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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • He was TOO good at the satire. On the left dum-dums thought he was actually right, while on the right dum-dums thought he was on their side.

    Also, I think people are hitting their limit of joking about the collapse of democracy and civil society. I know I am. I know there are now movies, TV, and books that I might have found interesting in less interesting times; now it all just hits too close to home. John Oliver can hit those “too close to home” topics and move on to other things. But it always felt like when Colbert was doing his conservative pundit schtick, he was trapped in it. It was harder to laugh along with him about other things that weren’t specifically about that kind of satire. He might have had some more material of a particular idiom if he’d stuck with it, but that idiom can wear thin.






  • Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.

    You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.



  • Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read. A detective (wait was this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, maybe? I don’t remember, anyway) is looking for a person and asking around. I stead of carrying around a picture of the person they are looking for, they compare the person’s features to a list of celebrities and just go around asking if anyone has seen someone that looks like that celebrity. Point being lots of people have surprisingly similar features and there really are “doppelgangers” out there.

    But just try explaining that to some stranger that just caught you staring off into space directly at their face because they look like a person you had a crush on in college, only you’re an old fart now and they don’t look like that old crush would look now, but like the memory you have of them. “You look like someone I know” always sounds like a pickup line.


  • It’s not a completely different thing. They were both trying to fully integrate the operating system and the web browser into one monolithic and inescapable thing: Windows XP + Internet Explorer to squash competition on the desktop; Linux + Chrome to squash competition on laptops; Android + Chrome OS to squash competition in the mobile space. The money to be made on operating systems is trivial in the consumer space compared to the power of control over platforms (like web browsers) that deliver advertisements and harvest data from comsumers. M$ saw the writing on the wall way back then in their fight with Netscape Navigator. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    I feel like I’m talking to an AI chatbot completely unable to reason abstractly or consider the full context of the conversation.






  • Focusing at a point behind the image is exactly what we’ve always done for every other magic eye poster because it only requires relaxing your eyes (staring off into the distance) for the image to pop into focus. Cross eyed viewing is damn near impossible on any screen at less than an arm’s length away without significant eye strain or external devices (like the stereoscopic viewers that photogrammetrists would use to view these kinds of images without inducing a migraine) and since the dot is on top holding a finger up as a guide ends up obstructing the entire view unless your arms are growing out of your forehead. The wall eyed view has none of these issues.

    I appreciate the post and your effort. But, the images themselves are frustrating and have killed my initial reaction, which was to share them further. Because I’m nearly the only person I know that wouldn’t loose interest in the explanation for “correct viewing” half way through. If they were wall eyed stereoscopic images, I could just say “Magic Eye”, they’d remember Mallrats, see the schooner, and go “Ooh neat.”





  • If we’re ranking shit by smell, then carnivores are the absolute worst, omnivores are a close second, and herbivores are a distant third. Everything excreted by a big cat (Lions, Tigers, etc.) is so so smelly, and it seeps into everything. You can smell the big cat zookeepers as soon as they walked into the room.

    Omnivores excrete stuff that is almost as smelly as those cats, but at least it’s familiar. Maybe that makes it worse. Admit it, your own farts are never as offensive as someone else’s. Raccoon poop, especially the dried out and dusty kind will straight up kill you though, so watch out for that. Primate fluids can pretty risky too because of their similarity to us.

    Herbivore shit is fucking perfume compared to the others. Horse shit doesn’t actually smell that bad at all unless there is something wrong. The ammonia from their piss is something fierce and awful though. Mucking horse stalls is like scooping a litter box for a cat the size of a horse, but the actual shit is the most pleasant aspect. Elephant shit is the most pleasant shit I’ve ever had the pleasure of shoveling. It’s like wet dead grass with a hint of musk.