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Joined 4 days ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2025

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  • Time dilation.

    Imagine you go to prison for a year. That’s one year you’re without your family and friends, and a year they’re without you. 1:1 time.

    Now imagine you’re put to sleep and kept in a coma like state, fed by tubes. A computer or similar machine induces a dreamlike state that is indistinguishable from reality in which you will be imprisoned for 100 years. You never sleep. You never eat or drink. You never need to. And you can’t relax, you’re constantly being hunted or otherwise threatened. In the real world your family never left your side because in the real world, you’re only under for an hour.

    Something similar happened to a guy on Star Trek (O’Brien on Deep Space Nine). Black Mirror did it a few times. And the fourth season of Sword Art Online (an anime) did it as well. Probably some others. Oh yeah, Interstellar. So you may have seen it.


  • For me it’s chaotic good vs lawful good.

    D&D divides character alignment along two moral axes, good vs evil, and lawful vs chaotic. Both can be neutral, and if you’re neutral in both you’re True Neutral. Heroes are good, but most are lawful good, like Superman in American comics and All Might (My Hero Academia) in Japanese ones. For chaotic good, that’s someone like Batman. I think that’s an anti hero.

    Whereas villains can be lawful evil or chaotic evil, that doesn’t seem to matter as much. Darth Vader is lawful evil — he is evil, but he follows a set of laws. The Sith code or whatever. Trump is more chaotic evil, he makes his own rules and just wants to see the world burn.

    I think most of us are close to true neutral. We might lean towards good but I don’t think most are pure good like a hero would be. Some of us lean toward lawful but aren’t pushing it like lawyers, judges, good cops I suppose… and some lean toward chaos (like say movie pirates) but they’re not trying to make the world burn, they just wanna watch stuff for free. The four extreme alignments are really reserved for heroes, villains — the movers and shakers.


  • When the kid can stand on their own. Some never learn. Sometimes it’s the parents’ fault, sometimes the kid is missing something (some mental or physical or maybe psychological deficit).

    When I was a kid, there came a time when I wanted as little to do with my folks as possible. I’d be out until just past dark (“when the streetlights come on” was the time we’d start heading home) and from a pretty young age. Like 9-10. We’d go for a mile or two, explore the world around us. Ride bikes to another neighborhood or (later) get on a county bus and go to another town. We didn’t have cell phones, let alone pocket computers like kids have now.

    I see kids as old as 8-10 still needing to cling to mommy’s skirt or daddy’s jeans. That could never have been us. And when they’re not clinging to their parents, they’re playing Minecraft or Fortnite or Roblox on a hand-me-down phone that doesn’t call (and probably has its serial blocked for non-payment so it just works on WiFi) or a tablet. And I’m not generalizing. I know kids like this. Kids in my family are like this. I have no control over it. I’ve tried to tell them they should be out playing. They won’t hear it. Family doesn’t care. I’m the old man shouting at clouds. I imagine those kids will be living at home at 30 being told when to take a shower and when to go to bed. It’s not just this generation, either. I have a couple aunts and an uncle (young Boomers/elder GenX) who were the same way. Minus the electronics, naturally.

    Parents: Raise your kids to be independent, or they’ll be your babies forever.


  • If you like chicken, go to the corner of 53rd and 6th and find the halal cart with the longest line. Ask for the chicken and rice. Go around back and squirt half a gallon of white sauce and maybe a little red on it. Cover it up, walk about half an hour to work up an appetite, find somewhere comfortable to sit, and thank me later.

    They have a chain now but nothing beats the OG cart. Even the pizza. Rose’s Pizza in Penn Station has my vote. May not be the best but it’s good! First pizza I had in NYC and while others were good, I haven’t found one I liked much more.


  • Insofar as humidity exists everywhere… I suppose it is.

    Speaking as somebody who’s lived where humidity is stupidly annoying… no, it’s not. And those of us who have experienced real humidity love it for that reason. We love getting out of really bad humidity.

    I mean, I suppose it could get humid. I’ve only visited. I also suppose any coastal area could get humid, due to proximity to the ocean. But the South ain’t playing when it comes to humidity, and that’s what I meant.


  • Never lived there but I’ve visited CT. Went to a movie with my wife. The first Narnia film, so it was like 3 hours long? It was nice when we went in. It was nice when we left. However, during the film there was a blizzard, seemed like it dropped snow a foot deep! That being said, the city had cleared all the roads. They know how to deal with the snow. Of course when you get to side streets it’s a bit dicey, but the main roads? Like to our hotel? Clear as you like. The roads are twisty and windy up there, and people drive crazy — well, they drive appropriate to the state of the roads, to be fair — and I never felt unsafe despite being unaccustomed to driving in snow.

    Beautiful area. Summers get hot, winters get cold. You gotta plan for each. But it’s nice and not too humid.



  • Maybe it’s the original? I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter. The Fediverse means all these Lemmy instances are networked, meaning if one kicks you off it you decide you don’t like it, you can join another, as opposed to Reddit, where if you say something one group doesn’t like, they can kick you off the whole platform.


  • Not a truck driver, but an American who has seen this question answered, and it applies to lorries, too (we call them box trucks, like moving trucks, here — I don’t know if you call a full tractor-trailer a lorry).

    It’s absolutely to reduce drag, and when they travel in a convoy, they typically do it with all members knowing full well what they’re doing, and they take turns leading (as that one gets the wind resistance the others avoid). So yes, they’re saving money on petrol (gas), they’re saving the environment, they’re saving time… it’s just annoying if you want to get over past them. They should let you through but it’s annoying you have to ask (with your signal). Typically our big trucks tend to do their thing and stay out of peoples’ way, but sometimes they wanna act like they own the road (and they’re unfairly maligned in thriller films).