I can’t do small talk or general chat, but I can do meta. I can talk about how awkward it is to talk to strangers, for example. That feels like information exchange, as opposed to a complex two-person dance where I don’t have rhythm or sufficiently-malleable limbs, which is what small talk feels like to me. The goal of small talk seems to be the process itself. If we’re instead ‘educating’ each other about something, and that information is the ultimate goal, I’m much more comfortable.

Sometimes you don’t know how good you have it until your “rock bottom” turns out to be an elevator which is now headed down a mineshaft 😭

I’m gonna get a stupidly-hot wife despite being a fat layabout piece of shit with a clear neurological condition.

I guess that’s not really physics related, so I’ll also add “gracefully float towards delicious food on a wafting scent trail”. I could toss a burger down a canyon and use the scent trail to lower myself down safely. Like a Portal gun, but for fat layabout pieces of shit with clear neurological conditions 👍

Heady times for the patient necrophile.

I’d be all up in them Dead Sea Scrolls adding a preface page with a boilerplate “this is a work of fiction, any similarities to persons living or dead or undead are purely coincidental” disclaimer.

Yeah it’s hard to imagine a more petty and pathetic incel of a god than the one described in the Bible. Genocides entire populations because they don’t love him enough. Nevermind the quintillions of planets and star systems and galaxies other than the rock we live on, it’s the most recent bipedal primate on Earth that he needs affection from, on pain of eternal torment in a place he had to have created himself for that purpose. Even sent his own kid to get tacked to a board so we could be forgiven for not being deferential enough to him, even though he could have just said “meh you’re forgiven”. Or, you know, grew the fuck up and got over himself. Who was he saving us from with his infanticidal sacrifice? HIM! The daft bitch was in debt to himself and had to off his kid in a brutal and humiliating fashion to wipe the slate clean.

And on top of that, he won’t just appear and confirm his existence, which would make everyone fall in line instantly. Instead, we have to infer his existence and base our entire lives on that inference, and the only manual we have to do so was written by dick-mutilating Bronze Age numbnuts who didn’t know shit about fuck.

There’s a “famous” gore video showing a Russian soldier being brutally murdered by Chechen rebels. Ya’ll probably already know what I’m talking about, so I don’t need to explain (and if you haven’t seen it or don’t know what it is, don’t bother looking for it, it’s not nice and does you no good to have it on your psychic hard drive). Since seeing that clip in ~2000, I’ve desperately wanted to know the man’s identity and the circumstances in which he was killed. I’ve had people swear to me that they also saw the clip, but the version they saw was quite a bit longer than the ~20-second clip everyone is aware of, and they describe some details that could well be useful in identifying him, but alas this alleged longer version seems to have vanished entirely, if it ever existed. The version we have is obviously heavily-edited, lots of quick cuts and time-jumps, so there is at least a version without all of that, somewhere.

Trust me when I say that I’ve looked into this issue on and off for the last 25 years, and I have heard many bullshit claims about who he is: they’re all wrong and provably so. I’ve watched hundreds (literally) of clips from that conflict that show barbarity of one degree or another, and in doing so I have identified the clips that specific reports and testimonies are alluding to when they claim to have identified the victim. None of them is our guy, it’s always some other video clip where some other Russian is knifed by a Chechen (there’re a lot of such clips).

There was a user on a gore forum who uploaded the Tukhchar massacre (safe click) video in full, and he claimed to have the full version of our mystery clip, but refused to post it and grew increasingly hostile the more people asked him for it, eventually taking his ball and going home by stating his intention to never post it because people were mean to him. He was obviously a bullshitter who had a few good uploads and decided to use that momentum to generate hype around this other ‘holy grail’ clip which he almost certainly did not have. Other than that one prick, nobody online has access to the full video or the identity of the man. At least, not on the English-speaking internet.

I’ve seen a lot of awful videos on the net, but there’s something about that one in particular that really energised me to find out who he is. I guess it being the first video of that kind I ever saw would probably have something to do with it, but it’s also just so fucking cold. You could sense the all-consuming hatred in the killers in the way they staged the scene and the matter-of-fact way they slaughtered him. Just pure inhumanity. There are “worse” videos, there are drug cartel videos that would make a Spanish Inquisitor lose his lunch, but man, that Russian dude is always lingering in my mind.

I recently made an Unpopular Opinion post about this (TL;DR I’m supportive of remakes/reboots if done with genuine passion for the material, just as I am with cover versions of songs or transplantations of stage plays to modern settings/Disney cartoons, etc.):

https://lemmy.world/post/35309322

The originals aren’t going anywhere (unless you’re George Lucas 😒), and there are new films coming out every week from all over the world, the reboots/remakes are like less than 1% of what gets released in any given year. Marketing and social media can make things seem bigger and more pervasive than they actually are. Having said that, I’d honestly be happier if the number was more like 5% (with the aforementioned caveats about passion, talent and quality).

But yeah, there are lots of remakes/reboots that are borne of pure cynicism and boardroom sociopathy. Fuck those. But they aren’t the only ones on offer. Baby/bathwater.

“He was actually an FBI informant against Epstein” seems to be the trajectory, per the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael “My Son Monitors My Porn Consumption Via a Special App” Johnson. The fact that it came from him and not some mushroom-infested 4channer makes it sound believable (if you’re already poised to believe such horseshit, that is).

math hurts

Can’t whistle loudly. I can barely do it quietly. I certainly can’t do that badass thing where you put fingers from both hands into your mouth and blow.

I was an early adopter of No Man’s Sky (long before the shift in public perception), and I fucking loved it back then, and love it now as well. But admitting that in public a few years back was tantamount to saying that stapling your child to a rabid badger was a great alternative to hiring a babysitter.

I instantly and impulsively pre-ordered a special superduper collector’s edition of Lake Mungo for ~£80. I probably shouldn’t have done that. I love the film and will no doubt love the goodies and bonus features, but 80 fucking quid…

https://shop.umbrellaent.com.au/products/lake-mungo-2008-4k-blu-ray-collectors-edition

Arbitrary choice, but Wherever I May Roam by Metallica never gets old for me.

I gift a riverboat to the otter people in exchange for splashy kisses on my cheeks.

The locations of past atrocities (N. Ireland).

Not even joking. It’s a huge part of our tourism industry. It’s like those Jack the Ripper tours in Whitechapel. Living here, you barely even think about them, but visitors act like they’re meeting Taylor Swift when they spot a bullet hole, bless 'em.

I agree with this sentiment. It’s insane to me that people need to cough up thousands of dollars to see their loved one off. It’s so wrong, although I do accept that funeral providers can’t simply give away their services for free. I would support a taxation that had a provision for funerary needs for all citizens. Universal death care. I mean, we’re all gonna die. It’s not like you can say “oh boo hoo I’m paying all this tax just for some other cunt to die on my dime??” because your day will come soon enough and you don’t want your family having to blow their savings on putting you in a hole.

I wanna be harvested for organs like a Chinese dissident, and whatever is left can be mulched and used to grow trees or something.

But if we’re talking “cheapest”, in the UK and Ireland there’s a pauper’s grave thing where the state will put you in a very basic grave and with a very basic marker. Not sure if you need to be poor to qualify, or if they’ll just do it when asked.

Honestly, I don’t. I came up in the '80s, wasn’t diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn’t feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.

Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish ‘Troubles’. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were ‘yesterday’ if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.

If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I’m not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the ‘70s you were your parents’ property and didn’t develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.

I still wouldn’t bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I’m glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.

1. The president of the United States is a rapist

2. A rapist is president of the United States

Wikipedia has an unusually high hit rate for me. I start reading about a band, a genre, or something music-related, then before I know it, the wiki rabbit hole of blue links has introduced me to 50 other bands. Some of my favourite bands were found this way. If you’re averse to using anything web-based at all, maybe you could get your hands on a music encyclopaedia from the library or something. If you’re into a specific genre, you can probably narrow down the scope with a book just about that genre.

I have never, not once in my entire life, been recommended an artist by an algorithm that I ended up liking. Not on Spotify, not on Last.fm, not on Bandcamp, it just doesn’t happen for me 🤷‍