Oooo, big stretch!

This is true, but also, a sentiment that’s coming to mind is a mashup of “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” And “a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit”.

Most of the benefits of domestication would be seen super far down the line, and if we’re talking about humans near the beginning of agriculture, which is (as I understand it), one of the developments that really shaped how humans developed, in terms of how we build communities, knowledge and culture. As a biochemist, I can’t really fathom how the practical understanding of selective breeding could even arise in these circumstances. Maybe superstitions that solidify into rituals, which become practical knowledge? Either way, it would surely take multiple human generations for it to even start working, as a crop improvement method.

Linking that back into the two aphorisms I mentioned, the big chunk of time mentioned in them is 1, maybe 2 generations of time. That amount of time feels real to me in a way that 1000 years can’t, because I met my great-grandma, and she was a real person, who knew other real people. Crop domestication is so impressive because there’s so much gap between the action and the payoff. It also makes me very impressed with humans, because I used to be the kind of asshole that /r/iamverysmart takes the piss of, and I used to fall into the trap of thinking that pre-Enlightenment humans were unintelligent. (I have fortunately learned to value the humanities in the time since then)

This reminds me of the UK’s shelved(?) plan to detain refugees and deport them to Rwanda. I don’t just mean people who have come from Rwanda, I mean everyone, just using Rwanda for people storage. If it wasn’t such a dark topic, I’d say the whole thing was slapstick, both in it’s original conception and attempted implementation.

So, I actually have thoughts about this. A while back, I went to a night club that had kink/sex positive themes and someone there wore a sign/note that said “while I’m wearing this note, you can: GROPE ME WITHOUT ASKING”. I got talking to this person in the smoking area and I asked her something along the lines of “doesn’t it feel degrading or scary?”

She explained that in the context of this nightclub where it was a very consent aware environment, she was able to enjoy the taboo aspects of the yielding of some rights to her own body — i.e. she felt safe in knowing that if she wanted a break from things, or to stop the “experiment” early, she needed only to take the sign off, or even tear it (as it was only paper).

She said that this ended up being one of the most powerful aspects of things for her: to borrow wording from the OP, she said it was liberating to not have to think proactively about her own desires, but to bounce around like a sexy pinball; to not have to try so hard to anticipate other people’s desires, instead being able to ask “are my desires currently aligned with the person I’m interacting with?” as and when it came up. Apparently most of the time, that meant continuing dancing as people were actively feeling her up.

(The most grim aspect of the conversation was when she said that even wearing a sign like that, she was groped less than what she would be in a regular night club. )

I got that trait too. When I first picked it up, some 18 years into the game, I didn’t mind too much, but I didn’t realise that the trait gets worse as you level up? Apparently the version of the trait that my character has can be prevented from progressing by spending more time “outside”, but that just sounds like a scam intended to make me spend more on some new dlc or something.

I agree that hyper focus is a mixed bag. I’ve heard it works best for players with a really clear plan for their character build, so they can use the buffs most strategically, but I have no idea how people can make effective characters based on such RNG mechanics.

Regarding the depressed moodle, I feel your pain; I feel like whoever designed this game needs to read about reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, because it’s fucking dreadful with how easy it is to get into a losing spiral, where you end up with such severe debuffs that it feels impossible to get out of. Honestly, even though all my friends play this game and seem to have a lot of fun in it, I’ve come close to just stopping playing a few times, with how unfun it is.

This might not be helpful advice, because the effect doesn’t seem to proc for everyone, but apparently when you’ve been stuck with the depressed moodlet for a long time (and apparently some other conditions), you start to receive a hidden xp bonus to routine tasks. I always thought it was bullshit they told people to keep them playing, but I tried it once (almost out of spite to prove that it wouldn’t work), and I found that yeah, I did actually see bonus progression from lower level tasks that wouldn’t ordinarily give xp. I found that the “showering” and “eating” tasks were the highest yield, but the xp-farming loop was too grindy and I got burnt out too easily to keep it up alongside the debuffs. I found that the xp multiplier still applied to smaller quests though, like “use wet-wipes to approximate a shower”, or “eat a snack”, and I could do those things close enough to my daily respawn point that it was easy enough to do on the side.

This certainly isn’t a solution though. Like I say, the balancing of this game is out of whack, and it sounds like you’ve been having a grim time of it. I hope that you’re able to break out of this cycle somehow and find aspects of the game you can engage in again, whether that happens via the game gets a big balancing update (unrealistic hope with these devs, I know), or something other way (such as grinding, or finding an exploit in the code that allows you to shed your debuffs)

Can we see the pens?

Ooh, this was great! Thanks for the rec.

As an ex-drummer, I enjoyed how stylishly understated the drums were. I used to enjoy leaning into a mock rivalry with bassists, the humour of which was partly anchored in the deep solidarity of being rhythm-section

The horrifying thing is that I have actually seen 9 year olds dressed pretty provocatively, and that just makes me feel more sick to think of gross perverts who find that sexy.

I feel even more sick when I remember being 11 years old and how I perceived the world; a friend (also 11) had a 16 year old boyfriend and I remember we all thought this was the coolest thing, and I wondered whether dressing more provocatively would help me to get a boyfriend. Normalising this shit is like societal level grooming

This is a great post.

This advice is platform agnostic in a way, because we will always have rules and systems that are rife for exploitation. I was talking to a friend recently about how cultural norms shift in this way: it’s like the overton window, but more nuanced I think.

Whilst one has to be mindful to not erode one’s own mental health in fighting this stuff too hard, I believe it is valuable to hold them to account on the rules they set for themselves. Like if an organisation says “hate speech is not allowed and will lead to a ban”, then this rule serves a purpose. If the rule is not enforced, then the rule still has a purpose, it’s just unlikely that this purpose is to prevent hate speech. Holding them to account on stuff like this (such as in the way you describe) helps to hold the line against the shift.

Thanks for the info. When I got online today, I was very confused at what had gone down; I appreciate people such as yourself who have made it easier to follow current events in this tiny corner of the internet

I’m confident that this is an element of things, even if indirectly. It’s been interesting to see the finely tuned, Hasbara propaganda machine become unstable. TikTok has definitely been a component of that

Increasing temperatures will lead to increased human deaths due to high heat, far more than the reduction in cold deaths.

Crop yield per acre is not going to increase. What are you basing this off, the general notion that plants need CO2 for photosynthesis, so more CO2 equals more growth? Because the reality is that crop yield looks likely to decrease, because of ecosystem disruption

A word I like for discussions like this is “verisimilitude”. Aside from being fun to say, it always captures a sense of “yeah, obviously this is fiction, but also we still care about realistic vibes”

Apparently in the UK, there’s a big Jewish festival/conference thing (called Limmud) that runs over Christmas. I found this really funny and sweet, because it’s sort of like “hmm, we’re basically all off of work for Christmas anyway, so what’s the most Jewish thing we can think of to spend this time”. Apparently the answer is being massive nerds. I’m told it’s a fun time, and loads of people go because the UK is quite small so it’s not especially far away for anyone

I want you to know that I’m screenshotting this comment (and the one you’re replying to) to send to a friend, who will find it very funny.

I do know an Anglican priest-in-training who refers to God with They/Them pronouns because thinking of God in a monogender way is weird to them. This apparently isn’t particularly controversial within their mini community, although there was a big argument once when someone suggested that capitalised pronouns (such as He/Him or They/Them) technically means God uses neopronouns

The way that someone explained it to be once is that if we think about the typical monotheistic, omnipotent, omniscient God — surely a God would be far more than what humans can comprehend at all, right? So any single characterisation of God is going to seem weirdly limited, because it’ll be grounded in our human perspective. So the idea is sort of like God™ is like a diamond, and each of the Hindu Gods is like a facet of that gem. The problem is that our human perspectives can’t understand the diamond (similar to how visualising 4D shapes like a tesseract is trippy and hard) so we have to try to understand the diamond by looking at each of its facets and trying to imagine an entity that can be all of those things at once.

As someone who is neither Hindu or Christian, it reminds me of the Holy Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I agree this post was likely bait, but I also feel the need to share my civil dissent against it nonetheless.

I’m a woman who is pretty damn sick of bland male protagonists, but “bland” is the key word here; for all the games ostensibly about men, there are few that explore masculinity like Disco Elysium does — it’s a huge part of who Harry is as a character. I can’t find it now, but there’s a Tumblr text post that I loved that basically said that they can imagine Harry winning a drag king competition, and then people being like “you do know that he’s not in drag, right?”, and the voters responding “yes, we know, but also are you going to look at this and tell me this man isn’t performing masculinity in the most drag-like manner ever?”. The actual post was worded far better than this, but you get the point.

Also, Disco Elysium may be a grimy detective story, but I found it was pretty ACAB in a really interesting way. But it also looked at some of the usual social functions that the police perform that ideally would still be performed by someone even if the police were mass abolished.

The thing is that this kind of thing works for people who don’t know better. I have spoken to dudes who like the abstract notion of Musk being a gamer, probably because it wasn’t apparent to them that his Path of Exile account was so obviously boosted. Similarly, a script-kiddie can seem like a skilled programmer to people who have little knowledge of programming

I’ve watched/played/read things I wouldn’t have discovered if there hadn’t been masses of people crying “woke” about them; there was a period where it was a really useful recommendation engine, because they’d be especially pissy if high quality stuff was woke. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work as well anymore, because “woke” is increasingly meaningless