• Gigan@exploding-heads.com
    1·
    11 months ago

    Aside from the things everyone else has said: Fahrenheit is better than Celsius for everyday use. Meters, kilograms, etc. metric is better. But not temperature.

  • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
    1·
    11 months ago

    Even though it’s an Internet argument, I’m still pretty much totally gung-ho on freedom of speech and defending it.

    When I was growing up (this was a long time ago, we didn’t even have dial-up Internet on our 486 for most of this) my mom and my dad weren’t really compatible people and so they fought, and eventually they got a divorce. There ended up being a big geographical distance between the two, so I’d talk to my mom on the phone constantly.

    Eventually I started to realize that when I talked to my mom about certain things, I’d end up hearing about it from my Dad later because she’d talk to him to have a chat with me.

    So I started watching what I said. First about one thing, then another, then another, and each filter I put up was like a thin plate of plexiglass, basically clear, but when you have 10 or 15 of these plates of plexiglass in front of you, you can’t see, and people can’t see you. You stop trying to communicate from within your soundproof bubble.

    The world I ended up in was terrible. You don’t talk, you don’t say anything because you’re constantly watching everything you say. And you think to yourself “I’m just the strong silent type”, but the truth is you’re just quiet and you’ve got a brick wall between you and everyone else you meet.

    It’s a lonely existence.

    It wasn’t until I grew up, finished college, and was living on my own that I realized how miserable this giant cage around me was, so I threw it off. I called up my parents and told them the things I wasn’t supposed to say, and I tried to open back up because being entirely alone all the time was a death sentence.

    So for me, even if the thing people want to put a filter up for isn’t a bad thing to filter, I don’t want people to have to pretend they’re someone they aren’t, and if I think I’m somewhere I can’t be myself, I don’t want to be there any longer than I have to be because I’ve been down that road, and it’s barren and ugly, like a road down in the industrial district.