Oh and indeed we will be ubering, if only because our time there is so limited and I don’t wanna waste it travelling between places of interest. Gotta sit down and make a simplified chart of crime stats comparing Detroit and Sydney or something.

Kinda figured that most violent conflict starts with some kind of instigation. Don’t fight people and they won’t fight you. What a concept! Thanks for your input.

Love this, cheers. Bookmarked for the next irritating conversation with an uninformed busy body.

Yeah, I’m truly not expecting anything I would expect from cities here other than supermarkets that stay open after sunset. Made this post in the spirit of due diligence in case I’m being overly optimistic, but mainly to compile some retorts to the things my wife keeps hearing that damn near convinced her to call this off.

Thanks for the recommendations! The Christmas market wasn’t on our radar at all, but I’m keeping it on mine.

Thank you! I mean, there are “dangerous areas” where I live too, where the reality is you have maybe a one in a million chance of something awful happening, as opposed to the one in two million you’re used to. When I became an independent teen and actually spent time in all these areas my parents had described so derisively, it all just boiled down to lower median income, higher proportion of disadvantaged people drawn to cheaper housing, and a greater chance that someone’s going to ask you for spare change.

My wife’s extended family lives in Canton, so I think it’s fair to say they do live in Detroit, but also that their opinions of downtown are informed by something they heard. Maybe “that one thing” they heard happened years ago. Who knows.

I’m actually really glad we’re working Detroit into this trip too, and it’s partly because I want to see first hand how distorted everyone’s perception here is. Everyone here seems to have an opinion on this trip, and they all make that 😬 face about Detroit. Definitely keen to hit up the museums, art institute, and whatever else we can before jetting out.

Well I’d much rather be shot than stabbed, given the choice, I suppose.

I’m glad we’re talking about this.

Panel #7: Regret

“Why did I take so long to get here?”

I just wanted to say that I have the same questions, and it’s a relief to see it posted by someone with more courage. I’m too ignorant to contribute to the discussion though. I don’t know how a government or private entity could pressure a FOSS project in this way, unless that pressure was put on the project’s git platform. At which point the repo just moves elsewhere.

I would prefer to use a standardised, client–agnostic messaging protocol than anything that requires a specific app.

I stopped using WhatsApp because using a Meta product makes me feel icky. I use Telegram and Matrix to contact drug dealers. My work requires a combination of Google Chat, Teams and Slack. Some of my friends like to stick to Discord.

What would be really great is if we could all decide on one protocol for sending end–to–end encrypted text and media over HTTPS to a globally unique ID and have everyone use whatever client they like. Like SMTP but more streamlined and secure. Google, Apple, Samsung etc can ship devices with a default client, but allow users to install another one that they like more.

But OEMs don’t like things to be open. Apple has iMessage, Google has RCS, and Samsung probably does some bullshit I’m not aware of since committing to the Pixel life. So I will probably always have a folder with 15 different messaging apps.

Okay, almost done. rm -rf ./*. Wait… pwd. Shit.

I created my first email account in 1999, and it’s the one I use for just about everything to this day. A couple of weeks ago I got fed up with constantly reorganising it. No number of rules or folders really solved the problem. There was just too much shit in there, and I have too much shit in my brain as it is. I deleted all of it. Saw a few flashes of emails to my childhood friends, from my first girlfriend, deceased family members. For a split second I thought “shit, no, these are my memories”. But no. Not anymore they aren’t. You’re free.

Servant. When your whole hook is “eerie and mysterious”, you need to provide some payoff for the viewer at some point. After 4 seasons we got some really underwhelming payoff, and by that point the show had gotten so stale that Leanne was actually getting a significant amount of dialogue, so we also find out that that girl isn’t a great actor. Thank god the production value was so high in other ways, because the narrative itself became very cheap.

That’s a good point. I was thinking the prevailing content here shows that my interests aren’t aligned with those of most members, and it would be inappropriate to post other stuff. Which was a really stupid way to think now that you point it out. Communities are splintered enough in the fediverse. No need to carve out more niches.

Well there are those of us who just feel we’ve done the wrong thing all the time and practically apologise just for existing. Not that that’s better.

It seems not, and I’ve been thinking that if this doesn’t change soon I’ll have to start that community myself. The problem is that during the “building it and waiting for them to come” stage I’d need to contribute to the community to encourage others to do the same, and my only contributions would be stuff like “I really wanted to try the MKC75 and I kept putting it in my cart and I did buy the keycaps that I thought would look really nice with the e-pink but then the board itself sold out and I feel like an idiot”. Would you guys be into that or…?