I keep following it, it keeps looking awesome, it keeps not being done. :(

Funnily enough, Guinness was the first beer I ever liked, and I liked it first try. I greatly dislike most other beers. Which makes sense to me, given that most people who like other beers can’t stand Guinness.

Enshittification does not mean making things suck in general. It specifically means the business model of making a good product for users, then making the product bad for users and good for advertisers or data purchasers or retailers or whatever, and then when you have a captured market, making it worse for everyone to squeeze more money faster.

Microsoft is not doing this. They might be sucking, and making a worse product, but it’s not following the enshittification playbook.

I’m Jewish, but grew up Christian (my mom converted young). I deconverted in university… heh, going to a Christian university at that. So I gave up Christmas at that time. I kinda miss it— that is, I miss the quiet memories of decorations and sitting in the dark by the fireplace watching the blinking lights… but I definitely don’t miss the loud blaring parts. And you can’t avoid the loud blaring parts. They’re freaking everywhere.

So I get to see all the things I never really liked about Christmas all the time. And it turns out that watching the channukah candles burn down with the lights turned down scratch the itch of what I ever liked about Christmas. So what’s left?

Yeah, that’s definitely an older generation problem.

The use case of Reddit/lemmy is entirely different from Twitter/x/mastodon. In Reddit/lemmy, there’s a topic of interest, and people chime in. In Twitter/etc, there’s people of interest, and they discuss topics.

I don’t care who is talking, I just want to talk about stuff. So the twitter style has zero interest for me.

Mind your tenses. Will die, not have died.

No, dogs know what a dog is, and also what a not-dog is. They clearly make distinctions, behave differently towards different things, and so on. They are neither as dumb as some people think, nor as smart as other people think.

Cats too, by the way, despite some claims to the contrary out there. Neither dogs nor cats act with the same behaviors they use with others of their species as they do with others of other species.

Man, I was a Potter fan for years. But the reviews and analysis that I’ve seen of this game mark it as casually and unrepentantly antisemitic… not as a side thing, but core to the main plot and central to what you do in the game. I don’t think I can handle that.

My friends and I played this a lot when I was little. Spent hours on it. The extremely extremely limited ammo system hasn’t been used much since— probably for good reason. The controls weren’t the greatest either, iirc.

Europeans can watch porn at work and not get in trouble for it?

Media and stories are not the real world, and serve a different purpose. Again, it’s an immersion breaking thing— not because it’s not realistic, but because the fact that it IS realistic triggers people to an extent that it, again, breaks willing suspension of disbelief.

The question is horrifying enough to shut off all reason and make me want to disengage entirely with the question, if that answers your question.

Incidentally, it’s the reason that when more of the population were parents, movies never killed kids in the end; it doesn’t just shock, it shocks to a level that breaks immersion and suspension of disbelief— I don’t get scared, I think “oh, this is just a movie with actors and whatnot”. (Now parents are less of a majority, so studios are more willing to push this boundary.)

Mordred’s Lullaby, by Heather Dale might be a pretty good choice. It’s creepy, although creepy in the abusive narcissist way, so I don’t know if that’ll be your jam.

I agree with the person who said it’s not a bad idea to learn the language of your enemy. And Russian culture is fascinating and worthy of study, even if the country is currently being run by a fascist dictator bent on world domination, at the expense and destruction of his own people. But then, that has been a trend in Russian history.

If this bothers you enough to ask about it, have you considered learning Ukrainian instead? You’ll get many of the benefits of learning Russian, and my understanding is that the two languages are mutually intelligible with some difficulty despite the differences.

I mean, on the one hand, one of the key features of autism is that they make people feel uncomfortable. This isn’t bigotry, this is the reason autism was investigated and studied in the first place. People on the spectrum make other people uncomfortable by a wide variety of mechanisms— not understanding social cues and not understanding body language being two big ones. That’s practically the definition of autism.

I wouldn’t say that this, alone and isolated from everything else makes her a bigot. But everything else absolutely does.

Yes, I genuinely enjoy the flavor of celery and distinctly miss the flavor when it’s absent. I grew up eating it raw with peanut butter, or melted/spreadable cheese. I grew up thinking it mostly tasted like water and was just a good vehicle for other flavors, but as my palate developed I noticed, and loved, the flavor more and more. In soups especially.

They say it takes something like twelve tries of a new flavor for your body to stop being afraid of it and actually enjoy it, and that most disliked foods are this kind of instinctual rejection. Maybe just try to force it a dozen times? I know that’s not pleasant advice, and I only recommend it if avoiding celery is something that will cause you life difficulties, such as in social situations.

If a pillbug/rollypoly/potato bug/doodlebug/ <whatever your region calls it> is a bug? Then lobsters and crabs are absolutely bugs. This actually doesn’t bother me.

There are many extroverts with social anxiety that call themselves introverts, by the way. Social anxiety and introversion do not equal each other. I’m an introvert who gets out there and has fun with people regularly… if you used social anxiety as a measure, you’d think I was extroverted. I’m not. My wife is the opposite— she has massive and severe social anxiety, but she needs people to be sane. She looks like an introvert on many people’s scales, but she’s not.

No, that exact thing, interacting with the particle, is what he was saying does not happen, or at least is not required for the effect to happen. This is where his explanation lost me, because my understanding had aligned with yours, and he spent a good half hour trying to explain how I was wrong, and to be honest, it didn’t quite sink in.

I remember there was a lot of math in his explanation, and multiple different interpretations and angles of understanding — but my takeaway was just that he strongly claimed no interaction with the particle whatsoever was required for uncertainty and the weird particle/wave dichotomy to take place, and that experimental evidence has been provided for this. Furthermore, that I have no fucking idea what observation means, but it doesn’t apparently mean interaction with the particle at all.