It's not quite what you're asking, but I have had my perspective on a lot of songs changed once I actually looked up their lyrics.

My listening comprehension for music lyrics is piss poor. For any given pop or rock song I'd hear on the radio, maybe 70% of the time I find lyrics unintelligible. Clearly it's skill issue on my part, as the body of music listeners at large seem to have no problems understanding what they're hearing. I don't know how people do it.

Sometimes I'll catch enough words to throw into a search engine and get the song's title and lyrics, and maybe even a short blurb of context. That knowledge alone can make a song go from irritating noise to something I find rather pleasant.

I believe the most recent song I looked up and learned something about was Even Flow by Pearl Jam. It's a song about homelessness. Who knew? Fucking everyone, probably! But not me. For fifteen years all I heard was "FREEEEE-ZIIIIIN'..." and the rest just goes to mush. I also learned Even Flow is a completely different song from Plush by Stone Temple Pilots. The damn radio kept bamboozling me with that similar vocal progression they both have!

Ah well. Better on the bus fifteen years late than never on the bus at all. They say ignorance is bliss, but it's also the source of a lot of undue hatred. I find I hate far fewer songs when I actually understand what they're trying to say (if anything).

Of course, knowing doesn't magically fix all stinkers. I Love It by Icona Pop didn't get any better in my eyes when I found the lyrics for it. I find most pop country songs (which I am unavoidably subject to, living in the American midwest) don't have much novel or interesting to say, either. The closer I look, the more accurate Bo Burnham's Pandering becomes, and I hate it.

I guess the silver lining here is I get to lucky 10,000 my way through many of history's greatest hits. I'm sure many people would give a lot to experience something they like again for the first time. By virtue of my being absurdly late to the party, I get to do it every day.

Finishing up harvest!

If the current tools work fine, have decades of historic support and battle testing, and the alternatives offer little to no net benefit, uhh, why?

Idk, crusading against common myths is something that's pretty hot these days. Stuff like:

• Christopher Columbus didn't actually discover America, and he was actually kind of an asshat
• Bell didn't invent the telephone, he was simply the first to patent and subsequently litigate
• "Frankenstein" is the name of the scientist, not the monster
• Many modern tropes about Christian Hell stem from a 17th century political satire novel

Crusading for truth in easily verifiable matters feels very on-brand for the kind of people who use Lemmy. In that light, reclaiming a negative term that's only negative because of a false premise to describe ourselves doesn't sound so bad. At worst, we become a little insufferable as we have to introduce the term with a "well, ackshually", which a lot of us would probably do anyway.

I only use Reddit for two things these days. Practicing my technical writing skills by offering answers to ELI5 posts, and silently doomscrolling though US politics.

Both of these are theoretically on Lemmy somewhere, but this place really doesn't move fast enough to be fulfilling.

That said, I only access Reddit on desktop PC in old.reddit mode. The third party appocalypse did not make me leave completely, but it did kill off all of my time using it on mobile, at least. The day they take old.reddit from me and force me to use that miserable card view, though, I'm checking out for good.

When that inevitable day arrives, I will not have FOMO over it. Anything positive I'd hypothetically be missing out on would be canceled out by the abysmal way in which they expect me to consume it. I will miss what it was, though. Lemmy just isn't a substitute for it. The Lemmy experience right now is the Miracle Whip to Reddit's mayo.

I can't fathom how anyone would enjoy being on a Discord server with more than a few dozen active users, and even then, more than a dozen or so active users at any given time. Above a certain threshold it just becomes noise.

Unless 97% of them never speak. Which, in my experience, is totally plausible.

Still. Weird way to do socials with schoolmates, imo. I would have expected students to self-select into smaller friend groups on Discord or TikTok or WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever the hell people use now. Not coalesce into one giant digital town square. Not knockin' it, though. Seems like a neat idea.

I garnered a very low opinion of pretty much all vegetables during childhood that persisted well into adulthood, because I grew up in a household that only ever prepared them one of two ways: raw, or boiled.

Doesn't matter what it was. Carrots, peas, corn, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, green beans... the two exceptions being onions (which may have been fried on occasion) or potatoes (which culinarily aren't in the same category). If it was boiled, there'd be a half-assed attempt to make it taste like something again by melting a knob of butter on it and salting it. That's it.

When that's the extent of your culinary range, cabbage has no reason to enter the house, so for us it never did. We just assumed it would be shit if you prepared it that way. And we were probably right. Boiled cabbage is what the poor Bucket family was said to have eaten every day in Willy Wonka. Doesn't paint a glamorous picture.

I'm only just now coming around to the concept of vegetables tasting good when you, like, y'know, actually cook them well. Haven't given cabbage a fair shake yet, though.

My sticking point with Discord in particular is that, at the moment, it's allergic to file drag and drop under Wayland. If I want to drag and drop a file attachment, I have to open the file explorer dialog and drag onto that.

This is more of a Discord being sluggish to update problem than a Wayland being unstable problem, but it's still extremely irritating.

The original definition of "magazine" was simply "warehouse". A place where you amassed a bunch of stuff. This usage is still around, but it's rare.

At the time, the military was perhaps the most prominent entity creating these well-stocked warehouses, so the specific linking of "magazine" to "military warehouse" was a natural progression. And as we all are familiar now, it later morphed into a word to describe a chamber of bullets. In a sense, a tiny little military warehouse you attach to your gun.

The definition referring to a paper catalog getting mailed to your house full of random written articles comes from one very specific one, named Gentleman's Magazine. It was named that because it thought itself a magazine (a warehouse) of information.

I assume kbin was thinking of the latter when using the term to describe its communities. Though, considering the right-wing bias of its target audience, I expect the wordplay with the ammunition definition was also intended.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as the editor alone can handle every step of the process from development to testing to version control to deployment to debugging, it's an IDE.

I don't care if it doesn't natively ship with all these things and you have to append them with plugins. (I thought we championed software that doesn't force bloat features we'll never use down our throats?) The only applicable factors are that it exposes the extensibility to add them, and that someone has added them.

Does that make EMACS and Vim IDEs, too? If you've sufficiently tricked them out with plugins, extensions, and helper scripts to do every part of your pipeline without leaving the editor, then I guess so! It is an Environment that has Integrated everything you need for Development. If it quacks like a duck...

VS Code is an IDE, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

MongoDB does it, too. So it's not exclusively a SQL thing.

Why do you have to "announce" your capabilities to beings you designed? Why do you have to onboard them to your "program" at all? If you truly are omnipotent, simply make beings that already know, and are already with the program. Assuming that is indeed what you want, why would you do anything else?

Are you throwing in extra steps for your own amusement? Just as a prank? Why? You're omniscient. You already know how it ends. What's amusing about it?

You are either toying with beings you created to be non-accepting and deliberately presenting conditions that won't convince them, or you're lacking one or both of omnipotence or omniscience.

An argument straight from the edgy teen atheist textbook, sure, but nonetheless one I have yet to see a compelling rebuttal for.