Personally, I think the concept of “talent” comes from people who think they were created by a magical man for a specific purpose. What I think talent is, is just practice, perseverance and passion. I’ll use guitar for example. Everyone fucking sucks in the beginning. There’s this very difficult barrier at the start that you can only get through by forcing your way through, before it starts becoming ‘fun’. And a lot of people don’t make it past this beginning phase and think they’re just too untalented, when what they’re actually lacking is the perseverance and the passion to want it hard enough.

Sure, some people have longer fingers (which also isn’t ‘talent’) but you don’t have to play on a wide neck classical guitar, there’s plenty of guitar shapes and sizes that are more suitable.

Because they’re burger citizens.

The funny thing about that is that there has been one study that shows conservatives (especially conservative men) have an enlarged amygdala compared to other people, the amygdala being the part of the brain that handles primitive responses, namely fear driven responses.

And there’s been another study that linked brain damage to having conservative, rigid views. Which explains all the right wing MMA fighters and rugby players.

Mine’s a British woman. And the volume of that voice always seems to be much louder than whatever I was listening to, so it gives me a slight fright every time.

Currently reading Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. A story about a family of carnies and circus freaks. It’s interesting but it’s been a slow read for some reason. Haven’t read as much as I should’ve for years (trying to fix that) and it’s just not my usual thing I guess. I don’t usually read more than one book at a time but I’m thinking I might move on to some others on my list and come back to this from time to time.

Yeah there’s a lot of games I would’ve never played when I was a kid if it wasn’t for the video store renting out games. I had a second hand Mega Drive, one controller and two or three games of my own, not bought all at once. And I can say that I got a lot more out of renting games than feeding coins into an arcade machine at least. They even had games available for swap, so I could trade something I bought and regretted, or finished and got everything out of.

I also definitely wouldn’t have watched 90% of the movies I got to watch if it wasn’t for the video store.

I think like anything else it’s neutral, or a good or bad thing depending on what kind of predator is running it. Same as second hand stores. Renting out things that people need to survive sounds fucked. But renting out Sega games and whatever fantasy / sci-fi / horror movie caught my eye made part of my childhood.

Ah that definitely makes sense. I think by the time I was experimenting with distros, things had probably moved on a bit. I can say from experience that using Arch just requires the ability to read, really. But it was probably more hardcore in its earlier days when the wiki wasn’t as well formed yet.

Where did this stereotype actually come from? I’m genuinely curious. Because Windows users wouldn’t know Arch from Ubuntu and to them, all Linux users are “I use Linux btw” types. And I don’t think I’ve seen Arch users just randomly telling people they use Arch in Linux spaces. But it must’ve come from somewhere.

I’ve been following this English teacher on Instagram, who has had every attempt at getting kids to read thwarted by the school admins, who don’t want anything ‘woke’ or ‘political’ or too challenging in any way. Which left this teacher with an empty library by the time the admin was done.

So it’s not the kids’ fault, it’s not social media’s fault, it’s not even the teacher’s fault. It’s pearl clutching, conservative, anti ‘woke’, horse dewormer enjoying, piss drinkers that want these kids to stay stupid and unquestioning, and to have the reading ability of 5th graders.

I guess that if you put a bunch of religious fruitcakes that think science and education are woke devil magic in charge of things, you’re going to end up with poorly educated children. Who would’ve thought?

👏👏

Yeah, the way the history books painted Hitler was like he was a supervillain with the power of convincing people to do what he wants against their will. Now I know that’s probably not true and that the Germans were probably just dumb as fuck pieces of shit that would’ve hammered their own faces if they were told to.

And guess what, in the ‘real’ world, you would get punched in the face for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. And if you enter the club and spend your time insulting the owner and all the regulars, a bouncer will throw your ass out into the street and no one will be defending your freeze peach.

Your consequence free version of ‘free speech’ has never existed and never will. It’s just a fantasy that you basement dwelling 4chan wannabe losers cooked up because you’ve never actually gone out into the real world or interacted with real people. Spoilt, entitled brats.

You’re free to speak, everyone else is also free to tell you to go fuck yourself. ‘Free speech’ doesn’t mean that everyone should be forced to kiss your ass 100% of the time, regardless of what you say.

I will be watching this thread with great interest for people to block and make my Lemmy experience better.

After spending the last year or so exploring mainstream social media, one of the biggest differences between Facebook and Instagram, is that Facebook has multiple reacts. And certain people, notably men, love to use the laugh react to bully people. You’ll find laugh reacts on everything from a trans person posting a selfie, to feminist pages posting about rape and abuse stats. On Instagram, the bigots are still there in the comment sections but they’re a lot easier to ignore because there’s a lot less noise in that regard, on how they’re allowed to react to things.

After this experience, I 100% believe that the people who rely on the downvote button so much on platforms like this and Reddit, are actually exactly the same kind of fucking people that laugh react news stories about rape. Stupid, mean, cruel, stupid people who can’t spar with their stupid ideas, so all they have is a panic button to make them feel better.

People downvote for absolutely stupid reasons. It’s original intention was for handling trolls and off topic content but most of these people just use it as a ‘dislike’ button. These days more than ever, I feel like it’s something that should just be done away with because it gets proven over and over again that it only really ever gets used in bad faith anyway, and therefore adds nothing of value to the platform.

That’s why I’m quite happy on an instance with downvotes simply disabled. Personally, between Reddit and Lemmy I’ve probably purposely downvoted about five things, when a person doesn’t know when to end an ‘argument’ and just becomes a troll.

Last time I was more active here, I did end up getting into the habit of checking votes and honestly, it just makes me want to block people, even if they haven’t been downvoting me. If you’re the kind of person that goes around downvoting everything all day for stupid fucking reasons, you’re probably an unlikeable, insufferable turd in ‘real’ life too.

It’s been a while but for me personally, the number one thing that saves your ass in event of failure is installing both the up to date and the LTS kernel. If you fail to boot, it’s gonna have something to do with a kernel update 90% of the time, in which case you just boot with the LTS kernel. Just about anything else can be fixed either while you’re up and running, or with a live distro installed on a USB.

As a South African, there could’ve been at least some punishment for some people. Basically everyone was forgiven, and presented with the opportunity to learn lessons by themselves and evolve. And 32 years later, Afrikaner farmers are trying to convince Trump that there’s a white genocide and that they’re all precious little victims.

I know that conservatives have a hard time learning anything and doing any evolving (if they could they wouldn’t be conservative) but maybe it would’ve helped if at least some examples were made. Because ‘love and light’ and ‘forgive and forget’ didn’t work.

Yeah all my MySpace friends were people I made friends with on forum sites. And we were actually friends that actually spoke and messaged other. Novel concept for ‘social’ media, I know.

Famously, married couples were shown to sleep in separate beds.

First thing I thought of was Bert and Ernie.