elavat0r

Repo! The Genetic Opera. I could not get into it at all.

This is really lovely! Excellent attention to detail, especially with the feathers and the lighting.

If you're looking for requests, I'd love to see an aquilops.

I am glad I am not in the dating game at this point in my life. I know I very easily could have been an anxious wreck of a hermit if I was completely on my own. Hopefully not a conspiracy theorist, but I can't honestly say I don't have tendencies that could put me there.

The poor relationship between the sexes is something I have morbidly kept my eyes on for a long time. I married pretty young, but I have a good handful of inexplicably single friends, both male and female. None of whom seem to be compatible with each other, or frankly even living in the same perceptual universe. They are all good people, fairly successful, and not being unreasonable in their standards as far as I can tell. But there is just some complete lack of trust or faith in the opposite sex on both ends. It hurts to watch.

I think best case scenario is that matchmaking services and "arranged marriages" (by this I mean voluntary setups through families and social networks, nothing coercive) begin to catch on. There has got to be a way to pair up people who are at least somewhat vetted for trustworthiness and seriousness in seeking companionship, outside of the confusing and alienating social landscape we have developed, or the meat market of online dating. But maybe I am naïve to think that would work.

Both are fascinating to me. I have also met a lot of people who are interested in both. I don't think it's a coincidence. There's something really interesting about the way we can use symbols and signifiers to encode and transmit and preserve information. Any kind of information.

Coding requires you to say precisely what you mean. Give clear instructions. Define exactly the pieces you are working with. There is really no room for ambiguity, and there's something really satisfying to the logical side of my brain about that kind of rigidity.

But that's exactly why linguistics is interesting to the other side of my brain. Human language is full of fuzzy categories, changing definitions, unwritten rules, unspoken connotations, creative repurposing, borrowing, taboos... You can add dimensions of meaning with text, your voice, your eyes, the movement of your body. You can pack so much nuance into a single word or phrase; a subtle hint can mean so much more than what you are literally saying. You can intentionally encode a message so that it is NOT understood. There is infinite malleability in human language.

This is why it's so exciting to see such progress in natural language processing. Large language models kind of blur the lines and begin to "understand" and respond to the ambiguities of the way we use language (at least in a kind of probabilistic sense). But they are also learning our programming languages. Right now, we can converse with AI models that can write (basic) code for us and with us, and make changes based on our conversational language. Imagine one day programming in plain language without that intermediary step!

• Night Feeder: featuring The Nuns, it's a very bad movie that was clearly made with a lot of love
• Hobgoblins: MST3K classic
• Blood Theatre: the music is somehow catchier than it has any right to be
• Undefeatable: Cynthia Rothrock "masterpiece"
• just... all of the American Ninja movies

I'd much rather take a sure million with a (slight?) chance of a bonus billion, versus an unknown chance at 0 or a billion. I could do plenty with a million that would significantly change my life for the better.

But I would probably do the opposite if A contained $1000 and B contained a potential million as in the original example. $1000 is a tolerable amount to risk missing out on.

I miss the old forums and discussion boards that we had pre "web 2.0". I read a YA book series as a teenager that had a forum, and met one of the best friends of my life on it. I know people still do such things, but I've never really had a close knit community like we had back then, not since the likes of Reddit and other social media giants have dominated the way we all use the internet. I'd be very happy to go back to the internet of the early aughts and just stay there.

Mander has been lovely so far. Plenty of interesting content and chill people. It was the first instance I saw when browsing that looked friendly and yet didn't require me to write an essay to register an account.

Anything creamy and "fluffy": cheesecake, tiramisu, pastry cream, even pudding with whipped cream folded in (like in ambrosia salad). Cream puffs are especially nice, having that soft filling inside a pastry, mmm...

Much appreciated!

Thanks! I'll check it out. Still figuring everything out. I'm not sure I know how to cross post here yet - unless it's literally just posting the same image again?

I put the Jerboa app icon where Baconreader had been on my phone. I kept opening it by reflex. This seems to be working.