You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

How about texting? Does texting work?

Maybe use “sucks”?

“Sucks” has homophobic/misogynist roots, though, and they’re much more recent than the ableist usage of “lame”. Even the 1950’s version of “sucks eggs” wasn’t actually talking about the things that come from a chicken.

If North Korea wants us to know something different, they could tell us themselves. Or, even better, let the people talk to foreign journalists without handlers and threats of repercussions.

Otherwise, we’re forced to wonder about how weird it is that it seems like every news organization in the world is dead-set on spreading lies about this one, tiny, geopolitically insignificant country (and no, being able to launch toy rockets into the ocean once every couple of years does not make them geopolitically significant). Like, why did the BBC and RFA and Reuters and the AP and Al Jazeera all get together in a dark, smoky room and cook up a conspiracy to defame North Korea, of all countries? Why not, say, Thailand, or Malaysia, or Morocco, or something?

If this is true, then another danger is it (community, server, platform, etc) becomes an echo chamber.

There’s a middle ground between being an “echo chamber” and being forced to put up with the same 10 different bad-faith bumper-sticker sealion questions over and over again for all eternity.

I come to Beehaw when I’m just dead-dog tired of having the same arguments over and over again, when I’m sick to death of hearing what the alt-right thinks about any given issue, when I’m just fed up having to defend my identity and my beliefs from crypto-facists who think they’re being subtle when they imply I shouldn’t exist and wouldn’t exist if they had their way.

I know what “the other side” thinks. Dear God, I can’t escape hearing what “the other side” thinks, about everything from the international politics of war to beer cans. I’m well aware of the “discussion” they want to have, I’ve had it eighty thousand times over the course of my life and it’s always the same theme and the same tactics lightly reskinned for whatever outrage bait they read about on Facebook last week.

For example, their opinion on “kids getting trans surgery” is exactly the same pile of nonsense as their opinion on “partial-birth abortion” was 25 years ago: “We’re going to take an extreme situation, that almost never actually happens precisely because of how extreme it is, that only ever takes place after months or years of agonizing decision-making between parents and entire teams of professionals with advanced degrees and decades of experience, and pretend like it’s the primary form of this issue and happens on a whim.”

I’m over 40. I’ve heard it all. I know what their opinions are. Fuck, I know what their opinions will be on shit that hasn’t even come up yet, because it never changes. They never shut up about their opinions. So no, I’m not worried about getting into an “echo chamber”. I like finally having a little bit of soundproofing between me and the “(allegedly) silent majority”.

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

Nobody mentioned the smell? Holy shit, that sounds like the setup to an awful prank.

The smell is an intense sensory experience. We had ferrets for a few years, and at no point did I ever go nose-blind to them. They are the stinkiest things anyone otherwise sane has ever willingly let into their home. Cleaning their litter boxes practically requires a respirator. And that’s after their musk glands have been removed (which, at the time, was standard practice; you couldn’t hardly get ferrets from anywhere with their musk glands intact).

They’re fuckin’ adorable, and playful, and fun, but man, the smell. All the other problems with them being only-just-barely-domesticated wild animals aside, the smell is probably the most important thing to know about them.

My ex had two sun conures.

The thing I would like people to know is that they make the kind of noise that will literally drive you insane if your brain doesn’t adapt to tune it out. It’s loud, high-pitched, and constant.

It’s not about just making phone calls difficult or making it hard to hear what your friends are saying (especially if the parrots decided they hate your friend, which is a whole 'nother parrot problem). It’s so pervasive that it actively changes how your senses perceive your environment.

Years after they both died (at about 20 years old, the female died from getting eggbound and the male died of a broken heart soon after), my brain was still putting parrot noises into the background sounds of my house. I’d be doing my normal daily thing, then stop and be like “Wait, why have I been listening to parrots screeching for the past two hours? They’ve been dead for three years” and my brain would go “Oops, sorry,” and I’d stop hearing it for a while.

Most literate tankie

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

Like today, but worse. We’ll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we’ll still insist on calling them “five-sigma” instead of “new normal”, and the denialists will still be denying that it’s any different than it’s ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just “a few years” away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.

Like Russia and Ukraine are working together, vatnik?

Dude, look, I’m sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.

Doc went corporate, and is now HMO. He’s rich now, because he charges the other dwarves a monthly premium, but somehow their coverage never actually covers anything that’s wrong with them.

Dopey has been replaced with Trippy, after discovering the healing powers of psychedelics.

Between climate change, the housing market, and stagnant wages, Happy found he needed some extra assistance to keep up the positive attitude. Fortunately, Trippy “knows a guy”. Happy now goes by Xanny.

Bashful, after being diagnosed by HMO, changed his name to Social Anxiety. He can’t afford medication, since HMO won’t cover the brand-name drug to treat it (only the generic that didn’t work and made him fat). But at least he has real diagnosis now, and he’s working on it through on-line pay-per-session therapy from a company he heard about on a self-help podcast.

Grumpy spent years doomscrolling through Reddit and Twitter, and now knows The Truth about Them. He is now known as Ragey, and frequently encourages the other dwarves to Do Their Own Researchy.

Sneezy became a pariah during the COVID-19 pandemic, as everyone assumed he had it. To fight against that stigma, he changed his name to Allergy. Nobody believes him.

Sleepy discovered that the best way to not have to deal with any of the others was to lean in to his shtick, and is therefore still Sleepy (and hasn’t been out of bed since 2016).

I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.

Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.

I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.

Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.

By what method? Is that when the secret computer chip in the vaccine will turn on and kill us? Thereby removing all the people who have shown they’ll do anything the government tells them to do, leaving behind all the staunch and distrustful individualists who are harder to control? Or is this some other global renovation?

Are there ghosts? Because I’ll pay a premium if there are for sure ghosts.

No, absolutely not. By Reddit standards, this was a tiff. Maybe a smaller tussle. Definitely not a kerfluffle.

Besides, part of this is a “me” problem. I’m still adjusting to not having to come out of the gate swinging the first time I sense hostility. Did I respond to an energy? Sure. Did I respond to an intentional energy? …eh, maybe, maybe not. Did I go from 0-100 too fast? Probably. What I’m saying is, I see how I could have handled that better. And the fact that you took the time to engage with me over it is a big positive for the platform.