FriendOfDeSoto

I don’t think this was “blistering.” At the time watching it as a kid I thought it is weird that nobody ever talked about the Cardassians or the war before. But things get introduced like that in Star Trek. And it is a big universe. I don’t think this is the worst or the most pivotal of retconning because it fit into the story and quickly got expanded on.

Chekov hadn’t met Khan. WW3 didn’t happen in the 90s. Mark Leonard was both a Romulan AND Soock’s daddy. Picard meets versions of his parents during TNG that are nothing like the ones in PIC. Virtually all main TNG main characters lost at least one parent early in their life (or their sight). There is no way in hell that Riker can just stay #1 after Wolf 359 and not get his own ship. There wasn’t a queen but baby borgs! Scotty knew Kirk was dead already. And there are plenty of cases when beaming through shields is possible.

That’s just a few examples that grind my gears more than the introduction of the Cardassians. But I love Trek and am willing to forgive a lot.

Trek is a statue that many sculptors work on at different times. Inconsistencies must happen as a result. It’s not like The Expanse where the story has been written down before in great detail before they started filming. They took liberties from the original but would’ve succeeded at sculpting their piece of marble as planned if it hadn’t been for the assholery of a certain Mr. Anvar.

At this point in time, let them see what it’s like and if they join, great. If not, no biggie. The fediverse is not depending on user growth like any of the corporate platforms. And it is hindered by people having to learn to be their own algorithm.

Yes, it would be nicer to increase the ranks in certain Lemmies or on Mastodon. But I haven’t felt it’s tumbleweeds in any of my feeds lately - this may be very subjective. And I feel reddit or the Melon are doing a lot of the convincing for us at the same time.

Neighborly disputes will most likely no be solved by this provocation meets counter provocation strategy. I would strongly suggest you deescalate. So he drops his weights loudly, then you play loud music, then he lights a turd in a paper bag on your doormat, and then you … This won’t end well. You still have to live there and all you’re doing is making a bad situation worse. You’re just retaliating because you feel powerless to stop what’s bugging you. And with this sort of dispute statistics are not on your side in terms of success.

Did you ever talk with him directly? Or put a kindly phrased note under the door?

30-60min twice per day - could you not just hide under some headphones for that time?

Get off the internet and find IRL help. Be that family, friends, and/or a mental health professional. The latter is highly recommended though.

A person on YouTube made a video? Oh no …

I think this is worthwhile posting again as a “TIL that leaf blowers are a good way to defend against tear gas” when this post gets removed for falling fowl of rule 1.

I’m not an Apple user so I cannot answer your question there. I just wanted to add another way to get ad-free podcasts. If the podcast offers a patreon feed, any RSS-based podcatcher anywhere will be able to do this.

The problem with the VPN solution is that the BBC has gotten smart about that. It’s a game of whack a mole. Every time a service has installed a new server with new IPs, iPlayer finds out about it and blocks it. So you don’t even get to the part where you could fraudulently claim to be paying for the license.

Where in France are you? In Calais you might still get terrestrial signal (although I don’t know if the signal standards differ) or it could be available on cable.

A third option is not perfectly legal but more so than torrenting. There are online services that record the terrestrial signal and allow you to download the recordings after the fact. Google BBC online HDR or DVR and see if one of these services might be for you.

I am not an expert and I think this falls at the first hurdle because a login is required to view more than the latest post or two.

Here is how I use it: you take an old device that you never installed Insta on, run it under a burner account at the OS level, run a kill switch VPN on it (preferably always on the same server), and then create an account on Insta that you’re ready to ditch the moment they want your ID. That device doesn’t do anything else than Insta.

I was under the impression that they do exactly the opposite of what fans want. So, Paramount, if you’re listening, we want a TOS reboot, more Section 31, and everything as movies, please. Under no circumstances do we want an episodic Captain Una show! Please do a prequel to Enterprise instead, but with Borgs. And I mean the ones from Picard S2, of course.

People behave very differently digitally compared to what they would do in person. It’s much easier to slam the door digitally and not having to explain why they did that. People are also insecure and do irrational shit, especially while dating. And some people will just troll you if isn’t a setup to defraud you. You just have to stop yourself from assuming best intentions from everybody.

Ghosting is just part of the ephemeral experience online now. In a way, people who ghost you do you a favor. They are not worth the effort.

You can describe yourself any way you like. It’s helpful to provide context, like you did here. Without it you may not be understood. So know who you’re speaking to and provide it, especially when puzzled faces stare back at you.

The Anerican political theater has twice as many viable parties as North Korea. Contrast that with virtually any other democracy where there are at least a handful of parties fighting to be in charge. That doesn’t mean though that you don’t have enough different opinions to fill a party-political spectrum like that in the US. The dominance of the two parties just forces most people under one of the big tent roofs. So you have more conservative Democrats (and there used to be more liberal Republicans) in the party that are bigger in relative numbers compared to what you’ll find in the social democrats in Germany (or among the conservatives in France). The Democrats are nominally the more left leaning party. But if you compared the party programs they would align more with the conservative parties of Scandinavia. Everything is further to the right in the US thanks largely to gun laws and lack of social security. And that explains why you have non-lefty people in the nominally lefty party. And while bigotry and hatred are certainly not a new thing, there is a culture that permeates down from the political leadership. And if name calling and pouring oil into the fire of social issues are the new MO, and admissions and convictions respectively of sexual assault don’t keep candidates out of office, many people feel they are now also allowed to say the quiet part out loud.

You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn’t so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We’re playing a long game that we don’t even want to win.

Let’s be realistic and not console ourselves with rosy fantasies.

Let’s take the most pessimistic view instead and project we’ll all get plugged into the Matrix.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that so-called AI and automation will replace all of those jobs. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that all these people will be destitute because they cannot be put in other positions. This is not the first time we as humanity have faced this big a structural change. We have largely gotten pretty good and are not dealing with a lot of bloodshed and poverty in the wake of such a big change. This transition will probably not be great for everybody but it won’t be a big human tragedy of the proportions you imagined. Worry more about our climate. The bigger threat of mass destitution will come from that clusterfuck.

Tried it with VPN on and on Vivaldi on Android and it works just fine. I think you have another gremlin in your setup.

On top of that you could argue that Latvia and Germany are probably more favorable regardless in terms of them enjoying largely functioning rule of law.

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

Because I swipe typed it and didn’t give it another thought. I’m gonna leave it as is so your comment continues to make sense here and thank you for the correction.

In my Venn diagram, “advertize” is a smaller circle wholly surrounded by “promote.” “Advertize” suggests to me there is a marketing effort with paid ads or something like that behind it. It’s simultaneously promoting whatever but promotion can be much broader. Preference doesn’t really come into it.