southsamurai

Fwiw, I’ve never put drm on anything I’ve published digitally, and never will.

Not that it matters, nobody buys my shit in the first place lol. But, as a matter of principle, even my crappy stories as a form of culture aren’t only for the people with money.

Mind you, that do? I have no beef with. You make your own choices, and I ain’t mad about it. But it just isn’t something I can do.

Jesus.

Jesus is always the answer

Both at once, hard enough to shoot boogers right through the tissue with a satisfying thwack. Bonus points if the neighbors move out because of the noise

Nah, surprise everyone.

Leap into the room, exclaim “I’m here to fuck spiders”, then drop trou and hump a cobweb.

Keep the bastards guessing

Well, back in the day, a doughnut cost a lot less than a donut.

So, betting dollars against donuts would be a bad idea.

Not that it was ever a betting term, it just condone contains a reference to betting.

It’s like saying “hey, lets get dinner. You give me a twig for every dollar I put in.”

You’re either exchanging something of unequal value, or making an “investment” where you get very little return on it.

Definitely sounds more like a pixelfed use case.

But, any instance can work, just communicate with the admins and make sure it’s cool, then create a community and set it to mod only posting. My cousin used to do that, and it worked fine.

There’s a couple of communities set up like that as well.

Generally, you won’t look like you’re spamming posts, unless you’re spamming posts. Like, set yourself a time limit between posts, and spread them out.

or do single posts via topic on your personal C/, and include related links/media as comments the way forums did stickied posts for things. Helps keep from reposting stuff too, since you can scroll a thread easier than a C/, on most apps.

Jesus, Nothing Else Matters, Metallica.

The song is indelibly linked to one of the best friends I ever had.

Me and him, arm in arm at a concert we had to drive hours to see. My first real concert, and the biggest one he’d been to.

So that song, every time I hear it, it takes me back to those two sweaty, goofy boys singing horribly along, and him leaning into my ear and saying “this is what it’s all about, brother, friendship, and nothing else matters.” And that opens up the doors to every other memory of him. All the silliness, all the tears, all the laughter and mutual support. And definitely the memory of him dying, and the funeral and all the chaos of that.

But it’s the happiness that wins out, every time. Images, thirty years old at this point, of him telling jokes and reading poetry and just being a fucking amazing guy. His rosy cheeks when we’d be fucking around in the southern heat, or headbanging, or lifting weights. He was such a rosy cheeked guy lol.

And all it takes is hearing the intro to that song for those memories to pour out.

What’s cool is that when I run across old pictures of him, or someone brings him up, the song plays in my head.

Gods, we were so fucking young lol.

WHAT?!

Maybe? My family is from the southern Appalachians, but we’ve spread all over.

One ancestor married and had kids with a polish lady, and moved to Pennsylvania. So, that branch tended to marry with other polish descended people more often than not. Their accent is different from people I’ve known from Pennsylvania, which includes some of my wife’s family.

So I tend to believe that the polish american accent does exist. Thing is, I don’t know enough about Chicago’s history to even start to pick away at their accents and how they came about. But I would still say that if there’s been a significant Polish population there, it’s almost certain that there is one

Dude, you melted part of my screen, gotta hold back burns that hot

Honestly, it depends on the app. I only use a few. Sync, boost, and connect only seem to handle full words, no wildcards afaik.

Eternity though, it has all the options for filters. Tbh though, I’m not great with regex, so I don’t use that on eternity. It has it though.

Generally, I only filter the stuff that clogs the feed. Filtering trump tends to cut out repeat posts that link to the same article, but since he’s not always in the title, some news about him gets through, which is about where I like it.

Filtering parties definitely cuts out some foreign news, since plenty of them reference the parties. I haven’t gotten flooded with those terms being allowed now that the election is over, it’s a fairly manageable rate.

I guess what I’m saying is that I adjust what I filter fairly often. When there’s a surge in a topic, I check the headlines and titles and pick what is going to filter most of the posts, but not all of them.

Like, right now, on sync I’m filtering “stocks” to reduce the tesla stuff without it filtering out other news around the company. If I filtered tesla entirely, I’d miss protests and such.

Oh damn, I woke up my wife laughing at that. That’s brilliant

You do know you could have just asked how to curate your feed without whining, right? I mean, if there’s enough negativity and stress in your life, why bring negativity with you?

I mean, I could give you the advice without snarkiness about it, but I want to make the point that it not only isn’t necessary to complain about what content is there, it’s counterproductive. Just ask what you want to know, and you’ll get better answers.

The first step is to curate your feed.

There’s three options: all, local and subscribed. All is going to pull in every instance and community that your instance is federated with, and has been visited by someone from your instance. To curate that feed, you block communities that present content you don’t want to see.

For the subscribed feed, obviously, you only get the things you choose to subscribe to, so it takes as long or longer to set up as blocking on all. So you’ll have to search your interests directly if you don’t want to scroll all to find things to subscribe to.

The local feed is only content from your instance. You can block things as they come up and trim away things you don’t want to see, but you’d be better off taking a few days to check out what instances have the least communities that feature content you don’t like, then join one of those and that way need to do less blocking.

However, some apps offer filtering, if you’re on mobile. Afaik, all the popular ones do, and most of the less popular ones, so you’d need to go to your app store and see what looks best to you.

You can usually filter keywords that way. I filter some of the more repetitive names that pop up in political communities so that it isn’t the majority of my feed, but still lets in some that if I blocked communities, would restrict my feed too much. That’s just an example of one way to go about it.

I prefer filters over blocks most of the time, with blocks being reserved for communities that are totally unpleasant, or aren’t useful for my needs at all. Filters in an app let you really fine tune things.

For you, I think a hybrid approach via an app will work best. Filter the term reddit, block any communities that you find that are based on reddit subjects.

Then, block political communities that are US specific, and slowly filter out via terms like democrat, republican, and the usual politicians. That way, you’ll avoid us issues without missing out on news that’s relevant to you and your needs.

I don’t think you’ll get as well tuned via browser, even when alternative front ends.

T’was every day I wouldst travel in mine carriage, wiping up the leavings of incontinent elders, and tending to those ill to death.

Alas, no prince charming could handle my giant shoes, so I languished in misery til my body could no more rise to the task

Subscribe to all of them. It won’t be a problem.

It’s like if you followed #s of the same thing on Instagram, twitter, mastodon, bluesky, and whatever the equivalent of # is on Facebook, then a reddit sub with the same name. Different populations and user bases, but that’s a good thing.

There’s some degree of consolidation that happens, particularly when one community is on a bigger instance and would be better served by being hosted elsewhere. But there’s not really any barriers to using multiple. If you crosspost, you have better chances of it being seen anyway, and you’ll get access to any responses. If you’re wanting to comment, then the OP that crossposted is going to get your response no matter which ones it’s in.

Only drawback is that your comment in one won’t show in the others unless you copy/paste it. Which is perfectly valid if you want to, but most people would see your comment eventually anyway, so the conversation will still happen if it would have in the first place.

I kinda had issues adapting to it myself, but now I tend to prefer it when communities are spread out, because every instance has its own vibe usually. So you get different kinds of discussions than you would if there was only one community on one instance.

Some subjects end up needing a single community just to make it easier to find, but it’s pretty rare imo.

Depends on how strict you wanna be.

My mom would play Queen’s we will rock you for me when I was still a baby, and well into the point I was old enough to remember.

I used to be, kinda.

The short version is that I found being Buddhist and Taoist didn’t interfere with each other, abs complemented each other in some ways.

The long version is that once I rejected christianity as a wee lad (seriously, the process started when I was in kindergarten, and finished when I was around 11), I started looking for other things that provided those answers and purposes.

Along the way, I dabbled in all the non Abrahamic religions to some degree or another.

It took me until my late thirties to decide that I’d looked all I really wanted to, and that I didn’t believe in any of it. There was plenty of stuff I enjoyed, and there’s good ideas in all of them, but at any point that faith is necessary, religion and me just don’t match.

I’m not capable of blind faith at all, and no religion offers proof of anything.

At that point, and into my early forties, I kinda decided that it was easier to have a religion for conversation purposes than not, so I picked the ones that I had held onto the most of, and that was Buddhism for day to day living, and Taoism for the woowoo stuff.

Eventually though, I stopped giving a fuck about anyone that would be annoying enough about religion that I would need to have a religion to shut them the fuck up. Once you’re disabled, in constant pain, and discover that taking the time to deal with that kind of person in a gentle way wastes your time, energy, and stamina, why the fuck bother with anything more than “yeah, I don’t do religion. Peace out.”?

That’s not to say I don’t still make use of religious concepts. From my days dabbling in wicca, neopaganism, candomble, and other religions that have gods or spirits, I still use archetypes like that as a useful way to organize thoughts, and I’ve never bothered to get rid of the adjustment I made to my language around oaths like “dear gods” instead of “dear god”. You grow up in the bible belt, and you’re gong to pick up excalamatories like “sweet Jesus”, and it isn’t worth the hassle of dropping them entirely, so I just switched them.

And I do still use a lot of Buddhist practices around meditation, and as a loose way of structuring a code of ethics. The 8 fold path is good enough for that use, though it’s extremely rare I’m willing to go deep enough into a conversation to need to reference it for someone. That’s as in “well, if you look up the 8fold path, most of my beliefs about how a healthy society should structure itself, and individuals should try to behave, can be explained using that as a framework for discussion, even though I don’t hold to it exactly or in detail”.

Taoism though, I just think it’s a fun way of looking at the woowoo side of things. I don’t believe it, but I enjoy it.

But one truth I discovered along the way, long before I actually admitted it to myself, is that I’ve never believed in any of it. I just wished something would be worth believing in, that maybe there’s a spiritual side of existence, that there’s a reason for all the ugliness of life. I wanted one of them to be real, even though I rejected the concept of the world as it is having an underlying reason at the same time I rejected christianity.

All the rest of it, that was just me in denial, kind of grieving the loss of an invisible constant that would make life fair. It just took my body falling apart for me to realize I had stopped grieving that, and now had something more important to grieve over.

Oh man, right now it’s Spirit Box, the Warning, Castle Rat, Crypta, Lizzies, and of course Unleash the Archers. Eleine can’t be forgotten, even though they’re not in heavy rotation for me. Kittie is in that same range where their most recent album is just old enough that it’s fallen out of heavy rotation for me

If you wanna step to more of a hard rock end of things, Halestorm is awesome.

If you consider Linkin Park in the same category, Emily has been killing it (but any asshat that whines at me about that is just getting blocked because it was a stupid fucking thing to begin with), so they would deserve a mention even though they aren’t historically a female fronted band, and folks love to argue about them being metal at all.

Going back, Lita Ford rode the line between hard rock and metal, as did Joan Jett. Both from the Runaways which was the all girl hard rock band. Vixen may have been better barely hard rock, but they deserve more respect than they get.

That’s just the stuff that’s in my main playlist of harder rock and metal right now. There’s a ton of great bands out there that are woman led.

And hell, you can’t really talk about that without at least giving a nod to Doro Pesch, and even Wendy O. They stand out among some of the earlier examples

But, right now, there’s so many good to great bands that are female led, or even all women. It’s an embarrassment of riches.

Dammit, that was going to be my line

You just described Spider!