Hi5! I'm 45 and I have played MC from the beginning, still play it more than any other game. Now my little kids play it with me and it's their favorite too.

for me, reddit nearly always has way more quality content and news for me though for the time being

It's not just you.

As constructively as I can put this, reddit has been building community and goodwill for many years. Lemmy has only recently become an option and it's done wonderfully in the short time it's had.

The challenge is the catch 22. People go where there is more content, they produce content there, and then there is more content there. There no vacuum, reddit didn't disappear. It became toxic and people apparently care less about avoiding toxicity than filling up on dank memes.

All I can say to that is we all need to be the change we want to see in the world. Adopt a Lemmy First mentality, and go to reddit only to pick up legacy slack. Continue the conversation from there over here. Link it up.

Look forward to talking to you!

Did this community just whiff /r/selfawarewolves

The same could be said of literally every single product that magically became way more expensive post pandemic for no justifiable reason.

First, let's consider that up until fairly recently in human society, writing has been the domain of the wealthy and not entirely accessible to everyone. The rich could write whatever they want or patronize those who could write what they wanted for them. The rarity - relative to the greatest developments of proliferation being chiefly the printing press and recently the internet - of written works, demanded that anything someone bothered to put into physical written form must have considerable innate value to someone. If they didn't, nobody would have bothered with the effort or expense.

I no longer have access to the reference for a citation and am having trouble digging it up, but I saw (probably on a blog about AI) some figures recently describing the amount of written "material" produced by humanity on a daily basis (or some other comically short time) in 2023 being comparable to the amount produced in the ~five thousand preceding years since the written word is thought to have been invented.

With as much "writing" being produced, most of it being spam or low-effort shitposting, the signal to noise ratio is unbelievably high. Regardless of the profundity of the thought being born and described, the chance of having anything written today - randomly on the internet - recognized for its quality is infinitesimally small.

I believe that there IS a fantastic amount of truly remarkable writing being done every day all over the internet. Nearly all of it will be retained on some form of media basically forever, even until the media is woefully obsolete / destroyed / the heat death of the universe. Most of it will never be set upon by human eyes again after this weekend.

Today, like hundreds of years ago, what rises to the surface does so due to commercial pressures. If you are awesome and impress a publisher with deep pockets, your words could be preserved in a form that will be read in 2434. Of course, it will have to continue to be impressive long after most of the books selected by Oprah's Book Club.

As one who has never burned a book to the best of my recollection, I'm flummoxed by the pleading for respect of dogma.

It's one thing to be respectful of other human beings, in adherence to the social contract. It's quite another to demand respect for an arbitrary thing, such as a point of view.

For example, I refuse to knowingly use Apple products in my house and, by extension of the same principle, my family chooses to use products on offer by companies who respect the rights conferred by ownership rather than effectively leasing a device to me with provisions. If I am vocal about my distaste for the way Apple does business, and you happen to be an Apple user, I expect that you understand that I mean no disrespect to you, the individual. I don't care one whit what you use privately, provided it doesn't perturb my rights to act differently from you. Anyone who has had this conversation from either perspective knows that being an Apple user is practically a religion on its own, so I think the comparison is apt.

And yet, nobody is going to put up a serious problem if I smash an iPhone. People understand that destroying a physical object in protest is not meant as a personal affront.

Meanwhile, religions throughout history have committed no small number of human rights violations and atrocities that pale in comparison to burning a book. Nobody has ever caused harm to another human being by setting fire to a book in protest, unless they then threw that book at someone wearing flammable pajamas.

We need to start asserting something like Bibliocism, wherein all books are holy, and burning any of them should be condemned. There is no reason that my kid's early reader "Pat and Meg" should be treated with one iota less reverence than "The Quran."

It’s alright that you don’t believe what I do but there’s no need to berate or mock what I believe.

I will be respectful to you. No such courtesy is owed to beliefs. Anyone here is free to berate or mock beliefs all they like.

I don’t go around telling people they’re going to hell because they’ve been mostly a horrible person.

Good for you?

I do know God is real

No, you don't.

if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it through such a bullshit life as I have.

Apparently you are a stronger person than you think, even if you humbly choose to give that credit to mythological figures.

I’m sorry you don’t want me here.

First of all, I never said or implied that. Second, don't apologize for what you perceive to be my desires. It's disingenuous and childish.

if this is how an atheist looks on social media then what is the difference in your thoughts towards me and my belief if this is how you conduct yourself?

I don't understand what you are implying here. If you exist in a bubble where beliefs are sacrosanct, beyond reproach, you may not want to involve yourself in a community that is effectively the antithesis of that mindset. That has nothing to do with whether I want you here or not. It has to do with feeling comfortable.

I guess you put everyone who talks about God in the same box. Such a shame!

Again, I'm not going to guess at your implication here. There's nothing shameful, in a community called /c/atheism, to make a distinction between 1) people who believe in gods, and 2) people who do not.

It’s like me saying that I think people that wear shoes are delusional.

If those people are insisting that they have shoes on their bare feet, run around saying how awesome those shoes are, and prattle on about how they wouldn't have gotten to where they are today without those shoes, all the while you're looking at their naked toes... then they are delusional. You would be right to say they are, and you should make sure everyone around you can hear it.

They need to be convicted in trial and immediately shot in the back of the head, and then we can string them up above a bridge so the public can see the consequences of that kind of wickedness. There should be no excuse to not put these people to death.

I'm not sure there's any ambiguity about what he means, unless his words are to be interpreted the same way apologists interpret "The Bible."

Also, gods would first have to exist for anyone to belong to them, so I think we can assume that he belongs to none, just like the rest of us. Just a plain old, smooth-brained, garden variety, bigoted asshole.

Using Connect right now. What I really care about is a Frontpage widget like RIF. I'm holding open real estate on the main screen of my Android. Basically the first dev to have that and a decently usable interface (bonus points for a "black" mode) gets the space :)

I've been in IT a long time and building PCs for longer, but my debugging skills degrade in direct proportion to how frustrated I am by the problem. That usually starts off very high and gets higher as obvious things get checked off the list.

Evidently I still have some kind of problem, because the GPU just fell off the bus again... but I haven't had any frame rate issues in the last hour, so I think it's a coincident problem and maybe not related to the moth. I did just update a BIOS, so I dunno. Too late to worry about it tonight.