cobysev

Lemmy is my main social media account. I also switched from Reddit when Spez killed third party apps, and I won’t go back. I use Sync for Lemmy on my phone and tablet. I paid for the lifetime Ultra account, because that’s how much of a “fuck you” I wanted to give Spez. I’ll gladly pay the $100 for an alternative ad-free app than use Reddit’s free app.

I also use Imgur, although it’s been suffering from enshittification ever since Sarah and the team sold it. I can’t even save a post without getting a pop-up asking to subscribe to the user or follow similar content tags. Or downvote without being asked if I want to block the user or related tags. Just let me do the thing and move on! Stop trying to customize my experience! I’m still able to block their ads, thanks to my VPN service, but they built a dedicated ad space at the bottom of the app that I can’t make go away. So a section of the bottom of my Imgur screen is unusable black space. I miss being able to use my full screen to browse images.

I still have Facebook, but only because everyone I know from my childhood until now is there and it’s my main way of staying in touch with people. If I dump Facebook, I’ll have practically no one left in my life, except for my sister, wife, and maybe two friends. If I need social engagement concerning something going on in my life, I’ll post it there. But I don’t use it much.

I have LinkedIn and spent years keeping my profile up to date and super detailed, expecting to need some good references and a solid history of experience and accomplishments. But then I retired at 38 years old and found out I don’t need to work anymore, so it’s just been collecting dust for the last 2 years now. I still get the occasional request to connect from someone offering to help me find a job (I’m a veteran), but I don’t need their assistance. I’m quite happy being retired young.

I have a Discord server I built for my closest friends to stay in touch, but only 2 people regularly interact on it. I subscribed to maybe 30+ other random servers, but I mute pretty much all of them so I’m not inundated with Discord notifications all the time.

I have Twitch, but mostly used it to stream the games I’m playing when I’m bored. I’m happy if I get 1 or 2 views. I do it just for the fun of it, not to build a following or anything.

I have NextDoor, but there are thousands of people in my town who use it regularly, so it’s hard to stay in touch with my “neighbors.” I mostly ignore it unless I’m trying to find suggestions for something local.

I made a Bluesky account last year; got an invite from a friend before it opened up to everyone. But I hardly ever used Twitter in the past. I always felt like it was pointless unless you were a celebrity with tons of followers. So I’m having trouble thinking of ways to use Bluesky now.

I have Instagram, but only because Facebook merged my account with Instagram when they bought it. I’ve never used it, not even to browse others’ content there.

I made a Snapchat account in high school, but never used it. That was over 20 years ago. Back then, Snapchat was just used to share selfies, and I didn’t like taking selfies so I had no use for it. Is Snapchat still a thing?

I had a MySpace account when I was a teenager, but I guess the site got sold sometime in the past decade or two. I kinda forgot about it, and the last time I went to check it out, it was a totally different site and didn’t recognize my login anymore.

I made an account on Pixelfed last year to share pictures, but I don’t really have anything to share right now. I only remembered I had the account because I just now found their app in my phone.

I use Patreon, mostly just to follow a few people I know and support them.

I worked as an IT guy in the military, and we were explicitly banned from using TikTok when it became popular, because it was a Chinese spyware program and they didn’t want it stealing data on US military members. When you installed it, we found that it embedded itself in your phone in a way that was extremely difficult to fully remove, then granted itself full access to your phone and started trickling your data to Chinese servers. It was a massive security vulnerability, which is why President Biden pushed to block TikTok from the US. But the app was so popular, he got a lot of pushback and it never got blocked. It’s still wildly popular, but I’ll never touch that program.

I tried Warhammer 40K once, but I got the cold shoulder when I mentioned I didn’t have any minis to play with.

They also took 3 sessions to finish pursuing a suspicious character across an alley. I nope’d out of the group after that.

I enjoy the imagination and storytelling most of all. Coming up with an adventure for all of us to discuss and enjoy is fun!

But most of the groups I’ve played with take forever to do anything. We’ll spend like 4 sessions just trying to wrap up a scenario in a tavern and move on. I need to find a DM who can keep the action going and not just give people all the time they want to talk their way through a situation before acting. And I also need to find players who are more decisive.

I’ve played with five completely different groups in the past 20 years, and all of them were exactly like this.

I love the idea of DnD, but every group I’ve ever played with just made it such a drag. I’ve never had fun actually playing it. So now I follow the memes and that’s about it.

Oh, and the Mann Shorts videos about DnD. I would totally play with those guys.

I actually prefer Lemmy because my voice isn’t drowned out like on Reddit. Anything even remotely interesting already had 10K+ comments on Reddit by the time I found it, and my own little addition isn’t going to be noticed by anyone. But here on Lemmy, the most popular posts have like 20-30 comments, tops. I could add my 2 cents, three days later, and still get up/downvotes.

I’m more likely to reply and vote on posts and comments here because I feel like I’m contributing to a small-knit community, not just adding to a massive statistic. Reddit was more about consuming content. My pithy up/downvotes and comments over there hardly made a difference most of the time.

I personally see “bloodline” as a specific, direct line of descendants through a certain genetic-based family, title, position, etc. Whereas a family tree is literally everybody you’re related to, directly or not.

EDIT: As an example, I have an uncle on my mom’s side of the family. He’s not genetically related to me; he married into our family. He also brought a daughter from a previous marriage, so she’s legally my cousin, but we’re not genetically related at all. They married into my bloodline, but they aren’tof my bloodline, if that makes sense. They’re part of my family tree.

They have potent psychic powers that manipulate reality around them

I read once that this is why they paint their vehicles red. Because they believe that red makes it go faster, and with their latent psychic ability, the red ships actually DO go faster, because they believe so strongly in it.

I’ve spent the last year or so playing Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint with a couple friends.

It has an interesting sci-fi/military story, tons of side missions if you’re tired of following the main campaign, and a wide open map to explore if you’re just bored of everything. Plus, there are random missions every day, so if you’re done with the main campaign, you can continue to do missions and enjoy exploring the world even more.

Also, your party doesn’t have to stick together. You can play on the same map, but go off and do your own thing. I have a buddy who can’t follow instructions to save his life. He’s always running around, causing chaos everywhere he goes. We’re trying to stealthily infiltrate a base and he just crash-lands a helicopter into it and runs in guns blazing.

So… we let him run off and grief other bases or enemies while the rest of our party focuses on the mission. Everybody wins, and we all get to play together and have a good time.

EDIT: Same goes for Tom Clancy’s The Division and The Division 2. Unlike Breakpoint, which takes place on an island nation, fighting against a wannabe dictator, The Division takes place in America after a virus plague has wiped out most of civilization, and you’re playing as an elite team that’s trying to restore order to the population.

I’ve been playing The Division with my friends for a few years now. It’s a very fun game series.

My grandfather had a massive heart attack in his 70s. He only stayed alive because my mother was a Red Cross certified CPR instructor and kept him going for over an hour until an ambulance got there. Doctors said his body was pretty messed up and they gave him maybe a month to live at best.

My grandfather said, “To hell with that, I wanna keep living!” He lasted another 10 years until he finally passed away.

Similarly, my dad was on hospice care earlier this year. He had a strong body, but his Parkinson’s was affecting his functions and they gave him less than 6 months to live. Not even a month later, he told my sister that he’s tired of fighting and just wants to die. Within a day, he had passed away.

I definitely believe that the conscious mind plays a role in keeping the body going. If you can convince yourself to keep going, your body will fight the good fight, but if you give up, your body stops trying so hard and gives in.

I thought it was referring to “standup meetings,” which is what we called weekly meetings with the commander in the military.

Everyone stands for the commander when he enters a room, then each person presenting needs to be standing while briefing the commander.

It’s military protocol for a high-ranking officer, although the cool officers would tell everyone to buck protocol, remain seated, and just give them the bullet points so we can get back to work.

We are. I just read an article yesterday about how Microsoft paid research publishers so they could use the papers to train AI, with or without the consent of the papers’ authors. The publishers also reduced the peer review window so they could publish papers faster and get more money from Microsoft. So… expect AI to be trained on a lot of sloppy, poorly-reviewed research papers because of corporate greed.

If I’m on the go, I’ll hook up my laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable, set the TV as a duplicate screen so I can close the lid on my laptop (make sure closing the lid doesn’t lock your computer or put it to sleep), then use my wireless mouse and keyboard so I can sit on the couch/bed/whatever and control it from afar.

At home, I bought a micro PC that I keep connected to the TV via HDMI. Then I use a wireless mouse/keyboard to control it from the couch.

The micro PC has WiFi so I can connect it to the Internet, and all devices on my home network can see each other, so I can quickly copy something from my regular PC or laptop to the micro PC if I want to view it on the TV.

I mostly use the micro PC for my streaming services. I don’t trust my Smart TV to be connected to the Internet, so I don’t use any of its apps. But I’m old; I’m used to TVs being dumb devices. I don’t like handing over control of my apps to companies; I’d rather access them directly from a computer.

I did this with my Steam Link in the past. Interestingly enough, my new Smart TV has Steam Link as a downloadable app for it, so I don’t need my physical box anymore.

hunter2

Reverse this for me. I shower first thing in the morning every day and my bath towels are just drying clean skin. They only touch me for maybe a minute or two before being hung to dry.

However, I go to sleep at night, after a full day of developing natural body oils on my skin. And I lie in bed for 8+ hours at a time.

My bed sheets are far more gross after a week of use than my towel will get in a month, more or less a couple weeks.

The Internet was the Wild West back in the '90s. Anyone could do pretty much anything and there was very little regulation. In the past 3 decades, standards have been popping up to help us build a solid structure for how the Internet works, but a lack of regulation in the beginning led people to believe the Internet was a truly free bastion of information. A place we could share data without going through an institution or government or organization that put their own spin on it first. Which has prevented certain areas of regulation from being enacted, like limiting who can use what root domain names.

Of course, that mindset has backfired since people realized how easy it is to just post false information, and we now find ourselves in an age of misinformation, unable to verify data we find online without a solid reputable organization behind it.

4chan is a perfect example of this. It was originally created under the concept that anyone could post anything and not be censored or banned for it. Their idealism led to many people pushing boundaries with how hateful or violent they could be. Which started as jokes, but then new members came who misunderstood the satire and sarcasm (it’s very hard to identify through text only) and took the diatribe as a welcome place to be their truly awful selves. And before we knew it, 4chan became a cesspool of the worst people, who push misleading information to corrupt the minds of their followers and harm large groups of people.

We’re in an awkward place where a lot of people want the freedom to continue posting whatever they want without censorship or regulation, while others want data to be regulated and controlled to ensure validity and hold people accountable for their online content. It may be many more decades before we find a solution, but for now, the best thing to do is teach our young students critical thinking skills and how to identify potentially misleading data they find online.

I inherited my childhood home and I’m still over 1,600 miles away from my mother. But she preferred her own childhood home on the other side of the country and moved there as soon as she divorced my dad. I’m still very close with my mother. Just not… physically.

It’s more about framing the conversation in a way that helps OP’s supervisor realize they’re at odds with each other, socially, and that the supervisor needs to make changes, not OP. I know it’s a bit blunt and direct and may not exactly describe their relationship, but I’ve found that being direct and binary with extroverted people generally gets them to the point faster, rather than beating around the bush with complex descriptions of their dynamic.

And the supervisor being an extrovert is definitely a part of the problem in this case. They’re ignoring signals from OP that they don’t want to be social, shaming them for it, and forcing public interactions in order to change them. This is classic extrovert behavior which is making OP uncomfortable.

The topic of discussion is definitely off-limits and deserves a conversation with HR, but the supervisor still needs to understand that OP’s antisocial behavior isn’t a problem. Otherwise, the discussion will change to be more work-appropriate, but the behavior will remain.

As a fellow introvert, I’ve found that being meek and timid about uncomfortable situations just invites more trouble from extroverts. The best way to handle it is to be direct and firm. If she wants to be nosy, then drop all the gory details:

"I’m an introvert and I don’t feel comfortable sharing my personal life with coworkers. I know you, as an extrovert, want to be involved in everyone’s personal lives and there’s nothing wrong with that, but as a leader and a manager, you need to understand how to change tracks and adapt to your subordinates’ needs.

“I need time to myself to recharge; being around people is mentally and emotionally draining for me. It’s not something I can “fix,” it’s just the way I am, and no amount of exposure to people or social events will ever change that. I need you to understand that and adapt to my needs, in order for you to effectively manage me.”

I worked my way up the ranks in the US military and eventually found myself managing people. As an introvert, I found it extremely difficult to get out and talk to my subordinates. But I soon realized that the mission wouldn’t get done unless I did my job, so I quickly learned how to fake an extroverted personality while at work so I could talk to people and ensure mission success. Then I’d go home and crash. I’d spend my evenings either sleeping or bundled up, watching TV or playing video games, just to recharge so I could do it all again the next day.

But one of the things I learned was how to adapt to the needs of my subordinates. I had one guy who was a complete fuck-up. Couldn’t do anything right without someone holding his hand. So I either had to be very hands-on with him, or delegate that responsibility to one of my subordinate leaders.

But then I had another guy who grew up in a ghetto being plagued by corrupt cops, and he hated anyone in an authority position over him. Why he joined the military, I dunno. We were all about authority and respecting rank and file. But if I even spoke to him, he would shut down and then be unproductive all day. As long as I left him alone, he was my hardest and most productive worker. So I learned to leave him alone and he practically did my job for me. Maybe your supervisor needs to learn that lesson with you.

The common lingo originated from the movie The Matrix, where Neo was given the choice of taking the red pill and waking up in the real world, or taking the blue pill and staying in the fake fantasy that was his life.

4chan adopted the term and started calling themselves “redpilled,” claiming that they were removed from the happy fantasy promoted in popular culture (wife, kids, decent job, etc.) and could see life for the harsh, cruel reality it truly was.

The mindset spread to Reddit where a community popped up (r/theRedPill), espousing sexual strategies for men in a society where they felt sex was highly unattainable for their gender. It turned into a very misogynistic subreddit, hating on women who “could get laid anytime” and didn’t respect the plight of men who struggled for simple affection from the opposite gender.

Being “redpilled” took on a negative connotation, turning into a darker, conservative term to support men’s struggles in life while at the same putting down women. Its original meaning has been corrupted into a warped idealism for men. One could argue it’s promoting the opposite of its origin; fighting to create a fantasy world for men to flourish without effort instead of introducing them to the reality that their struggles are all self-inflicted and needed hard work, patience, and determination to overcome.

The term became well enough recognized that “_____-pilled” started introducing other concepts of being introduced to harsh truths in the world. In this case, blackpilled, meaning to give in to despair and depression in an uncaring, cruel world.