Hello, 30-years-ago me. My sister and I had a similar age gap. We had an amazing relationship/friendship throughout our childhood and it was really hard when she left for college. The good news is that we still have an amazing relationship and she is still the best sister I could ever ask for.

It’s a funny thing that when we are young, everything feels so permanent when in reality, your life is changing incredibly quickly. When you get hit by something like this, it’s uncomfortable as fuck to see that reality. Change is hard, but it also leads to and comes along with growth… and growth is good.

I don’t say this to be dismissive of what you are going through, only to say that change happens. It is a part of life that we learn to deal with because it can’t be avoided. What is happening in your life probably hurts. It’s probably scary. The uncertainty sucks. All those feelings are valid.

She will be farther away. You will see her less. She is going to be incredibly busy at times. But she is also there for you and you two will still have each other and have time together.

Of course, I have no guarantees — your life isn’t mine. But for me, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed (it’s easy to imagine the worst). Just like it was awesome having an older sister as your friend while at home, it’s really awesome to have an older sister in college to talk to and visit get to experience bits of that life with.

Wow. I just want to say thank you for such a thoughtful, informed, detailed response. You are an amazing person!

I typed in the url and… yeah, that was A LOT of boobs and butts.

Came back here to see that I mistyped the url. Doubling the “O” results in many boobs and butts.

On this train of thought…

OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.

If the others suggested aren’t quite right for you, you might try looking for an interval timer app. These are generally used for fitness, but it seems to me that type of setup might do exactly what you want if you just set up a “workout” that has a single 30 min interval and repeats.

Or use a scale.

People use words in different ways. You will find varying definitions of propaganda. Some people will call any information produced by a government propaganda. Some people will only call that information propaganda if it appears to have a notable bias. Some will only call the info propaganda if it contains outright lies.

You seem to want to define propaganda as any information produced by a government designed to pursuance people of something. Most people are not going to be against that kind of information (or at least not strongly against it). I’m pretty sure most people that say they are against propaganda view propaganda as information that is misleading or an outright lie.

The problem here seems to be that you have taken the stance that propaganda simply means “persuasion”.

They should not do this without checking where the bed is supported on the floor. Your method only lifts the perimeter of the bed. It is very likely that the bed also rests on the floor down the center line of the bed or at other spots within the perimeter. If they only prop up the perimeter of the bed, it is liable to collapse in the center.

First, fair warning: I have little experience with repairing dishwashers and zero experience with that brand. I’m just a dude that likes diagnosing and fixing things.

Assuming that the internet steered you right and the error code is related to that sensor, how confident are you that the sensor is good and that it doesn’t have an intermittent failure? If I were in your shoes and the part is cheap, I’d replace it.

Gradation, color reproduction, and gaming performance are also important factors. There are a lot of “mid tier” TVs (and even some of the “premium” TVs) that can produce really dark blacks, bright whites, and vivid colors, but…

• Gradation: Mid tier and above non-OLED TVs have local dimming and other features to improve blacks and contrast. They tend to have dark blacks and very bright whites, but their performance in between is important too. You will find that many of these tvs are hard to impossible to calibrate to get even gradation between black and white. This leads to muddy grays and “crushed” blacks and whites. Crushed blacks means that very dark gray appears black so you lose detail. Crushed whites means the same on the white end. Additionally, local dimming can lead to “halo” effects in which when there is a quick transition from black to lighter colors, the black area has a halo around it.

• Color: In my experience, the colors are often off. Youll get really vivid colors in certain tones and more muted colors in others. This can lead to a picture seeming to have a tint to it. Skin tones, which we tend to be more sensitive to, may appear greenish. These TVs will often have a “feature” to improve skin tones because manufacturers know that people notice that. This feature will try to correct green (or other tint) but tends to also influence reproduction of other colors.

• Gaming: many TVs have a “game mode” which reduces input lag to make gaming better. Input lag is the amount of time it takes for a video signal coming into the tv to be displayed on the screen. With gaming mode off, many TVs have input lag that is 70-100ms (100ms is 1/10 of a second). This amount of lag is very noticeable in any game that requires fast reactions. Gaming mode input lag tends to be great these days - often 10ms or less… but on a lot of TVs it comes with a big price: many of the TVs picture processing features get turned off. This can include local dimming, which means you end up with gray blacks and a muddy picture in gaming mode.

I purchased and returned three higher end tvs ($900 to $1200 for a 65” tv) from about 2019 to 2021 in an attempt to replace a 55” plasma TV from 2013. Despite the fact that the plasma was 1080p and had no HDR capability, the picture was way better than any LCD-based variety I looked at (note: LED, QLED, and MicroLED are all LCD tech). All of them were bad enough in one or more of the above areas for me to return them. Most notably, I game on tv and that is where the failures of these TVs really really showed. Finally, about two years ago, I dropped the $$ for an OLED (LG C2). This was a true upgrade and I am really happy with the picture and performance. Not to say there aren’t software issues, but it felt like a real upgrade.

Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.

For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:

Maelstrom

Chiral

Apeiron

Swoop

Barrack

Escape Velocity

Avara

Bubble Trouble

Harry the Handsome Executive

Mars Rising

EV Override

Ares

Escape Velocity Nova

Sorry, no answer here. I just want to say that this is a really interesting question and I hope someone is able to answer.

Agreed. I’m 40 and I’ve reached a point where I feel like an adult. The biggest piece of that is that I understand that we’re all just making it up and figuring things out.

Imposter syndrome is also an intrinsic part of feeling like you aren’t an adult. Most of us experience this frequently - we have that feeling that everyone knows more than us and it makes us feel like we are fakes. But in reality, we just know more about ourselves and the gaps in our knowledge. We assume that they they know more than they do because we aren’t in their head and they aren’t expressing all the uncertainty and doubt hiding in there.

I think there is a pretty big difference between hearing people like you and me say “everyone is just making it up” and really internalizing that. I think internalization comes with time - you can believe something conceptually but often need to see it in practice over and over to really believe it in your bones.

There are other factors, too, which come with age and experience. Adults on the younger side are constantly running into new adult things and not knowing how to do those things is going to created this self doubt. “If I were an adult, I’d know how to do an insurance claim” or whatever. With further age, you will learn these things and have fewer of these doubts.

But you’re seeing the effect of having multiple niche communities right now: they are mostly dead. Quite simply, there is not a sufficient user base to keep niche communities active. Along with lemmy search being as bad as (maybe worse than) Reddit search and the issue of having niche communities dispersed and duplicated through multiple instances.

It looks to me like the numerous, inactive niche communities we have now largely sprung up during the Reddit protest. People came over her for a few days, created a whole bunch of niche communities, but then those communities never got traction. It seems most users quickly went back to Reddit, and now we have all these little ghost towns.

“Solutions”:

I see a few fixes that may help this issue, but I think the largest barrier is the size of the user base. There probably are not enough users on lemmy right now to have a bunch of active niche communities (edit: even if other issues with connection users were fixed). From that perspective, as others her are saying, the practical solution seems to be to keep your activity to broader communities that cover the niche topic, and use those communities until there seems to be enough discussion on a niche topic to warrant a niche community.

Other fixes:

Aggregate communities: this is something that has been discussed on lemmy, but I haven’t followed in depth. But essentially, being able to have a “multilemmy”, which aggregates communities across instances. Eg, there may be 10 different “model_trains” communities spread across 10 instances. This means that there could be enough discussion across those 10 communities to have one active niche community. But there isn’t an easy way to get users to participate in one particular community/instance combo. Some way to aggregate those communities could really help connect users and content. I get the impression that we are unlikely to see this kind of feature any time soon (but like I said, I haven’t been following this issue).

The other solution is finding a way to hide/remove/mark inactive communities. There are lots of niche communities with zero or one post from months ago with no active owner or moderator. It is up to the instance owner to decide how to deal with those communities on their instance, which means there is not going to be consistent handling of these communities.

Yes. But i was trying to make my change small… which is, of course, subjective. For me setting an empathy baseline feels like more than a small change.

Agreed, but looking in the bright side: it would kill the diamond industry, which is a fucking awful blight on the world :)

I’m trying to focus this answer on something that seems like a really small change:

I wish everyone is slightly more empathetic.

I feel like this could give us a lot of small nudges toward being better people and a better society. I wonder if a small nudge could end up having a profound effect.

Can you find an example? Maybe this?

https://youtu.be/ktSzKn8-TYc?si=QBXP9FVqgx4IltR5

Yeah, I feel like it would create a hell of a lot more chaos than half the world disappearing. And hijinks. And genocide.

I kinda like the idea of randomly distributing how much each person gets shrunk. Each person ends up anywhere from 99.9% to 0.1% of their original size. Think of the added chaos it would create.