ArbitraryValue
@ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on The difference is real 5 days ago:
Well, criminals generally don’t like law enforcement officers…
- Comment on Why conservative men repeatedly crash Grindr 1 week ago:
But what about the people with strongly felt but incoherent world-views, like the ones who voted for Sanders before voting for Trump? They need memes too!
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 2 weeks ago:
I think that most Trump voters support isolationism symbolically. They want a leader who prioritizes them rather than perceived others, but they don’t actually have a strong opinion about specific foreign policies per se. Attacking Iran does challenge that symbolism, but in the absence of direct effects on their own lives, their trust in Trump’s established “America first” reputation will go a long way.
- Comment on Anon blows his dad's mind 2 weeks ago:
Do male mice have nipples? Why?
That was my take-home exam from a somewhat eccentric developmental biology professor back when I was in college. I remember that the answer is no (although they still have mammary tissue and can get breast cancer) but not why.
- Comment on spoopy figs 2 weeks ago:
Most vegans do. The general idea is to avoid exploiting animals, but the wasps are living out their natural life cycle.
- Comment on Fascism bad. 2 weeks ago:
I’ve seen some interesting discussion of this linked to the idea of survive/thrive strategies. Is the world a dangerous place that calls for avoiding risks and protecting what you have, or is it full of opportunities and calls for exploring and being open to novelty? Neither inclination is fundamentally wrong. But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.
- Comment on seize the means of burger production 2 weeks ago:
When my family came to the USA from the Soviet Union, one of the weird things about the experience for us was how friendly retail staff were. Brighton Beach in NYC is a neighborhood with a lot of Soviet immigrants, and you can still go there and experience retail staff glaring at you because you’re creating more work for them by coming into the store.
- Comment on Anon is a scientist 3 weeks ago:
The dog would be fine. It takes a huge amount of chocolate to hurt a dog - I was freaking out once when my dog ate some chocolate but I learned that a 30 pound dog would have to eat an entire full-size Hershey’s Bar in order to experience any symptoms at all (and they would be mild and temporary).
- Comment on I am an amateur propagandist. A hobbyist. Enthusiast, if you will. 3 weeks ago:
Netanyahu’s sons did serve in the Israeli military, although how much danger they were actually in is unknown to me.
- Comment on The hooch causing hallucinations just becomes a vicious cycle 4 weeks ago:
DIME MYSTERY
20¢
Nothing is sacred.
- Comment on Anon hangs out with a coworker 1 month ago:
Hah for a while I slept on the floor because I didn’t care enough to get a bed. Furniture is mostly for when you want to impress guests, and so if you never have guests… The one exception is my recliner - it’s the classic kind with a lever on the side to raise the footrest and it is perhaps the most comfortable thing in the world.
- Comment on Anon looks back 1 month ago:
Seriously though, even as an adult I don’t know if I did or not. Why did she do that?
- Comment on The classics 1 month ago:
I wish it told me what the title of the deleted video was, so that at least I could know what I was missing.
- Comment on Anon looks back 1 month ago:
Everything is temporary - some relationships last longer than others but they all end, at least from old age. If there can’t be worth in a temporary relationship, there can’t be worth in any relationship.
- Comment on Anon looks back 1 month ago:
One time when I was in my early teens, I was teasing my sister and her friend and that friend suddenly lunged at me and bit me on the arm, hard. I had tooth marks and a funny feeling for the next few hours - a girl had touched me, with her mouth!
- Comment on -16 °C here, puppers, so same 1 month ago:
When I first got my dog, it took me a few days to notice that the reason he wasn’t asking to go outside as much in winter was because he was sneaking into the unused bedroom and pooping there.
- Comment on Someone should really do something 2 months ago:
I used to work at a company involved in breast cancer screening, and one of the skills I learned on that job was how to say the word “breast” without giggling. It was a small startup so we had some interesting people, including a woman who, when discussing how the machine worked, would just grab one of her own breasts through her shirt and start poking it.
- Comment on FFFFFUUUU 2 months ago:
We reached peak meme back then and it has been all downhill since.
- Comment on you're doing ReSeArCh rong!! 2 months ago:
But both sides sound as if they have done real science, so a basic understanding of how science is done won’t be enough to tell them apart. The only difference between the two visible to an ordinary member of the public is that one side represents “the establishment” and the other side doesn’t.
- Comment on you're doing ReSeArCh rong!! 2 months ago:
I don’t agree with this. The stuff written by, for example, the “vaccines cause autism” people can sound as sophisticated and authoritative as any textbook. A high-school education isn’t going to help someone judge it according to its merits. The problem is a collapse of trust in authority rather than a lack of basic knowledge.
- Comment on How often do you change your towels? 2 months ago:
- Comment on Shitty stores that penalise you for not having their store card 2 months ago:
I’m really annoyed by this as well, but why do you jump from that to concluding that the government should ban it? I don’t see any reason why the stores should not in principle be allowed to do it.
- Comment on He was HUNGRY 😓 2 months ago:
Sexy legs dragon.
- Comment on Damn 3 months ago:
Clearly he’s out of practice.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 3 months ago:
Not really archaic - if this was valuable stuff washing up on shore, the law would still be relevant.
- Comment on "No eating for free allowed! You must only watch it rot on the beach!" 3 months ago:
Members of the British government have been calling for strong efforts to ensure the shipping company and its insurers will pay the costs of the cleanup. Seatrade, which operates the vessel, said its insurers are fully engaged in the process…
- Comment on Who shops at small businesses? 3 months ago:
I do wonder about stores like that. According to a friend of mine who worked on the household staff of a very rich family, they did buy extremely expensive stuff in boutique stores even when much cheaper alternatives were almost as good (or even equally good, I suspect) but how many rich people like that are there?
- Submitted 3 months ago to [deleted] | 39 comments
- Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this. 3 months 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. 3 months 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.
