Sounds like I’m going to have to get hold of this book. Both Superman and Lois are two of my all time favourites and this sounds great. I’m throw in another random fact. Pretty sure he only got his ability to fly during the running of the Fleischer cartoons. Originally he could “leap tall buildings in a single bound”. Then somewhere along the line in the cartoons, they just found it more convenient if he could actually fly to take on some threats.

And this one even has a little homophobia sprinkled in.

Not quite as bad as 20 in 2 days but basically any time I get a phone call, it’s probably safe to say that it’s someone trying to sell me something. It especially sucks when you’ve been handing out your CV and applying for jobs and shit, so you have to answer calls from unknown numbers. But if it’s anyone that I actually know, they’ll use WhatsApp.

Yeah, every time I see people saying that they like the amount of users now just makes me think “hmmm must be nice that all of your particular niches and tastes are accounted for”. It’s pretty silly to be so anti growth for this place anyway. Even on Reddit, you literally have a choice to take part in the bigger ‘default’ subs or find a smaller one if that suits you. And I like choice.

This place still has a long way to go IMO. I’m starting to resort to lurking chat / ask style communities more just for something to do around here and even there, it’s not quite as engaging or active as it should be. As a humble user, sometimes I don’t have something particular in mind that I want to see. Sometimes I just want to bed rot and scroll and read people’s stories and discussions, maybe give my two cents if I feel so inclined. And there isn’t really that here yet because once you’ve checked AskLemmy or whatever, you’ve already seen 90% of the content for the next week.

First time I’ve ever read of this interpretation and that’s super fucking cool.

Recently did another Plants vs. Zombies run, so I’m gonna throw this one into the mix here.

I haven’t played GTA 5 (or any of the 2D games apart from the GBA release tbh) but as far as dark and gritty goes, I’d say that GTA 4 fills that role for the 3D games, especially the GTA 4 DLC The Lost and Damned. Wouldn’t call them cyberpunk though.

The only two that I ever still make use of are XDA for custom firmwares and other Android related shit. And Pokecommunity for the ROM hacking / decompilation stuff.

I look forward to all of the Fable ‘fans’ coming out of the woodwork to complain that the female characters and designs don’t look like porcelain anime supermodels. It’s going to be X-Men '97 all over again with a bunch of people that clearly weren’t ever fans of the original complaining about their “childhoods being ruined.”

I suggest that any and all one handed Gamers™ first take a look at the original character designs before opening their stupid mouths and complaining about the wOkE agENdA making characters uglier.

Probably DC Comics. And it depends what my role in this universe would be. But knowing my luck I’d just be a random civilian that gets wiped out during the latest rampage by Atomic Skull or something. But at least everything gets reset every few years, so that I could live again to be super villain fodder another day.

I definitely understand the aversion to algorithms because just look at what platforms like Facebook, Twitter or even Reddit these days do with them. In the wrong hands, it’s deceptive and dodgy as fuck.

But I wouldn’t be opposed to an algorithm that you can tailor yourself. And I don’t mean Bluesky style ‘tailoring’, I mean give us a list of interests and categories to toggle that then have more weight in the feed. So for example, if you like metal, you would then see more metal related stuff in your feed and not have it downed out by Taylor Swift and Kanye West because upvotes.

And something I picked up from Facebook (even though it doesn’t work for shit on Facebook because their algorithm is mentally handicapped) is being able to ‘favourite’ something. And by doing that, not just pinning it to the top of the list of communities but actually making it appear in your feed more whether the upvotes are a high amount or not.

I’ve got four different variants. Two of her in the grey top / hoodie but from different angles, one with her wearing the red top that almost looks like a Spider-Man hoodie at first glance, and now this latest variant with her wearing black.

Cringe is teenagers and 20 somethings hero worshipping Joe Rogan and supporting right wing christian nationalists. Lamest fucking generation around. Even boomers had a hippie phase before becoming old and bitter. Gen Z just skipped that and went straight to the conformist bootlicker phase.

Yeah, maybe we need a different word to describe the games and systems that we think of when we say “retro”. Because when I think of ‘retro’ games, I’m thinking of Super Mario Bros and the OG Doom and shit like that, not Halo or whatever. I’m thinking of the time before consoles were mostly just pre-built PCs in a fancy looking box.

I used to think a future with cyborgs would be pretty cool but personally, I’m not so hot on the idea anymore. The problem is that you would be beholden to whichever corporation or government manufactures and pays for parts. And who is to say that the support for whichever product that you’ve surgically implanted will be for life, and that you won’t end up with useless landfill electronics sewed up inside of you.

Personally I think that if AI was ever made with altruistic purposes, that could fill the role of things like complex calculations and extra memory or a log. And good Augmented Reality could fill the role of interacting directly with entertainment and blocking out the outside world. And maybe one day there would be effective ways of interacting directly with computers through electrodes or even wirelessly. Although who knows how our privacy would be invaded then. There could be literal thought police in that case.

The problem is that the tech will always come from someone else. Imagine integrating this kind of tech into your life on such a deep level and then the person in charge of over seeing and maintaining this tech turns out to be an authoritarian nazi.

Yeah that’s fair enough and I’m definitely generalizing. It’s just the general sum of my personal observations over the years. And it could easily be just seeing the wrong conversations in the wrong places or whatever. To be fair, you seem to hear about US issues a lot more than European issues on the net in general anyway.

I don’t want to start a war or anything but as someone from neither the USA or Europe, Europeans online often come across as even more exceptionalist than Americans, despite the reputation to the contrary. Because, at least in leftish or liberal spaces, no one is more ready to shit on and call out the USA than Americans. And I don’t mean they’re anti-American or whatever, they just want their country to be better, so they call out all the shit.

Europeans on the other hand often seem more proud and / or defensive about their countries. Maybe they speak openly in their own country specific communities but I don’t get the sense that they’re as open and friendly to outside input or criticism as the Americans are.

The way I see it, we’re all hooked onto the same stream of memes and billionaire owned news sources everywhere across the world. So thinking we’re immune to being overtaken by dangerous alt right nonsense and ignoring all the obvious signs would be a very stupid move, wherever you are. If they’re not taking this seriously, they’re doing exactly what the Americans did and have done since 2016.

I know that there’s a teenager advice community of some flavour floating around in the Blåhaj server. But I’m gonna take a guess that the only reason it’s there is because people who can’t just scroll past things were downvoting it. I have a feeling that if an instance or multiple communities for teenagers popped up, the users here would probably terrorize it until it all closed down.

won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up

Yeah, when I first started out here, my experience was like this:

• I went to the join Lemmy page, then clicked to show all servers. Then waited. And waited. Then I went to bed.

• By the next morning, the list of servers had managed to load. I spotted one that was advertised as “recommended for users to join to reduce load on the Fediverse”, which seemed like a good idea after seeing how even the join page was battling to load.

• Found out that the server I joined seemed to have all sorts of issues loading content. And was apparently de-federated from a bunch of instances that align with my interests. So search results were showing me little to nothing in regards to queer communities for example, only dead communities.

• Signed up on world instead and encountered multiple posts that said they had comments but loaded nothing. Found out that there were no languages selected in my settings. So I selected ‘undefined’, scrolled down, selected ‘English’, then saved.

• I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that ‘undefined’ was deselected again. That’s when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.

• Finally success! 3 or 4 days later. And now I’m here.

I would love to recommend Lemmy to the few people I know who use Reddit. But I can’t see any of them trying without just giving up and going back to the place where all you need to do is sign up and hey presto, content to look at and interact with.

I have a feeling that even the process of choosing an instance would probably put them off. I could give advice but there’s only so much I could do or explain without being there in person helping them. If they have to read walls of text explaining how to get started, it would probably end there.

I’m not sure what the solution is though, or if there even is one. It might just be a little bit like trying to recommend Linux to people who just want to be able to push a button and go. Which is the majority, based on what I’ve seen.

Also just one last thing and something that has been discussed to death. There’s just not enough content here yet for the average person to see any reason to switch over from the place with all the content.

And on that note, recommending this place to people that I know in real life would be too risky right now that they would see my account and figure out who I am. Because there isn’t a crowd of a million people to slip into and disappear here. And this isn’t Facebook. I don’t want people to know about the very personal things I sometimes say on anonymous social media.

The link isn’t loading for me, unfortunately. Not sure if it’s a browser thing (I use Firefox) but I suspect that it’s the “*removed*” in the URL causing trouble.

However, if you tap / click on those memos in the article I linked, it reveals the box art.