I’m not at all bothered by “swear words,” and I’ll use them occasionally (mostly when I think it’s funny), but it’s somewhat rare. I just don’t find it very necessary most of the time. I can usually make my point just find without, but sometimes the emphasis seems right out, again, it seems funnier.

So if a group of guys came to your neighbors house and told the family that they’re going to move into it with them, you wouldn’t be for removing them, even if that meant a fight? It would be better to just let them move in because that way no one gets hurt?

And if they successfully move into your neighbor’s house, they might have eyes on your house next.

Russia is trying to take over Ukraine, a sovereign country, by force, and other countries are trying to help Ukraine fight Russia. Yes, people on both sides are dying. Ukrainians apparently overwhelmingly believe it’s worth the fight.

The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.

But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.

That sounds really neat.

My family rescued a tiny baby squirrel that had been chewed up by a cat when I was little. My parents didn’t think it would live, but also couldn’t see not trying. It did live, and when it was fully back to health they insisted that we let it go in the yard, but it stuck around - lived in our walnut trees - and was very tame. It would come in the house, play fetch with a wiffle ball, hang out on our shoulders, etc. It was amazingly cute.

That’s the same thing racists say when they get to know a minority.

The way people talk about boomers here is pretty awful, and it wouldn’t be tolerated for any other group.

We don’t? Boomer with bird feeder who loves squirrels.

I don’t think it’s age related.

Yeah, in in my 60s, so old. When I was in my mid 20s, I was in a bad marriage and needed some escapism. One of my coworkers was a reviewer for Locus Magazine, which is a major SF publication. I asked him for recommendations, so he went with me to the bookstore and said “Try that one, that one, to and that one.” One of those first was Neuromancer. I chewed through them, and it became a routine to go to the bookstore with him.

I eventually got divorced, and didn’t need the escapism anymore. My reading went way down, maybe a few books a year. Now I’m heading towards retirement and I’ve been reading more than ever.

More detail than you wanted.

I’ve read them all, but Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive I haven’t read since the late 80s, so I don’t remember them well. Broadly, I think they were all worth reading. Count Zero was nominated for all the big SF awards, but I didn’t think Mona Lisa was as well received. I’m not sure I could even tell you the plots of them other than the second book has a lot about AIs, and the last one about online identities or something.

Great, I’m glad you liked it. I hope you like neuromancer, it’s one of my favorites. Stay away from the audiobook read by Gibson though, it’s awful.

It’s funny, I’ve always looked taking pictures, and I’m old enough to have started well before digital. I love looking at the old pics, but since I took most of them, I’m not in very many. Kids are grown, I’m almost retired, and I think the family only recently realized there aren’t many pics of me.

I’m with you, but I think there’s a happy medium. Like, I don’t need to take pictures of the food I get at a restaurant or a selfie at every single place I go. But I’ve always enjoyed looking back at pictures of people I know or am related to living their lives. I’m older and my parents are both dead. They took a lot of pictures on slides, and I recently scanned them - about 1000 pictures - to jpg. So many wonderful pictures, some I’ve never seen.

But even then, my mom took a bunch of pictures of trees from the car window while they were on a driving trip. Completely unremarkable.

Not identified

I block the really prolific meme ones, anything with content mostly posted by bots, and the gay male stuff. I also block the prolific bots themselves.

Yeah, seems like a bad idea all the way around. Not sure Reddit would want it either.

That’s a really strange “or.” .world has only existed for about a year, since the big reddit exodus, and it’s just an instance, running Lemmy software on a server. The Lemmy software was first released five years ago, but that wasn’t the beginning of the fediverse. Like all fediverse apps, Lemmy makes use of the Activity Pub protocol, which came out like a year earlier.

Need a running list of all the confirmed falsehoods Musk has personally shared. Seems to be increasing.

I’ve said before that it seems silly to me, but I’m not the target audience, and it’s apparently driving the MAGA crowd nuts, so what the heck.

I saw some guy arguing that Trump’s cult doesn’t literally worship him, it’s just a healthy respect for a leader.

I counter with Exhibit A…

KSM is definitely detail oriented. I sometimes think that’s just part of hard SF: they want to make sure everything is explained, and it doesn’t stop at the science.

I like those books, but I get that they aren’t for everyone. Contact is different, as is neuromancer.

I’m still around. Was it the giant cast of characters or politics that put you off? It’s been a long time, but I read through the series.

Contact is a wonderful book. Also been many years since I read it.