Agreed, the 90s marked a major improvement (and expansion, thanks to cable) in television compared to prior decades. Children’s television in particular flourished, especially educational programs. I’d consider it a stepping-stone era, however, as like I said things improved substantially again in the following decade.

I want to disagree, but the reality is that most TV shows from the 90s and before have aged pretty poorly (certainly way worse than movies of the same age have). There are a few reasons for this, but I think the big three are: TV used to be lower budget and lower prestige (going from being a movie actor to a TV actor was shameful), TV had to be episodic due to the nature of broadcast (this improved once TiVo entered the scene, but it was streaming that really made multi-episode storytelling possible), TV episodes were extremely exact in their length (had to stick to the broadcast schedule, which sometimes caused major pacing problems).

Sci-fi TV especially seems to have aged terribly. Part of that is it used to be a niche genre that did not get the resources it needed to not come off at least a little campy, but I suspect the biggest issue is that of audience: shows like Star Trek or X-Files tried to have mass appeal in a way that TV nowadays doesn’t need to. I think Firefly’s (eventual) success really helped the genre turn a corner, and subsequent hits like BSG showed that “serious” sci-fi was feasible on the TV model. These two series also really ratcheted up viewer expectations for what “good” sci-fi TV should be.

I appreciate the classics like TNG for keeping certain franchises alive and the genre as a whole stumbling along until it could really hit its stride in the '00s, and I do think the shows have some watch value even today, but honestly most of it is rooted in nostalgia and historic importance.

They rank lower than Volkswagen! I didn’t think that was possible given the VW emissions scandal that just happened [checks notes] eight years ago?! My god everything from 2016 onward has just been a giant blur hasn’t it

Two more suggestions that are upbeat and quirky (and highly regional): Cascadia Day (May 18) and Exploding Whale Day (Nov 12).

Cascadia Day is on the anniversary of the Mt St Helens eruption and is a celebration of the Cascadia ecoregion: a geographic area comprised of the NW United States and SW Canada that share similar natural features (there are several proposed areas, but the generally accepted definition is Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia). While there is a small succession movement associated with Cascadia, it’s mostly a recognition of the unique and interconnected ecology spread across several US states and British Columbia, as well as the interconnected human element across state and national borders (especially along the relatively-densely populated I-5/Hwy-99 corridor from Eugene to Vancouver, BC). The logo would be easy: superimpose the Cascadia flag on the Lemmy mascot.

Cascadia info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(bioregion)

Cascadia Flag: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_flag

Exploding Whale Day: This is an unofficial Oregon holiday of sorts. In 1970, a dead sperm whale washed ashore in the smallish town of Florence, Oregon. The Oregon department of transportation decided to blow up the carcass with dynamite, which (spoiler alert) went about as well as could be expected. The story was so bizarre that the event is still commemorated to this day, with a small celebration held annually in Florence (meanwhile on the Internet, folks celebrate by posting memes and rewatching the KATU news footage of the original event). A whale version of the Lemmy logo (perhaps with the body of a whale but keeping the Lemmy ears and whiskers, and with an explosion in the background) on the anniversary would be a fun way to share this local event.

The story: https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/florence_whale_explosion/

The local “holiday”: https://www.xplodingwhale.com/

The KATU news footage: https://youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34

This may be a YMMV situation. I’m not a huge gamer, but Pop has worked great for me for nearly all games I’ve tried. The one glaring exception has been the Civilization series (specifically 3 and 6)… Anyone know if that’s a Linux problem, a Pop problem, or a just me problem?

(Also, sorry you’re getting downvoted for sharing your honest opinion/personal experience)

In honor of !fuckcars, the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims is the 3rd Sunday in November. Every year, approximately 1.3 million people (and untold numbers of pets and wildlife) are killed in traffic crashes.

More info: https://worlddayofremembrance.org/#about

How to visualize on the logo (two ways):

1. Crass but clear: tire tracks across a x.x face
2. Respectful but subtle: a bicycle helmet, a tear, and a vigil candle (bicycle riders are disproportionately victims of traffic violence, so the WDoR is often organized by bicycle clubs or traffic safety groups with a bicycle focus, plus there’s no way to visually represent the other disproportionately-affected group: pedestrians).

If it’s a work requirement then use work resources to print it. Why is this an issue?

Actually it’s looking like German cars are extremely bimodal.

Eerily similar to the Dublin riots a few nights ago: far-right men “protesting” in reaction to social media rumors of violence upon white citizens by immigrants. When have these types of xenophobic shows of force ever ended well?

Queer Eye. The reboot is focused on self acceptance and self betterment, on getting through difficult times and past challenges in healthy ways, and the importance of developing and being grateful for your support system to help you through your journey.

Not op, but yes? Like people have been doing since homo erectus first migrated to snowy places?

[It seems I accidentally deleted the original comment when I went to edit it, so here’s the repost]

There were literally classes at the public library where people would get together and share websites. Also, because the web wasn’t monetized, similar sites would link to each other because they didn’t see other sites as competition for views and ad dollars. The Anime Turnpike, for example, was basically a yellow pages of any and all English-language websites related to anime. There were also “circles”* (even well after search engines entered the picture) of sites sharing a theme (eg a TV show fandom) and you could click through them like flipping through a Rolodex. But yeah, in the very early days (as in, before most folks even had email) word of mouth was quite prevalent; one of my mom’s favorite sites she heard about from a taxi driver.

*EDIT: Sorry, I think I got my languages mixed up; as others have said they were called webrings in English

(For those who don’t read Japanese: 彼=he 彼女=she)

Sure those exist, but so do many gender-neutral pronouns, although many of them are impolite and/or colloquial. However the main difference between English and other European languages vs Japanese is that you can make a fully-formed Japanese sentence with no subject at all. “Went to the store” (or even just “Went”) is a fragment in English but a perfectly complete sentence in Japanese. Actually if you say “he went to the store” you’re emphasizing that HE went to the store, rather than SHE or I or WE or THEY (Japanese verbs do not conjugate based on the subject). So if context makes it clear whom you’re speaking about, it’s actually clunky to include a subject. It’s like saying “Sam dropped her son off at school, then Sam went to the store, then Sam went home” instead of “Sam dropped her son off at school, then she went to the store, then she went home.” In Japanese it would be something like “Sam dropped son off at school, then went to store, then went home” (so if you don’t know whether “Sam” is male or female, this sentence would provide you with no information on the matter).

A fun wrench in the system is that Japanese has gendered speech; in theory you can tell the gender (and sometimes rank and age) of the speaker based on their speech pattern, although this is significantly less true in writing, especially formal writing (e.g. academic, business, etc). There are gendered forms of “I” (あたし, 僕, 俺, わし, etc) as well as various phrases and conjugations (such as かな vs かしら, ~て vs ~ろ, use of の at the end of a sentence, etc). However the Japanese people, especially the younger generations, have been breaking away from these conventions, and it’s not that unusual for women to use male speech patterns, and to a lesser degree vice-versa. Plus there are gender-neutral speech patterns where based on context you might be able to make a guess as to the gender of the individual, but this is highly context-dependent and again, these conventions are being contested.

There are lots of examples out there of works that are successfully able to obscure the gender of characters (intentionally or merely by chance) for either a chunk of time or even the entire series. This happens pretty frequently in manga, where the pictures provide extra context and make gendered pronouns (or any pronoun at all) even less necessary: no need for “he said… she said…” when there are speech bubbles, and no need to say “he’s doing a thing” when a character can point to another character. This occasionally creates problems for the English translation, where it’s much harder to avoid gendered pronouns; if it’s not immediately obvious what the character’s gender is based on context or appearance, translators have to either hope that future chapters will include a gendered pronoun, or that the manga-ka will clarify in supplementary materials. This usually happens in fantasy/sci-fi series with non-human characters, but it can also happen with androgynous human characters. For example, nearly every character (except for the human protagonist) in the CLAMP series Wish is a gender-less angel or demon; for ease of translation the English version made the angels female and the demons male because they thought the translation would be too clunky if they couldn’t use gendered pronouns (this was back in the early 2000s, when the singular “they” wasn’t a mainstream thing yet).

In conclusion, while gendered pronouns and speech-patterns certainly exist and are frequently used in Japanese, it is also possible (and more importantly, grammatically correct and not linguistically awkward) to avoid gendered references to individuals in Japanese, especially when done on purpose.

I remember a pre-search engine era, but that didn’t last too long. First there was Yahoo!, then Altavista, then Google came on the scene and changed everything. God those early Google days were amazing; it felt like if it existed on the web, Google could find it for you with the right search input.

There were literally classes at the public library where people would get together and share websites. Also, because the web wasn’t monetized, similar sites would link to each other because they didn’t see other sites as competition for views and ad dollars. The Anime Turnpike, for example, was basically a yellow pages of any and all English-language websites related to anime. There were also “circles”* (even well after search engines entered the picture) of sites sharing a theme (eg a TV show fandom) and you could click through them like flipping through a Rolodex. But yeah, in the very early days (as in, before most folks even had email) word of mouth was quite prevalent; one of my mom’s favorite sites she heard about from a taxi driver.

*EDIT: Sorry, I got my languages mixed up; as others have said they were called webrings in English

Current Paternity Leave Uptake: Despite existing benefits, only 17.13% of new fathers took leave in fiscal 2022, a slight increase from 7.48% in 2019.

That’s the real problem: it’s not that paternity leave doesn’t pay enough, it’s that workers don’t feel empowered to take the time off. Or any time off for that matter.

Interesting note: the journalist managed to avoid using pronouns entirely when referring to any non-binary individual during the entire article (with the exception of when they included quotes from others who did use the singular “they” pronoun). I wonder if this is AP standard or the journalist’s preference. Either way I’m impressed; it’s somewhat difficult to do in English without sounding incredibly clunky. Which is too bad, as it’s not true of all languages (Japanese for instance makes it fairly easy to avoid gendered pronouns if so desired).

Another cis woman, and my advice is similar. As the previous comment says, lipstick on its own is way harsh on anyone! Hold off on lipstick (try some lip gloss instead! You presumably missed out on the lip gloss era of your childhood that many girls go through after all) and for now maybe focus more on the eyes, specifically eyeshadow and eye liner. As far as makeup goes these are relatively gender neutral compared to say lipstick or mascara, so they might be less dysphoria-triggering. Check Google images for searches along the lines of “men with eye makeup” and you’ll find a good spread of masculine, feminine, and gender-queer inspo. Generally I recommend makeup newbies (with light or mid-tone skin) start with neutral tones for eyeshadow: a medium brown, a dark brown, and a gold or copper for some fun. For eye liner pick something in the browns: a little lighter if you have light hair and a little darker if you have dark hair. Black can be really harsh unless you have black hair, and navy and other colors are expert-level makeup. If you have darker skin, however, it’s actually easier to jump into bright colors because you’re working with a dark “canvas,” which makes for better contrast. Not to say that blue, purple, and green are off-limits for light-skinned folks, but you have to worry more about skin tone clashes so it’s trickier than sticking with neutral colors at first. Reds and pinks are intermediary difficulty and a good first color to play around with. Regardless of color start with a light application; like the other comment says, you’ll look unbalanced if you apply one element of makeup heavy without applying everything heavy. Also it’s really common to get bad advice at the makeup counter, so while they can be helpful in guiding you if you’re completely lost, take what they say with a grain of salt and trust your own judgement of what looks good. Also keep in mind they can only recommend what they stock; as an example I’ve needed to bring my own eyebrow powder before when having my makeup professionally done for a special event because too many times I’ve found anything other than one specific shade from one specific company looks really weird on me.

Tl;dr: don’t despair, makeup is hard

Yup any oil works in my experience but I’ve found cooking oil to be the least messy, hence that specific suggestion. But in a pinch any kind of greasy substance will do.

You don’t need a specialized product (like Goo Gone several comments mention) to remove sticky residue. Any kind of cooking oil will do. I usually use a small dab of whatever is on hand (which in my house is olive oil, but avocado, canola, corn, etc would also be fine). Start with a very small amount, like one drop: a little can go a long way and it can be a huge mess if you overestimate how much you need. Rub it in with your finger and the gunk should come right up. Paper towel the rest off. Repeat if necessary. Extra bad spots might require a touch of gentle fingernail action.