The commute was too far already (about 1h 10m driving each way), and they wanted me to transfer to another location which would require a full-on move, which I wasn’t up for.
In retrospect, after I left they got bought out, had a leadership changeover and rebranding, and closed several facilities. So I think I might’ve dodged something.
This. It was a golden age of information and community availability, and it’s going to be hard to put that back together. Especially since the prior eras of distributed sites, we had functioning search engines.
And yeah, sure, it can be rebuilt… but there’s going to be a long time of awful isolation until it is.
So. Early, early on I did reach out to a couple of them.
Unfortunately, there are some frankly terrible communities on Lemmy who engage in some pretty awful hatred and historical denialism, and they weren’t interested in moving to a community that wouldn’t dissociate with that, much less one that is actively run by the same people.
And like, we can repeat to the end of time that Lemmy is a distributed community and each instance’s choices don’t reflect on others. But the reality is that people do look at the largest instances not shutting that crap out, and it does color their perceptions.
I’m aware of it. It suffers from the same issues as WWZ. Max Brooks makes a lot of assertions, some of which are factually wrong (about topics other than zombies, I mean), some of which require the zombies to share the same oddly specific immunities to be true, and some of which is even self-contradictory. (Offhand, the bit that sticks in my mind is he completely contradicts himself about whether zombies can even climb things.)
I mean, the Zombies in WWZ basically run on magic shields to be a threat. They’re utterly invulnerable to anything Max Brooks doesn’t want them to be killed by.
Like, if I remember correctly, they’re immune to shrapnel and bleeding wounds because “the dead don’t need blood”, and nerve toxins or shockwaves don’t harm them because “the dead don’t have a nervous system”. But somehow removing the head is a 100% infallible method of killing them. What is in the head if not blood and nerves, Max?
These are creatures which casually violate the second law of thermodynamics. If they’re playing by real-world physics, chemistry, and biology, they’re radically less dangerous.
Damn, dude. I am envious of your travel arrangements. It’s especially incredible how hard it is to convince management that hours spent fiddling with receipts isn’t worth whatever small amounts of change they might save from not just paying a flat sum.