VoxAdActa

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

It's news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That's what all the "US news is world news!" people were saying in the meta thread.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

What's the metric unit for depression?

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

I believe the lack of charges for lying to Congress does lend a little credibility to the story he tells.

The tobacco execs who testified to Congress that nicotine was harmless and non-addictive didn't get charges, either. Does that lend credibility to the claim that cigarettes are good for you?

Fuck no, it doesn't. Because nobody has ever been charged for lying to Congress. Even when they've been bald-faced directly lying to Congress.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

I'm 6'5". I'd love to hear your suggestions for what I should do with my legs when you recline your seat. Do you think I can just take them off? Am I supposed to sit sideways with my legs in the lap of the person next to me? Am I supposed to do Yoga for a year before I get on a plane, so I can spread my knees out 180 degrees from each other and you can lay your head on my dick?

I'm not "slamming my knees into the back of your seat". They simply exist where you're trying to be, and the fundamental properties of matter are causing them to collide. You can be as pissed about your comfort as you want to be, but it's not going to change my knees into ethereal ghost knees so your seat can lean back.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

You're totally right, that makes me feel so much better about having to wait idly for the next 19 minutes rather than get my shopping done. They're not in my way, they're connecting! I should try to connect with them, too!

Wow, they left. Why don't they want to connect anymore?

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

a handful of times at most

You must have Shaq's hands, because I've experienced this literally every time I've gone to a grocery store throughout my entire adult life.

Get the fuck out of the way or someone less hinged than I am is going to move you.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

People aren’t mind readers and they aren’t purposely trying to make your life harder.

Oh, now I get it. They just don't even notice or acknowledge the existence of other people unless someone reminds them that such mythical beings exist.

Yeah, you're right, I'm much more sympathetic to them now. They're not mean, they're just amazingly self-centered and oblivious!

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

but most of us will also correct our mistake if it’s brought to our attention

Most of us will literally never make that "mistake" because we're aware that other people exist, even when nobody's standing next to us screaming "HEY, I EXIST! CAN YOU TAKE THAT INTO ACCOUNT PLEASE?"

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

Hey man if you want to read every interaction in the worst possible light that’s on you.

Please suggest to me a better way to read an interaction in which someone in a very crowded public place just happens to forget that the possibility exists that another human might also need to get down that aisle. "Oopsie doodle! I forgot I was surrounded by a hundred people who would really rather get this chore done as fast as possible! Again! Silly me!"

Give me a charitable interpretation of that person who doesn't take even a split second to consider anyone else in their environment without having to be verbally admonished.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

What mental disorder does this fall into?

This is totally bouncing off of me. How can a person, in a public space, surrounded at all times by other people, just forget they exist for any amount of time, for any reason? They're fucking everywhere. They're breathing, they're talking, their cart wheels are squeaking, the footsteps from their rubber-soled shoes are echoing off the hard tile floors, how do your senses just stop registering any of that?

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

Yes, I am incredibly unfriendly when I'm trying to get my shit done. I want to be out of that place as fast as fucking possible. I don't want to linger, I don't want to chat, and I sure as fuck have never in my life been so distracted that a hundred other moving, talking people just vanished completely from my awareness. Is that some kind of ADHD thing? Some manifestation of executive dysfunction, like always being late and never letting anyone else talk in a conversation if they can't actively shout over you?

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

It's not just me. If I was literally the only other person in the store, sure, I could understand that, they thought they were alone, they weren't expecting to encounter anyone else.

How the fuck do you just stop being aware of an entire seething mass of other humans flowing around you?

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

I’m glad you are very considerate and have never made a mistake when excited about something before. Good for you friend.

I'm serious, though. How do you make that "mistake"? How do you get so excited that you completely tunnel-vision out the simultaneous existence of hundreds of people? That's absolutely in no way neurotypical.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

What was the name of that program?

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

Probably has its roots from way back in the day so that women couldnt effectively run away from the men and get very far.

Can't speak to Muslim culture, but European culture way back in the day didn't want women riding horses because of sex.

There are a lot of branches on that tree, but the biggest one is that since horseback was believed to be capable of rupturing the hymen (hymen science has progressed quite a bit since I last looked into it, so I don't know if that's actually a thing), it was the same thing as having sex for women. They believed that women got sexual pleasure from it (which, I guess, was a bad thing), that they'd start craving horses as lovers instead of humans, and all sorts of weird shit that only twisted, perpetually horny dudes would think of.

So the sidesaddle was invented. It allowed women to ride horses while, literally and figuratively, keeping their legs closed.

Unfortunately, riding sidesaddle is a massive pain in the ass, so that fad didn't last long. Maybe about fifty years or so of general popularity (because, obviously, you can still get a sidesaddle and learn to ride in it today, if you want, for whatever reason) over the course of all horse-domestication history.

Of course, like so many things from European history, this primarily applied to rich/noble people. The poor didn't have the luxury of giving a fuck about most of it.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

a fucking chat on fucking reddit are you kidding me what?

RIGHT? AND, AND! It's a chat where you can't get rid of the bright flaming red notification until you make the neigh-irreversible decision to either shun a person forever or reply to them.

VoxAdActa , 10 months ago

Oh, but you do! I'm one of those autistic people who can't fucking stand flaming red notification icons and have to make them go away.

There's no way to turn off the notification without either clicking "Ignore" or "Reply" (maybe it's "Accept"). It doesn't go away just from reading the message. I even tried to disable the element in my browser, which worked, but then it disabled the normal notification icon too.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

It's not a story a perfectly spherical Jedi in a vacuum would tell you.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

I've got a friend who's otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it's a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight ("It's been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!"), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that's just around the corner.

Also, he's incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I'm pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he'd self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he's just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It's scary, so it can't be true.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

Oh, some percentage of the dead people are brown or brownish? Well, that makes it all ok then!

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

Glass is half full!

...because the top half boiled off....

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

Who is downvoting a puppy, and why?

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

"WhY dO pEoPlE sAy RePuBliCaNs ArE fAciSts????"

What do you think, @Kantiberl ? Do we have a clue towards that enduring, eternal American mystery? Or nah?

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

want a place free of authoritarian policies that don't limit actual human discourse.

You've already been given a suggestion for just that kind of instance. If you want to see that kind of content, there's a spot for that.

Or are you just upset that there are places who don't welcome those kinds of dumbfuck takes? Is it that you want to see the content for yourself, or that you want to make the content and force everyone to see it?

Either way, this instance isn't the place for you. Exploding heads is. Go there, be happy.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

Do you prefer having a centralized authority dictating your exposure to content?

Like, you mean, a website? That's what you mean by "centralized authority", right? A website? With its Terms and Conditions, following the applicable copyright and IP laws, following the relevant laws of the jurisdiction it operates in? Yeah, I'm fine with that.

If you're not, go to Exploding Heads. They welcome you. They want you.

We don't.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

My issue is I don't like having content blocked FOR me

Oh, I see. You want 4chan.

Well, good news! 4chan exists! Go there.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

That's not the same and you know it.

Oh, is 4chan too much freedom for you? What happened to your whole "no rules, just right" attitude?

It's sounding more and more like you don't give a single fuck about seeing this kind of content; you want to force us to see this content. All the places you could go to get it, and you're still arguing that we should have to see it too or we're not free.

You're right. We're not free. We're sad, pathetic, chained little sheep beholden to a "central authority" that doesn't allow hate speech. Run while you can! Flee, quickly! Or you, too, might get consumed by the woke mind virus and start thinking that maybe the Jews are ok people!

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

When did I say that? I'm very toxic towards people who are cool with the view that I should be either "sentenced to death" or "hunted with dogs".

Oh, you're not cool with it, you just want to force me to listen to it anyway. That's so different.

Go back to 4 chan, otaku.

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

What I wish for is an open platform where left and right can speak freely to each other in polite discourse

Oh, I see. You're delusional. You honestly think I should be having "polite discourse" with people who either want me dead, or are ok with voting for people who want me dead.

Because, see, what's left? What makes a Republican want to claim to be a Republican other than the culture war bullshit? What do they stand for? They haven't stood for "fiscal responsibility" or "small government" since W was in office. The straight-up write things like "We stand against teaching critical thinking in schools" (see: Texas GOP party platform) into their guiding documents. And you think they're going to have a civil conversation? You think I owe them a civil conversation?

Every server we allow those people on freely will become exploding heads or 4 chan. Go look at r/politicalcompassmemes if you need an example. I don't know how many times we have to watch it happen before you get the picture, or maybe this is your first ever internet community experience. But you're wrong. Their bad-faith rhetoric, carefully-stated death threats, and direct personal attacks will drive everyone who isn't one of them away, leaving only Nazis. If the admins call them out and ban them for that stuff, they'll end up banning all of them and we'll be having this same conversation. If the admins allow their speech, but don't allow us to say "Fuck off, weeb, nobody likes you" without censure, then guess who gets to control the "discourse"? And if the admins don't ban anyone for it, we'll become Voat. Since only the slimiest members of humanity can tolerate that vibe for long, guess who ends up owning the server by default?

You wanna see that shit, you enjoy being called slurs and told to go kys, you are free to seek out the communities who will do that for you. But fuck all the way off with telling me I must put up with it, too.

Oh, I can block them? No I fucking can't. I blocked you days ago, and your shit still shows up in my notifications. So, again, fuck off. If I have to listen to whatever dumb shit spills out of your brain, against my will, then you get to listen to my toxicity.

Are you suggesting that I should have an account on each fediverse instance, just to get all of the content? If so, then what the actual fuck is the point of federation in the first place?

...you... honestly thought... the fediverse... was supposed to be a centralized content aggregator...?

What.... uh, so, what... what do you think the fediverse is?

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

Wow. You're really sensitive to external stimuli, huh? Even just hearing someone cough disrupts your entire workflow? You know that's not typical, right?

VoxAdActa , 11 months ago

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn't be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I'd be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

VoxAdActa , 1 year ago

This sounds like one of those ideas on the level of "If we punch another hole in the ozone layer, the greenhouse gasses can escape!"

VoxAdActa , 1 year ago

About the only thing we can do is unsubscribe from and block the dozen or so "Reddit Sucks" communities/magazines, and report the "We Still Hate Reddit" threads that pop up elsewhere for being posted in the wrong place (like Technology or Gaming or wherever).

VoxAdActa , 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure that question mark on the second to last line is anachronistic. I don't know exactly when western punctuation was incorporated into traditional Chinese script, but I'm almost certain it was well after 1870. The character at the end of that line, before the question mark, is "ma", which, by itself, turns a statement into a question.