Turkey is explicitly backing the Syrian Natonal Army (not the actual Syrian Army or the Free Syrian Army - splitters!) but it’s understood that they were also backing HTS to some extent (although not openly as they are still a proscribed organisation in a lot of western countries) and it was Turkey that greenlit the recent big push as their negotiations with Assad were going nowhere. So, while the West have been scrambling for some influence in Syria (and Russia and Iran have lost their’s), Turkey has been left as the main puller of strings in Syria. Their main concern is the Kurds and they were attacking them within a day or two of Assad falling.

Good bot

@remindme@mstdn.social in 30 years

I think if more people took on tasks like running the communities while educating people the benefits of the fediverse, then we can see a bit more growth.

This is the way - be the change you want to see in the world.

Lemmy isn’t the size of Reddit, so it isn’t at a place where the vast majority of users can just passively consume content.

If there’s a niche for a community then start it. If you want more Mods, keep an eye out for active posters and ask if they want to help. If you are unsure about starting a community or want help from the start (as it might be popular) then start a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee. The more active communities, the more likely it is for the next wave of users to stick around and some of them might start new communities.

If you build it they will indeed come and stay.

I wish I was that young!

Yeah, that’s tricky - I have Italian DNA matches (although they go back to the late Bronze Age) and my cousin married an Italian woman, so have had a nose around some Italian family trees and they seem to have solid records. I don’t know about Spanish or South American records.

Going by this discussion (warning: it’s on The Bad Place) (see also this discussion), there are good Spanish records but you’d need to talk to someone with expertise on where to look for the specific records you need. It may be worth tracking down Spanish language genealogy sites or try general ones and see who you can find - I have great luck with RootsChat who have a Europe board on their forum (although I was mainly after British help).

It depends on where they were from. If the big repositories don’t have the data (and you have clearly tried them) then:

• The data may have been destroyed or never written down. I am ¾ Irish but landing any of my ancestors in Ireland has been hard. The records burned in 1916 and, in some areas, there are gaps during the Potato Famine when no-one was around to write things down. One of my best DNA matches on my Mum’s side falls foul of the latter as we have matching surnames and know pretty much when and where our connection would be but the parish records just stopped in that period.
• It’s not in English. They are doing their best to fill such gaps but adding translation in can be hard. There are often regional family record offices but they may be in a language you don’t speak (I’m having trouble tracing my sister-in-law’s grandmother who was born in Estonia. I am also helping a friend whose grandfather was born in Malaysia and it is tricky even working out where to look). Scandinavian genealogy tends to be excellent, but you may need access to the “farm books” where the records are kept.
• It’s paywalled elsewhere - Scottish records need you to subscribe to a specific site.
• The names are badly transcribed - the British record keepers clearly struggled with some Irish names especially when being told them by illiterate peasants (possibly not helped by some being in Gaelic). I have one family whose name is written over a dozen different ways and it can be hard piecing it together. The names settle down after a bit (there was a big push for literacy in the late 19th Century) but there are two branches of the family that ended up with two different spellings of their surname.

Or any other issues. Without details it is tricky to point you in any specific direction.

If you hit a wall, try DNA.

Accident it is then.

Yeah, I was pondering if it’d be possible to make it less of an issue. I presume the metal of the discs and chain is pretty thin, so you could get to work with tin snips, a file and some needle-nose pliers. Take them off, rework some and hang them back up. However, a) I’m not sure it could be done satisfactorily and b) that sounds like a lot of hassle for some, hopefully, cheap knickknack, so I’d probably just make it have an accident.

Turn them round.

You could try looking back through !horrormovies@lemm.ee but a couple of recent posts:

• The Best Overlooked Horror Movies You Must Stream in October
• 10 Underrated Horror Movies That Are Perfect From Start to Finish

In no particular order, genre shows include:

• Babylon 5
• Firefly
• X-Files
• Fringe
• Buffy/Angel
• The League of Gentlemen
• Dr Who / Torchwood
• True Blood
• Utopia
• Supernatural
• Third Rock
• Ash vs Evil Dead
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
• Peacemaker
• The Nevers

Find a smaller instance and use the local and subscribed feeds. Then make use of the tools for more fine-grained blocking.

I watch a lot of horror but that managed to unsettle more than anything in a while.

That was my reasoning.

Ahhhh, I didn’t check… Now I feel bad.

It’s an artform, like perfectly baking a poo. If you time it right you can basically fall straight asleep without your brain going “hey, I just thought of something!”

I messed up last night when I hit the wall after 9 days solidly on the go - I thought the bed looked nice and a little lie on it wouldn’t hurt but I still had shit to do before bed. So I dropped off but my brain kept prodding me back to near consciousness and I kept on having weird sleep paralysis/false awakening dreams - including one in which I heard a woman murder a friend outside my bedroom door but I couldn’t force myself off the bed to intervene.

You can do something cathartic. After getting dumped, I once pushed a tree down in my back garden and carried it around to the front of the house for disposal. My muscles ached and I was cut and bruised but felt a lot better afterwards. Other times I’ve just gone out drinking with friends. There are sater more controlled ways of doing it - try exercising to exhaustion, get away for the weekend and GI hiking, drive a tank, go to one of those places where you can smash things up, organise a big paintballing session, etc. Something that breaks you out of your routine, preferably gets you out of your local area, needs all your focus and tires you out. It should take your mind off things, get you so focused and tired you aren’t brooding about it and provide a symbolic break so you can leave your baggage behind on the other side.

It’s not an instant cure, this will all take time but it’s a decisive first step.

What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games.

There’s !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk