I’m religious neutral (I don’t like the term atheist), and I’m fine with the Ten Commandments.

Work within the system to bust it open.

The first commandment says “thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In a monotheistic religion (one god), that seems nonsensical. What He’s really saying is you can’t put anything before God. Including money. Or greed.

Another one says “thou shalt not bear false witness,” which is to say “don’t lie,” but they can’t stop doing that.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s…” I forget. Ass is in my family’s KJV (meaning donkey of course) and that’s funny. But this is another good one. They need to stop coveting our freedom and what little we have left and stop stealing from the poor.

Why should we live by these rules if the people in power won’t? In that case the rules aren’t even arbitrary.

Can’t tell what they are, but they don’t appear to be waifus. That would be funnier.

Or if it was all kid characters… e.g. Eleven and Max from Stranger Things, Anya from SPYxFAMILY, Wednesday from… Wednesday… I dunno, I’m sure there are others.

It’s not just the UK. Severance and Silo were made by Apple TV and the second seasons took like 2-3 years. And Apple is massive. Shingeki no Kyojin — Attack on Titan outside of Japan — was practically a breakthrough in anime, and it took them four years to do the second season.

It does feel like the UK has pioneered the short season with the 2-3 year break though.

Time dilation.

Imagine you go to prison for a year. That’s one year you’re without your family and friends, and a year they’re without you. 1:1 time.

Now imagine you’re put to sleep and kept in a coma like state, fed by tubes. A computer or similar machine induces a dreamlike state that is indistinguishable from reality in which you will be imprisoned for 100 years. You never sleep. You never eat or drink. You never need to. And you can’t relax, you’re constantly being hunted or otherwise threatened. In the real world your family never left your side because in the real world, you’re only under for an hour.

Something similar happened to a guy on Star Trek (O’Brien on Deep Space Nine). Black Mirror did it a few times. And the fourth season of Sword Art Online (an anime) did it as well. Probably some others. Oh yeah, Interstellar. So you may have seen it.

End of trust, not truth.

Back in my day, we assumed that if it was on TV, it was a lie or likely not the whole truth. When the Internet began to rise up, we extended that mistrust to the Web.

Lately, people have become too trusting of the Internet and I’m glad that trust is starting to roll back.

See, this is why I lean left. I’m not far left or alt left, I have some right leaning tendencies too, and I’m not gonna get into that because that’s neither here nor there, but all told I do lean left. And the reason is, generally speaking people on the left have their morals too (and it’s odd that the right says we don’t) and if someone on our side, even if we think he’s a saint (how people see Keanu Reeves, because he doesn’t play villains and they never played Cyberpunk, I guess) or maybe the best chance of beating an alt-right candidate in a high stakes election… we will bring him down, with facts. We hold ours accountable. The right? They say it’s fine for them to do bad things but for poor people? Stiff penalties because they gotta appear tough on crime… as long as it’s poor, dark skinned, or LGBTQ+ people doing the crime. If it’s them and theirs it’s fine. Never forget, they nominated and elected a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, a rioter, a traitor… and oh yes, a pedophile. They had plenty of cleaner guys they could have ran but they didn’t.

Now, there’s a rule in law, or a rule of thumb, I’m not sure if it has a name. It basically says if you destroy or hide evidence, that evidence is whatever we say it is. I don’t think it’s an actual law, it’s more of a philosophy of sorts. So everyone opposed to releasing the Epstein files, we can assume that either they are in them, or someone they owe favors to is, and it’s worse than we think. Like, I’m inclined to think maybe Trump fooled around with some 15-16 year old girls who could pass for 18-20. Lot of rich people probably do. Grass green, water wet, news at six, etc. He knows his base doesn’t judge him for the stuff we know he’s done. So what’s he afraid of?

Here’s my theory: we all know Trump is in the Epstein files. It’s a sure bet. I think that Trump doesn’t care about his name being smeared. How much worse could his reputation get now? Nah, I think the GOP has a short list of younger men (guys in their 40s and 50s, say) who could carry the torch for the next 8 years. I don’t doubt Trump would try for a third term if he had the health and youth for it. He has neither. I honestly think we need to stop worrying about his third term and start worrying about the two terms his successor is going for. Anyway, I think one or more of these successors are in the files, and they probably messed with some obviously underage and very young looking girls. Like 13 but can pass for 10, young. Underdeveloped, partly malnourished, that kind of thing. And these guys, after another 4 years of Trump, are going to come up and say they’re going to fix things. They’re going to fight hard for the middle and some of the left, but they’re going to be just as bad. And I think Trump is trying to protect these guys more so than himself.

Thanks! I went and followed the discussion link the other guy posted. I saw one concern — the handling of voting. But someone/some people are going behind a lot of those comments and saying they fixed it based on user feedback. So that’s good. I also feel I understand the two (Lemmy and Piefed) and their relationship a bit more.

If it sounds like I’m a bit eager to learn, it’s because I like to help others, but to do that I have to understand things first.

So let me see if I understand you correctly. The “one I’m on now” you refer to in the third paragraph, meaning dbzer0, is an instance of Lemmy (along with others) that are federated (loosely united) together in the same feed.

You’re on piefed.social, so you’re federated with dbzer0 and the other Lemmy feeds. So it’s not like you’re on a whole other federated social network like Bluesky (which is more like Twitter whereas Lemmy is more like Reddit). But it has different programming, so you can access more/different features from your end than I can on mine, but we still have access to the same communities?

Still kinda struggling to understand how fediverse stuff works.

For me it’s chaotic good vs lawful good.

D&D divides character alignment along two moral axes, good vs evil, and lawful vs chaotic. Both can be neutral, and if you’re neutral in both you’re True Neutral. Heroes are good, but most are lawful good, like Superman in American comics and All Might (My Hero Academia) in Japanese ones. For chaotic good, that’s someone like Batman. I think that’s an anti hero.

Whereas villains can be lawful evil or chaotic evil, that doesn’t seem to matter as much. Darth Vader is lawful evil — he is evil, but he follows a set of laws. The Sith code or whatever. Trump is more chaotic evil, he makes his own rules and just wants to see the world burn.

I think most of us are close to true neutral. We might lean towards good but I don’t think most are pure good like a hero would be. Some of us lean toward lawful but aren’t pushing it like lawyers, judges, good cops I suppose… and some lean toward chaos (like say movie pirates) but they’re not trying to make the world burn, they just wanna watch stuff for free. The four extreme alignments are really reserved for heroes, villains — the movers and shakers.

Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.

Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.

Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.

When the kid can stand on their own. Some never learn. Sometimes it’s the parents’ fault, sometimes the kid is missing something (some mental or physical or maybe psychological deficit).

When I was a kid, there came a time when I wanted as little to do with my folks as possible. I’d be out until just past dark (“when the streetlights come on” was the time we’d start heading home) and from a pretty young age. Like 9-10. We’d go for a mile or two, explore the world around us. Ride bikes to another neighborhood or (later) get on a county bus and go to another town. We didn’t have cell phones, let alone pocket computers like kids have now.

I see kids as old as 8-10 still needing to cling to mommy’s skirt or daddy’s jeans. That could never have been us. And when they’re not clinging to their parents, they’re playing Minecraft or Fortnite or Roblox on a hand-me-down phone that doesn’t call (and probably has its serial blocked for non-payment so it just works on WiFi) or a tablet. And I’m not generalizing. I know kids like this. Kids in my family are like this. I have no control over it. I’ve tried to tell them they should be out playing. They won’t hear it. Family doesn’t care. I’m the old man shouting at clouds. I imagine those kids will be living at home at 30 being told when to take a shower and when to go to bed. It’s not just this generation, either. I have a couple aunts and an uncle (young Boomers/elder GenX) who were the same way. Minus the electronics, naturally.

Parents: Raise your kids to be independent, or they’ll be your babies forever.

If you like chicken, go to the corner of 53rd and 6th and find the halal cart with the longest line. Ask for the chicken and rice. Go around back and squirt half a gallon of white sauce and maybe a little red on it. Cover it up, walk about half an hour to work up an appetite, find somewhere comfortable to sit, and thank me later.

They have a chain now but nothing beats the OG cart. Even the pizza. Rose’s Pizza in Penn Station has my vote. May not be the best but it’s good! First pizza I had in NYC and while others were good, I haven’t found one I liked much more.

I’m sad we didn’t see cazadores but I’ll take a tenth of a Deathclaw.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

I’m sure some are, but I stand by my assertion that I’ve met flat-earthers who were simply sceptical and pushing that particular point of view.

This was also when they were new. I’m not sure if those people represent the whole or if I just met an outlier (and online, at that, where anyone can say/claim anything). I certainly don’t mean to speak about all of them.

Insofar as humidity exists everywhere… I suppose it is.

Speaking as somebody who’s lived where humidity is stupidly annoying… no, it’s not. And those of us who have experienced real humidity love it for that reason. We love getting out of really bad humidity.

I mean, I suppose it could get humid. I’ve only visited. I also suppose any coastal area could get humid, due to proximity to the ocean. But the South ain’t playing when it comes to humidity, and that’s what I meant.

Yep. The kids born in the late 80s/early 90s were my little buddies, kids, who kids my age, would look after. Just like the kids born in the late 60s/early 70s would look after us. But now, I work with people that age, and we’re all just old. Like you’re still young in your 20s, you hit 30 it starts to be over for you as far as doing young people stuff. I have friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and I identify with all of them age-wise. 60-65 and up I respect but I think of them as “older and wiser.” Younger people (20s) seem like they’re too young to relate to. We’re cool, but they’re a generation apart.

As far as generations go, I’m technically GenX, but I identify with most of GenX and older Millennials. I feel like we had a lot of the same experiences. I don’t really buy into generational divides anyway. They’re fine if you’re in the middle. When you get closer to the edge and start mashing the names together, I feel like you’re admitting the groups are not that distinct after all.