I’m sure he only means it as “this is the shitty way the world actually works”. Not that he personally believes it himself.

Been running Manjaro for years. Don’t really know what would make me change.

I guess maybe if I suddenly started getting more and more dependency errors when upgrading packages from the AUR it would make me consider jumping to put Arch.

But right not that’s not the case. So the benefit of switching is out weighed by the pain in the ass of having to say Everything up again.

I’m not interested in a homelessness solution put forward by someone with “Green” in their title…

They’re not acceptable. In fact I can’t think of a single one except burnt that is still actively kicking around.

Who told you it was acceptable, if you don’t mind me asking. And if it was your english teacher, please ask them how they managed to get here from all the way back in Shakespeare’s time.

Past 30, age is less about biology and more sociology.

I’m a 49 year old male. But I’m divorced, no kids. Still living a bachelor life quite happily while most guys close to my age are married with the kids and coaching soccer on weekends in a minivan. As a result, my friend group almost exclusively skews younger because those are the people who are in the same stage of life as I am (regardless of biological age).

The same works for relationships. Past a certain point it doesn’t matter how old you are, as long as your sociological age is compatible. (Ie. Your way of life)

Edited to Add: The rule we always learned in highschool when we were stupid kids with nothing better to do is “half your age plus 7”

51 divided by 2 = 25.5 + 7 = 32.5.

So by highschool rules, you’re just a little bit outside the lines, but close enough that if you’re both attractive most people will ignore it.

This is basically going to make the population choose between smoking and having kids.

Hell I’d start smoking again.

I have an orange sweater that I got for a christmas present all the way back in 2001 that, despite nearly daily use a my “lounging around at home sweater”, is still in almost perfect shape except for the colours fading a bit in the places that see a lot of robbing (elbows, etc…)

Cromite. A de-googled, hardened fork of Chromium. Not perfect by any means. But it gets the job done admirably.

No worries. I freely admit that my entire opinion on the subject of self-publishing is elitist and condescending as all hell. So I can put on my big-boy pants and take a bit of my own medicine back. No worries.

But no, I didn’t take your response as condescending. You’re right that a person can sort and filter. But a filter should almost be an option, not a necessity. I’ll happily sort by genre, or page count, or yes…even ratings, to find something interesting to me.

But I shouldn’t have to have a button that says “sort out any crap that hasn’t even gone through a cursory elementary school grammar course”. There’s a line in the sand of what should and shouldn’t be acceptable in any business environment that nominally wants people to spend money with them, and “making my customers weed out unprofessional garbage” should (IMO) be that line. Amazon, Kobo, or wherever, should at the bare minimum be telling people front and centre, “this is the minimum level of quality you can expect…feel free to sort however you like, but we at least guarantee that every book will meet a certain level of literacy.”

I admire your optimism about cream rising to the top. But I just can’t share it.

The average person isn’t going to spend an hour digging through a literal trash-heap on Amazon in order to find something worth their time. They’ll give up after five minutes of reading terrible review after terrible review and then go find something else to do with their time.

And thus the collective intelligence of humanity drops; not because they’re actually reading all of this white noise of self-published crap. But because they’re not reading at all because of the effort it takes to weed through it at the book store (digital or otherwise).

The best example I can give is how “Oprah’s Book Club” (am I giving away how damn old I am yet?) got people reading. They read because they didn’t have to go and find this stuff themselves. Someone curated it for them, told them “Hey…this is good”.

If the average reader didn’t have Oprah and had to dig through five thousand Amazon self-published “suggestions” before stumbling onto Toni Morrison or Push by Sapphire, they’re quickly go doom scroll Facebook instead.

Like I said, I admire your optimism and a part of me wishes I could share it. But the idea that the lack of any accountability for self-“published” drivel completely muddies any real “discover-ability” of the actual good stuff is a hill that my elitist ass will happily die on.

But if some are as bad as you say they are, then they’ll get rejected all the same

Oh I don’t disagree with you on that.

However, because the barrier to entry is gone, and even financially there’s no barrier to getting your work out there, even rejection isn’t enough to curtail the slop.

First “self-published” novel got 1 review that literally called it “an atrocity worthy of the Nuremburg trials”? Who cares. Publish that sequel…and the sequel after that. There’s literally no incentive to get better and no dis-incentive to prevent it no matter how crap the work might be.

The only real incentive anymore to stop publishing your glorious 12-volumes-and-counting epic story about a space wizard that has never actually sold a single copy is literally self-shame, which, in art circles, is not a common commodity.

So regardless of whether or not they are being read, or purchased, they’re still just taking up more and more space. Adding more and more static to the crap that the future is going to have to sift through.

To me, anyway, it has less to do with gate-keeping and more to do with curation.

Writing is so much more than just art though. Writing is also education. Writing is also a chronicle of culture and of history. Writing educates us about our past and our future and our present in a way that goes beyond statistics, dates, figures and memorised names. It, in a way that other art forms can only touch on, enriches our understanding of ourselves as a species and our place in the world

We know, at least in part, about Antebellum south, not just by reading history texts, but by reading Mark Twain. Our knowledge of the dustbowl is similarly enriched by Steinbeck. Thanks to Homer, Ovid, and others, Ancient Rome isn’t just dusty stats and numbers, it’s a living breathing history that you don’t get from history books. Thanks to Orwell and Huxley we can look at our present world and see warnings rather than being completely blindsided by current events.

THAT is the power of writing.

And you’re saying that this generation’s contribution to that; this generation’s contribution to the future’s understanding of us is some asshole’s Edward Cullen Slash fic?

That’s ridiculous.

Am I elitist in this opinion? ABSOLUTELY. UNASHAMEDLY. It’s too important NOT to be.

You want to write your own dumb-ass crap, that’s perfectly fine. We ALL did that. We used to write it, share it among our friends and family, have a good laugh about it, and then put it in a drawer and never think about them again. I myself have a filing cabinet FULL of those things.

But what we didn’t do (at least not in the mass numbers technology allows us to do now), is enshrine those horrible pieces of shit into the zeitgeist just because it’s free to do so on fucking Amazon. We didn’t pollute this generations contribution to the future with our own laugable crap just because we could.

Some people eventually got good enough that our work deserved to be included in that zeitgeist, even if it was just a couple of short stories making it past the so-called “gate-keepers”. But more of us didn’t, and never would.

We still write, because you are absolutely right in that a person who wants to write their own crap without bothering to learn, or get better, or even understand what makes good writing “good” in the first place, is welcome to do so. It’s a very welcoming art form in that respect.

But leave what gets remembered by history to the people who are actually fucking good at it.

Someone please put razor blades in this fuckers twelve daily bigmacs already please.

You realize that most functional adults have the ability to focus on more than one person at a time right? Just because mom is taking a moment to wipe some spit off of babies face doesn’t mean she’s not listening to the person on the other side of the table. And the idea of that seems to be exactly the OP’s deal (and yours, apparently)

It’s not the “doesn’t like kids” aspect that makes them the asshole. Hell, I don’t like kids. It’s the “I’m competing for that person’s 100% attention” when I “grace them with my presence” mentality of the post that makes them the asshole.

I’m not a fan of kids either. But hey…guess what? Not being willing to put on your big boy pants and suck it up for an hour is the very definition of “being a selfish asshole”.

The fact that the first thing you talk about is how those kids are “going to be the focus of the occasion” (your words), shows that what you lack isn’t “enthusiasm about catching up with someone”. What you lack is basic human empathy.

From an artistic perspective, self-“publishing” (and I use quotations quite on purpose), changed writing as we know it and drastically dropped the average reading level of the public since now any chimp can bang their fist on a keyboard for an hour, upload it to Amazon and call themselves an “author” beside Stephen King or Umberto Eco.

It was always hailed as “the end of the so-called gatekeepers”. Without stopping to realise that gatekeepers/publishers exist for a reason. So that the public zeitgeist isn’t completely overrun with utter crap.

The response to having your short story or novel rejected used to be “okay…I’ll learn, practice and get better for the next time.” Now, it’s “screw you…I’ll pollute the zeitgeist with my 3rd grade level grammar nightmare with or without you and put it right up there on the shelf next to the actual writers.”

Just imagine if a doctor flunked out of med-school, and instead of trying harder, just said “screw you, I’m going to open up my own surgery and put it right next door to you and there’s nothing you can do to stop me…”

What a crazy stupid world we live in.

I don’t drive an F-150. I drive a quarter-tonne specifically because I wanted to balance my need for a truck while lessening the impact as much as possible. That’s called “working within the construct of reality” because as a homeowner, I need to make those kinds of decisions.

Solutions need to be based in reality; and the reality is that getting rid of vehicles for bikes doesn’t change anything in the real world because 20 people sharing a single truck for an hour each week to do their shit uses just as much fuel and causes just as much pollution as those same 20 people using 20 trucks for an hour.

And that single truck, seeing twenty times the usage, will wear out faster and end up using exponentially MORE fuel and causing MORE pollution as it ages and wears out; eventually needing to be replaced 20 times faster.

THAT is what I mean when I say “really real world”. Saying some hippy-dippy bullshit about how let’s replace trucks with ebikes isn’t contributing to any sort of serious discussion about realistic solutions. It only exists to make you feel better about yourself without needing to examine the long term repercussions.

Have fun getting groceries. Have fun renovating your house. Have fun taking a load of household recycling to where it needs to go.

Basically have fun doing anything actual real adults have to do in the really real world.

I swear to god, you people who think that replacing vehicles with bikes is actually feasible are so laughably naive about how the actual world works that you must just live on a commune somewhere drinking ayahuasca and playing fucking bongos.

Bikes are great. Ebikes are great. But here in the real world, adults need to do adult stuff. You might as well be telling people that we should all be skateboarding everywhere…

Barring any sort of major accident. Almost certainly suicide.

But not in an “I’m depressed, get me out of here by any means necessary kind of way.”

More in the, if I have terminal disease, or am otherwise going to be suffering a slow painful death, or I’ll be a burden to those around me because of health limitations, I’ll take myself out of the equation quite logically and happily.

So in that regard, there are only two possibilities; sudden accident, or taking care of it myself when the alternative is a slow decline.

And yes, old age is just another terminal disease, just on a longer timescale.