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What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Today I joined Tildes.
There’s another site that many here seem to be still recovering from, unable to escape its sphere of influence (a bit of Stockholm Syndrome? :) ) where I posted a comment about how it had changed for the worse in the 14 years that I was using it, so a user here sent me an invite. Thank you!
Welcome fellow 14+ year... refugee? expat?
Not sure the term...
How about welcome fellow tilderino?
Yeah, that works.
What about the site specifically made you want to jump ship? Everybody has a particular reason for wanting to leave Reddit. Mine was heavy-handed moderators and admin failures to rein them in.
The moderation is one of the things that is starting to drive me nuts. It seems that you cannot post on any of the big subs without some heavy-handed moderation rule deleting your post. I've tried asking questions on AskScience and similar subs multiple times, always deleted, I've given up. I remember once I reposted my question and merely flipped the order of two words in my title, and that was accepted -- that's just over the top.
Recently I posted something on the Linux sub and even though it had 860 upvotes, almost 100 interesting comments, and was given a silver award it was deleted and locked (so I couldn't reply to any of the comments) for some stupid pedantic reason.
There are a few useful subs, which I'll continue to use until someplace else grows enough to be useful, but I'll be glad to reduce my usage for sure.
Definitely have a similar sentiment, as someone who has been banned from a few major subs for non rule violations.
One sub banned me for criticizing Saudi Arabia's treatment of women, another banned me because I once made a comment on an entirely separate subreddit that criticized moderator behaviour. Lodge an appeal with the mod team and you'll just get a rude-as-hell 3 day modmail mute with no reply. Which is a direct violation of Reddit's moderator guidelines which ask that mods take appeals seriously.
And the Reddit admins have strengthened mod powers last I checked. Now those mutes go up to 28 days, and if you try to push the issue beyond that, you risk having the admins intervene and ban you from Reddit as a whole. Reddit's ownership are definitely complicit in all of this.
Then there's mainstream subs like /r/Games, whose moderators go on a heavy-handed thread locking spree the moment somebody makes a mean comment or the moment someone posts about a sensitive issue. Their job as voluntary internet janitors is to remove rule-breaking content, not stifle any discussion on a topic. Thread locking has frankly been over-used from the day it was introduced.
Frankly I just want a Reddit alternative where the moderators are reasonable people and where restrictions are more lax. At the same time I don't want a platform like Gab, Parler or Voat that goes too far in the opposite direction and become dependent upon hate speech.
I've noticed the same. I think it was one of the big Ask subs where I discovered that I was banned from commenting or posting, and I'd never posted there before, so I was clearly banned for my "behavior" somewhere else. Given that my account was nearly 14 years old, has very high karma, and I try to avoid anything too controversial I can't imagine what it was, and a message to the mods was ignored.
Whatever... I've culled my usage down to a small subset of smaller very targeted subs and just ignore the majority of it.
Some subreddits are very well known for their heavy-handed internet janitors, like OffMyChest, LateStageCapitalism, JusticeServed, and many others. I have been unfairly banned from a few of these... Some of these subs I haven't even participated in yet got banned.
What really sucks is that there is no appeals route despite Reddit's very own moderator guidelines which have apparently been in force since April 2018 demanding there be one in place. To quote their mod guidelines
In practice it's more like: "The mod team will likely tell you to fuck off and not contact them again... if you're lucky. Most of the time you'll be rudely modmail muted without any reply. If you push the issue further, Reddit's admins may take action against your account for harassment, even if you're in the right."
A lot of subreddits including the aforementioned employ bots that automatically trawl controversial subreddits and ban people from dozens of other subreddits just for participating in those subs - this is also a violation of Reddit's moderator guidelines (section 10) by the way, but the admins couldn't give a damn.
This one is particularly concerning as it's really easy to respond to something interesting that you see on the front-page without looking to see which sub it's in. I've found myself commenting in a few places that I would otherwise avoid, which is probably how I got caught up in one of those nets and banned from a sub that I had never participated in.
Spent $34,729.66 on two things.
-___-
That is most certainly not, as the youths say these days, a "flex" as I am very much not happy to have spent 90% of that.
One I'll tell you about next week when it arrives, the other being the plumbing in my house. After three solid weeks of work, which was after waiting nearly three solid weeks for it to begin because of constant rain, all of the crumbling, collapsed, leaking, and clogged original 60 year old cast iron sewer piping under my house has been replaced with shiny new PVC plumbing. Oh the joys of home
ownershipmortgageship! At least now I can flush, shower, and wash clothing with reckless abandon.I am uncomfortable on your behalf at this number. But plumbing could go so much worse so I'm also slightly relieved.
That it could and did/almost did. I discovered there was a problem when the washing machine was draining one night and it backed up into the sinks. Which would be bad enough if it had drained after going to bed as there's more water in the washing machine than the sinks could hold. Turned off the washer and while it was slowly draining I went to brush my teeth to go to bed and I hear gushing behind the wall. Walk into the hallway to see standing water on the wood floors coming from the hallway closet. So a late night with my wet/dry vac, every towel in the house, air compressor, and fans to get it to dry before it warps anything. Fun.
Cut open the wall under the sink in the bathroom to find every possible type of plumbing behind that one wall. PVC from one sink, cast iron from above and below, copper going to another sink that had then been cut off and botched together with a rubber coupler to attach it to another type of PVC. The copper had rotted through, I guess a piece finally let go under the pressure of the water buildup in the sink, and was streaming out into the wall and then through the closet.
Tip to anyone purchasing a house: If the house is over 20-30 years old or has foundation issues or has ever had a foundation repair, spend the couple hundred bucks to have a plumber come out with a camera (you can also rent them on your own, but it'll be about the same amount in my experience) and check all your sewer lines. Older houses (pre 1980), like mine, were pretty much always plumbed with cast iron and they have an alleged lifespan of 80+ years, but seem to actually fail around 40 or so years (I've seen people claim that early 1900's cast iron was thicker and they started using cheaper/thinner cast iron post WWII, but don't quote me on that), which was probably when the lines under my house started to fail and got to the point I'm at now after another few of decades. Back to the topic at hand... Foundations can shift due to general settling of the house, but also a leaking sewer line can cause the house to shift and if the house shifts the plumbing can move as well. A few hundred dollars is cheap insurance that the lines under the house you're looking at are in good shape. Had I known of the bellies, breaks, and rust through points in my lines I'd have had the previous owner pay for repairs prior to purchase (either personally or knocking money off the price) or walked away and found another home.
With all that done next up will be foundation repair as I've noticed a couple of cracks in the paint of my walls since things took a turn for the worst.
Oooooof. I got to spend five grand on roof repairs a few weeks ago. Fortunately all the cast iron drain plumbing in my basement seems solid, and while everything above that has apparently been done in every conceivable material by a series of increasingly-deranged amateurs, nothing leaks (fingers crossed…).
My next big expense will likely be hiring an electrician to redo the original ('50s-era) two-conductor electrical wiring, at least on the first floor. I want to give it a shot myself, but friends tell me in-wall wiring is often stapled to the studs, and opening up the walls is on my hard "pay someone else to deal with it" list.
It's maybe worth noting for anyone reading these stories with horror that amortizing all those expenses on top of my mortage is still significantly cheaper than rent for an equivalent place would be (assuming you even could rent something equivalent, which in my area, you can't).
Got my Dreamcast in! Due to a fuzzy picture, it was actually a VA2 rather than VA1 revision, which is unfortunate, since I already spent $45 on a gdemu board that's incompatible with the VA2. So I ordered a cheap VA1 unit with a broken disc drive, since the gdemu replaces that anyway, and that came in yesterday, but the board is still in the mail!
But luckily, my VA2 unit is a bit of a unicorn. That revision is already quite rare in the US, but what's more, it's capable of reading burned CD-Rs! With a manufacture date of October 2000, it's quite possibly one of the last Dreamcasts ever manufactured that can play burned games. So that's pretty cool.
So far I've played Jet Set Radio the most, and it's pretty fun. Controls are a little wonky, since the Dreamcast was the last 3D console made before the dual analog stick became standard, but it's a great audio and visual experience, which is something I appreciate a lot in media. After I finish that, I'll probably do Skies of Arcadia.
My only complaint is that both consoles are in such fantastic shape that I don't have an excuse to learn retrobriting. They both look practically brand new for consoles old enough to buy a beer.
Oh wow, you are definitely lucky with that build date! My November 2000 one wouldn't play burned discs at all. I was on a Dreamcast forum at the time (before it was common knowledge that Sega had changed their hardware to block CD-Rs) and nobody believed me that nothing would work. I remember trying everything under the sun -- multiple different boot discs, self-boot procedures, different burning software, and even different CD-R brands -- and still nothing would run. The forum was convinced that I was doing something wrong, when, in reality, it turns out that I was one of the "unlucky" ones to buy that new line of Dreamcasts (though I consider myself VERY lucky for buying a Dreamcast!).
I'm so excited for you with your gdemu. You've got SO much great gaming at your fingertips! Is there anything besides Skies of Arcadia that you've got your eyes on?
GDEMU should be in tomorrow, going to do that and the noctua fan mod for the world's quietest Dreamcast. I've also got it hooked up over vga to an old Dell branded Trinitron monitor, so I've got quite the setup. As for what else I'm going to play, definitely I'll try both the Sonic Adventure games, some arcade style stuff like Crazy Taxi and Space Channel 5, and just whatever comes up in those greatest hits compilations. I've got a friend who's a Sega and a fighting game fan, I was thinking of giving him my VA2 after I get my VA1 in a working state, and then who knows, might try out PSO on a private server. Of course I'll be obligated to play at least a couple games of Soulcalibur and Marvel v Capcom when I hand it over, but I'm not a huge fighting game fan, so that'll likely be the extent of that.
I am now living in a not so good neighborhood. Not close to the ocean, no parks, no outdoor spaces for long walks with my dog. So my fiancée suggested going to the nearby cemetery. The place is huge, beautiful, peaceful and full of nature. I'm not easily creeped out. I have at least two relatives buried there that I intend to visit, but it will be a bit hard to find them due to size of the place. I took a very long walk there with my dog yesterday. It was awesome! That will be a regular activity for me now.
I attended a funeral. Other than that, I have been really struggling to get back to being productive. Which sucks because I really should be focused for a few more weeks. It isn't that hard.
Internship onboarding, mostly. It was a chill week, I mostly sat in on two six-hour seminars and did a ton of online learning for things like GDPR compliance (it's an international company), anti-harrassment, company policies, etc. I met with my internship mentor/manager who is a super chill dude, and start sitting in on client contacts on Monday, and met my advisor today to talk about how it's going to work, and how we're going to progress.
I bought some long-sleeve shirts in case I need more than one (I only have the one, lol), and one of them happened to be just the color my brother wants the groomsmen to wear, so he sent that Amazon link out. I need to re-order my suit, as well, because it's too big (The last suit I put together was too small), and I waited to get feedback on that from him. We're getting them through a company with a beautifully simple return policy that respects the difficulty of getting a good fit online, which is nice.
I also went to the local t-shirt outlet to buy a few polos, because if I'm sitting in meetings it just feels better to be wearing one of those than some ratty t-shirt I've got laying around. I rode my bike to the store, 1.5 miles away, and my butt's been sore all day because it's not used to being on my saddle.
I worked my OLKB Preonic into a corner trying to port my Nyquist (split 5x12) config to it, while keeping the somewhat more detailed, programmatic, setup it came with. I kinda broke some things, and will be hacking on it this weekend to beat it into shape. Fortunately, even though it's C, I don't actually need to be good at C to modify the firmware, but that's also what got me into this mess. I'm mostly trying to port a gaming layer and a couple of number pad layers to it for convenience.
I graduate HS this week. I know you all must be thrilled to have an underagie here.
If this is about being young rather than graduating early like I think it is, you'd hardly be the first or youngest ;p (unless it's sarcastic)
But more seriously, congrats on the graduation.
Congratulations :D
Awesome for your friend! Keep us posted on an air date if you can!
I don't know if you know the rules, to be honest it's probably buried in the wiki, but I'm pretty sure you can't just mention canines without pictures. I'm about 95% sure it'll result in a super-mega-permaban from all the internet.
LOL. I have posted pictures before, but here they are from oldest to youngest:
Oh, and her air date was Thursday! She won again on Friday so I guess she’ll be on Mondays as well!
Your dogs are the absolute cutest! Jean Grey looks so comfy cozy in that pic.
Thank you! All three of them have their issues, but they’re awesome dogs overall. :)
Just FYI, the ?dl=1 in those links makes them behave as a direct download which causes an 'open with' prompt to appear when clicked, but if you remove that they can be viewed as an embedded image:
Lovely looking doggos, BTW. ;)
Oh shoot! I did this on my phone and it doesn’t behave that way. Will definitely edit!
Why on earth would someone replace straight quotes with curly quotes? I get that it’s proper for how handwritten English has traditionally been, but personally I see no use for it.
First week of doing this month's schoolwork. I started with the subject whose content that's closest to "just read and do your best at understanding the material and then you'll be able to answer the questions" rather than "read the prompt to see what kind of original text you'll need to make is".
Other than that, not anything new.