Apparently being fascist these days.

No one is arming

This is anecdotal, but I’m basically what passes for being the “gun guy” among my mostly very liberal friends

Basically my qualifications are that I went shooting when I was in boy scouts, have a few friends who own guns and have gone shooting with them, and have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies that have overlap with hunters and such (my own attempts at hunting have been with a bow, and I wasn’t very successful,) and generally have a casual interest in guns, but don’t really have money to throw at them, I have plenty of other hobbies and things I’m worried about and guns are near the bottom of my priority list.

Which isn’t all that much, but it’s a lot more firearms experience than most of them have. And they also know I’m someone who will do some research and not just make stupid recommendations.

But a good handful of those people have been asking me about guns because they’ve been thinking about buying one themselves. And some of these same people were, at one point, fervently anti-gun.

And those who already have guns have been going to the range more, trying to stockpile a little extra ammo, maybe acquiring some new guns, getting a carry permit when they never felt the need to and we’re content to leave their guns at home in a safe before, etc.

They’re not out there talking about it, spreading it all over social media, posting pictures of their guns or at the range. Some of them, I think, are a little ashamed of it, others just (probably justifiably) think it’s not wise to spread that knowledge that they have them.

So there is arming happening, I don’t think it’s on a massive scale but I do think it’s happening, but you probably won’t hear much about it unless you’re someone those people have already decided that you’re a safe person to discuss guns with.

And I don’t think it’s specifically building up to any sort of an armed revolution or anything. I think it’s mostly people wanting to be prepared to defend themselves if/when things get bad. I think we’re a long way off from liberals wanting to take to the streets, pull a Jan 6, or even show up to protests armed in any significant numbers. The overwhelming sentiment I’ve gotten from most of my liberal gun owner friends is that they really don’t want to be the ones who take the first shot.

2007 Toyota 4runner

It’s a fine compromise vehicle for me.

If I’m being practical, ideally I’d like to have 2 vehicles

First would some little electric thing, it only needs room to carry me, the wife and the dog or some groceries. It only needs to max out at about 50mph and have maybe 100 miles of range, heat, ac, and a Bluetooth connection to stream music and gps directions from my phone. I do not need any other bells or whistles, and that will pretty much cover all of my chores, commuting, etc. for a week on one charge.

And small 4wd pickup truck, with long bed, single or extended cab (don’t need a full crew cab) something like the old rangers/Tacoma/etc (the current Gen is too big) for camping, picking up lumber, commuting in the snow (with some weight in the bed) etc. preferably as some sort of plug-in hybrid. Can’t imagine ever needing or wanting a towing capacity over 5000lbs.

Ignoring practicality, I’d really like to have a big ol’ Cadillac. Not too picky on the specifics, but it should be a full-sized sedan, or maybe a convertible, from no later than the early 90s, it should be black or maybe red, and I want whitewall tires.

I also have a special soft spot for Land Rover defenders, and old broncos (or k5 blazers, international scouts, etc.)

I also think the Subaru Brat was really damn cool

Would love to have a VW microbus (I think the new EV thing is also really cool)

Getting more into the realm of the ridiculous, '64 Aston Martin DB5, a DeLorean, any batmobile, the ecto-1, a Jurassic Park jeep, the bluesmobile, or Mad Max’s pursuit special

It’s a bit complicated

With no further qualification, dogs. I’ve had dogs for most of my life and home just doesn’t feel homey without a dog to me.

But my wife and I have a bit of a thing for frogs, they’re sort of our unofficial mascot.

I also thought narwhals were cool long before reddit had them baconing at midnight. I think they were kind of when I realized that kids can be smarter than/know things that grownups don’t. I don’t remember what exactly the context was, but I remember once bringing them up, my mom didn’t believe they were real, so I marched my way upstairs to grab the book I read about them in to show her.

I also always liked Coatimundis (Coatis) because they were probably the weirdest animal the fairly small zoo I grew up near had.

And if I had to pick sort of a “spirit animal” for myself, it’s probably a raccoon.

Not affiliated with them, but if anyone has money to throw at interesting fruit, I got a box of assorted fruit from the Miami Fruit Company for Christmas and it was pretty cool to have weird fruits to munch on for a few days.

There may be other companies doing the same thing maybe with a better assortment or cheaper, but that’s the one I know off the top of my head.

There’s a number of ways to get non-steam games to run through proton or other compatibility tools.

I’m not the expert on that matter because basically everything I play is on steam, but off the top of my head Lutris comes to mind

As far as mods, I’m not a huge modder, so again I’m probably the wrong person, but the handful of mods I do use (mostly some basic quality of life/bug-fix things) I’ve been able to get running on Linux without too much drama. No, there’s not currently a nifty tool like Vortex to automate it for you and you have to manually copy files to the right place and such, but most mods tell you that information, so all you need to do is get used to the folders you’re looking for living in a slightly different place than they did on windows. YMMV if you use more complicated mods than I do of course.

Given that I do laundry roughly once a week, often pushing it past that a bit to maybe a week and a half or so

And I don’t wear jeans much during the summer, and generally prefer other styles of pants

Probably around 30 times a year.

I normally only wear them once before washing. Sometimes twice if the weather’s cool and I haven’t done much to get sweaty/dirty or if they were only worn for part of the day. There’s some extenuating circumstances where I might push it beyond that, like if I’m camping it’s possible that I might wear the same jeans for a long weekend (but with fresh undies every day)

I don’t buy nice jeans, pretty much just whatever Walmart or target has in stock in my size. I get a few years out of a pair as day-to-day jeans, once they start showing too much wear they might get downgraded to work pants for when I’m doing yard work, painting, etc. at which point they get washed when that job at hand is done, usually one day but for a particularly big job I may wear them for a few days.

I had the odd sip of my dad’s beer, little bit of wine with dinner here or there, some champagne at new Year’s or weddings, etc. but nothing that could seriously be called “drinking”

I had a shot of some fruity flavored vodka with my girlfriend when I was about 18/19 because she wanted to have a drink with me, and that was pretty much my experience with alcohol until just before I turned 21. Didn’t really feel much need to rush things.

When I turned 21 I was actually going to be away on an almost 2 week canoe trip during my birthday. I went to my friend’s beach house shortly before I left for that for a couple days. We got ourselves a case of corona a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black label, and some cigars and sat out on the deck having a couple drinks, nothing too wild.

Then after I got back I went out to a bar with a couple coworkers after work. Again, pretty low-key, wouldn’t be until a month or two later for me to really get properly drunk camping out at a music festival.

I think it’s probably safe to assume that it’s a spider on the inside too

I’m up voting because that’s exactly what this thread is for

But man, do I think that’s a stupid take.

I’m not gonna say you need to become a good swimmer and do it regularly with great form, or even enjoy doing it at all.

But I think everyone should learn at least how to do an acceptable doggy paddle, tread water, and float. Swimming should really be regarded as a basic life skill like basic first aid or knowing that you should get the hell out of a burning building.

Do you ever find yourself near any lakes or rivers, the ocean, swimming pools, etc? Walking along them, riding over them on a bridge in a car or train, etc. Then there’s a chance you could end up in that water, and if you can’t swim you stand a very real chance of dying, and possibly of dragging someone down with you if they jump in to help.

Hell, even if you don’t live anywhere near a body of water, flash floods can happen in some pretty unlikely places, including in the middle of a desert.

Unless you have some physical disabilities that genuinely prevent you from swimming, you can probably get the basics down in less than an hour, then you can get out of the pool and hopefully never need to use those skills again if you really don’t like it.

I think a lot of Linux people really do more harm than good when they try to sell people on Linux. Some of it is because they wildly overestimate how much the average person knows about computers, and some of it is just over sharing.

I’ve been using Linux for about half a year now. I’m a slightly above-average computer user, but not some kind of programming prodigy. I’ve had one significant hiccup when I was first installing it, which you probably won’t have because that was a weird quirk of my specific 10+ year old motherboard.

After that everything has pretty much been smooth sailing. 99% of my general computer use is exactly the same as on Windows (though to be fair, I’ve been big on free software for a long time so I was using stuff like libre office and gimp instead of Microsoft office and Photoshop already)

I haven’t yet run into a steam game that won’t run for me. One or two of them I had to add a launch option or choose a different proton version, and I figured that out by basically just googling “steam Linux game name” and a couple keywords about the problem I was having like “audio stuttering,” and the first search result had the fix.

Some games even run better for me now (mostly they’re about the same, some are very slightly worse)

If you use a lot of mods, they can be a bit of a pain in the ass to figure out how to get them running, but it’s usually doable, and once you do it’s done and you don’t have to do it again.

If you rely on specific windows-only software, usually you can get it running with WINE. That does take some figuring-out. But again, once it’s done, it’s done.

And overall my computer runs better and boots up faster without all the windows bloat.

It also breathed new life into my parents computer, and they’re tech-illiterate, retired, old people. They’ve had no issues with it so far.

–

In case that convinced anyone to give it a try, here’s my recommendations.

1. Think about what software on your computer you use. See if there’s a Linux compatible alternative. Try that out, see if you can live with it. Do this before you ever even think about making a Linux USB.

2. Pick a Distro - here’s where a lot of guides fall apart I think. I’ll make it easy. If you’re primarily a gamer, go ahead and choose bazzite. If you’re looking for a general computer to browse the web, do your homework, etc. choose whichever flavor of Ubuntu (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.) or Linux Mint (which is ubuntu-based) looks prettiest to you. Don’t think too hard about it, don’t do too much research about the pros and cons of different desktop environments, don’t listen to the people who have some moral and philosophical bones to pick about Ubuntu. Just go by vibes. It’s stable, it works, it’s about as well-supported and documented as it gets, and if you do have a problem, you’ll find the answers in the Ubuntu forums without too much searching.

3. Put that on a flash drive, and just run off of that for a week or two. See if you can live with it. Bear in mind it will probably be a bit slower running off the flash drive than it will be once it’s actually installed. Play around with it, you can’t really break anything unless you purposely go rooting around in your windows hard drive and start deleting shit willi-nilly. If you absolutely hate it, just pull the flash drive out and forget about it.

4. If you decide you like it, take a deep breath and go ahead and install it.

I’ve always felt like the wrong sports are popular (both to participate in and to watch)

Since the Olympics were on recently, I found myself watching a lot of luge, skeleton, etc. That looks like a fucking blast.

A well put-together marching band or drum corps show is something to behold.

Once in a while you can find a lumberjack competition - log rolling, 2 person crosscut saws, climbing trees with an axe, etc.

But instead of cool stuff like that, we want to watch people fight over a ball.

“Libertarian” is a pretty broad category that gets used in a few different ways. Most anarchists could be considered some sort of left-libertarian if you’re working off of sort of a “political compass” model where the two axes are left/right, and libertarian/authoritarian. The people and organizations (in the US at least, can’t really say much about the rest of the world personally) who call themselves libertarians tend to skew more towards the right end of the spectrum (and often aren’t actually all that libertarian and skew more authoritarian)

Because of that, most anarchists probably aren’t too keen to label themselves as libertarian (barring some outliers like anarcho-capitalists, InB4 “those aren’t real anarchists”)

For starters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone say “anonym” in that sort of context before, so if that’s something you say regularly, change that habit, either leave it at “anon” or fully write out “anonymous”

And I’m not saying that to be a dick, I’m illustrating a point, if you have a unique style of writing, that’s something that can be used to fingerprint you. That’s how the Unabomber got caught after all- someone noticed that in his manifesto that he said “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” instead of the more common “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” and said “hey, that sounds like Ted.”

A while back there was a post on one of the food communities here where someone made a post about the “salmond” they cooked, and I immediately thought “is this the same guy who misspelled ‘salmon’ that same way like a week ago” and sure enough it was. Those stupid little things can stick out to people.

And if you carry those quirks around to different websites, it’s possible for people to connect the dots if they really want to. Search around for different accounts across different websites that say “anonym” and they might be able to piece together a profile on you.

Hypothetically, let’s say maybe somewhere on Lemmy you say that you’re a fan of the Chicago Bulls, and on xitter under a different username you mention that you grew up in New Jersey, but both accounts have used the word “anonym” and they figure they might be the same person. Then on still another site with a different name where you’ve also said it, you mention that you were in marching band and went to Catholic school.

So now the profile is for bulls fans from New Jersey, who went to Catholic school and were in marching band. That is fairly specific. That might have narrowed down who you are to just a few hundred, or maybe even dozens of people.

So the most important lesson is to just be really aware of what information you’re willingly putting out there about yourself and think about how it could potentially be used to identify you. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tor and a VPN and all of the other technical measures you can take, because you’re still just putting information about yourself out there.

Possibly the best thing you can do is to not to log ino post, comment like, subscribe, or otherwise interact with anything if it can be at all avoided.

For most people, most of the time, that’s of course way overkill, I’m here writing this comment after all, and I’m sure there’s plenty of information about myself on this account for some to build a pretty good profile about me if they really wanted to.

So really you need to consider why you want to be anonymous, and just how much you’re willing to sacrifice your online experience to meet that goal.

Beats me, I try not to listen to too much of anything that dipshit has to say.

It’s been a while since I’ve encountered it, which is why I wasn’t totally sure of the usage

But anecdotally, the handful of times I have seen the term in the wild, it was always from someone inserting themselves into a conversation where obviously people aren’t going to be open to hearing about veganism.

Like if they hopped into a thread about, for example, a BBQ or hunting forum, and started berating people for eating meat, and when they get told to pound sand, they go off about how that’s “typical carnist behavior” or something.

Which I think you can probably agree is pretty CHUD-y

Not saying that’s how it’s used in regular vegan circles, but that’s how I’ve personally seen used it as a non-vegan

I believe “carnist” is used by more radical vegan/vegetarians to refer to meat-eaters

And I’m pretty sure “foid” is incel for “women”, femoid became f-oid became foid.

Feeling’s mutual.

If you need someone to teach you how to ride a bike, hit me up.

Alright. If that’s what you want to nitpick here

The average adult (in the US) can ride a bike, whether or not they ever actually do is a different matter, but the majority of us learned how to at some point, and there’s a reason “it’s like riding a bike” is a saying.

From being able to ride a bike to being able to ride it a reasonably long distance just takes time and work to build up to it, which is what he said.

Now a lot of people won’t put in that kind of work, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t.

I’m fat, I won’t sugar-coat that. In a couple weeks when it warms up a bit I’ll hop on my bike, and I’ll probably manage around 5 miles, and by the end of the summer I’ll probably work my way up to around 15 miles, and I’ll still be fat. I do this pretty much every year (and worth noting, I didn’t even learn to ride a bike until I was in my 30s)

There are parts of the world where damn-near everyone gets around on bikes, they don’t have some sort of unattainable genetic advantage because they grew up in Amsterdam or whatever that gives them some “dormant athleticism” that Americans don’t have, they just ride bikes.

The average adult can ride a bike. They just don’t or won’t.

He was replying to a comment about e bikes, and concluded his comment talking about them. The whole comment was building up to that fact. Just because every sentence didn’t explicitly mention e-bikes doesn’t mean that they weren’t the point of the entire comment.

He spent a couple paragraphs talking about his own struggles building up to riding a regular bike and then concluded by basically saying “or you can skip all of that hard work and get an e bike”