When I bought a laptop after self publishing my first book, I went with a thinkpad specifically because they handle linux so well. t480

That’s been a few years now, and it’s still running smooth, no issues at all, even with mint having been upgraded a few times.

Those are different things, and I think it important to say that because your question reads like you’re conflating them, when you aren’t; you’re asking how far it does stretch, not saying that locker rooms are the same as a social club.

Which isn’t directed at you, but any passersby that didn’t catch it

As far as that goes, I’m actually okay with shared lockers/showers/bathrooms, so long as you can find privacy as an individual. Stalls with good isolation for them what care in other words. I don’t, however, think it would be okay to enforce that at this point in time

Sure, of course they are.

I’ll even go so far as to say that even more fine grained groups are okay. What becomes a problem is when every group excludes people that really shouldn’t be.

You get a chess club, why the fuck can’t a woman join? Right? Calling it a men’s club is just exclusionary for no purpose. Even the girl/boy Scout divide was pointless in any real sense, and was a missed opportunity for those scouts to have guidance on how a scout is supposed to treat others.

Hell, when it comes right down to it, even a specific cis organization is fine, just the way trans specific ones are. The problem, again, is when a club is exclusionary just for the sake of it.

We all have aspects of our lives that aren’t shared by people with other genders and/or types of genitals. There’s struggles and discrete experiences that a trans man can have that I never will, and vice versa.

But, again, once it ceases to be about that kind of specificity, it starts being bigotry in disguise and needs to fuck right off. Ain’t no good reason women shouldn’t be allowed into things like community action groups. A gender division there is just pointless and stupid. If they also exclude trans men, it’s as bad (maybe even worse).

Hell, the masons are full of shit in that regard. Fraternal orders are hypothetically okay, but since when have the masons actually been about men sharing the unique aspects of life that men share? It’s just exclusionary bullshit (and I’ve seen it from the inside, so I know it’s utter bullshit). They’re the best example of how not to be a gender based organization.

I’m not saying that men shouldn’t be able to gather and just hang out. We should, as should women. There really is a different vibe, and there’s no way around that. But once you start organizing that on a bigger scale, you have a different threshold to meet.

Since, historically, most of the men’s organizations not only excluded women, but actively served to continue oppression of women, being a de facto patriarchal enforcement group, those groups get the worst attention. They weren’t really men’s groups, they were power control groups that men only could use to gain, maintain, and exploit control. That’s why there’s pushback on them, not the fact that they were/are gendered.

hype? Pretty much any because hype is almost always artificial.

But fans? I can’t say any band/performers don’t deserve their fan base. You pull the crowds that need what you’re making, so you inherently deserve them.

I can say that some fans do over hype the talents of what they like. It’s perfectly okay to be a middle range musician, and it’s perfectly fine to like them and recommend them exactly as they are.

Like, backstreet boys. Solid pop boy band. Had some great songs, but most were just okay pop. None of the members can really be compared to someone like Freddy Mercury, or Pavarotti, or Marvin Gaye, but they all had good voices to some degree or another and used them well. But their fan base back in the day was all about the hype, the fannishness of it. So they got hyped way beyond what they were.

That’s the curse of a lot of pop performers, and it is the curse of teen/tween targeted pop for sure.

A lot of that kind of performer has to totally undo their family friendly (which is a bullshit term to begin with) focus to ever really grow musically. Look at pretty much every Disney escapee for examples. Timberlake, arguably the best example of someone escaping that trap without having to piss off the original fan base, still drags some of that curse with him while producing some very good pop music.

Now, KISS? Since that’s the example in the post, I think you run into the trouble of hindsight. At the time they gained their initial popularity and success, they were a damn great live band. A KISS show back then was something most people had never seen, and the hype was justified

But they suffer from the success curse. Other people took what they did and did it better. So now the hype is essentially all nostalgia, so it feels out of place. Legit, go back and check out footage of their live shows and compare it to the standard rock bands of the same eras. It wasn’t until they went full idiot and tried to abandon the makeup (and all that went with it) that they lost the thread. At that point, they kept trying to summon up what they’d lost and never regained their mojo. At this point, a KISS show just doesn’t do justice to what the hype says. It can’t, because it isn’t the same band despite being mostly the same people.

But they were always mid tier songwriters (even the ones I fucking love were mid tier compared to a band like The Band that I tend to enjoy less).

So, that kind of thing is why I don’t jump on hype or shit on hype. It’s usually artificial, and it’s also usually generated by dint of numbers. So hype never carries well.

But it’s also why I never object or care about someone like Taylor Swift having a massive fan base either. She writes and performs for her target audience. She does that very well, no matter what else anyone thinks about her. Any pop performer is trying to do exactly that. Even niche subgenre performers that are actually trying to sell their music try to find a way to target a fan base (even if it’s only people that would object to being called a fan base).

I would, at this point in my life, also say that at least checking out hype can be worth it. Even if you don’t like whatever it is, you’ve shared something with other people, and that’s a net positive. Plus, you might run into a few songs you do like from someone you don’t otherwise enjoy (like shake it off from Swift for me)

Don’t worry, by the time you hit fifty-ish, you won’t have energy for rage any more lol.

Tbh, even the least well designed apps are a better experience overall. Lemmy via browser is often a drag.

Because it’s not a website. It’s a connected network of sites that requires a bit of a learning curve to really use.

Carson McKee

It always kinda amazes me how little interaction there is across generations.

The hippies and such that were part of the pre-eighties boomer counterculture movements are still there. Most of those don’t look the part, but still hold the same beliefs.

Some just grew the fuck up, had families, and no longer had the energy to sustain a life of protest. A lot of what drove that era’s visible counterculture was youthful energy. Young idealists eventually hit a wall where no matter what their beliefs are, they’re limited by reality in how much time, effort, and resources they can put towards their cause.

But there’s also the fact that every generation is diverse. You’ll have the edges, where you find the most vehement people, but the majority are going to just not give a fuck as long as they can live with acceptable levels of hassle. In that laundry majority, you’ll find the folks that agree with a given principle, but can’t/won’t do anything about it. They will, however, give lip service.

That’s boomers, Xers, millennials, Z, Alpha, whatever age range you want to point at. You’ll still have the vehement and loud, but as they age up, there’s less of their age peers jumping on the bandwagon.

Then, the next age group comes along and wants an enemy. That enemy is going to be the establishment because establishment is the thing we all are forced to live in. It’s the default, the status quo. And that means the previous generations that are in that majority that are just trying to live and survive are part of that establishment. So you get the bullshit generational warfare. Which, once you live long enough, and/or look back at history enough, you discover happens every generation. There’s always a struggle of some kind because there’s always some degree of power imbalance created just by surviving long enough to accrue knowledge/resources.

This is phenomenon relied on by power brokers. The 1%, if you want to look at it that way. The folks that have control of enough resources that they essentially control everyone’s lives.

It isn’t about killing the idea. It’s about making it known that some shit erases you as being allowed to exist.

That way, even when it does crop up, everyone knows exactly what will happen.

The only good nazi is a dead nazi.

Nah, as long as it isn’t significantly different, all that matters is that it isn’t going to irritate and rub.

Mind you, the more of a difference there is, the less comfortable it’s going to be in shoes, no matter what material it is.

You might run into the patch job wearing the surrounding fabric out faster if there’s a decent difference as well, but it isn’t like something that thin is going to last very long once a hole appears anyway.

Mostly only instrumentals. I suck at singing, but it brings me joy, So I do it anyway.

That being said, there’s a few I can’t really sing along to most of. If we were vampires, by Jason isbell is one. There’s parts I can follow, but most of the song, my voice just breaks on, so I more just hum along with, or mouth the lyrics.

Fuck, I don’t even know for sure.

I think it was for a patient back in the early to mid nineties. I’m dubious on which patient, and whether or not that was the first time or just the first I remember.

If it’s the one I think, the guy had a stroke, and I knew pretty much right away what was going on, so I was dialing before I got to him (this was pre-cell phone ubiquity, so it was a cordless phone via landline). It’s kinda muddy in memory now, what with about two decades of other patients in similar situations, but I recall thinking “fuck, fuck, fuck” a lot while I was moving to him, and my heart pounding with the adrenaline of it.

Dude survived, and even partially recovered before another took him out.

However, it’s possible he wasn’t the first, and I’m mixing things up. But I’m mostly confident that I had never needed to use the service until I was working home health. Those early years blur really hard nowadays. I used to remember most of the patient’s names, stories they told, etc, but there’s rarely been opportunity to call on those memories, so they’ve faded.

Until I started having health issues of my own in my late thirties, I had never called 911 for anyone but a patient that I can recall. Even when I would witness something like a car wreck, someone else was already calling by the time I’d have been able to.

Generally though, since it was on the job, I was mostly focused on giving clear, concise information to expedite a fast and appropriate response. You default to training and let things go on autopilot so you can handle both the call and whatever help you’re providing. Like, you can’t think through CPR while also giving info to a dispatcher, monitoring the patient, and stuffing the emotional side of things down. There’s no room for thinking in any appreciable way.

I did have the fucking Beegees running through my head at one point though lol. Caught myself almost singing underneath the panting I was doing while trying to keep the pace up because all the instructors back then would use “staying alive” as the perfect rhythm for chest compressions.

That was still better than the first time I ever had to do CPR, but that’s a different subject.

Anyway, yeah, that’s what it was like that time, and I think it was the first.

I also remember the dispatcher having to ask me to repeat things because CPR is hard fucking exercise lol.

Thing is, most of the times i had to call 911 on the job were kinda dull? Heart attacks, falls, strokes, when you’re following procedures and are providing the kind of care you trained for, it doesn’t hit the same as when something is outside your training. Something like a plane crash, I’d have no clue what to do, so I expect I’d be wound up like a stolen watch. But basic first aid, CPR, that kind of thing, there’s not usually a reason to get worked up. It’s one of those things where the knowledge and familiarity really do make something that’s a major event on one hand just another day at work. You do the job, you do CPR and get EMS on the way, and then you go home.

There’s stuff that happened on the job that I never even mentioned when I’d get home because why would I? It was “just” another bad thing that got handled and was over. My best friend, it was only a few weeks ago that I mentioned having had human flesh fly in my mouth and get swallowed. You’d think I’d have had a story to tell when I got home, but nope. It happened, it was over, and I just wanted to chill and watch some tv, or play some d&d.

It’s fucking weird how my brain compartmentalized/s stuff like that. There’s this section that got labeled “weird work shit” that would only get pulled out when story time happened, and that wasn’t very common by that point.

It took really heavy shit for me to get home and want to talk about it. And by the time I was doing home health I had burnt out once or twice already in the nursing homes, so my threshold for heavy had shifted. You see enough death and misery, you don’t really get het up over a heart attack or stroke. So I don’t have many clear recollections of the 911 calls on the job.

Now, some of the other ones? Like when my parents had their heart attacks, or when I thought I was, those hit different. Mind you, I still compartmentalized the fuck out of it during the event, but I broke down hard once things were out of my hands. The 911 calls though, I was icy as fuck.

Tangential, but in the ER when a nurse was taking me back to my dad, she said that I seemed to be handling it really well because I cracked a joke of some kind. I didn’t even think, and said I was faking it until I could fall apart, which was the truth. I had crammed all the fear and worry down into a box in the corner so I could handle shit. And handle shit I did.

Then I went home and fell apart lol.

I can’t wait to develop my natural immunity to polio! Or smallpox!

The flu, why, without the vaccine you can develop a natural immunity every year, twice a year if you really want to!

Legit dude, what the fuck do you think “natural” immunity is? It’s catching whatever it is, being sick, and surviving it. You specifically chose colds and the flu as examples, and they’re the worst possible examples because they mutate so fast you never actually achieve immunity to anything; the version you have resistance to might come around again, or it might not, but you damn sure will eventually run across a strain that your body isn’t equipped for.

Like, I get that vaccines are confusing to someone with little education, but this is the internet age, you can look up the terms you’re using and make sure you aren’t fucking up your entire point. Like, the time it took you to type the post up, you could have looked up what vaccines actually do, and why they are/were the single greatest achievement of the human species.

You can go and get a shot of something stable enough and never get sick from it, ever in some cases. In others, you might get sick but it’ll be a few bad days instead of a week or more of misery (as is sometimes how the flu vaccines end up because of the aforementioned mutations, but other viruses are just a bit harder to stop entirely).

So, nah, fuck your natural “immunity”, that’s just a recipe for lost health and time better spent on something like reading up on why vaccines are fucking awesome, even in the rare cases of allergies or bad reactions.

My own lol.

Any of them

Well, of course there’s a benefit.

To anyone selling the ivermectin or whatever to people that don’t need it.

Seriously. That’s it. There’s zero benefit to taking medications like that if you don’t have symptoms.

Shit, I’m hostile now.

Legit, I’m usually nice to people, even though I hate people at large. But I don’t trust any motherfucker at my back until they’ve proven they can be trusted.

That’s how I would handle things in a crisis like that. Short term, low trust, mutually understood cooperation, but with safety valves.

No more or less flawless than windows, Android, or the iOS stuff.

It’s different flaws.

In a pinch, some superglue liberally applied can either block reception or muffle it so much that anything it could send would be largely useless. Or you can open it up and remove it and hope nothing else breaks in the process.

It might make some kind of sense if there was anything close to feature parity, but at this stage in development, it just isn’t worth paying for at all.

Matrix doesn’t measure up to discord, signal, or telegram in terms of what you can do with it. If it’s going to be paid, it damn well needs to offer something useful for the money, not just lifting arbitrary limits.