TechyDad

I'm 47 and am using both Mastodon and Lemmy.

I would love for the day to arrive where Trump's impact was so low that everything he said could be ignored. I really, really wish that day was today.

Unfortunately, it's not. He's the Republican frontrunner for 2024 and even being indicted multiple times isn't slowing him down. If anything, Republicans are rallying around him and claiming that him being charged with multiple crimes somehow proves that that Democrats are corrupt. (Did mean old Hillary force Trump to take those classified documents home with him?)

Trump still has a following. If he tells them "X is corrupt and needs to be taken out," you're likely to have one or more idiots trying to follow Trump's order with violence. Given that they are idiots, they aren't likely to succeed, but throw enough idiots at "Trump's problem" and eventually one might succeed out of pure dumb luck.

Also the strings of "Nice" followed by the one "Noice."

I'd often use it on Reddit in political discussions where I didn't want to be mistaken for someone who actually held the views I was mocking. There were just enough of those folks popping in and out and it would be easy to mistake my sarcasm for a genuine belief. Ruining the joke with /s was better than being mistaken for someone with awful views.

Some of my least favorite Reddit posts were the ones that suckered me in with some photo claiming to be an original work only for people to point out that they were reposts farming for karma.

"Look at the horrible thing that just happened to my car! Ignore the fact that this same image has been posted a dozen times over the past 5 years. It really happened to me right now. Give me precious karma."

I'm in my late 40's and haven't cracked it. I've gotten very good at pretending that I remember the face and name of the person talking to me, though.

Yup. The guy was caught by the Secret Service as he was "trying to find an opening in the security." About the only saving grace in all this is that the people trying to do this are idiots. Like that guy who came up with a brilliant plan to get past the bullet proof glass at an FBI building by using a nail gun.

Unfortunately, throw enough idiots into the mix and some of them will succeed just by dumb luck. And the right has plenty of idiots to throw.

Same thing happens in the Jewish community. My father is a Republican and believes that Republicans support Jews because "they support Israel." He doesn't see that the only reasons that Republicans support Israel are because:

1. The evangelicals want Israel to exist and be run by Jews so it can be attacked and Jesus can return.

And

2. So the right has a place to say Jews really belong (not in America).

They'll "support Israel" all day and night while actively pushing for a Christian Theocracy in America where Jews are (at best) second class citizens.

I'm barely on Reddit, but the subreddits I still visit occasionally are a local one and a LEGO one. Lemmy doesn't have enough people to justify local communities and although there's a LEGO community, the Reddit one is much larger.

She would harass me for a few months and then move on to other targets before coming back to me. I believe that it took a year or so (going from memory) before I finally "let her win" by fooling her into thinking I took my blog down.

She's had some high profile targets too. She was convinced that Boy George was really dead and the person claiming to be Boy George was an imposter. She'd tweet at him incessantly to get him to fess up. She also targeted the then-CEO of Firefox.

Oh, and she also thought I was part of some Uber hacker group. Her proof? Anytime she messaged someone about how God told her we did all these horrible things, they blocked her. Obviously, it wasn't them blocking the crazy. Nope. It was us breaking into those people's Twitter accounts and forcing a block even though those people actually believed her.

I really didn't want her to get arrested and just hoped that she'd get help. Sadly, I don't think she ever did.

I've used this nickname for years and have grown attached to it. I'm not ditching it just because some crazy cyberstalker targeted me.

Yes. My son and I went to the IRS office and, despite my brain cooking up horrible scenarios (including us getting arrested - my brain apparently hates me), it went very smoothly.

The agent there had no clue what the person on the phone was talking about. Her best guess was that the phone agent wasn't trained well and looked up someone else's information. After a few moments, everything was sorted out and my son will receive his refund.