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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • How does that work, physiologically? We’re talking dopamine in the brain. If what that user said was true and “overstimulation like that drains your dopamine reserves (or something),” then another person being there wouldn’t make a difference.

    I mean, it’s because they have a misunderstanding on how brain chemistry works, obviously. Like, it can store it, but it doesn’t get used up from doing things that feel good. That’s what makes dopamine. And while loneliness is a problem in the general population, it’s more likely that longer lasting gratification from sex isn’t from the physical act or even just the physical act with another person, but the joy gained from the relationship as a whole. Pretending that there’s chemically something different happening in the brain just because there is physically another person there is ridiculous. I’ve had plenty of unfulfilling sex with people I didn’t like that didn’t make me happy/content afterwards like masturbating would have.




  • Oh boy. I made the jump from SLA to (kinda) publication order. Going from his most intricate series to his first published book was almost jarring. I still liked Elantris though.

    Personally, I read through close to publication order, but grouped series together. Well, I guess it’s really just Mistborn and maybe Emperor’s Soul with Elantris, but those last ones aren’t actually in the same set, just the same planet.



  • Oh man, every time someone asks a question along these lines I always think of the movie Hank and Mike. I found it in a discount bin at a grocery store probably a decade ago so I took a little time to actually look into it more this time. I knew it was Canadian and unlikely a big hit, but apparently it was just so poorly received. It made less than $17,000 of the $2M it cost, and it’s real tough to find anyone even reviewing it. I even struggled to find the music from it. (The one song is badass). And it’s got a couple B-tier actors that I remember doing a great job, and I think Joe Mantegna really went for it in his role as the god Pan. Chris Klein kills it in this song.

    The crude humor kinda puts people off I think but the satirical aspects cut a little deeper than the movie needed to. And probably when I discovered it I was depressed and had a drinking problem and the overall mood of it really felt at home to me at the time so I was able to just live in those aspects of the film and really absorb the more subtle message. It’s definitely absurd in many points but there’s a lot of heart in it.


  • I actually know this one. Access is available through the MS Office 2019 bundle officially and they pretend it’s not really there with 365, but if you have Office365 you can download the app version to work offline. Access still doesn’t show up on the main list in the app, but if you search it’s there. There’s also a way to search it in apps online in 365 but it just downloads it and only runs in the app.

    I recently went back to school and the basic degree requirements necessitated an intro to CIS class. It was just a glorified MS suite class. But I had an interesting time figuring out how to get to Access and no where online makes it clear. That’s the main reason I typed this out. Maybe some day someone else will have the same issue and this comment will show up on a search and be able to help them. You’re welcome future person!





  • I mean, I would say that it’s far more ethical than most billionaires. She didn’t exploit workers, she performed and the populace gave her the money willingly. It’s as ethical as one can get in the modern day where no person can participate in society without benefiting from exploitation. And as far as I can tell from some half-assed searching, her investments are in property, but not in the landlord sense. She owns rich people property. Mansions and jets and shit.

    I my personal opinion, musicians seem like the most ethical rich people in terms of how they got their money. They get exploited by the music industry early on, but money primarily comes from ticket and merch sales, which people choose to spend their money on in support of the artist. People hate capitalism, but forget what it is they hate about it and just start hating the money, forgetting why it’s bad- the exploitation.


  • Jesus fucking christ. You know how water works, right? It fits the form of the container it’s in. It’s an simplified analogy to explain what that other guy linked to. We (well, you) see a universe fit to our kind of life, but the reality is that we developed to fit the universe.

    You remind me of this guy I saw the other day claiming that a whole bunch of rocks that are vaguely shaped like body parts might be fossilized body parts.

    He just kept saying “I’m not saying it definitely is, but imagine if we don’t understand the world, and it’s maybe this way? Crazy right?!”

    It’s such cowardly bullshit. If you want to believe a thing because it sounds nice to you, don’t half-ass it and throw qualifiers on it. You brought it up, and then when challenged the tiniest bit, backed down with a “I’m not saying that’s definitely true… but maybe…?”

    and that doesn’t match our expectations.

    What expectations? Actual scientist, using facts, don’t have expectations of alien life. We don’t know the probability of life existing anywhere but here because we have nothing to compare it to. We have the one universe with the one data set available to us. Until we discover alien life, we should have no expectation for it. Do I think it’s likely there is life elsewhere? Yes. Does that mean I expect it? No. We don’t have enough information about the cosmos to even start to calculate whether it should happen.

    I had a roommate once who believed that the stuff from the Alvin the Maker book series was real. The magic and shit. I asked if he had anything that led him to believe that or if he just really liked the books and wanted it to be. OF course he didn’t have any evidence or real reason for it. He just wanted it to be so, so he decided that he was going to believe that thing.

    You’re doing that. Stop it. Be a grown-up here and stop believing in make-believe and believe things only when we have sufficient (or in your case, I’ll take any) evidence.


  • Have you heard of the puddle analogy?

    A small amount of water sits there, it this hole in the ground it finds itself in. It looks at this cavity, observes how perfectly it fits the contours of their liquid body. It’s perfect! Every nook and cranny seems to be formed to fit the puddle perfectly.

    “This hole must have been made for me! It’s too much of a coincidence that, with all the ways a hole could form, this one formed perfectly to fit me!”

    You’re doing that. You’re saying it’s a crazy coincidence that all the right things were in place here for life to exist that led to us being here… but if it wasn’t, then we just wouldn’t have developed as life-forms. Or if the environs were different, life would have developed to fit into that kind of solar system. I think you just like the idea, so you believe it, but I think it’s better to believe things we have evidence for.