On the internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog their wife. (Joking. Or am I? :P)

Huh. I don’t think I’ve seen a band where the drummer was the singer before.

I’d love to let my cat sleep in my room. He just won’t be reasonable about it and let me sleep. So the door stays shut.

Surely a second hand wedding ring must be cursed or something right? Why was it available in the first place? Did they die? Get divorced? Lose their hands and or fingers in some fetish play gone horribly wrong?

Better to just avoid the whole situation and get a cat.

Idk. Individuals are all different and if it makes the happy juices flow then I guess it’s enjoyable for them. For me there are a handful of people that’s true for but for most other interactions I feel similar to you.

That said: Humans developed a brain that could invent languages to make it easier to communicate and coordinate with each other. It’s probably up there with tool usage for advantages we had. So I don’t think it should be that surprising that our brains usually reward us for it if everything is going right.

To add to the anime recs, there’s a whole sub genre of “Cute girls do the author’s special interest” that can be a fun way to incidentally learn some stuff you’d never have thought to interact with otherwise.

The one that comes to mind at the moment is “Ruri Rocks” which is about geology.

EDIT: I thought of some more:

• Ascendance of a Bookworm: A woman is reincarnated into a medieval fantasy world. She loves books, but can’t get any because without the printing press books are super expensive. So she sets out to make her own. There’s a lot more going on in the story as well as them eventually getting into magic stuff, but at least the first part or spends a decent amount of time talking about different methods of writing, printing, etc.

• A Place Further Than the Universe: A group of girls go on a trip to Antarctica with a research team. So you get to learn a bit about the place and everything that goes into preparing to get there and survive.

• Keep You Hands off Eizouken: About making anime/animation.

• Golden Kamuy: Historical fiction set in the northern parts of sometime after the Russo-Japanese War during the Meiji period. You end up learning a lot about the Indigenous people who lived there before Japan basically wiped them out.

• I didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep watching, but there was a whole anime that was just about the author’s obsession with this one specific model of moped. It’s called “Super Cub.” You want to see an anime girl read the user manual for an old scooter and then fix it with a lot of detail? This is your show I guess.

I’d be shocked if there wasn’t an anime about trains. I know of one set on a train, but the particulars of how the train works isn’t the focus, it’s just the vehicle that gets them from one story to another. If anyone knows of any I’d love to hear it.

I had a PC/Typing class in school. I never ended up using it. I basically learned the way I type from playing WoW and other online games with text chats. I mostly use my left hand for typing and occasionally use my right for some keys briefly.

I’m sure if I took a typing speed test I wouldn’t be as fast as someone using the home keys, but it’s worked well enough for me.

Thanks. I’ll try that out for a while.

I’ll believe that they’re stupid instead of just malicious when they actually start to lose their wealth and power. Until such a time, any dumb statements or actions can’t compare to the overall long term success of their campaign to horde more wealth and power.

Ultimately, pacifism isn’t about choosing to reject violence, it’s about choosing who is an acceptable target of the violence and the choice is made to appear as a non-choice by failing to categorize state violence as violence because you are not the current target of that violence. How many of the powerless should die to save the powerful from any consequences? I don’t think utilitarianism always makes the most sense, but I think this is a case where the math and morality should make it clear why this is a deeply flawed way of thinking.

Honestly, there was a short time where I thought the prat fall might have been an intentional bit… then it just lay there and eventually the guy shows up to drag it off stage lol.

Also not an expert, just talking from what I remember from history class: in the mid 19th century, Japan underwent a period of rapid westernization and industrialization called the Meiji Restoration. This was at least in part a response to western interference in the region, including a pivotal moment when the US forced the country to sign unequal trade deals by showing up with some big naval vessels.

So it was kind of a love-hate relationship. They didn’t like the westerners invading their country, but they also admired them enough that they not only adopted western tech, but also a bunch of social and political customs.

Well that’s terrifying.

WHO’S BRIGHT IDEA WAS IT TO RUN THE TRAINING MISSIONS WITH REAL BOMBS?

The other funny one is the one that was described as “rolling off” the deck of a boat… how does that even happen? Did they just have it lying around on deck? Is that not the kind of thing you store in an extra safe, closed off location?

Wait what?

I haven’t really felt the need to upgrade since I first got a gaming PC. I’ve only ever replaced it when the last one was broken enough to not be worth trying to repair.

The funny thing is, these days maybe 85% of my time gaming is spent playing games that absolutely don’t need all the processing power I have. It is nice to be able to play the occasional AAA game, but all of them have looked fine to me. I haven’t really thought “damn this could look/run so much better if I spent another thousand dollars or so.”

I’ve actually been joking with friends about the unnecessary level of detail in some of these games. I was streaming God of War Ragnarok for them and we zoomed in on Kratos’ head and we joked about how some guy had to model the wrinkles on the back of his head/neck when it never matters and you only notice it when you’re going out of your way to zoom in on the details.

Games have reached a level of detail that is more than enough to convey any gameplay or narrative sufficiently. There’s nothing to keep pace with and I’m just hoping this one lasts long enough to avoid the price spike.

Ah. Thanks!

What is FOI in this context? The closet thing I found to something that makes sense would be Freedom of Information, but that doesn’t seem quite right, or I’m not understanding the connection.

Even before AI was a big thing, I really wish we had some kind of class, or at least an explanation from our teachers on the basics of how learning works. So much unnecessary drama could have been avoided if the kids had a better understanding of why their teachers were asking them to do things this way instead of just saying “do it this way because if not I’ll give you a bad grade.” Obviously younger kids aren’t going to be equipped to handle all the neuroscience, but I’m sure there is some simplified explanation that could be given that would get the point across.

This was an extreme example of this, but it was emblematic of the general way my teachers handled students who didn’t understand the point of the assignments or teaching methods: I forget which grade I was in, but in one of my math classes there was a day in class where I was solving the problems but not doing it exactly the way the teacher was teaching it. When he insisted, I asked why I had to do it that way if it works either way. He said something like “Because I have the big desk.” Basically just an appeal to authority without any further explanation. “You’re a dumb kid and I’m an adult, so do what I say.”

Others have good answers, but I wanted to add something that’s overlapping with this topic, especially since you mentioned anime.

I’ve watched quite a bit of anime since college when my friends got me into it. Recently I’ve been showing some anime to my mom based on things I like and which I think she would like. She commented that she thinks anime seems to have a lot of women in it.

To some extent this is skewed by my selection of shows for her, but it got me thinking. At least from my own personal experience, there do seem to be a lot more women in anime than you see in western media. There are many shows with female protagonists or all female cast and even the ones with a male protagonist frequently feature a prominent supporting cast of women.

While they do tend to get over-sexualized, there are plenty of shows where that isn’t the case and even when they do get objectified, there are a lot of them in strong or at least traditionally non-feminine roles. This is a medium where magical girls, battle maids, lady knights, female professionals and leaders are fairly well worn tropes. There are also definitely a lot of them that could be described as Mary Sues because they are just super powerful/competent at whatever they do.

At least from what I have personally observed, I haven’t seen nearly as much misogynist complaining about the prominence of women in these roles. But maybe that’s just the discussion sites that I visit. I also haven’t really done any kind of rigorous counting of shows with predominantly female casts, but they do seem to make up A LOT of the shows I have watched and enjoyed. So maybe this observation is just the result of a bias in my own viewing habits.

idk. I’d be curious to see what others have observed and thought about this. Maybe I’m way off base.

But what would the shareholders of oil and MIC companies do if we stopped spending that money on oil wars? Won’t someone please think of the shareholders!?