Wolf_359
@Wolf_359@lemmy.world
- Comment on xkcd #2907: Schwa 8 months ago:
Maybe it depends on where you’re from but I pronounce “tuh-nuhl”
- Comment on I hear phrases like "half-past", "quarter til", and "quarter after" way less often since digital clocks have became more commonplace. 8 months ago:
Of course the kids don’t know how to read them. Kids rarely encounter analog clocks and when they do, they have several digital clocks within arms length. Most people wouldn’t reach for a slide rule when they have a calculator.
And to be fair, analog clocks are objectively worse than digital clocks in every way aside from aesthetics.
- Comment on Want to watch porn in Britain? Get your passport ready 8 months ago:
I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s not a super common occurrence.
And even if it is, locking down the entire internet and monitoring people in an Orwellian fashion isn’t the government’s job.
What happened back in the day when kids walked in on their parents doing the deed? What did the parents do when their child snuck a passage of Shakespeare and read all the filthy jokes he wrote?
Oh, they spoke to the kids and guided them through a normal part of life?
I have a son. I would like for him to not see graphic images on the Internet. But when he does, I will explain to him that human beings have sex (which is why he exists). I will tell him that sometimes people like to watch videos about it because it feels good to them. I will explain to him that it’s fake, just like the action movies and violence he sees on TV. And I will explain to him that he’s not ready to see that material yet.
Fascists always gain control by offering “safety.” Ironically, they’re more dangerous than the thing they claim to protect you from.
Yeah, making a government list of porn watchers with their watch history available is 100% going to be abused. It will not turn out well.
- Comment on Why were so many people believers in the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job 8 months ago:
Donald Trump’s presidency pretty much removed any doubt I had about the official 9/11 story.
He proved that our government is full of regular idiots who are just barely able to work together. Of course the 3 letter agencies have a lot of power and fancy technology, but if the CIA or NSA was seriously that in control of this country, Trump would have never happened. He is a bumbling moron who did a ton of damage to this country and nobody lifted a finger apparently? Damaging alliances, burning undercover assets, etc.
Our Congress can’t work together long enough to pass basic bills. No way the Patriot act was planned with a false flag in mind.
The 9/11 conspiracy is just way too big and would need way too many participants to keep it under wraps like that.
Plus, every big disaster has conspiracy theories. If you believe all of them, you’re pretty much saying bad things never happen without the overlords planning them.
9/11, Hurricane Katrina, JFK assassination, RFK assassination, Pearl Harbor, and every other major event have had massive conspiracy theories and claims that they were inside jobs.
Yeah, the official story has holes but reality is messy. It was a big attack involving/affecting a lot of agencies, corporations, and people. It’s pretty much guaranteed that out of the measly 365 days per year, a lot of these groups and individuals would be doing their “once a year” inspections, misremembering details in their panic, dealing with other terrorist attacks, intersecting with ongoing crimes that were being committed separately, etc.
- Comment on What is your weirdest comfort habit? 8 months ago:
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Listening to AM 740 out of Toronto. I’m in the US but it comes over here. My grandma listened to it and I find it calming when I’m stressed because my grandma was the only person who truly loved me unconditionally and without question.
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Eat bits of granola cereal one at a time and chew them slowly. I don’t even really like it. It’s just such a simple food and I can kind of meditate on how simple it is.
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This isn’t odd but a hot bath. Truly a portal to another world for me.
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Listen to Dreamscape on YouTube and imagine dystopian fantasy/sci-fi worlds I could live in. Maybe I’m stranded on an alien planet, maybe I’m in a dark forest and creatures are hunting me, or maybe I’m driving through a foggy forest and I see something weird I need to investigate. Whatever the scenario, it gives me an escape from emotions I don’t want to feel and allows me to create situations where I can feel whatever emotion I do need to feel.
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- Comment on What is your weirdest comfort habit? 8 months ago:
It’s harmless and I love it, but it’s definitely odd my friend!
- Comment on Taylor Swift has won the Superbowl! 8 months ago:
Dark Brandon isn’t meant to be serious. It’s meant to mock the Republicans who say, “Let’s go Brandon” (meaning fuck you Biden) and it references the conspiracy theory that he’s a devil-worshipping communist by referring to him as “dark.”
Anytime you see Dark Brandon, it’s the left mocking the extreme right for being idiots.
- Comment on And how's there a car in a mall? Life's important questions 9 months ago:
Happened during the Rape of Nanking too, except they did it on purpose to civilians.
- Comment on And how's there a car in a mall? Life's important questions 9 months ago:
Kangaroos (aka “Roos”) were these awesome shoes with a little pocket in them.
I got a pair about 13 years ago, long after they’d stopped being popular, and used them to hide my drugs in high school and college. They were awesome until I started hiding really bad drugs in there. Then they were just enabling me.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
I think what a lot of people are missing in this thread is that not everyone has access to convenient physical stores and many people do have good reasons to want faster shipping.
For example, young families who don’t live near a Walmart. When you realize you need a few things for the kid, it can be pretty tough to pack them up and drive however far to the store that may or may not have what you need. If they do have it, you aren’t going to get reviews or many options.
My recent prime purchases have included bottle brushes, a crib mattress protector, a replacement remote for our sound bar (dog ate it), and a cheap car camera to check the baby since he started daycare last week and I’m completely paranoid about my ADHD brain leaving him in a hot car and killing him.
Did any of these need to be prime purchases? I guess not but you can see how I would want them sooner rather than later.
Walmart near me didn’t have any good car cameras in my price range.
The sound bar remote was online only and was required for us to watch TV since our TV speaker doesn’t work.
The bottle brushes were just convenient.
The mattress protector could have waited but would have been a gamble on ruining our very expensive crib mattress. This could have been a a Walmart purchase for sure though.
I’m not saying these were life or death purchases. They weren’t and people got by just fine before Amazon. But does the convenience and reliability outweigh the monthly prime cost? For us, yes. And I admit we have become pretty dependent on it.
- Comment on I'm never lonely cuz i got these little guys with me :) 9 months ago:
Floaters in the vitreous of the eyeball (aka clumps of your vitreous that got stuck together as your vitreous gel started to liquify, which happens naturally with age for everyone).
They’re normal if they appear gradually as you age. Most common in people with myopia. Can be caused by a variety of things including hits to the eyes or head, possibly by steroid eye drops, anything that increases the pressure in your eye, or just plain old aging.
They never go away but if you’re lucky they might “settle” or get stuck to the side. Never happens for a lot of people though, and they can be quite distressing for many people - especially for people who have many large and moving floaters.
Most mentally healthy people will neuro-adapt and they’ll become less noticeable over time. It can take about six months before this happens though and it does suck at first. I got some new ones after LASIK and I was pretty upset. Now I only notice them on light backdrops like snow or my shower. But even then I just noticed them briefly and my thoughts quickly move elsewhere. No stress.
For people who are absolutely driven insane by a large number of them, there is a risky surgery to remove them, but if it goes wrong you can be looking at blindness so you definitely need to weigh your options.
The non-surgical laser treatment for floaters doesn’t work. It seems to maybe work in the short term but most people report that it doesn’t help in the long term. It can even create more floaters or break up your big ones into many smaller ones that move more. The laser is also dangerous for younger patients because the floaters are closer to your retina when you’re younger. The laser can cause damage to the retina and it’s hard to avoid doing that when the floaters are close to it.
There are currently a couple groups researching how to get rid of them non-invasively. Last bit of news I saw said a group had been using gold flakes and a new type of laser to successfully and safely break them down. Personally, I will get mine treated if there is a non-invasive way to do so, but I’m not too bothered by them so I can wait for that.
Worth noting that if you suddenly get a lot of floaters and are feeling pain in your eyes or seeing bright flashes that look like a camera flash, you need to go seek medical attention immediately as these are signs of a retinal tear. Retinal tears are treatable but only if you go take care of them immediately. The consequences are not taking care of them quickly can be severe.
- Comment on Video game actors speak out after union announces AI voice deal 10 months ago:
Right, and it still saves the studio time and money on other recording costs. That would be the way to do it.
- Comment on 8 Years later my Steam Link is still getting regular updates 10 months ago:
I teach lower income students and they love technology as much as the rest of us. They usually opt for used electronics and a lot of them are getting scammed into buying secondhand enterprise rigs that are converted into shitty gaming PCs, but don’t worry, you made some nerd’s day.
- Comment on Legendary exit for a legendary creator 10 months ago:
Veritasium is like that for me. No clue why.
- Comment on Why do we have an internal monologue? 10 months ago:
Makes total sense to me that you think this way then.
I teach middle school and I think mostly verbally with pictures thrown in.
“I should staple this” plays in my head and I have a dreamlike image of a stapler I’m looking for, or perhaps its location. If I focus, I can make those pictures very vivid, but usually they aren’t in my day to day.
I talk to myself in my head literally non-stop. It’s a full day dialogue with myself - which I suppose makes it a monologue. But it’s pretty involved with a lot of back and forth.
- Comment on Why do we have an internal monologue? 10 months ago:
Do you enjoy coding, math, and logic?
- Comment on Why do we have an internal monologue? 10 months ago:
I’m sure it depends on how you define intelligence.
I’m sure there are people without internal monologues who can solve any problem you put in front of them. But I do think there is a certain level of emotional intelligence that can’t exist without an internal monologue. I suppose one could externalize this process and just talk aloud to themselves in order to mull something over. But even then, you likely couldn’t do that all day every day. Those of us with internal monologues must glean some sort of benefit from essentially self-reflecting all day.
Granted, all of this hinges on my limited understanding of consciousness being somewhat accurate. It’s possible that everyone has an internal monologue and some people just lack a connection in their brain that brings it to the forefront of their consciousness. Maybe some people’s IMs are in their subconscious and inform their actions in ways they simply aren’t aware of.
- Comment on Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO 10 months ago:
I imagine your priorities become different.
You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.
Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.
Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”
I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. Nevermind the fact that, even if Spez is still a good person and an idealist, he might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
- Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content 10 months ago:
I like the idea that tolerance is a social contract.
You’re only covered by it when you practice it.
You break the contract by being intolerant, nobody is obligated to be tolerant to you anymore.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
Tiny Scanner for Android
- Comment on Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that's different” 11 months ago:
The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.
As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.
But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.
- Comment on Does anyone feel like an actual adult? 11 months ago:
I think it’s relative.
But yes it’s valuable. Even at only 30 years old, I often learn from the 8th graders I teach.
Adults overcomplicate things and rationalize bad decisions. All it takes sometimes is one kid with a “naive” outlook to ask, “Why do you hang out with someone you don’t like?”
Then you think, yeah… Why do I?
- Comment on Circle of life 1 year ago:
So interesting. I wonder why your brother feels so insecure. Sounds like he felt he was under a lot of pressure to be successful with that lecture or something.
One thing I didn’t share with you is that I also have a younger, younger brother who is bipolar. And I’m very fascinated by the fact that you mentioned your brother dramatizing his life and adding bits from movies. My youngest brother actually does that too. Our childhoods had enough shit to complain about but he always takes it that one step further and adds one small detail to make it worse.
The classic example is the time my brother lost his shit (bipolar, remember) and pushed past our grandma on his way out the door. My mom (perhaps rightfully?) grabbed his shirt and pushed him against the wall, angrily explaining that our grandma was old and pushing past her was way out line. My youngest brother recounts that story as the time my mother choked him until he had bruises. My other brother and I don’t recall it that way at all. And to be honest, I think if you’re pushing past your grandmother, whatever happens to you next is pretty justifiable. Had she fallen and broken a hip, that would have been bad. My brother called CPS and they didn’t find his claim to be credible, so that adds to my belief that I’m remembering it correctly.
We were just a regular middle class family but my mom had pretty poor taste in men to be honest. Hence my drunk and absent father plus youngest brother’s bipolar which he inherited from his father, my mother’s second marriage.
I also recall the time he ran away to a friend’s house, which he recalls as the time that my mother “kicked him out and left him homeless for a week.”
I think the truth of all this is probably somewhere in the middle for us all. Our parents treated us differently because we were different kids. I had fewer issues and I’m sure I was easier to deal with. Maybe my mom scared my brother when she jacked him up against the wall. Maybe he felt like she didn’t want him home which is why he ran away. It’s just funny how perception works, especially when you throw in confounding factors such as mental illness and insecurity, different ages, different temperaments.
Well, best of luck to you and your brother. The best parents in the world still fuck up kids on some level. We can only try to be better for our own kids. This has been on my mind a LOT now that I have a newborn at home myself. I just want to be there for him and break the cycle of absent, drunken fathers. It’s a cycle that goes back to my great grandpa on my dad’s side, so even though I don’t do drugs or drink in my adult life, I worry about the family curse, haha.
- Comment on Circle of life 1 year ago:
You know your situation better than anyone so feel free to ignore this if I’m way off base.
But I’m guessing two things here:
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Your parents were able to provide you with things you needed as a child. Perhaps things like college and clothes on your back were the things you needed to grow into a fulfilled and happy person. But maybe your brother needed your mom to control her emotions better during an episode. Maybe he needed your dad to be predictable and consistent when he was instead drinking behaving in ways that were irritating or unpredictable from a child’s perspective.
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You might not be fully acknowledging some of the things they did (or didn’t do) that made you feel bad when you were little. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse for it to have an impact on you. We know now that children form attachment styles at least partially based on how their parents responded to their cries during infancy. Kids can be amazingly resilient, but also incredibly delicate.
Also, the odds that they treated you differently based on birth order, their age when they had each of you, gender, your personalities, etc. is very high.
You should ask your brother what really bothers him deep down. I’ll bet you get some tears and probably some very deep, very impactful memories/feelings about your parents.
If you asked my younger, more relaxed brother about our parents, he would say, “Yeah man dad’s a dick for drinking and bailing on us, and mom likes to guilt trip us but oh well.”
I would be the one to explain how their constant fighting, dad’s drinking/drugging, mom’s emotional manipulation and authoritarian parenting, etc. made me feel deeply unsafe and insecure as a child. I felt bad about myself and my life. I wished I could get a letter from Hogwarts more than anything. And when our father got so into drugs that he became absent completely, I felt lonely and abandoned. Took me many years to make peace with it and realize he was really sick and struggling.
The thing is, I suspect that I’ve actually come a lot further in my healing than my brother has. I don’t think he’s aware of some of the things he does or why he does them. Any chance your brother is actually onto something here?
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- Comment on The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee... 1 year ago:
I’m interested! Can you PM me? I currently use an IPTV service that’s just okay.
- Comment on For some reason, I'm doubtful. 1 year ago:
Can you elaborate on this more?
Is this really an issue? I mean it makes sense with the security updates being non-existent for a long time now, but would bots really hardlock the machine fairly quickly?
- Comment on The Problem with Jon Stewart cancellation highlights a problem for Apple’s content 1 year ago:
Capitalism can commercialize anything including critiques of capitalism.
Similarly, corporations can sell anything, including critiques of themselves.
Reminds me of the Beatles selling “Beatles Hater” merch.
- Comment on Leaks confirm low takeup for Windows 11 1 year ago:
You’d miss exactly nothing.
I have tried several times over the years to pick up a game of theirs that looks interesting due to the story, setting, or due to the fact that it’s a sport game my friends are playing.
Every single time, for well over a decade now, it’s taken me about 20 minutes to realize they haven’t changed one thing about their formula in any genre.
All of their games feel kind of cheap, floaty, and/or just “off” somehow in terms of physics and gameplay. They have nonstop in-game purchases, and they fill their game with hundreds of thousands of copy and paste quests. Like, the most tedious thing in the recent Zelda games is getting the Koroks seeds, and even that is more varied and interesting than the vast majority of Ubisoft quests.
The sports games from EA are, perhaps understandably, the same exact thing every single year.
If Ubi made smaller games less frequently, they’d be an amazing studio I’d bet. If EA released fewer sports games and instead just updated rosters and stats through free downloads, they could probably make some pretty incredible games.
One thing I’d like to see EA do is add more fun and experimental features. First person mode in Madden where you play with a full team of guys, creative rule sets, totally off the wall fantasy settings, career modes where you start as a high school player and get noticed, marathon games where you don’t get to call plays and instead it’s a constant stream of making it to the end zone and having to immediately punt the ball to the other team so they can start running and passing freely instantly, etc.
They could do so much to make sports interesting. And someone who likes sports more could probably tell me some of the more realistic/simulation style upgrades they’d like to see from these games. Things that have been missing way too long.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
I’ll assume you meant that in good faith.
If being trans is caused by microplastics, alright. They’re still not hurting anyone. If there is an environmental culprit, then hopefully conservatives would finally acknowledge that there is a biological process at work and it’s not a choice made by deviants or whatever.
- Comment on And now Bezos is trying to inserts ads everywhere 1 year ago:
Companies who stay private can do this. It’s when you have investors that you’re fucked and the ponzi scheme starts.
The idea, in its purest form, is that companies will innovate to keep investors happy. They will keep expanding and making wonderful new products. As an example, a printer company will start making phones, then laptops, then maybe expand into chemicals or farm equipment, making bold innovations at every step.
Companies who can’t innovate do this shit (inflate prices until they suck) and then they die because they’re no longer competitive.
…in theory.