We’re still new to the game, and we have no idea what we’re looking for.

Deadpool

Koyaanisqatsi

We have used an online school since COVID and it has resulted in flexibility, open mindedness, continuity, and opportunities that were not possible in other schools. We’ve seen our kids are above the fray on the playground, and better capable of resolving conflict. They are natural leaders. The school is platform agnostic, so the kids have an iPad and a Debian laptop and go to work.

Public schools: There is no Mandarin locally. The teachers locally are underpaid due to the political system, and it resulted in a brain drain of teachers. The local school board is in a culture war, and spends whatever money they have to fund studies on why books need to be banned. The other private schools are all Christian and still hit their kids as punishment. None of that.

In the US: Big franchise / chain -> never ever tip. The employees are disposable and I’m not going to reward a system that makes billions while paying nothing to its employees. I’m not worried about them holding a grudge or whatever because they already can’t remember me from one visit to the next, it’s so impersonal and unfriendly anyway. The kids behind any counter never remember me. Even when I still gave a fuck and tipped and was cordial, they never remembered me. I guess we all look the same.

But also over the past few years I’ve been to fewer and fewer large franchises and they’ve gotten more and more aggressive.

Small restaurant -> I always tip. I grew up as an immigrant in an immigrant restaurant so I relate to these people. They also remember me, my family, and engage in small talk, ask how my parents are doing, etc.

Overseas: Restaurants/stores: never. (they almost never ask for a tip but it’s starting to become common in the UK). But always carry cash on the streets because there’s always somebody who needs it.

There were/are some really good Asian and Asian-American communities on Reddit that didn’t follow typical discourse. IYKYK.

Some of those groups are replicated on Lemmy, but are completely empty of content.

Until recently, TikTok was filling that role for me, but it seems it is starting to get more “appropriate” for American audiences as I think they are finally playing the game. Lots of “Jesus” and “white guy with microphone” popping up on my feed there now. The same thing happened to Youtube about 15 years ago so there’s nothing new under the sun.

Gutenberg was a grifter. He stole money from people, sometime his own family, and ran up debts that he couldn’t pay.

The only reason that he started printing bibles and became religious was because he was going to be thrown in prison for swindling people out of money, and it’s a bad look to throw someone in prison who prints the word of God. In fact, most of what we know about Gutenberg comes from his court documents.

Also movable type and the printing press were already known in Europe and had already been invented in East Asia several hundred years earlier than Gutenberg. (the first printed texts date back to 700 CE and movable type prints around 1000 CE, both in modern China). It was nothing new.

People used their real names, and even posted where they were from on Usenet. There was a sense of community and there was a term – netequitte – that described how we would act towards one another. If you used a handle, watch out, you might be a troll, and you certainly weren’t going to be immediately trusted and had to build your reputation.

Replies went below the body, not above it, and everybody hated Microsoft Outlook for unilaterally deciding that replies go at the top of a message. Similarly, people hated WebTV users for just bringing the level of discourse to the gutter.

Web forums were fast and also a good place for community, kind of a gateway from Usenet to modern discussion forums. When people passed away we would all attend the funerals or whatever if we were close. There were 56k warnings in the subject line if a post had embedded images.

In the metal scene, maybe other places too, you would trade CDs. So like you had a burner and someone else had a burner and you would swap copies of CDs that you had for something they had. So you could build an entire huge collection of CDs and demo tapes cheaply. There were trading lists and people had reputations and who was reliable, who was a rip-off, and who was an idiot for burning 256kbps MP3s and selling them as CD quality (yes, you could tell a difference back then; something we still haven’t recovered from now that everyone is streaming). If you didn’t have anything to trade, you would pay like $8 for a CD. Black Friday 2000 was huge because burners only cost a couple hundred dollars that week, so it was a wise investment.

Sometimes the traders of new music were the band members themselves, and that was always fun to find out. I got Sons of Northern Darkness from a guy who was in the studio. I got a copy of another highly respected album from the bassist of that band who just wanted people to hear it. They would just mail it your house and you would receive a CD in an envelope with chicken scratch handwriting on it.

When Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia was leaked in the trading community, it blew people’s minds. People were like holy shit this meme band that everyone hates just got serious and took our entire genre to the next level. I cannot understate how big that album was.

People sent checks via the mail in exchange for goods. Online transactions were still done this way instead of all electronically. So you would purchase online, get an order number, put that order number on a certified check, and mail it off. And a week later you had your stuff.

Also everybody had a customized desktop. Not just the wallpaper, but the themes, the colors. There might be a talking cat that sat on the desktop and would get up and walk around and poop and tell you what time it was. Everybody had unique desktops. Everybody had different fonts. Maybe cursive, and in pink and yellow and that was what the entire interface looked like.

Slashdot was huge and the original Reddit. There was a Slashdot effect where if they linked a site, that site would suddenly get so much traffic that it might die. Also in those days you could tell if a webpage was using IIS or Apache because the Windows server was always slower to serve webpages. When Dell entered the server space people laughed because Dell was not an enterprise brand and who would ever seriously use x86 or Windows on a production server?

Online chat was a thing with a/s/l and everyone had an online significant other with whom they would chat about things daily, but who lived like 5 states away and no you would never, ever go meet them. Even suggesting such an idea would usually end the friendship. Everybody had an online diary with a guestbook and a stat counter – showing how many page hits you had.

There was less corporate ownership and more independence back then. It was okay to be different and unique. The Internet wasn’t just like 5 websites.

I think the Fediverse – Mastodon especially, comes closest to recreating that turn of the century feel.

Since mangoes are in season now:

Green mangoes (still crunchy) with crushed Thai pepper and sugar and a tiny pinch of salt.

Or just go all out and make the crack sauce.

I get mistaken for Hispanic and told I look Colombian. My American name is pretty common white guy name but people call me by the Spanish variant.

But that’s not even the right continent and I have zero Hispanic heritage. All it tells me is that you look at skin color and not features, and you lump me into an “other” category. We don’t all look like KPop idols.

This is complicated by the fact that my South American wife is light skinned with green eyes, and when she speaks fluent Spanish people assume she is an American girl who learned the language due to me, her “Hispanic” husband.

Not a bad thing, just annoying, and please stop yelling that I “have to go back” when I’m in the park with my kids.

I’ve been here a few months but finally decided to make Slrpnk my home Lemmy instance. Mostly because I like the discussion topics and found myself browsing this site more than other Lemmy instances. My former home instance is just too unreliable and breaks federation too often and that’s been the story since last June, a year ago now.

Is there a place to donate to help pay for hosting costs?

I was a much more interesting person as a kid. Around 13-15. I lived in a tent one year. I contributed to a Linux distribution. I learned guitar and scheitholt and harmonica and wrote songs. I swam in the lake. I experimented with technology. I fell asleep under the stars. I played basketball in the dirt. I didn’t wear shoes.

So … that.