I believe in the adage of, "If it sits between you and the ground, don't skimp".
Shoes, socks, desk chairs, lounge chairs, sofas, car( seat)s, mattresses...
You spend too much time in or on all of these things to be uncomfortable.
I also see posted here the Adam Savage advice of buying cheap tools first, and then upgrade after you better understand your needs. I also think that's great advice you can apply to most things. Just not the above things.
Getting static shocked by the TV screen.
A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.
The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you're in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren't in a kid's head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent's. The safety risks are high. Always were, that's not new. But the legal risks are new.
And yeah, it's not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn't happen back in, say, my dad's childhood. But I'd wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they're old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren't.
If the current tools work fine, have decades of historic support and battle testing, and the alternatives offer little to no net benefit, uhh, why?
Honestly? Still haven't found one.
The communities I've found are all fine, but I haven't found any that are a tailor match for me. Every one so far has either been not quite my cup or a ghost town.
I'm mostly sticking to All and interacting with posts I like as I see them, with no real care given to what community they are from. Individual communities don't have much for me, but all of Lemmy combined holds my interest decently well.
Theoretically, when it's up and running. How do you intend to get to that state, though? One has to install it first. And I think that alone is a massive filter.
inb4 someone says:
I did it, and I found it extremely straightforward.
I'm sure you did, Mr. "I hate how much Reddit is pandering to the braindead to the point that I joined an experimental social media platform", I'm sure you did. Clearly, you are a qualitative sample of people who use Windows computers.
Sarcasm aside, look at how railroaded and coddling the Windows 10 installer is. I am certain a large plurality of Windows users' initiative would completely evaporate having to navigate that. And now we want to throw a Linux installation at them?
Factor on top how the vast majority of computer users in all forms that computers take simply take for granted that the OS the computer comes with is a part of the computer. Normal people don't upgrade OSes unless the OS itself railroads them into it (which Win10 already does aggressively whenable), or they buy a new PC that happens to come with it pre-installed. The knowledge required to negotiate an OS wipe and reinstall is not something most people possess, and I expect presenting that knowledge to them on a silver platter is something they'd hastily recoil from.
We're in a catch-22 here. Even if all the pieces for the fabled Linux Desktop are arguably here, actually getting it into the hands of those who would benefit from it most remains prohibitive.
This is also ignoring the elephant in the room: A massive swath of these Windows PCs (Maybe even most of them? I have no backing figures, just a hunch.) are not personal computers, but office PCs that belong to a company fleet. There's a reason Windows utterly dominates the office--Windows rules the IT sphere, at least where personal devices given to employees are concerned. Active Directory? Group Policy? Come on, guys. None of the companies who depend on these management tools are pivoting to Linux anytime soon, and you know it. And if their cheap, bulk order desk PCs don't support Windows 11, they are absolutely getting landfilled.
The only effective mitigation I could think of would be to start a charity that takes obselesced office PCs, refurbishes them to Linux, and provides them at low or no cost to those who need a low cost or free PC. It would get Linux into more hands, but it would also strengthen a stigma that Linux is nothing more than the poor man's OS. The Dr Thunder to Window's Mountain Dew.
To me, using default face emoji gives off the same kind of vibe as still having the setting that adds "Sent from my iPhone" to the footers of your emails enabled. Or driving around a car you've purchased with the car dealership branding badges and license plate covers on it. Or using a laptop with all the factory stickers still on it. It signals a kind of "this is fine" lack of care or concern by allowing your own expression to be polluted by pre-canned expressions from a corporation.
Here you have a short list of milquetoast, approved-by-committee standard-issue emotion pictographs. Only the most broadly applicable ones. Perfectly weaponizeable for some airplane food communication by some brand on Twitter or Facebook. And people look at these and go, "Look! That one's sad! I'm sad! These emojis really 'get' me! I'm gonna use them!"
They're expressive, but only in the ways the platform is permitting you to be expressive. A valid counter argument would be, "Some is better than none". But I can't shake feeling like I'm being railroaded into communicating my feelings by approximating them into a small handful of simplified, standardized emotions. And I don't understand how others are satisfied with that.
Emojis only render a specific way on a specific platform, too. So if you're using an emoji that feels like it fits your current emotion because it has a very specific, nuanced look to it, but you're on a platform that doesn't render them the same for every user, you'll unwittingly send a completely different signal than you were intending, as your emoji will become mangled into some slightly different emotion depending on who receives it. The only two ways out of this are either staying inside a platform's walled garden so you only use their standard issue emojis, or you just relegate your communication to being described solely by the broad, vague notions that the emojis represent. Both options are restrictive in ways I dislike.
That isn't to say that I hate emojis, or that I don't think they can be used creatively. Ironically, in my opinion, the best uses of emoji are for when you're using one to communicate any emotion other than the one it was intended for. Exhibit A: how 💀 has almost entirely supplanted 😂 in some circles. Usages like that are communicating more than the sums of their parts in only ways that emoji can achieve, and I find that fascinating. It almost feels like a form of social "recapturing", taking them away from their usual stiff, corporate vibe and making them something transformative.
It only lasts for a time, though. As the mass market clues in on it and starts to cater to it, the novelty disappears. There was a time when 🍑 and 🍆 were clever innuendo. Nowadays there's no joke there. That's just what they mean now. The only ones who think themselves clever or fashionable by using them in that way are doing so in shitty Facebook memes.
The problems I have with emojis mostly only affects the face ones, specifically. The way the human mind is a hyper optimized facial recognition machine amplifies the platform exclusivity problem. Like, you can never have just a smiling emoji. You have to use this platform's smiling emoji, the way they drew it, expressing all the little microdetails they decided to put onto it. And given how complex emotions can be in particular, the inflexibility of a standard set of face emoji to express yourself with feels significantly more restrictive than, say, not being able to find an emoji for some random object.
Just my two cents, though. At the end of the day, if you send a message to someone, they receive it, and they understand exactly what it is you've sent, that's successful communication. Send those emojis with pride if you believe they enrich what you have to express in ways words can't. As long as you're being understood by someone, never let anyone, especially not me, tell you how you should and shouldn't be able to express yourself.
I still listen to my music using a 160 GB iPod Classic. Apple struck gold with that clickwheel. Carrying around a dedicated device for music just for that elegant one-thumb control I don't even have to look at to use is still totally worth it to me.
Here's an overview of how Linux reads its filesystems on boot:
/etc/fstab. "fstab" here is short for "file system table". It's basically a list of other partitions plugged into your PC, and a mapping of where it should be mounted in your filesystem. If your system partition was Partition A, for example, and you had another Partition B that you want to be accessed at the path /B, you'd add a line to your fstab file that says something to the effect of, "hey, reach out to the connected partition with ID , and if it's there, create the folder /B, and make the files inside of the partition show up there." This is called "mounting" the filesystem. You can do it manually at any time with the mount command. The fstab file is just a way to get Linux to auto-mount permanent partitions on startup. You can mount any drive to any path, including /home.What you need to do is:
mount command. Park it anywhere you want. /media/new_home or whatever you like. This will just be a temporary place./home directory to the newly mounted one./home folder to literally anyplace else than where it currently is. \home_old would do. It just needs to be out of the way. You almost certainly want to do this only when logged in as the root user, or from another OS running off a USB. You will not be able to log in as any user after you do this until you finish the following steps./etc/fstab file to point your new home partition to the path /home. This will "hook up" the new partition.Answering some of your questions:
Can
/homelive on a separate drive from the system partition?
Yes. Linux does not care in the slightest where any mounted drives are. A drive is a drive is a drive. If it mounts, it mounts. Just make sure it's in your fstab file.
How should I organize my partitions?
There is no right answer. It depends entirely on what you need and how you intend to use your PC. But since that answer is unhelpful, I'll tell you how I've done mine. I currently have a single 2TiB SSD split up like this:
[ 200 MB boot | ~500 GB system | 2 GB free | ~1.5 TiB home | 8 GB swap ]
Boot comes first and is tiny. System is probably an order of magnitude bigger than it ought to be, but whatever. 2 GB of deliberately unallocated space is there for the exceedingly rare situation where a dumb bug chews up all the storage on the system partition rendering it un-runnable; it's emergency expansion space I can tack on to get it running just long enough to resolve the problem. Home gets the lion's share. And swap goes at the end, where home can cannibalize it if some day I decide I don't need so much swap space.
You would probably organize your drives in a similar way, except one drive would be entirely dedicated to /home and nothing else, and system taking up the bulk of the other drive. That would be the easy and naive solution. Some users may be inclined to create other partitions for organizational purposes. I personally don't care for that organizational pattern, so, w/e.
I cannot help you with your display troubles. :(
As long as algoritmically driven centralized content pipelines remain popular, the Fediverse in general will not capture the mainstream.
Say what you will about Lemmy and Mastadon et al being "straightforward and easy to use". I'm sure it is for you. But there's a reason most mainstream platforms treat their users like absolute cretins: the majority of mainstream users are, and they both enjoy and expect being coddled and catered to by the platform.
The very notion of Lemmy being sharded into "instances" and what that means is so antithetical to the common preconceived notion of what a social media platform is to most people. "Oh, it's not just all here in one place?" And yeah, federation greases the wheels a lot so no one even has to think about instances... until a community you like is suddenly rendered inaccessible via defederation.
Also, content discovery on the Fediverse is admittedly kind of ass. Only those who both know what they want going in and where to look for what they want really get anything out of it. Most centralized social media platforms are relentless content recommendation engines because people don't actuslly know what they want until they've had it brought to them. An algorithm that at least attempts to adapt to what you want to see more of is a key part of that. Lemmy does not have this (nor should it).
All that said, the fact that Fediverse platforms like Lemmy filter "common people" in these ways is, from what I can tell from here and elsewhere, a feature, not a bug. By being here at all, you prove a kind of baseline competency and a willingness to put in effort to learn the system that sets you at the forefront of most social media users. Most of us like it that way and are happy to keep growth of the community stunted in exchange for it.
Of course, all of the major platforms were in those shoes at one point. Will the Fediverse be the ship everyone leaps to next when the current platforms become so enshittified that even the main stream hates it? Maybe. But wherever the main stream goes, enshittification inevitably follows. The mainstream success of the Fediverse will synonomously be the death of the Fediverse as we know it. I for one would like some more time to hang out here before then.
A middle school social studies teacher of mine gave me detention on numerous occasions because I refused to take notes in his class.
Partway into the year during parent-teacher conferences, where parents met with teachers to discuss their children's performance in class, the issue was brought up.
"Pixelscript is having some difficulties in my class. He is not taking notes during lectures. I've given him detention several times."
"Well that's strange, it says on his report card that he has an A in the class."
"Well, yes, he does extremely well on homework and tests, but you see, he doesn't take notes...."
"...Are you kidding me?!"
The greatest irony of the situation was that on the few occasions he forced me to take notes, it lessened my comprehension, because focusing on writing in real time during the lecture actively harmed my understanding of the lecture. God forbid a student actually listens to what you have to say...
I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.
Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.
I had to unsubscribe from NotJustBikes's YouTube channel because I could no longer bear thinking about just how thoroughly and irreversably fucked the city planning is out here in the American midwest, and how there's less than a gnat's fart in the wind I can do about any of it.
I don't mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.
Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.
Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don't care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that's fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.
Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.
It can also better integrate into the dev's personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I've had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I've held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I'm terminally online on Discord. So if I'm gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I'll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.
Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it's the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I'm hanging out.
It's a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.
I'm sure a lot of us looked at "15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux" and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, "15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms".
But in reality, it sounds more like "15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome". Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.
It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.
Back in the early 10's I paid $200 for a year subscription license to Adobe Flash Pro, as I had convinced myself I was gonna learn to use it to produce sprite animations like the ones I grew up enjoying on Newgrounds. Never booted it once.
I had a period where I didn't really understand the GPL or what it was trying to do. All I knew is that it was ""viral"" (whatever the hell that meant!) and that, supposedly, trying to use it would forever bind you and your creation to who knows what unforeseen legal horrors. I mean, look how long it is! It's frightening! I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it at first.
Then I got a clue and actually read it. It's quite straightforward. For almost all serves and purposes it's basically just MIT plus copyleft. All the legal density is just an effort to squash every conceivable loophole to the copyleft directive. I'm no longer afraid of it, I think it's pretty cool.
The thing I want to know now is why so many projects think their shit don't stink and that they need to pollute the FOSS ecosystem with their own stupid permissive license that is functionally identical to the MIT license.
I keep my 160GB iPod Classic on life support.
I think the clickwheel design is, in my view, the single best one-thumb no-looking-required input scheme for an MP3 player I think anyone has ever made. Plug it into, say, my car stereo AUX port and I can pick it up with a free hand to control volume, select tracks, and even navigate mostly by memory without having to look at the thing. I can just tell where I am based on the feel of the control. Infinitely better than a featureless flat slab of a touch screen that gives you no sensory feedback.
I like its solid build quality. Full metal chassis with that sexy anodized aluminum finish. I miss that. Despite having a spinning disk hard drive, it never skips, and I've never had read or write issues. Though I'd probably try to mod it over to some kind of flash NAND storage someday. There's also a USB-C mod available that I'd like to do someday, since Apple 30-pin connectors are an endangered species now, and even then, carrying around an outdated proprietary cable for only one device is something I'm eager to never need to do again.
I'm also pretty heavily conditioned to not have tens of gigabytes of music stored on my phone eating up all the precious space. But that's mostly a holdover from my previous phone, which had a 32 GB onboard memory limit and no SD card expansion slot. I guess now that I have a proper memory expandable phone and, and now that half terabyte microSD cards are relatively inexpensive, that's no longer a huge concern...
Also, Rhythmbox can sync to it. Maybe other software too. So I don't even need iTunes to use it.
Here's the ELI5 answer I'd give to your friend:
Computers are like servants. They do whatever you ask of them. But to be able to ask them things, you must do so in their language. On the extreme low level that means writing code to make programs, but on a higher level, it means talking to programs someone else already wrote using special commands.
The buttons and switches on a GUI that you can click on with a mouse are like pre-recorded commands that instruct the computer to do some specific thing. The button or whatever will have a symbol or text description that lets you intuitively know what it's for, and when you click on it, it plays a pre-recorded command to the computer in its language that tells it to do that thing. With these buttons, you can ask things of the computer in its language without having to know that language.
As you get more intimate with the computer, this system can start to feel a bit stiff. You've essentially got a butler who doesn't speak your language, and any time you need to give him a task, you have to fumble through a basket of pre-recorded tape recorder messages to find the one for the task at hand, and play it to him. For more complex tasks, you may need to chain several of these together. It gets slow and awkward. And god forbid you don't even have a tape recording for the thing you need.
It's easier if you learn the butler's language yourself. Then you can ask him for things directly. You're not bound to any collection of pre-recorded messages to use, you can tell him exactly what you need. And if you don't happen to know the word for something, you can look it up. It cuts out all the faffery with fumbling over a tape recorder looking for the messages you need to play.
Using a terminal is roughly the computer equivalent of speaking to your butler in his native language. You're not limited to only the buttons and features any particular program lets you have; you can make up exactly what you need on the spot. And you never have to bounce your hand between a mouse and keyboard to do it, you can keep your hands in one position at all times, which really adds up over time in both speed and comfort.
Practicing this will also give you the side perk of better understanding how the computer actually works overall, and what it's actually doing. This knowledge can come in super handy when diagnosing problems with the thing. When a GUI gives up, a terminal can keep digging.
As an American who was raised Lutheran, who was taught a bunch of Romance-Euro-centric world history in school, I always considered Roman Catholic to be the "default" flavor of Christianity. Protestantism in all of its forms are hard forks. It's in the name, even--the Roman Catholic church is what Protestants are "protesting".
To unironically "-and Zoidberg" Catholicism out of Christianity while leaving Protestant flavors included feels completely backwards. I've never heard anyone do it.
But if I did, I could only assume it was due to some No True Scotsman bullshit. "Only we practice the correct way. Everyone else isn't just interpreting it differently, but interpreting it wrong." Sounds like an Evangelical line of thought to me.
I don't think there are any desires I carried over from childhood that I finally fulfilled later. Most things I wanted in the past I simply stopped wanting as I changed with age.
I have, however, on numerous occasions in my adult life, looked at something that probably would've made my kid self go into orbit with excitement and thought, "Man, if only I could get an adult to buy me this..." only to blink a couple times, see the lightbulb turn on, and go, "HEY, WAIT A MINUTE..!"
Tab hoarding is just poor man's bookmarks.
Oh wait, you're on Gelbooru. Nevermind, I get it.
This is almost word for word what I said in another friend group today. Protecting individuals is literally why LLCs exist. It's what "LLC" stands for.
Nintendo Hyper Beam'd them into oblivion but they got a Substitute up first. The defense strategy was smart. The strategy that put them in the position of needing to use the defense strategy was idiotic, yes, but the defense was smart.
Short of Nintendo doing nothing at all, this is probably the best outcome that could have realistically happened.
I buy Royal Crown and mix it with Crown Royal.
The perfect marraige of the king of middle shelf soda and the queen of middle shelf whisky.
"Tubular" I can at least trace where it came from. It's surfer lingo. Sometimes when you catch a wave, the wave crests all the way over you and encloses into a tube. Surfing through that is supposedly the most euphoric thing about the sport. "Tubular" is thus "anything that makes you feel the way a surfer surfing through a tube-shaped wave feels". Thrill, wonder, excitement, etc.
I have no idea where tf "based" came from. Wiktionary suggests that it ultimately comes from the chemical definition of "base" (i.e. the opposite of an acid). "Freebasing" is a way of converting certain drugs, particularly cocaine, into smokable form by converting them from acid to base. Rapper Lil B. is alleged to have coined "based" to describe his lifestyle as someone who is unafraid to be himself as an individual (which, I guess, included smoking crack). This supposedly filtered into 4chan to become an alt-right slogan for "admirable person who bravely maintains alt-right opinions in spite of adversity" ("based and redpilled"), and later was claimed by groups outside the alt-right to simply mean, "someone with admirable opinions".
Finally found out why I couldn't renew my Let's Encrypt cert.
Did you know fresh installs of Debian Testing come with firewalld installed and enabled to auto-block all incoming connections? Me neither!
Pretty sure they are asking, "Why would I ever want the tracking copied, why is this relegated to a bespoke option instead of being the default behavior?"
Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.
It's one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It's another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.
Man, I haven't seen a pony in the wild in ages.
Seeing "please" in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.
MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.
The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.
When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can't select which stock they're buying. Gee, I wonder what you're gonna be getting...
Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.
The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).
As a very strong believer in Danny DeVito's quote, "When I'm dead, just throw me in the trash!", if any medical party is even remotely interested in dumpster diving for my parts when I'm done with them, they can have 'em. Better than throwing them in a box and taking up land in a cemetary. The less of my remains uselessly taking up space on this planet after death, the better. If I get my way upon my demise, anything they don't take is going into the incinerator anyway.
I'm sure you know it by now, but Mint is the "I Can't Believe It's Not Windows!" distro very much on purpose, haha.
I don't get boxers either. It's just going commando with an extra step. The sole thing you stand to gain (support) is nonexistent with boxers. I don't know why people bother.
Your posts take me back to 2007 where I was doing the same thing on the Nintendo Wii's Weather Channel.
The Wii hit different.
This failure of the word "open" to mean one clear and specific thing just feels like an echo of the failure of "free" to mean one clear and specific thing.
Someone came up with the term "free" in the context of software, and a bunch of people asked, "Ah, so that means I don't have to pay for it?" And half the room went, "Yep, of course!" and the other half of the room went, "Ehrm, not exactly..." And from that point on, we've had to amend the word "free" with awkward qualifiers like "as in freedom, not as in beer", or attempt to introduce a clarifying companion term like "libre" to try and capture one of the competing meanings.
I'm sure the "open" in "open source" is doomed to the same fate. "Source available" is to "open source" what "libre" is to "free". An awkward clarifying companion term that only dorks like us bother to distinguish.
I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.
Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?
In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.
Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think--to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I'd assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I'd also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.
Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I'm less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they'd react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.
Imagine one of those combined Pizza Hut/KFC stores from the 90's, except it's just one big combined buffet of pizza and fried chicken, and the whole place is cowboy themed.
As a child I was raised in a household of chewable Tylenol tablets. Those were the only pills I really knew, particularly for mild pain relief.
In gradeschool, I had a day where I developed a splitting headache. I was sent to the ""nurse"", who, by nature of this being a small town American public school, was just the school office secretary armed with a bottle of child dose Advil tablets. I was promptly given a couple tablets to take, and was shooed off to the drinking fountain. Instinctively, I chewed the tablets. Within minutes, they came back to see me, along with my breakfast, and I was quickly sent home. The valuable lesson I took away from that day was, "chewables are for babies, grown-up pills are swallowed whole".
Growing older, I became accustomed to increasingly annoying pills, which only further cemented that lesson. The culmination was probably being forced to swallow huge capsule pills while having a throat swollen and raw with strep. I just accepted that "real" pills are swallowed whole, and they suck, and that's just how it is.
Much later in life, I was visiting my parents while recovering from a pub crawl. My mom offered me some Tums to combat some heartburn I was having. Somehow I made it far enough into life to drink alcohol but not know what antacids were. I was handed two US silver dollar sized tablets. Flashing back to my previous mistake when taking unknown pills, I swallowed them whole. I was embarassed to learn after the fact that they are, in fact, meant to be chewed.
The morals of this story:
From their perspective, you're the fringe idealist who wants to move to a strange, remote place because of nebulous political ideology they neither understand nor wish to understand. And you are proposing that they uproot all of their preexisting social connections, support infrastructure, comfort, and familiarity to come live with you out in the middle of your scary, unfamiliar dystopia. Or, at least, force them to book a redeye flight and stay at a suspect hotel every time they want to visit you.
And honestly, you really are the fringe idealist here. Look at where you are posting this. Look at how few of us there are. Look at how many hoops you needed to jump through to set up what you have now. I certainly don't think you're wrong to champion privacy-focused ideals, but it absolutely is, strictly speaking in a populist context, extremely weird. It is weird to want to understand computerized tech, to know what it actually does, and to make bold, against-the-grain choices based on that knowledge. This is the unfortunate reality, and you have to make your peace with it.
I really do think your option is binary here. Join 'em, or cut 'em. Once you've shot your shot to convince someone to be more consciencious of their privacy and to take action to better secure it, and they frustratingly decline, that's it. They are not coming with you. Further pressing the issue will just drive a wedge between the two of you. At that point, the choice is yours. What's stronger, your willingness to stay conected, or your principles? Are you so rigidly disciplined that you're willling to cut ties (at least, through these channels) just to keep it? If so, I guess that's just a reflection of how much your principles really mean to you. If not, well, it's SMS/RCS and Google Docs for you.