You did just fine by my measure, it was folks reading what you wrote who screwed up 🤷‍♂️

I’ve personally never met a carpenter, union or otherwise. I’ve known a handful of framers - these are the folks assembling (way faster than is reasonable to expect) the somewhat pre-built wooden structures that eventually comprise a new house. The demands placed on those folks are extreme, they seem to be among the worst treated among the trades.

Spending your career in a trade isn’t a bad idea, probably a good one - it’s way better for a lotta folks than a thoroughly dissatisfying stretch of time in largely meaningless, forever anxious, corporate jobs.

Exercise some care though - don’t just assume something like “working with my hands will pay off”, do the research to find out what you specifically can be happy with, and the pros and cons involved.

And by and large, if you’re going the trades route, prefer one with a heavy union presence.

The Democrats’ stated strategy, after putting their heads together and trying to figure out how they got trounced on the last election - is to go more hardcore “center” than they previously have.

It’s basically impossible to tell at this point if they’re the most clownishly out of touch group of people imaginable, or actively complicit and just waiting for the pendulum to swing slightly back so they can be “successful” again, for a bit. Certainly a mix, but -

The only reason I lend credence to the former at all, is just how cartoonishly bad Dems are at almost everything lately. I say lately because throughout my life there have been at least sincere-seeming efforts from (some) Dems to help (some) regular people. Some might argue (with ample justification) that it’s always been this way, but the situation does feel distinctly bleak to me today.

Meaning that they claim and promise to care about (some) marginalized groups of humans but actually don’t give a single fuck and serve the capital-owning class with roughly the same slavering, dogged devotion as the goddamn Republicans?

If you’re in the US, we have a pretty robust “agricultural university extension” program, in a whole lot of places, that both will have more information than you’re ready to digest about your local ecosystem, and will also generally be thrilled to hear from you and answer your questions. Some even have entire projects devoted to “rewilding” (my word, not theirs), so to speak. Offering things like free “seed bombs” of local plants!

See if you’ve got one nearby and drop em a line about the questions you have! In my experience the folks that staff these are the best kind of nerd, the old-school variant that pre-dates even the word. Think about it - these folks are all over the place, and most of us never hear about it, even on one of the nerdiest places on the Internet. The ag extensions and the folks that staff them are a real American treasure.

People watch porn on their work computers, after being told not to. And not just a few. The Venn diagram of folks who do that and who wouldn’t give a single shit about handing over their ID has gotta be roughly a circle. A whole lotta folks are seriously ill-equipped for the burgeoning surveillance nightmare, in fact their complacency (and frankly just being thoroughly outmatched in sophistication) will march us all towards it.

Would you be willing to talk about what you’re intending to do with this at all? No hard feelings if you’d rather not for any reason.

For context on my request - I’ve been following this comm for a bit and there seems like a real committed, knowledgeable base of folks here - the dialog just in this post almost brings a tear to my eye, lol.

I work fairly adjacent to this stuff, and have a slowly growing home lab. Time is limited of course and gotta prioritize what to learn and play with - LLMs are obviously both and useful, but I haven’t yet encountered a compelling use case for myself (or maybe just enough curiosity about one) to actually dive in.

Selfishly I just wish every post here would give some info about what they’re up to so I can start to fill in whatever is apparently missing in my sort of “drum up fun ideas” brain subroutine, regarding this topic. Lol.

Just being charitable here (to be clear I agree with you) - but I think a big contributor to a lot of folks taking these old media organizations more seriously than they should, is how batshit insane the rest of the media ecosystem has gotten.

That combined with the kind of…legacy of trust, for these old “household name” ones? It’s hard for us olds to update our mental models in a deep way. I was raised thinking it was a respectable outfit - I know, for sure, that I don’t trust them or like them at all today. And yet every time I see “New York Times” my subconscious goes “ah, yep, one of the good ones”. Brains are dumb and annoying.

In truth, my drift from gaming stemmed from very similar self knowledge, I have such a wealth of ways I can spend my time (including with my kids when I can convince the older one, lol) with stuff that has small but accumulative impacts.

No shade on gaming, engaging with art and storytelling and just straight up play all have deep value and I’d argue all people need those things, but yeah. For me a few games in particular that end up feeling like “Chores Simulator XYZ” and which I almost consider a genre of its own (Stardew Valley, Valheim, TerraFirmaCraft MC were my few) helped me better understand my changing preferences. I’m like “why am I building this fake house and collecting the materials and etc. when my office, garage, and outside areas all look kinda shitty?” I have pets who like activity, I have projects and chores and people to see.

Now, I also do feel overburdened pretty often and my job is challenging and tiring, but yeah. By and large I just enjoy more IRL time spent these days, while also missing the former thrill of gaming with this kind of deep ache.

Edit to add: I should probably also say, I had lots to “escape from”, into fictions of various kinds, and I have over time built a life where that is no longer true, and so my time spent has also internally shifted toward more of a sense of gratitude in general, instead of thinking of things as obligations (though of course they 100% are, of the most critical kind) considering where I came from, and I also get how for many folks games can be some of the only pleasant experiences available.

Yeah I’ll be honest, I don’t have a lot to say about how those kinda scenarios should be managed at the moment, I haven’t thought that stuff through too deeply I’m realizing. I’m pretty happy to defer to folks with experience in community moderation and such, I’m frankly a pretty poor candidate for that, for several reasons (somewhat moody, sometimes fond of borderline hyperbolic takes, etc.).

I do think users should be able to have the experience they want, but that’s vague enough to be almost uselessly uncontroversial, and I also recognize that some people’s wants can be incompatible with others’, without either necessarily being unreasonable or unfair. So, another partial reflection of the human condition in general I guess.

I know that feeling so well, sadly.

Ah yeah that’s a reasonable take and I do know what you mean. I broadly like what federation offers over centralization, but it’s not without its quirks and some drawbacks, I hear ya.

Pretty much same for me! Not sure if I played the actual first or just one of the real early ones, but that def drew me to this one. You should play it! I paid full price and would have paid double, knowing now how thoughtfully made it was.

I guess I’d add, having returned to this, that it’s a bit off-putting for you to be sharing your preferences for how they behave with their own instance, given your non-involvement with that instance itself, or trans things in general.

One of the major points of federation as a concept is for folks to not be mandatorily subject to some overarching singular approach to content moderation. You’re here, so I think it’s reasonable to assume you care at least a bit about the way this platform works and what makes it unique(ish) and valuable.

At the risk of coming across more hostile than I intend - why on earth does Blahaj need to specifically, only, be about trans topics, to be a valid space in your eyes, when it seems they mostly just want to exist how they prefer and interact with federated Lemmy stuff, in the ways federation explicitly intends?

I’ll admit that I don’t always remember to look at where a given post originated from before commenting, and I should get better at that - could be that’s all you need, too 🤷‍♂️

Hilariously this comment is precisely as confusing to me as the comm itself.

“Middle-school sass with a poetic twist” is certainly what I aim for when crafting my roasts and witty jabs

Wouldn’t surprise me a bit, that show was crazy influential, at least initially. Punchlines came way faster than we were used to, sometimes deliberately abruptly (iconic example of that for me is Peter’s instantaneous face-plants, which I still find funny TBH). And people liked the endless gags that were just random non sequiturs of dumb stuff happening that had nothing to do with anything. Fun at first, not enough to scaffold a whole show around IMO, but most folks couldn’t get enough.

That kinda stuff really cheapened humor (“mainstream humor”? is that even a thing?) over the long run, according to me. I started to say I’m just crotchety and old, but actually I wasn’t then and I thought it was lame pretty quickly after the initial “fun new show everyone’s into” vibe wore off.

Then again if it wasn’t them it would’ve just been another, audiences were just kinda “ready” for that sort of humor I suppose, obviously wouldn’t have been the runaway success it was otherwise. I’d be shocked if The Simpsons weren’t influenced, seems almost impossible with the cultural swell around Family Guy at the time.

This is exactly why they tried not to bring him back, and I really thought he might end up dead rather than coming home. People who come back talk about the crimes going on down there.

I really don’t understand that comm either, but I haven’t looked too closely cuz I’m not that interested. I also moved off .world entirely for my accounts because I don’t like some of their moderation stances. I understand why they have them and don’t begrudge them for it, to be clear. But I do eye them warily as a kind of emerging de facto instance in some ways (AKA potential for more centralization than seems wise, given their need or desire to comply with certain local laws that limit speech).

Sad thing is from what I understand, Spanish language news commonly available in the US (Unavision I believe?) basically fed Latinos a straight up false version of the guy, the description I read sounded even less accurate than Fox.

The overwhelming effectiveness of widespread media manipulation is the real story (and human tragedy…) here.