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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’re right, they don’t.

    The ones beginning with “d” generally translate as “of the,” while the “à” ones generally translate as “to the” or “at the.”

    French has three words that mean “the”: “le” (masculine), “la” (feminine), and “les” (plural).


  • I had an surprising one, actually: I went to a private religious school, but I had a strangely comprehensive sex education.

    It started with unvarnished discussions of human anatomy and cautions about sexual abuse around age 8, and then moved on to the basics of (hetero)sexuality by the time I was a preteen. In high school that continued, though talk about birth control was postponed until the health units of later physical education courses, which not everyone took. Of course, the stress was always that sexual activity should be limited to monogamous (heterosexual) marriage, and there was no mention of anything outside of the hetero-normative.

    The last wrinkle was that it was all opt-out. At every point, there was at least one person who would leave the room for the duration of the class because their parents really didn’t want them learning about naughty bits.

    So it ended up actually providing a pretty good foundation. It was still incomplete and biased, but a lot better than what you would expect when you hear “private religious school.”


  • BenVimes@lemmy.catome_irl@lemmy.worldme_irl
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    4 months ago

    Honestly, James Stephanie Sterling.

    I had been following them since The Escapist days, but a few years ago I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was only interested in their Jimquisition stuff, and that had gotten really samey week over week.

    It felt extra bad because this was after they had already lost like 20% of their subscribers for other reasons. I really hate that I might be lumped in with all those lovely folks when my reasons for leaving were entirely separate.

    I still appreciate their message, though. I still think the Digital Homicide saga is one of the more interesting Internet dramas I’ve been witness to. And I still check in from time to time, mostly for their year-end lists and if something specific has happened in the gaming industry that I want their opinion on.

    What I’m trying to say is, thank God for JSS, but only in small doses for me personally.


  • “Swearing”

    5th grade, first day at a new school. I’m trying to meet new kids, but I’m terribly awkward. I try to lead one conversation with some humour “Did you know the Bible says you shouldn’t covet your neighbour’s ass?”

    Cue some other kid running off to find a teacher, which resulted in me having to skip recess and write an essay about how I shouldn’t swear because it is a bad influence on younger kids.

    Over the following four years I was on the receiving end of invective many times more aggressive and offensive, sometimes right in front of teachers, but I never saw another kid punished for foul language.




  • I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.

    I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for “green flags.” Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn’t mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren’t very good at writing about themselves.

    I’ll also say there’s only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There’s a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You’ll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, “unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I’ll ask you on a date and we’ll see how things go.”

    There’s also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren’t magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you’ll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you’ll need to take a break because you’ve literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won’t work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one’s physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.














  • You are welcome.

    Pointers do make more sense to me now than two decades ago, mostly owing to me being married to a computer scientist. But I always go back the fact that for the purposes of my first year programming course, pointers were (probably) unnecessary and thus confusing. I have a hard time understanding things if not given an immediate and tangible use case, and pointers didn’t really help me when most of my programs used a bare few functions and some globally defined variables to solve simple physics problems.

    EDIT: I’ll also say that pointers alone weren’t what sunk my interested in programming, they’re just an easily identifiable concept that sticks out as “not making sense.” At around the same time we had the lesson on pointers, our programs were also starting to reach a critical mass of complexity, and the amount of mental work I had to do to follow along became more than I was willing to put into it - it wasn’t “fun” anymore. I only did well on my final project because a friend patiently sat in my dorm room for a few hours and talked me through each step of the program, and then fed me enough vocabulary to convince the TA that I knew what I was doing.