Interconnected points about time and scale:

1. We don’t realize our impact. Over time we can change lives and never know. I could tell many stories about this, but you can inspire people and never know - or change their lives and they’ll never have a chance to thank you. After working in customer service, an important truth of life is easily recognized: people complain more than they say thank you. Besides, people who do good often do it behind the scenes and can’t always see the fruits of their labor.

This can be true of one time meetings or by being a constant light in their lives.

2. The amount of news we intake is literally incomprehensible. I mean this without intending to sound uncaring, but the human mind was not meant to care about billions of people (or me, who has been cursed by caring about all the fucking animals too). We’re animals that evolved in small tribes and then small communities. Caring about all the hurt in my city of a couple million is wild in and of itself, but my state? The country… the world? Are you kidding?? It’s literally impossible. Every being that exists suffers so much - from the roadkill gasping for life on the side of the road to the family trapped underneath rubble in an earthquake across the globe. You’re not responsible for taking on that mental load. It’s an unbearable weight that you were not programmed for. You’re not mad that your calculator can’t drive you to work.

3. Shit spreads in water better than more clean water. Put a little shit in water, it’s fucked. People freak and it gets attention. Add more good to good, nobody gives a shit. This metaphor brings me a lot of clarity.

4. We are too close. Over time things are, in fact, getting better. Many times, many well-meaning (mostly white) liberals push back against me here by trying to downplay historical progress. (Even with overturning Roe - support for a women’s right to choose has never been higher - we’ve just been overrun by Originalist Christofascists.) But to my point, even with how shit everything is now it’s materially better to be a person of color today, for the most part. Schools aren’t segregated (they are, of course still segregated in many cases - GOP has dismantled public education pretty well here), you can get a loan from the bank, run for office, etc. This is NOT trying to say everything is even approaching good or acceptable… but we have to take stock sometimes and recognize things aren’t totally doom and gloom. To make sure I wasn’t being a stupid man, I asked my fiancée if she thought being a woman of color now was better than at most points in history and she laughed, saying “of course, that’s undoubtably undeniable.”

So there ya go. A bunch of anecdotal bs from a sleepy dude.

LanguageTool

I'll have to look into that. I've always liked the idea of Grammarly, but it seemed like I was basically downloading a keylogger, which seemed... unwise, lol.

Yeah, that’s the unfortunate side of this.

I love the smaller community vibe, but I will admit it’s frustrating to have federation be sold as a huge advantage to users and then be cut off from like half the communities I was subscribed to in lemmy.world. They just have tons of communities that aren’t anywhere else because of how many users there are.

I get not wanting to create too many communities and have them all be empty. So that just means I have to make two accounts, along with my new Mastodon account, just to keep up with everything. Not ideal, but we’ll see how this plays out.

Edit: Reading this over, it sounds a bit more bitchy than I meant it to sound. Ultimately, I'm extremely thankful for the moderation.

redditors around the world pounding their fists on tables

let us jerk, let us jerk!

Same. It's really struck me both how little I miss it and how much I like the communities here. There's a much friendlier vibe.

And for the most part, aside from the bullshit threads where it's encouraged and expected, the comments are a lot more 'high-effort,' which is nice. That's something that I would expect to tend to naturally go down with the lowest common denominator as user count increases, but we'll see.

Same. I'm trying to decide what I like more.

Part of me thinks I'd prefer to have two seperate accounts - one here, one on Mastodon.

They'll get there. The cool thing about this system is - from what I understand - since it's not top-down, nobody has to approve people working on something.

Relative to lifespan, I would assume that would mean someone will take it upon themselves and will make it a lot sooner than if permission to even start working on a solution had to be approved via 6 months of meetings.

He was my favorite living author. Blood Meridian is a modern masterpiece. I think it will stand the test of time and will be read for generations, more so than some of his other work. I think his entire collection is wonderful, but I think that one in particular will still be read 100 years from now (if there is a ‘we’ to be reading thing 100 years from now).

Either way, you will be missed and thank you for staying with it even when you were destitute.

I’m so thankful he didn’t become posthumously famous but instead passed away being viewed as a modern master.

This is great - they really distinguish themselves well from other communities.

This is the biggest deal, imo. Having nuclear secrets, audio of him admitting he was breaking the law - and the public knowing about that, to me says they have much more ammo they'll be bringing to light in trial. I think he's screwed. I don't want to hold my breath, but this seems like it will really take him down.

This is gonna be wild... the feds hardly ever lose.

With that, I'm very curious to see the fallout should he be convicted.

I love this comment - it makes me feel really good about my decision to make Beehaw my homebase. Your stance is refreshing and thoughtful. Thank you!

I'm gathering there is some sketchyness about lemmy.ml, but I don't know what I'm talking about just yet. I hope not, because they have some of the larger communities, it seems. They have the only vegan one, I think.