-Neutral name (sorry SJW)

Boo this person! (I kid, don’t boo them, they’re doing good work and I understand if not everyone wants to be a sh.it.head)

I’d ask how you define evil in this case. To me, an act is evil when the net detriment to the planet and its contents (including humans) is greater than the net benefit it creates, and the actor pursues said act knowing this. I’d argue it scales with the nature and context of the act. It’s hard to say this isn’t real. But yes, we all have the capacity for evil, and also can be complicit in other evils by dint of normalized behaviours (without necessarily being ‘evil’ ourselves)

I do agree that an absolute Evil doesn’t exist, the same way an absolute Good doesn’t exist. But we’re a pile of writhing meat puppets on a moist, moldy rock - we don’t exist on that level in the first place.

My main counterpoint is for those of us who’ve acquired the taste, the rituals around beer (out at a nice place, away from your home/office, listening to decent tunes and drinking something cold, foamy, and a little bitter) are such that you can get that loose and relaxed feeling without the alcohol.

I’m not the biggest fan of getting drunk anymore, so I find myself grabbing a non-alc beer pretty frequently these days. Sometimes just that, other times once I’ve already had two normal beers but want another drink.

I could grab a soda, but I don’t like how sweet it is most of the time.

I. Fucking. Love this.

Thank you so much for sharing!!

The Toke-Athalon - a three stage sport involving [some thing], a 1 gram rolling and smoking race, and a round of trivia.

Back in the day we had a regular civil disobedience event that had a game like this, but it was cannabis activism trivia, roll and smoke race, and more cannabis activism trivia. Surely there’s a better third event somewhere.

Thing is, it’s not that uncommon to do this, and it’s not like the cashier is going to report you as suspicious to the relevant tax authority. Sometimes people don’t have the full value for groceries in their bank account, or are right at the tip of their credit limit - but do have cash on hand to cover the rest.

The point is to have a paper trail/transaction history of lesser value for the tax man. Two transactions in one visit is just as valid as two different visits using different payment methods.

Comes down to whether you feel awkward doing the first one I guess (cashiers generally won’t think twice about it, aside from maybe mild annoyance). It is a classic “Things aren’t going great for me rn” move - but who cares, you know the truth.

(Ignore all of this and pay your taxes, people)

I likened it to a room with bidirectional portals yesterday - your analogy is much better, and has been stolen for future use.

Ah, understood. Thanks!

Lol, fair. I’m still not well versed in inter-service ActivityPub stuff. I don’t know if you’ll see this or see any of the parent comments here on Lemmy.

Contingency plans if IA loses the appeal about the library stuff, or in general has something happen that puts IA’s collections at risk of being lost. Any thoughts on the matter? Also cool if it’s not something you want to talk about, I know you don’t speak for the whole org.

How do we archive the archive?

@textfiles@mastodon.archive.org Thoughts?

A little niche, but

If you have an issue with a given community, find or start an alternative one on another instance. If you have an issue with how your instance deals with anyone, sign up for a different instance.

I urge you to consider this before giving up on Lemmy entirely, it’s kind of the beauty of the federated services.

I kinda wanna see a pilot script if you feel like trying your hand at it, just for shits and giggles.

I’m in no better spot, but this is the crux of the problem, isn’t it - too many of us don’t have a strongly-enough bound local community to get assistance with stuff like this without involving the cops.

Also a military brat, I find your 50/50 split suspicious.

My own observation is 80/20 giant nerds to goobers. Varies between service branches though - higher for air force, about this for navy, a little lower for army.

I would love to see someone discuss any enshitification trends with EHR software, as well as any initiatives to bolster FOSS stuff like OSCAR for hospital use cases (far as I know, it’s pretty much just used at the clinic level, with more and more uptake of proprietary solutions for that use case as well here in Canada [obligatory Fuck Telus]).

https://fammed.mcmaster.ca/oscar-emr/

As a cannabis enjoyer, I feel in this case, as is usually the case in my world, quad claims are bullshit.

Non-alcoholic gin and tonics are the shit. If you’re legit looking for non-alcoholic drinks and like G&Ts give it a try.

An idle thought: who says you can’t have a foot in both worlds? While ‘witchy’ points of view typically obscure material causes and effects, the rituals and concepts they provide can still be useful. The trick is recognizing what their utility actually is for you, and where a more rational pov needs to be deployed.

I’ll give a pretty tame example of the idea here: horoscopes. I do not believe in astrology, in the sense that the position of stars and planets have a real, direct influence on human activities. But when I read a horoscope, I typically find myself looking at events from a different perspective, and it may cause me to notice something I otherwise would not have. That thing may be legitimately advantageous, and I may pursue action to my benefit because I noticed it. I should pursue that action rationally, with an eye to protecting my safety broadly understood (financial, bodily, etc.) and maintaining a level of risk I can legitimately manage - but I wouldn’t be acting on it at all without that moment of magical thinking.

Now, on the other hand, if I just blindly accepted that what I noticed due to the horoscope is truly pre-ordained, and therefore I should pursue action whole hog without any risk assessment or any rational thought, more likely than not I’d find myself in a shitty set of circumstances.

It’s a very fine line to walk, and too many people fall off into really wacky, dangerous or delusional shit. But if you can strike a balance, you may find yourself in far more unique, beneficial position than you would be otherwise, simply by widening the field of stuff you’re watching for.

Tl;dr: Deliberate, controlled fancy can be useful if you’re careful to not let it fuck with your ability to eat, cloth, house and protect yourself and your loved ones, or fuck with members of your community. You also need to take pains to not confuse those moments of fancy for objective truth.

/wook-rant

Something I haven’t thought about in a while: In the early 2000s games where you made a direct connection to the other player without an intervening, third-party server were still a thing. You still see it in things like netplay functionality in emulators.

Is this still a thing at all in 2023? Imagine it would be very niche, but this comment made me curious.