Thanks! This has become a January tradition with my kids. We are trying a different winter camp location in 2026, and I really hope there will be enough snow to do this again!

Pile the snow into a big mound, pack it down, then hollow out the middle. Camping overnight is optional.

1: @Skavau@piefed.social is right.

2, 7, 8: What’s the goal here? Is Reddit the gold standard we’re aiming for? I’m not convinced Lemmy needs millions of daily active users to keep a plethora of niche communities active, and to store a massive backlog for posterity. It’s fine if Lemmy is smaller and narrower in scope.

3: Reddit has duplicate/overlapping communities, too. I’m not sure how to avoid this without either (a) top-down control of community creation by admins, or (b) constant pruning of communities by admins. Neither are desirable, IMO.

4, 5, somewhat 7: Adjust expectations to reality, and appreciate what we have. Lemmy isn’t Reddit 2.0 and it never will be. There isn’t big venture capital money sloshing around. But Lemmy has come along way without it. Hundreds of instances hum along reliably, day-in and day-out. There are surprisingly good browser UI’s (look at Photon/Tesseract/Alexandrite) mobile apps. Not bad for an open-source project that runs on volunteer time and user donations!

6: The complaint about moderation tools is legit. I really want a better reports queue, among other things. But I don’t have the time and energy to contribute code, so I wait patiently.

I still remember a Burger King with smoking and non-smoking seating areas. As if anything ever kept the smoke on the smoking side of the room.

Maybe related to the Sunshine Act? The intent of the law is to prevent companies from bribing doctors to use their products or drugs. I have seen companies extend it to other employees to be extra cautious.

They are all in medical or medical-adjacent careers: nursing, radiology, pharmaceutical R&D, medical device R&D, etc. These fields seem to attract empathetic people who want to do good.

https://fedidb.com/software

“By platform” is a fuzzy request given the interoperable nature of the fediverse. This list is broken up by software, so Lemmy/PieFed/mbin are listed separately even though their users share and interact as if they were all on one platform.

I have many times, and I agree that travel is a good thing. But don’t be so quick to scoff at Americans who don’t travel overseas. Traveling is expensive. The flight alone from my house to Frankfurt or Tokyo (for example) is at least $1,500 per person, and a day of travel each way. That’s out of reach for a lot of people. Hell, it’s out of reach for me now that I have a family to bring with me. The most basic, banal holiday overseas would easily exceed $10,000. Nevermind the luxury of being able to spend enough time there to understand local takes on geopolitics.

Between the ticket prices and the, ah, challenging political climate in the US, I am really curious what game attendance will be.

a/s/l

Headlining this Friday night! With special guest Gay Zombie Super Soldiers! $10 at the door, 21 and up, doors open at 8pm.

Also baseball players.

Recent: Joey Wiemer

Old gold: Randy Johnson

You might get some downvotes for mentioning that book. The author makes a few sloppy assumptions, and the anthropology/sociology/history communities love to hate him for it. His overall thesis is still generally good though, IIRC.

One thing I don’t think is in Diamond’s book: once Europe had realized they could sail far and wide to get things, the Dutch invented the idea of a stock market to fund voyages (the British took this idea and really ran with it). This system made long, risky trips easier to finance. Instead of a single monarch funding a single expedition, many people could pool their money to fund many expeditions.

I agree that none of this means Europeans have some special intelligence or attitude. Any other civilization that developed in similar conditions could have followed the same path.

I didn’t notice that! I wonder who originally made that edit, and when. Google image search comes up with both versions from multiple sources.

Another strong contender, to be sure.

Also saying “im cishet” is so odd lol.

Yeah, reading back I see that it’s a clumsy choice of words. I’ll work on that in the future.

His left arm even seems to suggest his hand is between his knees

This is actually a crop of a famous photo. In the full photo he is nude, with his left hand between his knees and his forearm just covering his privates.

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/news/a48108/burt-reynolds-cosmo-classic/

n+1

There are a couple, but they don’t roam very far.

https://detroitzoo.org/animal/african-lion/