Pretty simple. Resist the urge to see people based on their membership in this or that group, and instead focus on each individual. People are not responsible for the actions of other people that may seem outwardly similar to them, they are only responsible for their own. Life is harder when you remember this, but it’s the honest truth.

If you’re not used to winter driving conditions, keep your speed to about half of the posted speed limit, AND allow about double the normal distance for any braking you have to do. Give yourself a little over twice the normal amount of time it’d take you to drive somewhere.

This is generous, and will generally keep you safe on the road even if you’re unaccustomed to the conditions. Ice can still cause (sometimes unavoidable) problems even with these extra allowances, but if you’re going slowly and giving the extra distance, any accidents will be at low speed and very minor.

It’s a pros and cons thing. The pros in this case are our upright posture with narrower hips that let us cover long distances more efficiently than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. We can even do things like carry food to eat while walking, which something like an antelope would struggle with. Then a second pro is the whole big brain thing. These two factors did let us take over most of the planet over the course thousands of years, pretty quick work, really.

Then the cons are high mortality in birth, and taking something like 10 years after that risky birth to become even semi-functional at a practical level.

Riding your bike is exercise, so I’ll give that one a pass as a healthier hobby. Reading just depends on what you’re reading I suppose. Going to restaurants is generally looked at as a bad habit in my experience. Waste of money basically.

Regarding what makes video games special, I will say that they can develop bad personal habits a little easier than a lot of other hobbies. I think they have greater addiction potential than say, reading or bike riding. More on par with sex or gambling. They also create a temptation to oversimplify/misunderstand things about real life in the same way tv/movies do.

But yeah, overall I don’t think its a particularly bad hobby if you don’t go overboard with them.

Very nice. I think if we want to grow the Fediverse, these types of communities are among the most important of all. Lots of people use social media to ask questions/find answers/show off about specific games/hobbies.

Hope you stick with posting content during the slow, early days of starting a new community.

Just imagine if you ordered a jack and coke, and you had no way of knowing if they’re actually going to give you watered-down diet coke and the mildest single malt scotch they could find, or cherry coke and a really intense rye, or anything in between. And at every new place, it’s just a gamble what you’ll get.

That’s kinda what its like.

IPA wackos, I can’t stand this places IPAs because they don’t put a whole roasted chicken in the cup with the beer.

… yea okay, that’s fair.

Still though, IPAs run a huge gamut for some reason. I feel like the degree of variety you find in the IPA category is really strangely big. Like, if I order a stout or a porter I know about what I’m going to get, flavor-wise. But with an IPA it can run from fairly mild to way-past-grapefruit-juice.

Depends on what type of bullshit.

On one end, if the bullshit is just “my partner wants me to give a fuck about them”, and you don’t want to have to do that, then decent sex might be enough to make you consider changing your mind, if you’re also compatible in other ways.

On the other end, if the bullshit is “my partner has psychotic breaks and chases me around the house with a chainsaw”, I don’t think any quality of sex would really merit consideration in the bigger picture, given how short your lifespan might become.

So, there’s something of a scale there, and it partly comes down to what you personally consider bullshit to be. People won’t agree on that, it’s a personal thing.

They’re headed in that direction, but not yet. Their pop is 143 mil roughly, and the Ukrainian estimates are a little over 1 mil Russian casualties last I heard.

They could roll in with tanks, if enough pro-Russian parties came into power in the EU. The Baltic countries are not very big. Creating a situation where an Article 5 is called by a small country, but not answered, would be the ideal result.

Let’s also not forget that Putin has only done a very limited amount of mobilization so far.

attributed the incident in part to a lack of proper Holocaust education and historical context on hate symbols, such as the swastika. “We have absolute faith that if the district takes actual measures to teach students the right lessons about being inclusive and anti-hate, that Jews are a minority that deserve compassion and understanding and deserve to be equal to everyone else in this education system, then that would be a huge step towards tomorrow’s society,” she said.

No, I’m afraid not. They’ve likely been preemptively inoculated against lessons by anti-intellectual sentiment, lessons will not cut it. They won’t trust anything that might be attributable to a “deep state”.

You need a more natural, more grounded style of communication if you want to have a chance.

A Trump ally using a bunch of funding from the Middle East to buy out an American company well-known for producing children’s cartoons? Where’d their Islamophobia go?

If we had a real propaganda arm and a complete lack of morals, we could exploit this.

Conspiracy being a real phenomenon and the manufacture and spread of conspiracy theories to help one particular narrative are two separate concepts.

MKUltra and Illuminati running the world/flat earth/young earth/great replacement/etc are two different types of things. You have to ask who benefits from spreading the idea around. Flat/young earth is a particularly easy example, certain religious movements benefit from convincing people those are valid ideas.

This is basically what various nonprofit orgs that people can join amount to.

Like, if you join the NRA your subscription cost is going to lobbying politicians on gun issues, among other stuff like keeping the org running and paying for nice things for the head of the org.

Diane wrote letters to Idaho’s governor and to Trump demanding Binod’s return. She was “disappointed” by the governor’s response – a form reply – and noted that the White House never replied

This reminds me of those videos you’d see in the early parts of the Russo-Ukrainian War, where some Russians would make some sort of appeal to Putin about some problem, as if he actually cared about some random soldiers on the frontline.

I think you can reach out via txt, just format your message to subtly acknowledge that a response is unnecessary. So, instead of wording your message normally as something that would begin a back-and-forth, word it more like an old fashioned letter, or something else where a response isn’t expected. Can talk about whatever, updates on you, your thoughts about this or that, hopes she/her family are doing better, etc etc. Then just end with an old sounding “hope this finds you well” type of thing. Just avoid non-rhetorical questions or anything that pressures her to return contact. When she’s ready, she can write you back.

Good lord, that’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it… Ugh.

Yeah, this has always bugged me too. It slows down our accumulation of old content, which is one of the big draws of platforms like this. People love to go to reddit for answers to questions originally asked years ago, and they could potentially use Lemmy for that too, if our backstock got substantial enough. As a much smaller userbase, though, we kinda need every thread we can get.

Yeah, but I like to try to use it to move in a certain direction emotionally. Like, instead of pure sad, I’ll put on something sad and wistful to move a little in that direction, or sad and angry to shift a little that way, depending on my current needs.

Like, this is sad and wistful, with a touch of determination:

https://youtu.be/es9MQweZzvc

This is sad and angry:

https://youtu.be/6NXnxTNIWkc

This helps avoid wallowing in the pure sad feeling, which I don’t really like.

Five maps so far. Is someone doing this by hand, the hard way? I figured it was an AI someone programmed, but if it’s an individual or small team, big respect. Very neat project.