I grew up Catholic, converted to Evangelicalism, and am now an atheist. The one thing I’ll always give the Catholics that at least I grew up around is that they took the “feeding the poor message” pretty strongly to heart. They had a HUGE food pantry and they gave food to the local people in need of it every week. There were always drives happening for food and clothes and whatnot. It was enough of an institution that they had full time staff dedicated to it. I’m sure this isn’t the case for many other Catholic churches, but my anecdotal experience of at least one midwestern Catholic Church was pretty good on feeding the homeless. Now, the transubstantiation (literal bread turning to body, etc) stuff was bullshit and played a key role in my deconversion. People in my community didn’t even know that we believed that and when some of us kids found out, that was a bit of a reckoning 😆

Evangelicals, on the other hand, had their acts of charity but they were weak sauce compared to the Catholics. Occasional Christmas toy drives or whatever. They did free car washes. It was pretty inane compared to what the Catholics had been.

And that kid? Guy Fieri.

I love supportive cars

1000% look. Not even a question. Can you imagine how dope it would be if Jar Jar in the movies had a deep ass voice? Like shit, imagine if he was voiced by Samuel L Jackson or some shit. He would be chill as fuck. I’d want to smoke some weed with that funny looking guy. People who pick voice want to hide from this life changing experience, but bro you gotta own it.

I appreciate your patience with my ignorance. Thanks for that 😅 Seems I spent a bit too much time in old hostels in cities to have a good understanding of European infrastructure… Probably not unlike coming to the US, seeing New York City and Boston, and assuming our infrastructure is all old…

All good points, though speaking from the US/Canada, most of our sinks now only have a single faucet so if hot water is dangerous in any way then this certainly doesn’t prevent things like residual amounts of microorganisms or harmful substances left from the hot water from coming into contact with our cold water by the time it reaches the faucet. Our single faucets are probably a result of modernized newer plumbing in our newer buildings - water heaters in the US are huge, sealed very tight, and are designed to be replaced fairly regularly. I’m guessing many places throughout France and other parts of Europe still have older plumbing systems because replacing them would be difficult and costly in all the older buildings you guys have. Do you have mostly dual faucet sinks in France?

US/Canada here as well as someone that has visited most of western Europe (UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland) and stayed in hostels - no boiling necessary in any of these places.

There’s actually a pervasive myth I’ve encountered that hot tap water is dangerous and that one should only drink cold water. As far as I’m aware, this myth is due to an old setup for water systems that many western homes had before modern taps. The tap was separated into separate cold/hot faucets. The cold water came safely from the city, but the hot water came from tanks that were stored in people’s attics. The water in these tanks sat stagnant and was therefore prone to rats and other creatures dying in it or bacteria building up. This is why still today, most British homes have separate hot/cold taps - to keep the “safe” water separate from the “dangerous” water. I occasionally encountered such taps in the US and I assume that’s why my dad raised me to make sure the water was cold before drinking it. My father’s understanding of this was clearly outdated though. I learned all of this from a Tom Scott video.

It really depends on your field of work, but if it touches customer service (or even is just a job that will involve socializing with peers) at all then I think my biggest advice is to just be very friendly and approachable. Practice your regular conversational skills.

More like based 60, amirite?

I wonder if it was a hypnic jerk. Brains are weird so maybe your brain made it feel like instead of just jerking in bed (that’s what she said) you had fallen and the sense of hitting the cushions was you landing. I know I get hypnic jerks every few months and they always startle me.

I tried Mastodon and really didn’t care for it. It didn’t translate quite as cleanly into the decentralized structure I felt. If I wanted to look up a famous person I had to know their instance, which felt like a really messy structure. Still, I have hope for it’s future when they clean up a few of the less user friendly elements. Lemmy, I’ve loved. I think forums like this work way better in this decentralized way. Part of that comes from the fact that forums are anonymous anyways, unlike Twitter-esque social media platforms.

I don’t even think it’s an approach so much as an inevitability that certain communities will grow and develop into the de facto ones for their respective subjects. Especially because people are attracted to communities where they can find more discussions. But yeah, I really hope the communities don’t all just end up pooling in the largest instance. Hopefully they grow and develop across many smaller instances.

This is what I think people need to understand. This problem also occurred on Reddit frequently. In the early days there were multiple subreddits for a single topic and over time with growth, one of them won out. I doubt lemmy.ml and beehaw.org’s technology communities are both going to grow at the same rate. Eventually one will get bigger faster and become the de facto tech community.

Okay, I did a search and I didn’t find any boardgame communities. I had a suspicion, so I checked and there is a boardgame community on lemmygrad. Is it possible that that’s the community you saw? Lemmygrad has been defederated from most instances (including yours, sh.itjust.works) because of their controversial political stances and I believe there were problems with community members bombarding other instances. Anyways, most major instances have defederated from them which means their communities will not show up in your instance searches and you won’t be able to interact with them. If I were you I’d be the change you seek and start a boardgame community! I’d certainly subscribe to it. Things are still new around here so there’s a lot of community building to still be done 🙂 Welcome!

Edit: Oh, and if you want to see what instances your instance is federated with, just click “Instances” on the bottom of your lemmy page. It contains a list of all allowed/banned instances. I went ahead and did the honor - sh.itjust.works only has blocked lemmygrad.

Edit 2: I guess I’m bad at the search too. There are two non-lemmygrad boardgame communities I managed to track down. !boardgames@feddit.de and !soloboardgaming@lemmy.ml. I’ve found that the easiest way to search these things is to find the communities in their home instance itself, then copy the entire URL and just paste it into the search on your instance. That seems to usually work for me. The search is definitely glitchy though.

To be fair, Reddit doesn’t merge similar communities either. You could have /r/cats, /r/catpics, /r/cat_pics, /r/PicturesOfCats, and so on. The point is, Reddit also needed time to establish popular communities before they took hold. I think it’s less a structural issue with Lemmy and more just a small forum problem. In time it should self correct so that when you look up “cats” on Lemmy, the overwhelmingly most popular community pops up and you can subscribe to it. The one downside is that you could have multiple /c/cats communities on different instances, but that still won’t be that big of a problem. The most popular one will still be the first search result and it won’t be too hard to remember that it’s the Beehaw cats community that’s the popular one (not literally - just to use a random example instance).

Yeahhh, that one doesn’t really play into the rest of what I said 😅 That’s just nostalgia. It’s hard to argue that Google Maps hasn’t made our lives easier in just about every way we use it unlike the other tech I mentioned…

Every time a new technology comes out we think it’s going to make our lives so much more simple, but what really happens is the expectations of what we should be capable of doing increase and as a result we take on more responsibilities. One example is cars. You can travel further now, right? Only, now it’s normal to drive an hour to commute to work. Or now you have a wider area of travel you’re expected to make to visit people you know.

My boomer opinion is that smartphones have done this in a big way. I’m expected now to be available 24/7 to respond to texts on a moments notice. Not responding looks rude. I’ve been in workplaces that had a culture of checking work messages on Teams on cellphones outside of hours (which I refuse to do). My friends will have long group messages that I’m expected to keep up with. All of this responsibility adds up to more stress than we had in a pre cellphone era. And that hasn’t translated to better lives for us in the end. There are advantages and I appreciate many of the things our high tech era gives us. But part of me longs for that era where we just had to trust that people would show up to get togethers at the agreed upon times. When conversations were special because we didn’t just have 24/7 access to each other. Where we had to decipher maps to take road trips. Where we were more present with each other. I was born in the 90’s which puts me in a strange generation of people that only kind of remember what it was like before.

This doesn’t particularly matter, but in the interest of answering your question, the equivalent word to “subreddits” here is “communities”. Thus the /c/ instead of /r/.