donuts

1. My cat
2. Tough one, but probably my cat.
3. Not only do I love my cats, taking care of your pets if your responsibility as a pet owner. I have no love or relationship to a stranger, they don’t care about me and I don’t care about them, and It’s also not my responsibility to protect other people. An animal that I raised from near-birth, and who has always shown me basically unconditional love and affection seriously means as much to me as a child. My pets are there for me when I have a bad day, and they’re with me when I’m having a great day too. They bring so much joy and comfort into my life and they are so innocent and kind. Even after a lifetime of interactions I never have a single bad or negative moment with my pets. I don’t hate people and I wouldn’t like to have to decide in a fucked up scenario like you’re describing here. But to be honest, I’m probably saving my pet. Sorry.

We don’t.

Right wing cultist morons do, because I guess they think that everything is somehow a giant conspiracy against Trump, because thinking that helps them process and cope with the fact that Trump is always in the news for saying and doing bad or dumb shit.

Whatever you want to do in life, start right away.

• If you want to start a business, start developing it and putting the pieces into place as soon as you can.
• If you want to be a artist/musician/writer/etc, take yourself seriously and start gigging or creating right away.
• If you want to reach the top of the academic pyramid, study more than what you’re assigned and start developing your ideas.
• If you want to be involved in politics, then start getting involved in politics.
• etc…

I’m not saying this because it’ll be too late if you don’t, or anything like that. It’s never really too late to change course or start doing what you want.

But don’t wait until you’re finished school. Don’t wait until you feel “ready”. Dispel is the idea that you’re still a kid or that you’re just going through the motions until your life really begins. Life is now. So, plant the seeds of your future as soon as you possibly can.

I’d also say to develop a healthy attitude towards soft drugs like alcohol and weed.

Hard drugs can fuck your life up faster, but addiction to soft drugs can also do a lot of damage. Have fun, but keep perspective. You’re probably gonna be around people do stupid shit from time to time, but resist the temptation to be the person doing the stupidest shit.

Everything, in one sitting. You might as well go out with a fucking bang, am i right?

Hopefully he’s dead (from natural causes) or in jail (from natural consequences).

Microsoft basically tied with Apple for the title of richest company in the world, by the way.

There are plenty of things that people do every day that contribute to the potential spreading of diseases, from every kind of sex to not wearing a mask when you’re sick.

To single out anal sex as a sign that homosexuality is immoral (despite the fact that vaginal sex can also spread diseases, and despite the fact that anal sex is not exclusive to gay people) is a sign that the person you’re talking to is biased and arguing in bad faith.

Ethically speaking, if someone wants to live by a moral system that differentiates between right and wrong based on the potential to spread disease, then that’s fine, but that logic still needs to be coherent and apply to all things, not just selectively to things that they dislike.

But anyway, if they’re sophists, you probably aren’t going to convince them. If you have to engage with that shit, then your best bet is probably the socratic method: ask them targeted questions to poke holes in their flawed logic until they back themselves into a corner. You know what they’re saying doesn’t make any sense, so simply asking them questions which reveal more contradictions will force them to adjust or abandon their position.

I wasn’t trying to imply that. I’ve edited my post to reflect that I’m speaking generally. Sorry.

Personally I think that asexual people also benefit from sex-positivity and an honest discussion about the wide variety of forms of sexual expression. When we stop treating sex as some dirty taboo thing, and when we start accepting that everybody wants something different out of it (or maybe doesn’t want it at all), I think it becomes easier to understand that all different kinds of people exist with different relationships to sex. That’s not only OK, but a good thing.

A lot of social ills have come from the idea that people who express different forms of sexuality are wrong, gross, bad, sinful, mentally ill, etc. The sooner we move past that flawed and harmful concept, the better, in my opinion.

We were doing so well in realising that all human beings are worthy individuals with emotional and intellectual depth, yet now so many of us don’t seem to see any problem with society encouraging many to reduce themselves to sexual objects.

Human beings, like most other animals and plants, are fundamentally sexual beings.

It’s good to value emotions and intellect, of course, but even before all of that comes the primitive basis of sexuality, sensual and sensory pleasure, and the propagation of species. Sex (with others or by yourself) is just as much a natural and core part of the human experience as eating, drinking, sleeping, and so on, and embracing sexual freedom and sex-positivity is in no way incompatible with emotional balance, intellectualism, or any other meaningful pursuit.

As such, masturbation or pornography aren’t inherently bad or problematic in any way.

There are absolutely potential problems surrounding pornography, like human trafficking, but those issues are separate things that can and should be treated and handled as distinct. We have the tools as a society to deal with human trafficking and sexual violence, and we can do it without throwing sexual freedom and bodily autonomy under the bus.

In my view the last thing we should do as a society is to continue to engage in mindless sex-negativity, which has a long documented history of direct ties to the persecution of women and LGBTQ+ sexual minorities, as well as needlessly shaming people (sometimes to the point of inflicting real psychological damage) for exploring the full space of sexual possibilities by themselves or with consenting partners. Like everything else, ethics, responsibility, moderation and legality are things to consider, but you can do all of that while still being sex-positive and open minded about personal sexual liberty.

Changing the way you think about and practice sexuality (your own, others, and in general) allows you to know yourself and others in a more intimate, authentic and human way.

I think it’s really easy to overlook Ping Ping.

I didn’t know or care about the sport at all going in, but the show presented it in such a way that you can’t help get invested in the characters. On top of that it’s just a excellently told story with a lot of good drama, and I think it says a lot about people and their relationship to sports/hobbies/art/etc. I hope other people will give it a try. :)

Cowboy Bebop - Tank
Trigun - HT
Neon Genesis Evangelion - Cruel Angel’s Thesis
Lupin III Part 2 - Opening 1 bad video but best i could find sadly…
City Hunter - Love, Don’t Leave Me
Ping Pong the Animation - Tada Hitori
The Tatami Galaxy - Maigoinu to Ame no Beat
Gunbuster - OP
Samurai Champloo - Battlecry
Re: Cutie Honey - Cutie Honey Theme
Paranoia Agent - OP
Macross - OP
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann - Sorairo Days
Detective Conan - OP1 or OP3
Nadia the Secret of Blue Water - Blue Water
Dragon Ball Z - Cha La Head Cha La
Death Note - OP1
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 2 - OP

I could probably do more…

Now, endings are another story…

I feel like I’ve given my answer to this question regarding Beehaw once before…

But as I see it, the main driving force and overall source of value for services like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc., is federation. That is to say, federation among a wide variety of different users and servers across the fediverse using protocols like ActivityPub is what sets this entire thing apart from legacy centralized and corporate social media, like Reddit or “X”.

I was initially on Beehaw myself and I liked the mature and kind atmosphere, but I ended up splitting for Kbin due to issues with defederation (on top of being curious and interested in Kbin as an alternative software to lemmy). But whether we’re talking about “Beehaw.org” or “Kbin.social”, in my view the federation is a huge part of the appeal, and I wouldn’t see myself continuing to use a server if it cut itself off from the rest of the network, regardless of whether they did it for “good reasons” or not.

Like, if Beehaw wants to be just a significantly smaller and more highly moderated centralized alternative to Reddit, that feels like a pretty weak pitch which, at best, might end up with a community roughly the size of a classic forum. I’m not really interested in that. I want the Fediverse to succeed as a decentralized, open, scalable, and community-moderated alternative to legacy social media. Frankly, my interest in Beehaw as a community hinges completely on it being a part of that movement or not.

I can understand how federation may have posed significant challenges towards your goal of detailed moderation and creating a safe and friendly space, but only in the sense that you were possibly not fully prepared for the level of exposure to a large number of federated users. But even so, if Beehaw is ever to grow into something bigger (which, to be honest, is not a given, especially if you set out on your own as just another disconnected and insular social media website), you will eventually have to deal with the harsh reality that the kind of moderation that you’re interested in doing is going to be a significant challenge as your community scales, federated or not. (For example, you may be prepared to moderate content in English, but are you prepared to moderate content in other languages? How will you know when someone starts spreading disinformation and hate speech in Burmese?)

Finally, I think you might want to consider the general movement towards federated social media. Between ActivityPub and the Fediverse, Meta’s interest in federating Threads, BlueSky being developed around federation to some extent, federation support in things like WordPress, and a number of other social media platforms tip-toeing their way into the idea, I personally feel that there is a pretty interesting paradigm shift happening right now. Some of that has to do with moderation, responsibility and government pressure on big tech, I think.

But nevertheless, social media is gradually moving towards federation, and I think that’s a good thing for the internet as a whole. You nice people at Beehaw will really have to search yourselves to determine whether you see the value in federation (both in terms of connecting people, but also in terms of allowing various communities to self-moderate to some extent) or not.

I do hope you’ll stay, even though it means facing the growing pains of moderation challenges sooner rather than later, because the fediverse is better with us all connected and communicating together. I’ll be sticking with the fediverse with or without Beehaw, but I do wish you all luck in your goals should you decide to set out on your own.

I think some people (usually right wing Americans who watched too much Fox News back in the 2000s) are opposed to “happy holidays” because they don’t want to acknowledge other religions.

And then there are snobby Europeans who hate and avoid the phrase because it sounds “too American”.

The only people I’ve personally known who exclusively say “Happy Christmas” are Irish. Are you Irish, OP?

I’ve lived in America for almost my entire life and I’ve never once heard an American say “Happy Christmas”. “Happy Holidays”, sure, but that’s mostly reserved for the days leading up to Christmas. On Christmas Day it’s always just “Merry Christmas”.

As a note, Ranked Choice still has bullet voting. About 30% of voters in a ranked choice election bullet vote.

I think that stat could easily be attributed to a lack of familiarity with what is, to a lot of people, a new and different method of voting. You’d be surprised how many people don’t adequately read or understand directions.

In other words, what you’re describing isn’t inherent to the system itself and it could be much worse.

I’d guess that the number of people who bullet vote will decrease as the level of education and familiarity around “new” voting systems like RCV increases.

• AI “content” is trivial to make and will soon be everywhere.

• Nobody wants to read, watch or listen to AI generated “content”

Infinite supply, zero demand. Sounds pretty devoid of value to me.

I can see from your other post that you’re talking about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:

The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar’s relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar’s residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. “Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users.”[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar’s Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]

Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don’t use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don’t you agree?

So what’s my point? Why is any of that relevant?

As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.

There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I’m saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it’s actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta’s staff would probably agree to that.

So what’s the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?

Frankly I’m not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.

I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that’s why we’re talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that’s simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.

As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.

For me personally there are two main forces at play here:

1. I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.

2. Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.

I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…

So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.

I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).

From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.

From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.