Because cops in America all fancy themselves the Punisher (don’t even get me started on that) where everyone is out to get them and every one they shoot is one less bad guy on the street.

No incentive to change when they can get away with killing with impunity and fulfill their murder fantasies.

Asshole who shot this kid probably bragged to all his buddies about smoking a dude with a knife and got attaboys all around.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll6ONO-ae4o&si=dpeX-RyeLH6I1fAi

Brain plasticity is absolutely a thing, and there are exercises you can do to maintain and even regain some of your brain plasticity.

Cosplay- I am a big movie nerd, and love movie props, scifi and fantasy armor and weapons specifically, and making them is so cool to me. Beyond that I do community events (kids hospital visits, parades, star wars nights at sporting events, museums, etc) and interacting with kids who genuinely believe I’m the character I’m portraying is loads of fun, and seeing their smiles is a fantastic feeling.

Tabletop games- for war games I’m actually more into the painting aspect, it’s so relaxing and cathartic, to put on an audio book or podcast and just paint for an hour or two is a huge stress relief, and now that I’ve gotten into DnD, the creative aspect. DMing is loads of fun as well. I keep a small notebook on me at all times now to jot down ideas I have throughout the day, even if I don’t use them, it’s still nice to get the ideas out and have them available for later.

I’ve gotten into 3d printing as a result of the other two hobbies, and it isn’t particularly fun, but is an incredible tool, and so I would consider it fun because of the output. I can start with an idea, and for a few dollars and hours I can have a new prop or mini without having to put on pants or leave the house. It’s the coolest thing.

I played games before, but my first obsession was Pokemon Blue, Diablo and 2 got me stuck into RPGs, and Halo CE got me into shooters.

Chilling with hobbits sounds pretty cool.

Eat lots of good, local food, drink loads of beer, smoke tons of weed out of sweet ass churchwarden pipes.

A decent flashlight.

A streamlight stylus pro is $20, uses 2 AAA batteries, is barely bigger than a pen, and can be an absolute life saver. It produces way more light and throws it way further than your phone’s light, and I’ve been carrying the same one every day for nearly 15 years now with no signs of it failing. I use it nearly daily in my personal and professional life, you will genuinely wonder how you manages without it if you make it a habit of carrying it.

Or go nuts and get yourself a something like a surefire G2. Bigger, heavier, but more durable and incredibly bright.

Tech background, but never worked with it.

I’m a plumber now, used to design trusses for houses.

I’m in the middle of the Wax and Wayne series by Brandon Sanderson, just finished Shadows of Self.

Sanderson’s books are a really fun read, highly recommend them to anyone interested in fantasy.

Sync for lemmy should be up in a few weeks time. I’m pretty stoked about it.

Remember lemmy is in it’s infancy still compared to reddit. I imagine as lemmy grows certain communities will end up being the more populated ones, and they will kind of become the default. The downside is that that will take time, the upside is there is always an alternative if something goes wrong.

Lemmy right now feels like reddit from the early 2010s. The community is still quite small, it’s mostly still early adopters and folks looking for an alternative to big social medias, which attracts a different crowd than the mainstream.

It’s actually a hit of nostalgia for me, I’m kind of into the weirdness and intimacy of a smaller community, but I certainly understand where you’re coming from.

One of my favorite niche subreddits has over 600k members, the biggest equivalent community has about 350ish users here, there’s a certain quality that comes with that quantity of users.

But if we stick with it more folks will join and we can make this place into what we want it to be, and that’s pretty cool imo. Lemmy is still in it’s infancy compared to reddit, and it’s not perfect, but I think we can build it into something even better, and missing the good parts of reddit can inspire us to make sure that we incorporate them into lemmy in the future.

It already seems significantly better than reddit has been lately. I was just mentioning to a friend how it felt like 2010 reddit did.

The community is good, it scratches the same itch, think I’m here for a while.