The West Edmonton Mall used to have more submarines than the Canadian navy. I think that was before the dolphins though.
Sometimes I make video games
The West Edmonton Mall used to have more submarines than the Canadian navy. I think that was before the dolphins though.
I’m a big fan of Day of the Dead (1985)
On the surface, it’s a bunker zombie movie. But like truly good zombie movies, it’s not about the zombies. It’s more about humanity’s response to existential dread and how groups can fail to cooperate with each other.
The movie’s been remade a few times, but imo the original is the most thought provoking.
I don’t remember where I heard it, but I do remember hearing that one of the signs you’re in a dream is that your phone doesn’t work properly. Which leads me into this dream I had recently:
I was asleep, when my phone wakes me up. I don’t remember it actually ringing, just thinking “someone is trying to call me,” so I answer it and do my best to pretend I wasn’t just sleeping. We don’t have an actual conversation, like no words are exchanged, but through the inscrutable logic of dreams I ascertain that the caller is an old acquaintance setting me up for a job interview. We hang up and I go back to sleep.
Next thing I know I’m at the mall wondering if this was where my interview was supposed to be. I try to think back on the conversation but I don’t remember anything other than being really sleepy. For a moment I suspect that I must have imagined the conversation, maybe it was all just a dream. I don’t remember who I’m supposed to meet, where I’m supposed to meet them, or what job I’m supposed to be interviewing for. Then I reason that I wouldn’t have come to the mall unless I was supposed to, so I decide to fake it til I make it.
Sure enough, I find my old acquaintance who introduces me to someone I’ve never met about the job. We start chatting for a bit, and then the job interview turns into a scavenger hunt and I’m sent off into the mall with my prospective employer’s shopping list. I wake up before I find out if I got the job.
There’s this ad I keep seeing that I really despise. It’s for teeth-whitening toothpaste. The actress is wearing a white coat then holds up a tissue to her teeth, lamenting that her sparkling white teeth are ‘still yellow’
They cut away to teach you how toothpaste works, because surely you’ve never heard of this newfangled thing, and when they cut back she’s no longer wearing her white coat and says how much whiter her teeth are.
It’s transparently obvious that the wardrobe and tissue are just to give you something whiter to look at. But like… your teeth aren’t supposed to be freakishly white. It’s just something that Big Toothpaste wants you to feel bad about the way your body is. Also, using whitening toothpaste when you don’t need it can damage your enamel and cause you long term problems.
Well as long as Bill says it’s cool, I guess I don’t have to form my own opinion
So does this mean that the “Second Breakfast” contingent of the Fellowship can be stored in one Hobnibble? Seems apt.
I was probably a child when I last read it, so I might have some details wrong, but here’s how I remember it:
A child is given a toy rabbit. A fairy visits the toy rabbit and gives it the gift of awareness. The child and the toy bond with each other and grow to love each other. Unfortunately, the child becomes dangerously ill, and after the sickness their possessions must be incinerated to prevent contamination. This includes the toy rabbit. However, the fairy arrives at the last minute, declaring that because the rabbit learned to love it was therefore a real rabbit, and with a wave of her wand transforms the toy into a living being and whisks it off to the woods were it lives happily ever after with the other rabbits.
So I guess my question is this - Do you think the velveteen rabbit and the fairy are real? Or is the fairy’s magic an invention of the child’s mind?
I think the narrative required the velveteen rabbit to be burned because it was so horrible. To the grown ups it’s just velveteen, but to the child it’s a dear friend. Even as children we know that being burned is horrible. So the child invents a solution where their toy can live happily ever after even after it’s thrown in the fire.
I think there’s definitely some Heaven and Hell symbolism to be had too. The velveteen rabbit was damned to hellfire unless it accepted love into its heart during its life. Then it is granted into the afterlife. In fact, you could say it was reincarnated into a higher spiritual form.
The story explores coping with loss as seen from the point of view of a child. Even though the velveteen rabbit was just a toy, the child has given it a soul. If you have a soul, when you die you go to the afterlife and live happily ever after. It’s a comforting story to a child, and one that many people around the world have believed throughout the ages.
Isn’t showing the sun your grundle purpose enough?
Anecdotally, I have two pairs of glasses where one has the filter and the other does not. I experience less eye strain when working at the computer with the filtered glasses. There’s a definite yellow tint to them, but you don’t notice after a while.
However, I 100% believe that it could be the placebo effect, so take from that what you will.
…no 🥲
I’m doing a lot better now though
When I was a kid I saw an elderly man get hit by a car. He rolled over the top, which I guess is safer than being run down, but he got a lot of air and hit the pavement hard. Just kept rolling over and over. My parents shooed us away from the scene, but I can’t imagine it ended well for him.
One time I was riding a bus that rear-ended a motorcycle. I didn’t see the collision itself, but the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.
We often take for granted how dangerous traffic is. Your life can end in a moment doing something we casually do every day.
I was working in a department store when a middle-aged woman collapsed in front of me. It was really warm, heat exhaustion I supposed. She looked like maybe she was drunk because she was moving kind of erratically, so I went to see if she was okay and she just fell. I’ll never forget the sound her head made hitting the concrete or the fact that she didn’t even blink. Remarkably, she was okay and was up in a few minutes, walked away and everything, really surprised me.
The thing that probably fucked me up the most though was some videos on YouTube. I was working for a video analytics company, and we were trying to build an image classifier that could detect firearms. Well, you need data for that, so we were scraping videos of gun crime. Mostly what we were looking for was armed robbery. Lots of videos put out by the local police of somebody holding up a convenience store, and that wasn’t a big deal. But every now and then you’d find a video of someone getting shot and that really affected me. Eight hours a day of looking at gun crime with the occasional homicide peppered in was a recipe for disaster. I definitely needed therapy after that job.
A lot of people in this thread appear to be pretty hard on themselves. There seems to be a trend of people who want to be nice, are trying to be nice, but don’t see themselves as nice. If that sounds like you, then I’ve got some good news for you:
You are a nice person.
If you’re sincerely making the effort to be a better person then that’s admirable. Self improvement is hard. Too often people are quick to judge based on the result of your actions rather than the effort that’s put into them. To put it another way, we judge people by their actions but judge ourselves by our intentions.
Treat yourself to the niceness that you’re trying to show to other people. You’re doing the best you can. You’re trying to be a nicer person which means you’re trying to grow. From tiny seedlings grow mighty oaks, and the seedling shouldn’t be shamed for starting its journey. Rather, it should be encouraged to keep growing.
If you find it difficult to be nice, but you’re trying to be a nice person, I’d say that’s a lot nicer than being the person who dismisses another for not being ‘nice’ enough.
I just shared this with my wife because she’s an artist and hates AI as much as I do.
Apparently she made an account last night.
“Red tape” is a pretty common idiom here. It’s similar to bureaucracy, but it’s more like the useless stuff you have to deal with in order to do something.
Say you want to update your driver’s license and you need to bring in some ID and fill out a form. That’s regular bureaucracy.
If you want to feed the homeless so you have to get a permit for an event, prove your volunteers have food-handling training, fill out forms for your volunteers, notify the police that there will be a public gathering, schedule an inspection of the facility, etc, that’s red tape.
Another way to look at it might be that Bureaucracy describes the system in which offices communicate with each other, and Red Tape are the tasks/forms/whatever you have to complete in order to get what you want approved.
I’ve heard before that the generous bulges of this era have something to do with knights having rampant syphilis and needing more room to breathe.
Isn’t history neat?
Okay, say you’ve got four inner loops (a crime on its own, I know), do you use i, j, k, l or i, j, k, ii?
Ah, well you can definitely build for Android with it then. I haven’t personally, but so far every other platform I’ve built for has just been a few clicks and away you go
Whenever I pick up my knife my brain says, “what if I just stick this into my belly?”
They say your brain imagines these scenarios so that you can try to avoid them, but the more you learn about trying to wrangle your brain the more I think the brain is just a dick sometimes.