Depends on whose definition it is.

Some define alcoholism as a dependence on the substance alone, others define it as a continued use of the substance despite it causing problems for the individual, other definitions require that the user display signs of physical dependency/withdrawal syndrome when no longer using the substance.

Anecdotally, in my experience usually people only begin referring to someone as an alcoholic when they become physically dependent and experience withdrawals when stopping use.

However, If I recall correctly, I think that when creating a post if you upload an image then it is immediately put into the database whether or not the post is actually made. As a result I don’t think there is a way to overwrite these, so some trace would still remain in such an instance if I am not mistaken.

Furthermore none of this prevents or rectifies snapshots or backups of data being created by pretty much any entity - I know that’s probably not in the scope of the question, but just something tangentially related to keep in mind.

I’m not looking for anything, I was describing an experience I can’t explain per the thread which was probably mechanical or electrical in nature. Unsure how you got that impression.

One time on a summer day as a teenager I went to the grocery store with my Mom.

We parallel parked the car a ways away from other cars. We secured the car as normal and went on a short shopping trip.

When we came back out after maybe 15 minutes, all of the cars windows were rolled down completely.

We both know for a fact all the windows were rolled up when we left, and even if we had them down, there would have been no reason to have the back windows down.

Nothing was stolen, no one was around, everything appeared untouched.

This was a Nissan Murano if I recall correctly - it did have power windows, but at the time there was no fancy stuff to remote control car features outside of having a remote starter installed, which we did not have.

There was only one set of keys.

We still have absolutely no explanation for this to this day.

I see, that is troublesome. To my knowledge there isn’t much you can do except wait until they reply to you - unless someone else happens to have a different way of contacting them.

Can you not create that new account, and then just mod that account for the community using your existing mod account?

Six screens? I’d love to see a picture of that setup to see how it works. What’s your system hardware as well, you would need some hell of a graphics card I imagine depending on resolution!

Yea and at that, if you do want touch capability, Plasma is also pretty good for that as I understand it as well haha.

I had the same feeling - I still disregarded other choices in favor of XFCE on my little home server since I mostly interact with it over ssh anyway and didn’t need all the other functionality others have for it.

If you are so concerned about battery life that you are looking to jailbreak a phone, instead you should look into a power solution such as power banks - or even better, a solar panel with a controller that stores to a 12 volt car battery or some such.

I have used inkscape though it has been some time. I felt as though it was not super featureful at the time so the UI felt slightly barren compared to something like Adobe Illustrator, but I don’t recall having the same kind of trouble with it that I do with GIMP honestly.

I only see one on your previous comment, but it could be because blender has recently started getting a better reputation for usability/learnability.

6 years ago I touched it and I was horrified, but I touched it a few times this year and found they had made some good improvements.

That is interesting and I did not know that. Thanks.

I think what you are thinking of is the ellipse selection tool, and yes this exists and can be used - however I am referring to the tool class of geometric shapes which is quite common among other software. Basically it creates a vector (In most cases I think) shape with options for stroke and fill, and controls the same way that the ellipse selection tool does (constraints etc.).

GIMP does not have this, instead you have to go through a decent amount of trouble to get simple geometric shapes drawn to the screen, and at that I believe they are always raster.

Take these procedures as an example for GIMP.

https://www.alphr.com/make-shapes-gimp/

This makes GIMP difficult if you want to use it for some niche uses such as making a quick flow diagram, or a quick vector mask which can be changed later.

True, but I prefer intuition over efficiency when I pick something up for the first time, second time, and third time, until I eventually have a good enough understanding to begin worrying about efficiency.

There are use cases for Libre office writer, just as there are for vim, even though they are both capable of producing text documents. One is arguably more intuitive while one is arguably more efficient, but if I didn’t know anything about word processing/text editing and had to pick between the two, I would pick writer.

Same goes for anything else, and it’s also why a decent number of text editors/software support emacs/vim bindings - so that you can use the software intuitively, and then once you understand it, you can become more efficient by using modal bindings. Same goes for GIMP versus other software. The thing about other softwares in the same genre is that they can be learned relatively easily and can also be used efficiently. GIMP I find harder to learn, even if it is efficient later.

For anyone who is new who has to make a choice as well - very few people would pick vim to start out with.

Furthermore, in this instance, I do have a decent amount of photo editing experience and have used multiple softwares to do it, but even after that, the problem I have with GIMP is that a lot of this knowledge does not transfer to GIMP like it does for other software. If I learn photoshop, I can get away with using affinity, krita, corel draw, clip studio, and other software - but not nearly as easily GIMP.

I would also argue that efficiency is equally dependent upon the software as it is the task. The workflow for digital painting, animation, and photo editing are all quite different, and no one UX/UI is the most efficient at all of them. This is why most of these softwares have modular interfaces, which is good, but I simply find the modular interface of GIMP harder to use or understand versus the rest.

Haha, yes the feeling is similar there, though I think I personally still had an easier time learning blenders current workflow.

Under the hood I actually really like GIMP. I’m also not too bothered by there being no circle tool. My problem with GIMP is that if there were a circle tool in it, its a little too difficult to find it if it does exist.

If they had some front end re-write eventually where they just moved some stuff around and better organized the front end of the application, I think a lot more people would use it. UX/UI is really important, and I’m sure the contributors of GIMP know this as they seem to have done well to try to make the interface feel straightforward by putting stuff under menu’s and whatnot, but the location of things just seems unintuitive/non-standard compared to what every other application does.

The other issue I have with GIMP is just that its development cycle takes forever compared to most every other open source application I have seen.

Not to say there is a great answer to any of this, image manipulation/animation software is not an easy thing to program by any means so I understand why it can take forever, but I just wish there was a real answer.

In the mean time, I’ve just been trying to get by with krita, though krita really seems geared toward digital painting specifically.

Thank you, and I am glad to hear that you were recently reminded of something you had love for. I had a similar experience when joining Lemmy about 2 years ago. It drove me to begin keeping a general book for journaling.

To that end, if you intend to take your rediscovery of your love of writing further, a recommendation of mine would be to find both a book and pen that you like. Something with a cover or paper which you enjoy, and something which makes it feel easy and smooth to write with. In doing this I have found that it has reminded me to write and allows me to enjoy doing so much more.

In my case I found a green, hard covered book, with a relief of a tree on the front. The cover has a soft wrap which makes it feel good to hold and warm to the touch. It has two tongues for keeping place.

My pen is a very cheap but nicely made Muji brand aluminum fountain pen with which I use Waterman black ink. It writes smoothly and the pages soak the ink in well. It is also not so expensive that I would be worried if I lost it. It has a knurling which makes it easy to hold, and the cap posts in the back in an unconventional manner.

I have found writing for myself has helped me when writing for others, the only difficult part was remembering to begin.

To try to clarify for you:

Imagine you could have your own entire reddit that you can install on a server and let other people join and use. On your reddit, they can create subreddits, make comments, make posts, and everything else you would expect.

Now imagine other people do the same thing. Many other people. They make their own reddits on their own servers which have their own subreddits, users, posts, comments, etc. Imagine I am one of these other people, and I have my own version of reddit on my own server.

Federation is where between you and I and everyone else, between all these peoples own personal reddits, posts and communities will show up from all of the reddits on everyones front page, and everyone can interact with them regardless of whose reddit they are actually on.

You might make a post on your own reddit, in a subreddit there called “mySubreddit”. Even though I am on my own server, I see this post you have made on the front page of my server, and I can comment on it, make posts on “mySubreddit”, upvote and downvote, everything you would expect.

This works both ways. I can make posts on the version of reddit running on your server, see its communities etc, and you can do the same on mine.

Now replace the word “subreddit” with “community”, the word “server” with “instance”, and the word “reddit” with “lemmy”, and this is how the platform works.

This means you can have a large group of people like reddit does, interacting with one another, but without any one person or a business having to buy and manage entire server farms, moderate an enormous platform, or any of the other major logistical stuff.

It means that no company owns it as well. Lemmy also can’t “go down” like reddit, because reddit is not federated. If reddits server has an issue, no one can access reddit. If lemmy.ml goes down, you can still see lemm.ee, lemmy.world, lemmy.one, or any of the other lemmy instances, because they are different entire servers owned by entirely different people that are managed and configured separately from one another.

Your account is on lemm.ee, which is an instance of lemmy on someones server. My account is on lemmy.ml, which is a different instance - someone elses server. And yet, we can hold this conversation because of federation. The community (subreddit) this conversation is taking place in is lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy, which is a community on my home server where my account is stored. Your account does not exist here, but you didnt have to create a lemmy.ml account to see this community, or the post, or my comments, or to reply to me, because federation allows your account to work on lemmy instances that are federated to your lemm.ee home server.

This also keeps you from getting banned from the entire platform over ridiculous things. At most, you can be banned from an entire Lemmy instance. This is good because if an instance has a change of ownership, and the new owner is an asshole, you can’t be locked out of the entire platform, you can always just create another account on a different lemmy instance without fear of being banned again (so long as you follow the respective rules on whatever instances you are communicating in). Furthermore, the mod logs are public data, and can be viewed from the sidebar of communities, so it is easy to see if a mod or admin is an asshole.

I’m glad to take any follow up questions or provide further clarifications.

Understand this is not reddit. There is no “reddit hivemind” on Lemmy because Lemmy is federated. You will find that this type of thing still exists within certain instances in various ways, but know that you are leaving a single large echo chamber and entering into a series of smaller, federated echo chambers. There is much more representation of human beings with differing morals, ideals, and beliefs here as compared to reddit.

Based on my own experience, you would do well by yourself to learn to not take what other people are thinking personally. You don’t have to believe in what anyone else thinks, but other people don’t have to believe in what you think either. Don’t make the mistake of believing you know what is best, or that you know everything.

I have seen this have a culture shock effect on newer users, because they often expect that everyone thinks, says, does, or feels all the same or similar things as them about anything and everything, and quickly find out that it is not necessarily the case here.

An example of this I have seen on multiple occasions is where new users are shocked when they make a post about wanting some kind of change to the entire platform “to attract users”, and are quickly informed that many user’s do not necessarily want, or care that the platform attracts users, because for many, that is not the point of the software Lemmy, rather that is the point for a business like reddit. If a user really wants some huge change, usually the response is for them to make an account on an existing instance like what they are looking for, or to host their own.

You will find much more actual individualism on Lemmy. It is important to be aware that not only is everyone not the same, but that they don’t have to be either.

People are also less likely to react positively to comments that are not offering actual thought. If you enter a thread to comment “this”, or just to make jokes without a point, you may find you receive a different reaction than what you would receive on reddit.

Do not read a title or a comment, hammer a reply into your keyboard, and then hit send so that you can move on to more content faster, like other social media has trained you to.

Read posts and comments and think about them. Weigh your replies. If you think you know the point you want to get across, consider what responses others may have, adjust what you are writing until you believe your reply thoroughly covers what you actually think about the subject matter as whole with consideration to what you think might be follow up questions and others thoughts, and then send it.

Of course if you have further thoughts later on, feel free to edit what you said to clarify or add to your thought (as I am doing this very moment, 40 minutes later).

Lemmy is an excellent opportunity to practice communication, because as it stands, you will find the degree of conversation is much more engaging than what reddit turned into over time. If you have a well thought out, beautiful, or powerful thing to say and go through the trouble of saying it well, you may find you are rewarded by someone else doing the same in return.

Just because the format is similar to that of reddit does not mean that Lemmy is the same platform.

In short I feel that Lemmy is not a platform that is there to work for you necessarily, instead it is a platform that enables you to work on yourself. But only if you will let it.