Contrapoints and PhilosophyTube were two big ones

Care to share why you stopped watching their channels? Because without context, the only potential reason that comes to mind is that they’re both trans women…

Another issue is how much easier it is to up your nicotine content. When my little brother started vaping, he went up to the equivalent of a pack of smoke’s worth of nicotine per day within a couple of months.

Whereas I, who got addicted to nicotine the old fashioned way, took a couple years before I was smoking a pack a day, because otherwise I would have been coughing my lungs out.

Vapes are as tightly controlled as cigarettes (at least here in Canada).

The issue is that cigarettes aren’t as tightly regulated as you’d think. Pretty much every town has that one spot where local teens know they won’t get carded for nicotine products.

I’ve known from a pretty early age that I never want kids. Don’t get me wrong, I actually love kids. At social events I’ll often be the one entertaining them, and I can’t wait for my friends to start having kids so I can be the cool & fun babysitter.

However, kids are dreadful roommates, I’d be a horrible parent, I don’t want to bring a living being into this cruel world (especially with climate change), I’m too poor for children, and, being non-binary, parenthood just seems so tied down to gender norms I don’t adhere to.

• Reading books

• Going for long bike rides to cool spots

• Trying new recipes

• Crochet

• Learning frivolous, semi-useless skills (juggling, solving a Rubik’s cube and unicycling to name a few)

• Trying a new operating system

• Work on my family tree

What is your goal with these posts man? You don’t want help, in fact you seem to react very aggressively at the mere idea, so why the fuck are you posting this? To torture yourself? To clap yourself on the back because, while you might be a fucking mess, at least you’re self-aware?

To answer your question, it’s nice being in a loving relationship, in no small part because it necessitates loving yourself and accepting you are worthy of love. A healthy relationship cannot exist without self-love.

I really hope you eventually seek out therapy, you obviously have a lot of hate for yourself and you deserve better. Everyone does.

Now to wait for OP to berate me for daring to offer advice and empathy! Sorry, not sorry! 😊 If you don’t want help, can you please at least stop spamming these super negative, useless posts? If you’re so insistent to stay in this mindset in which you are clearly unhappy, at least have the decency to buy a journal or something instead of posting when you are openly hostile to anyone who tries to be nice to you. Sorry if my tone is a bit rude throughout the message, but fuck I can’t help but feel you’d just automatically reject anyone sending any kindness your way.

I once had the second fastest time on a surf map back when I was really into surfing in CS:S.

If anyone reading this was also always on KSF servers back in the day, it was surf_hurrr, which was the surf map equivalent of a shitpost. So even in the niche realm of surfing in Source engine games, it wasn’t impressive, let alone for the general population.

I’m probably on the younger side of Lemmy, my first OS was Windows 98, but the first one I truly remember using is XP.

When I really started getting into computers, our family PC was running Vista, and the first nerdy thing I remember doing was trying to “downgrade” that computer to XP. My parents were none too pleased when they saw that the PC wouldn’t boot, thinking I had bricked it. It took me about a week to getting XP running properly, and that feeling of satisfaction is what started my love for tinkering with computers (I’m definitely a noob compared to the average Lemmy user, though).

Afterwards, I fell into the Apple fanboy pipeline and begged my parents for a MacBook. I was a huge Mac nerd, even saving up money as a teen for an iMac, until I started wanting to game more on PC, especially with friends on Steam. I then started dual-booting, initially XP but then Windows 7, and eventually I realized I was never booting into my Mac partition. I played around very occasionally with dual-booting Linux as well, Ubuntu and then Linux Mint, but this was more for computer nerd clout than a genuine need or interest for libre software, also the command line scared me and I still played too many games to main a Linux distro.

I then built a PC for gaming, and ran Windows 7 on it until around 2 years ago when I got really into FOSS and switched to EndeavourOS which is what I’ve been happily using ever since. I’ve always enjoyed tinkering on computers, but with EndeavourOS I feel like I’m less battling with my OS and more with my lack of skill/knowledge, which is much more rewarding to surmount, and makes me feel like my system is truly mine.

I’ve mostly worked retail jobs in my life, but I got lucky and avoided any public-facing work during peak COVID. Customer service is rough at the best of times, but I can’t imagine having to deal with the anti-mask crowd.

If I were you, I’d check around your area for a bike co-op. They often have great deals on used bikes they tuned up, so you’d save money and end up with something as good (or even better!) than entry-level hybrid models. Plus co-ops tend to be staffed by the hugest bike nerds who are sincerely eager to help new cyclists.

If you’d rather buy new, I’d recommend an entry-level (starting at around 600$) hybrid from any of the big bike brands (this advice is a bit location-specific, I’m talking about North America here). I ride a Trek FX1, but all the big bike brands have similarly-featured models.

Whatever you do, please stay away from cheap, big box store bikes. These are usually assembled by people who are not trained bike mechanics and shoddily assembled bikes can easily be dangerous. They also often have non-standard parts, making repairs and maintenance frustrating.

My ex taught me how to crochet, which was pretty cool of her. I’ve always wanted to do stuff with yarn and having someone there to guide and correct me was so useful. I’m not sure I would have stuck with it if I tried to learn via online tutorials.

Definitely lighting a cig (don’t smoke kids)

There’s so much missing history in early tech. This article reminds me of Ahoy’s video on YouTube about the first video game.

I switched to Linux, got a new phone to install GrapheneOS on it, and started self-hosting a few things.

I haven’t had this much fun with technology since I was a kid.

As long as you lock the bootloader, GrapheneOS operates the same as stock Android in this regard. If anything, you’d be safer on GrapheneOS because of the extra control you get over app permissions.

I do all I can to avoid ads on my devices and networks.

However, I sometimes have to use devices I don’t own. Or work-provided hardware I’m not permitted to install anything on. Or I can get exposed to ads if a friend shows me something on their phone, or if I’m in a classroom/work and someone wants to show a YouTube video as part of their presentation.

And even if I somehow managed to never get exposed to ads, it doesn’t mean ads don’t suck and I’m not allowed to complain about their existence. Additionally, sure uBlock, DNS, alternative front-ends and all other ad-blocking methods are simple enough for computer nerds on Lemmy, but the vast majority of people aren’t computer nerds. If I told my friends to “just get uBlock and a DNS-level filter”, half of them would look at me like an insane person. The vast majority of people who use computers have little to no understanding of how they work and can’t do much more than Facebook, YouTube, and email.

I’m a barista, coffee houses were a relatively new thing in 1700. People from the Middle East and East Africa would probably understand “I make coffee”, and maybe some very trendy Europeans as well (Wikipedia says the first coffee house in Europe opened in 1645 in Austria.)

If they weren’t familiar with coffee, I’d say I make a beverage with the opposite properties of beer. It’s hot and perks you up where beer is cold and dulls your senses.

(Random thought: how did beer refrigeration work pre-industrial revolution? Were our ancestors chugging lukewarm beer?)

I smoke weed every day. Casual marijuana consumption is definitely socially acceptable here (I’m in Canada where it’s legal) but I’ve been high more often than not for the past 8 years or so.

You didn’t even mention the biggest technological leap; recording. Being able to capture music and play it at one’s will fundamentally changed virtually everything about music.

Francophones are not prioritized for employment or political opportunities. Do you know which linguistic group is prioritized for such roles?

Bilinguals.

Do you think a unilingual French speaker would have more opportunities in Canada than a unilingual English speaker?

Of course, people whose first language is French have much higher rates of bilingualism than people whose first language is English, for a myriad of reasons. But I find it illuminating that for all the whining I see from (some) Anglophones about “lack of opportunities because they don’t speak French”, their proposed solutions always focus on stripping Francophones of their rights instead of encouraging French language education for Anglophones. Many countries around the world have huge percentages of their population being able to speak two (or more!) languages, why shouldn’t we strive for that? I see no downsides to increased bilingualism.

I live in New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province in the Canada, where our unilingual Anglophone premier repeats the same talking points you do about how difficult it is for unilingual Anglophones to advance themselves in our province. All while holding the highest elected title in the province without speaking a lick of French.