70 should be old enough to know cynicism isn’t wisdom. It’s one thing to encourage people to always temper optimism with caution, it’s another to spend one’s life indistinguishable from an edgy adolescent.

I don’t think I used one until about 2008. Until then they were pretty prohibitively expensive (for me, at least). I used CDs for most of my rather minimal data storage needs.

I mean I get it. It’s frustrating to deal with, but if the alternative is that Lemmy is completely hammered by bot traffic I’ll take the brief inconvenience.

This is bordering on being a Ferengi death ritual.

Seeing Jupiter up close is a good one. I bet I would have trouble even processing it

I kinda love it. It’s not what I would choose for myself but there’s something about seeing young people walking around with mustaches that puts a little joy in my heart.

Got a glass of water FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE

1. Lower traffic. Sort of a given, but reddit has more users. I like elements of this, Lemmy being small makes the vibe more conversational, people also seem more helpful in technical communities on Lemmy than Reddit. But while there’s a quality over quantity, there’s a severe lacking in quantity. Lemmy communities are taking awhile to flesh out and communities I would expect to be somewhat active can go months without a post.

2. Userbase cultural differences. Reddit is a bit of a catch-all now. Some of the old redditor stereotypes are actually breaking down a little, people aren’t really pseudo-intellectual turbo nerds ready to ackshully your post anymore, they’re just kind of angry and stupid like the rest of the internet. Lemmy users in my experience are either very friendly, pseudo-intellectual turbo nerds, or you quickly find out the real reason they were banned from reddit and came here (racism, from what I can tell). It’s sort of a cross-section of people who would be dissatisfied with reddit in its current state, but hasn’t developed a voice of its own yet.

3. Moderation seems pretty active so far. I’ve seen a couple of people get banned from communities but it does seem like they were knowingly breaking rules and generally being jerks. I do wonder how well the lower traffic communities are moderated though. I’ve not seen a lot of mod drama or anything here but perhaps I’ve just missed it when it happens.

4. Toxic wastelands. From what I can see there are big swaths of Lemmy your average user finds to not be worth going to, instances seem to block them by default. It may sound funny, but I actually consider this to be a healthy thing. The fouler the fertilizer the sweeter the flower, I think having concentrated places for weirdos to congregate keeps them from spilling into the rest of the site, and the existence of these places means there’s a substrate of users who will likely stick around, making it so the traffic never dips Lemmy into true obscurity. The trick is keeping them from festering into something truly awful, which I couldn’t begin to guess how to prevent.

Yeah I found deep solace in technology in a time where it was pervasive, but not all-consuming. I had a computer in my room which was like the peak of being “online” at the time.

I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate childhood and being perpetually plugged in like this. I spent more time on the internet than anyone else I knew when I was a kid and it wasn’t always good for me. Your average kid these days is wayyy more online than I ever was.

Kinda the same as getting to the top of a really big waterside.

You’ve officially made your choice. It was something you wanted to do and it’s honestly going to be fun and there’s really nothing to regret. But you have made your choice.

I used to do exhibition drill team in high school. I can still flip rifle-sized objects around with a fair amount of finesse. Sometimes if I’m holding something the right size and shape I’ll feel the urge and confirm I never really lost it.

But of course demonstrating this never comes up and isn’t particularly impressive to look at.

I mean I definitely remember back in 2021 people were laughing that Texans were getting what they voted for when the power grid failed during a snow storm and people froze to death

Bob Dylan dresses like I did in high school apparently

You don’t know that they didn’t.

It will as it grows, but trying to make it happen tends to have pretty embarrassing results.

I would miss the little ruse tbh. Keep my computer guessing, it’s trying to know me too much lately.

I see it a lot in organizing, like taking even a second to breathe is going to accidentally infect you with an airborne centrist virus.

And then the going gets rough and all the “We can rest after the revolution” types are burnt out so they start publicly infighting at the first disagreement because they’re tired and hopeless and miserable.

Nah I have too many games to play in my library already. I’ve never been a huge GTA person but maybe I’ll get it on sale if I ever find the space on my hard drive for it.

Zelda is more appealing but I haven’t played a Zelda game since Link To The Past so I could probably get by with some of the older ones. Still every so often I think about going on a Zelda kick.

Once I get Talarico’s face tattooed on my chest and fly a “Talafreako” flag on the back of my truck every day and wear a “Time To Start Flipping Tables” hat to every Thanksgiving with my family for the next ten years then maybe we can have a cautionary conversation about idolizing politicians.

Depends how.

Using Rimworld as an example because I’m playing it now, I’ll occasionally create a separate save file in the same seed at the same location and turn on god mode to see if certain defensive strategies will work before I implement them in the actual game.

Additionally I’ll sometimes save scum, but only if I think the consequence I’m trying to avoid would ruin the fun for me, I remind myself that sometimes bad things happening can be interesting, but I work a lot and don’t want to have to start from scratch because a mechanoid colony landed in the perfect place to wipe my tribe.

But I don’t give myself infinite food or the best weapons because that just wouldn’t be fun. I need challenge, I need to overcome hardship and come out ahead. I don’t want to cheat myself out of my victory.

That being said people still shouldn’t cheat in multi-player games.