Gimme an M! Gimme an L! Gimme a T!

What’s that spell?

I shoot birds at the airport.

Probably - thought about it harder anyway (see: actually read stuff), and the closest you can probably get to what I was thinking about with your average smartphone is disconnecting and terminating all connections to the antennas.

Let’s be real, though - if I actually intended to use something like this, it’d for sure be something cobbled together using an SBC like the Pi Zero.

Let me preface this by saying that, compared to your average Lemmy user, I am not a technical person. What stuck in my head was removing the radio and comms tech completely - no cell radio, no wifi, no GPS. Literally just make it an average cellphone sized offline tablet, where you’re adding stuff only via the USB port or SD card slot.

Assuming this were possible/actually worth it, would probably need custom firmware to actually make it useable anyway. Just taking an off the shelf smartphone and using a custom launcher would likely be the more practical route, but I’d be more interested if it was offline only from a pure hardware perspective.

But I digress - I just thought it was funny to see this when it seriously was the “What if?” that made it hard for me to get to sleep the other day.

Literally couldn’t fall asleep last night, thinking about how much I’d want this and how hard it’d be to neuter a cellphone to make this.

Friday, April 13, 2029

Can’t help but wonder if it’s bad luck if it hits us, or bad luck if it misses us at this point.

(/s shit’s fucked but I still prefer getting missed)

Assuming this was regular force equivalent, I can’t truly relate, but as a teen I got injured and RTU’d on CAF BMQ as a reservist, eventually lead to seeking a discharge because in the time I was waiting for the next course, I just wasn’t interested anymore and Burger King was the preferable part-time job.

One thing I will say is, as much as possible, enjoy the small things you can get away with not being in boot (assuming you’re living in purely civvy circumstances). Make your bed? Fuck that! Hospital corners are for orderlies! I don’t know what it was, but straight refusal to make my bed for like a month or two was cathartic as fuck.

Acronyms? Nah fam, say the whole god damned phrase, every time, for everything (obviously I didn’t keep this up, lol).

Mine’s a sillier example, obviously, but taking this perspective might point you in a useful direction, at least a tiny bit. Hang in there.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I was in kindergarten and had a very inattentive babysitter.

Boy, that movie will seriously stick with you when your typical fare was Barney related. It’s really the grounding for me having any memories of that period of my life at this point, lol.

Real talk: I’ve been using YouTube without an account and with some ad blocking stuff installed. Based on what I’m seeing, I’m pretty sure the algorithm’s datapoint for me is “He was born with a penis and is ok with that.”

When I lose my better judgement and start scrolling shorts like an idiot, It is fight videos (IRL, movie scenes, UFC and boxing), auditing, Charlie Kirk and right-wing influencers, and the occasional clip from Shoresy on the basis “He might be Canadian too, idk”.

It is noticibly weird, and I have brought it up to my kid who uses an account, is not what Youtube believes me to be, and whose shorts feed is very different.

We do both get that guy who opens Pokemon cards with a catchy jingle, though.

I’d support it. If something is worthy of drawing attention to, it’s worth taking a screenshot and sharing that - preferably with a backup to Wayback Machine.

There’s no need to drive traffic to or engagement with X imo, even if it’s relatively minimal.

Same for Meta products really, though idk if Instagram has some defense against screenshots (I know there’s other photo-focused services that do, I’m just not on Instagram very often/recently at all so idk).

Edit: You know, given the existence of xcancel and similar services, I want to walk this back a little. People are in here making good points - screenshots can be doctored, and having access to a trusted mirrored/archived source is better for verification purposes while still accomplishing what I’d like to see. If it’s technically possible to do, some automatic means of doing that would be cool, but even that’s a bit iffy. Maybe something like that Pipedbot thing could work, even if people kinda hate those bots. Best choice is just posting mirrored/archive links from the get go.

There’s a couple weird things about this re: lemmy.ml data - for instance, the fedidb entry for them specifically shows 147k total posts, but they don’t show up in the top 10.

Not sure what to make of that either.

sh.it.heads: “We’re number 5! We’re number 5!”

(me. I’m probably the only one chanting at this fact)

Man, it’s always weird hearing this, because as a millenial this sounds exactly like my experience growing up.

How did you like it, btw? I loved the idea as a kid, but was pissed as hell I kept getting Numemon and dying. Didn’t get back into it until Digimon World 3, which was very different gameplay-wise.

I may have just been a particularly dumb kid though, wondering if it’s worth giving another shot.

Context matters a lot:
-Discussing a general topic at length among peers, and someone says “Dude, no one cares”? They’re telling you to stop taking, and a) are annoyed, or b) in a mood to put you down. Use the rest of the context to determine your next move (e.g. stop discussing it, point out why it’s important, or leave).

-Discussing an insecurity of yours, and someone says “Dude, no one cares”. Usually means they think the basis for your feeling insecure is unwarranted, usually though not always followed by a more direct statement on said insecurity. Meant to be reassuring, as someone else said.

-In some cases, “no one cares” means that in the speaker’s experience, the amount of people who do care about thing x is marginal, to the point that paying too much attention to that warps the understanding of the situation. This is tricky - by way of example, I’ve said “no one cares if people are trans or not” before (I’ve learned - this is a deliberate example, stay with me). Taken at face value, this is blatantly untrue - some people care a lot, both in a negative and positive sense. But as just a guy in the world, this is truly my experience - other people being trans generally isn’t something the majority of people care about. I can think of only one person I’ve met who does care (negative sense), and he’s generally a weird guy anyway.

As you can imagine, though, going around saying this carries some danger, as it can gloss over the risks posed to trans people by those ostensibly marginal figures. My saying no one cares is a product of my necessarily limited exposure to and experience of the world. The best way to approach this IMO is considering, and speaking respectfully to, the speaker’s blindspots - whether or not the people who care are truly marginal demographically, the impact the people at the margins actually have in the topic of discussion, etc. Depending on the exact topic, either it will be demonstrated that it is essentially true - while it’s doubtless someone cares, the number of people and impact they have on the topic is marginal to the point that this is irrelevant to the topic at hand - or identify a blindspot that hampers the speaker’s understanding of the situation.

I will note that in speaking of context, you may not be neurotypical (took a couple tests at some insistance by my kid, and despite being an odd duck in general, odds are I am) - unfortunately I can’t speak to how to elicit and identify full context in that case, but others here might. Apologies if that’s the case, where “use the rest of the context” probably sounds like “draw the rest of the fucking owl” in an owl drawing tutorial.

To this day, I haven’t the foggiest what the fuck he and Guattari were trying to say, but think the concept of the rhizome can be useful insofar as I think I understand it.

sigh Gonna have to try again. Started reading Benjamin’s Arcades Project recently in a similar fit of “shit you referenced in grad school and successfully bullshitted your way through because no one else actually understands it either” guilt, may as well do it for the big D too.

My experience re: this phenomenon was “I stared at A Thousand Plateaus for a while, then all of a sudden every fucking thing I read afterwards mentioned this guy.”

Gilles Deleuze, once I learned about him for some reason. It was an odd experience.

It’s a fun phenomenon, especially if discussing with New Age types who will start dropping numerology interpretations.

If you can rein in an immediate “this is stupid bullshit and so are you” reflex, it’s interesting from an for-entertainment-purposes-only perspective.

I caught it, but tensions are high in this thread (I get why), an /s would help a lot.

Being a little literal, but I can guarantee someone has said 1, 3, 5, and 7 in the past twenty years. Heck, probably the last year.

Payphones are still a thing in some places and get used - I started doing a thing involving them a yearish ago (it’s in my post history if anyone really cares). Literally had someone ask “Hey, are you done with that phone?” as I was jotting down its number, which was shocking. Can confirm where I am they still take coins (it’s 50 cents now, unless you’re calling a toll-free number).

VHS is making a … come back isn’t really the right word, but there’s a small number of folks interested in what’s on old tapes they find and some hobbyists swap stuff. And there are still a few video rental places around (though really, really rare - or near places like campsites, catering to folks with cars that still have DVD players or households with spotty internet).

It’s all still disappearing, no doubt, but not 100% dead yet.