I’ll use the preset responses sometime for Google but that’s as far as it goes. It’s very cool that you’ve found a way to help your anxiety by using it though.

Funnily enough (not funny actually, considering the war crimes and all), the Old Testament says that the Jews/Isrealites will never get rid of other people living in the area due to not driving them out in their original conquest.

Interesting, I’ve not heard of this shell of ice, and I believe in a young earth. I have heard though of a similar hypothesis based in Genesis 2:5-6 which proposes that it did not rain before Noah’s flood and that plants were kept watered by a heavy mist and/or extremely humid atmosphere. Acoording to this idea, that excess water in the air and ground would’ve been all condensed by God as part of the flood.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the hypothesis, and I do not believe it is essential biblical knowledge so I don’t concern myself with it, but I have heard it before.

I agree with others, this seems like a flat-earther belief that has gotten mixed with Christianity’s creation story.

I’ve heard of it before while browsing the internet, but not from any Christians I personally know. All the Christians I interact with (myself included) believe in a literal interpretation of the creation but nobe of us believe in a physical firmament. I will note that a single man I know denies the moon landing (for reasons I haven’t bothered to ask) but even he still believes in a spherical earth and heliocentric orbit.

My understanding of Genesis 1:6-8 is that the firmament mentioned is the earth’s sky or atmosphere itself, and not a physical barrier at the edge of the atmosphere. The easiest way to show this would be Genesis 1:20 where birds are described as “flying in the firmament of heaven”. If the firmament was a solid object, birds could not fly in it.

The guardian target lock music from Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.

Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it’s a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.

I personally doubt it. If you consider it an addiction then you can compare it to the idea that drug addicts have to take more to get the same high and may even look for more extreme drugs.

I’m worried it would make things worse, but I’m not sure.

I don’t think there is a cutoff.

My 80yo grandfather still pulls out the gamecube to play Mario Kart (and for a long time noone else could beat him). My grandmother before she passed was not really big on video games but would play one specific level of crash bandicoot over and over again.

My 45~yo mother streams minecraft in her free time and is even looking to start up a YouTube channel with more content. Some of her viewers are close to her age and when she was playing more Counter Strike than Minecraft the server she played on had adults of all ages on it.

I’m getting closer to 30 every year and I can’t see myself ever quitting games. If/when I marry I imagine playing games will just be part of family bonding. I may get worse as I age like my grandfather but I doubt I’ll ever stop.

To be fair, it’s got survivor in the name. I love vampire survivors though so I’m pretty pleased to see a DRG spinoff.

Trap him in the house. “If you don’t rock and stone you ain’t going home.”

Is this all that was on this “laptop” I keep seeing people meme about? I haven’t paid the whole situation much attention but this seems like a lot less of a deal than what some people were making it out to be.

Yeah, I think monthly active users is a better metric because I’ve head about some automated mass sign ups that have been happening.

I will point out that Mastodon and Pixelfed are Federated and open source versions of Twitter and Instagram respectively. Although, I do remember seeing something about Pixelfed’s founder stepping away for a while.

Short one hour 4x game? That sounds like a blast to me, particularly with friends.

You can see a good example of this in the gaming sphere as both Path of Exile and Warframe have entire instances for themselves.

I can forgive the issues with Kbin and Lemmy because Reddit has had more time and resources to build the platform. My hope is that with the new attention and the open source nature that Lemmy will show consistent improvement to where I don’t feel like I’m compromising.

Pros

• more attention to the Fediverse and all the advancement that may bring with it.
• If the Fediverse ever becomes mainstream corporations will end up with their own content on it so having Meta join would provides early insight on how the Fediverse may be effected by becoming mainstream.

Cons

• Some instances may not have the server load to support being federated with Meta
• There’s a decent chance it hinders healthy growth (Like a Cuckoo hatchling that starves out the bird’s actual children.)

To be fair, reddit is the same way. There’s an r/pics and r/pic and r/pictures and r/picture and r/photo and etc.

What happened is eventually one of the subreddits (r/pics) rose to the top and the rest are either made private (although that could be the protest) or only have a few users. Lemmy will likely end up the same way, with some of them being popular and some not popular.

The only way I can see multiple popular communites for exactly the same topic is if there is defederation involved (for example, if Beehaw never rejoins the web as a whole, or etc).

There was a time where I’d boot up Libre office for tasks that Google docs wouldn’t cover. But it’s been so long I don’t remember what it was.

Now I just use Docs for all my personal work.

Honestly, it keeps it simpler. The idea of federation and etc can go above the heads of people so it’s probably simpler to just focus on one instance and let the users discover the wider world of federation at their own pace.

Personally though, I would have mentioned Lemmy/Kbin in some capacity.