It depends on the severity.

• If you are touching cloth, then it is a shart and should be relatively well contained. You just need to clean-up and perhaps discreetly dispose of your undercrackers.
• If you are touching socks, then the world has dropped out of your bottom and is pretty disastrous as everything is contaminated. You also have a larger problem as this would suggest you have food poisoning or some kind of illness and this is just the start of your problems. When I was in hospital the guy opposite me got C. difficile and the result was unexpected and borderline volcanic - that wasn’t just a bad day, it was a bad week.

My folks were great and I miss them a lot.

I’m a big fan of the Hong Kong New Wave in cinema. It’s also a handy entrance to wider Chinese films - if you like a director or actor or type of film, there are a lot more to find if you start digging.

Go and see your GP. It wasn’t a heart attack but it was a wake up call and I don’t think jumping to seeing a cardiologist will be that helpful, although a GP can refer you on if they think you need it.

I was in the foothills of heart health problems - high BP, cholesterol creeping up, etc. and the health staff were starting to express concern (suggesting I might need to go on statins). So I turned it around in two years and at my last health check my weight and bloods were all “perfect” according to the nurse. So it is doable.

However, from what you say, mental health issues may be holding you back and making important and sweeping changes to your lifestyle require effort and focus. So the GP may want to get this addressed while starting to monitor your health through regular checks. I found the checks motivating in themselves as the data can really prod you into action because you no longer can say you are probably unhealthy - it is there in stark numbers. I also suspect I was slightly gamifying it as I made beating the numbers a focus and figuring out what I needed to do to adjust each on (as lowering triglyceride levels requires different action to lowering LDL, bad cholesterol). I even made a spreadsheet.

Left during the APIcalypse, largely only go back to help guide people to the fire exits.

Which tools specifically?

Standard Web forum tools include:

• Editing posts - the main issue is misleading titles
• Moving posts to different communities
• Merging posts
• Splitting comments into separate posts
• IP check

This post makes some good points about reports federating (being worked on, I believe) but also about the lack of what we’ll call a “moderation panel” where you can access tools for the community, like seeing a list of banned users and being able to add to it there or unban someone.

There are other “nice to have” tools like post approval

I am curious to see what moderation tools PieFed, has and NodeBB now they are federated, but the documentation is skimpy on that front.

It shouldn’t be too difficult. A move is essentially a cross-post but it keeps the OP as the poster (rather than the cross-poster). You’d then want to lock the original post, and either hide it or add a message directing people to the new post. That’s all current forum software does.

From my perspective we need better Mod and Admin tools. Forum software has a lot of them but Lemmy is lacking in this department.

The key important one is being able to move posts to different communities. You’ll often get reports of posts not being appropriate for a community but there is no way to actually move it.

Yeah, that’s a tricky one - it does have local content but this is about helping reduce confusion and helping people sign up, and it won’t help in that regard. So I’ll remove it from the list.

That’s great news.

I’m curious to know if they got the auction stopped or if they had to shell out thousands for it.

That’s just misdirection for all the other policy changes:

Meta on Tuesday announced sweeping changes to how it moderates content that will roll out in the coming months, including doing away with professional fact checking. But the company also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, adding new types of content users can post on the platform, effective immediately.

Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it,’” according to a section of the policy prohibiting such speech that was crossed out. A new section of the policy notes Meta will allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”

I think if more people took on tasks like running the communities while educating people the benefits of the fediverse, then we can see a bit more growth.

This is the way - be the change you want to see in the world.

Lemmy isn’t the size of Reddit, so it isn’t at a place where the vast majority of users can just passively consume content.

If there’s a niche for a community then start it. If you want more Mods, keep an eye out for active posters and ask if they want to help. If you are unsure about starting a community or want help from the start (as it might be popular) then start a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee. The more active communities, the more likely it is for the next wave of users to stick around and some of them might start new communities.

If you build it they will indeed come and stay.

I wish I was that young!

Yeah, that’s tricky - I have Italian DNA matches (although they go back to the late Bronze Age) and my cousin married an Italian woman, so have had a nose around some Italian family trees and they seem to have solid records. I don’t know about Spanish or South American records.

Going by this discussion (warning: it’s on The Bad Place) (see also this discussion), there are good Spanish records but you’d need to talk to someone with expertise on where to look for the specific records you need. It may be worth tracking down Spanish language genealogy sites or try general ones and see who you can find - I have great luck with RootsChat who have a Europe board on their forum (although I was mainly after British help).

It depends on where they were from. If the big repositories don’t have the data (and you have clearly tried them) then:

• The data may have been destroyed or never written down. I am ¾ Irish but landing any of my ancestors in Ireland has been hard. The records burned in 1916 and, in some areas, there are gaps during the Potato Famine when no-one was around to write things down. One of my best DNA matches on my Mum’s side falls foul of the latter as we have matching surnames and know pretty much when and where our connection would be but the parish records just stopped in that period.
• It’s not in English. They are doing their best to fill such gaps but adding translation in can be hard. There are often regional family record offices but they may be in a language you don’t speak (I’m having trouble tracing my sister-in-law’s grandmother who was born in Estonia. I am also helping a friend whose grandfather was born in Malaysia and it is tricky even working out where to look). Scandinavian genealogy tends to be excellent, but you may need access to the “farm books” where the records are kept.
• It’s paywalled elsewhere - Scottish records need you to subscribe to a specific site.
• The names are badly transcribed - the British record keepers clearly struggled with some Irish names especially when being told them by illiterate peasants (possibly not helped by some being in Gaelic). I have one family whose name is written over a dozen different ways and it can be hard piecing it together. The names settle down after a bit (there was a big push for literacy in the late 19th Century) but there are two branches of the family that ended up with two different spellings of their surname.

Or any other issues. Without details it is tricky to point you in any specific direction.

If you hit a wall, try DNA.

In no particular order, genre shows include:

• Babylon 5
• Firefly
• X-Files
• Fringe
• Buffy/Angel
• The League of Gentlemen
• Dr Who / Torchwood
• True Blood
• Utopia
• Supernatural
• Third Rock
• Ash vs Evil Dead
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
• Peacemaker
• The Nevers

I watch a lot of horror but that managed to unsettle more than anything in a while.

That was my reasoning.