Make America Go Apeshit

In The Netherlands, within my social circles, it’s mostly seen as overly informal and quite intimate to take off your shoes.

You can do it at friends, but certainly not by default at acquaintances (unless they ask), as it might even be a little disrespectful considering taking off your shoes could smell a bit after some hours. Like you force your bodily odours or sweaty feet on to someone’s house.

I totally get the opposite and am noticing a slow shift (also in my own house) to dropping the shoes. But it’s interesting to see that both stances are based on some form of respect, and perhaps also some pragmatism on our side.

Why mix up all the numbers, but not numbers 9, 5 and 6?

But you get rusty in moist environments; when you urinate you slowly rot away your urethra.

ERASED is about a guy reliving his life as a young school kid, with awkward moments around romantic feelings. While I do think it kind of fits the story, I think it does not go well with the requirements.

With this classy response of his it’s almost better for his perceived character than when he didn’t say it.

But I’m allergic to mittens.

Who?

No need to attack me like that when I’m just sharing my viewpoint.

I’m not that outspoken about whether it is fair or not to train on publicly visible data. As that is like having a set of brains look at the same data, but on steroids.

I do feel, however, that large companies making money off that inspiration input seems skewed. But that comes down to the question, can you look at public work and then ask for money for the work you create yourself afterwards. As you surely build on inspiration.

In a sense everything every artist makes is inspired by other people’s art and general life experiences. We humans only have some extra sensory channels and brain paths to map that inspiration through, so it “feels” more original.

I’d argue our creation of art is just a couple of levels more complex. But at its core its just external stimuli followed by some internalisation that enables us to create art. But we needed the aggregated input.

Which does not mean that we can’t disapprove of literal copies of other people’s work. But I think we should be very aware of the fact that it’s more or less a complexity scale.

There have been studies that claim there is a max on what money can buy you in terms of happiness. Before it was said to be 70k (of course depends on the country), now it might be 500k.

Maybe he is over a thousand years old, don’t you see the wrinkles?

This is a brilliant description; the feeling OP has is probably on a way more abstract level than most of the comments here are thinking of.

Doomscrolled Instagram

If you have a whiteboard marker, you can draw over it and then erase it. Works wonders.

And things in itself that are too small to see with even a microscope do not reflect light right? Light might interact there but will not reflect in the usual sense, it can however emit light though. As far as I understand that is.

Interesting video, thanks. I think the main point is that most (historical) data has a lot of gaps and wrong interpretations / extrapolation. People like Pinker seem to (perhaps just ignorantly) somewhat cherry pick data and use it as an argument for their optimistic statement.

It depends on what you mean by “ugly”. Seeing so many people worldwide vote for harsh xenophobic policies made me realize that I consider most people sort of ugly.

Perhaps they are just afraid, but it paints the real world picture. I don’t think people are good or bad inside, just egoistic. Me included.

Still I try to see the good in people and I tend not to whine, but I do understand the pessimistic views.

Congratulations! Same here!

Interestingly I can agree on the grossness of it, only when “the mood”™ arises a kind of nasty turns into attractively naughty. It’s a strange alteration. Like the new texture of a food you might find somewhat repulsive at first suddenly becomes highly addictive or desirable when you give in to it. The sleazy feeling of wanting to keep popping bubble wrap plastic without stopping.

This differs based on time, context (persons) and general mood.

I wonder if at a base level we have kind of the same attitude, but the hormonal alteration or lack thereof is what creates the differences and clouds my mind while yours stay sharp.