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watching the unbelievable development of Hurricane Milton, which 24 hours ago was about a Category 1 hurricane and is now a Category 5 hurricane (as a of a few minutes before writing). if you're in the Tampa Bay area and you're near sea level i'd probably get the hell out right about now

I'm 30 and horrible at keeping friends. I don't know if it's the unschooling or the autism, but I'm told I come across as hostile when I think I'm being nice.

I know the basics. I make eye contact but not too much, I ask people about themselves and their interests to show I'm interested, I don't dominate conversations with myself and my own interests. I try to be a nice person people might want to keep around, too— I give money when someone's in a pinch, I remember birthdays, I help move, et cetera.

Eventually people either people tell me I'm being a dick in ways I never realized, or more likely, they just eventually stop messaging me back.

The one thing I'm sure I struggle with is body language. I've read a lot that you need to mirror the other person's body language, but I don't know how to do that. Especially since I normally meet people at work and we're usually pushing big carts around and moving products and I'm just not thinking about my body as something expressive, just practical.

I'm sure I have many more blind spots that I'm not even aware of.

So like... are there classes for this? Some kind of specialized therapy? I don't really want to try anymore unless I can stop being a dick

i am working with people to co-launch a new social media platform and that launch happens tomorrow so we've been putting the finishing touches on it all week and it's been incredibly busy. hopefully it will not be starting tomorrow-ish

When faced with a future for children that is less than ideal, not having them makes a lot of sense. And yet it's viewed as somehow sacrosanct.

"Stop killing our children"? Why would you have them in the first place when they aren't likely to have an enjoyable life?

Having kids is not a need, and it certainly isn't some odd "that's what organisms do" thing even more insulting than suggesting that's what people do.

Bluntly: Kids you don't have can't die. The easiest way to ensure your kids don't have bad outcomes is not having them.

Don't have kids in a world that doesn't want them. That's true in Palestine, the U.S., and literally everywhere else.

just finished my 43rd book of the year; currently helping administer an idea for a confederation of websites and we just got our Loomio set up

i'm back after an absence; i've been working on a bunch of stuff because Cohost is shutting down at the end of the month.

the result: i have a website now, and i'm porting over my essays and running my union blog out of that. i have an RSS feed that works for both, as far as i can tell. things seem like they're calming down now so hopefully i'll be able to be around more for the remainder of this month

Because the shops don't fucking sell them, and that makes me sad for some reason.

They're just on like Temu and shit like that, usually with weirdly small black panels.

I have only been browsing here occasionally so I am not sure what all the new things happening here are. I did notice kbin.run is down so I am not sure what is going on with that.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579423

This is my first try at creating a map of lemmy. I based it on the overlap of commentors that visited certain communities.

I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024 (sometimes shorter if I got an invalid response.)

I scaled it so it was based on percentage of comments made by a commentor in that community.

Here is the code for the crawler and data that was used to make the map:

https://codeberg.org/danterious/Lemmy_map

alt-text for thumbnail: The words: ““biological” sex is the gender binary” on a 2d digital art wooden background next to the non-binary flag

OR Another perspective on separating the art from the artist.

Story time. I needed a haircut and shop from the neighborhood is good enough for me. The guy that runs it always had a extreme way of thinking, bordering dangerous territory, but a nice person that argues using what they know and listens. Until today, when I realized he just needed to talk to someone much worse to bring out all the bigotry inside of him. So he’s transphobic, homophobic and doesn’t support neurodivergent diagnosis. He’s a feminist, which the other client wasn’t, so it was horribly funny watching him trying to convince someone that women weren’t better off dealing with reusable diapers. It was bad. I considered leaving, but staying was a last kindness to someone that never treated me poorly, but that I can’t support anymore. He even apologized for the conversation, certainly unaware that his other client wasn’t the most awful for me.

Lately, I have been torturing myself by following the allegations against Neil Gaiman. I honestly don’t know the reason I’m doing that, but I am. I was quick to drop him as a choice in entertainment, specially because the parts he corroborate are already bad enough. Then, as usual, there’s the argument of separating the art from the artist. I have my issues with that, but today I found a new point of view with my experience. (not really, but a new way to demonstrate it)

I needed a haircut. I just shave my head, so it’s quite simple. Doing it at home during the pandemic was bad. Finding someone else to do it at a reasonable price and be completely satisfied will take some tries, again. It doesn’t have to be him. There are options. The next one might be secretly worse, might be the same or, with all the luck, someone better. At the end of the day, I don’t want to ever have to sit and listen to that kind of conversation because it’s simply convenient and because my leaving will not change anything.

This is mostly me venting. It drained me more than I thought it would. I'll probably not answer any comment so soon. I don't have the strength to spellcheck what I just wrote to tell the truth.

Instead of focusing of creating good algorithms to push certain content to users why don't we focus on creating a good map that allows users to find the kind of content they want more easily?

I found this website that created a map of reddit with different countries for different topics and I thought it would translate to lemmy because instances sort of do this already really well.

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

alt-text for thumbnail: text saying “apolitical friends don’t exist” next to the progress flag on a 2d digital art wooden background

finished 40th book for the year (The Displacements - Bruce Holsinger); we move ever onwards

I wasn't expecting anything Earth-shattering coming out of this given that everyone at Fox News was salivating for fresh meat. Problem is, not having a straight answer for anything now becomes the narrative.

This was not a great look for either of them (as little time as Walz got).

If you haven't seen it, links below:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The article states that these horrendous, disgusting infractions of health regulations have been documented out for at least the previous year, but given their severity, I’d imagine it’s always been this way at Boar’s Head production facilities. (Seemingly without any meaningful accountability from regulators.)

I’m going to cook my deli meats from now on, no matter where they come from.

closing in on my 40th book of the year; this should optimistically be read sometime next week

I'm comparatively old. I was raised in a household that viewed news as the highest calling.

Net result is I watched, at 5, Geraldine Ferraro's speech at the 1984 DNC. She had far more energy than Mondale, and my takeaway was if I could vote, it would be for her. I told my parents as much, and we had a fucking picture of Thatcher in the office.

That was my dad's call, as somehow a believer in Reagan. Mom told me we weren't ready yet, but I would see a woman elected president in my lifetime.

That was 40 years ago. Hillary couldn't get there, but with so much baggage that you want a private jet, scarcely surprising.

What I see today is not that. I didn't really expect this to be "biracial woman of colour," but we are finally exhausted of Trump's artless self-dealing, and we have zero interest in playing that movie again.

I've previously expressed not being thrilled with Harris, but she's grown on me.

This is where we finally get out of the dark ages and recognise that a woman can run the goddamn country. This is different. It's rather crazy to me that no one in my lifetime has run on joy. We keep plumbing the depths of society and wonder how we don't move forward.

No politician has ever been perfect. I'd argue Biden gets close for seeing the writing on the wall and accepting he can't win again. Giving us this.

Harris is also not perfect, but she is right for the era.

I watched her acceptance speech and felt 5 again. With hope for the future.

What happens past Nov. 5 is going to be interesting, but I think the felon will lose and fight it tooth and nail. He's literally running again to avoid prison. That's not who we are. We cannot reward this.

There was a post on the local subreddit that Texas is now in play. Holy shit, do you have to fuck up royally to have that be a thing. Florida is in play. North Carolina is in play. Forget all the swing states, we have an election on our hands.

There's plenty of time before then, and, as someone who ran a newsroom for the first time in 2000, that's worrisome. But if we can finally break out of this pattern, I welcome it.

We are about to see the U.S. cast off the chains and see the GOP for the cult of personality it is. They have no policy we want. I won't go much past that, as it's clear they're unaware of what "soul searching" looks like.

But I have hope for the first time since 2008. I hope it's not misplaced.

starting on 2 books this week (The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability and Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934); optimistically i'll get both of these done in the next day or two

alt-text: [yellow text saying "different pronouns in different spaces" next to the queer anarchist flag and on a 2d digital art wooden background]

Pushing yourself doesn't always make you stronger, for many people it can do the opposite. Harm and challenge is not an inherent good. There is the common saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that applies to rest too.

This can be seen clearly in many of the different things we do while resting, like organizing the spaces we live in. In the moment it might be much faster to look through that mess instead of cleaning it up, but eventually it will cost far more time overall. If we are living paycheck to paycheck though, we might not be able to sacrifice that time.

This is a perfect argument against things like wages in any system though. I know many people say we need “incentives to work” or to “give resources to groups that do the most work, so that they can do more”, but that is by far the wrong way to look at it. Convincing someone to work too hard now can cause them to do less in the future, no matter how many incentives and threats you add. Rewarding people for doing more in the moment just means you are systematically rewarding people who just look through that mess more, instead of those that clean it up. If you do that enough, give them the energy to expand and make more of that form of organization enough, eventually you won’t achieve anything but collapse.

Without time to rest we will achieve nothing, and punishing people for resting will only be counter-productive.

Metrics from a distant observer will never replace the workers there in the moment.

I am looking for anarchist streamers to talk/interact with. Sadly most I know are shit and do stuff like use ableist language all the time, I was hoping to find some here.

Any of yall know of any good ones or are one yourself?