Best reply I’ve ever gotten on Lemmy.

There was a version we played where you use pencils, you draw your battle force on one half of the page, the opponent on theirs. Then you draw a mark next to the unit you are shooting with by drawing a dark spot. You fold the paper in half and rub the back of the paper to see if the mark lands on your opponent’s unit. Of course, you have to draw the explosion in great detail and go “KERSHBOOOSH” or something.

Bigger question: is there any kind of online archive of paper/pen games we played back in the Before Times when we didn’t have electronics or money?

How could we ever let that poor oil stay down in the ground where it can’t be loved and cared for? It’s cruel NOT to destroy countless lives in exchange for this act of kindness and empathy.

“This run, I will play a necromancer villain, I will terrorize the populace with dark rites and make the women and children cry in every conversation!”

Ends up playing an archer sniper who saves every lost child and fetches the old lady’s herbs without hesitation.

Me trying to do the hums and noises thing around my teenage niece thinking it’s still relevant but she just ignores it and keeps scrolling on her phone

You’re following me around.

You go on thinking you’re that important and not that Lemmy is small and people can tag users. Don’t bother replying, won’t be seen.

The people are reshaping the democrat party. It’s slow, it’s in it’s infancy, but it is starting to happen. The bungie-cable on the Overton Window finally snapped and yanked the thing out of the garbage dump at the end of the scale, and people are dragging it back to a visible place and the establishment Dems are not happy about it. Because it means power structure and status-quo are no longer adequate and they are going to be out of the game.

This is why dems and Trump alike have unified to try to sabotage and invalidate Mamdani’s win, because a socialist becoming so popular sets a mandate. It flies in the face of narratives against socialism and true progressive populism. It sets a tone against big corporate money in politics, and it shows that grassroots community action can topple empires. A lot of polling institutions and old-guard half-baked pundits are slinking into the shadows right now after losing their ratings for predicting that New York and the country broadly were not going to elect anyone but Trump-loyal, authoritarian strongmen.

If you want any more proof of how Sir Mamdani and his band of knights have made the old Houses bend the knee, go watch Morning Joe and listen to Joe Fucking Scarborough praising Mamdani and socialism broadly. (Albiet tepidly, it’s still something I never thought I would see.)

Great now you just have Loss.

We have made the same mistake over and over again when dealing with conservatives, which is the assumption that they give a micron of a shit about definitions and facts.

They are not living in a fact-based world, and we resent them for that because they are benefitting from the science, facts and reason that has build the world they cherish.

But we can make far more effective arguments if we meet them on an emotional level in these debates. I’ve seen more progress made in debates by progressives asking them what they would do if their own son or daughter was gay or trans than all the graphs and statistics in the world.

Or at the very least, call them heartless, weird, child-hating, freedom-hating, etc.

Grok, is this true?

I would make the case that the people being directly killed here by the state, while atrocious, pale in comparison to the number of deaths that will be directly attributed to the cutting of USAid internationally and the loss of healthcare, jobs and environmental regulations in the US. And of course the gutting of the US health department and ending vaccine programs/requirements.

We will likely see a death-toll directly tied to Trump and his administration in the range of seven figures in the next decade.

Most of our existing social and governmental structures are going to be radically upended in the next half century by climate change and AI.

I expect Trump will be footnote in history and his memory will be utterly overshadowed by the coming changes. We are heading into those “interesting times” that the old Chinese proverb/curse warned us about.

I’ve been saying this because I started to feel a rising sense of hopeless frustration every time the administration or Miller has destroyed some sacred institution or started scooping cash from needy families, you would invariably see someone, especially on Lemmy start spamming memes about “That’s cool bro, what about the epstein files?” as if anyone still cares when they’re starving and jobless or healthcare premiums have been driven up to a thousand dollars a month for someone on minimum wage.

We are truly in the scummiest, stupidest timeline when an authoritarian can shield himself from accountability just by having child sex crimes hanging over him.

The modern slang term for it is simply a series of hums and noises not fully audible to people over the age of 15.

If you can’t control anything else in your life, learn and grow internally. That’s the best I can give. You have every tool literally at your fingertips to grow and change and be who you want to be. It’s just not rewarding in the process.

It might vary wildly depending on who it is, but you might be surprised. See, you’re already thinking it’s going to be “an approach with an intention to being accepted” and that’s a mistake.

I grew up conservative in a deeply conservative part of the land, surrounded by all types of the breed, and I taught self-defense for about 17 years to families, so I would love to pass on some of my own perspectives that may help you or someone you care about at some point.

I would never push someone to confront a stranger even though I often advocate for a much stronger hand against fascism and racism, especially if you’re already part of a targeted group for hate, but if you ever do find yourself in a situation where you’re sharing a bus or a jury box with someone with a red hat and a punisher tattoo, the KEY thing you can do is make them let down their guard. Be funny, friendly, break the tension with something self-referential. See, a lot of people don’t get just extremely simple and stupid the motivations are of the average right-wing transphobe/racist. I don’t mean the smaller set of ideological monsters who have nazi compounds, but maybe the average Joe who works construction and lives in the city and has kids and all the same basic axioms as any of us but a deeply narrow worldview.

For a lot of the people like them, their introduction to bigotry almost invariably starts with jokes and making fun of something they “don’t understand” and this joking is performative to signal to their friends that they’re not connected to that strange, weird, outsider THING. They then grow up with this deep hangup about “THING” because they had to hold frame, and are also now afraid that they might say the wrong thing about “THING” in front of their peers, or someone might mistake them for being friendly to “THING” themselves, it’s a stew of feelings.

All of this is to say, in a one-on-one situation, they are very likely more scared of you than you are of them. You are THING. And if you’ve ever had a dog, you know that fear often expresses itself as barking and yapping. And just like with a dog, it’s more productive to calm them down than yell back.

Make very friendly small talk, if you express yourself with unique clothing or are wearing something untraditional, make a joke about it, “Don’t worry, it won’t bite” kind of thing, or just say hi if they’re staring at you. Don’t say anything that could be interpreted as assuming they’re racist or bigoted at all, unless you can feel right away there’s a discomfort you can identify. Being friendly and even parental in tone and asking friendly questions, showing curiosity and warmth even if they’re cold or bitter. Don’t be persistent, don’t give their fear anything to latch onto.

And more often than not, something magic happens and you change their entire world, either right then and there they might try asking you sarcastic-sounding questions or talking about their own life so you understand them. You might be the first time they’ve ever met a black, trans person. Think about how formative that experience will be in their mind well after you meet.

I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I’ve seen it, and I’m not the only one to learn how effective this can be. Just don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t always work. Just know that the internet and social media and television has radically skewed just how scared of each other we should be. And never shows us how to actually make it better.

This is all in very stark contrast to when you meet them in groups while facing counter-protestors in the street or something. Learn some martial arts and get some mean fucking boots so you can kick their goddamn teeth in.

I think you may be doing something wrong, I would be curious what store bought kind you tried too. It’s very easy to mess up making it ingestible, you can’t just eat cannabis flower or even raw THC oil, it has no effect ingested unless it undergoes a chemical process, such as being extracted into fat/oil/butter with heat, but not so hot the THC breaks down. Some cheap store brands also are weaker than the label and count on people being suggestible.

I say this because if it effects you inhaled, then it’s the same chemical in your blood. It just takes up to an hour to work ingested, sometimes people give up waiting on it and go to bed and miss the effect.

All that said, ingested high feels different than inhaled usually, unless you’re using a strong tincture, that stuff can knock you on your ass and your family will find you laying on the floor as you travel through space.

I’m middle-aged and with a good career in the tech sector and I’m in very nearly the same situation.

Community is what you make, sometimes it’s no more complicated than talking to the same people every evening when you take a walk or getting to know your neighbor. Your brother’s family is your community. Your family is your community.

I will repeat what I said in another post here, in one of my own darkest periods after literally losing everything and almost everyone in my life, I wrote myself a note I keep in a box labeled “open in case of emergency:”

“There is no wrong way to live. Just being here, experiencing anything is a cosmic miracle, it’s literally impossible to waste your life.”

Speaking for myself, and likely the broad majority of adult straight men in the world, I would feel very uncomfortable in that kind of environment and would not enjoy physical contact with even good friends.

Is this feeling a product of an entire system of social constructs based on things like sexual insecurity and iron-age standards of masculinity? Definitely… but it’s not something I could turn off and on, the mask has grown into the flesh.

Would our world be better if everyone, broadly, across all genders and ages and cultures were more physically close and less worried about sexual feelings or less concerned with physical intimacy of any kind? Also absolutely, so I hope this kind of culture does spread. We need people, men especially, to start having friends and relationships with other humans again. When we all decided as a society that men must be isolated walls of stone, we lost something important in our shared fabric.