I’m going to be blunt, this reads like reddit rage bait. As such, I’ll respond that way, then give a more neutral answer in case it’s real.

The response to it as bait is that anyone saying that seriously is an idiot.

More neutral, anyone saying that has an obligation to explain themselves because it makes no sense by itself. And it doesn’t.

Our old pong console. I don’t know if it still works because it’s been boxed up for over a decade at this point.

Oldest in use? Probably my old texas instruments graphing calculator, but it’s dying. I got it back in the early nineties for college, and my kid was using it last year with homework, but the screen is failing and it sometimes just freezes until you pull and replace the batteries. So only kinds in use, and barely hanging on.

My VCR is newer and still sees use rarely, but was used daily for a few years in the early naughties.

Wait! The phonograph! It’s still functional and my dad got it in the early eighties, so it’s older than the pong console, but I think calling it electronics is dubious, so I dunno if it counts. But it’s the oldest functional electric powered thing we have that I know of.

Well, I’m not sure what level of familiarity you have with martial arts/combat training. Or with what goes into “stage” combat, or fifty choreography.

But there’s no single answer here. It’s going to vary based on the production of the film/show/play, and the individual actor’s interest/ability.

Let’s point to the stuff I’m familiar enough with to have done personally: stage combat. Someone does a play with a fight scene. Actors that do stage work tend to pick up the very specific skills involved in making a fight scene in stage look “real enough”. You don’t have to learn how to fence for real, you just have to look interesting while you clash fake swords together.

That goes for hand to hand scenes as well. Matter of fact, in both cases, you’ll often be training how to miss and still look like you hit. This means that an actor that doesn’t train outside of stage combat is going to have trouble in a real fight because their reflexes and perception of range aren’t going to work right.

Movie fighting can be exactly the same. The actors aren’t supposed to hit each other at all. Fight scenes are planned ahead of time, with camera angles set so that the shoot is reasonably safe, but the action looks good on screen.

So, again, most movies or shows aren’t going to be training actors to actually fight. They may not even do amy marital arts training at all, even just to look a little more realistic, because it’s faster and cheaper to have an actor just memorize steps like in a dance. Which isn’t too far off from what kata are tbh. So an actor in that kind of production isn’t going to gain any practical skills at all.

However, some productions do have the actors train to some degree or another because it allows for a little improv and for the actors to move like they know how to fight both within a fight scene and in other scenes.

That productions sometimes end up with actors having a degree of real proficiency in what they’re taught. However, it’s very rare for a movie to have the budget for that. Even the Matrix and John Wick didn’t go super deep into it. They hired top end stunt performers and choreographers that prepped the actors extremely well. The Matrix in particular was a lot of wire work, really heavily influenced by Hong Kong style kung fu movies. So they didn’t teach the actors any significant fight skills, more how to look like they knew how to do stage/movie kung fu.

Now, Keanu is actually a really great example to use. He’s got a reputation for putting his work in outside of what’s required. He’s done a shit ton of firearms work over the years on his own. And, supposedly, he has done some h2h training too, though I’ve heard conflicting stories about what kind.

And there’s been plenty of actors that have a background in some variety of fighting art. Plenty of actors end up finding a love for one style or another from acting. Fencing ends up being fairly popular among stage actors, though they rarely compete, and never seriously that I’ve ever heard of.

But could Keanu do the same things as in the movies? Hell no. Dude is human, and doesn’t have an entire team supporting him in a real fight. Nobody could pull off the stuff John Wick does because he has plot armor. He’s going to get hurt, but not catch a stray bullet in the head and drop dead.

Could Keanu hold his own in a realistic fight? Probably. He’s physically fit, has done at least a little training, and those two things are huge advantages in a random fight with some asshole looking for trouble. Could he step into an MMA gym and hold his own with fighters his own weight class and age range? I don’t know. Maybe, like I said, he stays in good shape, so he wouldn’t be an utter failure.

But it depends on how much work he puts in on his own time. A year of training for a movie isn’t going to mean shit if that’s all the training you ever do, no matter how good the training is. Fighting is one of those things where you will lose your skills to some degree if you don’t practice in some way. I’ve lost a good bit of ability over the years since I can’t train the way I used to. I can’t take falls, I can’t move the same, so if I was to jump on the mat and try to roll, I’m likely going to need a doctor. I might, however, be able to fake it on camera with a little help.

But I have had violent encounters since becoming disabled, and that’s not the same as sparring with someone trained in controlled settings. So I did fine. Came out of it uninjured entirely in every case, though I felt like I’d been beat to hell because my body just ain’t what it used to be. So I wouldn’t count an actor entirely as untrained if they were dealing with a low threat fight over a parking spot or whatever.

So, there’s no single answer here. In some cases it’s a hell no, they’re toast; in others it’s where I’m not likely to start a fight with them

Alex Steele is bloody awesome

Yup, you’re misguided.

Be yourself, all the time, unless you’re a bigot.

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

It’s harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.

Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.

I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?

But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I’d run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.

They really are fun

I feel that!

I roll armed everywhere, and I would be all “yo, you got this! Ima nap, we cool?” And be snoring before they could even swivel my way.

Napping under unusual circumstances is my special power.

Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

Preach! We should be way past the silliness of body hair choices being open for other’s opinions. It took my sasquatch looking ass a while to get there for myself, but there’s still social pushback that just pisses me off. I’m glad you found your balance :)

Just for the hell of it, I don’t know about OP, but I don’t even know how to.

I went to the relevant linked section and couldn’t find a way to raise an issue directly. I’m going to try again, and if I succeed I’ll return here and make a top level comment for anyone scrolling by and wondering. I’ve never tried to do this before, so I’ll see how it goes.

Edit: aha!

You have to go to the issues page and select the “new issue” button, where you’ll be directed to log in to github.

Which, for me, means I’m finished trying. No desire whatsoever to have another login for a one time thing. If I ever manage to learn enough code to do anything like this often enough, I’d do it, but it just isn’t worth it to satisfy my curiosity about the process.

People are fucking weird. There’s also prudes and morons that assume any contact at all has to be some kind of horror.

But we’re supposed to teach our kids how to clean and manage their bodies. That’s the job; we do it for them when they’re too young to do it themselves, or if something temporarily/permanently disables them from doing so.

It isn’t weird to help with genital care under those circumstances either. You gotta teach kids how to wash their junk, and if they want/need to change their pubic hair, it’s part of the job to discuss it, decide if it’s the right choice at that point, and if the mutually agreed answer is yes, to teach them how not to screw up.

For real, who else is supposed to? You gonna hire a nurse or nurse’s assistant to teach them? That’s weird, and there aren’t any specialists in aesthetics that are going to agree to it in most circumstances when the kid is under the local age of consent. Too much risk.

And even that assumes that the kid is going to be okay with a stranger helping them with their genitals. Not every kid would be. For me, there’s no way I’m going to have a total stranger fiddling with my kid’s junk for non medical reasons, even if the kid was alright with it.

You did the job, end of story.

This is all you fucking do. These shitty little comments that are supposed to look like irony, but are empty and mindless.

What’s the deal? Why have you put in that much time on lemmy making essentially the same comment over and over again? Like, often enough that I don’t even have to look at the user name when there’s a comment like this, it’s going to be you.

There has to be a reason behind it, some kind of thing in your head that makes you think it’s a beneficial hobby, so what is it? Help a motherfucker out, I don’t like blocking people unless there’s no other choice, so show me the human behind the blathering.

Well, I don’t miss the kiddie porn being dropped into chat rooms and forums randomly like could happen back in the day. But I like having a decent chance of finding whatever product I want/need and a better than zero shot at finding whatever obscure thing I’m interested in on Wikipedia.

There’s tradeoffs. But the old net was a lot more fun.

Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)

Oh damn! Wet leg and tiny desk! This is gonna be great :)

Thank you for sharing

Edit, after having watched it then scrolled all the way through lemmy. It was great! If you’ve never seen or heard wet leg, this is a solid point to get introduced to them. Their unique sound is well showcased here.

If you’re an established fan, they were on point, and obviously excited to be doing that kind of performance, so the energy is really high and satisfying.

Into a pool? Yeah, it really isn’t that hard. Plenty of people manage to get in their first time after verbal instructions and make it short distances.

You won’t have great form, and you’ll probably wear yourself out fast because of it, but as long s you know ahead of time that there’s some basics that even a dummy can do to stay afloat while you rest, you’d be fine.

Wouldn’t even take six months. If there was a book written with basic techniques, described well, you could absorb that in however long it takes you to read.

Panic would be the barrier, not knowledge. But knowledge can sometimes prevent panic, so it’s totally doable.

I mean, fuck, I know people that have started out with way more complex movements with nothing but reading up and done well for a first timer. If there’s illustrations, it’s even easier.

Majestic as fuck!

It really was a great era for CG.

The problem is that to get the look of chalk, you have to use something that applies at least close to the same, and nothing that would be waterfast or similarly durable is going to apply the same. Like pastels, they’re basically in between chalk and crayon in the way they transfer to a surface, but you can tell at a glance that it isn’t the same effect. The livers lines look more structured, fill in the valleys of something like cement or concrete more than chalk. And asphalt isn’t much different.

So you have a few choices. First is to go with chalk and a fixative. If you’re going for something artistic, that’s your best choice. It won’t last forever, but it’ll look like chalk while it lasts.

Second is to use grease markers. They’ll still smear, but should last through rain at least. It won’t look like chalk, but it’ll still have a similar enough vibe to maybe carry it off. You’ll have a limited palette unless you make your own, but you can get similar effects with something like cray-pas. It’ll be expensive as fuck though with pastels and such, that stuff isn’t meant for big projects.

Then there’s temporary marking paints. Like the guys that mark power lines use. Won’t last forever, but it’ll take some wear before flaking off the surface. They won’t look like chalk at all, but if you’re doing something more like hopscotch lines, it’d be a better pick imo.

It really comes down to your project. Like, I used to do fairly frequent sidewalk art on my own sidewalks with neighborhood kids. They’d do their thing, I’d do something a bit more complex. There’s sidewalk chalks that will hold up being walked on lightly for a few days as long as it doesn’t rain. Better than your typical chalk you’d use on paper or a chalkboard at least. Crayola was actually pretty reliable in that regard, but the colors were all primary or pastel; so you’d have to pick up anything else as regular artist’s chalk, which is a thing at most hobby and art supply stores.

But if I wanted a section to last longer for some reason, I’d usually make my own parafin or beeswax blocks. A little cheap pigment (like tempera powder as one example), some heat and molds, you have a slightly crumbly chunk of color that won’t get rinsed away in the first rain. It’ll melt and make a mess in the summer though, so you won’t want it where you’ll walk on it much.

Tempera paint actually does decent for very temporary but more wear resistant sidewalk art. Once dry, people can walk over it a little without it being wrecked. Rain makes it run though.

Damn, I just realized I miss the fuck out of those days. Come home from work, and there’s a gang of kids waiting. Break out the boxes of chalk, and everyone is just making happy pictures all over the porch, the sidewalk, even the street if there were other adults to run interference with traffic. There usually were, but not always. Rule was that if there weren’t two adults that could manage traffic, the street was off limits.

Since it kinda turned into a thing, there were days when not only my house, but houses all up and down the street would have suns and houses and stick figures under trees all over the driveways and such.

Anyway, old man memories aside, it depends on what you’re doing.