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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 23rd, 2022

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  • I dislike the conception of Free Will that asserts will is only free if it is not deterministic. Any system dictated by the law of Cause and Effect will necessarily be deterministic, given knowledge of First Cause. Together, those premises imply that the only way to be truly free is in a chaotic universe, i.e. one without a relationship between Cause and Effect, where decisions are completely arbitrary and have no predictable outcome anyway.

    The fact of the matter is that you’re already free to do whatever you want, even if that’s shooting yourself in the foot or refusing the choice entirely and running off to live in the woods, and that’s freedom enough for all practical meanings of the word.


  • I went from a fundamentalist community to full blown antitheist to agnostic (after studying religious philosophy in college) to pagan.

    My experience teaches me there are many, many great arguments for the existence of the gods. You just have to accept that gods do not fit the conception the christian fundamentalists have: there is no sentient entity in existence that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent (towards humanity).

    If, and when, you are willing to relax your criteria for what constitutes a god (mine are personifications of the forces of nature) and what your relationship with such a being should look like (I respect them, but worship no one), you too will realize that the “either god is perfect in every way and should be worshipped without a shred of skepticism or there is no god and everything is doomed” mindset is just another arifact of christian zealotry and brainwashing.




  • Volunteer. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s beneficial for everyone involved.

    I used to work on plays at the local theater, which was fun as hell, and introduced me to lots of weird and cool people, and got to explore my love for the Performing Arts.

    I’d also do work at small town festivals and faires, which was a great way to get fresh air and sunlight while being exposed to Culture™.

    Sometimes I’d volunteer at senior homes just to keep them entertained. Didn’t think much of it back then, except had fun putting on performances, but looking back it is nice to know that we were making people feel less lonely.

    On occasion I’d volunteer to do meal drives and the like for churches/charities. This one was masturbatory, but it did feel good to feed/clothe people who couldn’t afford it, or give out toys to kids on christmas. And it definitely felt nice to put in some manual labor.

    These are just some ideas, and some benefits. If you do ever decide to seek further employment/career/education, having stuff like this on your resume looks better than “hung out with friends and tried not to die for several years.” If not, you’ll make friends and memories and discover passions and help others and build community; it really is a priceless experience when you find the places you’re most passionate about helping at.


  • Unless you experience physical pain from driving, it’s a slippery slope because every facet of modern life gets easier in car culture if you have a car.

    Just look at Road Ragers: people who experience extreme emotional duress from driving, possibly endangering everyone with their angry antics and maybe giving themselves health problems from the blood pressure fluctuations, and yet they keep doing it.

    And some people even drive without a license, simply because getting between places in time is nigh impossible otherwise.

    As for why I decided to give up renewing my license, here’s my rant from elsewhere:

    It’s not just the pollution from the exhaust, it’s not just the tons of trash/scrap that rots away in junkyards, it’s not just the rubbers and plastics from tire wear and tear getting into ecosystems, it’s not just the gigagallons of hazardous chemicals required to maintain, it’s not just the steady trend toward “Cars as a Service” while locking your premium features behind a paywall, it’s not just the carwashes draining their runoff into the local groundwater, it’s not just the needlessly large cities to accomodate every individual having a car to themselves, it’s not just the ever expanding highways in between cities that continue to have congestion but now take more space and more time to repair and do more damage to the environment, it’s not just the asphalt island effect, it’s not just the burden on local economies that is car culture, it’s not just the hostility drivers have for pedestrians and bikers, it’s not just the millions of accidents causing hundreds of millions dollars in medical damages and 40,000 deaths every year, it’s not just the blatant disregard for millions of animal and insect lives left on the roadside and windshields as warnings, it’s not just the arms race between assholes for bigger and louder and more dangerous death machines so they can feel like they’re the only one on the road who matters.

    It’s all of it, and more.


  • Seek more work. Find tasks you can help on, earn brownie points, don’t offer to do anything extra that takes more than 30 minutes to get done. Don’t overdo it, and make sure to also use the downtime to grab a federally required break, stretch, drink water, meditate, do some calisthenics.

    The first part boosts how you’re perceived by others: your bosses will take note of your enthusiasm, your coworkers will appreciate you more; this is why it’s important to not overdo it—you don’t want your extra effort to be the new baseline expectation.

    The second part boosts your health, mood and productivity.

    If you find you have more free time than these fill, consider asking your employer to sponsor certifications/continuing education in your field to further your career, or just talking with your boss about taking on more responsibilities for a raise. But still make sure to “leave room on your plate” to do the aforementioned breaks. If the money/career growth isn’t an issue, consider negotiating reduced hours so you have more free time.




  • I recently started reading Eichmann In Jerusalem, because I was aware it introduced the phrase “banality of evil” and always think of that in moral/ethical discussions about the real world (versus hypotheticals), and was immediately struck by how uncritical she was of zionism when it crops up in her reporting/writing. It’s almost like just a quirk of some of the heads of state that is used to explain their politics, rather than anything with more sinister implications.

    Perhaps this comes from some immature SJW-ish ideal that an author should always negatively represent harmful ideas—or maybe she does later and I’m just impatient—but it still strikes me as ironic that in the seminal work on The Banality of Evil, genocidal colonialism is treated as, well, banal.


  • I have a similar story from a different medium:

    Frank Zappa has an album called Francesco Zappa. On the back of the sleeve, Frank describes finding out about a distant relative who composed and played music during the 18th century. After telling some friends about it, I got to thinking that Frank had invented another character (á la Ruben and the Jets), because that’s the kind of thing he would do, and felt very foolish for repeating this information uncritically.

    Years later I looked the album up on Wikipedia, and it turns out Francesco Zappa was a real musician in the 18th century (who was not actually directly related to Frank).

    He got me twice with one album.


  • Stalker. The movie, not necessarily the games.

    Roadside picnic is a fantastic book that feels thrilling for a scifi story. There’s everything you could hope for, from deep philosophical questions to fictional technology that’s described in a way that fascinates but doesn’t attempt to over-explain; there’s political implications to the geopolitics of the time that the authors consider. And at the center, an anti-hero who just wants to get his wish fulfilled and get out of this place, who’s willing to make a deal with the devil for it.

    To take all that and reimagine it as a long trialogue in an eerily deserted nature reserve/post-apocalyptic wasteland that touches upon all sorts of deep philosophy—from the divine to whether we can truly know ourselves; the struggle between logic and creativity; the vast ineffability of the natural world, not so much as Man vs. Nature conflict but as a reminder of how large and apathetic the natural world is to humanity—while maintaining a strained atmosphere of invisible threats that we never see. I could draw parallels to Dante’s Inferno and Sartre’s No Exit.

    Stalker ending spoiler

    Then for the protagonists to leave empty-handed after it all, too afraid to find out who they truly are deep down.

    chef’s kiss

    It is one of the most aesthetically beautiful films I’ve ever seen, and does something I wish more filmmakers would do: focus on atmosphere rather than plot and action. It sounds boring, but it was a transformative work of art.

    It’s dark, it’s broody, it’s strangely serene. I love it so much.


  • Redox isn’t Linux, it uses its own kernel. I want this one to succeed above all others, just because Rust was born to perform this kind of application: guaranteed memory safety when dealing with tens of thousands of lines of code handling hundreds of moving parts running thousands of different tasks, all at a very low level.

    I’ll second Plan 9, just because it sounds like scifi and truly takes advantage of how interconnected all computing hardware has become.

    Third place goes to anything based on GNU Hurd. The microkernel architecture intrigues me, and I’d like to know how it effects the end user. Plus I’m just a big fan of the copyleft/FOSS aspect.

    Also, I’d just like any mobile device alternative that’s not AOSP, and Linux seems like a bad fit for mobile in general. Why do we need a fully-featured, all-purpose kernel when we’re only gonna put it on a known number of SoCs and therefore a known set of hardware configurations? We could be optimizing the hell out of our privacy-friendly mobile OSes, but instead we’ve shackled ourselves to google or linux



  • take a cue from the theater folk: stage left/right is defined by the performers’ perspective. Call it “bed left” and “bed right” to talk about it from the perspective of someone on the bed, and “standing left” or “standing right” to talk about the perspective of someone looking at the bed

    Although it’s kinda silly to me that anyone’s default orientation would be from looking at the bed, which is not the position most commonly associated with the thing famous for laying in it.



  • I feel this so hard.

    It’s not even that 90% of love songs are for straight people, it’s that 100% of them are about gals and guys who have no definining features, beyond their predisposition to breaking the singers heart or making them “feel like woah.” Give me an actual story about something beyond just vague descriptions and the musician just saying how they feel without going too deep into why.

    I don’t want to fill in the blanks with me and my crush/partner/ex. I want a story that puts me in someone else’s shoes so I can see the world through their eyes. Extra credit if it’s not the same demographics and stories that saturate every other form of media.