It brings me some comfort seeing how clear and easy to understand language is being used against these angry people.
They are being forced to explain their behaviour instead of arguing the specifics of words. It’s subtle but effective in my opion.
I am really enjoying this.
I’ve been enjoying the use or weird lately. I’ve had some strong personal opinions on language lately. A lot of it comes with a huge increase of new words that sort of seem abstract from it’s meaning.
I think with how rapid information can spread to large groups of people, it’s just too fast for my mind to keep up. All of a sudden I feel like I’m in a war with words and who knows which landmine of a word will get you in trouble. It causes me even more anxiety when someone comes at you with manipulative intentions in order to control the direction of the discussion.
I think weird works because it’s an almost basic word. It’s simple and descriptive. It’s not a newer, more specific word that requires a deeper understanding of a broader topic. It’s understood by more people. People with varying degrees of language knowledge including people whose native language is not English. It’s easier for more people to understand.
It’s a lot easier to understand someone is weird compared to someone being a fascist.
I don’t believe all raccoons live near roads. It is entirely possible for some animals to have minimal or no contact with human infrastructure. The world is a big place even if it feels small at times.
Country raccoons aren’t aware of the dangers of motor vehicles. City raccoons would have been taught by their mother how to wait and avoid such obstacles. Foraging for food in bins is also a lot different than hunting for food in a more wild setting. The diets are vastly different with the mother again showing the young how to search and obtain food in their respective environments.
Yes, racoons can teach each other but from my understanding, a lot of that teaching is from mother to child.
I do not expect a city human to be able to head into the wild and survive without a considerable amount of training before heading out. A wild human would have a difficult time adjusting to the city life without starting out with some money.
I still stand by my original statement unless I can be proven otherwise.
I watched a documentary about racoons. It mainly focused on raccoons that live in the city and how they adapted to city life. City raccoons adapted so well that city racoons and country raccoons would not be able to survive in each other’s world.
If I recall correctly, cities helped the spread of racoons throughout North America. Any animal that has is able to adapt so easily is far more clever than we give them credit for.
And since they aren’t bound by human laws, I fully support them in vandalising and trashing these Cyber Truck monstrosities. I’m eternally jealous that they can look so cute while accidentally rebelling against Musk.
This feels like satire? A site called real men, real style with an article about penises?
I’ve found myself lately a lot more interested in games that don’t focus heavily on graphics but instead allow other parts of the game to speak for itself. This allows for the imagination to fill in the gaps, as you mentioned.
I’ve been playing a lot or Caves of Qud recently. It’s a rogue-like game with tile graphics and colourful text. Somehow this menu simulator game has drawn me into it’s harsh and unforgiving world. The tile based graphics actually allows for an amazing amount of creative freedom both from the developer and player point of views. The developer has created this futuristic planet with mutants and cybernetics roaming the planet trying to survive. The player has the freedom to play as they like and create the most unique characters they can imagine. My current character has two hearts, a scorpion tail, a fanged beak, two dagger wielding claws and a habit for stabbing.
I think the rise of constantly better technology has inadvertently encouraged a focus on better graphics over other aspects of video games. While there are some absolutely beautiful games with higher hardware demand, I think as of late, I’m yearning for games that focus more on story or gameplay. Games where you can feel the developer’s passion. Games with polish and attention to details in the most unexpected ways. Games that attempt to push boundaries within certain limitations (think hardware or graphic styles for example).
I think what I want is a game that feels like I’m reading a fiction book in a way. What I mean is that when you read a work of fiction, your imagination is filling in all that visual information. A game can provide you more than just text, but if it can balance graphics, gameplay and story, it can really transport and immerse your imagination into that world.
As with many travelers in Australia, we both had work/holiday visa’s that allowed us to stay in Australia for 1-2 years. This wonderful comment was thrown at me within the first week of arriving at a hostel in Sydney.
Fortunately they left a month or two later but I still avoided them when they did still live there.
Amazing. Layers of ignorance for an already dumb thing to say.
I’m a person of colour who has a white step parent and has grown up in Canada in a fairly mixed area.
My family history would have started in India but my parents were born in South America and migrated up to North America (both Canada and the US) where my sister and I were born. I grew up “white.” My voice, appearance and behaviour are “white.” I was born and raised Canadian. I’m far from proud of this country where I have spent my life but I will identify myself as a Canadian. My family history had been thoroughly white washed and erased.
I say all this because for all this history I have behind me, it means nothing to most people.
The majority of Indian people here will look at me one way until I speak and then promptly ignore me because I’m not “Indian.”
West Indian people want to be my best friend until they find out I’ve never visited any West Indian country. Then I’ll be treated as an idiot for not embracing a culture I have no real knowledge of and have not been immersed in.
Then there are the white people… No matter how white I act, I will never be “white” enough. I’ll always be the colour of my skin. I could look, act and behave as awful as a white cop and still not be on the same level.
In fact, I have a “friend” who is a cop. He’s not really my friend, more of an acquaintance I’ve known for 10+ years through another more decent friend. This guy is just fucking awful and every molecule in his body is racist and vile. He looks at me, arms full of tattoos and tells me I’d be a perfect “UC.” Undercover Cop. My only value to him is to be used to incriminate fellow people of colour. I’m just not a person or anything close to equal. Always something less.
I’ve never really had a place where I felt I belonged while growing up. Hated for being me from multiple angles for reasons beyond my control while doing nothing harmful to anyone. There are good people out there who treat me as a person first but they are few and far between.
Another quick story, I once had a Dutch guy in Australia tell me that his last name Hoffmeister means “House Master.” You know, from the times when they used to own slaves. Thanks for telling me that to my face, you absolute weirdo.
I always find it interesting when someone states they don’t enjoy an activity and one of the first responses are to subtly guilt the commenter for not enjoying an activity.
I’ve been losing interest in movies for the past 15-20 years and being guilted into enjoy something I no longer enjoy for someone else’s expense does not sound like fun.
Fortunately there are plenty of activities to do together. As you mentioned, cooking together sounds great to me. So does walking in nature. I especially love playing music for each other because I love hearing what other people listen to.
Humans are wonderfully complex and there’s plenty in the world to for us to enjoy.
A long time ago I came across a game that was part of a 1mb challenge. It’s called A New Zero. I played it quite a lot, just flying around and dive bombing boats was entertaining enough for me.
I was impressed with 1mb but 13kb and 96kb is pretty amazing. I really enjoy seeing stuff like this.
I’ve had stocks in a couple forms over my lifetime and after a while, both times I have pulled all my money out.
The first time was shortly after the 2008 crash. All those reassuring words my investing manager person told me were simply sweet nothings. I decided that taking the hit of losing half my money was a life lesson and used the remaining half to go travel and live a life for myself. That investing manager later went on to have a covid party out of defiance for masking requirements, caught covid and died. Felt good knowing my stranger-danger alarms were working even if I didn’t understand my decisions fully at the time.
The second time I simply put my money into a low risk, government stock option for a few years. After watching global leaders fumble the handling of a global pandemic, I lost faith my own government to have my best interest in mind. I pulled my money out again.
I personally feel super uncomfortable allowing other people to make money off my money that I am risking. Even if it is low risk. It make me feel exploited.
Ultimately, I decided I don’t need my money to work for me because I don’t even want to work. I hate the concept of money. To me, money just disconnects us from community and nature.
If you are curious to how I live, it’s with very little. I spent a number of years of my life living out of a 34 liter sized backpack. Living minimally while making sure what I owned had meaning, purpose or intention transfered over to when I finally started settling into a certain location.
This game has caught my eye. The visual style alone is what really draws me in to the world.
There’s something about the Half-Life-ish graphics and unique style that sort of hits a personal nostalgia for me. It has a wonderful combination of weird and abstract with a touch of familiarity. It also feels both vibrant and gritty at the same time. Something I didn’t realize I was missing so much. Especially after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 which has absolutely gorgeous but very busy graphics.
After I get over my Caves of Qud hyperfixation, I am definitely going to pick this game up.
I wouldn’t mind if societies also made some compromises for me too. Currently it feels like I’m making all the compromises to fit in but made to feel like it’s never enough.
Feels like I’m trying to fix an awful relationship by doing all the hard work myself. I’m tired.
I think I meant gardening instead of farming in my first comment. I’m drawing comparisons from the majority of my life in the suburbs. I have strong feelings about industrial farming that I’m not interested in going into at the moment.
I do believe it’s important for us to learn how to rejuvenate our land as a step towards a sustainable future which is why I’m interested in learning and sharing such things. Food is quite important to our lives.
Not being able to till or use synthetic fertilisers makes it a lot harder to scale up production.
This is exactly why I believe we need to start relearning soil health care among many other things. This is why we need to bring food back locally into everyone’s yard’s and parks. This is why we need this knowledge now to help future generations.
It’s hard to imagine another way of living life but we’ll never know if we don’t collectively try.
I’ve personally drawn a lot of inspiration from Australian indigenous peoples and their approach to land management which is why I feel so strongly about learning soil health.
I’ve only had a year experience with growing crops but learned a lot about how important “living soil” is from having a bioactive terrarium.
Bioactive refers to making an active ecosystem with plants, insects and even microfauna. In mine I had plants, isopods (land shrimp) and springtails. The isopods break down fruits, veggies, poop and decaying matter like fallen leaves. The springtails eat fungi and mold that forms from constant moisture. The plants thrive off the nutritious bug poop.
Learning about this cycle was important to me understanding that creating a garden means creating a home for all the insect and microfauna first, the resulting crops were the tasty bonus.
Clover is amazing for ground cover. The roots will help losen soil. Along with underground insects, this helps create air pockets in the soil for all plant roots to breath. It helps prevent moisture loss, keeping enough moisture for roots to gather nutrients with less watering. The roots also act as a home for bacteria, fungi and anything considered microfauna really. The flowers attract pollinators which is so important for both crops and local pollinator populations. It may also bring nitrogen into the soil providing food for other plants or crops. I’m recalling most of this from memory so there may be outdated or slightly misremembered info but that was my take away from my initial research into healthy, living soil.
My first year of crops grew amazingly and I hope for more of that. This year I’m adding walking planks and a few large stones to my garden. Between the clover ground cover, stones and wood, that should give even more protection for my tiny insect\microfauna friends. I even went as far as to add a layer of fallen leaves over the soil to help protect it during the winter.
I can never look at “traditional” western farming practices the same again. Soil health is just not given the attention it truly needs.
I have the ability to make others feel safe and comfortable to be their themselves. It’s always a shock to me how comfortable some people get around me. I’m still waiting for someone to make me feel the same way.