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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • To add to that, if weight loss peptides like Ozempic are working, let them work.

    My mother, in her late 60s is obese. She was forced to retire early due to this, she has had lifelong self image issues due to this, and she’s very aware that it’s both robbing her ability to enjoy her later years, and years of her life. Until this year, she was staunchly against taking Ozempic due to potential side effects, but the reality is that the side effects of Obesity are so much worse.

    For an analogy, there is a lot of evidence that the quantity of people who need to wear glasses has increased because in infancy, children are not looking at distant objects, and irreversible damage is occurring to their vision as a result. Of course this is something we want parents to consider in how they realise their children, but it would be monstrous to then deprive that person of glasses because the fault is societal.

    Everything on your list is the equivalent of encouraging children to exercise their eyes, and is absolutely the best way to treat obesity, but medication should be considered as a treatment beyond this.


  • There’s a clip of Conan O’Brien playing this, and you can tell he’s definitely not a gamer, and he’s so shocked by a death animation. I don’t really understand their place in the game, they are so disproportionately violent compared to everything else, and it’s random.

    There is a novel called Blood Meridian that has a lot of incredibly violent scenes to the point many consider it unfilmable, but that violence is depicted as an almost detached spectacle, the prose is externalised and the scenes are never lingered on for pleasure. It’s generally considered perhaps the most violent classic novel, but the entire metaphysics and purpose of the book exists in this violence.

    When I first played tomb raider, I didn’t notice half the violent scenes, because the medium is so unnecessarily stuffed with it. It wasn’t until replaying it after seeing the Conan O’Brien interview that I really honed in on it.

    In comparison to Blood Meridian, it’s so much worse. It doesn’t really have a message or a story purpose beyond showing the setting as dangerous, and it lingers on the violence, taking pleasure in the sudden violence, that has befallen our protagonist who we deeply care about and can internalise her suffering easily. We see a young woman, who we live through and care for deeply, come to a brutal, sickening end due to sheer bad luck, and then we hit restart.

    I’m not even really mad about it, like it said, I’m so desensitised to video game violence that I only noticed the brutality of these scenes after seeing Conan. Perhaps the creep of violence in the medium alongside the fact that in 10 seconds, she’s fine and you do it again is enough to justify it, but it’s weird that it exists so normally in the first place.


  • TLDR: I think AI is coming for teaching (for better or worse), but not coming to replace us, because the teacher:student ratio is already as poor as can be.


    I’m a teacher. Giving a serious answer, AI is likely going to be very involved in this industry over the next decade, purely for it’s ability to track and scaffold individual learning better than one adult doing the same for 30 people, but that would require a shift to even more digital learning, which takes the “how” of teaching out of the hands of a teacher in a way it currently is not.

    That said, I don’t actually think it’s coming for my job precisely because there is 1 teacher to every 30 students. If you compare us to how cashiers have been replaced by self service tills, teachers have already been stripped to a minimal coverage of the classroom, and you cannot have 30 students independently working, because children and teenagers are predominantly motivated to avoid working. I’m this regard, it can only supplement our job, as they can’t meaningfully cut the adult to student ratio further for safety reasons.

    Also, although I think it’ll start to be seen in the next 10 years, I’m not sure where it would come in. State schools do not have the budget, energy or time to experiment with individualised AI learning support, and private schools prefer to maintain older styles of teaching for a long time, as they prioritise the development of attitude and trust over academic scores as not only does it supplement academic scores, but it is what the corporate employers of privately educated students seek above merit.




  • He’s the only actor I can think of I actively boycott other than Gal Godot. Aside from his violent racism and American nationalism which is all well documented, I just absolutely loathe the type of character he likes to play; the macho snarky asshole who feels like he got kicked out of basic training and makes being a veteran his whole personality.

    There’s few archetypes I hate more than the “former soldier who could kill a man, harbouring some deep unnerving instinct”, or the “American in a truck who loves the flag and is just a hard working guy”, and somehow he always plays and glamorises both, despite not actually being either.


  • This was my hometown’s team. It’s super strange having it put on the map, where basically everybody knows this story, and before then nothing at all.

    It’s absolutely just a random investment in a potentially very lucrative industry. 21st century football is massively swayed by who can spend the most money, especially below the very top level where the money becomes too ridiculous. Wrexham had the oldest active ground in the UK and the ground itself is particularly goodnfkr the level of play. Wrexham had dropped from 3rd division to like 5th, near 6th when he bought it (I think). But Wrexham as a city isn’t small, it’s the largest population centre in North Wales, and before it gained city status in 2022, was a larger town than many of the cities near it. All it really needed to do well was investment, where it had the facilities to be tenfold more successful if anybody actually paid for it, it’s the same for probably a dozen other teams across the UK.

    But the investment worked of course, and the team has done amazingly well since then. But don’t consider this anything but an investment where two celebrities used their image to aid it’s success.




  • He wanted the weird image. He implied he was intending to start some sort of harem cult a few years back, which was really a hippie holiday for millionaire women in a very LA way. He absolutely played up his image as a self obsessed creep looking to be worshipped to sell this experience. I honestly feel everything kinda gross about how Jared Leto feels is marketing, although God knows why, as it must hurt his career.


  • I agree about Palestine, where there was a huge, disheartening cry from America in October - December 2023, when the general attitude was that this was all a terrorist attack, and not the beginning of a genocide. I am definitely wary of celebrities who made pro Israel statements then, but I feel many felt expected to, or were just grossly misinformed.

    He does sort of just suck though. I feel the internet’s perception of his soured so fast in the 2020s, from beloved to loathed, and all he did was keep doing what he always does, just with a tiny amount more selling out, which was enough to snowball the hate.


  • The internet made him his darling and then turned on him pretty quickly, a similar thing to what most female stars face, such as Jennifer Lawrence hugely had to deal with in the 2010s. Not that I’m fond of the guy, but this his internet attitude stinks and I think has coloured his image since. However:

    He’s had a really strange rise to fame. He was in Parks and Rec as the lovable goofball type, then the US army literally put him in Zero Dark Thirty (a film with unbelievable rewriting and military control) to be a recruiting tool, “Even Andy from Parks and Rec can Kill Bin Laden.” Even though he was put on the map by nationalist military propaganda, I don’t blame him for that.

    He also attends a church (Zoe Church) which was modelled of an openly homophobic church (Hillsong), and founded by a former pastor of the homophobic church, although this church specifically has no open statement on LGBTQ+ people. This church and it’s pastor are absolutely suspiciously absent on this stance, to the point many assume it’s homophobic and transphobic but in LA and not wanting the backlash, particularly as the pastor has funded a Christian film, The heart of Man, that has an openly homophobic messages.

    There was also a controversy with his wife and ex-wife that I think was more of a fuck up than anything else. He parted with his first wife who he’d been with since before his fame, not long after she had a baby that was born premature. He then married again and announced his gratitude for a healthy child. Obviously people didn’t like this, but I don’t think he meant it how it comes across. People also feel he showed disloyalty to his first wife in leaving her once famous, but even if fame did change him, that’s still a forgivable reason for parting ways with someone.

    Although I don’t avoid movies with Pratt, I feel he wants to be funny like Robin Williams, and a hero like Harrison Ford, without the charm or wit to come close to either. What we’re left with is a bland, typecast actor who feels he’d abandon any tolerance and compassion in his image if it stopped being in vogue, but maybe we just want to see him fall from grace.


  • I feel that’s old enough not to be in the Tom Cruise produced issue area. In the 2000s, he was in War of the worlds, Collateral, The Last Samurai and even showed he still had range in Magnolia, Vanilla Sky and even Tropic Thunder. It wasn’t quite the same as the 90s where he was cast in a huge range of great roles, and it definitely became less common over the 00s.

    I’d say from 2010 onwards, he’s stared in 0 films that don’t feel warped to be an advert for his specific style of masculinity. Even if one was good, Edge of Tomorrow, it’s still a Tom Cruise movie.


  • It’s going to suck. There’s no getting away from the fact it’s going to suck. You are going to have a lot of pain ahead, and so is he. You’re going to see people who know you both, and need to choose between which of you they’re seeing, you’ll drift away from some people who he was closer to, and he’ll drift away from people you were closer to. Eventually you’ll date someone else and he will too. You’ll have photos, trinkets and many other things that are bound to him as memories. You likely will never get closure, and just have to let the pain fade.

    When I reflect on memories, I often feel that the good ones change how they feel to think about after six weeks; they start to feel that they happened to someone else, a very long time ago. Maybe this is how memories feel when they change from short term to long term, I have no idea. The bad memories take longer, it’s different for each one. You are in mourning, in a manner of speaking, and that’s okay to acknowledge. Give yourself a time to mourn, to leave those items up that make you think of him. Get rid of the photos now, put the digital ones in a folder to be forgotten, change your lock screen, if it’s him, to something you love, a friend, pet, parent etc. Let yourself otherwise have a mourning period and let yourself feel the emotions. Set a date, perhaps a month from today, or a month from the breakup. On this day, clear away those little trinkets you bought together. If they’re valuable or you’ll miss them for another reason, don’t bin them. Don’t go overboard, just because that dress was his favourite, or he bought your favourite book or whatever doesn’t make it his, it’s yours. But some things will only bring pain to dwell on.

    A poet, Richard Silken once said “Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.” You are going through something that is nearly a universal pain that every adult faces. Mourning, without closure, about someone who is still out there, who you may see at parties, in the street or with your shared friends. This is a pain we all have experienced, that colours so much of our happy memories with pain and despair. There are people I wish I could hold when they cry who I’ll never speak to again, and there’s people I wish could hold me who I’ll never see too. They may hate me more than the last time I saw them or have forgiven me and wish things went differently, but they definitely have not forgotten me, as I haven’t them.

    These memories need to fade into that back part of your mind, and that takes time, and every memory that reignites that pain, perhaps the better word is trauma, will delay it. But eventually those memories together will feel like they’re not wrapped in the same emotion, but the memory of emotion. Until that point comes, it’s okay to let the feelings in, to mourn.

    I hope you read every comment, even the worse ones about finding someone else quickly, to rebound. That is a tool to move these memories into a more distant part of your mind faster, but you won’t get to process them. You may never get closure but you’ll get even less if you don’t let the emotions in. Turn to positive distractions, do exciting things, do things with friends and family. Reach out to those friends you’ve seen less because you made so much time for him, they will be happy to have you back. Don’t mask the pain with drugs, weed or alcohol; nothing good comes of that. I had to avoid drinking when I had similar experiences. Seek process therapy, it’s not always too cheap, but this is a terrible pain that deserves professional check in, being young doesn’t make it easier, and most of us can empathize with the pain, and know not much is worse. Let yourself spiral today, this week, this month, but don’t make decisions that close you off from the world. Don’t stop seeing friends and family, do more activities, take up a hobby like the gym that you didn’t find time for when your hobby was time with him. Make your guiding light who you want to be next month, next year. You don’t have to be them now.

    In a few months, this pain will be sadness, and nothing more. Let it in now but prepare for that day. Forgive yourself, you’re going to be okay.


  • I started using Reddit when I was 13, I’m currently 24 so still a kid depending on who I ask.

    For years in early Reddit, it always felt like everyone on the site was just people browsing it in work, to the point where ‘summer reddit’ was a thing because the quality would drop when the kids weren’t in school. You could feel the difference in the website between work days and weekends.

    That’s exactly how Lemmy feels now. I bunch of people in their 20s and 30s who all have jobs Infront of a computer, sometimes I’m sad that this site isn’t filled with Gen Z because they are the critical generation. It’s much less progressive for the internet if this site is filled with old fogies nostalgic for the golden age of the internet, than it is if it’s equally filled with enthusiastic kids who never saw the unfiltered internet but want to ride the fediverse train regardless, because they believe in it.

    I hope everyone on Lemmy didn’t grow up with the old internet, because it means they believe in something they haven’t seen.