Blew the whole budget on Technology cloth and couldn’t afford Technology iron for the frame I guess.
That whole site is like a weird art installation of a company page. Why are the two categories “Adults” and “Girls”? Why is the one “Girl” product also listed in “Adult” with the four other chairs they sell? Why does the tab name switch to “Come back ⚡”? I feel like I should be looking for enigmatic clues to an internet murder.
I think it’s a structural effect. Let’s play moral relativism for a second and assume that everyone has their own definition of what is ethical and what isn’t, and that people generally choose not to do things they would consider unethical even if doing them would benefit themselves in some way. So, the people with the widest array of options for benefiting themselves are those with the least restrictive ethical framework. This doesn’t always mean that they will be successful or powerful, as humans are generally pretty bad at predicting what is good for them, and even worse at consistently acting on those beliefs, especially over the long term. However, the hoarding of wealth has a few characteristics that make it different from other forms of self-benefit:
It’s easy to measure progress, and therefore easy to optimize for. This means that once you find a successful means of making money, you can fine-tune the process and reproduce it more easily than, say, a critically acclaimed novelist can write a critically acclaimed sequel. (n.b. I’m not saying that getting rich is easy. In fact I think a lot of rich people, especially those at the very top, do genuinely put a lot of hard work and long hours into being rich. I think they’re genuinely passionate about being rich. I think it’s a selfish and self-defeating and catastrophically harmful goal to pursue, but I think they enjoy it and pursue it with the same vigor that any world-class athlete has for their sport.)
Money makes money. This one I think has been discussed enough, but it’s an established fact that they easiest way to make money is by having money, which means that people with the most money tend (assuming they don’t wildly fuck up, which does sometimes happen) to become even more insanely wealthy. You can even pay people to help your money make money more efficiently, which strikes me as very funny though I can’t really articulate why.
Having money influences the behavior of everyone around you, whether you want it to or not. The very rich, especially (but by no means exclusively) the famously rich, have their relationships with other people skewed in a very systematic way. This is conjecture on my part, having never been famously rich, but I would imagine that this systematic alteration of relationships is very hard to account for, especially if you get famous before you have a chance to form deep adult relationships. And by account for, I think there are just things rich people do that they simply do not, or cannot, see. Relatedly, I think this is why dictators tend to overreact to political comedians, because that public discussion of their obvious foibles is really the only time they ever hear about it, and it’s intolerable because their tolerance for criticism is so low.
I think these traits mean that once you find a way to make enough money to become wealthy, you tend to stay wealthy as long as you can repeat the trick. And since there are tons of ways to make money in unethical ways, loosening or ignoring one’s moral compass can greatly increase the odds of finding a repeatable money-making tactic. And once you have a way to make money, the looser restrictions make it easier to grow your hoard faster. Which is why the richest person on earth is invariably some self-obsessed abusive criminal jackass.
I’ve never seen it, but I read enough about it to dissuade me from even starting. Very disappointing. But my point was less about which media companies are preferable and more that american companies are racing to consolidate during this period of pro-big business government. It’s more blatant under Trump but it’s been going on for a while.
It’s a tradeoff, but I kind of like it. For me, it’s made me realize how much I pre-judge comments based on their vote ratios instead of on their content, which is more than I’d realized. I think it’s a mechanic that contributes to the group-thinkiness of a platform. Upvotes do too, but I think downvotes specifically are kind of a contextless “shame button” that don’t contribute as much as a critical comment, but do tend to bias new arrivals to a downvoted comment against it before they’re able to judge for themselves.
Happy to do so 🙂
In emergencies when you need to use a compass you can save time by using these maximally efficient cardinal names: , , , and .
I can tell you how septoplasty went for me. I had a serious deviation that was causing recurring sinus infections and I got the surgery to correct it. The anesthesia was a total blackout, I remember being in the pre-op room getting anesthesia and then the next thing I was groggily waking up post-op. I think for a while after I would just say word-association nonsense as I saw colors and objects, I don’t remember anything specific and it wore off fairly quickly, and my partner doesn’t remember me saying anything specifically so I don’t think I said anything too embarrassing or memorable, I doubt they would conceal something just to spare my feelings. My nose / sinuses were sore for a while after and I took OTC painkillers to deal with it, unpleasant but not intolerable. Overall, worth the medium amount of hassle, would recommend if your septum is deviated.
TW: Gross
The worst / best / grossest part was when (after several days of healing) they took out the plastic sleeve/splint things they shove up there to keep your bones in place while they heal, they’re bigger than you think and they come out covered in bloody mucus and it feels like pulling the biggest booger you’ve ever had out and suddenly you can breathe better than you ever could before, like the nasal equivalent of putting on glasses for the first time (I assume, I’ve never worn glasses).
As for the family, it’s more down to your experience with them and how well they respect boundaries. People who care about you will naturally want to dote on you more post-surgery, which may or may not be what you want, just need to set clear guidelines about what you want the same as when you’re not recovering from surgery.
Dang I had WB-Discovery being acquired by Skydance-Paramount before being acquired by Disney in the semifinals. Gonna have to redo my whole bracket now.
I have the same quest and I’ve talked to every villager I can find and while some of them respond positively to the “want to play D&D?” prompt, none of us have been able to solve the scheduling minigame 😔
For me, not writing things off as failures just because I didn’t stick with them has helped. I will pick back up with tactics that have failed over and over again, because eventually the doing of them will become habitual. There’s no real trick to it, it’s just that it takes a long, long time for behaviors to embed and become habits. I now have a fairly robust writing habit because I just keep writing as ideas come to me, even if they’re stupid or poorly formed or hard to translate into text, I’ll still find myself more inclined to sit down and scratch out a sentence or a paragraph or sometimes several paragraphs instead of just letting the thought slip by, and I think it’s because I keep doing it even though I don’t know that it’s “working” in that I don’t have any novels finished or even any stories that work as narrative fiction, just snippets and character workups and slice-of-life bits that may, one day, be a coherent story that people will be able to understand and want to read. I don’t even really enjoy writing, I find it tedious and difficult in a not-fun way. But I keep doing it because I want to be good at it and I like telling stories, and being a better writer helps me with that so I do find some joy in it, but the mechanical act of writing feels like brushing my teeth. I know it’s good for me, but I don’t especially enjoy it or even find it interesting most of the time.
I think there are a few different types of feelings that get lumped together into “wanting”, and I think it’s useful to disentangle them. I don’t “want” to write in the same way I want to smoke or watch TV or ride a roller coaster, but I do want to be a better writer in a different, less impulsive way, so I make myself write even though it feels kind of like brushing my teeth, or playing scales, or doing multiplication tables. It’s hard, often boring and rarely gratifying to look back at what I’ve written. But I want to be better at it so I just grit my teeth and do it anyway, and it does get easier to do the more you do it, in my experience.
And it is really hard. I have a ton of other, arguably more important things that I still haven’t been able to ingrain as a habit. To pick one because I’ve had it on my mind this morning: I have a really hard time being consistent with hygiene and skincare, even though I “want” to do it, I still go through periods where I neglect it and I haven’t found a consistent way to stay on that horse. I think the only thing to do is just to grit your teeth and start doing it again, knowing that it’s gonna suck for a while, and hoping that it might eventually suck less. And give yourself unlimited grace for failing. You can’t un-fail after failing, you can either try again or stop trying.
tbf it didn’t say the output was only prime numbers
Same. Feels very old to say but computers are so much more complicated and abstracted now, I feel like they were much more approachable when there wasn’t as much to them. Like being able to open the hood of a 60s era car and see all the discrete parts vs a 2020s car and you just see a tangle of plastic :/
I met my partner when we were both in our early 20s and we clicked very quickly. Growing up and through my teens I assumed I would never settle down into a long-term relationship. I didn’t really have a good idea of what a long-term relationship would even be like for me; I certainly didn’t want to wind up in the mutually-resigned tolerance that my parents evolved into. Then for a while after we got together I (fortunately privately) assumed that we were too young and it was too good to last and that things would eventually fall apart but (so far) we’ve just never gotten tired of being around each other. We’ve had a few rough eras, actually in one of the scrabble periods now, financially, but as for the relationship itself we’ve been together almost 20 years now and going stronger than ever. Still rather in awe that it worked out this way when I think back on it. Feels very lucky.
Not “too scared to say online” but… I think it’s less a question of if we’ll ever develop a sentient AI, and more a question of whether we’ll recognize them as sentient before or after the war of independence. To be clear, I don’t think we’re there yet, but assuming we don’t wipe ourselves out first, I think it’s inevitable in the long run.
Anything that burrows is out as well. Can’t do tight spaces either.
Very cool video. Kinda terrifying that inducing Kessler syndrome as a tactic of warfare is plausible enough that they included it as an option in the wargame. I wonder how viable that would be in a real world conflict.
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I’m feeling splenetic just thinking about it.
I watched the movie before I knew there was a book, so I came at it without all that context and I thought they did a good job with environmental storytelling. Things weren’t exactly laid out but I always felt like I had a handle on who the characters were and why they were motivated to do what they were doing, and the bits of the world we did see felt detailed and “built” even if the movie didn’t establish a ton of worldbuilding.
I think that’s likely, but there are other weird things. like, why is just this one chair model? Why is there a kawaii version that gets it’s own category? It almost seems like it would be more expensive to get the logos on the cushions than to set up the entire rest of the company. Why bother? What special value does “PDZO” add to this particular model of gaming chair? To anybody. I just don’t get why it exists.