Used to be reddit. I’m here now because I can’t be on reddit anymore, but this place (maybe thankfully) just isn’t the abyss to suck me into, so now, my online time is mostly on discord

I’m not counting videogames. Though I do play some online stuff, I don’t consider it the same as something like browsing a website. It’s a different activity. If you do count it, then yeah, it’s games. My computer time is largely games

How long did you wait until getting a new account? After my ban, I was getting my new accounts autobanned within minutes

I did a test just a few days ago, and just scrolled to see how much of my feed was from people I followed, and how much of it was stuff I didn’t. 36 posts in a row of stuff I don’t, followed by 10 posts of people I follow, followed by another 27 targeted stuff, and then 1 post from a friend, and then another 35

It’s ridiculous, and this digital landscape is dystopic; It’s cyberpunk. I can’t believe, for example, that I can enter something in a search bar on youtube, and get results that are explicitly not my search results

I have, but only because my reddit ban left me with a void–a void I should fill with something more productive, tbh, but it’s still not taking nearly as much of my time. I’ve always used it, never left, but at this point just use it for some private chats I have with people. Since reddit, I’ve scrolled a bit and been slightly more active

I’m only here because of an unjust reddit ban, and I’m very sad to say that I still would prefer reddit to this. The shear scale of reddit means there was always something interesting me through the far more varied and active communities available there. Lemmy is great and all, but I feel way less engaged with anything going on

I was active, and even a recognized name on some subs where I was particularly active, but here, those same communities are either woefully underpopulated and inactive, or just straight up don’t exist. When I need to ask questions or get a wide variety of opinions, or even share a story, I knew reddit had enough activity for me to get at least some traffic. Here, I haven’t even made a post

Sorry, Lemmy, but we’re only together because reddit left. You’re my rebound

This is not how I expected to get a degree in arachnology

People hate what they fear and fear what they don’t understand. The path, then, to fight against hate is specifically understanding

I learned this by watching The Crocodile Hunter as a child. I remember very vaguely a point Steve Irwin made about how people are terrified and act to harm animals they know nothing about. Either he went on to further say, or I extrapolated it myself, that knowing how an animal will act informs YOU on how to approach the situation; No need for fear or hate if you understand the reality of the situation. I then further extrapolated this race relations. It’s a little general, but a white person may be racist against a black person because they think they’re dangerous, just as someone might see a snake they know nothing about and think it dangerous

The twist is that his original owners didn’t know jack shit about basketball, but were really into a specific strain of beef

You’re outta your mind if you think the spider girl is the one calling someone else a master

Look at my user name and take a guess

It’s funny because my phone battery is fucked because my ADHD doesn’t let me remember to put it to charge

Floridian here confirming that 0%

Art, beauty, and pleasure, and the desire to see more of that in earnest in a world that seeks to convert anything and everything into profit; The beauty and humbling significance of nature in its indifferent power, and the grand scope of the endless nothingness that stretches beyond what our eyes will ever hope to see; People, real and true, speaking against cruelty and injustice, seeking to better spread love instead of otherness, to show a less conditional love than that of any state or religion

Have you seen the world? Shit’s irrational as fuck. I’ll argue here that rationality has an aspect of subjectiveness to it; It is based on your ability to understand and perceive things. There is a very very small number of things you don’t know, and a practically infinite ocean of things you will never even know to not know. Even things that behave rationally may behave irrationally under some variables you will never even fathom, and so, to you, that would just be irrational

You wanna see something rational? Read fiction. Truth is always stranger than fiction. It was Mark Twain who added that “fiction has to make sense.”

I’m pretty sure the US IS considered meritocratic. There are just countless other factors that also impact your ability to succeed

That’s too vague a definition. Like, if person A is an accomplished athlete, the best basketball player ever, I do not think his position of power or success should be, say, president. I think this is actually a very dangerous mindset derived from the capitalistic notion that success determines your–I’ll call it value. If you’re successful, you must be smart; If you’re smart, you can be anything, even the president. Success is equal to wealth in these talking circles, and it sort of ends up as a backwards meritocracy. You gain merit measured by your success (wealth) instead of the other way around

But if you define it as a place in which positions of authority are given to people who have proven themselves knowledgeable and capable in the field in which the position of authority is being granted, I do believe in it in principle. I say that because principle and practice are rarely the same in politics and sociology. There are countless other factors that will impact your “success” that are not actually based on your expertise in the field. Better people have designed public transport, electric cars, social media, and spaceships than Elon Musk, yet the man sits in a position of tremendous influence. In a just meritocracy, we would never have heard his name

Which brings about the point that we have certain ideas as a culture (or maybe system) that awards some merits disproportionately more than others. Some will say his merit is in being a ruthless business man. He’s good at that, I guess, so he should be the leader of the company. His “merit” of being a bad human being is being disproportionately rewarded compared to the merit of the scientists that actually design his spaceships, and the engineers that make them work. Meritocracy only really works in a closed system. The most capable archaeologist will be the head of the expedition. If you let the ideas go beyond that, and start comparing apples to oranges, you start seeing instead a system’s idea of what’s important, and by extension that of the society built in that system

Or Florida

there also tends to be an expectation that men (even those of us that are submissive) be dominant to some degree

This is an important point to make, for sure. Things like this will be greatly impacted by things such as cultural norms and expectations, so any statement that says “There are more D men than D women” needs to come with the caveat that there are likely biases in these observations, and that culture and upbringing have an impact, either deciding the ratio, or skewing it

I do tend to default thinking of men as Dominant, and that is in no small part due to culture, but I’ll add that this assumption is specifically outside of the kink community. In BDSM spaces specifically, I expect most men to be subs, but my own experiences could also be because I attract the guys who are looking for their “goth mommy dommy” 😅

I like submissive men, and generally am downright turned-off by dominant men. Am I the norm? Probably not. I think there are more subs than Doms just in general, but especially among women

But I’m just answering your question as presented. Another has already commented some decent love advice if you’re asking about this stuff as pertaining to you

I will add, though, that while strictly in a D/s dynamic, women are subs more often than Dommes, in any dynamic that strays from BDSM, the submissive tendencies are just sort of a spice when they come up, and that, if you’re using the word submissive to describe a man who isn’t conventionally masculine (Or maybe toxic masculine), you’re probably better off. We wanna feel safe with who we’re with, and outside of BDSM, you’ll probably have better luck as a gentle, emotionally intelligent, confident person. Some people might describe that as submissive

How do I cope? Poorly