I think that is kinda true. Like, American brands that sell here are branded as “Heinz Ketchup” for example. And it’s definitely more processed or whatever. But I feel like most people would still say “pass the tomato sauce”, or if they say ketchup it’s in a joking way. I couldn’t speak for my whole country though.

Phones have become boring and are all the same. I want options like we had with Nokia back in the day. So a music phone, gaming phone, business phone etc. but with a modern OS. All we have now are camera phones. Google announcing that they’ve added a second possible function to The Button in settings just doesn’t excite me. Smartphones have become shit and it’s not because we’ve perfected them or some shit, it’s because chasing lines on marketing graphs and playing follow the leader has resulted in no choice anymore and everything being lowest common denominator, mass produced slop.

I didn’t even know that “catsup” was an option until now. Where I’m from, we call it “tomato sauce” and “ketchup” is the American word as far as I’ve ever known.

Schools stalking their students’ social media profiles is actually just fucked up in the first place. Before social media, they had no way to invade a kid’s life outside of school this way. And the fact that it happens now without much of a fuss is alarming. Humankind really is just sleepwalking into fascism.

If they all used it at the same time, there’s a possibility that it would result in 5 different alternate realities, one where each of those countries has achieved their goals. Maybe 6 different alternate realities, including the original.

Young Justice rocks. I love the stuff that showcases a little bit of everything in the universe.

Currently distracting myself with a rewatch of Batman Brave and the Bold while eating and stuff. If you’re ever in the mood for something funnier, would recommend. Even if you’re sick of Batman, this is a fun version that’s friends with everyone and isn’t an asshole. And there’s appearances from everyone from Kamandi the last boy to Doom Patrol.

Personally I’m looking forward to that same kind of idea where everything exists in the same universe from Gunn’s take on things. And hopefully not counting my chickens before they hatch. But I get the idea that’s what he’s going to go for.

As far as Marvel goes, I’m more of an X-Men fan than anything else personally, so I’m really hoping there’s going to be an X-Men '98 and '99. Not particularly looking forward to MCU X-Men but maybe I’ll be entertained.

Thinking about the USA right now too much doesn’t lead to any good sleep for me at all right now. Because there’s bad things happening to good people there. I feel awful for the actual decent people that share a country with cruel and dogmatic clowns. People who probably live next door to someone who voted to ensure their rights get taken away and their lives become even more miserable.

I honestly struggle to come to terms with the fact so many people are still so cruel and backwards. It’s not the stupidity that’s the main problem, it’s the malicious intent and desire to turn everyone into a goose stepping clone. And how easily people are turned into goose stepping clones. Conned by reality stars and drug addicted tech bros, what a joke. I think it’s part stupidity and part the fact that these people really are just malicious assholes, so they could’ve been convinced into this by a talking toilet brush mascot.

I feel sorry for the intelligent and empathic, and the people who dare to live lives that are true to themselves without dogma who have to live in a country with the stupid and selfish, and the people who want to impose their narrow minded puritanical views onto everyone else with force and cruelty.

I’ll be sleeping like a baby when the goose stepping clowns are all dying of some easily preventable disease that they could’ve vaccinated for but right now there’s nothing comforting about what’s going on there.

Finally some exposure for Lemmy in the news.

Yes. 💜 for my favourite people. 🙂 for people I’ve interacted with once or twice and would like to interact with more. ⭐ for people that I haven’t interacted with but always enjoy their posts and comments. ✊ for similar reasons to the star but I like their politics.

I’ve also given one person a red flag 🟥 but haven’t seen them again. There’s a couple more I could probably give red flags to but also I would prefer to see more friendly symbols in my feed than danger warnings.

And seeing as you asked so nicely, I haven’t tagged you yet but I think I’ll give you a 🙂.

The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s

Ah, so that’s why it was chosen as the default here.

When I first signed up here, or tried to sign up here, join-lemmy just didn’t want to load anything. So I ended up going to bed and trying again the next morning. The next morning, it finally loaded the list of instances and going by the experience I had just had with the website battling to even load anything, I chose an instance advertised as “join here to reduce load on larger instances”. And this instance just didn’t want to load anything properly. Half of the images in posts just weren’t showing up. And when I searched LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, only dead communities showed up and I’m pretty sure nothing from Blåhaj.

Then I went to world and still found it to be a ghost town. Eventually I realised that it was because ‘English’ wasn’t selected in my language settings. Because I didn’t realise that you have to ctrl click to select both ‘undefined’ and ‘English’. I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case. And on this note, the whole fact that ‘undefined’ even exists as an option comes across as bush league and makes it look like a beta version.

Then there’s another issue here. The god damn internal politics. So someone signs up on the insurance that says “focused on programming and development”, then have everyone calling them a tankie or be cut off from multiple instances that have de-federated. It’s clear to me now that ‘ml’ stands for “Marxist Leninist” but when you’re new here and just looking at descriptions in join-lemmy, it just looks like a unique url like all the others.

Personally I think there’s a lot of reasons that people would give up trying to get started here. That’s before even trying to break them ice with a silly question in AskLemmy and getting snarky snark and smart asses in the replies. And I use that as an example because in my first week here, I saw someone post an innocent question in AskLemmy, get hostility as a response, then leave.

Astrid from Fringe. She’s just the nicest person in the show and cool and smart. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly, she’s just an extremely likeable character. And watching it more than once, it’s actually sad how little she really got to do in the show. She barely gets a backstory.

Also, I don’t know if it counts but in Walking Dead it felt like all of my favourites were side characters because all of my favourites died. I actually stopped watching after season 5 because both of my top favourite characters got killed within episodes of each other and I just didn’t really have a reason to keep watching. Everyone that was left was an asshole.

Season 3 was fucked from day 1

Kinda glad that I haven’t got that far then lol. Although one day I’d like to catch up with season 3 and Sinners of the System just for completion sake. But I’m definitely not as amped about it as I was with season 1 anymore, so I’ll get to it some time. It’s just not exactly high priority.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3. I wish I could say Sonic 3 & Knuckles but we weren’t swimming in money so I very rarely got a new game (and just to add, I never threw controllers or punched TVs either because mommy wouldn’t just buy me a new one if I did that).

I did rent out Sonic & Knuckles occasionally though. But I can practically picture the early level layouts of Sonic 3 in my mind like they’re familiar streets that I grew up in.

When I was a kid, for a while my mother, one of my sisters and I lived with my grandpa. Grandpa loved his caine and other white spirits and would drink until he went and passed out in his room. Then he would start shouting in his sleep and have big fights and arguments with someone. Usually when this started, someone would go to wake him up and tell him to shut up (as suggested by him).

Anyway, one day the three of us excluding grandpa were sitting around in the lounge doing whatever, when next thing we heard grandpa shouting in his sleep from his room. So both me and my sister go to tell him to sit up. And we both saw the shape of a person in his bed and heard him sort of mumble “ah, fine, ok, sorry.” And that was the end of the shouting and we went back to the lounge to carry on watching TV or whatever we were doing.

Next thing, a car pulls up outside and out gets grandpa and his friend. They had both been out the whole day and grandpa wasn’t actually home that whole time.

That’s easily the biggest unexplained experience I’ve had in my life. The fact that all 3 of us heard him shouting and that both my sister and I saw him in his bed still freaks me out today.

This whole year so far, it’s been The Gathering - Shot to Pieces for me. It’s not even a new song I discovered, I first heard it when it was new on a Metal Hammer compilation CD. But it’s just been speaking to me this year. The lyrics, the vibe, the sound, everything. It’s the song in my soul currently.

I don’t actually watch a lot of anime but reading this question, my immediate answer is PSYCHO-PASS. Season 1 is a masterpiece of a story regardless of the medium IMO. Philip K. Dick tier.

Then they carried on with it instead of stopping there. The movie was ok, season 2 was meh and the villain was a bit much. And I haven’t even been able to bring myself to watch any other content from it. Not sure I’d want to because I prefer to pretend that sometimes it’s about art and not always about money and that they stopped after telling the story they wanted to tell in season 1 without turning it into a franchise.

Phil Anselmo, singer of Pantera, in 2016:

And seeing that made me feel stupid for never picking up on the white power undertones in their music before. Honestly it’s made me feel something not good about a lot of metal bands in general since, considering that this very year, Metallica, Slayer and Pantera were still happily touring alongside each other as opening acts for Black Sabbath’s 20th final tour.

I can’t, personally. Same with any art. Kanye can get fucked. Manson can get fucked. Pantera can get fucked. Neil Gaiman can get fucked.

Some are harder to walk away from than others though. Sandman and Death were two of the first comic book characters that I ever got to read complete stories of and not just random back issues. But I’ll never be able to look at another Gaiman creation again without thinking about everything.

Others are easier to leave behind. Bands like Pantera always came across as macho dickheads that beat up kids for listening to heavy metal back in school anyway. So I feel nothing saying nazi metalheads fuck off

I didn’t even know that “non-binary” was a thing until later in life. I knew that I wasn’t like the boys but we wore uniforms and had to have gender specific haircuts and were all seperated and categorised, so it’s not like I was spending all my time with the girls either. I just thought I was a weirdo that hated sports and stupid immature behaviour, who preferred reading fantasy and sci-fi books alone.

And I still didn’t even know that it was a thing for years after school. We’re kinda progressive in my country but probably still at least 10 years behind the first world in that regard. So it’s something that I was just never exposed to. When I finally did sit down and do some homework about it, it felt like I had finally found the picture to use as reference to put the puzzle of my life together, if that makes sense. Before that, I was just building the puzzle blind and not doing a very good job at it. So many things in my life would’ve made more sense or been easier (and I would’ve made better decisions along the way too) if I had only known who I was.

This meme might’ve done the trick for me lol. Still gonna go with 16 though because that’s the age I started sneaking out on weekends to go to the alternative club. I think that if I had a clue back then and wasn’t still in denial, I would’ve done everything better, especially relationships with people.