While vigilante killing is wrong no matter who it is, killing a health insurance CEO is apparently not that bad in the eyes of many in the American public. Many many many people have stories about health insurance companies screwing them and their families over and denying claims, their business is built on denying valid medical claims, so there's not alot of sympathy for the victim here in this case, thus the flood of memes that showed up.
What I wonder about though, given all the predatory capitalism we're seeing in the US and around the world, is this a spark that sets off a wave of copycat killings? CEOs of investment firms or oil companies or gun manufacturers or apartment/rental home companies or RealPage (responsible for increases rents across the country), or just billionaires in general, alot of these companies/executives have devastated America & the world with their business practices (or some people may believe they have). Do these executives start getting targeted by vigilantes as a means of "balancing the scales"? And if that happens, how is that countered, do we start seeing CEOs hiring out teams of bodyguards to protect them whenever they travel, and we see a sort of futuristic feudalism start to develop from this?
You might try meetups around a hobby that you're into (or interested in learning about). I always suggest boardgaming because it's a relatively casual atmosphere for meeting people around an activity. There's no pressure to carry on a conversation and you're not dating these people, just meeting strangers for gaming. You usually still have to talk about the game and rules as you're playing, so it gives you something in common to talk about. The rules provide structure if you're socially awkward, so it's maybe not as chaotic as just going to a party with a bunch of people there and trying to carry on random conversations. Meetup.com is what I've tried before and that worked well for me in my area (results may vary).
That's just something to get you out of the house, pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone seems like the first thing you'd want to try doing. Getting out and meeting new people can help sometimes. It sounds like you're in a rut, just sort of bored with everything, or at least wanting something more. Otherwise, maybe pick some sort of hobby or interest maybe you've though about before and just throw yourself into it if you have the time and/or money. Learn something new. Start an exercise routine or just start going on extended (30min) walks around your neighborhood. Start volunteering somewhere. Write in a journal. Just do something that's not part of your typical routine that sparks some new mental connections for you.
And even though you don't feel depressed, what you're describing still could be a sign of depression, so reaching out for support is always an option that you shouldn't feel ashamed of or anything.
Just throwing some stuff out there as ideas, but I hope everything works out well for you.
Yeah, no, we're still going to walk into this, despite nothing about this sounding like it's going to turn out well. Gee golly, there's just nothing we can do about any of this. Not like we have a current sitting President with the effective powers of a king who could wield that power for the greater good. Nah, we're just gonna do this. Hope it works out well.
Congratulations on pricing people out of a college education, have fun with that.
On one level, I sympathize with companies like Nintendo, I don't want to, BUT companies are supposed to make efforts to protect their IP or they run the risk of losing those exclusive protections when it matters later on (abandonment). So if they want to continue their IP rights, they're supposed to defend it against anything that comes along. I still don't like it, but I kind of understand why they have to do it.
Granted, I think they could come up with some sort of licensing terms that would made it easy for solo developers to still develop small-time projects to encourage people to create these one-off labors of love, similar to what alot of TTRPG developers do, but for whatever reason, they go the hardball approach, which just creates bad feelings in the community.
https://www.themyerslg.com/blog/what-happens-if-you-dont-defend-your-ip/
Then call me gay, because I'm still gonna be fuckin' (women) for awhile and I'm definitely not getting any more kids ever again. Guess I got to start marching in gay pride parades now, it's like the law, isn't it?
That's what I've been wondering, we really don't even know what the motive was, but the one thing that kind of elevates this beyond him being a "basic murderer" is the carved words on the bullets. That seems to suggest some kind of motive above just him being a hitman or just killing some random person.
Regardless, I think most people are having the reaction they're having to this because of our ridiculous healthcare system, everyone recognizes it as a problem and alot of people have a loved one who has been wronged by it. Almost any other issue would've created a partisan split where Republicans took one position and Democrats took the other position. That a set of clear Left/Right narratives haven't emerged yet kind of suggests that alot of people aren't particularly bothered by it. Where this goes though is anyone's guess, maybe it's just a single unified moment that is quickly overshadowed by some other bullshit that comes along.
That's kind of how I thought about it before, I didn't want them to think they had gotten to me, that they had "won" the argument, but anymore I feel like I'm using it because I just don't care to interact with them and I don't want any incidental contact in the future. We disappear from each other's online presence, I don't have to think about them ever again. They can think they "won", whatever, I've stopped thinking about them anymore.
That "You" part was specifically something I was thinking about before I wrote this. It sounded odd when I first started thinking about it, but that often becomes the point when the other person starts making it personal. It's one thing if a person says it as an example, "Would you be ok if this or this happened?" But if they're personally directing it at me, whether name calling or accusing or something more confrontational, that's where it usually crosses over.
Limits of negative online social contact that you'll accept?
I just had a weird online encounter on Bluesky that made me start wondering what people are willing to accept when it comes to negative online social contact (comments, replies)? What sorts of things are red lines for you personally?
Previously, I would accept quite a bit and would only block/mute/report somebody if it was incredibly offensive, but I would still try to explain myself, argue my point, or defuse a situation or whatever, still honestly trying to engage and make my case. I would rarely block anybody because that seemed almost like cowardice, like I was running from a fight. Since joining Bluesky however, I will not hesitate to block people for the simplest of reasons. Oftentimes if they start parroting obvious right-wing propaganda, if it's a bot, if they're offensive, make it personal, or if they're obviously trolling. As soon as a person starts calling names or makes accusations about the person themselves and strays away from the topic at hand, that's kind of become my personal red line. If you don't know me and you make it personal right away, we're done.
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To give some background, my conversation that prompted this was over books vs audiobooks (it's been a subject for weeks on bluesky). I was responding to a librarian's post saying that it's a pointless debate, books are books, doesn't matter if you read a book or listen to an audiobook. I replied, agreeing with her point, saying that the experience of taking in a story is what we're doing, whether it's a regular book with text, picture book, audiobook, movie, or whatever. One format or another may have trade-offs, but you're still absorbing the story, it's still a similar experience you're getting. Not particularly controversial, just adding input, just whatever.
A reply came in from another person, somewhat combative from the start, not particularly long, but there was edge to it I could tell ("So what are you saying? Reading is reading, listening is listening" or something like that). I assumed they wanted more clarification (thus the '?'), so wrote back just kind of explaining how media formats are different, our brain takes in the information differently, but that one format or the other wasn't better, just different. Again, not directed at the person, just discussing the idea.
They replied back with something fairly negative, really sounding like they wanted to start an argument and directing it personally at me as if I was the one being argumentative for replying to their question. Without hesitation I just blocked them. I was like, I'm not going to waste my time engaging with this person (though I apparently will waste my time posting about it on Lemmy). I'm not really afraid of getting feelings hurt or anything, call me whatever you want, but if it's an obvious negative experience they're trying to goad me into, I'm not going to engage, I'm just going to walk away.
It's an interesting thing that's happening on Bluesky, because that's the overall behavior that seems to be encouraged on there that I haven't really seen elsewhere, don't engage with obviously negative people, it's not worth it. Is that what we should be striving for, starving the trolls and trying to encourage polite, civil discourse?
Unless he put the clothes in the backpack and put all of that into the other backpack, Backpackception! It sounds really silly though, like he purposely changed his clothes ever so slightly, just enough that a few people would call it out, instead of changing into a completely different outfit, which would've been more effective IMO. It's just alot of work for little benefit, people come up with the weirdest theories.
My Dad died about 4 years ago now and I still think about him often. Despite being around him for most of my life, I honestly didn’t really get to know him until his last few years when I started taking care of him. By that point though he was starting to fall apart mentally and physically, so it really felt like I was trying to hold onto sand, he just gradually slipped through my fingers, no matter how hard I tried to hold on.
My time with him though helped us to prepare and get his affairs in order, so it was a relatively painless process when it did happen, though I still find myself dealing with minor things here and there, long after probate finished.
I still miss him all the time. He was flawed in many ways, but he was also a better, nicer person than me who should’ve lived longer.
This would be depressing as shit if it were true, not really a hallmark movie. I’d be traumatized if I found out a dead brother had done something like that for me and I just blew it off.
I keep seeing the backpack as not matching, I don’t get how these are considered the same person, unless is going to be the next blue-black white-gold thing.
If it was before I’d had my kids, probably. Now with my kids existing in the world, I’d essentially be deleting their existences too, so no.
And upon confirmation of my fertility, Lula, their chieftess (34DDD) takes me to her personal sanctuary inside of a rusted out old Greyhound bus on the edge of the ruins of old Cincinnati, close to the Forbidden zone.
Once inside, her personal servants cleanse my body of filth from the rigors of travel. As is tradition with their tribe, soap is applied directly to their nude bodies before being rubbed vigorously across my body.
After an extended cleaning session, and a pat down, I’m deemed acceptably clean for my first mating with Chieftess Lula, who will personally collect my sacred life juice, impregnating herself to produce the tribe’s next chieftess. After that, I would be given the rest of tribe, a slave to their every whim, expected to impregnate their finest, bustiest shield-maidens. I thank past-Me for never having gotten a vasectomy.
Stay tuned for the continued adventures of the Fallout Fuckboy, as he struggles to survive the She-Demons of Cincinnati!
James Gunn did great with Guardians of the Galaxy. I'm not sure many others could've pulled it off as well.
The MCU has run out of steam after they got away from the A list heroes. It's not that B- or C- list characters can't do well, it's just that it takes a talented writer/director to do it with a good movie, and Disney/Marvel just isn't capable of getting that consistently on their own, they're too safe & corporate. They're just trying to recreate what made the original MCU run successful, but we've already seen that. I don't know that there's necessarily "superhero fatigue", though trends in movies & pop culture come and go, that's inevitable, but for me it's more been "bad writing fatigue", I'm just sick of their lazy ass shit writing, it's insulting and I'm tired of being treated like that by the MCU.
Is anybody else just Not planning on gift-giving this year?
Normally by this point in time in the year, I would already have 80-90% of my holiday shopping done, yes, even before Black Friday, I just try to stay on top of it. However, I don't feel connected to Christmas as a holiday and don't want to take part in gift-giving this year. I've got three children and some nieces and nephews, though primarily it's my children I buy for, and I've bought for them every year of their lives. I think it's due to a few different factors, there's some amount of guilt for having participated as long as I have, but at the same time, I feel that I shouldn't be participating anymore, or at least for this year. Is anybody else feeling this way this year?
- I'm not a Christian, more Agnostic/Atheist, so it's not even anything I feel particularly spiritual about, it's just been this secular tradition that my family did when I was a kid and I've just kept going with it out of sheer momentum without really questioning it. I wanted to give my kids a "normal" childhood and obviously you do Christmas for your kids if you're a good parent, right?
- I've been the only active participant ever since my kids were born. My wife, a Christian, doesn't even participate in gift-giving and has even actively sabotaged the Santa Claus "game". She's literally told my young kids (12 , 7, & 6) that there is no Santa Claus and it's just been me giving the gifts. She's always done this, but the kids have at least pretended to play along most years (12 year old has known for awhile). So now I feel like I just want to throw the towel in, what's the use anymore? It's obvious nobody believes in it anymore, why bother?
- My wife and I are already talking about getting a divorce (due to other long-standing issues) and things have been tense in the household for some time now. I want a dissolution because we agree on most terms, she refuses to participate and won't budge unless it's a full divorce. I'm hesitant to bring in lawyers for a divorce with how biased it feels like the court system is in divorces, I would rather have everything negotiated between us beforehand and bring a lawyer in for dealing with details.
- I've been getting treated poorly by my wife and other family members particularly bad this year. My kids have been fine, and I hate to feel like I'm "taking it out on them", but I don't know why I'm contributing to this family holiday when I'm being made to feel like the black sheep of the family, like I don't contribute anything anyways (despite being the only one who has ever participated in gift-giving).
- Due to the above family situation and some other events, I'm feeling a bit of depression. I realize that giving gifts could probably raise my spirits, but it just all feels so hollow, like even the temporary hit of happiness from just buying consumer goods for others isn't enough to make it worthwhile.
- The "magic" is pretty much already gone, probably due to a little bit of above the wife essentially spoiling Santa Claus for multiple years and also due to the kids just growing up naturally. I'm pretty sure all the kids already know what's going on, so there's just no impetus to keep the charade going, though it was always going to have transition at some point.
- Some small part of me, despite not being religious, thinks that just mindless gift-giving of consumer goods is not "in the spirit" of Christmas. It's just this Retail-driven holiday being pushed on us by corporate overlords who want us to BUY MORE STUFF.
- Financials are tighter this year. Certainly not the tightest it's ever been, I've been in much worse situations financially (and still bought gifts), but it is a factor this year, and with potential upcoming hardships due to the incoming administration, it might be better to tighten the belt a little. If this was the only thing, it wouldn't be much of a factor for me.
I think I'll sit the kids down at least and talk it over with them, their ages seem young, yet they understand alot at their ages, but I feel like I'd rather be up-front with them about it, rather than them waking up Christmas morning expecting gifts and finding nothing under the tree. Just wondering if I'm just being a douche about the whole thing.
Ending Relationships
tl;dr long rant, I don't care if anybody reads it, I just want to get it out because I've been depressed and suicidal for months now (not so much suicidal now, I'm not in any need of immediate help, but it's scary how my brain was working through the logistics of getting it done).
42 M, I've been through breakups in the past, I've been through plenty of failed relationships for a variety of reasons, but I'm coming out of a ~10 year relationship now with somebody whom I have a kid with and we've been partners through alot of shit together, but I think I'm just done now and it's tearing me up inside.
It started a few months ago, she was finishing up nursing school, which I had been supporting her for the past year through it financially (paying her rent) and helping her with most of her classes. It was supposed to be a big achievement, but the week before her final exam, she told me she it was over, that she'd been seeing somebody else for a few months and that she didn't want to have anything to do with me anymore. I was devastated, but stayed around like a pathetic dog because we have a kid together and her being successful would help everyone out in raising him. Even though I had just had my heart broken, I helped out with some post-graduation things, thinking maybe it was just a temporary thing, maybe things would turn around once the stress of graduation and her nursing board exam passed, but nothing really changed, I just got more and more pathetic and suicidal.
Her behavior though after graduation started becoming problematic though, she hadn't passed the state certification exam (the requirement to actually becoming an RN), but she'd basically just checked out at that point. She was more stressed about planning for her graduation party than she was for studying for the exam. She failed the exam and essentially has 45 more days until she can take the exam, but still she doesn't seem to care that much about studying for it. Things apparently broke off with whoever the other person was that she was seeing, or so she said, and then started talking about traveling across the country to Seattle to work some nursing jobs out there, as if she was basically just tossing 2 years' worth of schooling down the drain.
Things briefly rekindled for us the past two weeks and things seemed happy again, though in my mind I suspected I was just being used again, but I was tired of being depressed. She wanted it to be an open relationship though, no strings attached, and I stupidly agreed, just telling her that I didn't want to know anything about anyone. else. On Wednesday, she wanted me to watch our son while she said she was going out to study with a girl-friend from school. Thought nothing of it and was glad she was applying herself. The next morning, I stopped by her place to pick up something for our son before he went to school, she wasn't there, bed was empty (she normally sleeps in). When I called to ask where she had been at, there was no response, just dodging the question, it was obvious she'd gone out with somebody else and stayed the night with them, and she hung up on me.
I know I had opened myself up to it by agreeing to a NSA relationship in the first place, and I thought maybe I could distance myself emotionally from it, but I couldn't do it, I felt betrayed, after all we had been through and all I had done to help her over the course of our relationship, I just couldn't go through with it, I can't willingly go along with that with somebody I care so deeply about (even if it's not reciprocated).
In a way, I was glad it happened, because it gave me the anger I needed to break things off between us for good I think, but I'm so pathetically lonely and touch/attention-starved that I don't know that I'd be able to keep myself from falling back into the relationship if she tried to start things up again. One of the big complicating factors is that we have a kid together that we co-parent and we're constantly picking him up back and forth between us, so it's not like I can completely cut myself off, but it's painful to think about her moving on with somebody else, I don't know how co-parenting couples get past things like that.
And so everything just feels pointless to me now. Life feels empty. All my future plans had revolved around our relationship and plans together, it all just hinged on her getting through nursing school and then we were going to start building a life together, and now it feels like I have nothing to look forwards to. Obviously I have a son I love very much, but I just feel a big emptiness inside that I can't get past. The events of the past week with the election have further compounded things, but I'm at the point where I just don't care about that even. I don't care if the world burns.
Could Global Warming cause societies to become nocturnal?
I noticed this Summer I started transitioning my morning walks to pre-sunrise hours to try to escape the heat (since even mornings in Ohio are getting to be hot). Since global warming (or climate change in general) is happening and there's apparently nothing to be done to fix it in our lifetimes, it made me wonder if our overall society might move towards more nocturnal working hours instead of the standard 9–5, just to escape overheating during the day?
There's probably no incentive currently, since workers aren't dropping like flies yet, but I could see it coming into play as global warming gets worse over time and it causes legitimate production issues. Probably some jobs wouldn't have the option, but most I think would be able to benefit from it. Does this sound like something realistic, or are we cursed to have to endure extreme temperatures because we've always worked in the daytime and we can't/won't change now?
Gloss overtop Matte Coating?
I'm wrapping up a project and I had an idea to mix matte with glossy elements. I've got a spray can of Testors Spray Dullcote and then was wanting to paint the glossy elements by hand with a different gloss coating/finish. How well would those interact with each other? I'd obviously let the matte finish dry first, but would the matte "cancel" out the glossy effect or does it have some other interactions that basically make it not worth pursuing?
Being a Contrarian Makes People Feel Good
Whether it's a sense of superiority or just to be funny or asinine or out of a genuine need to spread the truth, people online generally try to be contrarian as often as possible because it gives them some sort of personal gratification or a sense that they're correcting something wrong in the universe.
Streamer Perrikaryal uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) device to play games
TTRPG Product Category terminology?
I settled on using Zotero (meant for academia, but whatever, it does what I need) for cataloguing/organizing my ttrpg pdf hoard and I'm trying to set up some top-level tags to make it a bit easier to sift through what I'm looking for. One set of tags will be genre tags (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc), with another level below that for sub-genre (cyberpunk, supernatural, low fantasy, post-apocalyptic, etc).
Another set of top-level tags will focus on the actual types of books/products one might see for an RPG. These are just all the terms I've come across before, setup in a hierarchy that makes sense to me, though sometimes terms aren't used consistently across different RPG lines. Since some products can straddle multiple genres/categories, I'm hoping tags will help make it easier to sort through everything. Does this set of categories/sub-categories make sense? I'm still at the early stages of just importing everything into a library, so I'm sure there's categories I've not thought of or considered.
- Core Rulebook (books required to play)
- Player Handbook (this might straddle the line between core and supplement)
- Supplement (books that expand the rules/setting)
- Sourcebook
- Bestiary
- Splatbook
- Adventure/Scenario/Module
- Campaign
- Setting
- Accessory (mostly non-book related items)
- Cards
- Maps
- Fiction
- Music/Audio
- Screens
- Sheets
- Character sheet
- Rules/Cheat sheet
- Misc sheet
- Resource (more for general books on RPGs, system-agnostic)
- GM aid
- Player aid
- Educational
- Tables
Organizing TTRPG pdf collection?
I've been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven't really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I've looked at has some sort of weird thing that's off about it that doesn't seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here's what I've looked at so far:
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Folder system: This is what I'm already using and it's serviceable (PC), but it really doesn't give me any tagging function and so it's hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go.
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Calibre: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I'm not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app).
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Jellyfin: Really not geared towards books in general, it's functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can't get anything else working.
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Kavita: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me.
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Komga: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn't work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder.
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Ubooquity: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn't seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn't seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn't particularly care for it.
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Zotero: It's actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it's not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn't display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can't just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional 'Book' object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven't figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a 'Journal Article' and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I've already gotten most file names where I want them.
Have you ever gone down a gaming rabbit hole?
That is, have you ever started getting into a game, only to discover that the community is much deeper than you initially ever suspected?
My kids and I started playing PlateUp! for funsies, it's a 4-player co-op kitchen/cooking/restaurant simulator that has you doing fun things like cooking food, taking customers orders, and washing dishes. We kind of play it for laughs and barely make any headway in it, usually as a result of all the chaos that comes from multiple people trying to run a kitchen. I started looking deeper into it because apparently there's ways to automate your whole setup and have the whole kitchen run itself. The amount of diagrams and setups that people have created are just insane, way deeper than I ever even considered with this innocent-looking game and it's made me reconsider what I thought was just a quirky little party game.
Comment Removal Criteria?
I literally only wanted to use Instagram for looking up porn star accounts and viewing softporn material, yet SOMEHOW I seem to mostly see non-porn material. Artwork and craft projects and whatever, everything but porn. Whatever, one thing I've noticed though is that if I make a comment on a porn star account and it's something lewd and inappropriate, it will never get removed for any reason, no matter what language I use.
YET, on multiple occasions, I've made completely G-rated comments on non-porn posts, the most recent one about the difference between Star Wars & Star Trek (fantasy vs sci-fi), and that comment will get removed, there's not even any curse words being used. I have no idea why it's happening, is it that I'm writing too much and using too many big words? I'll write the most offensive horny things on porn accounts, and nothing, but as soon as I write up a semi-intellectual comment on a non-porn posting, it gets removed. I'm just mystified as to what's happening and what's triggering it.
TIL about Eugene Debs, a 1920 Socialist candidate who ran for President while jailed in Federal prison for sedition, receiving 3.4% of the vote at the time. He promised to pardon himself if elected.
Eugene Debs, a Socialist leader in the early 20th century, ran for President five times. His fifth and highest vote count came in the 1920 Presidential election, in which he was running while in Federal prison for sedition. He received about 3.4% of the vote at the time (which included women for the first time since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920 as well). Not naming names, but yes, it's possible to run for President while in prison, though results may vary.