Used to be reddit. I’m here now because I can’t be on reddit anymore, but this place (maybe thankfully) just isn’t the abyss to suck me into, so now, my online time is mostly on discord

I’m not counting videogames. Though I do play some online stuff, I don’t consider it the same as something like browsing a website. It’s a different activity. If you do count it, then yeah, it’s games. My computer time is largely games

As someone who has written songs… We get them, and I don’t think it’s particularly ironic

I suspect a whole lot of atheists were brought up religious. The heavy religiosity is the push they need to even think on the subject. I think a lot of people who are what I’d call passively religious (non-practicing, don’t really care, but might say say they believe in god if asked) don’t have to engage with the material critically, so it’s not as much a part of their world. For sure there are atheists out there who have a dogmatic approach to atheism because of their former belief systems

But even beyond that, I think it runs deeper. Christianity, if you’re in the west, is foundational to our culture, even in secular nations. It still informs traditions and morals and perspectives that can trace themselves to a Christian origin, and that underlying religiosity in our cultures does inform the way in which we view the world. I concluded this when a friend pointed out to me the language we use in evolution

We describe evolved adaptations as serving a purpose. We’ll say things like “we evolved opposable digits to better grasp things”, and yeah, we all know that’s not strictly true, but language informs our perspective and reflects it. We didn’t evolve thumbs to hold things; We just got thumbs, and were able to hold things with them. These are not the same, and the former still has that kernel of creationism in it, some subconscious belief in a greater purpose

That said, I generally agree that an atheist might be made more militant if he had a particularly religious upbringing. Really, though, I suspect it’s also a lot to do with insecurities. I grew up in a passively religious household, and was sent to a catholic extracurricular just so that I could choose for myself what to believe, and in that brief time, I actually became easily the most religious person in my house. Religion spoke to my insecurities and fears. I was bullied a lot at the time, and the thought that my righteousness would be rewarded and my bullies wickedness would be punished was wonderful. In turning atheist after that, it didn’t undo the bullying. Instead, the self-righteous idea of “I’m smarter than you dumb Christians” was the new salve for insecurties

I’m way more tolerant now. Maybe the issue is just age. Maybe most of those awful ones are just obnoxious teens and young adults who would be obnoxious either way, and they’ll grow out of it. If they don’t, they get to become Ricky Gervais without the money or fame. Kinda rambled more than I meant to, but yeah, just throwing out some perspectives

I think we’re stereotyped often as the militant and belligerent atheists quite a lot. We have been painted as unsympathetic assholes who like to talk down to religious people to make us feel better about ourselves, not to mention a weird overlap with some parts of the far-right, usually by way of transphobia, homophobia, racism, social darwinism and the enforcement of poorly understood or straight up incorrect “science”

Eugenecists inhabit this space, as well as people who might call themselves “race realists”, as well as people who think their middle-school-level understanding of genetics and sex encapsulates the entirety of gender and sexuality. It’s those atheists who claim to love science, hate ignorance, but remain ignorant of science. They give us a bad name, and their loudness makes it seem like they represent us

I did a test just a few days ago, and just scrolled to see how much of my feed was from people I followed, and how much of it was stuff I didn’t. 36 posts in a row of stuff I don’t, followed by 10 posts of people I follow, followed by another 27 targeted stuff, and then 1 post from a friend, and then another 35

It’s ridiculous, and this digital landscape is dystopic; It’s cyberpunk. I can’t believe, for example, that I can enter something in a search bar on youtube, and get results that are explicitly not my search results

I have, but only because my reddit ban left me with a void–a void I should fill with something more productive, tbh, but it’s still not taking nearly as much of my time. I’ve always used it, never left, but at this point just use it for some private chats I have with people. Since reddit, I’ve scrolled a bit and been slightly more active

I’m only here because of an unjust reddit ban, and I’m very sad to say that I still would prefer reddit to this. The shear scale of reddit means there was always something interesting me through the far more varied and active communities available there. Lemmy is great and all, but I feel way less engaged with anything going on

I was active, and even a recognized name on some subs where I was particularly active, but here, those same communities are either woefully underpopulated and inactive, or just straight up don’t exist. When I need to ask questions or get a wide variety of opinions, or even share a story, I knew reddit had enough activity for me to get at least some traffic. Here, I haven’t even made a post

Sorry, Lemmy, but we’re only together because reddit left. You’re my rebound

This is not how I expected to get a degree in arachnology

People hate what they fear and fear what they don’t understand. The path, then, to fight against hate is specifically understanding

I learned this by watching The Crocodile Hunter as a child. I remember very vaguely a point Steve Irwin made about how people are terrified and act to harm animals they know nothing about. Either he went on to further say, or I extrapolated it myself, that knowing how an animal will act informs YOU on how to approach the situation; No need for fear or hate if you understand the reality of the situation. I then further extrapolated this race relations. It’s a little general, but a white person may be racist against a black person because they think they’re dangerous, just as someone might see a snake they know nothing about and think it dangerous

The twist is that his original owners didn’t know jack shit about basketball, but were really into a specific strain of beef

I first saw a message like this on a DVD release of old Loony Toons shorts. The topic of what to do with “problematic” historical things has always been contentious to me as a person who loves history, as well as a filthy libtard cuck, or whatever we get called these days. I think historical context needs to be preserved. We learn so much from history, so removing it also removes are ability to learn from those mistakes. It also colors our current perception of those historical periods inaccurately, which makes it harder to track down the roots and causes of systemic and cultural issues. Presenting the reality with the additional clarification and context that values have changed and should be taken with a grain of salt is, in my opinion, the best way to present anything historical whenever the subject of “problematic” content comes up

Legit I good instrument. Would love to own some day

“This is Melody Crescendo”

“Oh, that’s pretty. What’s her middle name?”

“Well Melody is her middle name. Her real first name is Hurdy-Gurdy”

O never played any of these games, so I don’t really know exactly how these stereotypes come off, but if you’re gonna release something old into a world with changing sensibilities, this is honestly how I think it should be done. If whatever was in the game was really all that bad, it is important to still remember how we did things. It’s important to remember the past as it was, both the good and the bad

Right? He looks like he’s 16 at the absolute oldest

And yeah, photos were actually colorized fairly often back in the day and there were a bunch of different techniques

Floridian here confirming that 0%

Art, beauty, and pleasure, and the desire to see more of that in earnest in a world that seeks to convert anything and everything into profit; The beauty and humbling significance of nature in its indifferent power, and the grand scope of the endless nothingness that stretches beyond what our eyes will ever hope to see; People, real and true, speaking against cruelty and injustice, seeking to better spread love instead of otherness, to show a less conditional love than that of any state or religion

Have you seen the world? Shit’s irrational as fuck. I’ll argue here that rationality has an aspect of subjectiveness to it; It is based on your ability to understand and perceive things. There is a very very small number of things you don’t know, and a practically infinite ocean of things you will never even know to not know. Even things that behave rationally may behave irrationally under some variables you will never even fathom, and so, to you, that would just be irrational

You wanna see something rational? Read fiction. Truth is always stranger than fiction. It was Mark Twain who added that “fiction has to make sense.”

there also tends to be an expectation that men (even those of us that are submissive) be dominant to some degree

This is an important point to make, for sure. Things like this will be greatly impacted by things such as cultural norms and expectations, so any statement that says “There are more D men than D women” needs to come with the caveat that there are likely biases in these observations, and that culture and upbringing have an impact, either deciding the ratio, or skewing it

I do tend to default thinking of men as Dominant, and that is in no small part due to culture, but I’ll add that this assumption is specifically outside of the kink community. In BDSM spaces specifically, I expect most men to be subs, but my own experiences could also be because I attract the guys who are looking for their “goth mommy dommy” 😅

I like submissive men, and generally am downright turned-off by dominant men. Am I the norm? Probably not. I think there are more subs than Doms just in general, but especially among women

But I’m just answering your question as presented. Another has already commented some decent love advice if you’re asking about this stuff as pertaining to you

I will add, though, that while strictly in a D/s dynamic, women are subs more often than Dommes, in any dynamic that strays from BDSM, the submissive tendencies are just sort of a spice when they come up, and that, if you’re using the word submissive to describe a man who isn’t conventionally masculine (Or maybe toxic masculine), you’re probably better off. We wanna feel safe with who we’re with, and outside of BDSM, you’ll probably have better luck as a gentle, emotionally intelligent, confident person. Some people might describe that as submissive