I dunno, I was up and running in five minutes. You pick an instance, you sign up, you verify the email, and you’re good to go. What server doesn’t matter much, barring it closing unexpectedly and without warning. There’s not enough users to need more than a handful.

There never was

Define reasonable.

That’s only part joke.

Why do these always exist before the internet? We can order bullion online now. It’s almost midnight in a fairly rural area

But yeah, I know a guy that will sell certain things for cash that normally require legal hurdles. But if you show up, cash in hand, he’ll backdate things on his end. One phone call, I could buy out his stock in fifteen minutes because I’m a regular customer he trusts. He’s usually got a few hundred thousand of goods in place.

Barring that, I’m kinda screwed at this time of night.

I know a couple of farmers that would let me buy livestock in cash like this, but that’s only going to be a few thousand bucks.

I know a weed dealer that would be able to give me a few pounds if he’s got it in, but I would have to call and ask how much he has.

Do services count? If so, I’ve got an idea for a cheat lol. Hire my wife for a back rub.

So, I just took a second and sent a text to an acquaintance and explained the scenario. Turns out you can buy a car in an hour or less. It’s just a matter of paperwork to make the sale official. So, if you know a car dealer, and they have enough on their lot, you could easily get rid of most of that million in time. Most of the time wasted isn’t really necessary. If the dealer and the buyer are already on the same page with the price, you could get as many cars as you have time to sign for.

As bat shit crazy as it sounds, I don’t. I let the name “come to me”, or wait for the critter to pick its name.

It isn’t literal woowoo hippy bullshit, but it looks like or when I try to explain it lol.

But it’s a matter of letting the subconscious mind have a chance to percolate with the personality and “nature” of the pet.

But it just kind of pops into my head at some point. Might be the second I meet the animal, might be weeks later. And it never fails me because when I let that happen, the animal immediately recognizes the name as theirs. That’s held true for anything but invertebrates and most fish, even a pissy iguana and an unusually smart oscar.

What sucks is that sometimes the name isn’t very cool lol. For every shaitan and samson, there’s a sugarplum and a cricket.

Eh, if it were easier to block an instance as a user, I’d be 100% with you instead of 95%.

There are instances that are batshit crazy. Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet, I can see why defederation before trouble gets going is useful. Once the nasty side of the internet gets snowballing, it’s much harder to manage.

Troll, or serious extremist, some things are just cancerous.

Element and fluffy. They’re kinda the default, and I don’t use matrix enough to merit hunting around

Crikey! This heah sasquatch is a hairy bugger!

Eh, mostly sms and telegram.

The only people I care about use sms, and I’ve convinced them to use telegram for thighs sms can’t do, like file sharing.

I have and use matrix for specific tasks, and I got suckered into discord for gaming and reddit. But neither get used much nowadays. There’s one discord server I stay vaguely active on because internet friends use it. Post reddit implosion, the matrix isn’t very useful since they were for mod chats and I’m only modding one sub until the end of the month, and that’s mostly solo (no need for chats lol)

Yeah, it’s decent. The aesthetics are iffy, but it works well

Redundancy is never a bad thing

Worst, up until the current fiasco, was having told a very deeply personal and unique story, but being torn to shreds because I wrote it pretty. That meant it had to be fake.

It taught me the lesson to never waste effort on reddit.

But the best was kinda the flip side of it. Similar thing, talking about death and dying, which was a large part of professional life, and despite writing it pretty, it resonated with people and I got some really nice conversations commiserating about the way that can change you.

It’s all about fucking with them. Yeah, they can pull the plug at any time. But the longer it drags out, and the more of their own rules they have to change/break along the way, the worse position they end up in.

Fuck spez, don’t make it easy. Make them play the heavy. Make them do it in a way they can’t pretend is justified.

I’m not seeing a problem with that statement

Unless you’re hosting the storage, it would be wise to contact whoever does host your instance and make sure they don’t have a problem with mandating direct uploads.

But, on this end, it isn’t necessary. It’s easy enough to click through if it doesn’t show directly.

Sorry, but I nuked my main account and my author account because there were comments and posts that reddit could slap ads on and profit from.

Anyone that wanted that content can damn well wait for me to repost it eventually. Fuck reddit, fuck spez lol.

I make a distinction between childish and child-like or simply the things from childhood. This isn’t pedantry, it just serves to illustrate a way of thinking for me that’s tangential to the question.

But, a lot actually. It is very unusual for me to not enjoy the things I enjoyed as a kid, and it is almost as uncommon that I reject new things that are for kids just because I’m an adult.

But yeah, I still play with Legos (as opposed to building kits). I finger paint (though I call it working primitive to the art snobs lol). I still watch some cartoons, and I still enjoy the ones I don’t watch when they happen to be on.

Joy is a thing that should be cherished while it exists. It, like all things, is ephemeral, so if something that brings it is deemed for kids, I refuse to reject it solely because of age.

It’s kinda sad at times though. My niece and my kid used to finger paint with me. Now they’re too old for it in their heads, and I miss having that fun with them. The kind of silly play we used to do has been replaced with more structured activity, though there’s still play and joy in it (even the knife fighting and general unarmed combat I’m teaching my kid and some others lol).

Retaining that sense of joy, cherishing it when it comes and being able to let it go when it moves on is essential to life.

You can, it’ll just be a struggle.

If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.

I’m almost always behind a strike to begin with, but this one is a big one.

As a side note, the ups driver that handles the route for my small town brought a package today. I was throwing down hard with the music (amon amarth, fwiw), so he gave an extra hard pound on the door to make sure it was audible over the music.

I get up, get the package, and he’s throwing horns as he drives off. \m/ my metal homie in brown, \m/ indeed.

Considering the volume of bots spreading venom about it, I have to say it’s doing something