I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it's original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!

I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums... but it's so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.

In that regard, fuck Discord.

The "respect" and "you should be thankful" comments reminded me of that old (I think Tumblr) post:

Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person" and sometimes they use "respect" to mean "treating someone like an authority".

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say "if you won't respect me, I won't respect you" and they mean "if you won't treat me like an authority, I won't treat you like a person."

and they think they're being fair, but they aren't, and it's not okay.

I'm not sure the specific blame the above commenter is referring to, but I blame Democrats for two things.

1. They failed to recognize and truly fix systemic problems because the actual solutions aren't market-oriented.

2. They dragged their heels on prosecuting Trump when he was out of power long enough for him to escape any liability and ultimately establish... this.

When a leftist (or anyone opposed to this human rights catastrophe) says "nobody is coming to save us" it's an acknowledgement that the state does not give a fuck about us, and it's up to us to save ourselves.

When an ICE agent wears "nobody is coming to save you" it's a fucking threat.

That's, uh. Certainly a thing you said. Cool.

Flared bases, people!

God, that final bit. I was a resident assistant for my dorm in college for a year. Didn't date anyone that year. Had plenty of crushes, including plenty from the dorm. At the end of the year, my coworkers (female RAs) were like, "yeah we were all so surprised you didn't go out with anyone, like, half the girls here were in love with you." And I just stared into the middle distance, "and you didn't think to tell me???"

"We thought you knew!"

"I DID NOT"

I can't speak to your exact circumstances, but I would caution against judging your parents too harshly. At least not until you've had more experience as a parent.

You might not be able to imagine doing wrong by your kid now, but we are only human. Parents fail all the time, even when we try our best. We hit limits. We lose our patience. We have bad days.

You need to ensure you allow yourself some grace as a parent. And that grace should extend to other parents, possibly including your own.

But if you were genuinely mistreated, abused, or neglected... then I think those feelings of resentment will only grow more certain over the next 5 or so years as your relationship with your kid puts your relationship with your parents in stark relief.

All to say, I wouldn't rush to condemn. Offer yourself and other parents some grace. Be ready to possibly confront some really uncomfortable feelings as you reevaluate your own childhood experiences in light of your parenting journey.

Stay safe out there!

I may not be any of those things... but turns out I enjoy the humor of all of them greatly!

Reefill.com isn't even a registered domain. I call horseshit.

Enshittification, also called chokepoint capitalism, is a term coined by Corey Doctorow (sp?) that lays out a common pattern with platforms in a capitalist system where:

1. Platform builds a product to entice users to it for little to no cost to the user (Google search, Facebook, Amazon shopping, etc)
2. Once users are locked in, make the experience worse in ways that increase profits for business partners (Google ads partners, etc)
3. Once business partners are locked in, screw them over to rake back as many profits for the platform owner.

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can't remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I'll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there's a verse that basically goes, "blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks." And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God's explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. "Know thine enemy, right?" So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely "rational" arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

YouTube may be a mental illness, but it's my preferred mental illness.

I think their point is that the pilgrims set the cultural precedents for what would later become America, to which later immigrants would be beholden.

I don't know how true that is, but I think "protestant work ethic" is at least one example of that sort of thing.

Rumble isn't any better. It's where my dad gets his COVID conspiracy material after folks got kicked off other platforms.

The problem then was the immaturity of Linux for gaming. Valve has done a shit ton of work to make that possible and focused on a specific experience with the steam deck for several years. Now they're just expanding and building on that success, which is awesome to see.

A lot of us thought this would happen if Trump won again. I don't think any of us thought it would get this bad this quickly, but definitely within his 2nd term.

Just to be clear, when I say I blame Democrats, I mean I blame the Democratic party, the Democrat leaders (Pelosi, Schumer, etc), and their apparatus. I can see how you thought I was blaming voters, but I assure you that's not what I meant.

And yes, I agree. The GOP are officially fascists by virtually any definition of the term.

I'm unfamiliar with the context for most of these. Plenty don't look like Nazi salutes. To me, anyway.

But literally every word that has slithered out of that moldy potato's mouth for the last two decades is all you need to know he's a white supremacist.

Is it just me or does that look like it was added in post?

I almost exclusively shit indoors. I don't get it.