It really does. I had fried frog legs in Malaysia. Just like tiny chicken wings.

As a Scot I’m always secretly pleased when we get a pass while the rest of the UK gets a ‘meh’.

That said, the North of England, Cornwall and Brighton, and parts of Wales are definitely worth a visit.

Did you make it to Scotland? Edinburgh is lovely and the Highlands and Islands are definitely worth a visit.

Australia. Not that it was wholly terrible. It just wasn’t what I expected and I overcooked it by staying for 2 years.

To be fair, it could never have lived up to the super-positive stereotype it has here in the UK.

We think of Aussies as fun-living, friendly, witty, laid-back beautiful people who are down to earth yet somehow savvy and open-minded. They love a drink and a BBQ and have a ‘live and let live’, inclusive attitude. Basically everything we Brits would love to be if we weren’t so repressed.

I think this cliche comes from a cross between Crocodile Dundee and through meeting the thousands of charming Aussies who end up working behind bars when they visit the UK in their youth.

Also, with the British weather being what it is, we imagine anywhere with a sunny climate would encourage people with a similarly sunny disposition.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the details, but having travelled extensively throughout Australia - well beyond Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane - I found little of the stereotype I’d expected and quite a lot of the opposite.

I did meet some great people, but they were mainly Irish 🤣

At 48 it’s funny how the comfort of normality has become a thing.

However, as someone who tried and enjoyed Acid, E, cocaine, speed, weed, valium, mushrooms, ketomine and alcohol in his 20s I admit I’m pretty curious about DMT.

I’ve just read the Irvine Welsh book Dead Man’s Trousers and it’s definitely piqued my interest in psychodelics, but I just don’t feel there’s room for that in my life at the moment.

Keen to hear how it goes. When I took Acid I had the best time, but I always knew that I was on it and could therefore explain to my consciousness that it was a trip.

I understand the DMT experience is more profound and can genuinely reveal things to people about themselves, which lasts post-trip as people process the insights it reveals.

True. Of course, there are plenty of good traditions. Birthday cakes. Halloween. Christmas. Sometimes OCD can be useful.

I agree. In my case it was a necessity, so I spent a bit of time actively looking for a Reddit alternative.

I half-heartedly joined Lemmy on a random instance (is that what they’re called? I forget). Anyway, it was Lemmy.pl and it went offline for a bit before I could get anywhere with it.

I tried again with lemmy.world and then stumbled across Boost, which was my favourite app for Reddit before they locked everything down and forced everyone on to the inferior Reddit app.

Anyway, the experience now is great. Just like old times. I confess I’ve no real interest in the fediverse as such, although I’m of course greatful that others do and that it exists. I’m just glad to be able to easily interact with communities that seems to be free from oppressive moderation and cold, automated admins that ban longtime users for accidental missteps.

The slow but inevitable murder of platforms by their paymasters is a real pisser.

Feels like every platform starts well, expands and just gradually mutates into unusable corporate dogshit.

Depends entirely on how successful the media wanted him to be. He could be a just, moral and enlightened force for good, but if the he wasn’t dancing to the tune of certain corporations the public could very easily be made to hate him.

I fully lurk on public social media, but on here and formerly on Reddit I habitatully post several times a day. Never occured to me to just not interact with it, and I was surprised to learn that a friend of mine, who was always sharing stuff he’d seen on Reddit, had never posted in the decade or so he’d been using the platform.

From recent experience it feels like Reddit is stricter with bans and access than FB, and applies more tracking and detection tech, lest your previously anonymous internet persona upset a mod.

I have a new Reddit account, running on Brave on a VM at work. I use it as a news and pop culture aggregate. I used to post in the big UK sites for well over a decade, but recently got a site wide permanent ban for ban evasion (I hadn’t realised that throwaway accounts were no longer allowed).

My new account has insufficient karma to post (another petty rule), but having been on Lemmy for a few months Reddit now seems cold, hostile and impersonal in comparison.

Computer programming.

Joking! There’s no way in hell that’s true around here. I’m pretty sure some of you guys could code The Matrix.

My specialist subject would probably be 90s UK Indie bands.

We have this old glass square tray thing with a glass cover that we use. We leave the butter out and it’s spreads great. We live in quite a cold climate (extreme North of Scotland), so it’s ideal. Perhaps not the best idea in Dubai…

That’s surprising about the time thing. Why is that? My cheap battery powered watch doesn’t significantly drift from the actual time. Why would a PC be any different? Just curious.

I get all the sides of this dilemma and I think it comes down to personal choice. I got rid of most of mine and kept a handful. Then we had kids and I herited an old TV/vid combo so they were able to watch my wife’s old Disney movies she’d kept. For a few years there they enjoyed a brief renaissance, but as they got older and less keen the tapes just take up space.

We can access every thing we want online, and, while the VHS does have that nostalgia, my children aren’t that into the novelty of it anymore and would prefer to stream stuff instead.

In terms of ownership, I struggle with which physical formats to retain. Musically I’ve kept my vinyl, but we’ve got 100s of CDs that I can’t bring myself to toss out. I’ve got a load of Blu-ray which is cool, but never gets played.

Even all the media files in my NAS are rarely used. It seems like IPTV is king or us at the moment, and physical media is somewhat redundant. But hey, we’ve got a basement, so there’s always the option to store them out of site, which is a workable compromise for now.

:::

Same! Wild how they went from throwaway accounts being part of the culture to banning people forever and employing techniques beyond what Facebook does to control accounts.

I’m 48. I have a few buddies that I rarely see in my hometown. I travel once or twice a year on a city break to drink and eat with a few old pals.

But yeah, generally I don’t hang with anyone outside my own wife and kids and extended fam. This isn’t through choice, it just seems to be the way things have gone.

Depends entirely on whether or not it has an incognito mode.

Sensible choice.