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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • That went from zero to apocalypse very quickly.

    I think you’ve been chasing the news dragon too long and too hard. Past a point, it doesn’t make you more informed, just… sadder. More given to misanthropy and despair.

    We’re here, and we’re not all bad. Most of us want the same things: health, happiness, love, and camaraderie. We want those things for the people we care about— sometimes more than for ourselves.

    The vast, vast majority of us are just people. We get caught up in things, and we forget it sometimes, but that’s a people thing too. And so is helping— when tragedy strikes, or those times we create tragedy, people are also the ones running toward the danger and uncertainty to help save those who cannot save themselves.



  • This is a fundamentally dseems like an argument than in your post, and more or less is just an argument against any sort of progress or innovation. “We got by without ____ for many years, so what benefit could they offer us?”

    If communication is intended, then the speaker or writer has a responsibility to make an effort toward being accurately understood. That effort involves using forms, formats, and punctuation that is old and well established, as well as more novel elements of them.





  • All meaning is constructed meaning, and, to quote Shakespeare, “there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

    We decide, collectively, and as individuals, what is positive and what is negative. We invent for ourselves, whole cloth or adopting from our elders, meaning in life, the universe, and everything.

    That doesn’t mean they are without worth. The world is altered daily through the things people imagine. Money is an invention, its value existing in the collective imaginations of those who use it. Maps are not the lands they represent, but their cartography influences where people live, work, and travel. Numbers and maths are inventions— languages invented to describe the universe and its movings, but the universe moves without needing to know them…

    … nevertheless, with those invented languages we orbit distant planets with artificial satellites, and create the wonderful bit of nonsense that allows us to communicate here.

    We choose to find meaning in the world, and then we choose the meaning we find there. Ultimately everything else can be winnowed away, but that. I believe we have value because I choose to believe we have value, and I weigh the good of the world with the bad because I actively choose to continue to see both. It isn’t easy all the time, and it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. But it’s what I want for the world, and what I want for me.




  • Another way of thinking about it:

    Numbers offer a sense of scale. As numbers go further left from the decimal, they get bigger and bigger. Likewise, as they go right from the decimal, they get smaller and smaller.

    If I’m looking with just my eyes, I can see big things without issue, but as things get smaller and smaller, it becomes more and more difficult. Eventually, I can’t see the next smallest thing at all.

    But we know that smaller thing is there— I can use a magnifying glass and see things slightly smaller than I can unaided. With a microscope, I can see smaller still.

    So I can see the entirety of a leaf, know where it begins and ends, even though I can’t, unaided, see the details of all its cells. Likewise, you can see the entirety of the line you drew, it’s just that you lack precise enough tools to measure it with perfect accuracy.


  • I’m wondering if the degree of believability of the image has, or should have any bearing on the answer here. Like, if a third party who was unaware of the image’s provenance came across it, might they be likely to believe the image is authentic or authorized?

    For another angle, we allow protections on the usage of fictional characters/their images. Is it so wild to think that a real person might be worthy of the same protections?

    Ultimately, people are going to be privately freaky how they’re gonna be privately freaky. It mostly only ever becomes a problem when it stops being private. I shouldn’t have to see that a bunch of strangers made porn to look like me, and neither should Taylor. And mine are unlikely to make it into tabloids.






  • Not a fan of them, but I am inclined to agree with you on this one. Appearance of corruption for sitting out and letting the decision default, or much stronger appearance of corruption by sitting for it.

    Unless sitting for arguments and abstaining from submitting or signing on to an opinion is an option… but even then, sitting for the arguments of a case you’re a defendant of is a bad, bad look, comes with no guarantee that you actually will abstain from opinion, and might not even be a valid way around quorum rules.