I did have another account on another instance a few weeks back, but it kept going down so I created this one on lemmy.world. I had the same username without the 2 on the end, so it could be that. Can you recall the username?

Love being online, where people can casually say “I spend a fair about of time in kink clubs” and nobody bats an eyelid.

Absolutely. I recently needed to satisfy auditors with a report on our network security. Our main guy was on leave, but I quickly got the evidence I needed with a few powershell commands that I would have previously spent way more time googling.

It’s also decent at reports and short, impersonal emails to suppliers etc. It frees up a lot of my time to do actual work, and for that I think it’s decent.

Like basically everything in life, the truth is between the extremes. For me it’s useful, but doesn’t replace me and my team. I’m neither an AI evangelist or detractor. It’s just another tool.

I posted on another thread about this a while back. Oddly, I have a weird mental block that stopped me gaming when I was 16 back in the 90s.

Basically, being a nerd in small-town rural Scotland was not something to be proud of after a certain age, and gaming was social kryptonite, so being an insecure teen I focused my energies on bands and drinking.

This was great for a while, but looking back, it would appear that I completely missed out on the Golden Age of gaming, and now it’s me who is the odd one out at work, having never played anything beyond a sneaky stab at Portal.

I’m now 48 and in two minds about it. On one hand, some of the guys at work have failed to launch and live physically isolated lives and spend all their time gaming. On the other, I see my own kids laughing their asses off playing Fortnite with their friends, and they are clearly having the best time.

I did try playing with them briefly, but they’re already leaving me for dust. So yeah, my plan is to maybe low-key get into gaming again when I retire in like 17 years’ time. We shall see.

I’d finally secured a permanent, full-time job in IT at the age of 29. Then my new girlfriend, who was a charming alcoholic with borderline personality disorder, convinced me to quit and travel the world with her. Which I did. We broke up somewhere in Malaysia. I sent my 30th working on reception in a Backpacker joint in Brisbane. I regret nothing!

Now happily married, 2 kids (11 an 9) and working as an IT manager back in my hometown.

I’m not into gaming. I think I’m the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn’t. I don’t really know why. I think it’s a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.

Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.

But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.

Lemmy is like internet jail. We got sent here for breaking the rules on Reddit, but now we’re institutionalised and it feels safe, even if there are some very odd people here with us - they’re mostly nice and just serving their time…

Yeah, I was pretty vexed at first. I really tried. But then I figured I’d seen them back in the day and they likely wouldn’t have been as good. Of course, it turns out that they were better than anyone expected and the atmosphere at the gigs was apparently unparalleled.

There’s a lot of musical snobbery around and I get that people might find them derivative - they’re not insanely talented musicians and they’re lyrics aren’t the best. But some of those tunes are timeless and to be there belting them out with thousands of people just loving it would have been great.

Next time I’m definitely getting a ticket.

Thanks for the info - yes, Lemmy’s worked out pretty well so far and it’s given me a chance to use the Boost app again, which was my favourite way to use Reddit anyway. Be cool to check out Digg when it’s ready, but Lemmy has definitely filled a gap!

I tried to join when I got banned from Reddit permanently after like 12 years for ban evasion (using a throway account). I joined the waiting list for an invite but still waiting. That’s when I discovered Lemmy, which I’m quite liking. Never heard of Piefed. Is it similar?

I used to use the NME website, which was a weekly music paper in the UK, back in the day.

It had forums and free webmail, so I had had an nme.com address that made me feel kinda cool (I was a teenager and music was very much my identity).

Then they cancelled the webmail and that was that. All my teen emails gone forever. I’d love to get them back, and who knows,they could be sitting on a server somewhere, but I doubt it.

Oh, also Bebo. Posted a lot on that precursor to Facebook and now it’s all gone.

To be brutally honest, I have only the slightest inkling as to what it actually is - I was just looking for a Reddit alternative. I signed up, entered my credits into the Boost android app and here I am. It’s liked the Reddit experience I miss from years ago, except with less content but nicer people.

How to disagree with people politically but remain friends

I wouldn’t use my Amiga, ST, ZX Spectrum or Mega drive on anything other than my CRT. They were designed for that pixel blur and playing on a modern TV is just not the same. I hadn’t realised the difference it made until i tried it and now I can never go back to using an LCD for any of my 80s/90s devices.

However, beyond that somewhat niche use, CRTs are otherwise entirely pointless and basically a worse display experience in every concievable way when your source is anything produced after the advent of HDMI/Display Port.

Wow. I’m sometimes perceived as a nerd, but you guys make me feel like James Bond. I salute you.

Sadly we’ve created (or at least blindly complied with) a society that values consumerism over community. The larger family/tribe unit worked because everyone had someone. The young were looked after by the elderly, who in turn were nourished by feelings of worth and value, while younger adults would work or look after the household. Now we pay strangers to look after our kids and ourselves in old age. We work with colleagues we barely connect with for the best years of our lives, lives that we spend mostly buying stuff and things to fill the void we’ve created.

It makes political sense for them to demonise certain groups. The childfree movement has been quite vocal (or at least well publicised) of late, and it’s super-easy to cherry pick some of the more extreme viewpoints from that ‘community’ and weaponise it against ‘normal’ people, conflating those opinions with the so-called left (as if deciding wether or not you have kids defines who you are politically). It’s easy fodder for the media and, as always, successfully distracts much of the population from the fact that they’re being bled dry by billionaires.

That… Yeah, that’s not going to help.

I have gout, which runs in my family (but I doubt the 90s pints helped). Therefore I was eating Ibuprofen like skittles for way too long to take the pain away. I finally relented and got on the meds after the diet and exercise didn’t fix it. Now I never take ibuprofen, and it makes me worry about how much damage I did to my organs and stomach lining while I was using it.