Sidenote, but thought experiments are complete nonsense. It's just something made up by Anglo philosophers so they don't have to engage with the real world. Trying to ennoble it as a higher form of reasoning just seems like an attack on the kind of political considerations that actually matter. You're not going to convince a hardcore Catholic that abortion should be allowed by posing them the trolley problem.
Pisha
Some of the saddest characters online have got to be writing influencers. Posting about the nobleness of art all day and how unrewarding and tough the life of a writer is, commiserating with others in the know about how those fools just don't appreciate the harsh realities of the publishing industry – and never actually posting any writing. I mean I literally never see anyone recommending their stories or their magazines. It's just self-aggrandizement based on the idea of accomplishment rather than actual accomplishment.
Can you tell I got mad about social media again?
People say a lot of good things about Something Awful these days, but I think there was a real shift towards 4chan-style slur usage and shitposting that occurred a few years back. One of the last things Lowtax did, strangely enough, was close the subforums where a lot of that originated, and one of the first things the new owner did was reopen them and give them free reign of the forums. There was also a minor purge of trans users around that time, as I remember it. I really liked those forums once, but they're completely unacceptable now safe for a few of the better-moderated megathreads.
Certain discussions of weight and eating habits might also merit a content warning – these might trigger people with eating disorders in some way and so I feel it's better to be on the safe side.
I'm still nostalgic for the Saints Row 2 character creator because it was one of the only ones with a gender slider. If there's just two (or even four, see BG3) body types, they're usually still ultra-male and ultra-female in my view. The development of ever more realistic graphics has only served to cement this, I feel.
Suspended, then unsuspended, then labeled, then un-labeled. Bluesky mods are looking incredibly incompetent right now. On the plus side, he's on his way to be among the most widely blocked accounts, so at least there's that.
No regional trains for most of the night. I should be able to get home from the big city between the hours of 22 and 6
Removed: Tracking not fixed
Just remembered a strange event from my childhood. My dad and I were walking down the street when an old man stopped us in order to show us his life's work: a detailed miniature recreation of a famous circus. He had a yellowed photo in his wallet of some acrobats in the center stage of a miniature circus. We didn't know him and I never saw him again, but to this day the art of miniatures is the only thing I still share with my dead father.
I wish I loved anything as much as the writer loves quotation marks. So the "anti-imperialists" oppose the "Western world", namely the "US", due to "Marcyist" "Campism". Wow, you really wouldn't want to write this sentence without those scare quotes!
Not a new observation by any means, but people on Reddit are so mean for no reason. Sometimes, I ask questions about various hobbies because you can't always google everything and I inevitably get rebuked for having the temerity to not already know the answer. Sure, I'm also frequently upset about people online, but I don't go and let them know about it – that's just rude.
Fuchsia Dunlop has a recipe by Buddhist monks in her Hunan cookbook that's simple and vegan. You cut some celery and smoked tofu into strips, you fry the tofu in a wok, take it out, fry the celery, put the tofu back in and season with soy sauce and chili flakes. Serve the whole thing over rice et voilà.