While y'all are out here hoping for wind, solar, and EVs to take off, I'm here counting the E-ink dubs

I am new, and I am sure that the culture has changed a lot like with Mastodon in the last few years, but what I perceive is lots of FOSS and Linux people, which is unsurprising. There's tech/infosec people like on Mastodon, and people that have what I consider a very healthy skepticism about big data, corporations, and corporate surveillance. I also notice that political attitudes have a much healthier range than any other social media I've been on in the last decade - and I don't just mean that there are more people like me. There is a good number of people I disagree with, too.

There are definitely people interested in games and niche interests/hobbies, but it feels to me like the community is still very FOSS-centric. Which is nice. :)

e: obviously influenced by my instance of choice

Productivity boosters like Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open -- whether it’s 7 or 7,500. Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Customizable new tab wallpapers that will let you choose from a diverse range of photography, colors, and abstract images that suits you most. Intuitive privacy settings that deliver all the power of our world-class anti-tracking technologies in a simplified, easy-to-understand way. More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.

...

We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models -- i.e., more private -- to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities. The alt text is then processed on your device and saved locally instead of cloud services, ensuring that enhancements like these are done with your privacy in mind.

I am not one of these types, but I did want to ask you if people wanting to grow their own crop always brings up these critical views for you.

I personally think "self-sufficiency" (may be the wrong term) in vegetable gardening is a great way for people to increase resilience against famine.

Others have pointed out the anti-consumerism angle - for small scale food gardeners, non-chemical pest deterrance becomes viable in a way impossible for manufacturers of scale, while they can still benefit from any increases in health of the food stock through both traditional selection and genetics research. Very not-Luddites, in that example.

I would also say - and it is possible that I just haven't checked in on solarpunks recently enough, and I am missing something - but I always thought it was supposed to be the positive answer to doomerism, and to systemic or social collapse, and to the endless barrage of climate collapse news many of us have grown up with. With that in mind, I would question how much the aesthetics and how much individual examples may distort the overall perception of a movement or community.

Overall, is it an obsession with primitivism? I don't think you are completely wrong. Aesthetics have a major impact on people, so it seems reasonable to me that you are reacting to a dizzying mix of politics and motivations, a lot of c/collapse -grade "this stuff is all gonna fall apart", and maybe seeing some false positives based on your past experiences having to deal with fringe politics.

Hopefully all of that made any sort of sense

As a big fan of the show - don't look into his dating history unless you want a plurality of reasons to dislike him.

look you know how the internet made people with fringe ideas into self-perpetuating communities???

well get this, there are tonnes of people out there that just eat chicken mcnuggets and only chicken mcnuggets

and thats why i am starting a kickstarter for mcnuggetcon

Bill Maher

eeee

The View

www

Dailymail

wwwwwwwwwwww

based and the natural progression of things imo

~

hey, if you like Minecraft, and you like freedom, you really should check out Minetest, which VoxeLibre is built in. Do some reading about it -- it's an engine, and it lets you build voxel games for you and your friends/kids to play.

unless you WANT to keep supporting bill gate's cocaine habit with your minecraft bucks

Precisely. I am interested in reading what people have to share, and for the most part I feel that people here are interested and thoughtful when they share! I am not taking it for granted - its good while it lasts - and can't ignore that it is closer to Reddit than the 00s forums that I really miss, but it's good.

The silenced cries of the side taskbars......

These are all very, very good questions, my friend.

Without trying to treat you combatively, I am reading a lot of the same things in the way you talk about things.

I'll say again that its possible you and I have seen different solarpunks, but I think you may have waded into a personally difficult topic, since solarpunk as a concept is supposed to be instilled with an awareness that certain kinds of collapse are certain, but that there are things people can do to make life worth living.

When you are dealing with people trying to find hope and talk about what they can do to live well and not contribute to the worlds problems, and you talk negatively, you are going to find responses like these.

Hope that didn't feel like a pile on

Eeerp. Yep, I meant PPI not DPI. Thanks for the write-up about text scaling, though, I will note that when I end up upgrading. The PPI calc also looks interesting.

My eyes genuinely glazed over at that point and I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought...

Did somebody say "STICKERS"?

I would say I agree with this, but also just navigating social interactions at work. As I've got my life together in the last few years, I've grown increasingly shocked at how many of my coworkers just.. can't get over simple adult challenges like avoiding hanger by eating normally timed meals/keeping their tempers in check, recognizing and isolating insecurities. These are things that take time to overcome, certainly, but the bare minimum is the bottom of the pyramid of needs, and I see well-paid people failing at them constantly.

I think that I learned a lot about basic work courtesy as a younger person but didn't actually understand how to practice it and communicate healthily and positively with others until just recently. Probably because I had my own insecurities and issues holding me back.

(forgive the American POV)

What I anticipate is that government services will start to appear less in people's lives, very gradually. HOPEFULLY people start to get a bit more involved in their community. Probably, our urban environments will end up worse for wear. Cars will trend rarer and rarer, and hopefully we'll have some kind of renaissance of automotive maintenance to keep the good vehicles working (spoken as a car hater). HOPEFULLY we will get over the taboo of calorically-expensive human-centric farming (makes sense for some specific, small scale stuff where its not just a soil science and fertilizer supply game). As an extension to that last one - fewer (but not NO) email and service jobs.

Saying all of that sounds kind of rosy or very positive - obviously, the collapse would be bad, there would be hunger, there would be violence.. but there already is, I guess? The main point I guess I'm trying to make is that collapse is gradual and I think westerners have seen some of the baby steps.

As a younger person I was a big 'big government' and bureaucracy advocate, so this isn't a libertarian wet dream or something, it's just informed by the change I've seen personally and a bit of extrapolation and history.

have you been smoking that ganja

its habit forming you know!!!!!

What I’m picking up is that it’s not a fully formed set of ideals agreed upon by everyone

Oh yeah absolutely. I think I was vaguely thinking this in one of my other responses. Fwiw I can imagine seeing basically exactly what you described as some kind of bad doomsday prepper negativist solarpunk, but I couldn't get over the sense of it being a strawman, or, less dramatically, just the opposite of what a lot of people seem to think they're joining.

I was going to respond elsewhere - I don't think you have to be sold on these solarpunks and their ideas. Not in a mocking way -- but I would say my encounters with solarpunks are like my encounters with squirrels. I see them very occasionally, we don't interact, I take pleasure in the encounter, maybe appreciate something I didn't before, and then I move on. Based on that you could imagine how little data I have on them

holy moly! just when i was hankering for some of those advent burgers

I know I shouldn't be disappointed it hasn't already been said, but uh.. rap music really came into its own in the 90s. Also, you know.. was probably the peak as well.

Fantastic comment that speaks to so many of the contradictions of the current political line in the west. This one goes in my special little tankie book that I read at night under the covers

Distrotube and Mental Outlaw were the two final dominoes in a decade+ long journey for me :) those two are both legit

I find this hard to believe. Are you thinking talent shows and CV accomplishments? We've got a whole society of people undervaluing their soft skills, and work traditionally relegated to women.

I personally am one of these people who doesn't ever get to the point where I feel I am an expert in a skill. I really love to learn enough to understand what "my" experts are talking about, and understand why they love it. Then I usually move onto something else to see if there's a better fit.

Having people in my life lavishing praise upon me for things that I don't consider that impressive is probably something that helps keep perspective, though, and I guess that is an experience I wish more people had.

FORTRESS ECONOMY 😡❗

Sure - if you are looking to play Better Than Wolves or Tekkit specifically (forgive what I am sure are boomer MC mod references) thats what you will go for.

I think my comment was more intended for people who aren't yet aware of MT, its mod scene, and the huge catalogue of components available in its ContentDB.

irrational counter culture normies

i'm going to hang out in the drainage ditch with my friends in our leather jackets and use KDE and smoke ciggies

Have had at least one phone fitting this description. :(

Android, too.

I believe you may be trying to speak to a very common question: "why don't we just do what the Scandinavian countries do?"

This part of the world benefited from imperialism and colonialism visa vis their monarchical relations and representative forms of government that are not too dissimilar from the rest of the west. They have benefited from the specific industries that they had access to, in some cases I believe petrodollars included. Their relatively smaller and more homogeneous populations mean they have fewer social issues, and when immigration happens, it does not work remarkably better. So, essentially what I am saying is that it is a misconception that they are somehow better. They have a cleaner image because they are lucky to have one, and their model is not something politically special that we can adapt. Could America and the UK have better social safety nets? Could the ruling class care more about the welfare state? They could, but they've spent years pulling it down, so I think they will not. I would then say that we shouldn't expect them to suddenly become very inspired by European state's healthcare programs.

Down the road, I think you would benefit from reading up on counterrevolution and opportunism as an extension to your curiosity around reformism. The German Revolution series by Jonas Ceika is a great primer, because it gives a real world example of communists working with social democrats, and how that tends to go. "Reformists" trying to work with a system of violence ends up working with increasingly violent, increasingly rightwing factions. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7y0zyKXzhwzrZ0raG4HpT8ZdXx9USoW3

Another poster already described that ML is about material change. I think if you go looking for people in community trying to resist Cop City in Atlanta, or people trying to push for justice in Palestine, you'll find people that are looking for material change. That's not idealism, and would be at home in ML discourse (and indeed, these two topics are taken up by MLs). I had to explain to a close friend recently that communism is not a utopian ideology - it's not about daisies. It's not about doing communism, or creating a "communist nation" (whatever that is). It is about material improvement. It would want to, wherever possible, put science and improved ideas, industry, and policy in place to make things work better for the people and the world that they live in. When you explore ML texts (not just foundational text, but the years of anti-revisionist work that have continued to this day), I should hope you find all of this.

Hopefully this helps (e: and isn't too far afield from the original topic)

Do we have an insight into how much of the writing Seinfeld accomplished in the post-David years? Like, they had a staff of writers, so I'm not sure if Seinfeld was the biggest voice at that time or if he was just being a star