ArbitraryValue

@ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking of mind blowing… I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you’ve said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn’t relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I gain the ability to “see” even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I’m sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think “Ooh that’s pretty.” Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.

  I thought that that’s what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!

  I don’t mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I’ve only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You’re saying that you can see anything you want… Excuse me because I’m going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.

  But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I’ve always been good at “using my imagination”? I love reading fantasy novels and they’re not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? Strange.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting… I can’t do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child’s crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn’t bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now that I think about it, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that I have a good visual imagination but it works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let’s say that you see a mouse run by. You think “I have seen a mouse. It was small and gray.” My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

  This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can anyone scientists confirm?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They grab the hook because they intend to pull you into the water.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is 5'1"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking of Nordic… When I was in college, the woman who organized the Medieval Enthusiasts club was over six feet tall, with golden hair to her hips. She would dress as a Scandinavian princess, when she wasn’t wearing armor. There were two categories of tourneys - foam weapons, or dull metal weapons and armor. She did the latter. (I wasn’t the combative sort - I was there for the costumes and the feasting.) Too bad she was already married…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon lives in 2056⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Our “What if?” timeline diverged from the main continuity in 2000 when Bush v. Gore was decided.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is looking for a girlfriend⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Welcome to 4chan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is looking for a girlfriend⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No then she’ll be French.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How has there not yet been a leak of the Epstein files? Surely there is someone with access to them that could have been subject to worldwide pressure to let something out.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My guess is that they’re not particularly outrageous but embarrassing to both parties. Maybe the unreleased information is about Epstein’s work with intelligence agencies, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans would want to release and individuals with access wouldn’t feel a moral obligation to leak.

  But that still doesn’t explain why Trump doesn’t just say so without revealing any details - it seems less damaging than total stonewalling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists of Lemmy, explain:⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe they’re like starfish, which grow from bilaterally symmetrical larvae into many-limbed adults? Image Note how the adult starfish body starts out like an organ in the larva and then grows as the rest of the larva is absorbed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon travels overseas⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolute zero is a useful reference point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just opened a new jar of jam, only to find mold in it.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never understood how being a wanker to someone whose job it is to sort issues out somehow nets you a better end result.

  I saw a guy yell at an airport employee who kept telling him that she couldn’t legally let him on the plane because the cabin door was already shut. He kept at it until a supervisor showed up, contacted the pilot, and let him in. I get where the guy was coming from (he loudly proclaimed that he was missing a connecting flight through no fault of his own) but it was still weird to see him get something by being angry which he probably couldn’t have gotten by being nice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i hate myself and i want to die lol⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ll soon be free!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just FYI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to work for a guy who was never wrong. He didn’t talk much, but when he said something, it was always correct. He still hedged a lot, so he would say “I’m not sure you’re right; I think the answer might be X.” What that meant was “You are certainly wrong and the only reasonable answer is X.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wrecked 'em 💀⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Only the foreign objects need to be removed. British rectums are for British objects.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨fucking French⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Once you’ve pulled the trigger for a three-round burst, your hand becomes free and you can change the mag while the first round is still being fired. Duh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨life purpose⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  easy work in an air-conditioned office

  despair

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a filter but it’s not necessarily a “sanity” filter. People on here generally seem to put more effort into learning and understanding the causes that they support than the average person on Facebook does, but those causes themselves are often far out of the mainstream and people’s understanding of why someone might disagree with them in good faith is often rather poor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think blaming billionaires for this is incorrect. Look at Lemmy: this place is very much a silo. I’ve been actively participating here for over two years and in that time I have encountered one or two people who supported Trump (the ones posting in /conservative/ before it apparently got taken over). I routinely get called a fascist for being a mainstream Democrat. I’m not complaining (after all, I choose to be here rather than in a more comfortable silo) but clearly being a federated open-source non-profit isn’t solving the problem.

  Some billionaires got rich by enabling people to join online silos, but those billionaires were doing what the people wanted already.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Close your fuckin eyes⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  kills fish

  Stop staring at me with your dead eyes!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just in time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  How dangerous were women in the past, that you had to wear full plate armor when near them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just in time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I paid $15 a month to haul bulk cargo in a freighter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cuddly gerbils⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cuddly gerbils⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Then why is there an odd number of gerbils?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon watches Lord of the Rings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if not, it makes the refusal of Aragorn to use them again even more noble, which is the literary goal of their existence.

  Maybe, but given that they were trapped in undeath for thousands of years because they didn’t hold up their side of the oath, finding out what would happen if Aragorn didn’t hold up his end of the same oath seems like a bad idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon watches Lord of the Rings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re a limited-use item - once they do enough to fulfill their oath, they won’t keep fighting. Also, in the books it wasn’t clear that they could actually cause physical harm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asking for a chocaholic friend⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Winning a Nobel prize causes one to consume enormous amounts of chocolate? Is that what the prize money pays for?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The level of discourse in the US right now ⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think Garfield or anyone is going to change an adult’s well-established sexual orientation, but the idea that children growing up in a society that normalizes homosexual attraction will be more likely to develop inclinations that otherwise would have been suppressed seems reasonable to me. It’s supported both by the prevalence of what we would call bisexuality in certain cultures and by my own personal experience - I distinctly recall being young and trying to decide whether an attractive character in a picture was a flat-chested woman (and therefore OK) or a long-haired man (and therefore not OK). I had internalized social expectations before I even knew what the differences between men and women were, and so from that point my sexuality developed to be strictly heterosexual, I think that I might have become bisexual if those social expectations had not been taught to me before that formative time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the human body so incredibly bad at responding to colds?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of those symptoms are caused by the virus as part of its strategy for spreading. They make you likely to spread infectious fluid from your nose and mouth. Meanwhile your body has to learn how to recognize a virus that has evolved to be hard to recognize (and do that without also accidentally “recognizing” some of your own cells and killing you) and then track down every last virus. And there are billions of viruses, many of which are hiding inside your own cells.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good evening.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I saw a guy once with no gap between his beard and his chest hair.