Got pissed at corporate social media for the way they’ve accelerated the damage being done to our already degraded public discourse but I still needed somewhere to doomscroll and find… gifs… of… nothing in particular…

For advanced STEM degrees, there are people who just enjoy learning that sort of thing and applying their knowledge.

In the same vein, some folks are just attracted to dangerous and difficult jobs because they get a sense of purpose or identity from it.

Others it’s community. I knew a guy who did 20 years active duty military, then joined the national guard, then took a job for the same national guard unit as a DoD civilian and stayed on until they forced him to retire. They had practically drag the guy out. He never did anything but bitch and complain about the work he spent more than 40 years doing, he sounded like kinda hated his job, but he liked being a part of the military.

As others have said, I use a client that doesn’t display them, so it never dawned on me. And in general, profile pics have never been a big deal for me. So if the app or site doesn’t make me do it as part of the account set up, my profile pic just stays as the default.

You can set profile pictures on Lemmy?

deleted by creator

The phenomenon is sometimes called the Naccism of Small Differences or the Law of Triviality. It appears in just about any group of people to some degree. It’s a wild and weird little bit of human behavior.

From others in general - Always invest in the things that separate you from the ground; shoes, tires, and your mattress.

From a coach I knew - Every so often sit down and make sure your actions fit with your goals. It’s easier to get off course than you think.

From my father - The Hassle Factor. A job can give you three things, enough money to make up for the time you don’t have, enough time to make up for the money you don’t have, and a sense of satisfaction. If you aren’t getting at least two of the three, the job isn’t worth the hassle.

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it.

I know. I have a problem. =(

Oddly enough, I don’t claim to really love language for the sake of language, but it’s pretty useful in my day to day so I try to use it well. I like your post, so, in the spirit of negotiation let’s use the term baseline instead of rules.

The bulk of educational and informational works on the English language gives us a kind of baseline for our written language. When someone deviates from that baseline, most of the time we can still understand them because we can see how it differs and can infer their intent based on context and that baseline.

The dictionaries, style guides, and grammar texts that give us our baseline exist to facilitate written communication, not stifle it. They’re the result of hundreds of years of these kinds of negotiations, not just arbitrary choice as so many people claim. Good grammar isn’t just a cudgel to beat the creativity out of kids, it’s the benefit of centuries worth of experience and study. Just as new ideas shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, we also shouldn’t disregard past practice simply on the basis of it’s age.

Baselines do change. But it’s a slow process, not every popular new deviation will stand the test of time, and many antique forms are still present in our modern language. Think of it like scientific progress. Some ideas are validated by experimentation, others are proven wrong. Our understanding of the universe is more complex now than centuries ago, but there are still numerous constants that have been proven time after time. Our language has grown more complex too, but that doesn’t mean that some very old ideas about how to communicate in writing aren’t still useful today.

But you’re very, very right about shame and reactions, and I’d be dishonest not to admit that. It’s too easy for armchair grammarians to treat language as if it exists in a logic vacuum separate from human emotion, and that’s simply not the case.

Omitting a period from a text isn’t a crime, I freely admit that I’m often a grumpy old asshole about this sort of thing when I shouldn’t be, and you’re 100% correct that people shouldn’t be shamed over it.

At the same time, the reverse is also true. Not every plea for punctuation and grammar is creative or ideological tyranny, and if some people react poorly to a text that omits punctuation, that’s not something the author has a say in either.

At any rate, I hope this comes of as intended, a genuine, if overly lengthy explanation from someone who supports the widespread use of punctuation, and not just Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud. =)

I still send =), =D, and =P.

I’ll just go ahead and get in my coffin now.

Oddly enough, I liked sidebars because they left more vertical real estate available for endless scrolling in browsers and auto-hide on some taskbars can get flaky.

But then again I go out of my way to find 16:10 monitors, so maybe take that with a grain of salt.

You seem to think a centralized style and grammar book like the French have is the only way to have strict set of grammatical rules.

An overwhelming number of English textbooks and stylebooks agree on the use of a period. We’re not talking about something esoteric here, it’s how you end a sentence. Omitting them is poor writing. Claiming artistic licence or understandability doesn’t change that in the vast majority of cases. I’m not calling those who omit them baby-killers or anything. It’s just poor writing that people have grown accustomed to seeing.

Writers like McCarthy, Twain, and Joyce have the chops to communicate exceptionally well despite breaking these rules, not just because they broke them. The people in the office next to yours mangling emails don’t.

And literacy rates are on the decline in the US. Take that however you will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

It’s very in line with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death and the idea that the medium itself shapes communication and public discourse.

People seem not just unwilling, but at times unable to tolerate any sort of discussion that’s long enough to get into the real nuance of an issue. Postman blamed the news, especially TV news, and an over reliance on TV/Video as means to convey information (though he actually supported TV as entertainment). But he also cautioned against the risk centralizing what he referred to then as “computing” in a way that seem to almost prophesize what’s currently happening with social media and AI.

Show me where those sources conflict on the use of a period.

It’s fine, I don’t care

I’ll just do it the way everyone else wants to, I guess I don’t need to use periods, not like my opinion matters anyway

That weirdness is, of course, the whole joke about Holt starting and ending his texts that way.

At the end of the day, despite my spending way too much time in this thread defending the mandatory use of periods, I have to admit that it doesn’t really matter how you write a text to your friends.

But proper grammar is important when you need to communicate clearly with a large audience who might not be aware of the colloquialisms and informal conventions you’re used to and it’s better to have a strict system of rules to make sure everyone can understand. Which is why primary and secondary schools teach the English language and an overall decline in literacy is cause for concern.

So yeah, context is important, but there are many contexts where proper grammar is required.

You eventually restated my point. It’s a convention used among a portion of the population, documented in articles and studies, but not taught or a part of formal grammar.

At some point a set of fairly strict rules is important for a written language, as your point with Gen X and Boomers helps to illustrate, because it makes sure you can be understood by a broader audience when clarity is required. Punctuation is a fundamental part of that.

Omitting periods in text is a technilogical colloquialism. I’m not arguing that. But that doesn’t mean, as the poster that I first replied to implied, that people who omit periods from texts are the only ones who “know how to write”.

Over-use of exclamation points is another poor habit, since they can mark something that’s important regardless of it being a positive or negative. With quoted speech it could be something that’s either angry or joyful. Using them to convey a non-threatening tone shouldn’t be required. I get that it is in some cases, and I belive that indicates a problem with our overall literacy and a renewed misogyny in the workplace.

Whether this is a result of the medium of communication or a decline in literacy is up for debate, but word choice and context should do the bulk of conveying tone and relying on punctuation for that purpose understandably looks like an indicator of poor literacy.

I said nothing about spelling, lol.

Correcting people’s gammar has always been a surprisingly contentious issue.