Probably meaning backwards, highly conservative, people from there are seen as "hicks" or "red knecks," have an abnormally high rate of incest and child marriage compared to the rest of the country, and any person part of a marginalized group would probably want to avoid.

Is it them taking a hard right authoritarian shift?

Reminder to all my queer friends that homosexuality was criminalized under Stalin's regime, and was not repealed until the Soviet Union collapsed.

I prefer having a physical game collection, but with the way physical games are handled now, with more than half the game needing to be downloaded to the console to cut costs or because they didn't finish the game before release, it doesn't solve the preservation or ownership problems anymore.

Yes

Finally, we have caught up to the orcas in climate action.

If I can help it, I try to support local businesses over Walmart, Target, Amazon, or any other near monopolistic retail chain.

Chick-fil-A, and Hobby Lobby. Owners have been vehemently antiqueer and antichoice, and have funded such organizations and politicians through their business.

Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft. Both have been accused of large scale sexual misconduct, and neither company has completely dealt with the issue.

Twitter and Reddit. It's not just that I hate the direction both sites are heading, but I want to fully back and support the open source alternatives that have grown during the migrations of both sites. Besides, Musk has made it to where I can't even lurk on Twitter if I wanted to.

JonTron. He's living proof that as long as you're funny, people will forgive and forget anything. (Look up his history with racism and antivax for those in the latter camp, cause I'm tired of answering the "what he do" question)

The Harry Potter franchise. This one hurt the most because I had just starting to get into the Harry Potter series as the pandemic hit, and I was halfway through Prisoner of Azkaban when Rowling started her campaign against trans people. I Also used respect Rowling a lot because she's a master at world building, and I had gotten into reading Harry Potter cause I wanted to take inspiration from it for my own work.

Ruroni Kenshin, and Nobuhiro Watsuki's other works. I can get why people would forgive JonTron and Rowling to an extent, but defending Nobuhiro's pedophilia is a bridge way tf too far for me.

I play Mahjong. If I try talking to most Americans about it, they'll think I'm talking about Shanghai, or Mahjong Solitaire.

I actually play 3 forms of it:

Riichi: Standard Japanese rules. This is what you typically see in anime and mahjong games from Japan.

CSM: Competition rules for Chinese Mahjong. This what you'll typically see played in tournaments outside of Japan

American Mah-jongg: A ruleset with a lot of unique features. An AMJ set contains jokers that can act as any tile in the set. The game is played without being able to call "chow"(taking a sequence of 3 pieces), You "Charleston" for the pieces you need before the round begins (pass pieces to the right, left, and across from you), and the standard hands you can make change on a yearly basis. This is the version you often see played by the American Jewish community.

I love playing all three, but it's hard to play them in person, because you need to find at least 4 people who can play by the same rule set.

Riichi is easy enough in Japan, but it's seen as kinda a sketchy game here, and most places you can play it are at expensive and seedy mahjong parlors. Luckily there are a flood of video games based around it that make it more accessible.

Chinese Mahjong is very regional, and each area can have its own variation on the rules, scoring, accepted hands etc. When playing with Chinese friends, I just kinda roll with whatever variation they're playing.

For American Mah-jongg, because the standard hands change year to year, you have to buy a new card from the National Mah Jongg League yearly in order to keep up with it, so it's the only mahjong game with a subscription cost built in. Also as mentioned, the game is very community specific, but also the majority of players are often senior aged women, usually making me the youngest at the table by far.

I love playing all three, but it's hard enough finding someone else who also likes Mahjong, let alone find someone who doesn't confuse it for the solitaire game. I'm not saying Mahjong solitaire ruined my life, but if I could Thanos snap a game out of existence...

Here's a rough C° primer for Americans

0° or below, fucking cold

1° - 10° cold

11° - 20° cool

21° - 30° warm

31° - 40° hot

41° or above - Jesus Christ I'm on fire!

As for Fahrenheit for the rest of the world, on a scale from 0 to 100, how hot is it? Assume anything below zero is really fucking cold, and anything above 100 is really fucking hot.

I honestly prefer fediverse remain as that complex open source alt, because it's one of the few filters we have for users here.

I honestly don't believe rapid growth is healthy for any platform, and we've even seen it here with how comments and memes are getting increasingly vitriolic and offensive. Fuck, antivax memes are starting to appear on lemmy.ml's meme community.

I'm starting to think Beehaw had the right idea with vetting users, because there people here who think Lemmy should be another 4chan.

It's they/them because there are so many of them.

I enjoy the furry art style and aesthetic, even though I'm not into the kink or sexual stuff.

It's like being an anime fan without being into hentai.