You don’t cure shy. You can’t.

Only thing you can do is offer support and give them the freedom to explore with the safety that good support can bring.

She’s not going to have trouble making friends. She’ll be selective about who she considers a friend. That’s not a bad thing. We all have to surround ourselves with people that match us and/or balance us.

That balance is what you encourage. Finding her own path to friends she, she feels connected to and safe with. Once she finds them in her own way, in her own time, you provide the opportunities for them to spend time together so that those friendships grow and develop.

Being slow to warm up, being shy, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just one way of experiencing life.

hype? Pretty much any because hype is almost always artificial.

But fans? I can’t say any band/performers don’t deserve their fan base. You pull the crowds that need what you’re making, so you inherently deserve them.

I can say that some fans do over hype the talents of what they like. It’s perfectly okay to be a middle range musician, and it’s perfectly fine to like them and recommend them exactly as they are.

Like, backstreet boys. Solid pop boy band. Had some great songs, but most were just okay pop. None of the members can really be compared to someone like Freddy Mercury, or Pavarotti, or Marvin Gaye, but they all had good voices to some degree or another and used them well. But their fan base back in the day was all about the hype, the fannishness of it. So they got hyped way beyond what they were.

That’s the curse of a lot of pop performers, and it is the curse of teen/tween targeted pop for sure.

A lot of that kind of performer has to totally undo their family friendly (which is a bullshit term to begin with) focus to ever really grow musically. Look at pretty much every Disney escapee for examples. Timberlake, arguably the best example of someone escaping that trap without having to piss off the original fan base, still drags some of that curse with him while producing some very good pop music.

Now, KISS? Since that’s the example in the post, I think you run into the trouble of hindsight. At the time they gained their initial popularity and success, they were a damn great live band. A KISS show back then was something most people had never seen, and the hype was justified

But they suffer from the success curse. Other people took what they did and did it better. So now the hype is essentially all nostalgia, so it feels out of place. Legit, go back and check out footage of their live shows and compare it to the standard rock bands of the same eras. It wasn’t until they went full idiot and tried to abandon the makeup (and all that went with it) that they lost the thread. At that point, they kept trying to summon up what they’d lost and never regained their mojo. At this point, a KISS show just doesn’t do justice to what the hype says. It can’t, because it isn’t the same band despite being mostly the same people.

But they were always mid tier songwriters (even the ones I fucking love were mid tier compared to a band like The Band that I tend to enjoy less).

So, that kind of thing is why I don’t jump on hype or shit on hype. It’s usually artificial, and it’s also usually generated by dint of numbers. So hype never carries well.

But it’s also why I never object or care about someone like Taylor Swift having a massive fan base either. She writes and performs for her target audience. She does that very well, no matter what else anyone thinks about her. Any pop performer is trying to do exactly that. Even niche subgenre performers that are actually trying to sell their music try to find a way to target a fan base (even if it’s only people that would object to being called a fan base).

I would, at this point in my life, also say that at least checking out hype can be worth it. Even if you don’t like whatever it is, you’ve shared something with other people, and that’s a net positive. Plus, you might run into a few songs you do like from someone you don’t otherwise enjoy (like shake it off from Swift for me)

For anyone curious

\m/ af

Well, yeah, it’s normal.

When you find goodness in the world, and it shares a common denominator, it is perfectly normal to develop some degree or another of affection/attachment for that common denominator. You don’t have to be depressed for that, it just makes it easier.

It can turn into an unhealthy obsession, and it’s possible that the motivations may not be without strings (cults and such), but those aren’t going to be the case every time.

Like, for me, I have a deep and abiding love for gay culture, specifically gay male culture, because of how much love I have received from that subculture. That has expanded over the years to embrace the entire rainbow of the LGBTQ+ community (with some extra affection for my trans folks). You go for a while needing acceptance and open appreciation, you’re going to end up returning it when a specific group is where you find it.

Truth is that the more sub a subculture is, the more likely the people in it are to be outsiders in some way. Maybe marginalized, maybe just atypical; but whether they were individually outsiders that found solidarity, or they became such by joining the subculture, outsiders have a tendency to be at least a little more accepting of other outsiders (though you run into some weird shit where you get schisms sometimes).

And it can be local. As an example, I’ve had universally great interactions with juggalos in my area, but they can be major dicks in other places. As another, furries tend to be really chill with non furries that accept them but can have bitter faction wars with each other.

Don’t let yourself get sucked into any cult shit, but otherwise find the goodness of humanity wherever you can, and enjoy it. Nothing wrong with that

Jfc, I love that song. Pure fucking absurdity in musical form

Of course, at least under normal circumstances.

Like humans or wild animals, a pet is going to have their full sensory array available. Even a blind and deaf animal can pick up vibrations as someone approaches then, feel changes in air movement, etc.

Since hands are different sizes, even if they were asleep at the moment of contact, it wouldn’t take long to figure out whose hand was on them. Obviously , that might be negated if the hands are similar enough, but I would suspect that even then the differences in how a person pets them would be useful.

You could likely create a situation to bypass everything and “fool” a pet, but that’s what you’d have to do.

Jfc, that’s a wild fucking rabbit hole

Don’t worry, by the time you hit fifty-ish, you won’t have energy for rage any more lol.

Tbh, even the least well designed apps are a better experience overall. Lemmy via browser is often a drag.

Because it’s not a website. It’s a connected network of sites that requires a bit of a learning curve to really use.

Carson McKee

It always kinda amazes me how little interaction there is across generations.

The hippies and such that were part of the pre-eighties boomer counterculture movements are still there. Most of those don’t look the part, but still hold the same beliefs.

Some just grew the fuck up, had families, and no longer had the energy to sustain a life of protest. A lot of what drove that era’s visible counterculture was youthful energy. Young idealists eventually hit a wall where no matter what their beliefs are, they’re limited by reality in how much time, effort, and resources they can put towards their cause.

But there’s also the fact that every generation is diverse. You’ll have the edges, where you find the most vehement people, but the majority are going to just not give a fuck as long as they can live with acceptable levels of hassle. In that laundry majority, you’ll find the folks that agree with a given principle, but can’t/won’t do anything about it. They will, however, give lip service.

That’s boomers, Xers, millennials, Z, Alpha, whatever age range you want to point at. You’ll still have the vehement and loud, but as they age up, there’s less of their age peers jumping on the bandwagon.

Then, the next age group comes along and wants an enemy. That enemy is going to be the establishment because establishment is the thing we all are forced to live in. It’s the default, the status quo. And that means the previous generations that are in that majority that are just trying to live and survive are part of that establishment. So you get the bullshit generational warfare. Which, once you live long enough, and/or look back at history enough, you discover happens every generation. There’s always a struggle of some kind because there’s always some degree of power imbalance created just by surviving long enough to accrue knowledge/resources.

This is phenomenon relied on by power brokers. The 1%, if you want to look at it that way. The folks that have control of enough resources that they essentially control everyone’s lives.

It isn’t about killing the idea. It’s about making it known that some shit erases you as being allowed to exist.

That way, even when it does crop up, everyone knows exactly what will happen.

The only good nazi is a dead nazi.

Not important to me. I dig the skullet I have, and the shape of my head works for me overall.

Plus, my beard is fucking epic :)

It happens :)

Something that would be said in person in a way that makes it obvious as a joke doesn’t scan as well in text. Add in the divergent thinking so that even the text is different than what a neurotypical person would think of as a dark joke, and things can fall flat (or worse).

Keep at it though, humor is the only thing getting a lot of folks through life, even when it’s dark

I love that reference :)

Used to be my grandfather.

The man had magnificent salt & pepper hair right up to his death, though the salt was well into taking over in his late seventies. Absolutely amazing hair. Alas, the genes for male pattern baldness hit me because that’s how it works.

Nah, as long as it isn’t significantly different, all that matters is that it isn’t going to irritate and rub.

Mind you, the more of a difference there is, the less comfortable it’s going to be in shoes, no matter what material it is.

You might run into the patch job wearing the surrounding fabric out faster if there’s a decent difference as well, but it isn’t like something that thin is going to last very long once a hole appears anyway.

Pretty much, yeah, though it doesn’t have to be low, iirc. It can come from higher in the throat, and thus sound higher pitched as well.

Isn’t that a version of fry?