OpenStars

Learning about the philosophy of the Stoics (which frankly was not enough for me), plus this quote (which also was not, but the two together… that did help!:-D), something to the effect of: “Strong societies beget weak children, who then grow up to create weak societies, which then beget strong children, who then grow up to create strong societies” - and the cycle continues. i.e., Boomers mainly did not fight in the wars, just grew up hearing how Great America was, without having to experience first-hand the blood, sweat, and tears that made it that way (to the extent that it ever was that way ofc). Well, now things are changing in the direction that they were ALWAYS going to have to changed in - b/c evil people gonna evil it up, no doubts about that - and eventually, sheeple will get sick & tired of being sick & tired and rise up, to change things. Until then, we suffer, but not needlessly.

In other words, we’ve gone through the stages of denial (climate change / economic downturn / wage slavery / cultural insensitivity / whatever is NOT happening), anger (okay so it’s happening but what are you going to do about it), bargaining (he tells it like it is and big daddy will fix everything & make it all great again! ironically this holds true for both Obama and Trump, loathe as I am to have ever uttered such a sentence), and now we are into the depression era.

Next comes acceptance, and that’s when the healing - and the beginning of lasting change - can truly start.

Nobody “never gets mad”, they just deal. But your issue speaks to something bubbling underneath the surface, it sounds like (obligatory caveat: I am nowhere near a professional). Figure that shit out bc it’s not going away.:-(

Maybe you are worried about your job or partner or something, and this little stupid stuff is just how it comes out, bc you won’t allow yourself to be mad about the REAL reason you are currently unhappy. It definitely sounds like it is yourself that you are mad about… but even that could be a smokescreen or like projection or some such, if it were not okay to be mad at someone/something else.

Therapy could help if you could afford it - even just the time bc there are like volunteer orgs that lower the cost - but you can also do a lot on your own, like try to create a safe space where it is okay to be mad about whatever, even if it seems “wrong”. Stupid dog tracking stupid dirt on the stupid carpet… why can’t I ever do anything right? (Like: I could not even marry someone who I don’t highly suspect is cheating on me… WTF!? Or maybe not that, maybe it’s a midlife crisis with career, or children, or who knows what else). Eventually your brain will allow you to know what is REALLY bothering you, when telling you that fact will cause a lesser amount of pain than doing so right now would.

IMHO, start with: you are not okay, this is not normal, and things can get much better (REALLY!), but it will take effort and possibly time (depending on how deeply ingrained whatever it is turns out to be).

Porn will train the next-gen AIs and, since AI cannot tell the difference, in the future 90% (-99%?) of all language will be based on porn, just as (looking back with 20/20 hindsight) the proportion of the current internet would imply must have been true of today’s culture.

“Yes spank me harder daddy” will come to mean “I would like a promotion in my place of employment, so that I can take on exciting new challenges in this fast-paced, team environment”:-)

Ofc, “help me stepbro, I am stuck” will still mean the same thing as it always has.

Future generations are going to be so confused… :-P So exactly as we are now, I guess? :-D

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

I thought originally it meant like Merry Christmas + Happy New Year, bc professionals might take that whole week off so like “see ya next year Bob, enjoy your holidays!” (plural)

Then some people started using it to throw in like Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid al-Fitr / end of Ramadan, plus there’s Buddhist, Hindu, Hispanic / Latin American (Las Posadas), Scandinavian (Lussinatta), German (Krampusnacht), Chinese (Dongzhi Festival), and in UK/Canada/Australia/New Zealand. there’s Boxing Day afterwards, etc.

Okay so Diwali is a bit of a stretch, being more than a month earlier but it still feels like it fits:-). The rest all occur within about a month of one another, so saying “Happy Holidays” is by definition inclusive of others who may or may not share your particular religious belief structure.

Which ofc is why Faux News had to go to war against it, promoting instead the Christmasgasm that Jesus most definitely invented (/s btw bc rather, everything He ever said or did goes directly against what they are trying to claim it is all about). But fuck Fox, do what you want, and I wish you Happy Holidays (whatever form they may take for you:-).

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

Eventually you will also come to the question often expressed in the popular phrase: is it better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all? i.e., even as you retreat from hostile forces, what are you advancing towards, that is worthwhile? I am not very knowledgeable about this - most of my own advances irl have failed, though I do not really regret any of them, as each decision was made only with the knowledge that I had at the time, even if I have learned & changed & grown since.

The reason I bring it up is to help illuminate how boundaries need to be set even upon the very setting of boundaries (how meta!:-P). In the limit (I mean in the mathematical sense), the ultimate safety is achieved by walling off everyone and everything so that it cannot affect you in any way - I have heard that concept expressed as an analogy where someone builds a castle, and thereafter basically suffocates inside, walled off entirely from the world, both the bad but also the good from it.

At some point you (& me, and each of us, possibly uniquely for each situation even) will need to find the appropriate balance point b/t avoiding toxic people, vs. allowing contact with imperfect humans. If we cannot forgive them, at some level we cannot forgive the faults within ourselves, and that would be the ultimate tragedy - if we could not even stand to be around our very own selves! That said, it is an advanced concept, b/c for instance it does not mean that we should re-establish contact, or to not break away contact, from a toxic person. If anything rather, it is the ultimate severing of their “hold” over us, where we know that we will be okay regardless of what they do, even if we remain in contact with them (which would need to be decided on a case-by-case basis ofc, b/c the more contact we have with them, the more they influence us even if we fight tooth & nail against that).

Doesn’t that sound nice, in theory? Sigh… I have literally no idea what it means though, in practice:-P. We, like them, are all just bumbling around in the dark, trying in our own way to do the best we know how. The difference is that at least you are making the attempt to illuminate the situation - and that will make a HUGE difference in the outcome!

Then this might help: remember that even as you try to set boundaries between yourself and others, you can set boundaries within yourself as well. e.g., you could watch a movie depicting a fictional narrative of a not-good-faith event, and decide to at least attempt to not be triggered, or at least quite as much. You cannot control the world, but you control your response to it, and you deserve to be happy:-). Though you need to find the route to get to it - even in spite of others attempting to ruin it for everyone around them, to become as unhappy as they are.:-(

I guess you already said this, sorta, in that when people act that way, you respond to increase your happiness by getting away from that source of toxicity. But I mean something deeper, which you may also already be doing, in terms of setting the boundaries within yourself, to not feel unhappiness about their actions.

To me, the key is always good-faith.

Abso-frigging-lutely. Even the dumbest person, or maybe someone with a bad memory, but who is trying can eventually be trained, or else constrained, whereas a malicious actor can do everything “right”, until they get what they wanted all along and then cause the highest magnitude of harm.

I like how you are approaching it intentionally, which demonstrates awareness and intent to make things better for yourself, and also others as you plan ahead for what is most important.

We ALL are that way. :-D

You can do whatever you want.

So too can they.

The balance point lies somewhere in the middle.

I won’t tell if you don’t…

30 seconds costs a minute

I… but… it… wha… my brain just broke a little :-P

A study on astroturfing on Reddit, written in the style of Reddit by an astroturfer - oh the delicious irony? :-P

I’ve seen individual instances like that, but ofc ymmv. Curate what you do not enjoy, and maybe consider switching instances even if need be, to get something acceptable to use. Life is too short to waste your time otherwise - there will always be trolls, so let them troll, but you don’t have to choose to share the same space as them!

Although ofc some amount of that is going to happen no matter where you go, so it’s a matter of degree (and also of kind, in terms of new levels of severity) depending on your instance, the magazine you are in, etc. Even so, blocking can work wonders for someone who simply ruins every single conversation they are involved in without ever contributing positively. It is not your responsibility to help train everyone around you to live life, if you do not want to! It is nice to have choices, sometimes:-).

That is bc Reddit used to be a discussion forum, but along the way (to the planned IPO) switched to aim to become a social media platform. Longer comments literally got harder to type out, as more users were pushed towards using the mobile app (to monetize their data?), which in turn brought in a younger crowd, used to different forms of interactions from other social media sites. I’ve heard reports of old-Reddit starting to break after July, and you just know they’ll kill it off entirely soon enough, or would if they thought they could get away with it.

Reddit literally changed, lead in large part by the push for the IPO, and it got harder and harder to buck the trend.

Until we all just gave up on it entirely and came here instead - problem solved! :-P

The ability to curate our individual experiences here is fantastic!

As one example: in the main niche Reddit sub I visited there is someone who continually downvotes literally every single comment in any given random thread, no matter what the content. It is extremely obvious when that occurs, especially when there is a rather pronounced demarcation indicating the time that it stopped. Ironically it seems to be just one person! Probably someone who was banned and since lack of consent only excites them further, now is out to “make them pay”, including the randos who never visited the sub before in their lives and now just wanted to ask an innocent question, having nothing whatsoever to do with the mods or common contributors. Here, you can see exactly who downvotes you, and could block someone doing that.

Similarly one person started abusing the report button on practically every comment I made, tagging my name 9 times in a message before I blocked them, so with that avenue to try to hurt me disabled they sought out other means. Here, again I think such reports are public.

Having to put your name to something rather than allowing it to be anonymous may cause someone to pause before jumping immediately to abusive behaviors. Sadly their parents never taught them how to behave, but at least we have better tools here to curate our receipt of what the platform delivers to us from these would-be abusers, making it much more enjoyable IMHO. I don’t think I’d like this place if it became more like YouTube or 4chan, even if some people seem to think the opposite (except those places already exist practically everywhere, even X nowadays, so like… go there if you enjoy it so much, but I’d like at least one place that is NOT that way, somewhere/somehow!?). And Lemmy/Kbin is that place!:-)

The trick is that people can talk however they like, but they cannot mandate that a particular comment rise to the top of a particular scoring scheme. If commentors and voters would both use discretion based on the magazine they are in… but that is a moot point bc that won’t happen either.

Short of something like a separate voting scheme (was this comment (a) popular or (b) insightful? or maybe both types can be up/down-voted independently; but then you could sort by either one or the other), I think it will just continue to happen here, even if less overwhelming than on Reddit, due to both different audiences and scales of population.

I hear that, but also…

Well, I was doing the same, but noticed that even in the niche subs, the conversations seemed to be getting more and more… juvenile? Like prior to the Snoopacolypse (as you called it, and I love it! The term not the event in case that needs any clarification:-P), it was a point of pride for me that I had never blocked anyone in my life - whereas now I don’t think twice before doing that bc who has time to waste on someone not engaging in good faith!? Especially if they lack enough self awareness to even realize that fact about themselves while they are doing it. (Tbf, possibly watching Innuendo Studios’ analysis of GamerGate that uses many tactics of the Alt Right in America had something to do with my changing views as well:-).

Ymmv ofc, bc different subs means entirely different people & thus experiences interacting with them, but I’m just saying that rather than stick with the subset of that community that remained after Rexit, I eventually just find myself going or even wanting to go there less and less, instead enjoying engaging here more, even at the expense of not being able to talk about those matters. I haven’t posted there for months, nor even commented for a month, and barely go once a week to read. Bc I use Kbin and the mobile browser experience here is so horrible to write a comment, I find myself not commenting here often either - but when I do I have much more fun doing so, not having to be anywhere near as defensive as that other place that shall not be named.

I hope you find something that works best for you as well, wherever that may be.

:wq will save and then exit, while :x will save only if the file has been modified and then exit, and then there’s ZZ that does the same as :x, plus there are probably others:-)