I really appreciate the clean UX. When Signal used to let you manage your SMS in the app too, I used it for everything. Myspace and later Facebook popularized the vomit on a page design style but it never resonated with me. I want it clean with clear conventions and no ads or spam.

Agreed. I can ignore my SMS for a day or two, but when Signal rings, I know it’s someone I actually want to talk to.

If your WhatsApp loving friends need some convincing is switch to Signal I would tell them:

• Signal is more private than WhatsApp.
• Signal has a “stories” feature similar to Instagram or Snapchat… I think, I don’t use that sort of thing. They added it in the last few years and I’ve been wanting to try it but like you my friend group is mostly elsewhere apart from a growing few who have had enough of Meta’s BS. The Europeans and South Americans I know are extra embedded in WhatsApp because SMS stopped being used there much earlier than in the US.
• Nearly no spam! I can’t recall having ever received spam on Signal. WhatsApp is full of it.
• Signal is a simpler app. If you have anyone older, anyone handicapped, anyone with a traumatic brain injury, etc. in your friend group, Signal is much more sensical and easy to use. WhatsApp is cluttered and has some baked in AI slop.
• Built in scheduled sends. You can press and hold the send button and choose when your message will go out. This is great for a night owl like me who doesn’t get around to answering until everyone is asleep and also doesn’t want to wake anyone up.

Hope this helps, and let us know how it goes,many of us are trying to do the same thing. How big is your group? Can we help you make a slideshow presentation? :D

I’ve only ever had to block spammers on any Lemmy-like platform. Users tend to be cool and I try to give people grace for being awkward and weird because… I’m awkward and weird.

I need to sit down and have a serious thought about redundancy and what I want to keep long term. I want to leave little portable drives with an encrypted backup of my family photos with all my relatives so I can restore them in the case of a catastrophic failure that includes all local backups (like a huge fire, an earthquake, war, famine, see etc.). Essentially like sending duplicate or triplicate physical photos to relatives in the old days so they can send a copy back if needed. This is addition to a normal backup. Essentially in case the US falls apart.

Like you, I’ve also been collecting other media of interest to me. I would have plenty of space for Atari games, but I can’t imagine spending the drive space to archive every game in my Steam and GoG libraries or every GameCube game. If you have a generous 60 TB of space, that becomes 30TB really quick with redundancy. With a single offsite backup, that becomes 20TB and with 2 backups and redundancy that’s only 15TB or usable space. Granted I’m not factoring in compression, but at today’s prices buying 3 extra gigs for every usable gig practically requires a mortgage. If we could have $14-15/TB again I would probably buy another 2-6 drives right off the bat just to complete my build and be somewhat future proofed.

I’m also concerned about things that need updated. I need working images and copies of my systems and programs that I can restore to if the internet goes down or gets locked away.

Almost certainly some of them. I enjoyed hearing that insults and trash talk are still the norm for corporate passwords you have to remember! :D

At a job I hated, they made us change passwords often. It was quite irritating. I also think it was counterproductive because something like fuckcorporate!666 is likely more susceptible to a dictionary attack than a carefully chosen password rotated less frequently.

Get your tentacles off me or I’ll weld them together! :D

I heard of a similar situation. The person was being garnished but the rate of repayment was pretty slow because they were broke, not coincidentally. When you’re broke, you can’t pay your insurance but in most of the US and many other countries, you need a car to participate in daily life. It sounds perversely circular to me and it’s not getting the innocent party refunded in any reasonable amount of time either. Maybe drivers should have to be bonded like electricians or plumbers.

Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. I do watch in the bedroom sometimes, but I find that I don’t use the one in our living room at all and have considered reclaiming the space. For me, the reason for having it in the bedroom is that there is an extra heater in there in the winter and it’s extra cool in there during the summer because it’s not on the top floor and is shielded from the sun by landscaping so it heats up much slower. It does heat up a bit slower now that my gaming PC got moved to my office.

I live in the US where it is just a greeting, but grew up in a different culture where it is almost always taken literally and isn’t something you ask a stranger. I tend to answer honestly because I want to normalize not being fake polite and I almost always have some bullshit to call out. If you can find something to complain about that other people also hate, it’s a great way to bond around how shitty the world can be. :D

I knew someone who did this kind of work. They don’t wait until the weather improves. They climb poles in 70mph winds with sideways blowing hail and lightning if that’s what needs to happen. That’s crazy hardcore!

I remember watching a documentary about someone who was welding under the ocean, and simultaneously inside of a empty undersea pipeline that they had to swim a ways down to reach the problem area. That’s too damn extreme for me. I would sign up to be a doordash driver who only delivers to the worst Karens before I put on a single flipper. :D. Crazy hardcore.

Hell yeah, I’ve been wanting to sign up for a glass blowing class. I think it would be so cool to have some self-blown glass on display.

Cheese, I love cheese.

I like the way you phrased that. I had a similar experience making peace with my mortality when I left religion. The self I “am” is just an illusion. It’s the link in a metaphorical chain that’s being forged. There were a lot of links before me and there will be many after me and every new link is shaped by the experience and skills the blacksmith developed from the previous links. I am not the link, but rather, I am the chain. Every action I take was made possible by the past and will echo into the future through the people I impact, the physical artifacts I create, and those will someday leave behind. One day the chain will have many links. Looking back from the newly forged links my link will become distant and less detailed, and yet, I am still the chain. Even if I am no longer known by name and everyone I ever knew has been dead for centuries, my actions will continue to echo until the end of time itself. That’s the only way I was able to make sense of it without resorting to woowoo metaphysics, deities, and such. It’s also why I feel it’s so important to be nice to people.

Now I’m wrestling with the nature of consciousness.

I hope you have a great day!

I have struggled with feeling lonely during different times in my life. I found I was attached to preconceived outcomes and some unhappiness I was feeling stemmed from that. When I stopped searching, I learned to find. I stopped trying to plug that hole and I sat uncomfortably in my loneliness. I’m definitely still a work in progress, but now I try to enjoy my time with people, to be more in the moment and less “10 steps ahead”. Now, most of the time, my loneliness doesn’t live on the surface, just in that occasional existential dread of knowing that one day I will have to die. I hope someone I love will be there to hold my hand, and I’m scared to be alone. That’s a heavy weight and I sometimes wish I was too stupid to recognize our mortality so I didn’t have to wrestle with it.

When I was young, I had my parents, grandparents, even great grandparents, and thought I always would. I was friends with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood and at school. I’m down to one parent and a super young and hip grandparent in-law in their 90s. When everyone was sick with Covid and my partner was feeling the stress too, there were times I felt very alone and I really felt the weight of having nobody to lean on in those moments because everyone was just as overwhelmed as me. It’s an uncomfortable part of the human experience. I try not to put all my eggs in one basket, but as an introvert it can be hard to maintain a large circle of support. Hopefully some of that answers the question. I’m curious how others see it.

There are worse hobbies. There’s also no shortage of items to try.

Ideas:

• eyeglasses
• braces
• bra underwire
• Freddy’s hand
• Edward Scissorhand’s hand
• fake flowers with a wire core
• bread bag ties
• beer cans
• tire tread reinforcement
• a knight in chainmail
• Christmas tree tinsel
• photoframe
• tie clip
• tooth fillings
• a bicycle
• a tricycle
• chain link fence
• chastity belt
• hammer
• aluminum wrapped baked potato

Check out Pixelfed It’s a federated Instagram, similar to how Lemmy is a federated Reddit. I find there is a lot more photography content than typical insta content on there.

Sign me up. It’s been a few years, but I still have a few modules of my N scale teenage budget build in the basement. Now I actually have the budget for model railroading, but I no longer have the time. My favorite stretch of rail is the Spessartrampe in Germany. It’s one of the older stretches in Germany and until recently, they were still using a helper engine to push freight up the grade because it exceeded the maximum load on the couplers. Such an interesting operation!