Working on non-musical projects for once! All of my musical commitments wound down for summer. My other projects have been starved of attention, and now I can feed them.

I swear there were other small web/indie web communities out there that might be interested in linking yours in the sidebar. !smallweb@lemmy.cafe, !retrowebnet@retrofed.com, !indieweb@programming.dev, !smolweb@slrpnk.net, and !webrevival@lemm.ee used to be good for this before lemm.ee went bang.

I know !fedigrow@lemmy.zip (or maybe its old iteration !fedigrow@lemm.ee) has guidelines on trying to consolidate the communities if there is too many of them with not enough recent activity, not sure if it’s worth it or if these communities are sufficiently different.

Also, that banner is cool, what is the source? And I love the custom theme.

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Artist: https://www.willquinnart.com/

Is there a word for this kind of artstyle? I love it

I love trains

@ladybutterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone curious about your take

Always fun to get together with people you care about.

Curled up with some tea, maybe gaming or knitting or working on music or literally any other of my hobbies that don’t involve being outside.

The people at !wholesome@reddthat.com and !nicememes@sopuli.xyz and !thelittlethings@lemmy.cafe would probably like to know about this. !thelittlethings seems to overlap in intent too, although it does not seem very active from what I see on my instance, so you might want to message the mod. Thanks, I really appreciate positivity communities.

Birthdays and the like used to feel inherently special as a kid, as an adult no longer and it just feels like another day. But I still like to celebrate because it’s a nice excuse to see people I care about or treat myself to something nice, or to just relax. I don’t believe we should always do things just because that is what is done, but this is one place I’m happy to just do things because the rest of society does and thinks I “should.” We get something nice out of it, and those who are not interested in celebrating are free to opt out (which I’ve done a few times too, and didn’t regret it.)

For example, I don’t think Valentine’s Day itself is all that important, but it’s a good reminder to pay attention to your loved ones and spend time with them, and because it is enough of a societal thing there are things done (think a couples’ dinner special at a restaurant or something) to help you do just that. So a lot of people do celebrate on the day. Some will celebrate on a different day to avoid higher prices on the day of the usual celebration. Some will totally disregard.

But that’s just me. It might be different for others.

A novelty account on Reddit I really liked seeing. Apparently they published a book lately, and have been busy but are still alive, having last posted a poem about their relative lack of posts 4 months ago.

Hot green tea made to the exact strength I like it at.

People have already written about how in the United States of America, the zone is being flooded, and I happen to live there. I am prone to doomscrolling about the negative things going on to the point of being almost paralyzed, doing nothing but scrolling headlines for the rest of the day, convincing myself it is alright because I am “staying informed” and “maybe it’ll outrage me/make me fearful enough to push me into actually doing something to help.” But I don’t ever actually help anyone as a result of all that scrolling. Or do anything to help myself. Or anything necessary for my own wellbeing. It really is paralyzing for me.

I notice when I aggressively curate that content out successfully and instead my online feed has more positivity and zero headlines about people suffering, I actually do something about others’ suffering, even if it’s just a small, manageable drop in the bucket instead of a large act of martyrdom.

I am prone to rumination and negative thinking and cynicism myself, yet I find people who mostly complain constantly unpleasant to be around, even if I agree with their complaints. In an effort to avoid hypocrisy, to avoid being the very thing I don’t like in others, I am trying to be more positive. And that means trying to find communities that act positive, and trying to contribute positivity myself. Practice towards being who I want to be.

I have the demographics of minority groups many consider oppressed, and recognize how lucky I am that I haven’t faced any of the things I’m “supposed” to have faced. I’d like to have a break from seeing headlines that remind me that my luck is very very likely to forcibly run out within the next three years. They certainly will not invigorate me to do anything about it.

I, like most people, have a brain that can be hijacked by outrage and will click on controversy. I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’d rather have measured conversations with smart people I trust about issues, who can also keep me in check if I go wrong, instead of looking to the latest online fight full of hot takes, bad faith, people acting in good faith but misinterpreting each other, and all the many problems that have happened/been exacerbated with the rise of social media. This means shutting out negativity and running towards positivity.

And yet I still think about the negative bad things often, the headlines I’ll see in public or overhear people talking about. It’s not like I’m oblivious.

I really really think it’s okay to try to stick my head in the sand for now when the air is being filled with proverbial poison gas intentionally trying to make people despair and feel hopeless and paralyzed instead of trying to resist, and I have a known tendency to be vulnerable to that.

The Unhook browser extension for Youtube lets you choose what to block. You can choose to toggle the Shorts off without toggling anything else off.

I agree. I want to see positivity, not general anything (which could also include rants or complaining, lots of negativity). I respect the effort to consolidate communities to ensure you have more active communities and not just dead communities after awhile, but I do not think that is the right move here.

As someone who hopes to be old someday, this will definitely mean I get talked about as “the old generation,” and even if I try to be the most virtuous elder, I fear for common sentiment being

as usual the “old generation” just has to die out first

with people wanting me to die out first because my quiet, inoffensive elderly existence reminds folks of elderly generational cohorts in power, or elderly people fighting to make things worse. It hurts to see the generalization, especially when you know elderly folk out there protesting and trying to make things right. Elderly folk being hurt by the system, who did not vote for it, but because some of their generational cohorts did they are tarred with the same brush of the ones who did vote it in.

Autistic person who thought we aren’t supposed to generalize based on demographics, but keeps seeing people online do it anyways on the grounds that the demographic they are generalizing is being screwed less than other people, or some people in the demographic actively working to hurt others. I actively end up avoiding a lot of spaces meant for my multiple non-majority non-in-power demographics because of all the “punching up” and feeling really uncomfortable with it, but also not wanting to tell people to stop venting in areas meant for that. But now it happens basically everywhere and it always feels wildly uncomfortable to see.

As a certified “Reddit wasn’t so bad actually” person, as someone who wishes society weren’t so prudish, I still wish we left the NonsexualtopicPorn naming convention behind.

Adding extra NSFW to a title for things that are not actually NSFW does not seem like a good idea to me. Tells people who are not in the know about the naming convention and who do not have a sexual interest in Nonsexualtopic that the space is not for them, shrinking the audience. Don’t have to be a prude, just a newbie, to see “MistranslationPorn” and think “cool for people who have a fetish for mistranslation, but even though mistranslation is a cool topic I’m not interested in it as kink or a sexualized version of it, time to scroll by”. Also looks bad for browsing where people might see, and then having to explain “no it’s not porn porn, it’s just a silly naming convention”…

I think !nicememes@sopuli.xyz would like this too. Would crosspost myself but Piefed has made that hard for things that are not link posts.

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