The trendy junk store at the mall still sells them and has a literal line to get in. I have no idea if Labubus are trending down or not, but they still seem pretty popular around here.

It doesn’t have to be a religious celebration. Just copy the USSR and celebrate the parts of Christmas you want (putting up a tree, gift exchanges) on New Years.

I get where you are coming from, but I find holiday decorations to be one of the highlights of an otherwise crummy season.

Winter is so depressing. It is cold and dark all the time. It is fun to come home to a bunch of silly lights everywhere. I leave mine up for a few weeks past Christmas. If you ask me, the tree should stay up until the first day of spring.

And Soviet Socialism never went away either, it just reorganized upper management. Instead of the state owning a few mega companies, a few mega companies now own the state. In either case, it is the people controlling the human/natural resources paying off politicians to overlook all the horrible shit they do.

Except that I am using a very porous knit scarf as a mask and only masking up outdoors (the opposite of proper masking).

I am convinced that I will come down with cold/flu if I breath too much cold air. When I walk in the cold, I always wrap a scarf around my mouth and nose. If I don’t, the cold air will give me a sore throat. That sore throat will act as a Petri dish for illness to develop and spread into my lungs or nose.

I know plenty of medical professionals and all of them tell me that that is not how it works, but I have a datum of proof. In my first year of university, I had a nasty, persistent respiratory infection during the late fall/early winter. To keep my throat warm while it was recovering, I started wearing a scarf and my illness went away quickly. After that, I started wrapping up whenever I was walking to class in the cold and never got sick again.

I am now used to wrapping my face in the cold and feel wrong without it. When I don’t, it seems like I am more likely to come home with a scratchy throat. I can definitely say that many of my flus start in the throat (though it could just be that the first flu symptom I tend to notice is the sore throat).

With an ISP, you are not paying much for your bandwidth to the Internet. You are paying for connection between your house and their office. Your ISP has to maintain many miles of wire across your city. They also need to maintain equipment that can handle thousands of individual connections across many individual wires.

In comparison, a VPN provider just has a couple of very big connections going into their data center for pushing data in and out.

Plus, you likely have only a few choices of ISP (or only one choice), so your ISP can maintain a very healthy profit margin. With VPN providers, there is a ton of competition, so they have to charge you only a little above actual cost.

Also, that imply i have to plan doing sex weeks before if i have to take the pill

Same with the female pill. The intended usage is that you take birth control regularly, regardless of how often you actually have sex.

https://libbyapp.com/

Assuming you have a card from a participating library.

It seems like Massachusetts Best Buys did not get the memo. I hear all these stories about people hating Best Buy over pushy employees and have the opposite experience. The stores only have 1-2 employees on the floor and the duty of those employees seems to be to hide from customers. If I ever need help finding an item or want something from a locked display, I have to spend 15-20 minutes running around the store trying to catch a ninja.

Wasn’t that the Pocket Pair game before Palworld?

Keeping skin pretty is completely out of the realm of reasons for religious coverings tho

Isn’t it? I assumed that that is a big reason that religions that start in a desert demand that all members, regardless of gender, cover most of their skin in clothing

“Son, wear your long sleeve shirt. You know how prone you are to sun burn.”

“But dad, it is so hot outside and my clothes are so stuffy and I will only be outside for 15 minutes, tops.”

“Well guess what, son. I just spoke to God and he told me that boys who don’t wear long clothes outside go to hell. That is why you turn red and painful from sunburn, to remind you that you will roast in hell.”

Your journalism degree makes you a more well rounded person. Also, there is an overlap between journalism and IT: tech news, tech blogging, tech review, etc.

Have you given any thought about what your next steps will be?

They left entirely? Not just tuned out the group until the topic of conversation moved on?

The article argues that extremist views and echo chambers are inherent in public social networks where everyone is trying to talk to everyone else. That includes Fediverse networks like Lemmy and Mastodon.

They argue for smaller, more intimate networks like group chats among friends. I agree with the notion, but I am not sure how someone can build these sorts of environments without just inviting a group of friends and making an echo chamber.

If you read the article, the argument they are making is that you cannot fix social media by simply tweaking the algorithm. We need a new form of social media that is not just everyone screaming into the void for attention, which includes Lemmy, Mastodon, and other Fediverse platforms.

When I (rarely) browse without an ad blocker, I notice how much better contextual ads (ads based on the site I am looking at) are compared to personalized ads. For example, on Board Game Geek shows ads for board games, board game accessories, and board game storage solutions. On webcomics I will see an ad for another webcomic that targets a similar audience. Both types of ads are genuinely interesting to me and I click on them on occasion.

When I see “personalized” ads, they are for things I have absolutely no interest in. On a tech news site, I get an ad for hair conditioner (I have short hair and losing it). On a 3d printing site, I am sold t-shirts with pro-police slogans (the fact that I regularly visit lemmy should automatically mark me as a bad target for the product).

Except they are not. Their car sales revenue is falling. Their plan to reverse it is to make their cars cheaper (crappier).

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/07/tesla-q2-2025-sell-fewer-cars-and-carbon-credits-make-less-money/

And you still have to buy an even number. Also, only if all items are the same price.

As a heterosexual cisgender white man, I have to be careful that what I say does not insult or offend those around me. Doing otherwise would be rude. Back in the day, we called that etiquette.

Now, some people might be thinking “well I am not racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever so I never have to think about what I am saying.” Good for you. I am approaching 40. When I was growing up, there was no such thing as trans inclusive language. You were an ally if you did not call LGBTQ+ people “fa***t” and super inclusive if you did not use “gay” as a generic negative adjective/adverb (i.e. “The teacher gave us homework even though we also have an essay due at the end of the week? Gay!”). A few years ago, a gay friend (and here I literally mean that my friend is homosexual) called me out and made me realize how my speech patterns on sexuality were super heteronormative.

We have to periodically reexamine how we talk, especially around sensitive topics, and make sure we are not implicitly saying things we did not mean to.