I’ve been playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors on original hardware today haha. On my old Apple color monitor.

I mostly game on old systems or my steam deck.

It’s funny. The most innocent pranks ever on YouTube happen at GameStop.

LEAVE OR I CALL LAW!

Every time!

That was amazing. Haha.

The power will go to his head when people start trying to assassinate him. He will go crazy looking for plotters and purge a bunch of people, establish secret police to look for them, and it will end as badly as every well intentioned moment in human history.

This is human nature and we can’t stop it. People will try to kill him and his family and he will lose his mind because of it.

Sorry to be a Debby downer.

Just took my 3 year old to the hospital because I thought she had a concussion after climbing her sister’s walker and slipping backwards and hitting her head.

Turns out the vomiting was from a stomach virus thank god. Just bad timing.

I’m so tired.

My god I feel you.

This right here.

I feel like my people have been left to starve.

There really is a lot to it and it’s really depressing. It seems like every little thing that stimulates the economy just goes to a new RV for the business class too. Like the Hatfield McCoy Trail. Local businesses are doing better than ever and the owners are living it up, but the people working them are making 8.75 an hour.

Sucks.

The neighborhood I grew up in was beautiful. In less than 15 years half of the houses are collapsing including my childhood home.

This is almost identical to what I said to my kid. I explained that it would be a process for both of us and he would need to be as patient with me as I was with him.

My kid has not spoken to me in 4 years. Two slip ups (said she or her twice accidentally) and me saying I was just going to avoid pronouns until it sunk in. Nope. “Fuck you dad. You’ll never see me again.”

His mother messed him all up though. We were very young when she got pregnant (I was 15) and naturally we didn’t make it as a couple.

He was allowed to eat family packs of Reece’s multiple times a day until he was so overweight it was ungodly. I was the bad guy for trying to do anything about it. He had to have a meal separate from everyone his entire life. If the family was having baked chicken and vegetables, my son was having ramen noodles or chicken nuggets. The body issues started there. When I refused and said, “Eat with the rest of us and eat healthy or I can’t help you. I can’t in good conscience feed you pop tarts and ramen for dinner.” Mom used this to paint me as some kind of monster who was starving my kid.

When the kid got to middle school those kids ate him alive. He ended up developing an eating disorder and starving/surviving on lettuce. Mom finally decided it was time to do therapy and blamed me for it. “You just had to make a big deal about what he ate!”

My kid has been spoiled and turned into a self obsessed person who I don’t recognize and I’d cut a foot off to just have my kid back. He’s an adult though, and I can’t change any of it.

All I can do at this point is hope that he regrets this one day but I don’t have much hope. That kid could have a best friend and love them with everything, and then just cut it off like it was nothing over some small thing and never speak to that person again, so my hope is very small.

Sorry to spill all that here. This just made me spin when I read it.

All I can do to show my love is keep paying for the services. (Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc.) And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s laughing at me for it, but I’m happy to be doing something, anything. As silly and small as it is, it’s all I have left.

Y’all take care and if a trans kid reads this and can relate to this story, please don’t skip on your family because things aren’t going the speed you like. My kid stopped talking to everyone in my family overnight and never had a conversation with anyone but me. I get that it can be hard and I’m certain there are people who you will have to leave behind, but don’t cut your lifeline/support network and burn bridges unnecessarily. You could end up regretting it and causing yourself and everyone else a lot of unnecessary pain.

This is a great idea. But only used stuff from the community with cash.

That helps the community and your kids will get an awesome Christmas.

My wife is a hard one to budge, but I’m gonna talk to her about it.

As a West Virginian, this rips my heart out.

They’ve done a damn good job making the right the “Christian” side.

People take their damn religion seriously (usually the leaders, not the text), and when you’re told every single day in an ultra religious community that being accepting of and protecting other religions is the same as a deal with the devil, it is easy to make you serve any master using your indoctrination against you. Every advance for the gays was an advance for Satan too and further solidified the demonization of the left to these people. Not long after 1921, deeply religious rural communities were introduced to an explosion of evangelical leaders and tent revivals whose preachers were all influenced by right wing Christian radio and that shit spread like wildfire. Any social advance was an advance for communism and therefore the devil.

I love my people, and you won’t find a more giving and loving people, but my god are they indoctrinated.

When driving through West “by God” Virginia, you will encounter 15 churches for every dollar general. No shit.

Around 2016 I went to several churches with my uncle, and all but one of them was politicking in the pulpit. ONLY ONE focused on the love of Christ and spiritual growth.

According the people who went to his little church, he just wasn’t “fired up” enough. To me he was the only worthwhile leader there.

I don’t know. I tell people all the time around home that their ancestors fought and died for their rights as workers. They’d all willingly walk into fire before forsaking the religious leaders in the community though.

Another big part of it is that their only source of income is coal. The left wants to end coal use. In all honesty it has starved and destroyed the place because it is so engrained in the culture that no one bothered to look for alternatives. It could have been manufacturing, and West Virginia would gladly accept lower wages than the rest of the US for such work, but it ain’t China cheap. So we’re doomed here. Everyone believes that the only hope is coal because it’s the only place to make a living.

My brother was making 30 bucks and hour when minimum wage was 5.15 (what the rest of us were making with no hope of anything better).

I don’t know. I get worked up thinking about all of this. Especially right now with my hometown under water likely due to climate change. The current flooding is the worst on record, but you can’t convince folks even while they’re drowning.

Yes.

I live in the Bible Belt. Catholics might as well be satanist to 99% of the people here.

My neighbor is the only catholic in the neighborhood and that’s how the neighbors talk about her.

She moved here from New York for some reason.

I can’t speak for other people, but if lemmy.world were to shut down today I’d just pick another server.

I will admit, it was confusing and almost turned me off at first. I was very upset about the whole deal with third party apps on Reddit. My daughter gave me the whole email analogy and it cleared my hesitation to join Lemmy.

I don’t know how it is today, but I had to apply to join world when I first got on. It would be awesome if an app would sign a person up for, say, three different servers and sync settings between them. Something goes down, wouldn’t even notice.

Assholes ruin everything though and making it easier for bot accounts to exist would end badly.

I don’t know.

When I first got on here it was a mess. It didn’t work half the time and when it did no content was being generated. I stuck it out though and I’m glad I did.

I’m definitely not the right person to come up with any solutions.

Man. You just gave me an idea (which would matter if I wasn’t a complete idiot).

Instead of servers that all attempt to be a sort of clone of Reddit, servers could focus on content similar to the way subreddits work.

So you’d join any one of these servers and federate with other servers just like now, only content would be focused between servers.

Example:

This server is a games server. It has /c/games, /c/fallout, /c/vintagegaming, etc.

This server will focus on news and politics. It has /c/worldnews, /c/marketnews, etc.

Sure, it would still have the issue of being fractured, but it would narrow it down so much that it would be more appealing and easier to navigate.

It’s probably too late for that.

Ultimately, I’m happy with the fediverse. Algorithms aren’t dictating what I see. There’s no profit incentive that will lead to bad decisions, so when bad decisions are made, folks will talk about it and come to a solution.

I miss old Reddit, but it’s gone.

Well, they did.

As a matter of fact they gave my parents multiple loans until it exceeded the value of the house so badly that we couldn’t keep up with it.

They did this so many times for so many people in my neighborhood that the place is now nearly rubble because of it. Oh, and that kind of irresponsible lending led to the 2008 collapse.

Most of the US doesn’t care what the pope has to say.

What REALLY pisses me off is that feeling that I’m being fucked. My ass has been pulled around to the front like a fucking contortionist and they fucked it right in my face.

Every email with the “stop fascism” this, and “stop fascism” that with the goddamn donate button like they’re actually doing anything to stop it OR that they actually believe it in the first place. You know what? They don’t. It’s politics as usual for these people.

Trump skipped Joe Biden’s inauguration.

These assholes are always pretending to be the good guys, he gave them a free pass to skip his inauguration when he went on and on about the election being stolen. Or, I don’t know, when he had them all running for their lives on January 6.

Seeing all of the former presidents sitting there at his inauguration (including Bush, who by the way has said out loud that the man is a threat to democracy) legitimized his position and everything looked like no big deal to all of the people who aren’t paying attention.

It lends legitimacy to the claim that people are experiencing some derangement syndrome when everybody comes to the big party and it appears to be business as usual.

And you know what? It mostly is. At least to them.

These are a rare breed of people who are nasty enough to seek power in the first place. They get it by being two faced. They get it by exaggerating their feelings. They get it by calling a fellow human being whatever nasty name they can think of and then turn right around and shake his hand with their fake smiles and their suits that cost more than my car.

I. Am. Done.

I’m done responding to them with donations. I’m done being bombarded with cries of threats that they don’t take seriously except to say what they need to say to raise funds.

I’m staying out of it. I’ll vote for the lesser of two narcissists/egos when it’s time to do that.

As others have said. It’s time for a progressive party.

This isn’t the time of magazines and newspapers telling folks who to vote for. If the internet can’t make a viable third party stand a chance I don’t know what can.

I’m rocking five of them at least so, I hope you get here.

My dad’s construction job was working for my mom’s brother for next to minimum wage. Not that it matters.

In 1990 my mom stayed home and raised us. My dad worked a measly construction job and we lived in a two story, 5 bedroom house (which they lost after the 2008 collapse, I took it over and lost in 2012).

My mom was also able to borrow against that house over and over again for cars.

Around 1996 my dad got his CDLs and drove a coal truck.

We bought that house for 30k.

My aunt bought a huge colonial house with 8 bedrooms for roughly 60k in 1979-80. She never worked. Her husband was a coal miner.

When it burned down in 1996, she bought a beautiful brick home in a wonderful neighborhood for 100k. She sold that same house recently for 600k.

The difference is absurd.