I graduated as a kid with 2 retirees in my psych classes who told me getting their degree was one of the most important, rewarding things they had ever done.

Also, nowadays you can travel abroad in dozens of countries, take English-language courses and get accredited degrees in every field for very affordable tuition fees, as in 90% cheaper than the US.

While you’re attending those schools, your cost of living will be dramatically lowered as well.

If anyone wants details, talk to me here or in Travel.

Got it, thanks.

Then a hundo percent on a “reduce motion” option.

Are the vote animations the colors or the score auto update function?

I like the color indicators for my votes, but would gladly give them up for a “reduce motion” option that kept the docks stable. Persistent docks are far more important to me in terms of app useability.

Totally get it about inbox swiping, seems like a down the line thing that would integrate with the rest of your app design eventually, but is in no way critical even to me as someone who brought it up.

Thanks. A few appearance items became salient for me. Maybe opt-in appearance choices in general would or will take care of these issues without interfering with the simplicity I really appreciate in blorp:

Biggest one is no auto hiding the docks, I find it distracting for them to pop in and disappear every time I scroll up or down.

Comment/post margin width slider or color picker; it seems just on the side of unnoticeable to me so i have to discern the margin actively rather than intuitively.

Inbox slide left/right for tab selection, although I only tried to do this because of how smooth blorp is in general, and I get it’s weird to implement because then are you refreshing the data with each slide or what.

Color differentiation for user/comm in replies, helps differentiate the post title and user info from the reply. bolding the post title is helpful, but I still find the white text of the post title leading into the white text of a comment just noticeable rather than intuitive, whereas i find the jerboa reply info intuitively simple to pick out user/comm/post title/comment

Personally i don’t need the “replied to your post in” reply phrase, seems like clutter in the to add the “replied” phrase in the reply tab, but I’m sure I’d get used to it.

And that’s really it, a few appearance items that make scrolling a couple degrees less intuitive, or want to check inbox or profile but have to scroll up to get the docks back.

I like blorp, it’s the first alternative lemmy app i’m going to keep to see how image support compares, because I know jerboa has issues playing gifs and rendering images from certain sites.

I’ve tried every alternative I’m aware of, but they all seem overbuilt or insisted on a particular layout so I got rid of them.

Blorp certainly seems functionality and user-focused, thanks and great work!

Okay, I’ll try it. Happy birthday blorp.

A few minutes later: Welp that switch profiles and stay on the post you’re viewing is pretty great. blorp is probably going to get a longer trial run than basically any jerboa alternative so far.

The simplicity is nice.

Good name too.

I did that with podcast hosts recently, their faces were not at all what my brain had conjured up.

Pete looks a lot scruffier/grunge in earlier videos, but he’s a dad guy now and it’s been a couple decades.

Still got some clear-as-a-bell pipes!

If you like his voice, he does some interesting solo stuff with a different sound i think turned out really well, that’s probably my favorite track from the album “In Measured Hundredweight”.

Did you have a specific image of him in your head? I’d love to hear what you saw in your mind’s eye initially.

Ha, rad. I still listen to the first album regularly. I love Someday and This, Girl in the Sea(got the t-shirt!), About Schroeder,pretty much all of it.

When I taught English in China, Michael became a favorite breaktime music video for my students. Great art style.

What a coincidence, did you know they released a new Battleship music video today?

Premiere was a few hours ago.

So happy to see them getting some attention, i love them too.

Tonal, using different tones to differentiate meaning:

The car. The car?

You intonate the “a” differently to denote different meaning.

Logographic - picture-based writing.

What if a Chinese language became the global standard rather than English, for example.

I’m not sure, but it seems like voting, because this month i had two surprise hits in Travel that got ~200 votes each and now Travel tallies almost 800 monthly users, much higher than before.

Since we’re well past the first of the month, i was thinking it’s a running tally of the last 30 days of community engagement(votes) in a community.

Your title is warranted and exactly appropriate for this level of information.

That piece of information is lodged firmly inside my psyche now.

A lot of Thai crew have hammocks on their boats they sleep in.

Most of them left their boats to go home at sunset, but I saw people sleeping in boat hammocks many times overnight, and even more taking naps during the day.

The world is much, much bigger than one sparsely populated country, and there are far more important metrics than the physical size of the US.

Metrics like population, geographic isolation, health care, political instability, violent crime, technical superiority, countless others that mark a country like the US as an entity to be safely disregarded.

Thailand passed the US in health care years ago, China passed the US in renewable and next-gen tech, not to mention manufacturing, most countries citizens enjoy much more robust civil rights.

Yes, the physical country is large, but the US is s small, insecure, violent pocket of the world that people don’t need to pay nearly as much attention to as its groupies demand.

The US looks very tiny from out here, and even tinier from the inside after seeing some of the rest of the world.

Cool music, though. Nice forests.

I get it, I was shocked when I looked it up. Extremely disappointing

Michelin stars are pay to play.

Inspectors will not visit cities unless the city registers with Michelin, which carries high, recurring fees.

That’s why many prominent cities like Boston, for example, have zero Michelin star restaurants, because they won’t pay the shakedowns(tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the city) that Michelin demands for their stars.

Michelin stars are highly valued because advertising, elitism and tradition are highly valued.

The Michelin Brothers thought it would be good advertising for their tire company, and it was, and it kind of became its own thing but stars are still owned and operated by Michelin the tire company.

Important to note that beyond it being owned by a tire company, they don’t even give stars to the best restaurants, only restaurants that fit certain prestige requirements as well as agree to pay Michelin to give them a star.

Other tire companies don’t pursue the same scam because Michelin is the front runner, and it obviously doesn’t tie in to car accessories very heavily, so there’s not much incentive for other tire companies to do the same thing, especially when it’s basically just a “pay me $400,000 for a fake gold star racket”.

I looked into this after watching the bear, when they were talking about Michelin stars, and then I found out the extent of Michelin star chicanery.

No trust necessary; like IRS form 2555, it’s all publicly available and verifiable info.

As a traveler, I have a travel community. Nothing strange about that.

I haven’t tried to sell a thing, and I have months of legitimate conversation, travel advice and information publicly available for scrutiny.

I hear you and understand your resignation; tender despair is the most common result of whirlwind threats and proclamations.

You don’t have to leave your spite behind, and I’m not telling you to; I’m letting people know that if they want to live for themselves and others rather than dying for their enemies, it’s possible and I’m here to help.

Thanks. I appreciate simple, correct solutions and I understand why emotional investment and habit makes those solutions difficult to accept and implement.

If you take a step outside of your situation, it will quickly become apparent that the grip you believe others hold you in is largely insubstantial and based on empty proclamations and threats. Magnates can plead for your attention, but you don’t have to give it to them(climb a mountain, play video games), your government can scream for your taxes and you don’t have to hand them over(IRS form 2555, foreign earned income exclusion).

The world is huge and no matter how important someone demands you think they are, you don’t have to.

There are no failsafe assurances anywhere, but some places are safer and more comfortable than others and I’m very happy to talk about how you can move to those places.

I’m originally from the US and have mostly been living abroad for over a decade since I left over many of the issues US Americans still deal with today.

Perspective on the US is much more clear from the outside.

If you’d like to live abroad, I can definitely help you do that with information and advice.

tldr is get a passport, secure $500 USD in monthly income (English teaching is in very high demand), buy a plane ticket.

Someone from the US I’ve been offering advice to this year literally left the US today based on that tldr.

I’m very happy to go into details and supply more context for anybody interested in living abroad.