Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you remembered! Thanks :)

(It wasn’t my birthday, until I read this post. But now it is, so thank you)

This is bending the prompt somewhat, but I was once almost struck by lightning. I was walking home through a park, and based on how soon I had been hearing the thunder after each flash of lightning, the storm was basically right on top of me. I was feeling pretty nervous, and tried to take a route with minimal tall trees, but I was a teenager and didn’t know what else to do but to keep heading home

All of a sudden, I was filled with a sense of foreboding, and I felt an overwhelming instinct to get away from where I currently was. It was so strong that I dove off to the side, before I heard one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard. Based on where the lightning had seemed to hit, I was very lucky, as it looked like I would have been caught in it had I been standing where I was a moment before. I assume that the wrongness I was feeling before I jumped aside was subconsciously recognising the electric charge buildup in the air or something. I don’t know.

Either way, I’m glad I jumped. In an alternate timeline, I’d have dove and felt very silly after nothing at all happened. Or alternatively, I might have jumped aside and still been affected. Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re feeling like this, it might be that you haven’t found your people yet.

When you’re with the right people, it still takes effort to socialise, and time to build your skills, but it’s much easier.

The hardest part is the early bit, where you need to push yourself to go to lots of different stuff in an attempt to find your people. There is no trick or tip to make this part easier — it just sucks. I’m at a decent point in terms of social skills nowadays, but I’ve been trying to make friends after moving to a new city, and damn, this part of the process is tiring.

I mention this because I want to emphasise that if you’re finding this difficult, that’s normal and okay. If you find yourself becoming weary after many instances like in the OP, then that’s okay and normal too. It is hard. But it gets better, if you keep at it.

Thanks for the link. There have been a few people in this thread making this point, and I was considering asking them to elaborate so that I can gauge what my risk is from using pip for python. I appreciate you providing a resource so I can go learn more about this

Pentiment was great. You can feel that it’s made with so much passion.

I played with a friend who was a medievalist sitting beside me, and she confirmed that all the weird and wonderful marginalia animals were from actual manuscripts

What’s your basis for saying the vast majority are into it as a kink thing? Because I’m someone who used to feel uneasy about furries for much the same reason you are — but that was when I personally knew few, if any people who were furries.

Over the last few years, my work has meant that I’ve met more furries than I can count, becoming friends with many of them, and developing a better understanding of what being a furry offers them. It’s not a sex thing for the vast majority of furries I have known. This isn’t just based on my experience either — I have an artist friend who draws furry porn for a living. Although she is not a furry herself, she exists in close proximity to the furry community so that she can network and get commissions, and she agrees that the people for whom it’s a kink thing is a minority

NOT ESPECIALLY, BUT NONETHELESS, I CONSIDER THEM TO BE MY CULTURE BECAUSE I HAVE AUTISTM

Yeah! Nerd party!

That’s what makes it so beautiful to learn what I can. I do sometimes feel overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, but what grounds me is taking the time to feel joy at each wonderful little thing I do have the opportunity to learn, as well as the opportunity to share my learning with others.

Throughout my life, I have accumulated a heckton of random knowledge, all tied together by my subjective perspective. There are things that I know that no-one else can know — insights that come from a particular arrangement of facts and experiences. It gives me a sense of clarity because it reminds me that one of my duties is simply to just “hold the camera”, so to speak — to be the anchor for my particular, situated perspective

It’s less about the ability to find the clitoris, and more about the will to do so. I think that it is more than a meme, but in the sense of “men seem so oblivious about the clitoris that surely they must not be able to find it”. Some women do seem to genuinely believe this to be the case. I guess that, as absurd as it may sound, it may be more palatable to believe than “most of my partners don’t give a fuck about my pleasure and I’m functionally little more than a fleshlight to them”

There have been a few times where I have been a bi woman’s first experience of sapphic sex, where they have told me that the sex was so good that it basically redefined for them what sex could be like.

I don’t know if it makes it more or less grim that I have slept with plenty of men who were invested in my pleasure enough that they actively enjoyed helping me to have a good time. I guess they have just been fairly unlucky with their partners.

I bumped into a friend of mine who was doing a PhD in physics, and she said “well, men have started to explain my own research to me, so yay for passing?”

Vive la France

There are plenty of Israelis within Israel who are opposed to Israel’s war crimes and other crimes against humanity. If you doubt this, I recommend checking out the journalistic outlet +972, which has an editorial team of both Israelis and Palestinians, and have been speaking out against the Israeli state since 2010. They’ve written at length about how hard it is to operate within Israel when journalism such as theirs is heavily suppressed, but much of their work is also available in Hebrew, because they aren’t just writing for an international audience

Smart if so. Israel’s only been able to keep up its campaign of aggression because of US support (and I’m not just talking about this most recent war), and this seems like it could help drive a wedge between Israel and the US

It sounds like you’re in the affected area. Please accept my well wishes if that is indeed the case. What’s happening right now is disgusting beyond words, and I appreciate you giving your perspective

I find that I don’t have to tinker with settings anymore than I did on Windows — which is to say that it’s pretty occasional

But what I like about Linux is that in the rare instances of struggling to make stuff work (like when I found out how to run mods in Baldur’s Gate 3 — big love to the random person who made an excellent Steam Community guide on how to mod Bg3 on the steam deck), at least at the end of it, I come away from the process with some additional knowledge that’ll be useful beyond the problem I was dealing with.

The OS is just way more transparent and communicative in a way that facilitates learning (once you learn the basics of how to communicate with it, such as not being terrified of the terminal)

It has changed a bunch, but I don’t mind it. It has gotten larger, and with that comes a greater number of trolls and spammers. I don’t see as much tankie discourse nowadays. There seems to be more political content, but that’s likely a reflection of the world.

Communities have become more concentrated — after the Reddit APi debacle, it was common to find the same community across many instances, and these were often inactive or sparsely used. Now many of these have been consolidated into fewer, more active communities.

Some communities are niche enough that you can easily read over a week’s worth of posts in one small burst, but remain active due to the dedication of moderators who do things like weekly threads.

There are frequently recurring big names who post frequently. These people aren’t necessarily the same as at the beginning, because there are still a few individuals who make up a majority of posts. I worry for these people sometimes, because it must be a lot of pressure to know that if you stopped posting, the community may wither away. Some of these communities are just silly little meme comms, but I imagine people still feel a sense of ethical duty towards these things.

The rules pages for communities are much better now. It’s easier to know where you stand in different communities, especially in areas where there may be overlap between the communities’ scopes — there has been gradual iteration that has helped people to understand how things relate to each other

When I first got here, I was struck by how much it reminded me of my early time with Reddit. It was much easier to have productive conversations with people. I felt sad because it highlighted how bad Reddit had become. It has always been a bit of a toxic cesspit of a site, in some ways (when people ask me what pseudonymous social media site I used most as a teenager, I am often embarrassed to admit that it was Reddit), it had a lot of good going for it — people engaging in genuine conversation despite everything. I can get that a lot more reliably here.

Things have changed, but Lemmy is still capable of fulfilling my desire for genuine conversations with random internet people. I often write long comments, and I often feel that my time was well spent. Sometimes I non-judgmentally call out people for being unpleasant in their comments, and it leads to productive conversations. I honestly live for that shit, and Lemmy reliably helps me to scratch it. I am better able to navigate the site to find what I am craving.

I wish there were more posts and comments sometimes, but I recognise that this is a bit of a monkeys paw wish, in that a greater userbase will degrade the experience further. Nothing lasts forever though. When Lemmy dies, whenever that ends up being, I will have been glad for my time here

Commenting to follow

This was at an Unknown Mortal Orchestra (a psych rock band) gig at an old and fancy venue. At one point, the lighting was such that members of the band were silhouetted against the upper ceiling; it was also cycling such that different band members were casting shadows. The image doesn’t capture the phenomenon very well, but it’s enough to invoke the memory in me, as well as the awe I felt at seeing it.

I’m really glad to hear this. FIFA might still be arses about it, but by New Zealand’s team being good sports about this, it will make it easier to hold FIFA accountable

Edit: also props to Mexico for making it clear they’re open to host also