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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Aside from the Shub-Niggurath worship (I’m more of an Azathoth person, myself), I agree with most things here. I’d just add to the list, group B I guess:

    • aquatic animal husbandry and aquascaping (freshwater preferably, saltwater if you are really masochistic and have money to burn on corals and expensive equipment)
    • model railroading

    I feel these are more ‘apex’ hobbies, wherein you need a bit of everything (chemistry, electronics, an artistic sense, lots of patience) and they will occupy most of your time. You’d think electronics and aquaria are not the closest things, but just you wait until you feel the need to build an LED lamp with simulated day/night cycles and moonlight, controlled by an arduino.

    The barrier to entry is fairly low - there are starter sets available and I’ve found that hobby shops of this sort are usually staffed by very knowledgeable people, eager to help newcomers. And, you can go as deep as you want and still have fun. You will also learn an absolute fuckton of things about what you choose to model with your hobby.

    An honorable mention for homebrewing, which I don’t even regard as a hobby at this point, but more of a necessity, like cooking.


  • you’re fighting a losing battle. ‘having kids is a good thing’ is the only piece of propaganda that is distributed to probably every human. and probably the oldest one, too. it’s also a base instinct, sort of hard to override by reasoning, as anyone who’s ever been horny or hungry can probably attest. this is probably the best example on here related to the posted question.

    for what it’s worth, I do think you are correct





  • It’s easier to tell people to just use a rubber when on antibiotics rathern than explain to them that it’s only for some unpronounceable substances for most of the population and have them memorize a list of substances for which it’s safe to go on as usual - azithromycin is safe, amoxicillin is not. They may sound fairly similar to a layman.

    It’s because some substances (in this case, antibiotics) mess with the units in your body that process them and prepare them for excretion. They may inhibit or induce them, but these units process a whole load of other stuff. Including birth control, which can lead to less activity from the birth control pills because they’re inactivated quicker (in case of induction) or the biotransformation to the active form is slower (in case of inhibition, for prodrugs that are inactive as is, but have active metabolites, no idea if this is the case for birth control though).

    A similar thing happens with alcohol, for example, which is why you should always be honest with exactly how much alcohol you drink or what other drugs you take when talking to an anaesthesiologist, or any doctor prescribing you any sort of medicine, lest you risk ineffective anaesthesia or treatment (the first one is worse imo).



  • the world would be a much more terrifying place if stupid people doing ‘evil’ (never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity) stuff were instead evil and highly intelligent. I like this version better. we like to think that intelligence brings with itself high morals and every intelligent person is an agent of good. some people might just want to watch the world burn, but that’s a discussion for another thread, I think.

    imagine a highly intelligent musk or spez. ugh






  • The same nagging notion sometimes claws at my brain as well.

    The notion of consciousness not existing is especially troublesome for me to wrap my mind around. Logic says that no consciousness means nothing to perceive said lack of consciousness, therefore no loss there (for the subject, of course). That somehow… does not make it any better.

    First time I’ve been through general anaesthesia I was wondering what it’d be like and a bit fearful of it. Happened in an instant, and I woke up what felt like immediately. Afterwards my conscious mind fixed that with perhaps artificially introducing passage of time to make everything fit. If I think back now, I certainly know some time had passed. But had it? And how much? No idea. Clock said around 3 hours, so I’ll go by that.

    Shortly thereafter I had a massive bleed and lost about 1/3 of my blood (by looking at amount of hemoglobin before and after the event). The more I lost, the less coherent I was and the less anything mattered. By the time I got to the ER, I had tunnel vision and survival mode on. But I wasn’t scared for some odd reason… nothing mattered much. Not sure how close I came to actual death then, but it felt pretty close.

    What I can advise… enjoy what you can, and don’t waste your hate on anything. It’s pretty much not worth it. Unless your life or the life of loved ones is in immediate danger, screw it. Guy cut you off in traffic? Fuck’em. It’s not worth shortening your life for some rando with not enough respect for himself or others as to break the social contract. Just choose your preferred intensity of sustainable (for you) hedonism and go from there.

    I also hope it gets easier with age, but the prospect of becoming more jaded that I am now is not appealing. Though if it makes everything easier…

    I will say this, though. Not existing was (probably?) fine. But being brought into existence just for it to be taken away after a blink of an eye (in terms of billions of years of non-existence vs the average lifespan) seems like cruel and unusual punishment.


  • I also can afford stuff but sometimes stuff doesn’t allow itself to be bought. Tried buying some music in mp3 format from Amazon, they wouldn’t sell me digital music because I didn’t live in one of the handful of countries they sell to. So I just ordered the audio CD and ripped it. Now I have the physical disk as well which, I’m not going to lie, I like, but convenience went out the window. This was a new release.

    On a different occasion (older release), I couldn’t find the audio CD version but found a site that sold to me (not Amazon, but what do you know, it is possible to sell digital goods all over the world. Whoddathunkit?).

    And then I have some music I still cannot find neither digital nor disk except for some very rare vinyls which pop up once in a while. And I don’t have a set-up to rip vinyls, so what does one do about that? Piracy is also a service problem.


  • I am puzzled as to what exactly you mean. I watched the video until min 17 out of 19, then realized it’s got no deeper message beyond that point so stopped it. Lad spoke about philosophies, how different philosophers thought people were good or others thought they were bad then had a weird intermezzo blaming imperialism. The weird part was the style change not the actual blaming, mind you - that’s all valid, but still serves to prove an actual human nature.

    Spoke some stuff about look at all cultures in Africa being friendly, and then babbled on about how humans aren’t good or bad but they are victims of their circumstances.

    Overall a mediocre video from an argumentation standpoint, but figured hey, why not give it a shot?

    I never said we’re all willing participants. Active or passive participants - willing or unwilling. Still participants. Maybe it clears it up, hm?

    Paraphrasing the video it does indeed say that humans aren’t bad or good, but their actions are due to the social environment. Do tell me how this is completely disconnected from what I said? I took it a couple of steps further.

    Social environment bad (somehow, not tied to human nature because social environments come into being by themselves and exist even without humans, if I’m understanding this as you mean it - cause otherwise, if people were responsible, they would be bad people. but the video tells us there are no bad people);

    BUT people not bad or good means it’s basically not their fault for anything cause they aren’t bad if they do bad stuff. But look people are good because they come together sometimes.

    I honestly don’t understand what point you are trying to make. If it is that human nature isn’t a thing and that’s it, well… best of luck to ya. Is it not in your nature to argue with random people on the internet?

    Maybe if you are trying to make a point don’t just drop a youtube link and expect people to understand the same thing as you did or expect them suddenly be enlightened. Did you understand it? Care to elaborate on what you understood from it? I did. Let’s compare notes.

    Edit: Obligatory I’m not your bro, guy.