[Migrated, see pinned post] Casual Conversation

It was all fun and games two years ago when most AI videos were obvious (6 fingers, 7 fingers, etc.).

But things are getting out of hand. I am at a point I'm questioning if Lemmy, Reddit, Youtube comments etc. are even real. I wouldn't even be suprised if I was playing Overwatch 5v5 with 9 AIs while three of them are programmed to act like kids, 4 being non toxic etc..

This whole place could just be an illusion.

I can't prove it. Its really less fun now.

The upside is I go to the gym more frequently and just hang out with people I know are 100% real. Nothing worse than having a conversation with AI person. It was just an average 7/10 like I am an average 5/10 so I thought it could be a real thing but turned out I was chatting with AI. A 7/10 AI. The creator made the person less perfect looking to make it more realistic.

Nice. What is the point of internet when everything is fake but can't even or only be identified as fake with deep research.

I'm 32 and I know many young people who also hate it. To be fair I only know people who hate on AI nowadays. This has to end.

The North sea VS The Mediterranean sea I have always wondered which one of these seas have the more unfavorable climate conditions, and hard to work at.

It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I experience heterosexuality very differently than my peers. I'll describe in broad terms to keep things SFW.

Bodies are not "hot" to me. I'm drawn to feminine features because I find them pretty, but bodies do not physically excite me in the way that they excite others.

My sexuality is focused on receiving loving and romantic physical affection, and to a lesser extent, giving it. To my brain, affectionate physical contact is sex ITSELF, not a prelude. In practice, this means that I'm very attracted to kisses and don't care about real sex unless I had a partner who wanted it.

If I approach a woman, it's because she seems nice and I want to get to know her, not because I find her physically attractive. I never pursue romance from the get-go; I develop friendships for their own sake and romantic feelings may develop later.

I have some concerns about this.

I've long suspected that there are certain signals that I don't give off. Female friends have called me things like "innocent," "adorable," or "Christian" (lol). While that may be due to my gentle demeanor, I wonder if my unique attraction profile eliminates behaviors that signal sexual availability, such as flirting. Perhaps the absence of these signals creates an impression of purity and sexual abstinence.

If that's the case, I feel like that might prevent most people from finding me attractive, simply because I lack the hardware to speak their language. My actions might just come across as friendly, and I don't want to lie about feeling attraction that I don't have.

Another concern of mine is submissiveness: my physical attraction is centered around receiving. Although I want a relationship that's reciprocal—giving and receiving in equal measure—I absolutely need moments of receiving affection to be sexually fulfilled. From what I've seen, submissiveness is stereotypically a turn-off, and I don't know how widespread that is.

But I'm not BDSM-submissive; I don't want a dominatrix. I just want someone gentle, kind, and willing to kiss me a bunch lol. I want to create a space of warmth and safety where we meet each other's needs and I love the idea of being an affectionate and caring partner. The receptiveness I describe is episodic, not all-consuming.

These worries may sound silly, but being different is a catalyst for insecurity. It's very easy to speculate because I can't measure how much heterosexuality varies. I would expect that I'm a rule-breaking outlier and most heterosexuals have similar attraction models.

But I lack perspective, especially because I've never been in a relationship.

What do you think?

My two year old adopted nephew must have had some bad experience while playing in the bubble bath because for two months straight he fought and resisted and cried whenever trying to convince him to get a bubble bath. His Grammy has been giving farmers baths with baby wipes this whole time.

Well today I (his favorite uncle) decided to try to convince him to once again get in the tub.

"Ooh stinky Ricky needs a bath, do you want to get one"

"No."

"Awwh don't you want to play with bubbles and draw on tub with crayons? What about TOYS? Do you want to play with uncle SmokeyDope while you take a baaath? Huuh?

His little mind takes a second to process the query

"mhm..."

"Oooh wooow! Alright let's go play, let's go PLAAY!"

incomprehensible shrieks of transcendent happiness "bye bye, bye bye, bye bye!"

He gets up and starts running to the stairs towards bathroom while gesturing me to follow. At this point Grammy and I are like "okay this is happening" so we got his little butt to finally willingly go for a bubble bath. I spent over half an hour playing with him like drawing on the tub, splashing him with water, making goofy noises that kind of thing.

This kind of thing is not really in my comfort zone I never gave him a bath before but im willing to try if it helps the situation. So today was a success but now were unsure whether he's back on the regular grammy time bath routine or if playtime with uncle SmokeyDope is now a non-negotiable update in the terms and service agreements.

I don't feel very good about myself most of the time so when I'm able to make change for the better in someone elses life or add even a little bit of positivity to a situation it makes me feel like im not wasting space. Today was a good day as uncle SmokeyDope :)

Mondays is the busiest day of the week, so whenever my off-day falls on Monday I feel some type of way. I don't know if anyone has this experience.

I previously didn’t really care but selfhosting has slowly pushed me to really care about my media and data. Moved to Linux, try to prefer FOSS even if some minor function is lost. But considering when it’s not worth it.

For me, it’s that I have 100% control and the devs respect the consumers enough to show they have nothing to hide.

These are the hottest things I’ve ever tasted, and here’s my journey to spicy chips.

A few months ago, I decided to try some spicy potato chips. They were interesting, and next weekend I tried something hotter. They were actually really good, so I kept on trying hotter and hotter things every week, until I ran out of options at the local supermarket.

Yesterday, I visited my local Turkish supermarket, which sells all sorts of weird things I’ve never seen before. They even had a bunch of potato chips from obscure brands that are probably normal in Turkey and Middle-East.

Among those, I found these… non-potato chip thingies. Nevertheless, they’re, by far, the hottest thing I’ve ever tried. At first, I just took a tiny little crumb. It burned so hard, but after a while I was ok. Then I took another crumb, it was really hot etc. After about an hour, my mouth was strangely getting adapted to chili, so I could take small bites too. It just escalated from there, and less than 24 hours later the bag was empty.

What a weird experience! I never thought you could get adapted to chili. I thought it would be equally hot all the time, but that’s not at all how it works.

Feel free to have a look at

• !movies@lemm.ee
• !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
• !animation@lemm.ee
• !horrormovies@lemm.ee

The more I think about it, the more I feel like people seem to have some level of desire to see "THE END". Call it morbid curiosity. Call it nihilism. Call it death anxiety. Whatever. It seems like with all the effort people give to thinking about "the downfall", there must be some fascination with it.

There's so many forms of it. Doomsday preppers. Prophetic apocalypses. Global warfare. Climate disasters. The rise of fascism. People see "THE END" in so many different ways. And with the world not becoming any less precarious any time soon, we can only expect these mass-anxities to continue. (And the rich guys certainly have a vested interest in the end of everything. They get to keep their High Score.)

Or maybe not. Maybe human civilization (in at least some form) will continue for millennia more. Maybe we're far off from the end. But one thing is certain: for each and every one of us walking this earth, the end is at most a century away, give or take a few decades.

"How grand would it be to witness the end of everything!" cries the mortal pretender. For it is not just his death, but the death of all that he knows -- and he gets to bear witness.

• Planning
• Materials
• Setup
• Production
• Breakdown
• Cleanup

I added materials, since you're not going to get much of anywhere without them. Sure, you could consider that part of either the planning or the setup stage, but I feel that materials should be explicitly stated as well.

I guess on that same note, tools count in as materials for sake of this list. Any which way, if you don't have all the stuff you need to do the thing, you're going to hit a roadblock in your project.

And always keep at least 3 extra 10mm sockets around, just in case...

I should've checked first so that's my bad

If you could go back and change a decision you made in the past would you take it regardless of the unknown consequences?

I hate to say it but I'd choose to accept I fucked up and move forwards.

I have an nginx server with WordPress where I post my own poetry, for no one to see. Also the subdomains I use for some self-hosted stuff.

I'm losing my will to fight. You're losing your will to fight. In the last few weeks, you've been nothing but despair. I am trying to hold it together so I can keep up the fight. But it's been getting harder. All the levity has been lost. I guess I got more levity from you than I realized. I don't know how I became so dependent on you. Isolation has become the norm for us, I guess. But right now, all I know is that I can't do this without you. You've gotta stay strong, and stay light. So that I can stay strong, and stay light.

Yes, you. The faceless mass.

I've been nuking my online presence on big tech platforms, and among the biggest data sources are my Google accounts, including the one I used for watching YouTube.

Using a service they provide for exporting data, I was able to download a list of every video I've ever watched since mid-2020. How many of them were there?

Fifty-four thousand.

I have watched more than 54,000 videos since mid-2020.

I knew that I was chronically online and became complacent due to my disabilities, but seeing it laid bare like this suddenly made it feel much more real.

I am awake an average of 15 hours a day. That's 5,475 hours per year. It's not unreasonable to assume that I spend around 15 minutes on each video on average, especially given that I often read comments. So that's about 13,500 hours for all of the videos.

That means that, since 2020 alone, more than two entire years' worth of my waking hours have been consumed by YouTube.

Two full years of my life, gone. From just YouTube. And the worst part? I hardly remember any of it. Out of all of those videos, I remember maybe 10 or 20 of them off the top of my head. The remaining 99.9% of them were just noise. Void. Nothingness.

How many novel experiences could I have had during that time? How many thought-provoking books could I have read? How many interesting people could I have met? I don't want to know.

I've always felt like there was something wrong about it being 2025 already. It feels like it should be much earlier in the decade. But I think I finally know why: I have created very few memories in the past five years, because most of my time was spent staring at monotonous and forgettable Internet content. That's why time has gone by so quickly.

Instead of trying new things, engaging with enriching material, and meeting new friends, I allowed my time to be siphoned off by an attention-hungry algorithm that doesn't care about the incalculable damage it's doing to millions of lives. I am not the first one to have these regrets, and I certainly won't be the last.

Never again.

While they're busy loading your bike, hop into their driver's seat. If you're lucky, maybe they left the keys in the ignition, free car! If not, either surprise the fuck out of them and ask "Where are we going?", or call the law, or just beat the shit out of them, your choice.