OpenStars @ OpenStars @discuss.online

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2 yr. ago

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But to young people, "Boomer" means "old person". Millennials are Boomers, even GenZs are Boomers, everyone's a Boomer now! (in the world where words don't mean what they mean but rather how it makes someone "feel", which ofc is subjective)

Careful - you are going to be liking Perl before you know it:-).

Half an hour ⁉️ You... might be over-doing it. The goal is to put it away neatly, not open up a hole in the spacetime continuum.

Nauwreigh does objectively sound awesome though 😎

Possibly either a respect for Halloween held by all those murderers, or officials covering up the actual date when things happened, the former seeming more likely.

Hrm... so Halloween is wholesome? :-P

Are you sure? Did you try counting the number of pieces of candy? I bet you got at least 6 to 7 pieces somewhere in there...

I don't get what "1234713" means?

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.

e.g. I think this comic is wonderful & gorgeous:-)

every I see a mainsteam media portrayal of a “foreigner” in America, its never a White or Black person

That has not been my experience, I think you may have confirmation bias, but it depends so strongly on the particulars, and I'm only making this narrow point here. Like Marvel movies, to name a specific set of examples, has white+black+Asian-looking people from Europe, white from Scandinavia and Russia, black from Africa and India, and so on. Even much older movies like Coming to America with Eddie Murphy featured several black men and women ostensibly from Africa - so saying "never" is far too strong there. Though as for how "common" it is... that I don't know, and maybe you are only looking at a particular genre, and only at movies from the last year or five or some such, and perhaps it is true in that more limited sense.

On the other hand, we see Asian-Indian people like Aziz Ansari and Hispanic people like Gabriel Iglesias speaking English, and white people such as Arnold Schwarzenegger who infamously arrived here from another country (Austria in his case), and black people similarly such as Idris Elba and Sidney Poitier. Though definitely Asian (and Indian) representation has lagged behind non-white, since the days of Leave It To Beaver started off television. And comedians are one thing while movies are another - Hispanic people who speak English are definitely underrepresented (but still not "never", like The Mandalorian). George Takei (Sulu) famously appeared alongside Nichelle Nichols (Uhurha) and Walter Koenig (Checkov) in the original Star Trek series from the 60s - but nowadays the most Asian-American actor might be Steven Yeun (e.g. The Walking Dead) or John Cho.

So you definitely have a point, I just wanted to nit-pick some of the particulars in how you said it: "never" is a very strong word. Also, does Hollywood really "engrain" these ideas onto the population, or merely reflect the pre-existing biases back at us? Yes! As in, it does both, creating a feed-forward cycle that would require effort to overcome.

More to the point, why "assume" one way or the other - why not just ask, if in doubt? But of course that would be a question for them doing it, not you:-).

It might very well be the case that you are literally the first Asian-looking person that they have ever met, who speaks English natively. So merely by being present, you are helping break down cultural barriers and helping them realize that the world is larger than they had assumed:-).

Media, by increasing Asian representation, has also helped broaden people's experiences beyond what they see in their small hometowns. So if you had these experiences as a child, and at least one or perhaps multiple decades have passed since then, it might be far less common today to do that. Especially for younger people who have watched such media (TV, movies, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, etc.), and therefore realize that people can come from more diverse backgrounds than literally all of the people that they see around their small area - in their churches, grocery stores, and so on.

But Hispanic/Latino/Asian are usually presumed “foreign”.

That is not universally true, though yeah is true in some areas. I think whether it is "usually" true or not depends whether you are measuring by geographic size of the land area or by population density. Inside the major cities where most people are, people tend not to presume anything until they hear someone speak, and then go by the sound rather than the look.

Pants-less but wearing a hat while doing chores outside? You brave soul, I love it: be your free self! :-P

I took a quick look and it seems that SDF is not defederated from virtually ANYTHING at all (just one instance that as it was dying got taken over by spam) - not even the known CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) ones, nor the most controversial triad across the entire Threadiverse: lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and the one that the main Lemmy software developers also run, lemmy.ml.

One time I said something in hexbear.net along the lines that Biden, who was then President, at least lowered gas prices, so at least there was that - and my inbox just BLEW UP with replies streaming in for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. Then I did something similar at lemmygrad.ml with the same result. They are purely engagement trolls, enjoying their argumentation style of... well, as you said it. They are basically 4chan.

And it is not like I am on a campaign to wipe out their very existence, but neither do I want to recommend the Threadiverse/Fediverse to people if that is the kind of experience that those people will receive - and then look weirdly at me for having recommended it to them in the first place. There are stories aplenty on r/RedditAlternatives saying exactly as you: they came, they got disgusted with what they saw, and they immediately noped out, heading right back to Reddit. People here can be kind - whereas on Reddit that is extremely rare, especially in the larger subs. Traffic here is low and you can feel like you will be heard - on Reddit you are buried beneath an avalanche of thousands of comments, some of which are proven bots (repeating identical patterns of messages spaced years apart, just from different account names but they are word-for-word and it is beyond any rational thought of credulity to think that they could be otherwise - e.g. if you repeated this, my entire message here back to me, not even just this sentence or paragraph but the entire thing, then I would surmise that you had copied and pasted it, not responded organically, and would not believe you if you claimed otherwise, especially upon finding out that you literally could get paid irl money $$$ for having done so, to increase "engagement stats" and therefore advertising revenue).

I doubt you will remain long on SDF - the Lemmy software has very few features to help you deal with such trolling, although you can help reduce the clutter a little bit by blocking the instance. Unfortunately this does not "block" the "instance", instead only muting the communities on it - leaving the users there free to reply to you in other communities, triggering notifications, blowing up your inbox, and otherwise wasting your time. You will convert nobody there as they exist in their own artificial echo chamber realities, and instead you will become more like them.

I recommend checking out PieFed - the list of features that it has that Lemmy lacks is long and it is FANTASTIC! e.g. polls, flairs (both user and post), Topics/Feeds that are both user-customizeable and shareable, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., but most importantly the ability to block all users from an instance, which that one feature alone silences I am not even kidding basically 99% of all trolling negative experiences on the entire platform. See more at https://join.piefed.social/ e.g. a list of instances at https://join.piefed.social/try/. Or if you want to stay with Lemmy (but... why though?) and are in the USA then discuss.online or if in Europe then feddit.org - neither of which defederate from lemmy.ml nor allow you to personally do so unlike PieFed, but both of which at least defederate from both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.

Unless you are also a troll:-P, but the above is still sound advice imho.