You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.

Because they mostly all have terrible personalities and would find each other totally unbearable just like the rest of us do.

They also generally don’t really want to date any sort of actual human that exists in the real world. They want to date a perfect parody of the opposite sex, incels are looking for someone who looks like Barbie (or whatever their idea of a perfect body type is, some go for a the petite almost childlike look after all) who wakes up looking like she just left the salon, who is totally subservient to all of his wants and needs, never speaks up unless it’s to stroke his ego, a perfect cook and maid, an oversexed freak in the sheets, who will bear however many children his twisted ego wants to inflict on the world but never gain a pound or show any stretch marks, wrinkles, or grey hair

In short they don’t want to date a real person, they want a real doll who does their laundry and squeezes out children.

And they’re convinced that these mythical creatures exist out in the real world but that someone is conspiring to keep them from them, because obviously they’re the perfect example of masculinity and why wouldn’t these perfect females be flocking to them otherwise?

And I’m not certain exactly what sort of fictitious Superman feels are after, but the same overall sentiment applies.

Or else they’re just deeply in the closet.

Definitely, normally my skin is pretty resilient, never really been someone who needs to spend money on moisturizers and such, I could probably just about wash my hands with acetone and steel wool and be none the worse for it.

But there were a few times when I worked there that my hands were getting noticeably dryer than usual, pretty sure if my skin were any more delicate I would have been in pretty rough shape.

We definitely called them cardboard cuts, can’t say how universal it is but every job I’ve where I’ve handled a lot of boxes it seems to be in pretty common use

Cardboard cuts are absolutely a thing, like a paper cut on steroids.

I used to work in a warehouse and spent most of my day opening, resealing, making, and breaking down boxes. Spend enough time around them and the boxes will get you.

I was hoping a hebrew-speaker would chime in to confirm that I at least wasn’t too far off-base with that part. Talking about languages I don’t know is always a little uneasy for me because every language has its own weird quirks and something is always lost in translation.

I’m not sure why, but a lot of people seem to have a really hard time looking up information about stuff from the Bible. I remember probably about a year ago not too long after I first joined Lemmy commenting on a thread from some guy whose sister fell into some fundamentalist Christian flat earther bullshit and he was trying to figure out where she got her info from and said that he couldn’t find anything about “the firmament”

It’s on like the first page of the Bible. And just googling “firmament” will get you plenty of good sources about the firmament and what it’s supposed to be.

I’m not too sure where I first picked up the idea, for some reason I think it may have been one of the videos on the Useful Charts YouTube channel, but in general it all kind of fits together to me, and I of course kind of put my own little bit of spin into it myself. Unfortunately I don’t have exact sources to cite directly to where I first heard this theory put together.

For starters you can go to the Bible itself with Mathew 27:16-17

16 At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Jesus Barabbas. 17 So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”

I misspoke in my earlier comment, and I edited it accordingly, the language would have been Aramaic, which is what most scholars agree is the language Jesus mostly spoke, although it is a pretty closely related language to Hebrew. I speak neither Hebrew nor Aramaic so I kind of just have to take it on faith that some of the people I’ve seen discussing this online have some idea what they’re talking about. You can kind of piece it together from some common bits of Hebrew “bar mitzvah” literally translates to something like “son of the commandments” and I believe in modern Hebrew, the word for father in “av” with “aba” being commonly used in some places/cultures.

There’s also some that would say it comes from “bar rabban” (may be misspelling that) meaning “son of the teacher” instead of father, which you can compare to “Rabbi”

This comes from an era when people didn’t really have official last names, depending on who you asked, Jesus could have been known by quite a few different names, Jesus the carpenter, Jesus son of Joseph/mary, the son of God, the teacher, the guy from Nazareth, the religious weirdo, the insurrectionist, of the house of David, etc.

I believe in modern Hebrew “ben” is more often used as the “son of” prefix. And those sort of patronymic names are pretty common in semitic languages, in Arabic you’ve probably heard a few people with “bin” in their name. It’s basically the same idea as Irish/Scottish names that begin with mc/Mac/O’, or names that end in “son”

As for Barabbas having been involved in an insurrection, going back to the bible we have Mark 15:7

A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising.

Israel experienced more than a few different Jewish uprisings/revolts/riots/insurrections/whatever name you wanted to call it. They weren’t exactly happy to be under Roman rule, and there were always a bunch of different political or religious movements trying to do something about it and usually not having much success. It’s not unlikely that Jesus is sort of a composite of several different folks making trouble for the Romans.

I’m no scholar, my knowledge on this doesn’t really go a whole lot deeper than what I’ve said here, and I can’t say how widespread this particular little conspiracy theory is in academic circles, I won’t say that I’m totally sold on it myself, I’m very open to someone else saying differently, but it’s something to consider, and it looks like a hell of a coincidence to just be a coincidence to me

One of the interesting things that sticks out to me personally that lends credence to the idea that the Bible is just kind of a bunch of half-remembered stories all mashed together is Barabbas- the guy that Pontius Pilate supposedly pardoned instead of Jesus.

In some versions, Barabbas is given the first name “Jesus”

And “Barabbas” could potentially come from “bar abba” in Hebrew Aramaic (although Hebrew “ben av” or “ben aba” is not far off) meaning “son of the father”

He was imprisoned and sentenced to execution due to taking part in an insurrection against the Roman empire.

The two characters- “Jesus, son of the father, and sentenced to death for sedition” and “Jesus, son of God, sentenced to die for claiming to be king of the Jews” sound a hell of a lot like they’re referring to the same dude to me.

That’s either one of the biggest coincidences in all of history, or someone heard two different versions of the same story and mashed them together.

Or maybe it’s just sort of a 1st century version of the saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.”

There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them

It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s

Even if the movie weren’t made, there’d probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.

It probably wouldn’t be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you’d probably still have a pretty good chance of people who’d at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.

It’s hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play “my heart will go on” on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven’t seen it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world that people don’t know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.

Litter is usually reserved for animals that typically have more than one child at a time, it’s normal for a dog, cat, mouse, etc. to have multiple babies at once, whereas with animals like humans, pandas, etc. it’s a somewhat unusual occurrence so we call it something different

I think there’s a little more to it than that.

Yes, there’s the fact that American culture is very dominant in pop culture and we’ve exported our culture around the world. As the Rammstein song goes, “We’re all living in America”

But there’s also the fact that we’re a melting pot and we’ve happily appropriated bits and pieces of culture from everywhere else and integrated them into our own, and the lines get murky about where those other cultures end our our own begins.

And there’s not really one American culture, we’re rugged cowboys, and we’re Hollywood movie stars, we’re fat assholes and we’re health conscious hippies, we live in modern cities, suburban sprawl, rural farmland, mountains, forests, frozen hellscapes, wide open plains, deserts, we’re gun nuts, and we’re pacifist vegans, jocks and nerds, some of the richest people on earth, and homeless on the streets and everything in between, and every part of the country does things just a little differently, so it can be hard to pick out things that are truly emblematic of Americans as a whole.

I assume when you say “American culture” you are referring to the “United States of America culture” not one of the other countries in the Americas.

This has to be one of my least favorite bits of pedantry out there.

Everyone is aware that there are other countries in the Americas, the US is the only one that is commonly called America and the people who live there “Americans,” and in fact none of the others have the word “America” in their name.

The only time I see people trying to refer to anything besides the US as America/American, is when someone feels compelled to bring up this point. In actual usage, people will refer to the things as being North and/or South American, or “From the Americas,” or in certain contexts, they may use “New World.” Otherwise, they’ll refer to specific countries or regions, like “The United States and Canada,” “Central America,” “Latin America,” “The Amazon Basin,” “The Pacific Northwest,” etc.

Because frankly, there aren’t too many contexts in everyday usage where it’s useful to lump both contintents together as a whole, the two continents have a pretty diverse cross section of different cultures, languages, economies, climates, geography, seasons. One of the only things you can really say about them as a whole is they’re not physically close to most of the “old world” (Europe, Asia, & Africa) and even that’s technically a little iffy because part of Russia is pretty damn close to Alaska.

Because really, what sort of useful comparisons are there to make between, say, Newfoundland, Kansas, and Peru besides to say “Yeah, those places sure are all different from each other?” What do you gain by trying to lump them together?

You know years ago I heard a recruitment ad for the CIA on the radio, and that caught me a little off guard, I always kind of assumed the CIA personally reached out to specific candidates and hired through shady back channels and such and didn’t really do open recruitment.

I guess it makes sense though, for every James Bond type super spy there’s probably a hundred different random office staff, IT guys, clerks, mailroom guys, secretaries, janitors, accountants, etc. who handle boring day-to-day operational stuff and rarely or never get to see any of the crazy spy craft stuff happening.

And I guess once you land one of those jobs, maybe you can get your foot in the door for eventual promotion to International Man of Mystery.

Your comment was true, but not exactly relevant since we were talking about airtag-like devices that don’t have connectivity besides Bluetooth, saying that a device like them exists that has GPS built-in is kind of moot since they don’t have any additional ways to send that location info.

The thing you linked would fall under the walkie-talkie-like device I described.

Depending on where you are and where you hike, you may have a very different idea of what a large forest looks like than some people. Unless you’ve really traveled to go camping and hiking, or just happen to live in a very heavily forested area, what you think of as a large forest patch and what others think of may be in entirely different leagues. And just being in the woods is only part of the issue, geography has a bigger effect than all of the trees.

I’m from the Philly area, we have a pretty big wooded park, something like 2000 acres, that is entirely within the city. It’s also in a valley, so when you’re in the park there’s usually steep hills or even cliffs all around you. Cell service gets spotty in a lot of the park, even though there is probably no place in the park where you’re more than about a mile or so from major roads and cell towers and all the other stuff you expect to find in a major city, the signal just can’t get through all the dirt and rock surrounding you.

It gets even worse when you get up into the mountains, driving along a winding mountain road you can see your signal going bonkers bouncing between full bars and no bars based on what mountain is in the way of a tower at any given moment. And towers and everything else are just more spread out in general, one area I go pretty regularly to you’re often driving a good half hour or so between anything you’d really recognize as being a town, without much but woods and mountains in-between.

By contrast, I’ve also done some hiking in the NJ pine barrens, some of the sections I’ve been to absolutely dwarf that park in Philly I mentioned, and are generally more remote, but they’re mostly pretty flat, trees aren’t great for cell signals but they’re a hell of a lot better than mountains, so I can usually get pretty deep into the woods before my signal starts failing me.

I’ve also been to Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, which dwarfs pretty much any other forest I’ve personally ever been to, just an absolutely massive tract of natural area, and relatively flat at that, but it’s just so big and remote that there is really no cell service to speak of.

GPS is one-way though, your device isn’t sending anything up to the satellites, it’s just looking for where they are.

You still need a way to get a signal from the collar to your phone or computer or whatever device you’re using to track it. Things like airtags and tiles use Bluetooth to talk to nearby phones that relay it onto the Internet. If no one is close enough with a phone they’re basically useless, and if the cell service is spotty, the location can’t be updated until the phone has a signal, and depending on the area, that could be a while which means your dog could be miles from where they were when a phone last picked up the signal from their collar.

If the collar itself is hooked up to the cell network, then you don’t have to rely on someone being nearby with a phone to pick up the location, but it is still reliant on having cell service, which may not be a given if you’re out hiking in the mountains for example.

Other than that, you would have to use other satellite services, or rely on having a direct radio connection to the collar, sort of like a walkie talkie except carrying the GPS data instead of voice.

I don’t know the ins and outs of how they work, and I’m sure there’s some catch and they overall skeeve me out a bit, but I have seen a few companies that offer very limited free service, something like 25 mb/month. I don’t know how much data a gps tracker would use but that might be doable

I’m sure those companies do everything in their power to get you to pay more than nothing, automatically change your plan if you go over, deceptive emails, etc. so definitely something to be careful about. I also wouldn’t have a whole lot of confidence in those companies sticking around for very long.

And while not free, there are some pretty affordable prepaid plans and such that may be competitive or slightly cheaper than what a regular subscription might cost.

Depending on where you live, it may be possible to forego the call plan entirely, in a dense urban area with lots of open public WiFi networks, you may be able to work it entirely off of WiFi.

If you wanted to get real weird with it and jump through the loopholes to get licensed, there might also be some options using ham radio stuff like APRS, though that’s probably going to leave your dogs location exposed to any ham who happens to be playing with their radios in your area.

Now I’m not saying that any of that is necessarily a good idea or worth the hassle of setting any of that up, I’m just spitballing some ideas for what someone could potentially do if they did want to homebrew such a thing.