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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I hate airbnb. I live in a place in the US that depends on tourism that also has a bad housing shortage for locals who cannot find affordable rentals. Tourists come and pay the excessive prices to stay at airbnb places that should instead be used for long term rentals to the actual residents who live here. Tourists should go to hotels which are meant for them instead of wrecking the housing market.

    I spent years being homeless because the little long term rentals that open up every so often have such high prices. I have stayed at places that were unpermitted since that’s what I could afford, I cannot stress how awful it was being off-grid away from town with no transportation. No bathroom either. Power, outlets, etc. completely exposed. And when I finally got section 8 (after years of waiting for an opening and then years waiting for the selection to happen), no landlord would lower the price or even rent to someone using section 8 so I had to “network” to find someone that would let me rent with them as long as I illegally gave them extra money every month since they felt their property has more value than what section 8 covers, oh also lease says utilities included but you need to pay for your own utilities. Yeah every landlord I’ve had with section 8 has done that so far because section 8 pays more if utilities are included. We need rent control and airbnb banned asap. We are not doing OK.


  • I never considered Zippys fast food, more like a diner that hands you a menu at your table. The food doesn’t taste good since it is all frozen food that I assume is microwaved but have no qualms charging you as if they were a proper restaurant. I think they are only popular because there was nowhere to eat back then so people go there for nostalgia. If I had no choice but to go to a fast food joint, I would much rather go to a different one on the list than Zippys, it’s cheaper and tastes better but still pretty unhealthy.


  • This has nothing to do with MFA. Reread the article.

    To understand these questions, you have to know how the scam works. Here’s what typically happens: One of my social media accounts goes down. Suddenly — in a way that feels too quick to be a coincidence, though it’s unclear exactly how they might get an account down taken down — a stranger contacts me via Twitter DMs or email. They promise they’ll get my account back if I pay a price. Sometimes, they claim they have an inside man at Meta.

    Performer Abigail Mac has received these messages after losing her account. “It’s people that work at Instagram,” Mac says she believes. “[They’re] extorting them and just stealing their money.”

    In her most recent ordeal, Mac says, Meta took down her account then she received a message from a scammer, offering to retrieve the account for $15,000. They swore the account would disappear forever if she didn’t pay them in 24 hours. She replied that she would get her account back herself.

    “Then they asked me what my budget was,” Mac says. “Every day [they] would knock some money off. It’s such a scam.”

    The scarier scenario occurs when someone messages you are saying, “Hey, save my stuff in case you lose your account.” Then, whoopsie doodle, lo and beyond, your account’s gone. Now, when I receive these messages, my stomach drops.

    The worst part is when I’ve paid these people, it’s often worked. They’ve retrieved my account. I’m thankful for that, but it raises questions about how these people operate and what they know, not just about sex workers’ Instagram accounts, but everyone’s. How do they get the accounts back? Where do they work when they’re not retrieving sex workers’ accounts? How do they communicate with Meta to fix the problem? And why does your account get deleted over and over again once you pay these people?

    “Once you pay, they know you will pay and keep doing it,” Mac says.

    Girls have paid up to $20,000 and have not gotten their accounts back. It’s plausible these scam artists message a girl, report her account, and then contact her via another avenue, such as Twitter or email. But there’s no way to know for sure. For all the talk about the dangers of social media, from teenage anorexia rates to smartphone addiction, the public pays little attention to the harms sex workers face on these sites. (Unless a porn star is fucking a president, you’re not going to see her on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.) We need Meta to investigate the problem and identify what has gone wrong before more people get scammed.


  • Clothing that is UPF 50 can provide protection but unless your wardrobe is filled with these specialized clothing you won’t get the same protection. For instance, a white T-shirt provides only moderate sun protection, with a UPF of about 7. When that T-shirt gets wet, it provides a UPF of only 3. A dark, long-sleeved denim shirt can provide a UPF of about 1,700; in essence, complete sun protection. (https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/sun-protection/sun-protective-clothing/)

    It’s recommended to use both sunscreen and sun protective clothing by just about every skin cancer authority (https://www.cancer.org.au/cancer-information/causes-and-prevention/sun-safety/preventing-skin-cancer). I have no idea what data you are referring to that sunscreen is not a good thing, I suspect exposure to fear mongering from the “natural” anti-science crowd. Let me guess, you think sunscreen is a hormonal disruptor even though you would need to use oxybenzone (the “worst” one) sunscreen continuously for 277 years to get the equivalent amount to cause a noticeable hormonal effect - so even oxybenzone is considered safe. Or you think “nano” sunscreen is bad even though the studies so far have found that the nanoparticles don’t get very far into the skin (only to the dead layers of the stratum corneum). It’s possible that nanoparticles will penetrate further if you apply them on broken skin, but they’re currently considered safe.

    Physical vs chemical sunscreens is a debate with a lot of misinformation and fear mongering because people will drink water while not registering water is a filthy cHeMiCaL (half joking). You should be much more concerned where you buy your sunscreen because the US has shitty standards for UVA protection while the other countries have much better UVA systems and standards. I can’t even begin to debunk this but here we go:

    https://labmuffin.com/chemical-vs-physical-sunscreens-the-science-with-video/

    Physical and Chemical work the same

    Physical sunscreen ingredients (more correctly known as inorganic sunscreen ingredients) are zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.

    Chemical sunscreen ingredients (more correctly known as organic sunscreen ingredients) are everything else.

    The reason organic (carbon-based) and inorganic (not carbon-based) is a better classification than chemical/physical is that there’s overlap between how they work. Both types work by absorbing UV and turning it into heat. Inorganic sunscreens also scatter and reflect about 5-10% of the incoming UV, as do some particulate organic sunscreens like Tinosorb M, so really they should be classified as both chemical and physical.

    Natural things aren’t better than synthetic, man-made things

    The amount of heat produced from UV by sunscreen is really, imperceptibly tiny. There’s also only a 5% difference in the heat produced by the two types of sunscreens, since physical sunscreens also absorb about 95% of the UV they protect you from.

    Even if they were – physical sunscreens aren’t even natural. They’re processed to get rid of toxic contaminants, and often need to be coated in synthetic chemicals to stop them from being photocatalytic, and prevent them from clumping up and causing patchy protection.

    https://www.kindofstephen.com/physical-vs-chemical-sunscreens-myths/

    Even more detailed explanation

    Chemicals are physical – they have a mass and take up space. On the other end, the “physical” sunscreens titanium dioxide and zinc oxide are chemicals, you can find the elements titanium and zinc on the periodic table.

    In marketing, organic is a label that describes how something is produced – often with a safe-list of chemical treatments and approved practices.

    In chemistry, organic means the chemistry of compounds that contain carbon. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide don’t contain carbon. They’re made up of metal and oxygen and classified as inorganic.

    Marking the categories as organic and inorganic makes more sense because all of the sunscreen chemicals used contain carbon, except for titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.

    It’s often said that inorganic sunscreens (titanium dioxide and zinc oxide) reflect UV off of the skin and organic sunscreens absorb UV and convert it into heat. In reality, for most of the UV spectrum they work very similarly.

    Organic sunscreens absorb UV because of the way the bonds between their carbon molecules are arranged… The energy from UV light promotes electrons in the conjugated carbon bonds of organic sunscreen molecules from a lower energy state to a higher energy excited state. The excited electrons in the bonds then relax or release the absorbed energy by stretching, vibrating, or bending – this turns that energy into heat.

    Inorganic sunscreens work very similarly – even though their structure is different from organic sunscreens… The principle behind the UV protection is exactly the same as organic sunscreens.

    There is a strong belief that these inorganic metal oxide sunscreens act by reflecting UV light instead of absorbing it, but this isn’t the complete story. UV light is divided into UVB and UVA. UVB is between 280 to 315 or 320 nm and UVA is between 315 or 320 to 400 nm. Inorganic sunscreens predominately absorb in the UVB spectrum and reflect in the long UVA (above 360 nm) and visible spectrum. Only about 5% of UVB light is reflected by inorganic sunscreens and the remainder gets absorbed and converted – just like organic sunscreens.

    Both organic and inorganic sunscreen particles can penetrate into the upper layers of the skin. If and how much they penetrate is dependent on properties like their particle or molecular size as well as the overall sunscreen formula. This isn’t a desired effect and formulators work to reduce the amount that penetrates. Modern organic sunscreens often have larger molecular sizes, chemical and physical properties, or even coatings which make it more difficult for them to penetrate past the surface of the skin.

    Keep in mind that skin penetration doesn’t mean that it’s causing harm to our bodies. There has to be a biological mechanism for it cause an effect. There is a lot current and ongoing research into this area, but we don’t have any strong answers yet.



  • This is definitely a con of Lemmy for me. I like to be more privacy focused but Lemmy gives you 0 privacy on whatever you do on the website. Anyone who wants more privacy on Lemmy is told you have no right to privacy, don’t expect any privacy, everything you do is public on the internet, etc. A massive boner killer for me. I think basic things like deleting your own post or comments should actually get removed from all servers, PMs should not be viewable by anyone except the recipients, and what you vote on or subscribe to should be private. Lemmy doesn’t sell your data but that’s because anyone can take the data for free. I thought this stuff was because Lemmy is still new and will get to it eventually but the push back seems to say this was a choice or is not broken. I ended up exploring different social media alternatives but I like the style of Lemmy better since it is more reddit-like with an active user base plus has different android clients. I don’t like kbin because it shows who upvoted or downvoted something to everyone - it’s not accountability when it erodes your privacy.

    I used to comment on Lemmy more but then I ran into this problem when juggling multiple accounts, Liftoff sucks ass at letting you know which account you are logged into (I use Summit now and it is better at it) so I ended up getting my accounts’ wires crossed when I thought using the drop down on your accounts changed your account but no you have to go to manage instances to switch which was not intuitive. I ended up abandoning the accounts when I couldn’t figure out how to actually delete the post from the server.

    Edit: man I wish I saw this sooner, might be time for me to either stop posting again or look somewhere else.


  • I have to agree. I considered Standard Notes but I would have to pay for super notes in order to use images, even if I self-host. Same for code blocks, organizing notes into folders, spreadsheets, web clipper. Have to get the most expensive plan for offline access and being able to have local backups, although it is discounted if you self-host completely but why still pay a sub at that point? I would rather pay once and then be able to self-host using their super notes without paying more every month.

    I liked Obsidian but wanted encryption that works on my android so I went with Joplin.



  • I wish I could install lineage on my s10+ snapdragon. I just got this phone and now I just ordered a pixel to get grapheneos. I was willing to pay this guy on telegram to unlock my phone so I could try to get lineage to work or at least a custom rom, but my bootloader is one update off, I have v6 but he only supports up to v5. I hate ordering new devices when my current ones are still functional. I also am getting rid of my fitbit I also just got and replacing it with the amazon band 5 since it can connect to gadgetbridge. Degoogling is expensive, it shouldn’t be this bad just to get privacy. I’m not sure what to do with my devices I am replacing, but I hate that they had to be replaced in the first place. I also switched from google services to proton mail/drive/vpn.



  • Godamn that reminds me of college, I had a class at 7-8ish in the morning but the only bus that could get me there in time left around 5am so I was waking up at 4am to get ready. I would just find a bench to go to sleep until my class started at that point. I had classes throughout the day with hours in between each one so I would stay most of the day at college, spending a lot of time sleeping and trying to study / do homework. The bus is not free for students here. No trains here either. I am not able-bodied so I can’t just walk but it’s a 40 minute drive from where I lived to college with a long highway so I don’t think people are walking that anyway.

    I can definetly sympathize with you, it sounds very rough. Just gotta hang in there!


  • I had to take the bus and it left at *7:00am so I was waking up around 6ish everyday. I was constantly tired and had trouble staying awake in school. Taking the bus back put me at arriving at 4pm home. It was awful tbh. I see grade school years, especially high school, as the worst years of my life followed closely by early adulthood in college.


  • Admittedly I only read one mod post by you, the sticky. If the other ones are also important you can sticky more than two posts, which was the limit on reddit.

    Being a mod sucks, I used to mod and I feel better now that I’ve abandoned it because I am just not suited for it. I’m sure everyone here appreciates your work into the community. I hated being the only person posting and some of my posts would get downvoted which was confusing. At least people are commenting, I didn’t even get that hah. I don’t mean my previous post to be an attack on your moderating, it’s a thankless job and you should have rules you feel is right as long as the community goes along with it I don’t see a reason to change. You’re not supposed to personally attack or insult people on your instance so it makes sense that is a rule.

    I checked lemmy.world’s code of conduct and the official citizen code of conduct linked on the join-lemmy page that’s here. This is probably where we disagree about what is doxxing and why when I checked there wasn’t an actual rule for censoring usernames. If someone posts something with their real name and any other personal real info, they have doxxed themselves and I don’t think posting their name at that point is doxxing. This includes public figures too (reddit required you censor even the usernames of public figures and have banned people for posting a congress person’s Twitter handle even though their own rules are supposed to not apply to public figures, ban appeals denied). I’m not saying to post their personal address or phone number, but just the username/handle is fine because they have already provided that information. If their username is redbaron, and they haven’t posted their real name, then it is doxxing to post their real name in that case. I also don’t think censoring a username will stop someone from finding it especially if they want to do some malicious thing, I think that is wishful thinking at that point.

    But all I was saying was that censoring usernames is/was not an actual rule in lemmy or lemmy.world or this community at the time. If you think that since this sub is for mocking people that you want to censor it so hopefully people don’t find the subject person to harass them then I guess it makes sense, I can see the logic. I do like the idea of holding a vote that everyone can see (I outlined why the ratio on my comment isn’t representative of the whole community). But I know it is a lot of work on one person and I am the wrong person to even bring this up, I was thinking of not commenting in this community again because the reddit hive mind is already here and I’ve also made things worse for you when you want actual contributors and mods and not people nitpicking a rule. I don’t think you are a bad guy, I’m sorry if my comments had a bad tone to them because that was not my intention.


  • I’ve been downvoted for saying facts just like I did with my previous comment here so I wouldn’t read into it as this is what the community for sure wants. I checked the rules and it was not there so I commented that, it’s not an opinion but people get triggered all the same because they are used to reddit’s rules and assume lemmy is like reddit. But it is not, the different instances have their different rules and communities have rules on top of that. If you want to change the rules that’s up to you. Generally a vote might be nice, one that everyone can see and it isn’t hidden in this comment chain (the OP of this chain is already hidden by downvotes) and isn’t determined by only 20 people. Personally, it’s a waste of time because you can easily lookup the tweet and find the person. But if people want it to be this way because they think it “helps”, I guess that’s how it will be. But at least the community will have a voice even if it is something I feel is a waste. I feel more irritated by the constant censoring of “bad words” and don’t care so much about the usernames, after all it can be easily looked up if you want. I wouldn’t downvote a post over it like OP said but I can see where the frustration comes from, how corporations want to sanitize the internet. Anyway, thanks for listening to my rambling.




  • I was talking about the metal arms stretching, it stretches because it would clip horribly and wouldn’t follow the arm movement properly.

    But for breast size, you have to make two versions of the armor with breasts and without breasts (flat like a man’s chest) that are basically swapping parts of the outfit out as a “slider” (these have to be remade completely). Then people like me will want breast sliders that are small breasts to larger breasts (these would be morphs so you can’t add or remove geometry to make them, instead you would try to mold them) and so you’re making quite a few different versions of the outfit just to make sliders work and high/low weights for them. The second set of sliders would be more popular but some games don’t even give us that lol. It takes development time for this stuff and making AAA video games is all about cutting corners, crunching, trying to do everything with as little money spent as possible, etc. Making sliders can easily double to triple the work required. Ever look at the baldurs gate 3 mod section searching for a larger breast version? You’re gonna run into clipping galore since every outfit has to be redone and the mods don’t redo every outfit. The Sims is the only game series I know that care enough about giving people sliders for everything.

    I’ve played every major Sims game and they all had the clipping issue for hair and clothes. To make things like belts and pockets work they paint them on in the textures. Same way underwear is made. Saints Row had sliders but there was still clipping with it, for instance necklaces were floating on top of the outfits whether you had a shirt on or not (this also happened on Sims) just to try to minimize clipping. Another tactic used in games is to not have long hair, keep it above the shoulders as much as possible.

    Body hair has to be remade for both character models, but that would probably be less work than sliders. Work still has to be done, it’s not as simple as copy + paste.

    Anyway, that’s just my rambling. It takes a lot of development time to make sliders work which is why it gets omitted a lot. I hope more games allow more sliders, but I understand why a game wouldn’t do it.


  • It would be a lot worse if they tried doing what you want and make armor not bend/deform but have the arms bend with the skeleton anyway. I take it you haven’t done much gamedev when it comes to 3D modeling/animating? You should really get into it and try for yourself. You can even mod a game so you don’t have to make everything yourself from scratch. You’ve made up your mind that it is inexcusable without trying it for yourself.

    Hair clips because it doesn’t have physics on it usually, preventing the clipping would mean calculating the hair colliding with whatever else which can be taxing on the engine. Video games need to have the least amount of taxing resources in order to run smoothly, especially on older hardware. Many games choose to make hair static instead because of this.

    What games are you talking about btw? I’m in my 30s and I remember games always being like this. You might be having some rose colored glasses going on, I very much remember how jank early games were haha


  • I too like having sliders in my games but it takes extra time and effort to make these sliders work. You have to change the shape of the body without adding or removing polygons. And you have to get rid of the jank that appears (parts poking out weirdly/overlapping) when using the slider. It’s not as easy as you think. For something like the Sims, it means making each outfit three times for the three body types and a high and low version for every slider option. Not every game has time/money for this type of development. Swapping out body hair is much more doable. But swapping out breasts is not doable unless they make each outfit have a version with breasts and a version without.

    I don’t think the games are doing stuff like this out of malice, I think they just didn’t feel a need to spend extra resources or doubling their work to cater to a smaller population that really likes sliders. It’s funny though when you see Baldur’s Gate allow female bodies to have a penis but not allow sliders for the boobs and butt.