also don’t forget that placebo work even when you know it’s placebo

This right here. I’ve had problems with pain relief medicine simply not working since I was a child. A couple years back I started drinking caraway seed tea whenever a headache was JUST going away, and even tho I know dang well that caraway seeds do jack sh*t against pain, my body now somehow associates the taste with “ok, headache time is over” and I can drink that stuff to MAKE headaches go away.

100% placebo, 100% aware about it - still works.

PS: why caraway seeds? Because it is the least likely “tea” you can be offered in everyday context. If I had used something as common as charmomile or green tea, I think the effect wouldn’t have had a lasting effect.

Marvellous ♪

Just to add another factor to the ongoing discussion: artistic talent isn’t uniform and never was. Just because only/mostly “immature” art survived from a certain century of human history, doesn’t mean that there literally was no realistic art present at the time. Since you mentioned the statues already…

These are from the same era (around 200 BC), but as you may have guessed, made by different artists =P The statue is called The Dying Gaul by the way.

As for painting examples, I guess the Rothschild Canticles^[1] book illustrations represent best what most people nowadays would call medieval art. Not exactly realistic, a little goofy … perspective? Never heard of it. Proportions? Who cares. And who needs shading anyway?! As long as you can still distinguish a human from a cupcake, it’s “eh good enough”.

I guess that was also what you meant by “immature” art, because it is the same art style as those goofy weird pictures of knights fighting giant snails and rabbits riding cattle into battle and the like.^[2]

That book is dated to be around 1500–1520 so it would be easy to assume that people at the start of the 15th century didn’t have a realistic art style yet. But you know what else was made in that same era?

The Mona Lisa (1503–1506).

One dorky meme-esque style, and one realistic, modest and easy-on-the-eyes style in the same century, probably even the same decade. But they were used by different artists.

Now you might be thinking that those art styles might have been intended for their respective purpose or something along the lines: that the goofy, simple art style was used for nothing but amusing little pictures, and the more realistic style was for “proper” art, because noone in their right mind would spend 100+ hours painting highly detailed nonsense just for sh*ts and giggles, right?

May I introduce you to Joseph Ducreux?^[3]

I guess most of you will have seen that meme by now, but this is a real painting made by a real artist - and it is far from the only one. Ducreux created an entire series of similar self-portraits in … unusual poses and situations.

… so yes, at least that one guy DID indeed spend dozens if not hundreds of hours (plus material costs) painting amusing nonsense for his own entertainement. He was, in a way, the victorian era equivalent of a shitposter (and I mean that in a good sense!)

Long story short: one can’t just claim that “they didn’t have X art style in Y century” because the truth is much more facetted than that. It is way more likely that each and every era of human history has had people with insane talent who were able to create art as realistic as possible with whatever tools their lifetime had to offer, and also a bunch of “eh good enough” art or stuff that was deliberately stylized for fun. How we percieve said art today depends mainly on what artworks have survived up until now, and/or how popular the surviving art is. (Everyone and their grandma knows about the Mona Lisa, but how many of y’all knew about the Rothschild Canticles?)

If we don’t know about any realistic art from a certain period of time, it doesn’t automatically mean that there was no realistic art. It may have been lost, forgotten or it exists but it’s just not popular enough to be well-known.

Wikipedia claims they’re quite popular.

big pair of chopsticks to flip deep-frying stuff,

100% this. I have a pair of metal chopsticks that I use exclusively for frying food, especially small, super sticky stuff like nan gua bing. Most wooden ones here (Germany) have some sort of artificial coating and I’m a bit worried about it melting or releasing chemicals when it gets too hot, so I don’t want to dunk these into hot oil.

You know a dad joke is a good dad joke when you angrily groan while being compelled to still upvote it.

I always called it “clutter” tho I don’t know whether this is in any way official. De-cluttering an inventory means tossing the useless stuff out or packing it away.

f I created a community, would I become it’s (lone) moderator automatically?

Yes. But you can also immediatly appoint new mods and/or un-mod yourself if there are other mods present, so it is easy to give a community away when there are other interested users. It’s not a permanent thing.

What consequences, requirements and things would I need to keep in mind as a moderator?

Your community needs to be compatible wih the Fediverse Code of Conduct … but that boils down to “don’t be a dick and don’t post illegal stuff” which is pretty much just common sense. It’s not exactly hard to follow those rules ;)

Apart from that, you can set whatever rules you want. But keep in mind that the Fediverse is still a lot smaller than reddit, so if you are TOO niche / narrow / strict with the rules, you’ll have a hard time finding people who want to engage with your community. General, broad-themed communities with easy-to-follow rules have a bigger chance to thrive.

… and a personal little tip: don’t slam down the ban hammer at every opportunity. As a mod you are able to ban, silence, remove or otherwise “punish” people for bad behaviour, but that doesn’t mean that you have to do that. It’s a lot better to give users the benefit of the doubt, explain instead of punish (as they might not be aware that they did something bad in the first place), and give them a reasonable chance to fix their mistakes on their own before taking action. Post removal, bans and the like should be reserved solely for when the user in question is unwilling to cooperate OR did something obviously super shitty (like threatening other users, using slurs, posting illegal stuff etc.)

Is it advisable to copy-paste content from Reddit to kickstart new communities (given that the link source to the original content was added as well when making new posts)?

Well … as a last resort, yes. Original content or stuff from non-reddit sources is always preferable as it gives users of the Fediverse an incentive to visit communities here instead of going to reddit, but copypasted content is still better than no content at all, so if you can’t find interesting / worthwile stuff elsewhere, then copypasting from reddit is okay-ish too.

OC is still way better tho.

“Goodbye” exists because of 15th century chatspeak. It’s a highly abbreviated version of “God be with ye”

More and more relevant by every passing day …

Ohh okay. I really misunderstood your point then, but thank you for clarifying ;)

I’ve talked my way into jobs I can’t do, then failed badly

Failing at something is not the end of the world. Sure it sucks at first, and possible setbacks in life aren’t exactly cool either, but you DO sound like someone who refuses to stay down whenever life decided to knock you down, and that is something not everyone can do. That requires an inner strength and determination that a lot of people simply can’t muster.

And you know what? Your idea of working in the social sector sounds like an excellent goal - it IS a hard job with little pay, but since you fought your way up from the bottom already, you have a completely different, deeper insight into related issues than someone who knows homelessness and its struggles only from a textbook. You will be able to understand clients in similar situations on a completely different level, and they in turn might be more inclined to trust your advice. You might be able to actually help people that simply fall through the cracks elsewhere.

Good luck, friend. May your spark never fade.

The thing that really scares me though is the way the problems change at the higher levels.

In case you find yourself in the situation, tell your employer. It may sound awkward to them at first that someone wouldn’t want to be promoted, but in the end it is in their best interest to keep employees who ARE good at doing their jobs, instead of creating a situation where the same employee is suddenly no longer able to do a good job. This is no shallow talk by the way, but a well-documented, scientifically proven effect called the Peter Principle (which basically boils down to “everyone gets promoted until they reach the point of maximum incompetence and then get stuck in that position”)

We as a society are trained to percieve “climbing the corporate ladder” as the main/only goal of working jobs with a hierarchy, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying at the level you’re comfortable at. ;)

Good luck. It’s not an easy feat to consistendly walk that fine line without burning out, especially in the holiday season … take care.

Exactly … there would not even have been a shortage if everyone just kept shopping the normal amount instead of trying to hoard stuff. Especially for TP it was completely unneccessary unless your entire family planned to shit themselves eight times a day for weeks on end, yet people acted as if their lives depended on it (and even stole rolls from the public toilets, bought paper towels as backup and the like).

Another delicious “FU” moment, that I was sadly not personally present for but got told in great detail, was when one customer tried to return 100-something packs of TP for a refund after the first wave of Covid was almost over. Turns out he and some buddies had the genius idea to buy “one pack per person” multiple times each day for a couple of weeks (he had a giant bundle of receipts so we know when the packs were bought) and then resell the TP online for profit, but noone bought it… and since TP is a “hygiene article”, we don’t take those back for safety reasons, just like underwear, swimsuits and everything else that is meant to come in contact with human bodies. He was so furious that he started throwing things, screaming about how “we ruined him and will pay for it”, and threatening employees to the point that police had to be called to remove him.

Not the shop security, but actual police. A report was filed and a shop ban issued.

Because of toilet paper.

Cashier here. I managed to outwardly stay friendly and nice during the first wave of Covid, even tho at least 70% of our customers had managed to turn into the most insufferable nuisances in the history of mankind. It was especially exhausting when they started to bulk-buy toilet paper and literally everyone had some sort of super lame excuse why they NEEEEEEED eight packs at once and why we definitely SHOULD make an exception to the “one pack per customer” rule specifically for them.

If you have the same old discussion fourhundredandeightyseven times a day, it gets old pretty fast. But you can’t just tell them to STFU without risking your job, soo … well. It was simply exhausting.

One day I had a proper Karen at the register, who tried to tell me that she was buying the second pack for her poor old neightbor lady which allegedly had a broken hip and couldn’t walk to the store herself (you know, because if you have a broken hip you DEFINITELY stay at home instead of the hospital and definitely also use the toilet yourself, no issues here …) and she simply refused to leave the register. I was honestly contemplating whether I should call security and have her removed when the guy behind her looked at me and said:

“Well, that lady definitely needs twice as much toilet paper as others … because judging by the amount of shit that just came out of her mouth, she’s got assholes on both ends.”

It took all of my remainig willpower to not laugh. Imagine the “Biggus Dickus” scene from the Life of Brian for a mental image of how hard I tried to keep a straight face. Karen got red, huffend and left without buying either pack, and that delightfully snarky guy has been my favorite customer ever since. I might or might not sometimes “accidentally” swipe my own tag across the scanner to give him an employee discount…

Not hate per se, but my grandpa was very uncomfortable around any kind of “persistent noise”, be it too many people talking at once (he usually spent the most part of family reunions in the garage, tinkering with his gadgets), loud machines running for a long time (he’d rather walk a few miles than sit in a car for longer than five minutes) … or music. Then again he was a German WWII veteran who never went to therapy, so who knows what kind of memories he buried deep down … he never talked about it.

So … not exactly “hating all music” in the actual sense but I think he had a good reason to avoid it nonetheless.

Probably a lot more reliable than electronic reminders too. It is super easy to acidentally turn off the alarm you set on your phone / watch / whatever and then immediatly forget why the alarm was set in the first place. But a hangry cat has no snooze button, so that won’t be an issue. ;)

OR you actually get the chance to talk without interrupting someone else, and then YOU get interrupted by someone who doesn’t care, so of course you instinctively shut up to not re-interrupt the other person.

“People don’t trust autonomous vehicles for safety, security and privacy concerns, so instead of fixing these issues, let’s put some googly eyes on them!” galaxy brain explodes

…seriously tho, which kind of genius exec thought that this was a good idea? Do they think the Uncanny Valley is a spa resort or whatever?

An AI would not have any interest in hoarding wealth, deliberately screwing over others for dumb, petty reasons, would not be able to have addictions, grudges, superstitions and the like … I would actually prefer an AI running things over what we have at the moment. How much worse could it be?