uriel238

Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 2mo ago

The simulated universe hypothesis is not impossible, nor is Azathoth's dream (essentially the same scenario just in neurons rather than silicon or whatever). But even if the universe is purely material it doesn't make us more or less real.

We're tiny. If we vanished next century, the universe would thrum on not even noticing.

So there are no rules. You exist for whatever, or npt for whatever.

However, we assume every menace has agency (part of our survival programming) and we anthropomorphize concepts like death or time or nature. So you can assume we all have the agency of a rainstorm or a wildfire, and be fine.

I lost a lot this year, including my society. So I don't have any real answers. I continue on in a leap of faith that I'll see light again if I continue down the tunnel. Even if its an oncoming train.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 2mo ago

IRL if you have gay sex it only makes you gay if you find you like it and decide to identify as gay.

If you are a man and identify as bi, then no-one mainstream will want to date you and if you're a woman and identify as bi, lesbians will be spooked but straight guys will fetishize you.

So you may want to identify as gay but exploring your straight side sometimes. Challenging your position on the Kinsey scale, as it were

According to Russel T Davies (and the series Bob & June which examines the idea) gay as an identity doesn't necessarily correspond to behavior, which is how I've ended up in Lesbian culture while possessing male characteristics. (disclosure: I've been married to a lesbian for twelve years during which I re-identified as enby and renounced my manhood. It's a long story.)

That said, the blood banks used to exclude men from donating if they ever had sex with another man, even once, what is a permanent exclusion where people who pay for sex are good after a year. I think this restriction is lifted now, but it was there for decades, including when I was donating plasma. So at least according to the California Pacific Blood Banks, a single intimate moment with another male hottie is enough to mark you as gay forever.

For every other part of LGBT+ -adjacent society, though, meh.

Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 3mo ago

I wasn't meaning to imply that restricting societies to small states is the solution, only that once a state gets larger than a village there's going to be factioning and rivalry (and hence renegade behavior either to harm or subvert institutions).

Just as we found an alternative solution to infectious disease (centralized disease control, when we give it a proper budget) we need to find an alternative solution to factioning and subversion than keeping groups small. We just don't know how to do it. Yet.

SMBC once posited a gamification of being nice to each other, in which society was self policing because everyone behaved with benevolence for the points. So I'm not the only person who's thought about this.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

I think the problem is the intrinsic enemy within rhetoric that is used to keep the public willing to tolerate draconian measures. Also the draconian measures, themselves.

It's like the thing with cults (which I thought about looking to start a good cult or two): The basic cult template is to create an us vs them mentality against the rest of the world so that the followers can be exploited as cheap labor, easy sex or sexual labor.

(I wanted to created the Esoteric Order of Dagon as a means to allow gender redefinition and gay marriage. But cults have the evil pre-baked in.)

[ now I'm just ranting ] This is also the problem with the (blackboard hypotheticals) of the Christian Nation or the Islamic State. Either one, assuming they want a peaceful thousand-year reign needs to embrace enlightenment values such as liberty, social equality, short or no hierarchy, rule of law with no selective enforcement and sustenance guarantees. And by then, the conservative faithful might feel there's not much of the religion left.

But without these concessions, the government is at odds with the public. It's less of a problem if your society is under a population of one-thousand, but then larger societies will dominate your society with culture, if not a massive army.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

I have fat in my freezer and am a total noob at stock making. The fat is leftover from a slab of pork I cut up into 8oz portions and froze.

I would like to hear / read more about this earth thing called stock, if you are willing to share.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

This does happen to me. When I go out to family gatherings, I am exhausted coming home, often needing to nap for a couple of hours before doing anything.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

Would you like the Fashion Police Annihilator Pistol or the Commando Laser Hairbrush?

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

When 32-bit color depth came out, a magazine reported a request by a non-computer person to create a list of all the colors. Just all of them. The response was something like

00 00 00 Black00 00 01 Still black00 00 02 Nope, still black00 00 03 More black...

So a list of 4000 colors, named, might actually be useful at least to give someone a scope of color depth.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

In the post about the new convert your colleagues to your faith in the breakroom memo by the Trump regime, I offered an example of what my spiritual workmates might encounter if they raised the topic of Jesus, several paragraphs about the cosmic horror of reality.

The main thrust is that all spirit, whether another subatomic factor, or a manifold like gravity, is transparent to to the standard model of particle physics. It's also transparent to relativity, but we expect that.

And that includes human souls, ghosts, afterlife.

My point was I've thought about and researched existential philosophy at length, possibly to suggest I'm ASD (disclosure: I'm diagnosed), and my evangelical rivals may as well be walking into the Total Perspective Vortex.

Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

I was diagnosed with ASD around when I was fifty. Five-Oh. I'm still wending the administrative labyrinth to get appropriate support.

As for ADHD, I only really noticed my executive dysfunction when playing Subnautica and Satisfactory, both of which feature periods where there are big lists of tasks I can engage in right now towards large goals, and my brain would freeze up.

Folks and teachers and peers noticed I was a bit odd since I was six.

Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 4mo ago

I've become bitter, but...

... given our current examples of IRL men being masculine (Donald Trump, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan...

...and, in SoIaF, masculinity as Joffrey Baratheon perceives masculinity, and Gregor Clegane is seen as a paragon of masculinity...

Having human decency, or character integrity are feminine, or at least the opposite of masculine.

There are plenty of guys that have these features (though considering the gender breakdown of the 2024 general election, many that do not), but I wouldn't attribute them to what makes these guys men, rather what makes them mature or adults.

Just as truth and facts are left-leaning, maturity and character are feminine-leaning. It is why I am no longer a man (though I don't take offense at he, him pronouns).

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 5mo ago

There are literal eldritch horrors we do not comprehend. It is why the sun has all the material features of god, yet we see it as a (very large, implacable, thankfully consistent) object, and we don't think about how we must refrain from looking at the sun directly, only that it burns our eyes.

Bertrand Russell's attempt at reducing all of mathematics to a perfect system of logic (until this was proven by Gödel to be impossible) broke him, much the way professors at Miskatonic would go mad trying to model the universe by pondering quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

Myself, I was already pretty mad (diagnosed) when I saw lines being crossed in the US that pointed towards a fascist autocratic future and a purge campaign, and so I took to studying moral philosophy and the Holocaust, specifically the human mechanisms that justified the engagement of and participation in evil. Consequently, I broke my brain even further. Nature, human or otherwise, can be unflinching and ruthless in its efforts to exploit or consume us, which is why we need reciprocal ethics in the first place.

I do not imagine the universe is incomprehensible, only that we are small and still pretty simple, imagining the moon closer and bigger since we see models drawn to disproportionate scale. And so the layperson doesn't understand how difficult it is to launch a probe from one speck so that it drifts for months or years, to fall into an orbit around another speck. It's difficult to imagibe that the stars in a single galaxy, each teeming with satellite objects, are uncountable like the grains of sand on a beach. We know it's a number, but still have to estimate its value with a wide error margin.

It's not forbidden knowlege. The parabolic manifold in which the pillars of R'lyeh stand can be computed, but our hominid brains have to bend a lot, or chain together analogies and metaphors to understand them.

It's like a dog chasing a hyperball, possibly to its peril.

Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 5mo ago

It's also very squishy.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 5mo ago

Expose him to Baby Shark.

Then the Badgers song.

Lather, rinse, repeat until he latches onto a song you can tolerate.

Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 5mo ago

The thing is what I wish for immigrants and refugees, I wish for absolutely everyone.

But I see fascism, autocratic tyranny and the hoarding of wealth and power as sickness rather than character flaws.

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Uriel238 [all pronouns] @lemmy.blahaj.zone 5mo ago

As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.

In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.

Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.

FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.

Trust, but verify.