The last time I turned off XP was a few months ago when I replaced it with Linux Mint on a PC I use to play old games in my room (because I wanted to play old MMOs and that required internet access, which XP would not have been safe for.)

I can relate in several ways. One day I woke up to my step mom screaming and my dad screaming at her and the sound of things being thrown around. He was super drunk, and when he came out of his room, I pulled a knife on him, but he was too out of it to notice. That or he had and just never told me. Before I got it in me to move, he started crying, hugged me, and kept repeating “I’ll get better” over and over again. After that day he started going to regular therapy. Religious therapy, not real therapy, but it never happened again, so I guess it worked either way. Nonetheless I can’t bring myself to ever step foot in his house again. I’ve talked to him over messaging before during some emergency situations where I had nobody else I could call. He seems like he’s really improved. But tbh, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully trust that he’s genuinely changed. Because of him my stomach still drops whenever I hear sudden loud noises, even if it’s just somebody dropping a screwdriver or something.

I’m in neither camp personally. I overheard my dad joke to my mom about how the best time to stop beating your kids is when they’re old enough to fight back, and so I learned to fight against it, physically. Of course he didn’t stop at first, I was small and weak, until one day soon after I cut his eye with my fingernail. That’s when he finally decided to tone it down.
And yet when that happened, I wasn’t happy. I thought I was a monster for putting him in the hospital.

I just wanna say I appreciate that you went into such detail to explain this. As somebody who’s honestly a little dumb, this has always been something I struggled to understand but could tell I was missing something. It’s nice to finally hear it in a way that makes sense to me.

As a trans woman who came out the other side… well there’s no modest way to put it- pretty damn attractive I’m told, I never understood why women just assume guys are hitting on them until I lived it.
I don’t even do it on purpose. It’s just that the vast, vast majority of the time, guys are trying to hit on me, and my brain has connected the “guy talking to me” neuron and the “guy hitting on me” neuron so tightly that it doesn’t even occur to me that they might not be unless they prove it through extended interactions, usually over years, of never showing any interest.
And yeah, I’ve definitely fallen for people largely because they simply hadn’t shown any signs of being into me. You’re right that there is an immense sense of safety in knowing they’ve never tried to get in my pants. Unfortunately, that also means, 99% of the time, that they’re gonna say no if I ask them out (I generally prefer to make the first move because it feels safer.)

For the sake of example and because it’s relevant to the thread, I asked a dude out who’d shown no interest, and it turned out he was actually attracted to me, but wasn’t interested because he’d been heavily abused in a past relationship and he wasn’t ever willing to give it another shot.

And on that subject, having life experience as both a man and a woman really does open your mind to how differently abuse is treated between men and women. I was heavily abused as a kid, both by men and women, and telling the story before I transitioned, people always desperately searched for a reason it was my fault (even though I was a kid at the time it happened) and when they couldn’t find one, spouted lines like “at least you’re stronger for it.”
As a woman, people, not having knowledge that I wasn’t always a woman, immediately recognize how horrible my abuse was, zero attempts to justify it, and hell, even direct me to support groups (albiet I’ve attended said groups before and they’re fucking useless trauma feedback circles in my experience.)

Well, that turned into a half irrelevant rant, but it’s nice to have some of that off my chest.

No I don’t.

You’d be surprised. Both “The farming of your plants kills more animals than livestock raising” and “veganism is genocide because they’ll stop breeding the animals if we stop eating them” unironocally come up almost instantly when I talk about it and I’m not even quite vegan, I just avoid animal products because of allergies to a lot of them…

They should have stopped coming out with new years after 2010.

I suppose I just had higher expectations for Lemmy tbh. When I first joined on the first instance I found, the community was so nice, supportive, and in general just an amazing place to be where it felt like anybody could have a reasonable discussion about anything. It just really, really quickly devolved into what every other social media site is.
I did find using the app Connect to block lemmy.world where I assume most of the most toxic people land purely on account of its size instantly reduced toxicity in my feed by a massive amount, but it also unfortunately blocks half the content on the site and I also don’t like that I have to block plenty of reasonable users as collateral to achieve it.

I’ve noticed this an uncomfortable amount on Lemmy. Being trans, I’ve started bringing up my pretransition experience/traumas living as a dude even if it’s not relevant whenever I talk about a women’s issue that effects me because I don’t get taken seriously otherwise.
Well, actually, lately I’ve taken up just not talking about women’s issues, and really just commenting less frequently over all, because this whole place is like a mine field of people who just wanna argue. Every time before I hit send I have to think “Is somebody gonna think this is about them and get pissed with me?” And 99% of the time the answer is yes.

Team “Not bothering to look for signs/flirting and just asking out people I like and crossing my fingers.”

lol, it is pretty bizarre I know. I just know 9 breaks into 3+3+3 because it’s a square number, and adding one of those 3s to 7 makes it 10, which is easier to add stuff to, then I just get rid of the remaining 3s by adding them to 6, then 10+6 is a very easy equation to intuitively add, because you just replace the “0” with “6” to get “16” and you’re done.

9 is 3+3+3, 7+3 is 10, 3+3 is 6, 6+10 is 16. I’m also a fucking heathen.

Huh. Most of my friends are in the older gen Z and younger millenial range and reaction GIFs are everywhere in every chat we have. I’m just about the only one who doesn’t use them, and it’s not because I find them cringy, they’re just not my style.

Gen Z here. Your interpretation seems correct to me, but I’m also on the way older end of the generation.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s super common for millenials to hate on gen Z for stupid stuff the same way boomers do, but this thread is not an example of it. It’s just a bunch of people saying “do what you want, don’t need to be cool” and playful teasing.

Also, it might just be because I’m on the older end, but I haven’t even heard of anybody from my generation cringing at any of these things. Either there’s a bigger divide between older and younger than I thought, or we’re getting accidentally lumped in with gen alpha again.

Gen Z here.
Do people really not have wallets now? There’s so much I can’t carry without a wallet, most importantly my ID. Am I expected to just put that loose in my pockets or bag?
And like, sometimes I’m forced to carry cash for one reason or another. I need a space place to put that.
I’m guessing it’s just because the majority of my generation isn’t old enough to be regularly encountering these issues. I’m 100% certain it’ll change as they age the way I was forced to.

I wasn’t intending to say we only like muscles as an indicator of lifestyle. I was saying they’re also an indicator of lifestyle, so even if we are attracted to them we may still pass because it doesn’t match the kind of personality we prefer, and personality is generally a lot more important to us than appearance (generally, but not always.)
For instance, I find muscles attractive. I like that they show somebody’s interested in staying healthy, but I don’t generally date muscular men simply because I’m not into the fit lifestyle. I much prefer a guy who’s more likely to join me playing my favorite games or watching my favorite movies, because I’m a nerd and those are the things I like, and a guy who’s a little chubbier tends to be exactly that kind of guy.

I can’t speak for every woman, but I can speak for my own experiences and report based on the things women I know have said. For me and those I’ve spoken to, we may like muscles, but the things you need to do to get those muscles often aren’t as attractive and cancel it out. Like, if you’re getting muscles by going to the gym every day, that’s only gonna attract women who are enthusiastic about the gym. If you get them from farm work, you’ll attract women enthusiastic about farm life.
That’s why a lot of us like dad bods so much. It’s not that it’s inherently more attractive, it’s that it’s a body type achievable by living the kind of life style people who’re into that enjoy.
In other words, yes, muscles can be attractive, but not nearly as attractive as shared hobbies and interests, and it just happens quite often muscles can be a quick indicator that you probably don’t share many.

Yeah, and the worst is when people are talking about something I know a lot about, getting virtually every detail wrong, and I have to resist saying anything because I know my input will either be ignored, or worse, straight up unwelcome.
Luckily the blessing of being dumb as bricks is that that doesn’t happen a lot, but I sure hate when it does.

I’ve definitely heard “invasive” used to describe people quite often. It’s not usually the first word people will pick, but it’s not uncommon.
But on a related note, what’s up with Lemmy (and previously Reddit) insisting that just because they didn’t get a joke means it’s not funny/poorly written? You’re allowed to just not understand jokes sometimes. You can’t explain away why something is objectively not funny any more than you can objectively explain why a joke is funny.