Back around 2010, my girlfriend of the time ended up on someone’s page detailing how to pick up girls, and shortly prompting readers to buy their pheromone based product (obvious scam, but that’s not the point now). She got super upset. Outraged, even. She went on a rant about how she’s not a fucking moth that can just be lured by silly simple stuff like that.

About a year later we took part in a competition where two attendees (2 girls, maybe a year or two younger) were desperately looking for accommodation. One of our rooms was empty that day, so we offered that to them with another flatmate (my GF wasn’t around that day).

When she had heard about the whole thing, she got rather jealous. Didn’t matter how much I explained it to her that I am boringly faithful, that I only love her and I didn’t care about the girls romantically, or that I have always been like this: in her mind, if a guy is “alone” with 2 girls for the night (daytime is fine, but mystically, horny zombification happens at full moon), he will be as easy to seduce as it gets, not matter what (like any of those two girls wanted anything, anyway).

Am I a fucking moth, then? It goes both ways.

I usually add context for this exact reason. You get lazy once, and there you go.

That’s admirable! I looked it up in translate and got a completely different result. I think I know what was going on : ) 🦃

I think we can - but just see how many people in your country call Turkey Türkiye (they made a request back in 2022) - and that was just one country, not all.

My first thought was that you’d appreciate it more every decade.

It’s like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Holland. Holland(ia?) is part of the Netherlands which gave the name of the country in a bunch of languages.

This is weird, by the way, I just wrote about the exact same thing not too long ago.

I used to work at this kiosk which was inside a café. A customer wanted to pay from the inside, which can happen, but it’s rare. Since the reader was cable wired to the plug at the window, I had to bring it to where he was standing, but the cable wasn’t long enough. I pulled it out as much as I could, and waited for him to step forward and reach out with his card in his hand.

He was just standing there, waving his card at the machine from ~3-4 feet away. Like, I don’t know, at one point the card reader would go “HEY, that card is Larry! Hi, Larry, how are you doing, you old sonofabitch?”

In my opinion the world is at this shitty state exactly because so many people just don’t care and turn a blind eye to so many injustices, awful things happening in the world. You can ignore the smell of smoke coming from the neighbour, but enough sitting around will just get your roof on fire, as well. Even if the fire avoids you, you could easily be the person burning inside while the neighbour is just “taking their pills”, not caring about the state of the world.

Had more people cared, we wouldn’t see the same atrocities as back in and around WW2, Fascist states and semi-dictatorships running wild without anyone stopping them, white men oppressing minorities, etc.

So they will be just called snakes.

I’m slowly starting to believe that a US started world war can only be prevented by a US started US civil war.

The car was turning and accelerating. From his position, all he had to do to avoid getting hurt was exactly the same as he was doing, minus the gun. He just had to step aside. Which he did. Not like the car was going fast, and it was turning away from him already. The gun literally didn’t do anything to prevent a collision. If anything, she might have let the steering wheel go after the shot, making the car go straight instead of further turning away from the guy.

At the point of the last shot, he was basically making sure to send a bullet after her.

I’m not an expert copolist, and I’m almost sure this is not the only reason, but it seems somewhat easier to keep crime at bay when not every four year old can just carry an AR15 with a rocket launcher and plasma gun attachment.

Well, I didn’t necessary mean the structure of a song (that doesn’t have the complexity that would challenge an AI agent… in the early 2000’s, even), but more like coming up with their own lyrics that even make sense, and producing human speech with rhythm and musical tones.

Not closely related, but back when I was first reading the book, the idea of computer generated songs sounded like “flying future car” delusions, and learning AI in the early 2000’s even confirmed not the impossibility but the crazy limitations of all this.

I have just listened to a podcast last month that mentions how there are songs on Spotify made entirely by AI, and 97% of the people they asked couldn’t tell apart regular songs from the AI generated ones.

On one hand, it’s remarkable. On the other hand, we’re cooked. What’s even more depressing is that many-many, even more worrying things are getting pretty accurate in the book. Maybe not back in 1984, but we’re witnessing the convergence.

I was just thinking about ways to justify “have a ftp” server. The only defence I can think of is that they pronounce ‘ftp’ not as ‘eff-tee-pee’ but literally as ‘ftp’, a vowelless word.

Hol’ up, does that mean Venezuelan politics is mighty fine?

Yeah, everything checks out. He is two worlds and 6000 years old.

While I’m not an expert in economics, from my uneducated point of view it looks like they are an inevitable result of unregulated/improperly regulated capitalism. But I understand once you make strong enough regulations to try and prevent that, it might not be called capitalism anymore, but I guess it also depends on your (everyone’s?) very definition of capitalism.

Again, I might just be a dumb fuck in the matter, though.

To be fair, back when I made a decision of decreasing my meat consumption, it took off as “meatball Mondays”: I allowed myself to eat meat one, maybe two days a week (but not a must). It’s been ~6 years since. Last year at one point I tried to remember when it was the last time I had meat (it wasn’t that week or the one before). I couldn’t remember.

Meatball Mondays are still a good start.