Retired engineer, former sailor, living off grid in Puerto Rico. Volunteer for climate change mitigation efforts.
I thought Arrival was a good spin on time-travel. The information travels backward in time, but it is resolved - a consistent timeline results (as far as we witness it, at least). Good sequel could be to fast forward whatever it was . . . 3 millennia and see the intelligent cockroaches from Earth arriving to save the hecapods after the knowledge the hecapods bequeathed led the humans to promptly self-annihilate, opening the path for cockroach evolution.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=binding+knots&iax=images&ia=images there are so many wonderful choices! The simpler looking ones are usually the best. :) But they are hard to describe with text . . .
tying knots. All you need is a couple of pieces of string to get started. The right knot, well tied, is like a good friend - you can count on it. Shipyard workers sometimes make fun of how inexperienced mariners tie up their boats to a dock with “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot!?” (full disclosure, I am a sailor).
someone else mentioned sign language - that is also extremely useful sometimes! My wife and I learned it when we learned to SCUBA. We do not have any deaf friends, but sometimes you meet a person who is reliant on sign, and if you can at least spell out some words, ‘they are so grateful’.
The guy living across the hall from me at Georgia Tech in about '80 had bought an Apple II with a 50hz power supply. He was an electrical engineer and rigged up a new power supply for US grid. All he had was the motherboard and a keyboard, the screen was an old TV. The memory was a regular audio cassette player. He had a game called “Orbital Mechanic” and we played with it quite a bit. It turns out that the paths of objects thrown from one orbit to another are not so intuitive - so it was a real challenge to toss a wrench from Astronaut A in orbit 1, to Astronaut B in orbit 2. That game used WASD for aiming the throw, and when I later began playing PC games, I wondered if that old game might have been the originator of the concept or if it goes even further back.
The demise of reddit marks my third foray into the fediverse - first after Google+ shut down and Mastodon was a squalling infant. I made accounts in numerous fediverse instances to try them out, and most withered from disuse. Then Musk began the death of Twitter and I moved solidly into fediverse and our distant cousin, Diaspora. I did not think of reddit as social, but as a news source - my bad. But now that it is effectively gone, I am all in with the fediverse. I again have multiple accounts, and they work remarkably differently for being so connected. Like if someone comments on Lemmy in direct reply, and I commented from Mastodon, I get the notification on Lemmy AND Mastodon (because the first @ is the same on both accounts I suppose). Anyway, hard to say how the platforms will evolve, but I love having a front row seat for these things and participating.
I created magazines, not to stake out space, but to make a “bus stop” for fellow explorers. I have no long-term desire to own a piece of the fediverse. When a more robust space arises for a group’s topical interests, we’ll subscribe there too, and let the weeds take the old bus stop where we first gathered.
I’ve been slowly going back through my content and editing it all by mostly-deleting and inserting exerpts from a Rammstein sex scandal in today’s WaPo - it makes the comment threads become quite humorous sometimes!
a thing with the nsfw filter in the fediverse generally: there is a school of thought that people should treat “content warning” somewhat like an email subject line - basically marking everything nsfw if there is any chance that anyone might find it offensive. Not subscribing to that point of view myself, I tend to block anyone I encounter who adopts that practice because it is so annoying - but I can also understand that some people of very delicate sensibilities might appreciate being able to protect themselves from things that are not well-behaved kittens. TLDR, this is why a lot of people don’t turn on their nsfw filter - because in many places 90% of the so-called nsfw content is actually sfw, but evokes food, alcohol, politics, violence (yet of the sfw sort), or controversy.
This has been my approach - to observe that a topic is missing and put up a “lightning rod” - if no lightning strikes, the magazine can wither, but if others are looking, they have a place to accumulate.
I (tediously) deleted my posts and comments - wow that was a book! I am not deleting my account however - there is no useful data in the account existence, imho.
But speaking of trust, and such meta-issues. I wonder where I will INVEST such effort again. Kbin and Lemmy and fediverse in general have a lot of potential, but it is VERY DIFFICULT to assess engagement. I know they want people to not chase “likes”, but on the other hand, a person wants to put their effort in a place where it seems to provide the most social value. Reddit upvotes gave that in some degree - though a brilliant reply that was misplaced could still be downvoted. I don’t see how the fediverse can prosper and be a repository of accumulated wisdom, if there is no way for the community to call out wisdom when they encounter it.
I was putting some old donated computers into a school in the Dominican Republic and they had old Windows versions and I could not update without spending some cash. So I installed Ubuntu Linux on them. It was GREAT! So pretty soon I upgraded my own PC and now I have been using Linux for a decade. The range of games is reduced - some Windows games just won’t work. But I am not a “coder” and not really a hardcore gamer either - I do some engineering and some technical writing, surf internet, and watch videos. I have no idea why anyone still uses Windows except for the fact that it came on their PC when they bought it (and it cost them $200 for the privilege!).
I am finding that is kind of broken. I mean, if I follow a Lemmy community “News” I can see all the posts in my Mastodon home feed, but I also see all the inane comments and boosts (out of context), so it is actually a terrible thing to add to my home feed. I can see all the magazines to which I am subscribed in kbin, but I cannot see a feed of the latest content in just those magazines - so that is also not a very attractive (to me) way to see the kbin content. I am not going back to reddit, so I feel much like a man without a country at this point.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - it works perfectly all the time now. I have no idea at this point why anyone would continue to use Windows, tbh. A couple of years ago, audio management and networking were still a little bit fiddly, but I have not typed SUDO in almost two years now. I game with Steam, and Proton works with pretty many titles, but not all; I guess I am not that heavy a gamer - having a hard time getting past Kerbal Space Program 1.0 with its endless variety of fanbase mods and CKAN for mixing and matching them.