Since I became an adult I always found it kind of strange. I did not realize just how strange it was until I dropped my son off at Pre-K a little late and walked in to a whole class of 4 year olds hands on hearts mumbling through the pledge. It was sooo eerie.
The pledge was written, by a minister in 1891 without the “under God” part. It was added by Congress in 1954 in the midst of Macarthyism and the Red Scare. In 2002 an appeals court said that forcing public school students to recite it was went against the separation of Church and State, and it was but stayed. The Supreme Court overturned that in 2004, but I think a lot of schools may have dropped it then.
that was a huge issue i had with it too, but i omitted that so i didnt seem like an edgy tween atheist (though its a 100% valid criticism that i should have included).
It's very strange. It's a very doublethink cult. The same people who worship the flag will vote to not give health benefits to 9/11 first responders. Those same people will then use american flag napkins.
Came for the UI. Stayed for the granular settings (including turning federation on and off) and the content just seemed higher quality (though that is very subjective)
Extra features like (apologies for the run-on sentence) being able to see upvotes and downvotes on threads and comments like lemmy admins can, better integration with mastodon, every community has both a 'reddit-like' section like Lemmy/Reddit, and a 'twitter-like' section which as I mentioned integrates with mastodon via hashtags, we can block users, communities, domains and (soon) instances, we have a wide variety of user-style scripts via Tampermonkey to customize the UI (the base UI is also, subjectively, better).
Given its all federated, you also don't lose anything by using kbin since you have access to lemmy too. Plus the dev is just the nicest, hard working son of a bitch lol.
Only drawback is we dont have an API yet, so for mobile you're stuck with the mobile site, but the mobile site is also really good so eh. Once the API is up tho there's a few apps which have already said they'll support kbin as well, so that's a matter of time.
It really is amazing. Was able to scrape a LOT of gorilla tape (it's like FlexTape) residue off of a painted surface using a few applications of goo gone, and an improvised plastic squeegee last weekend. No scratches on the paint, and no more than about 2 minutes of effort on my part.
The only time it's disappointed me was when I was trying to use it -- among a variety of other substances -- to deal with something other than sticker goo.
A few years back, a bunch of electronic devices were sold in the US that used some sort of rubberized coating that gave them a nice grippy feeling. Unfortunately, it turns out that after a couple of years, the coating degraded and turned into an incredibly sticky mess. I had a Grundig G6 Aviator shortwave radio that was affected, as well as a few other devices. It felt a bit like sticker adhesive, but trying to clean the stuff off with Goo Gone didn't work well (ultimately, isopropyl alcohol and a lot of elbow grease wound up being my most-successful combination).
But for what it is actually billed for, adhesive residue, I've had good experiences.
Note that Goo Gone, or at least the variant I have, has a quite-strong citrus smell, which I assume is there to mask some less-pleasant smell that the active ingredients have. So when I use the stuff, everything nearby smells like oranges for a while. Haven't had a situation where that's a problem yet, but thought I'd mention it in case it would be an issue for anyone else using it.
If it's a rubberized coating on new devices, it may be a similar formula that doesn't have the degradation problem. I haven't personally had any devices do that in several years (not saying that there aren't products that do, mind).
And I remember that when the coating was new, before it broke down into a horrible sticky mess in a few years after purchase, it did feel pretty good to me. And it seemed pretty durable -- like, it didn't wear through or anything.
Just that when the Stickyocalypse did happen, it was awful.
I remember reading on Reddit once that people who bought a variety of dress shoes with a particular type of substance used in their soft soles had something similar happen. For a few years, many types of shoes from different manufacturers would break down and degrade in the closet. You take them out after a couple years, and they just crumbled apart. Wasn't a sticky mess, but I bet that people who rarely wore those shoes were pretty irked.
Anyway, point is, the industry moved away from that particular fiasco after a couple of years when the problem came to light, switched to similar substances without the problem. I wouldn't be surprised if the electronics industry has done the same.
Or any kind of oil. Even WD-40, if you have it. Put oil on the adhesive residue, then scrub it off with a cloth. You can then remove the oily residue with soap.
I rage quit Lemmy when I saw the developers of it defending genocide. Previously I had heard about that through the grapevine and thought I could hold my nose and use Lemmy anyway but when I read the actual discussion it made me sick.
Plus I know the language kbin is written in so I can contribute better to kbin.
This is when I came over to kbin. Never saw it myself but was warned of it.
The kicking-off point was that I actually had created two communities and made a post in each one talking about how I was toying with the idea of using the Reddit API to mirror posts into them from the subreddits of the same name and then they magically disappeared (I assumed deleted by admins). So I dug into it and asked @feditips and was told they don't recommend Lemmy for those same reasons.
Turns out it was a weird nuance of language settings that hid them from me, despite being a mod of the new communities. So they are still there, but now I'm SERIOUSLY questioning the capabilities to moderate if I couldn't see posts because of language selection, especially my own posts.
If I remember correctly @ernest once described kbin as a "gateway for the fediverse" (but at the moment I don't have a source for that).
This would allow kbin to gather and integrate even more services from the fediverse - maybe
As a genX-er, I grew up having to say it through elementary and middle school. I quit participating in the mid ‘80s. We were forced to attend John Birch Society events in school hat would talk about how horrible Russia was and how they fed propaganda to the kids from an early age. Reagan would always talk about all the horrible things USSR would do with their childhood propaganda too. I realized right away that everything the school was doing was the same thing.
I got labeled as a bad kid. Not Christian enough and not obedient enough.
Also Gen X (1971) and while I remember it in first grade (so this would have been around 1976-77) I don't think it continued much past 1st grade. MAYBE 2nd. So I lucked out there I suppose. I cannot imagine getting indoctrinated by JBS though. I'm sure it would have gone down well in a lot of the midwest where I grew up, but I suppose I also lucked out there in that the school board and staff were pretty apolitical when it came to school structure.
The irony, to me, is that town is liberal now. The surrounding county is super maga but the city is all hippie liberal. But as a child, this Colorado town was Texas red. Don’t spend money on education because we need a better high school football stadium type of town.
Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!
There were so many times I was browsing reddit and thought to myself, "this didn't deserve a post of its own." Was it content related to the subreddit? Absolutely. But it was simple, trite, repetitive - for example, just someone having a halfway neat experience in a game, but with an incident for which the novelty had worn thin for long-term players long ago. (oh so your taming inspiration lined up with a thrumbo passing, wao sugoi moving on....)
On the flip side, I'd often want to share my inane thoughts about a topic with others interested in that topic, but I knew my inane thoughts didn't really warrant a whole post. Sometimes I just wanted to say "I thought this event story was neat" without adding a "what did you think?" and massaging whatever discussion thread followed.
So, in short, I had a higher standard for what counted as discussion-worthy and was dissatisfied when both consuming and producing content because of it.
The kbin magazine blend of discussion threads and microblogs is perfect for this sort of problem, in my opinion, which is why kbin is my ideal setup. You clearly define when you want to make a discussion space for everyone vs. when you want to just bounce a thought into other like-minded people simply by whether you create a thread or a microblog, and you don't need two different sites (reddit/twitter, or lemmy/mastodon) to do it.
Some subreddits already had a daily/weekly discussion thread pinned to the top to serve exactly this purpose. Kbin's just taken that idea and made it a default part of the software.
I was never a big fan of twitter/mastodon random personal ramblings that would fill my feed so I was naturally very skeptical of the microblogging feature in kbin, but honestly... it kinda makes sense here!
If I'm on a magazine for some game like elden ring, for example, it makes sense to keep threads for big threaded conversations while using the microblog for just small thoughts, tips, screenshots, for sharing personal accomplishments or smaller things like that which don't usually create big discussions. If I need to ask a quick question I can just make a microblog post and maybe get answers even from people using mastodon that aren't on kbin or lemmy!
I'm mostly repeating what you said, I know, but just wanted to gush about it a bit, it's a pretty cool idea.
@RMiddleton Yep. Means the author removed a letter from the word. So in the image above the author removed a d or s from the word waive. It just helps the quote make sense in context of the passage.
If you aren't already a really good writer, Gammarly Plus will make your work worse because you'll accept everything it tells you, and most of its corrections (compared to regular Grammarly) are straight-up wrong. It ignores your voice, your audience, your tone, your context, etc.
That said, my work pays for Grammarly Plus & I put work-related blog posts (which will end up public anyway) through it. I like the plus version because:
It forces me to really reread everything, because it highlights fucking everything. Often I will make changes unrelated to what it's saying.
It often highlights things that can be improved, but not in the way it suggests.
Sometimes, it's actually correct.
But usually it's wrong. For example:
It tells you to remove passive voice 100% of the time. This is straight-up incorrect. For example, if you're writing a post in which you talk about a new feature or patchnotes, you will use passive voice all the time. Sometimes the object of the sentence is actually the most important thing.
It often says "be more confident!" and then removes any nuance in your writing that you were using to soften the blow of something, or to make something sound more exciting, or etc.
It always tells you things like "don't use the word interesting! don't use this other word! they are too common!" Well...
Using random fancy words is an anti-pattern. Keep on saying "interesting"
Sometimes, this word in question is LITERALLY A TECHNICAL TERM IN YOUR FIELD. STOP TELLING ME NOT TO REPEAT IT.
It always wants me to say "So," at the start of every sentence. Jesus shut up. This is a thing I'm trying to REMOVE from my writing because it's a bad habit.
Anyway. I'd say it's right about 10% of the time, max. Would I pay for it? Hell fucking no. Am I using it since it's already available? Yes, absolutely. But I'm not accepting many of its changes.
Again, though, REGULAR Grammarly is usually right. Unless you have code snippets HAHAHAHAHAHAHA have fun having your Python code proofread for the rule "comma goes inside the quote." lmao. Literally they could ignore everything inside triple backticks, but do they? No.
I wish I'd known how nice a place this is ages ago! After 10 years I was so institutionalised to the way reddit was, it was really hard to imagine using anything else and having anything like as nice a user experience. So many times over the last few days I've suddenly realised that for hours I've been browsing Kbin and not reddit. It's a nice feeling. Also, now I've replaced all my reddit bookmarks with Kbin ones which makes it feel a lot more permanent.
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