cobysev

Again, I make my own judgment call. If something has tons of negative reviews, then I might read some just to get an idea what everyone’s upset about.

If it’s a common complaint about a specific thing, then I’ll decide whether that thing is a deal breaker for me, or not that important. If it’s just a bunch of random complaints, then I won’t trust any of them and make my own call.

But in general, I don’t really pay attention to reviews. I guess Steam reviews on games are pretty much the only ones I ever read, simply because they’re displayed prominently right at the top of every game’s store page. If a game is review bombed, I might read some recent reviews to see what the deal is. But I’ve definitely bought games that have tons of negative reviews, simply because people didn’t give reasonable explanations for their negative reviews.

I don’t trust others’ reviews. Some people rave about a product or service and then I try it and it’s actually garbage. Or worse, you can’t really tell what’s a legit review from a customer and what’s a paid review by someone within the company. Or AI generated.

In the end, I prefer to make my own judgment call rather than trust reviews. So I don’t expect anyone to trust my reviews.

Which is kind of ironic, seeing as I write lengthy movie reviews and video game reviews. But in my defense, I do that purely as a hobby, so I can rave about something I really like (or on occasion, dislike).

I do it for fun and I don’t make money on anything I post. Which, in my opinion, makes it a more pure review because I’m not motivated by pushing a product or meeting a deadline. I’m not required to highlight certain features, push a popular trend, or promote an event or sale. I can just speak from the heart, write whatever I want, and geek out about something I personally enjoyed.

Note for those passing through and not reading articles:

This is not a summary of the article, but OP’s suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that’s lacking in bees’ diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.

OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.

When I served (2002-2022), we were always told that warrant officers are technically officers, so treat them the same as any officer. So we would’ve addressed them as Sir or Ma’am if we came across them. As well as saluting them if we met them outside.

I don’t recall ever addressing anyone as “Mister” in the service. Heck, I retired a few years ago and now I feel weird when people call me Mr. [Last Name]. I got so used to being called by my rank and last name for 2 decades. Mister just sounds wrong.

I served in the US Air Force. Everyone was “Sir” or “Ma’am” and it was very gender-specific. Even for the few years we allowed transgender folks to serve (before Trump banned them), you referred to them by their preferred transition title.

We don’t have warrant officers in the Air Force, so I can’t speak to their title of address.

I retired about 4 years ago, but before I did, my office was using Teams, Slack, and Outlook to manage communications at work, and occasionally text messaging or social media (FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) outside of work to get information outside of business hours.

To keep things organized, we always had a singular database where we tracked all tasks and projects, as well as who they were assigned to. We used to have this on SharePoint, but with Teams expanding their toolkit, we rebuilt our SharePoint sites there. No matter where the communication came from, it was everyone’s responsibility to update the master task list with new items, but core projects were always added and tracked by upper management.

It became habit to update the status of projects at least once daily. If a project went 2 or 3 days without a new status - even a simple note stating that no work had been done that day on this particular task - then upper management would come asking questions. Yes, there was a bit of micromanagement, but it kept us task-oriented and productive. We always reviewed everything on the master task list every morning and prioritized our day based on what could be accomplished. Nothing was missed.

I personally would also make bullet lists throughout my day with simple checklist-type objectives. Anytime someone asked me to do something, it’d go on the bullet list. Any new update I needed to add to the master task list, I’d make a quick bullet reminder. A new idea pops into my head… into the bullet list so I don’t forget about it later.

I have ADHD, so keeping focused on multiple things throughout my day was difficult and I’d always forget some important details. Keeping my own simple checklist on my person let me hyperfocus on one or two projects at a time without completely losing track of all the other things I needed to deal with that day.

I got real quick at jotting down notes as information came to me, so I could track dozens of projects a day and never lose details on any of them. At the end of my work day, I could settle down and take my time writing out detailed logs in the master task list so upper management would be satisfied with the effort put into my projects that day. The more detailed my logs, the less likely they’d come to ask me questions and interrupt my workflow during the day.

If checking age on social media is all it ever does, then sure, whatever.

You’re forgetting an important detail: you submitted an official ID to prove your age. Which means your face, address, and legal name are also on record. So every time you get age-verified, you’re basically checking in with your full legal identity, leaving a breadcrumb path across the Internet of everything you do. That data can be used to track your online activities and build a database on who you are as a person, based on the things you access.

THIS is why age verification is a terrifying thing for computer access. It’s a form of government tracking that should be illegal. Cops can’t legally barge into your home anytime they want and go through your stuff. They can’t take your computer and scan it for data collection. Not without a court order.

With age verification embedded within your OS, it won’t matter if there’s a court order or not. If your computer is connected to the Internet, you’ve just publicly broadcast all your data to the world, and anyone - cops or not - can tap into that data and build a profile on you. You don’t even need to be browsing the Internet; if your OS is verifying your age, it could also be broadcasting that verification for every program you use locally on your computer. None of your data is safe; it’s all tied to your legal identity and trackable.

I live in a forested countryside in the Northern Midwest. Leaving the windows open invites in bugs and other small critters. Even with screens on the windows, insects crawl through the cracks, and I’ve definitely had several field mice chew their way through screens. I also have rabbits and possums who tend to nest up against the foundation of my house, and if a lower window is left open for prolonged periods, I sometimes find babies nesting in the window frame.

If I open my windows, it’s for a limited time to get some fresh air moving through the house. I’ll turn on strategically placed fans in various rooms to encourage rapid airflow through the house so I can close the windows sooner.

I only open windows in the winter if I need to cool a room quickly. For instance, I’m renting my first floor to a friend and I live on the second floor. But I only have one HVAC unit and thermostat for the entire house. The first floor always stays a few degrees cooler than the second floor (heat rises), so I keep it a little extra hot upstairs to ensure I’m not freezing out my friend. But I’m always hot in general, so I’ll either have fans on me all winter, or I’ll occasionally shut myself in a bedroom and open the window for 15-20 minutes, just to lower my body temp a bit and help me tolerate the hot house.

There have been a few winter nights where my wife and I have left the bedroom window open to cool down our bedroom, while burying ourselves in thick blankets. We don’t sleep well if we’re sweaty and stuck to the bed. I usually get up a few hours later and close the window, so we don’t freeze overnight.

This is why I keep a tablet next to my bed. When I want to recline in bed but watch something, I can do it on a decent-sized screen instead of squinting at my phone.

But my couch also has two “zero-G” recliners on either end of it, which basically means they recline so far, my feet are slightly elevated over my head. So I don’t really need to go to bed to lie down and watch something.

It’s more about if I’m trying to settle down for the night or not. I have wireless headphones for my TV, so I can watch shows late into the night without disturbing anyone, but if I’m gonna fall asleep myself, I’d rather be in bed already so I can just set down my tablet and sleep without any more effort.

The Gary Jules cover of Mad World, for the Donnie Darko soundtrack.

Similarly, the original song by Tears for Fears sounds really upbeat and happy, but you’d never know it was a sad song unless you paid attention to the lyrics. I love both versions!

I barely got grandfathered into a pension program with the US military. They went away in 2015. I had served over a decade at that point and they still let me retire in 2022 under that program. The new program is a sort of 401k type system, but I didn’t have enough years in service to contribute to it for retirement, so they didn’t even give me the option to switch over.

Granted, I retired after only 20 years served so my pension is not very big. But it’s money in my pocket every month for the rest of my life, so I’m not complaining. I’ll never starve or go without shelter.

This happens to me on Android, but it happens whenever I make a comment on a post. My window shrinks after I submit and stays that way until I close the app and reopen it. Here’s a before and after from about a week ago:

EDIT: It happened when I posted this comment too. Literally, every comment I post does this.

Yeah it was my Reddit app too. But when I switched over to Lemmy, there were a lot of initial issues with the app, and the dev would vanish for months before responding to complaints.

He was very reactive when he came back, addressing every issue people pinged him on. But then he’d just be gone again and any further issues were stuck until he decided to return.

I remember that being a problem I had with his Lemmy app in the beginning. I specifically remember webm files didn’t load at all, until I pinged him right before he pushed an update and he added it to his patch. But then his patch broke a few other things and nobody could reach him for another 3 months.

I still can’t remember what the final straw was for me, but I had an ongoing issue that had no resolution until the dev decided to show his face again and I decided that was it. I needed an app with a more reactive developer.

When I was living in Japan for a few years, I ended up dating a Filipino lady for a while. But she had no concept of colloquialisms; she took everything I said 100% literally. I quickly discovered that the English language is riddled with colloquialisms and we use them constantly.

One evening, she had called me maybe 6 times over the course of a couple hours. On the next call, I picked up and said, “Damn, you’re killing me!”

She immediately broke down crying. She wailed, “Why would you ever say that?! I would never want to kill you!”

It took maybe a half hour to calm her down and get her to understand that this is an English expression and not meant to be taken literally. She finally agreed that I didn’t mean it, but she told me I’m not allowed to use that expression again, because it hurts her heart to hear me accuse her of wanting to kill me.

I actually switched away from Sync. I forget why, it’s been a while, but something about that app was bothering me, so I shopped around and ended up on Voyager.

The lack of profile pictures and custom username fonts is probably the only downside to Voyager. But I love everything else about it. And it’s free; I had to pay for Sync to get rid of ads and other junk in the app.

I turned 24 in 2008. I had been serving in the US military since I turned 18, and in 2008, I was stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, my second military assignment after 3 years at Misawa Air Base in Japan. I got orders in 2008 to relocate to Osan Air Base in South Korea for a year, with a follow-on assignment to Germany.

In January the very next year, I would marry my wife and she would join the US Air Force as well, leaving for her basic training literally 5 days after our wedding. Oh, and we got married over webcam, from opposite sides of the globe. I was stationed in South Korea and she was living in Nebraska at the time, so we mailed the marriage license back and forth to pre-sign it, then we did the ceremony over Skype from our respective bedrooms. We would meet up in person later that year in Germany for my fourth military assignment (and her first).

I’m turning 42 this year and have been retired for almost 4 years now, after serving for 20 years in the military. I’m fully retired, as the military kind of beat me up physically and mentally. My wife and I both qualified for the coveted “100% Permanent and Total Disability” through the VA, so we can afford to be retired at such a young age.

I used to see you everywhere. Then I got the “Voyager for Lemmy” app. Now I rarely ever notice you.

Voyager doesn’t do custom username fonts or icons, so everyone’s username is just plaintext. You blend in with every other user in my feed, and I rarely look at usernames, so I tend to miss users that I haven’t specifically tagged myself.

I’m pretty glad to not see my name popping up in any of these comments, ha.

Same here. At one point, I tried to be known for providing a certain type of content here, to help fill out a then-quiet community. But I’m kind of glad no one really recognizes me until they see a post by me. I’m here daily, but I mostly lurk, so I don’t particularly want to wake up to hundreds of comments in my inbox every day.

And yes, I’m still trying to provide that content despite my apparent hiatus. I’m just dealing with seasonal depression (as well as all the national news drama going on in my home state 20+ minutes from my home), so it’s hard to get motivated to be creative lately.