Signtist

True. Think of how many you’d be able to inspect from up there!

Except in the US the moderate left generally chooses to cater to the right when they need to bolster their numbers, rather than the far left. It makes sense given that our current Democratic party is far closer to the moderate right than the far left. We’d need to elect new incoming lefter-leaning democratic leaders across all levels of government over the course of decades to get the party as a whole to tilt leftward rather than rightward when a clean majority is needed. It’s still the most viable option, but it’ll be a lot of work to achieve.

I wish the US had a system like that. It’s unfortunate that even a more inclusive voting system suffers from a surplus of voters fueled by hate and selfishness, but here in the US even protest votes for the far left play into the far right’s hands since all 3rd party votes together wouldn’t even come close to rivaling the 2 established parties.

Yeah, she had just broken up with her boyfriend and found a bunch of “self-help” youtube videos that basically just said everyone who disagrees with you is a narcissist, then the algorithm started recommending her videos that said everyone who disagrees with you is actually an “energy vampire” literally and maliciously draining you of your life force. From there she got into all the crazy health conspiracies - which of course happened right as she was diagnosed with DCIS, which is easily treatable, but if left untreated becomes breast cancer. She dove head-first into all of the conspiracies after that, throwing money at anyone claiming to cure cancer so long as the method wasn’t backed by “big science,” and died of breast cancer a few years later.

It took my mom less than 4 years to go from crying in horror when Trump was elected in 2016, to crying in horror when he wasn’t elected in 2020, and lamenting her inability to join Jan 6 due to her cancer that was mysteriously worsening in spite of all the 5g blockers and expensive heal-all herbal teas she bought.

I dunno, I grew up with the “there are kids starving in Africa” spiel and other such lectures. For my family, it was more like the idea that “lesser” parts of the world had problems because they were “lesser,” and if anyone is suffering in America it’s because they brought that “lesser” mindset with them from elsewhere.

You’re right that the vast majority of media will shift to being AI, to the point where you’re really going to have to dig to find real art, but art will never cease to exist. So long as people have a way to make things, they will. It might be surrounded by a sea of soulless generated content, but it will exist. It will likely never be a viable career, even for the most talented, however. It will only ever be something people do for their own self-expression.

People always assume I want to turn my hobby into a job. I love to bake - it helps me de-stress from my job. If I made it my job, I wouldn’t have something to help me de-stress anymore. I make enough money; I don’t need to extract the joy from everything in my life for the sake of making more money.

Yeah, there’s always the underlying faith in the system in these types of stories. They assume that if someone was found guilty, they must have done it. The only ones that I see that go against that are ones where’s it’s been proven that they were falsely convicted, and even in those it’s usually framed as some freak one-in-a-million accident without anyone at fault.

I remember when I learned about the vastness of space when I was, like, 6. I sat up that night just thinking about how incredibly huge the universe is, and how nothing on one random planet amongst it all could ever really matter. Then I thought “Well, I matter because I want to matter,” and went to bed. Sometimes the simplicity of childhood can help answer the most paralyzing of philosophical quandaries.

Good to know I’m not the only one! My wife was just talking about watching Pocahontas with our niece, and rolled her eyes so hard when I told her I’d poke her hontas.

I’ll often repeat things my wife says in the “I’ll x your y” format as if it were a cheesy pickup line. Like, she’ll ask if I can grab the remote, and I’ll say “I’ll grab your remote.” She hates it.

I mean, they’re trying to say that the terrible colonialism practiced by the European-based American people against the native Americans is happening again in Israel, which is definitely a good point to be made. We’re well past the ability to stop the atrocities committed by America in the past, but we’re able to stop Israel today. The same idea applies to the terrible treatment of non-while populations in America today by ICE and other agencies, while we’re on the topic of preventable atrocities.

I’ll find a few new songs to be the first in my new library. I love finding new music, and transitioning from one library to another helps me take some time away from songs that might be getting stale to focus on new stuff. It also gives me the opportunity to rediscover songs from previous libraries after some time, and fall in love with them again. Just today I added a song to my library that I used to have on my old iPod, and I’m listening to it a bunch now that it’s been several years since I’ve last heard it.

My sister is like this, and she’s basically just constantly anxious about what she’s supposed to be doing and how people feel about her, so she forces herself to be talkative and energetic even though it exhausts her. It’s sad to know that behind her smile she’s just always stressed out about every little thing that she construes as someone maybe being mad at her. I’m glad that over the years I’ve been able to get her to be her real self around me, but I haven’t been able to get her to see a therapist yet.

My point is that the time when we might have found the right words to fix things is almost certainly over. It’s now time to start fighting against injustice with real action.

We can’t even agree on what most of these words mean, much less get the majority of people to care about whether we adhere to them. I know multiple people who think the entirety of science is wrong, and that hispanic people don’t have the human right of safe housing, even when legal citizens.

When I built my first computer I got a bunch of RGB and loved it, but by the time it was a few months old, I got bored of it and started to view changing the colors and whatnot as a chore more than anything, so when I built my second computer, I went without.

I’ve been doing a few Duolingo lessons a day in Japanese for a couple years now. At the rate I’m going it’ll be a decade before I’m even slightly able to understand the language, but I don’t mind - it’s already been well over a decade since I first tried to learn it, so as long as this pace is sustainable, I’ll still be a lot further along than if I’d tried too hard, gotten burned out, and quit for a decade again.

When I was a kid trying to play flash games on dial-up internet, I found they took almost exactly the same amount of time to load as it took for me to make and eat a sandwich. I ate a lot of sandwiches.