ameancow
@ameancow@lemmy.world
- Comment on Gotta Catch 'Em All 2 days ago:
This gives me the vibe of a meme someone would share on their midwest neighborhood’s Facebook group to “prove” that Medical academia is a scam, right next to a list of “chemicals” they put in your shampoo or pet food or something.
It’s a funny little snippet but doesn’t “mean” anything. Words are silly and names for things can be hard to invent.
- Comment on Gotta Catch 'Em All 2 days ago:
Basically American medical academia in the next 10 years.
- Comment on Sea Level 2 days ago:
The Moon is so far from the surface of Earth you can comfortably fit every single planet in the solar system between Earth and the Moon.
This would lead to a cataclysm and people would generally disapprove of you doing this, but the point is there’s space in space.
- Comment on How do you "feel" gender? 4 days ago:
As a cishet man, I don’t. I recognize it, I know my social expectations, I know what the unwritten “rules” are and I am just “comfortable” with it. In that it doesn’t bother me enough that I want to change anything.
That doesn’t mean I “feel like a man.” I don’t know if there’s such a feeling. It’s words we use to describe having comfort with your life and situation, and I bet there are very few men or women or anyone else who feel that sensation all the time. Even though I feel comfortable being a man, there are so, so many things I don’t understand, but cannot change.
I would say the way I feel my gender the most is physically and sexually. Without delving too deep into the horny-pool, all I can say is I feel like a man in sexuality. I feel very “male” urges tickling the back of my mind which are very pleasant to indulge in the right circumstances. I have attractions and desires that line up with being heterosexual male and that’s probably the only place where I enjoy maleness.
Everything else? It just feels like wallpaper, and I don’t care. I wear a beard because I know there are people who like beards and have decided I look better displaying facial hair, but I don’t stroke it and say “damn, that’s nice man-hair.” I would feel better smooth shaved but it makes me look like gumby.
I am the first downstairs with a gun when someone hears glass breaking, not because I like being first in line for danger, but because I know I am larger and well-trained and can probably survive an injury better than smaller humans around me that I care about.
I am the one who does the “guy things” because I am the guy. When I (rarely) get support or reward for specifically male things, it feels good but I don’t connect it with my gender. I don’t even know what that means. I feel more like I happen to be in this body in this culture and need to do the best I can with it, and feel no strong urge to change that dynamic. No glaring discomfort, but also no real sense of “identity” about my gender.
Honestly, maybe it’s because I keep the company of people with a few more brain-cells than the stereotypes you see in media, but my male friends are usually the same. We don’t “talk like guys” together, if anyone tried that they would get stared at. Most of our conversations are about healthcare and problems with our homes or backs or family members, real-world, material issues with life more than our gender roles. Most men I know are just “people inhabiting male bodies and roles” and I don’t think that’s rare, I think it’s largely what most people feel.
There are things I recognize that are deeply painful about my gender role, as well as things that give me benefits. If I let myself feel anything at all, it would be a level of despair that no matter what else happens, there is an expectation on me that I will have to work, solve problems and do the hard things in my family/social circle that people who do not identify or “feel” like men don’t have to do. I don’t get that part on a broad, social level.
- Comment on does this count as a science meme? :3 1 week ago:
I had a slew of therapists in my adult life, some were amazing, some were… less so.
My last therapist had me down for 30 minutes a month, and spent the majority of every session telling me what his unique, special “approach” to therapy was, his tenants and his approaches, and then how he covers it in detail in his upcoming book and new Youtube channel.
My parents and life growing up was more than a disaster, it was a cult-like situation, but it’s very hard to find anyone who wants to talk about it or address it, I assume because it’s complicated and difficult to find an entry for in the DSM5.
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 1 week ago:
I am using a 7-year-old video card on a 5-year-old machine and have been notified my health care premiums are going up 1000%.
I’ve been playing small, cheap, low-res social games with friends and family like Misery or RV There Yet and those are nice. But I feel like gaming broadly is starting to recede in my rear-view mirror. Too many real-world problems and stresses and not enough pay.
I am not sure what all these huge companies are going to do when nobody can afford anything anymore.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 1 week ago:
That may be it, I am expecting something more grand or epic or complicated to start uncovering, not really realizing that what I’m already doing is “it” and the rest is just exploring for the sake of exploring.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 1 week ago:
I really really really want to like this game
Same, when it comes to games with vast scope and scale of a universe, it’s either this, Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen.
Elite Dangerous feels very “cockpitty” even with recent updates, it’s just not very pretty or engaging and I’ve tried several times to launch myself into it. VR was amazing for a little while, but still felt very “yellow cockpit” after a bit and a dark field of stars everywhere you look.
Star Citizen was very engaging for a bit, the open-world PVP, realistic scale, social, busy world and hyper-realism and absolutely beautiful environment have sooooo much potential, I log in annually and stand in a viewing area on a space station and just look out at the universe… but that’s it, I don’t like the janky, unpolished controls, the broken missions and lack of personalization/incentive to survive. I would even take very basic survival mechanics like base making, farming, upgrading skills and devices and places to loot and gather furnishings like No Man’s Sky.
No Man’s Sky feels a lot like “less intuitive minecraft” and I think I rather just play minecraft if I want to dig and build in a colorful, cartoonish world. The whole "harvest oxygen and swamp gas and process it with tungsten dust and then turn that dust into widgets which you refine into super widgets… it gets grindy and off-putting because it’s not comfortably accessible, it’s not intuitive, and that’s where my biggest beef with NMS is, the lack of an intuitive direction or goal and the feeling that there’s just too many lonely planets and not enough rewarding experience in spending so much time landing on each. Even if it was an actual MMO it would be more engaging.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 1 week ago:
I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game
Are you me?
I have it installed right now, I logged in to play all this new, raved-over content and found myself on some planet with too much air-traffic making noise overhead, needing to collect minerals to power my ship, and a base with some minecraft-like chests of loot.
I know the game is vast and deep and full of surprises and such, but I have the hardest time connecting with it enough to feel like I want to explore several hundred hyper-colorful planets.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 1 week ago:
The beach is a nesting ground of vast biomes of creatures, singled-celled, through to vast arrays of worms, some parasitic, all the way up to burrowing arthropods like sand fleas and their many, many cousins. We don’t usually have problems with any of this stuff when we swim or hang out on the sand because… and I cannot stress this enough, we do not eat things we find in the sand.
Please do not eat things you find in the sand.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 1 week ago:
Laughs softly in the spreading American corporate virus
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 1 week ago:
No but they will have an entirely squirrel themed Magic deck.
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 1 week ago:
Compare this percentage with how many are MAGA and you start to see a distinct pattern.
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 1 week ago:
People are far more scared of inconvenience than death.
Most people would rather put their pet down than have to care for them in some new way that requires money and attention, and this is what people who don’t understand autism think it is, like they will have to strap their dogs into a special chair and spoon-feed them.
- Comment on I just learned 37% of Americans fear vaccinating their dog will cause the dog to develop autism. 😐 1 week ago:
No, and I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.
I had a brief, fanciful idea a few years back that if everyone starts using AI that it would help increase personal education and knowledge throughout the world.
That worked out as good as the feeling I had back in the mid 90’s where I said “Wow, if everyone has access to all this information, the future generations of this world are going to be fantastically intelligence, we will have starships by the time I’m old!”
We might need to accept and start compensating for the hard fact that we are just complex apes and have fundamental limitations as populations. It might not get better. We might make more new things and we might create new ways of living, but we’re always going to be spiraling around our own limited cognition and our survival instincts that make us forget to think.
- Comment on Let's stick with just the one observer from now on, then 1 week ago:
Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.
Yes and no.
The essence of what you’re saying is correct, but there’s still a “black box” area that we can’t measure, because if it was just a matter of a billiard ball deflecting another billiard ball, we could theoretically build finer-scale devices that could cause less interference of find ways of inferring what’s happening before waveform collapse.
This is what Heisenberg worked out that crushed physics a century ago, it’s not just a matter of making a precise enough measuring device, the nature and behavior of the particle is fundamentally unpredictable, meaning that you can even manipulate it by using information you don’t have.
Example: let’s say you want to teleport some percentage of photons across a barrier. You simply measure their velocity with greater precision, thus making their position less defined, and BAM some of them start popping into existence across the barrier. And you can do the opposite.
Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all these waves as they propagate through space.
- Comment on Let's stick with just the one observer from now on, then 1 week ago:
Since like, everyone gets all their understanding of the world from goddamn memes now, I think it’s worth pushing back on or clarifying.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 week ago:
I’m not policing shit, but it paints an impression that you might not be aware of if you care about people’s impressions.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 week ago:
I can’t imagine using the word “normie” unironically in 2025.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 week ago:
A lot of people get called “idiots” but that doesn’t mean I can’t actually differentiate who’s really an idiot.
(There is a subtle subtext in this reply, see if you can catch it.)
- Comment on Skyrim on Switch 2 ships with severe input lag and a huge 53GB file size despite being capped at 30FPS 1 week ago:
The year is 2064. The world outside is fire and riots.
A new life is brought into the world, the hospital lights flicker. The doctor, dirty and worn out, pushes the new parents a form on a battered clipboard.
“Congratulations to you both, now please sign this release to bring your baby home, but not before you designate which formats of Skyrim your child will inherit, please understand this is not optional, and we no longer take Bitcoin to pay the mandatory $60 Skyrim Fee, so please use cash, credit or ration cards to pay.”
- Comment on After Black Ops 7's weaker launch, Call of Duty will no longer do back-to-back releases in the same series 1 week ago:
Go buy Vein on Steam.
Yah it’s nothing like CoD Zombies, but it IS a zombie game, and it’s made by just two people trying to make a quality survival game and it’s obviously a work of passion worth supporting.
I haven’t bought a big company release in years at this point. There are so, so many good indie games being made right now, this will be a nostalgia point for kids someday, back when there were was a flood of games and half were huge, bloated AAA wastes of money that nobody liked, and the other half were amazing, weird, experimental concept ideas produced in low fidelity and released for $5 - $20.
- Comment on Sandy Loam 2 weeks ago:
“Door” too.
- Comment on Sandy Loam 2 weeks ago:
“Loam” gets funnier the more you say it. Try it, say it until you stop seeing the letters and just hear the noise it makes coming out of your mouth.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 2 weeks ago:
Every country is worried about their currency collapsing because all economies are deeply connected.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 2 weeks ago:
There are a lot of delusional people in here posting about their personal shower-fantasies of what they would do in the apocalypse. You can safely discard all that. If it gets so bad you need guns and tools and… blacksmithing supplies? you are so utterly fucked that gold and bartering will be the last of your concerns. People will be fucking eating each other.
Read some Cormac McCarthy for a more realistic view of the end of the world. (Then have a therapist on hand for the after-effects.)
For a financial collapse, gold would probably retain value, a society still needs something to base the value of its trading on, we can’t just all carry around sacks of grain. How much value gold will retain is very hard to predict, but people have been using it for so long that it’s already survived several widespread disasters and is still in use.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 2 weeks ago:
If it gets so bad that you need tools for building shelter, you are absolutely fucked unless you already have farmland and can defend it. People are massively ignorant about how difficult it is to live off the land if you don’t have experience in it and a lot of supplies and knowledge accumulated. It takes acres of crops and animals to support a couple people. It takes months or even years to make that land productive enough to keep you barely alive. Then if you have hard winters you better hope you have a stockpile.
Financial collapse is one thing, but a total societal/technological collapse would be bad in orders of magnitude that I don’t even know how to describe it.
Source: work in logistics.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 2 weeks ago:
Why? It’s not inherently valuable beyond a handful of industrial/electronic uses.
It has the precedent of societal agreement going back thousands of years longer than literally anything else besides food and prostitution. If the world started over from the stone-age, people would be using precious metals to represent value all over again. You don’t need it to make sense, you just need a social agreement, and that doesn’t happen with just anything that can fall apart or decay or be found easily.
- Comment on Splitting Hairs, Splitting Atoms 2 weeks ago:
I had no exposure to school or formal education when I was real young. I just had a few picture books about the world, one was a cut-away that showed the layers of earth’s crust, mantle and core.
Being about 5, I had no idea of the proportions or scales involved so whenever I saw someone digging a hole outside for a firepit or fencepost I would yell and scream that they were going to break through to lava and it would pour everywhere and burn everything up.
Nobody was able to explain things to me so I had to self-educate myself about science and everything else over the next couple decades.
- Comment on Still out there 2 weeks ago:
Soulless Artificial Intelligences irritated with humanity can replicate a lot of them from purely data.
FTFY