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2 yr. ago

  • So do dogs not have different barks, the way cats often have different meows? I've never considered this possibility, but it feels like it should be the same. They do whine, for instance, but idk if there's a food bark.

  • If you can pull it off, you have my blessing. Better post it when you're done, though.

  • I've been on discord for almost a decade, lmao. Appreciate it. Unfortunately, my experience with "a discord for every hobby:"

    • Two thousand general servers. Your theme is 18+, furry, 6th grade goth/weeb, or all three.

    • Remainder don't have a description, or don't have a name/description that's at all explanatory.

    • Whatever server you do join will either start out snubbing the newcomer (dealing with that now), will already be dead (half my list), or WILL, without question or exception, die in 6-12 months (the other half).

    The last time I went looking for hobby groups, the only server in existence I could find for one of my favorite games seemed active as hell, and was entirely in a language I wouldn't be able to converse in. I'm still upset like a year later.

    I also think, generally, it hits a spot that's close to that, but it's not quite that, in large part for the server lifespan thing. They're expected to be more stable, but because of that, joining them feels like a bigger commitment than popping into a random AIM chat for 2 secs. Leaving one is a big statement.

    I'm curious whether this might be a reason places just end up as a husk instead of seeing new blood like a revolving door like one would have expected.

    There's a whole server-specific atmosphere sometimes, some of them have miles of updating rules and other have none. I joined one semi-recently that had a trigger board paragraphs long and while I would be fine with any one of those individually, I was amused and horrified to find the specific combination of member-submitted triggers left me completely unable to talk about my life.

    90% of my existence, past and present, was upsetting to someone, and all I could do was talk about birds or something and send extremely careful memes while I waited to be yelled at.

    Everyone's known each other for a while but the standard format REALLY doesn't lend itself to in-depth discussion as much as it does to chatting, which pushes the subject higher out of sight. Meaning the usual scenario is a place for a bunch of longtime friends to get together and talk, as long as they're talking about absolutely nothing of import. Which is fine for a good while.

    Creating threads is a thing now, but I've never seen anyone use them aside from to harass a user or see what they did, and no one wants the amount of threads a forum typically has, crammed into a discord menu.

    I'm not aiming for slander, if I couldn't stand it I wouldn't have been in it for so long. But it really is the bastard love child of forums and chat and the combination carries some drawbacks if you're hoping for either one.

  • Fair enough. I think I've had so much ire for so long over identical behavior from both groups that they've melded together in my mind

  • I don't know whether I'd call that intentional. Mods Admins still retain and already utilized the power to wipe whatever they wish. They left the other renditions before this more or less alone (to my knowledge), to be overwritten by users during the natural course of things.

    If he were that concerned about what was being written, I doubt he would wait to be certain the very last image of the finished r/place was a giant fuck-you billboard. He'd either wipe every fuck or try to end it after this one is gone so he can pretend it ended on a good note.

  • I'm happy to know it's not just me. Everything else was fine (non-sync user, grain of salt), but I feel breaking up the lines breaks up the middle image in a way that's more confusing to read, and the bottom right is a bit uncomfortable.

  • I still remember a video I found a year ago that was just barely over a whole minute. It was a guy doing one single really clear cable stitch in complete silence, and then the video cuts out.

    I do not know who they are, but I will vouch for that man before god.

    Doing a cursory search to see if I can find it again, the second video suggested to me is 26:44 long.

  • I always liked the dial-up sound. I don't know why it's so often reviled. Yes, it sounds like multiple minutes of demonic screeching being played backwards, but it was my demonic screeching. It was the sound that meant you were about to have fun.

  • Oh. My god. Why did I never know about that. That would have been incredible. I feel honestly robbed now TT

  • And then you would openly answer that you were ten. And then a 16yr old would offer to date you on Runescape.

    I actually really miss topic-oriented chat rooms. I know they don't seem to be liked/used at all whenever a site adds the ability, but back during AIM they were really the coolest.

    I thought it was so fun to just go see what kinds of rooms someone had opened that day, or sit and listen to people. I could talk to complete strangers about my hobbies and we would even learn from each other, and often continue talking for months to a year.

    I wasn't exactly allowed to have friends, or in fact even speak to non-family, so the ability to socialize like that so often in my free time and then eventually come to know regulars at a favorite forum meant everything to me.

    This was also way before all this shit, when (at least in my neck of the woods) being as clear and civil as possible, accepting nuance, and providing viewpoints/links were considered far more important than "whoever incites the mob first doesn't get doxxed."

    I credit what debating skills I have entirely to the amount of time spent lurking on the forum and watching two specific users fight each other every time they met.

  • Now let’s get to the part you’ve waiting for: I’m going to play through the entire thirty minutes worth of level four before you get to the demon door and I will stop to make useless commentary on the bad guys you encounter.

    About a month ago, I'd gotten back to replaying Suikoden Tactics, and there's this whole quest-accepting mechanic that's the easiest way to rack up skill points. But one of them is a series of "go get X out of the murder death ruins for me."

    That place is pure ass and permadeath is a thing, so I'm not just going to go jaunting down to the final floor because I'm bored. And for the life of me, I could not remember which floor whatever item was even on in order to know whether it was worth trying for right now.

    This game is old enough that there are almost no discussions about it. I'm rooting through abandoned forums from 2005 looking for gems. God bless forums from 2005 btw.

    Somehow, there is a single video on this subject. It is a series of videos as the youtuber fights through the entire dungeon in one go. There is commentary. There are no timestamps. He does not split the videos according to floor. The information I'm looking for is somewhere in here, but I have zero guarantee he's even treasure hunting, so he may not mention it.

    I could have cried.

  • I was all set to start bitching about the obligatory 10-15 minutes of "older, medicated suburban housewife shows off her whole yarn closet, every needle, which needle she likes (it's just pretty), her fingernails, pushes her state-mandated store, and then finishes off with an internet recipe story about how her gramgram was fleeing the war and had to knit jasmine stitch backwards to survive......before fucking up the stitch and never editing that part out. But it's ok because her hands were in the way the whole time anyway."

    But I think you've found the only thing that has me beat.

    I will at least use this time to implore any knitting/crochet peeps on the fediverse that if you or someone you love is uploading how-to videos anywhere on the web.....SHOW ME THE DAMN STITCH SO I CAN LEAVE. I HAVE PROJECTS, I DO NOT CARE.

  • God, this meme can vote

  • Now that I think about it, Turkish doesn't even have the letter X. Even with loanwords, they get around missing letters phonetically with words like "taksi." Italian doesn't either. Finnish, Polish, and German seem to at least use the letter, but again, only really in rare loanwords.

    The annoyance of not being able to describe what social media you're using without reverting to someone else's language.

  • I think this especially stems from how those games are seen by some more asshole-ish people. Few would disagree that strategy RPGs are not gaming, but I've had a clerk at gamestop lecture me about how my then-favorite title wasn't a "real" part of the series. So it's still my favorite, but I don't bring it up anymore.

    For much the same reason, there's an internalized mental block concerning whether or not something like The Sims, Stardew, Animal Crossing, etc. are "real" games because they don't really have a goal or require the same level of skill. If someone asks me what I play, I'm going to mention Hades before I ever breathe a word about Slime Rancher because one of those is going to get me stereotyped and insulted.

    If all I played were really chill, micromanaging "girl games," I just wouldn't say anything and would have doubts about describing myself as being on the level "gamer" normally entails.

  • From someone who also remembers this, it doesn't get better in your thirties.

    If it's anything, you and a college buddy of mine were both teething during 9/11, and I watched that live as a kid, and adults with their own apartments not remembering that is distressing to me. He'll act like a perfectly normal adult and then it will come out he always thought pokemon was lame, and it's because it had already worn out all of its welcome by the time he hit elementary school.

    You're not old. I'm normal and you're a baby. Tiny infant. Do you want to go in the playplace?

  • I think that could be understandable, to be honest. Even just this (apart from where I live) is all stuff I came across scrolling news articles or random tweets. It's not something I go out of my way to look for every day. Why? Because it makes me feel really bad and there's nothing I can really do about it. If I could chuck a lemonade over there or ask people to kindly stop drone striking each other, I would. All it accomplishes is causing me more hopelessness than what I already have.

    Which is likely why a lot of other people don't devote a lot of research to it either. It takes a very specific person to voluntarily devote yourself to feeling really really bad, and that kind of interest in events only spreads to the masses when it's unavoidably happening to them. It's not anywhere close to idyllic, but most of human nature isn't and (especially in the face of the internet) we end up whittling things down to our own personal well-being in order to make it manageable.

  • Maybe more like...goes down a bit in well-developed countries, in areas that are not already prone to natural disasters. We're already losing people to the heatwave again. Last year, Europe lost a little over 61k, this year it's 3 entire degrees below that. Heat waves are natural and would be happening regardless. Climate change makes them leagues worse than they would have been.

    Areas like Ireland that get a lot of rain are experiencing a dangerous amount of flooding. Areas in the middle east that typically only see rain during the monsoon season are experiencing an even dryer, hotter dry season followed by a much stronger rain that causes increasingly destructive flash floods.

    Myself, personally, I live in an area that is typically protected from the worst weather. We do get snow, but most of it ends up being waylaid by the mountains and I feel sorry for those who live there rather than in the plains. The area does get at least one hurricane every year, but it's deflected by the coastline of the Outer Banks and I have no idea what kind of person still wants to live there, but they're a trooper as well.

    Hurricane Florence in 2018 was the first time in my life I have ever seen a hurricane come this far inland, and they are continuing to do so. For obvious reasons, I do not like this.

    The earth isn't going to shut off like a simulation tomorrow, it is just going to be a slow and steady burn. Which is the biggest reason nobody is doing anything about it -- we're wired for immediate threats. This will never be immediate. The human race is currently the boiling frog, acclimating to their new life in whatever happens to happen.

    You would seem to suggest it's a matter of an annoying loss of comfort, and it's already not that for millions of people. Rising oceans and harsher cyclones blowing seawater inland have turned the soil and water supplies in Bangladesh increasingly salty. Enough that the salt-water resistant mangrove trees the area is famous for are experiencing a shift in biodiversity as those species with a lower tolerance are beaten out by more resilient competitors. Loss of habitat aside, we're about to test out exactly how resistant tiger kidneys are to drinking that.

    Available drinking water is hard to come by and repeatedly bathing in saltwater causes miserable full-body rashes. Building farms on floating river rafts is an older technique there that addresses the flooding a bit, but the salinity of the river water and the worsening heat are still having their impact on crop failure anyway.