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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • This is not to disparage or discourage OP in any way, but when (and really if) people say something like “X is not a houseplant” they absolutely don’t mean you can’t grow such a thing indoors at all regardless of how much equipment and effort you use. That would be stupid, and easy to counter, since indoor greenhouses are a thing as are heaters, humidifiers, air conditioners, fans, and artificial lights.

    By the time you’re injecting CO2 you’re well past the point of what would be considered typical indoor growing conditions. Let’s be honest. I think we can mostly all agree that if there actually were people who said “you can’t grow X indoors”, those people likely meant under standard household conditions.


  • I’m old and unlucky enough to have had many bad sexual experiences, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, by modern standards, I’ve definitely had some questionable experiences where I was taken advantage of (i.e. intoxicated, emotionally vulnerable, etc) and which would likely fall into the non-consensual category these days, so I’ll leave those out, since they were the worst by far.

    I’ve had plenty of bad experiences that were totally on me, so for the sake of my own ego, I’m going to disqualify those.

    The worse consensual experience I can recall at the moment was awkward and a bit weird. The guy was persistent and braggadocios while pursuing me. He was nice looking and we got along fine online and in phone calls, so when the conversation came up about meeting up for nothing serious, I was okay with that.

    We hung out awhile before getting intimate and he was nice enough, nothing seemed off. It’s almost a stretch to call what we did together “sex”, though. He wasn’t able to get an erection. Not a problem honestly, there are still plenty of ways for two guys to have fun. We basically just snuggled together in bed.

    At a certain point, though, he just started saying weird or off the wall stuff. I do not know if he had taken some drugs or if he was experiencing a mental health episode. It was like he was hallucinating that he could see the night sky even though we were indoors in his room with the curtains pulled, since he kept talking about how pretty the moon was and things of that nature. And he would ask me the same questions over and over so I know for sure something wasn’t quite right.


  • If it were maybe 15 years, I could very quickly identify some changes that would easily change the entire trajectory of my life.

    At 10 years, it’s hard to say since by today’s perspective, I’ve had my life in reasonable order and heading in the right direction for the past decade. So there aren’t a lot of options to make different choices I’m certain would help me gain things personally. That being said:

    I would make a more concerted effort to leave the job I had in 2014. It was a regrettable decision to stay as long as I did and a very toxic work environment for me. I could have made more money almost anywhere else and by that point I had met all the important and amazing people that worked there during my reign, so I wouldn’t have missed out on those friendships.

    I do have much better employment skills than I had 10 years ago and most of what I know and do would still apply back then, so I guess I could make use of that to climb the ladder a bit faster and/or earn more money sooner in my career.

    I suppose one day to day “exploit” would be that I’d know in advance if any specific purchase was a good decision or not. For instance, I’d know that the car I was going to buy ended up being a fantastic choice or that the piece of crap bookshelf was only going to last me a year before it started to disintegrate at which point I would have to replace it. This could be useful for saving money, since at the very least I could avoid purchasing the stuff that I know would not last or live up to expectations.

    I did not have a lot of money back then and certainly not enough to make good use of any stock market foreknowledge from today turn into a big payday. I don’t keep up with lottery numbers. I’m not a sports person, so I wouldn’t / couldn’t make any money off that kind of betting.

    If I were motivated enough, I might try to teach myself some music / music production skills and then start releasing my own version of popular songs from the future that haven’t been released yet. Maybe I’d luck out and end up with a lucrative music career! Or similarly, I might try to figure out the patenting process and then start patenting ideas for stuff that had not yet been invented, then do my best to become a bit of a patent troll.

    There’s a slim chance I could save the lives of some relatives, but honestly that’s hard to know. I had one family member die suddenly of a heart attack and another that died of an accidental drug overdose. I also had a friend that ignored people’s advice to go see a doctor and ended up the problem she was having was cancer, which she passed away from. Apparently, one of her doctors even told the family that if she had gotten treatment a little sooner, things could have turned out quite differently. We’d been telling her to go for at least a year, but if I could go back I would try a lot harder and be more persistent.





  • In a way, I’m glad people are slowing starting to come around and pay attention to this. For years, any time I would publicly complain about Amazon customer service online, it was very common for people to be completely dismissive or even blame me. I’d hear statements like “sure Amazon sucks, but they have great customer service” and I’d think to myself, just wait until it’s your time to find out that the customer service isn’t what you think it is.

    Long story short, the item came with a broken part. Should have been quick and easy to rectify (send a replacement part, send a replacement unit, or refund the purchase). The seller was completely unhelpful. Amazon customer service would not intervene and insisted that I continue fruitlessly corresponding with the vendor, even though they had an “A-to-Z” money back guarantee if something goes wrong. It literally took months of back and forth between me, the vendor, and Amazon customer service before things were finally refunded in full.

    So, basically I gave them another chance and they showed that things hadn’t improved a bit.


  • Lightning bugs are really cool! Where I live, people are usually surprised to find out that there are dozens of species native to the region.

    A few years ago, I went on a trip to a different part of the US and they had a species of lightning bug where they all flash synchronously. Instead of flying around the yard, blinking seemingly at random like all the lightning bugs I’d ever seen up to that point, the synchronous ones crawled around in the bushes and trees and then when they flashed, they all flashed at the same time. It was super cool to see.

    Another thing I’ve noticed about adult lightning bugs is that the populations can vary greatly from year to year around here. We might have a year or two with large numbers of them each night during the warmest parts of the year, then a year where they are few and far between.



  • I’ve noticed a downward trend, not necessarily “dropped off suddenly”. One of the most notable signs I’ve seen is from the new comments sort.

    When I’m interested in seeing what’s actually active and where the action is at, one of the things I will do is click to sort by “New Comments” and change my view to Comments. Typically I go to that page, see if any of the headlines or comments catch my attention, then go read or reply.

    In the past couple of months, I’m seeing more and more new comments on that first page of results that are 5+ minutes old. When I get to the bottom of the page and click to refresh the results, there are times now when I don’t even get a full new set of comments because there haven’t been enough new ones to bump the prior comments off the first page.

    That didn’t used to happen much at all, it was rare enough that it really sticks out when it does happen. Typically, the comments on that first page would be anywhere from seconds to maybe 2 or 3 minutes old and every time I hit refresh (I wasn’t spamming the button), I’d have a completely new set of comments to peruse (other than a bug in older versions of Lemmy that would cause some comments to get stuck at the top of that page even when they were significantly older than anything else).

    My overall interpretation of this is that it appears there’s less commenting, at least during the times of day that I tend to be most active on here. Of course that’s not the only possibility. But like OP, I’m noticing a lot fewer posts in those top 6, top 12 filters with lots of comments than I used to see. So, those types of observations do have me thinking things are on a bit of a down trend. It could be a seasonal thing, perhaps a temporary lull.





  • The definition of these “generations” is arbitrary and subjective. The reality of the matter is no such person exists. So, I completely disagree.

    Even if everyone in the world agreed that Gen Z is all people born between 1995 and 2010 (which would require you to be ignorant, naive, or just plain stupid), it ignores the reality of things like geography, culture, time zones, etc. Literally hundreds (if not thousands) of people could have been born at the exact same moment of time, but due to the magic of time zones, some would be Gen Z, others would not. That’s super arbitrary if you ask me.

    So, it’s more like theoretically some person is the oldest member of Gen Z, for some given interpretation of what “Gen Z” means. But in practice, there’s no such thing. In some ways it’s like a mathematical limit. There’s no smallest number greater than 0, because you can always devise a smaller fraction. But, if you artificially and arbitrarily limit your resolution (let’s say to 1/10th), only then can you declare some number the smallest (ex: .1).



  • USED TO GO TO CHURCH WITH A LADY WHO GRANSON WAS A PREACHER OVER AT THE CHURCH IN MAYFIELD BUT RUMOR IS HE HAD AFFAIR WITH THE CLEANING LADY AND THEY HAD A BABY WAS MIXED AND SO HE DIVORSE WIFE AND MOVE TO COLORADO WITH THE CLEANING LADY BECAUSE SHE HAD FAMILY THERE WAS A BIG SCANDAL LAST YEAR BUT I THINK EVERYBODY FORGOT NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT ANYMORE AND PATRICIA PASCAL HAS PASS FROM HER KIDNEYS PROBLEM IF YOU HAVE NOT HEARD SO SAY A PRARY FOR HER HUSBAND GEORGE