous week: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjBWCJyLDX29fdgdaq-UJ21X3osVcBhx/view?usp=sharing

As always, !movies@lemm.ee , !television@lemmy.world , !animation@lemm.ee

I might as well ask this since I got stung or bit by a bee yesterday during America day.

Last year, when taking strolls, it was rare enough for a bee to swarm around me that I could go whole strolls without it happening sometimes.

This year, they swarm around me everywhere. Everywhere. It's like fighting your way through putty patrollers. They respawn instantly, there's absolutely no lag. Shoo one away and one comes back five seconds later. Sometimes for three hour strolls encompassing six miles.

What the heck happened? Anyone else notice this?