• 3 Posts
  • 91 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I was reading this like “this guy should be a furry, it’s what fixed me”

    And then you reveal that you’re a furry. Bro, that’s more than a saving grace, that’s absolutely the solution.

    Now in most contexts, just being a furry already makes you a subgroup, so you get so socialize off that alone; but when you’re in a furry space, it can get awkward integrating into a new group because the commonality you have is not as relevant. In those contexts, it’s easier to socialize in a sub-subgroup within furry. Like we have this group of 5-viewer streamers that all hang out with eachother on and offline. Being able to draw will make you popular just in general. And then there’s the dancers, hackers, programmers, gamedevs, suiters, activists, kinda subgroups within furry that make it effortless to integrate socially.

    The above is true online and off. As far as IRL things go, your local convention will be once a year and that’s probably not enough, if you’re in the US there should be a local scene that will make it a lot more regular. Online and offline feed into eachother.

    That’s all i can think of, if you’re a furry you have a chance to not be lonely for long



  • The best explanation i’ve seen is this:

    Places that put children under the authority of adults (schools, camps, etc) are appealing for child predators; but where most will kick them out when/if found, the Catholic Church makes it easier for them to stay in.

    This is because of a religious belief that God judges men for their sins, eventually rehabilitates them, and the job of mere mortals is to forgive and forget.

    I really like this explanation because it doesn’t flatter my atheist sentiment and provides a very neat and rational cause-and-effect relation, it’s a thing that’s specific about the Church compared to other institutions.

    Priests also take a vow of chastity, in people’s minds they’re supposed to be above sexual desire; and they have an extra aura of authority compared to the average teacher or summer camp instructor. Both of these things makes it harder for children and parents to question them.

    And once they do question them, the Church gets a similar behavior to other institutions where they’ll try to protect their reputation by burying the case. I’m not sure which positions are supposed to be held for life, i assume most of them, and so that makes firing someone (or whatever the right word is in this context) a bigger deal.

    Thems my attempted explanations




  • You’re coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don’t think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it’s designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).

    My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.

    Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It’s not even a business at all, i’m not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.

    Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we’re seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.



  • Here’s the thing that makes Minecraft’s world so much more dangerous: we have life-threatening creatures in the real world too, but they are living creatures bound to the laws of ecology; if you build a city without large herbivores, you can be sure that this city won’t have tigers in it, because they need those to live. A tiger would need to physically walk from the forest to the city, with ample opportunity of getting spotted. Hell, killing the last tiger is a safe way to never have to worry about them again, since they need to reproduce sexually, and if there are no tigers left in an area then no new ones will appear out of nowhere.

    Minecraft creatures, meanwhile, do appear out of nowhere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve depleted the world of every last zombie, new ones can spawn absolutely anywhere, even within the safest possible area, all it takes is a small corner of mild darkness. Or does it? Because i’ve had random mobs spawn in extremely well-lit built environments where i was convinced they couldn’t.

    Minecraft’s creatures cannot be definitively excluded from an area, nowhere is really safe beyond doubt even if the place is built entirely out of light-emitting blocks.

    Then again, people do live in areas with venomous snakes and scorpions, those have a similar “potentially anywhere” threat as Minecraft mobs, yet people seem fine. They don’t live in fear all the time. Then again again, snakes and scorpions are passive and only attack if you make physical contact with them, whereas Minecraft mobs actively look for you.

    So yeah, nowhere is truly safe in Minecraft, there’s genuinely always a possibility that you’ll need to defend yourself from some horror.




  • I do have a backup laptop, which does come in handy for the rare case of, for example, making a new install.

    But yeah, i feel like a laptop is an awkward middle ground between a phone and a desktop. It’s not as powerful and has a small screen, but it’s also not as portable as my phone.

    Granted if i travelled more i would need a laptop, and then i would have a dock of some kind at home to extend its capabilities (USB hub, second monitor, etc)



  • See the thing is i’m not worldly enough to know what common animals in my country are uncommon in other countries. I mean there’s some mallards here and there, the ones with the green head just like the meme, are those exotic and surprising? Oh, my old hometown has swans. They’re surprisingly aggressive.

    What i will say though is that i definitely feel that way about architecture. I quite like the winding medieval back alley leading to a church built in 980 (as in the year), it’s cool; but Americans will have a spiritual experience over it because no building in the US is that old.