There should be a fourth panel where you’re holding onto gaming and start looking at depression … to complete the cycle

… worst level so far!

We’ve passed the point months, years ago …

The idiot is not Turnip … America is the collective idiot that puts up with all this shit and accepts it

I no longer think of him as dumb … I think of the entire US government and its people as collectively stupid for making all this possible.

It’s some sort of a disassociative childhood trauma that we put up inside ourselves to either forget something horrible, traumatic or just generally depressive.

I grew up poor in my Indigenous family and everywhere I turned from the moment I was born, there was near constant tragedy and trauma. And if it wasn’t happening around me, people were also remarking, remembering or recalling even more horrible things from the past. On top of that, I basically attended one or more funerals for friends, family or close relatives every single year of my life until I was 20 and left home. I saw funerals for old people, middle aged people, adults, teenagers, children and babies. Add to that the reality of knowing that as a kid, everything was kind of OK but I knew that as an adult I would be completely on my own and would have to do something while living in a world that probably didn’t want me because I was just another ‘Indian’.

By the time I was about 12 - 13 a switch went off in my head that basically said … ‘OK let’s turn everything off and just run on auto pilot for a while’ … it’s a coping mechanism to just forget and disassociate from everything and everyone and just go on living without really thinking about anything. I have entire years of my teenage life that are just black empty periods with no memory. I still have family and friends who come up to me to say ‘hey, remember that time you did that amazing thing?’, ‘you jumped from a high dive at the lake’, ‘you did an amazing jump with a dirt bike and crashed and flipped a million times’, ‘you played hockey with so and so and you guys won a tournament’ … entire periods of my life that are just blank, empty and lost. Sometimes I think really hard and look back and its like trying to recall a TV show or movie I saw 30 years ago and just remember an image or two but nothing about what the movie was about.

I’ve never been diagnosed with anything or ever seen a doctor or psychiatrist about any of this … never had the time or the money or the access to see one. By the time I could afford it all, I had pretty much dealt with my inner (and outer) demons in my life to be able to live with it all. Alcoholism was another problem I had to deal with and AA, NA, Al-Anon and years of being part of support groups really helped a lot. And I’ve seen the same thing with so many people like me that I grew up with and so many other young Native people I see today.

Yeah … I don’t like giving Reddit any more activity of any kind. If I see an image from there that I want to share, I’ll download it and reupload it to Lemmy. Reddit links are hideous and any time you directly go to an image link, it draws up a Reddit page to present the image, giving the site another complex hit that forces you to interact with their dumb site. These links are also specifically designed to just mess up any linking to any other service because it forces people to only see the content on the Reddit site and nowhere else.

To anyone reading this … if you see a Reddit image, gif or webm that you want to share … download it (or screenshot it) and reupload it and never bother linking the original Reddit link.

I’m guessing you’re a guy … or you had a heated accident after that hot sauce

This is the most thrilling dullness I’ve seen in the community … thank you for your service.

How warm is your empty chair after you’ve sat in it for an hour

The greatest thing that social media ever did for humanity was in its ability to allow all of us to talk to each other in an open platform.

Those private corporate platforms have slowly been eroded and controlled to only waste our time and designed to keep us all angry, afraid, anxious and confused.

Open decentralized social media is bringing us back to that era 20 years ago when social media was just starting and people just talked and openly discussed the issues of the day with one another. It doesn’t matter what kind of platform we have or can create, as long as it is decentralized and controlled by people, everyone will always find value in it because it allows us to talk to one another. The greatest thing I’ve ever found in taking part in the fediverse was in connecting to like minded people who want to talk about the important issues of the day without all the distractions of advertising and without having having to give up my privacy or security and have my identity sold to the highest bidder.

Gotta hand it to our ancient ancestors and all those guys and gals who saw weird things in nature and said … “I wonder if can eat this?” … “This looks yummy.” … or that friend who said … “Dare you to eat that”

And the foods we got out of it only account for those daring adventurous tasters who survived. No one counts all those unfortunate souls who died eating things they shouldn’t have.

We are the bridge generation.

We know and saw a world without the internet and we experienced it when it first came to be.

We saw the first mass produced computers and computer devices which broke often, didn’t work the way we wanted them to, they weren’t fast and they didn’t have much memory in any way. We were the first generation to see all this. Our parents were too old and busy to figure it out but we were young enough to be curious about it all. We also kept wanting to have the newest fastest hardware and software so we had no choice but to either buy, beg or steal these things to get them. We learned to swap parts, add parts, remove parts, install an OS, uninstall the OS, run backups, store data and learn it all on our own because there was no easy internet social media community to help you. Software was constantly changing and we had to keep up by either buying expensive titles or we learned about Linux and open source software or we became digital pirates or both.

Now the digital landscape has changed. Younger generations prefer handheld devices so to them everything is solid state … they never can imagine changing the RAM, HDD, SSD, CPU, GPU or the PSU or even bothering to learn what those things are. Because everything is built in and no one (or very few) people bother with fixing or tinkering with anything. There are fewer people who learn about software and about how or where to find it, install it, configure it and run it. To new generations who only know the digital world through locked devices, there was less incentive to learn or even have access to know how these things worked.

We are the bridge generation. We got to see the world without the internet and the world with one. No one before us got to see what we saw, no one after us will experience what we went through. Our civilization dramatically changed during our lifetime and we got a front row seat.