not really big on fires actually. Indoors they make the air too smoky and just seem obsolete for the purpose, and I dont really enjoy being outside enough to want to do camping or such like that would necessitate an outdoor fire.

That being said, sugar is also harmful and I do have a sweet tooth- its not that the thing is harmful that bothers me per se so much as the degree and obviousness of the harm. Even if I was to enjoy being around a fire, the effect from campfire smoke is slow and non-obvious, it doesnt literally make you watch your friends act temporarily brain damaged while theyre in the area of effect, and its the anxiety over if friends taking it will cause themselves harm, and the existential horror of contemplating reducing one’s own mental functioning on purpose, that really emphasizes to me the toxicity alcohol has.

Somehow most of the things that we label “drugs” (like illegal stuff not like prescriptions) don’t throw me for quite the same mental loop, because I’m not legally and socially permitted to just buy those if I felt like it the way I could with alcohol. It feels less jarring to be reminded of an aspect of society that you’ve opted not to participate in to the point of it’s existence slipping one’s mind, if that thing isn’t made conveniently available in the first place

Every so often I’m reminded that alcohol really is a thing that exists and I end up going through the mental loop of processing that people actually do drink poison recreationally and that it’s not just some omnipresent fiction trope.

Ive sometimes had the thought that an alternate reading of that story could be that Ozymandias’s works really were so great as to cause the almighty to despair, so much as to be motivated to destroy them out of spite.

People tell their family and bosses what their “main” social media handle is?

Who designs robots with dicks? Sex-tox companies in a society that has relatively cheap consumer robots, presumably.

Whenever this meme comes up, I like to mention Courland’s colonial empire if you can even call it that

Tbf, aren’t the argonians in lore basically magically bioengineered by some intelligent trees in order to have a means to keep tabs on and defend themselves from the world outside their forest? It’s not really absurd for them to have some mammalian traits if they’re intentionally designed to interact with mammals and not naturally evolved. (actually, is anything naturally evolved in that setting, rather than being directly designed by deities?)

I wrote the thing you replied to before I learned about the DDOS thing

Im inclined to believe that there were death-threats. I dont agree with what this person did here, but it should be considered that there is a certain segment of the population that has sufficiently poor consideration for others or emotional regulation that they will send death threats to people that make them angry, and, importantly, while this segment may be more or less common in some groups, that tendency in itself does not force a person to hold or not hold a given view (even ideologies or ethical systems that condemn death threats, because plenty of people out there are hypocritical). As such, these people can be expected to exist in any sufficiently large group, to include whatever groups you, I, or anyone else consider to be an “in-group”. The tesseract dev got a lot of people mad, so, it would honestly surprise me if they didnt get a few such threats just given the sheer number of chances for one of the angry people to be of the sort to send them. If anything, Id expect a shittier person to be slightly more likely to get them just because people like that tend to do more things that make people mad at them, though this should not be taken as saying that people that get death threats are necessarily shitty people or that they’re deserved.

That stuff aside, Ive had mixed feelings about this whole affair. I do agree that the hidden blacklist thing was way out of line, but I find that most of the criticism Ive seen doesnt really give the right reason (in my point of view) for why it was out of line. (Namely, Ive seen a lot of it framed as “this is censorship, its wrong to make software that intentionally does not display posts from specific people/places”. I dont think I really like this argument, because I think a lot of the people making it havent really considered the implications of it thoroughly. Its generally considered acceptable for users to block other users for example, for moderators to ban users from a community, and for instances to defederate from other instances if they feel the need, and these things also prevent one seeing the posts of affected users, they just happen at a different layer than tesseract did. It is censorship, yes, but one cant expect to be entitled to the attention of others, theres simply too many people that have things to say, even important things, for it to be otherwise, nobody can possibly pay attention to everyone, nor is it healthy to try, so there must be systems in place that allow one to ignore those one doesnt want to see in favor of those one does.

The problem in my view is one of consent: if tesseract had made it known upfront that using it without disabling some default setting also opted the user into its developer’s personal blocklist, then, well, it wouldnt be much different than when people on microblog platforms share blocklists with others, or when people choose an instance based on that instance’s federation decisions. I would not personally have wanted to use it, as I have different ideas of what I want to block and not block, but I dont think that in theory it would have been unethical for it to exist in that state. However, while the dev themself seems to have thought that they had done enough to make this feature known, based on one of their responses to the controversy at least, they clearly did not, else the public response to the list’s exposure would not have been outrage so much as “well yeah, thats what that program does, dont use it”.

Part of this I think is that while moderation decisions are expected of an instance, they dont tend to be expected from alternate UI software, so, what would have qualified as “making it known upfront” would necessarily have to have been been very blatant. As it was, they certainly didnt meet that bar, and it was very plausible for a new user to find tesseract and end up using this guy’s list without knowing about it. This isnt something Ive seen come up in the angry response nearly as often as just “he’s blacklisted people that I dont think ought to have been, doesnt he know blocking people is bad, what an authoritarian!”. Though of course, I havent seen every post about this whole deal so its possible that I simply have missed that criticism and just seen the angry memes.)

While Ill agree that self-reflection in their part would have been the most desirable outcome, I dont think it was ever really a realistic one. I doubt that any but a small fraction of the population would really be capable of anything but defensiveness when they have managed to anger thousands of strangers into yelling at them, its not a situation that humans are really well adapted for or handle well, given that the conditions we arose in would not have allowed for it nearly as easily as those of today do. As such, I think that just leaving in frustration, while not a satisfying resolution or a perfect one, is probably the best ending that could reasonably hoped for here. The other likely outcome would have been doubling down further and keeping the anger going, and by leaving there’s at least a chance that they might reflect on what happened once emotions have a chance to die down.

Could be worse, we could be on the three day challenge again

they’ve responded about it a couple times at least, so they do know.

It kinda makes a lot of sense I feel that they’d fit together. You have a form of transportation that is dangerous enough that requiring government licensing is generally agreed to be desirable, meaning that if its the primary option, a government can effectively take away a person’s ability to participate in public life or make a living, and easily justify it on safety grounds. Cars are expensive, so a government can both funnel money to its partners in private industry by promoting them, and subsidize them for the populations it considers “desirable” as a means to seem like it has created abundance and luxury (see how how the VW bug came to be for example). And, a society built around cars is one that tends towards physical separation and isolation between people (because of space inefficient infrastructure and relatively quick travel outside of densely built areas), which promotes distrust of others. Thats not to say that cars are inherently fascist or that most people that promote them do so to benefit that sort of ideology, but that if I was some kind of fascist dictator seeking to control a population, Id probably want to push them into buying and relying on cars.

Solution: make up some original characters with designs one likes, make up some lore that they have some cutesy loving relationship, and draw or write some for yourself with whatever vibe you want it to have. Also lets one turn horny feelings into motivation to practice creative expression which can then make for something of a hobby.

Aesthetics wise, I used to think it kind of looked cool… when it was just a computer rendering with no exposure to conditions of the real world. In person all the flat and shiny but not like mirror-like surfaces mean that even the tiniest warp and defect is visible when the sun shines on it. Someone in my area has one ive seen a few times painted a somewhat matte black, which makes it even worse in that Ive been able to see fingerprints on it from across the street, and from a distance the colors of the windows and body blend together to look like some kind of featureless black monolith.

Sorry, I have no idea what this is. Some kind of sentient wheeled typewriter presumably but it doesn’t ring any bells

This is why I moved to Massachusetts after growing up in the south: the trains here might be old, late, and apparently catch on fire once in a while from what ive heard, but we have trains.

block-time/eternalism, though determinism is a consequence of that

Personally, I tend to think that the past and future exist “already” in a sense, as part of a single object along with the present

One of my cats found a ribbon someone got on a gift and forgot to throw away (i make it a rule to throw out ribbons and twist ties on sight specifically because this cat will seek them out to nibble), and bit off and ate the tip of it, maybe an inch or so. Later, half of it ended up hanging out his rear before he passed it completely. Cue me getting rather panicked because it looked, at the time, like he’d eaten a whole ribbon rather than a tiny piece, and to my understanding, doing that can be incredibly bad for a cat due to the potential for it to get stuck or damage their gut. To make matters worse, at the time I was a teenager in a suburban neighborhood with no ability to drive and my parents were away on an errand, so I had to wait for any chance to get him to a vet. Then he ended up passing it before they got back and at the same time I found the rest of the ribbon with only the tip nibbled off, so it turned out fine, but it was a scary few minutes.