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.

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 …

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?

the biggest pain in the ass

…that’s because they’re not meant for that, despite looking… uh …similar.

Joke aside, that mess sure does look annoying, and it is probably also not easy to replace parts if one of those lines snap or get twisted too much.

Supermarket employee here. We have a “fresh” fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.

Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they’re lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some … people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.

Long story short, “fresh” fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.

One of my biggest fears is to see moderators act too quickly

That’s an important point right here - one that is commonly overlooked. We all have shitty days every now and then, sometimes the tone of a comment / post is completely accidentally way harsher than you intended it to be, sometimes you can lose yourself in the heat of an argument if its about a topic that happens to be a sore spot for one of the participants. It happens. And if a mod then comes swooping in to immediatly kick you out of the conversation and tell you off for having a bad day, it won’t get better.

I sure had days like these where I let frustration get the better of me, but once I cool down a bit and realize that I’ve been too harsh, I always come back to apologize and explain to the other person that it wasn’t their fault. And I’ve been on the “other side” of such conversations as well, and every time it happens I truly appreciate the other person reaching out to me. Now, if mods act “too quickly” and/or too harsh, that scenario is oftentimes no longer possible. If one of the people involved in the argument is kicked out of the community, silenced, banned or whatever, there is no apology, and people might hold grudges.

Of course there are times where you absolutely need to act quickly and harshly (violent threats, racist slurs etc.) but it is also important for a mod to know when NOT to act immediatly, or when to intervene in a “soft” way (like asking people why they’re being cranky today - sometimes that’s all it needs to snap out of a funk you didn’t know you were in).

… and I get that this isn’t always easy for a mod. You may stumble upon a discussion that’s slowly deteriorating and think “oh dang, I’m responsible for making this right - I have to DO something!” and then do something that might not have been necessary. Sometimes, it is completely okay and even preferable if the mods just keep an eye on a discussion without immediatly intervening.

Sorry for the confusion, but I’m not talking about the emoji - that this little wolf head appears everywhere is normal and intended. What I mean is the red icon right next to it

Very weird. Just out of curiosity, have you seen that symbol anywhere else, too? Or just in this thread?

The mod logs are public: https://lemmy.world/modlog

It doesn’t matter whether a comment is “just” deleted or purged, there will still be an entry in the format “mod/admin purged/deleted X for reason Y” (if you scroll down to the “21 hours ago” mark, there is even an example for a purged thread)

Ah, goot to know. If it was something “official” then it should show up in the apps as well (I’m using the boring, ordinary browser version) so it seems likely that it is just a bug.

…and I’m also not the OP of that other comment thread ^^°