Particularly devastating when you reflect on a lack of success after following this advice because now you can no longer think you were a victim of unfair circumstance or something external, but rather, you are , at your very core, just unlikeable. After all, you were yourself and it turned out nobody liked you.

That said, I think it’s only bad advice in as much as it’s glib and shallow, but I can’t exactly fault it per-se. I mean, I can’t really say the inverse is particularly healthy either. We’d think an adult telling a child specifically not be themselves would be pretty fucked up, but in any case, it’s just horrible advice to give because it doesn’t prescribe any actual changes one can enact that would result in a different outcome and the advice is insidious because of the implications for the any lack of success you encounter when following it. The other problem is that, you were already being yourself when you sought the advice, and you mostly can’t really help but be yourself even when trying not to because you ultimately become yourself trying to be someone else rather than someone else and that doesn’t doesn’t tend to work very well since if you could have been someone else you probably would be them rather than yourself given how much being yourself has sucked of late.

While I hate that advice though, I can see why it’s tempting to give and also how tricky it is to have anything useful to say, especially to a child in school. School is such a hellish jungle. It’s an environment so ripe for cruelty and all the worst of human nature at the very worst time for people to be exposed to it and there’s so little one can say that really does help because it’s such an inherently difficult situation to do anything about. You have to be there for years, you can’t rely on any level of maturity at all because the perpetrators of the cruelty are often your peers who are children, none of the adult world’s methods of navigating this type of situation are really applicable and the whole institution breeds an environment where this type of thing is such a regular occurrence that the best, kindest and most well meaning staff have to build a kind of immunity to it or risk emotional collapse from empathy for all the children that go through this every year and then you have the staff who are not good people, who don’t have empathy and are perpetrators of the cruelty itself whilst charged with the care of the children. This turned in to a big ramble, but yeh, school, fuck school man.

Sometimes I’m googling a tech issue and the only useful results are Reddit. I don’t abstain on such an occasion, I need my answers and I’ve never seen a Lemmy post show up in the results.

The other main situation is here on lemmy I’ll click a link based on the title without paying much attention only to discover it’s taken to content on reddit which is a weird phenomena that I kinda hope fades with time.

Laser tag. Shit’s great, the shine does get taken off somewhat when I do really well and rank top but all my opponents are small children and their parents look vaguely annoyed.

Ah. I’ve gotten so used to Newpipe that the few times I used the real YouTube app it just pissed me off

How’s revanced compare to Newpipe?

Even if it was possible to feel at ease and not in a work mindset while hanging with them, it’s just wise not to get that close, it makes it harder in future to be selective in what you divulge about your private life which can give your boss leverage over you. Sometimes you may need a “sick” day and it’s just better if they don’t know enough personal information to be able to determine how sick you are and make everything awkward.

That might seem dishonest, but there’s reasons why you might need to the employer to know only what they need to know and they aren’t necessarily laziness or incompetence. It’s a shame because it’s nice that your boss wanted to be friends but unfortunately there’s always going to be that fact that they’re your boss which gets in the way of that and everyone is better off keeping things arm’s length

But it still only works if magic actually works and if it doesn’t, then you just understand really well how you would have used magic, if it were actually real.

I think the consumption of only oily fat will cause a bit of a shitsplosion and probably sooner than 3 days in.

The Titanic being swapped out for a different ship is a persistent one that’s been around for a while

Hey mate. The way you explain things is very clear and especially helpful if like me you’re missing the broader strokes context of a lot of Lemmy based discussion. It’s very off topic, but I wonder if you could explain to me the drama around meta wading in to the fediverse space and also specifically people getting angry about secret meetings and NDAs? I got wind of this on posts on my local instance but they’re all discussing the issue assuming an audience that’s already ten steps deep and understands the technical basis behind everything so I was pretty lost.

Specifically, people were afraid what Meta’s entry in to this space could mean for privacy in the fediverse but I don’t really understand why it would make a difference unless you basically joined whatever this new thing Meta has brewing is. If they enter this space, do they somehow pose a privacy threat to users of instances that federate with them? I worry about that because as far as I know you can’t personally as a user defederate, as in block anything from a particular instance, you just have to hope your specific local instance does that.

It’s given me an obscure error and timeout when hitting the post button while commenting once and it was a detailed comment that took a while to type. It did not post. That was a bummer

I’m still getting used to this but, I think you can respond to that Lemmy.ml post using your Lemmy.world account if the two instances are federated. I’ve made comments to posts in communities hosted on instances other than my home instance.

Nah, they were just a company after all. The strongest feeling I get is that it’s just a bummer because I’ve grown to depend on the platform so much and now I’ve got to try and adapt.

At the same time, as this thing that was previously an interesting little curiosity on a corner of the web grew to be a big time suck and addiction, the dopamine hit returns and actually helpful interactions I was getting from Reddit were diminishing anyway so when there was finally a convenient push to make me try harder to either find an alternative or just ditch it, I was strangely grateful.

I do feel like I’m losing something that was very useful resource and which also filled a need, albeit one that it created in the first place, but at the end of the day, it’s just a forum. I can’t really feel betrayed or heartbroken by an entity that was only ever intended to make money and had no obligation to my approval.