Oy, now I understand why I wasn’t seeing your latest content!

Hmm, I haven’t hyperventilated in a long time.

I think I’ll refrain from posting a pic here, but mom had a ‘plant-bent’ that she followed up on by eventually becoming a certified ‘master gardener’ via series of courses.

In parallel with that, over the course of many years, mom took the little suburban backyard we had and transformed it in to… holy Willy Wonkas… a sort of ‘lush paradise,’ and with each square foot or so, it consisted of generally non-native, fascinating species. I.e., plants with interesting herbal qualities, incredible flowers, or whatnot.

Earlier, we’d rescued two stray cats, and it was really fun seeing them go back outside and frolic in mom’s garden. Hahaha, it was like an amusement park to them, one in which they became undeniably blissful and non-argumentative. (see, they didn’t like each too much, despite being sister littermates)

I sort of accidentally discovered that when dining at the local cantina.

The restaurant did something neat in serving an appetizer of guacamole on top of pico de gallo. For whatever reason I decided to dump the whole thing in to the bowl of spicy, chicken-black bean soup I was having. The contrast in flavors, and cooked vs fresh, spicy vs cool was an instant game changer. Indeed, I never looked back from there.

!eurographicnovels@lemm.ee

I… am both dumbfounded and grateful that you appreciate our community, Rolando. <3

Where would I even find Mastodon content, being logged in on Lemmy?

The instances / servers don’t seem to auto-populate here, so would I need to subscribe to something?

“Salmon chanted heaving,” by Harrison Ford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxP65isXSXw

You’re a big help.

World collapses and all maps of New Zealand are destroyed.

That made perfect sense to me for a moment because I’ve read several times now that NZ seems to be the preferred location for global billionaires to build their ultimate survival bunkers when collapse happens.

Plus, I imagine they’d want people topside to hang on there reasonably well for several reasons, such as a labor pool, genetics pool, testing pool, and possibly to grow some food on the surface.

I paid around US$700-800 for a nice Neumann mic that I’d researched pretty well, but like a dumbass didn’t realise that it required power, meaning I couldn’t just hook in to my amp like your basic Shure.

So later on as a solution, I got myself a Focusrite powered amp-interface that has a bonus of being able to route guitar and mic input in to USB. Spent hours trying to get everything working and kept running in to problems. IIRC the USB signal was barely received by my computer, and the only way the amp received a signal is if the computer was powering the thing, which shouldn’t have been a requirement as it already had power.

I just went back to my Shure while that fancy stuff gathers dust. Similar thing with my Ableton.

What would be some commonly unused features?

While I don’t dispute any of that, it seems to me that Google’s CAPTCHA services can also cycle endlessly no matter what.

For example, I’ll have uMatrix give full permission to the service early in the day, and the queries will never end. Come back a few hours later and it will work first-time, no problem. Other days it might loop in images more than usual but will eventually work.

As if they have no issues with my particular setup, but sometimes lose track of my progress through the CAPTCHA.

Thank you for these thoughts & interesting perspective. :-)

Maybe your experience was like mine in class. It just wasn’t the right format for me, and I needed to find a different way to unlock the door.

Thanks for explaining. So I guess that kind of thing is an artifact of the language being originally designed… what, ~100yrs ago? Still, since the main point is ease of learning and simplicity, maybe this is just something worth putting up with for the time being, no?

Oh, sorry. It’s a classic Sanskrit Buddhist mantra. I was switching gears there.

Anyway, good to hear about “La,” thanks.

Om mani padme hum.

So do I have it right that gender is mostly neutral? One of the things that kills me about FR (and SP) is the need to clutter my limited brain space with useless gender nonsense.

French.
I figured since I was exposed to it for a year as an infant, it would help me out when I was farting around with electives in school. Well, nope-- that ‘infant period’ was just too early I guess, and classroom learning didn’t work for me, regardless.

What actually helped a tonne was just vacationing in Paris for a week (i.e. helpless immersion), and later, developing a passion for Franco-Belgian comics, which led to me using the DuoLingo app on phone whenever I’m bored or have a spare moment.

~Six months in, I’m just blown away by how much I can read without too much trouble. Google’s vanilla “Translate” app helps a bunch when I’m stuck. Of course it’s also good to have other aids, such as a handy chart of verb conjugations, etc, but really it was just DuoLingo that caught me on fire.

Feel free anyone to drop by our Lemmy community devoted to European graphic novels if you’re interested.

Oh shoot, I meant the above for @small44@lemmy.world actually, i.e. OP. I don’t believe you had replied to me at any point, hence that wasn’t meant for you.

That said-- I’m not too sure the “90:9:1” rule applies so well to the FV. For one thing, it seems like a good number of subscribers tried out Lemmy (etc) at some point and then went back to Reddit (etc), meaning they’re no longer really here. Another point is that since the FV moves a lot more slowly than Reddit, I question whether FV users are as active here compared to other places.

About the bias of me seeing only part of Small44’s community numbers due to filtering by my own instance-- you’re right of course, but after double-checking their overall global numbers, they’re actually only a tiny bit larger. Ironically or not, most of their users came from my own instance (lemm.ee). So their numbers across three communities are really too small to ever be properly viable IME.

So something like the kbin worldnews community I mod has literally thousands of inactive subscribers.

Geez, that’s… not good. :S

https://lemm.ee/u/small44@lemmy.world

Hmm, it looks like you’re mod of ~three fairly dormant communities that have very small user bases. Unfortunately, at that size I wouldn’t think there’d be much in the way of regular comments, much less guest posts.

In my case I was lucky, because a co-mod and regular poster happened to join in early-on, and we were able to build up the first couple hundred users fairly quickly.

But something else that I think helped a lot was that our community is very visual-oriented, so it was pretty easy to find users who were perfectly happy to join up just to look at pretty images without necessarily clicking links or putting too much thought in to anything deeper. So pandering to the lowest common denominator of user interest seems to work nicely for building up base numbers. That said, there’s still a lot of growth we need to do, which likely involves outreach of some kind or another.

There’s absolute mass quantities, as Beldar the Conehead might say.

It’s easy enough to guess that plenty of people just grabbed a community name in case they might find it useful one day, but I’m guessing plenty of others legitimately started up a community, put some effort in to it, then ultimately got discouraged and abandoned it. A big part of that likely due to not being able to attract many subscribers and contributors.

Personally what I’ve found is that if you really want a community to grow, you need to seed it with content on a regular basis; preferably daily. Posting bots are probably a good way to help with that, altho if the sub looks like it’s little more than bot posts, I don’t think users will be inclined to post or comment much.

What I haven’t quite figured out myself is how to incline users to post on their own, but hopefully with time that issue will kind of resolve itself due to sheer user count.

Btw, see here:
https://lemm.ee/c/fedigrow