We have strayed so far from God

“I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”

I’m gonna have kids just so I can make sure to raise them on the correct media diet. They’re getting all the classic video game consoles, in order of generation, so when they get to something like Elden Ring they have the context all the way back to Space Invaders to appreciate it. And we’re going to be a home of physical media, god damn it. We’re not streaming things. We’re putting CD’s and vinyls and blu rays in their respective players. No iPads. Only books, comics, coloring books and notebooks.

How the fuck did parents start giving their kids iPads, anyway? Nintendo Switches? My first Gameboy cost $90 and I bought it with my own birthday money. A children’s book from a young reader series cost $6 new in the 90s and is probably not much worse now. Less, if you buy it used, which is much easier now. And people are just like, “here, my 12 year old child, have an Xbox Series whatever, and an iPad, and a Galaxy phone. They’re all pre-connected to your YouTube account. Don’t let your other parent know that I told you that for Christmas we’re getting you a gaming PC, Logitech C920, condenser microphone, wireless headset, gaming chair, scissor arm, and LED lighting array so you can chase the completely impossible dream of being a professional streamer. Can I kiss your feet while I’m at it? Will that make this a good half-birthday for you?” Unfuckingthinkable. Knock it off.

Forgive me, sire; I hadn’t $80,000 to spend on a luxury truck.

You fuck.

But if white widow earlier. But of strawberry cough also earlier but less earlier.

Then I mean a later year because my girlfriend and I each own X1s from around that time which we bought on eBay. Mine, I believe, was listed as a 2018. Hers is a year newer. So those figures might need budged but I do not mean a T480.

Unless you’re just recommending a T480 over an X1, in which case, I apologize for stepping all over your punchline.

Preowned ThinkPad. You can get a 2018 or so X1 Carbon for $400 or less on eBay.

It’s already saved me from accidentally tapping a recent or favorite number because they hang up a split second faster than my thumb lands on the end button. I approve of this change.

If Lemmy had awards this succinct answer would get a pile of them.

“Save every five minutes and never buy Packard Bell.”

Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.

So for example, I’m an atheist, but it’s be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I’m not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the ‘hide subreddit’ feature that I don’t believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must’ve blocked at least three ‘atheist’ and two or three ‘atheistmemes’ communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.

Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don’t want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don’t want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I’m entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.

Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.

Writing and drawing aren’t lost arts, yet ;)

There’s strong evidence, by the by, that writing things down by hand works different parts of your brain than typing does. This can be great for somebody like me, with untreated attention issues, as writing things down by hand can help me remember them better. It takes longer to do, so your mind is on it longer, and particularly when I’m journaling, it seems to help me parse through what feels like a jumble of chaotic, circular thoughts by laying them down one word, one letter at a time on paper.

And since I write pretty much everyday, whether it’s notes at work, the occasional journal entry, or little notes for later in a nice Moleskine pocket notebook, I’d like that experience to be as nice as possible, in the same way a typist might invest in a mechanical keyboard (with just the right feeling and sound for their tastes) or anybody who can afford to will invest in a quality mattress, etc.

If you ever do give handwriting a shot, or if you get into art someday, you might check out some of the pencil and pen recommendations in the responses to this post. They can be a real treat when compared against, like, a standard no. 2 pencil you got in a box of 50 for $2.

You and I are fighting now.

Anything that is, or once was affiliated with Gawker / GMG is, in its current state, a cringe-inducing, shambling husk of whatever it once was. My muscle memory still directs me to a number of those blogs and everyday I recoil at what has become of them.

Corinthian. Fight me.

Just speculating here. And building off some half-remembered On The Media pieces. But as (for any number of reasons) the faith in a social platform collapses (and often the safeguards against toxic stuff go down too, a la Twitter), people with a low tolerance for that shit are likeliest to bail and the ‘call people the N word on Xbox’ folks are likeliest to stay behind. People who could watch what Reddit did and stay behind aren’t bad, I’m not saying that, but their tolerance for unethical stuff is way higher than the tolerance of those who decided to find a new home. Self-selection, ya know.

I still type shitty things. But then I stop and rephrase in a more human way.

Sometimes I open up the home page to see what’s up, then I see what’s up is less interesting than it used to be and less interesting than what’s happening here. And I close it pretty quickly. I’m still using it as part of my Google searches when I need quick human answers. It’s gonna continue to be a historical resource in that regard. No getting around that. But my account only exists so that I can access those resources without too much fuss. It’s not something I use to post or contribute. I used the Sign In With Apple feature to just generate a throwaway anonymous account after I deleted my 11 year old account.

That ‘motivation’ bit is so important. Former educator, currently still working in education, and I’m always wary of anything that makes a sweeping statement about ‘the kids’ not being ‘all right’. But there are important, substantial contributors to undesirable outcomes that need to be acknowledged. Poverty being one, as well as the cycle of poverty and abuse which is deeply tied to white flight and de-industrialization (which we might collectively assign to the death of the American dream if we aren’t too concerned with being precious about the the notion of patriotism).

Saying ‘iPads’ or ‘TikTok’ is the culprit doesn’t help anyone. But iPads and TikTok are contributing factors because they both exacerbate the feeling that being entertained is enough to scrape one’s way through life at the bottom of the barrel of expectations…as well as over-informing young people (and adults) that there is positively nothing left to look forward to. Industry is collapsing, housing and transportation are unaffordable, everything you once expected to purchase (and let’s not get lost talking about purchasing as a metric for determining whether one is living a good life) has now moved to an ever-bleeding subscription model; inflation is compounded by corporate greed (and maybe we should talk about how the business incentive of endless growth contributes to every other problem) and corporate greed (something no one but the executives and their shareholders can influence, let alone control) is raping all the natural splendor, wealth and even health and stability of the very ground we walk on and air we breathe.

Why the fuck wouldn’t some young person whose future job prospects (which were shit to begin with) are being devoured by AI, just turn toward the boundless font of readily accessible entertainment rather than going uphill toward seemingly fruitless self improvement? Why would they bother to rise to the level of literacy that allows them to appreciate a 19th century classic translated from the original Russian, or to parse the dense theming of some modern masterpiece? What’s the reward, to someone whose entire life to this point has been flavored with instant gratification? To them it’s all just ‘content’, and there’s plenty of content more accessible than literature. Art may mean nothing for many reasons, not least of which is it can be falsified to a level of acceptability (AI songs by dead artists, for example).

It’s a Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Brave New World living nightmare. But what is the alternative? What systems or entities or organizations are coming to save the day? There are none. This moment is a gruesome forbidden experiment: it is a post-Reaganite, neoliberal race to the cultural bottom, and the youngest generation are the lab rats.

Speaking as someone who never really plugged into Twitter much in the first place: the notion that tweets have any sort of real value and that putting caps on consuming them is a meaningful control measure is the funniest fucking thing. Like no doubt he I actually trying to ruin it, that’s happening. But this is clearly supposed to elicit some kind of reaction, and I just can’t imagine feeling like, “oh, no, this only 600?” 600 of what? Brainfarts? Serious ideas that, if they were written by serious people would be in a long form medium? It’s like saying “you can go to the grocery store but you can only buy 60 chew toys for your dog per day”. Like, okay, I wasn’t going to do that anyway and I think it’s funny that you thought I was going to, or that I’d care about this new limitation.