Littering your yard with food attracts things like rats, raccoons, squirrels, etc, which destroy property and infrastructure, spread disease, and cause injury to people and pets. I’m not saying I’m against fruit trees, but I do understand people who are. It’s a legitimate concern. Some areas even have things like boars or bears which are extremely dangerous.

I’m also curious with the way you can sue people in the US what would happen if someone becomes sick after eating one of your fruits. I imagine it varies by state.

I’ve often thought that maybe time is like color or weight. Electromagnetic radiation exists, but color only exists as an idea in our heads, how we’re perceiving and interpreting what does actually exist. Our weight is variable based on our mass and gravitational effects in our environment, rather than being an actual property that describes us. Is what you’re saying about time potentially being an emergent property of entropy the same deal? Are color and weight emergent? (I’m asking both about the actual wording and also how analogous the ideas are.)

Karl Marx stated that technological development can change the modes of production over time. This change in the mode of production inevitably encourages changes to a society’s economic system.

I dunno, man, that doesn’t sound too crazy. I’m in a really bad condition for learning new things right now, and I can’t even figure out what claims this idea would be making. It sounds like it’s just describing a process of advancement and the types of conflicts that arise?

I’m finding this especially hard to grasp because my brain’s on a tangent about how you’d really go about falsifying most stuff in history or sociology. You gonna put a bunch of people in a series of jars with carefully controlled conditions for hundreds of years and observe the results? Like we have this piece of paper from 1700 that says Jimothy won the big game, but our understanding of this guy and his alleged win of this supposed game are totally vibes-based because we don’t have a time machine. I think like the best you can do is try to base your beliefs and claims off things that have been observed repeatedly, but does that make these kinds of topics unscientific? We test what we can and go with our best guess for what we can’t, right? This is going to bother me.

Many people claim the Loch Ness monster is an animal thought to be extinct though. The thylacine is generally held to be a cryptid in my experience.

The wording for the fad diet section bothered me. If benefits of calorie restriction and fasting aren’t scientifically supported, why are their Wikipedia pages full of scientific research regarding their benefits?

Things like the actual uses of aromatherapy make me wonder what to call them. Maybe the word placebo applies, but I feel that there’s a certain level of arbitrariness needed for that specific word.

There’s something about aromas and the soft gestures of reiki that are pleasurable to us in a more objective sense. We don’t like them simply because we’ve been told they’re good for us; we like them because we like them. A waterfall will make most people feel good even you don’t tell them it’s good for them, so I don’t feel it can be called a placebo effect. What is the term for a thing which isn’t directly a medicine, but is medically beneficial by promoting a sense of wellbeing?

I don’t think that laughter should be considered medicine in a literal sense because it would make the term too broad, but also because these things are at least somewhat subject to taste rather than the truly objective effects of drugs. A given drug might effect two people differently, but the difference is a matter of chemistry rather than the subject’s opinion.

(Maybe it will all be the same someday when we’ve dialed in how everybody’s brains work in exact detail and tailor treatments more specifically. Maybe we’ll actually prescribe touching grass instead of suggesting it.)

But “their” is singular all the time.

He’s Biblically accuracymaxxing.

I’m not aware of any other species sexually selecting for mammary size. Some birds do a puffy chest thing.

It might be a learned association rather than anything instinctive about tiddies. There’s this one study where they gave rats a backpack fetish, but it has a sad ending because then they murdered all the rats. They did phrase the murder like they were doing a Satanic ritual though, and that kind of took some of the murdery edge off it for me.

I’ve been looking forward to like 20 years from now when all the incels will be into girls with too many fingers.

At least half the population buys into the “fake news” shit about how Trump never did anything wrong and all of this is somehow making more jobs for Americans. I’m not kidding. I have this argument too often. I don’t know what to do about it. It’s so frustrating and depressing.

“devs too focused on making a game pretty instead of fun” is talking about making the art photorealistic with fancy hair engines and such, when doing so doesn’t add meaningfully to the experience and only serves to needlessly complicate development and inflate the cost.

We can tell that making all these 3D models and animations is a problem for the devs because they’ve said so repeatedly. They’ve even said they can’t have every Pokemon in the same game as a result. Instead of the lovely pixel art of FRLG we have a mish-mash of dead-eyed, poorly-animated cartoons with PSP-quality “realistic” terrain that grate against each other. And for what? Why do 3D when you can only do 3D so poorly?

I think we’re taking about the same thing, actually. When the maps were small 2D areas that connected at set points, I was able to learn them well without any special effort. With experience one could bypass the paintball system by having learned a monster’s likely behaviors, which was extremely satisfying.

Now we have the auto-tracking features which render navigation mindless, along with maps existing in 3D and on much larger scales and interconnecting in more complex ways. When I’ve attempted to ignore the navigation system and do things manually I find it very difficult, which I have to assume is why they added the navigation in the first place.

My memory isn’t as clear as I’d like for this kind of discussion, but I remember something like a single button being both start climbing and also jump off the thing you’re climbing or something like that? And then if I wanted to jump off a cliff it was a different button from what I’d been lead to expect in other contexts? So I’d just constantly be accidentally using the wrong inputs because they were too context-reliant, and it made it extra difficult to navigate and gather. The controls used to be a lot simpler, and we didn’t have any of this hookshotting around with bugs or super dogs. Saying the controls used to be simpler and 100% meaning it is hilarious coming from someone who played on PSP. How did you make me prefer the claw, Capcom? Maybe I was just used to the old way and can’t adapt; I just remember things being more straight-forward in terms of actual gameplay.

I could also really do without action games bogging themselves down with lengthy dialogs and cutscenes. If I wanted to watch a movie or read a book or play an RPG I would just do those things. I don’t need an epic lore motivation for stabbing dinosaurs. This series barely had dialog when it started out, and the voice lines were delightfully world-buildy and flavorful by not being any real-world language. Less was more in terms of immersion.

I don’t really like the more recent entries in the series anyway, honestly. Like so many modern games, I feel like it’s become over-complicated with systems and cutscenes, and I miss when it was just you and a sharp object vs a dinosaur. If you want to check it out, get a PSP or emulator. I wish I could remember which specific titles to recommend.

e: Freedom Unite, I think.

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I know there are more, but I just watched a bunch of clown fish grab what appeared to be a coconut shell from rather far away and bring it to their anemone to lay eggs all over it, because I guess they need a hard surface. I was pretty impressed with how they were tossing it, and so cooperative, too.

I feel like I hear about Chicago a lot in terms of LGBT rights, like it’s one of those oases of human decency you can find in the US. A brief Google seems to indicate they have a quality school meal system as well.

Do you have any fun mnemonics for remembering your SSN? :D

I cannot recommend that film enough to anyone who’s a fan of horror movies which are more than just a fun spoop.

Nested drop-down menus are exactly what I miss though. In most of your screenshots there are text menus and little icons that are duplicates of menu options. I love that design, especially because I recall most programs allowing you to customize the menu bars so that you could hide whichever ones you didn’t like. Little icons only is okay on desktop because you can hover over them to get more info, but on mobile your only option is to tap them.

Another feature I’ve been reminded of is keyboard shortcuts which can be referenced in the drop-down menus, but are otherwise not taking up any screen space at all. I love that design for people who can use it, but for myself, if the button isn’t on the screen as an option, I forget it exists. This is a huge problem for me as gestures take over things, particularly on Apple products. There’s no scroll bar or right click on the laptop mice; you have to use multiple fingers. And on ipads you have to double-press the one button instead of just having a hamburger button, which is a nightmare for me because I often just hold it in or end up hitting it three times. At least on Android you have the option of gestures and buttons to customize as you like.

Gimp has never not been confusing as fuck, but I think that’s probably due to me not having any education in image editors in the first place. I’m lucky I can work with layers.

GitHub is so effing confusing, I can’t even. You’d think I’d get the hang of it as often as I need to use it. I feel like UIs for the last like 20 years just get harder and harder for me to follow as everything is condensed into wordless little icons and countless images tile across my screen.

Thanks. <3