Increasing temperatures will lead to increased human deaths due to high heat, far more than the reduction in cold deaths.

Crop yield per acre is not going to increase. What are you basing this off, the general notion that plants need CO2 for photosynthesis, so more CO2 equals more growth? Because the reality is that crop yield looks likely to decrease, because of ecosystem disruption

A word I like for discussions like this is “verisimilitude”. Aside from being fun to say, it always captures a sense of “yeah, obviously this is fiction, but also we still care about realistic vibes”

Apparently in the UK, there’s a big Jewish festival/conference thing (called Limmud) that runs over Christmas. I found this really funny and sweet, because it’s sort of like “hmm, we’re basically all off of work for Christmas anyway, so what’s the most Jewish thing we can think of to spend this time”. Apparently the answer is being massive nerds. I’m told it’s a fun time, and loads of people go because the UK is quite small so it’s not especially far away for anyone

I want you to know that I’m screenshotting this comment (and the one you’re replying to) to send to a friend, who will find it very funny.

I do know an Anglican priest-in-training who refers to God with They/Them pronouns because thinking of God in a monogender way is weird to them. This apparently isn’t particularly controversial within their mini community, although there was a big argument once when someone suggested that capitalised pronouns (such as He/Him or They/Them) technically means God uses neopronouns

The way that someone explained it to be once is that if we think about the typical monotheistic, omnipotent, omniscient God — surely a God would be far more than what humans can comprehend at all, right? So any single characterisation of God is going to seem weirdly limited, because it’ll be grounded in our human perspective. So the idea is sort of like God™ is like a diamond, and each of the Hindu Gods is like a facet of that gem. The problem is that our human perspectives can’t understand the diamond (similar to how visualising 4D shapes like a tesseract is trippy and hard) so we have to try to understand the diamond by looking at each of its facets and trying to imagine an entity that can be all of those things at once.

As someone who is neither Hindu or Christian, it reminds me of the Holy Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I agree this post was likely bait, but I also feel the need to share my civil dissent against it nonetheless.

I’m a woman who is pretty damn sick of bland male protagonists, but “bland” is the key word here; for all the games ostensibly about men, there are few that explore masculinity like Disco Elysium does — it’s a huge part of who Harry is as a character. I can’t find it now, but there’s a Tumblr text post that I loved that basically said that they can imagine Harry winning a drag king competition, and then people being like “you do know that he’s not in drag, right?”, and the voters responding “yes, we know, but also are you going to look at this and tell me this man isn’t performing masculinity in the most drag-like manner ever?”. The actual post was worded far better than this, but you get the point.

Also, Disco Elysium may be a grimy detective story, but I found it was pretty ACAB in a really interesting way. But it also looked at some of the usual social functions that the police perform that ideally would still be performed by someone even if the police were mass abolished.

The thing is that this kind of thing works for people who don’t know better. I have spoken to dudes who like the abstract notion of Musk being a gamer, probably because it wasn’t apparent to them that his Path of Exile account was so obviously boosted. Similarly, a script-kiddie can seem like a skilled programmer to people who have little knowledge of programming

I’ve watched/played/read things I wouldn’t have discovered if there hadn’t been masses of people crying “woke” about them; there was a period where it was a really useful recommendation engine, because they’d be especially pissy if high quality stuff was woke. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work as well anymore, because “woke” is increasingly meaningless

The person you’re replying to includes friends in the “so too will others [love you]”, and I think that may have been a part of their wider point — that putting romantic love on a pedestal is often how we end up blocking ourselves off from love.

I apologise if I have misinterpreted what you are considering when you say “there’s a good chance they’ll never find love in their whole lives”, but this appeared to me like you may not be considering platonic love in making this statement. Being single for life doesn’t mean that someone will never find love.

I don’t wish to seem like I’m sidestepping the crux of your point though, because I wholly agree that it’s difficult to be single in a world that does tend to put romantic love on a pedestal. Even if an individual is able to break themselves out of that toxic mindset, there are many who will make you feel broken for not having, or not wanting a partner. A friend who didn’t have family was once in hospital following a severe accident, and she wasn’t allowed any visitors, because despite the fact that I was the closest thing to family she had, I was “just a friend”. It means that even if you live a life full of love, you will be made to feel like it’s not enough, and that sucks.

Something that blows my mind is realising how much of our understanding of sex and attraction is socially constructed. For example, there are plenty of documented cultures where women’s breasts don’t have the erotic connotation we attach to them. The thing that really threw me off was learning about some people who don’t kiss as a show of affection — I found this a surreal concept, because in terms of romantic interactions with a partner, I’m fairly meh about sex, but I’m a big fan of kissing/making out; There’s a sense in which I obviously know that preference towards kissing is likely not an evolved trait, but more sociocultural, but it feels so intuitive that something so visceral isn’t necessarily an innate trait.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying “did we evolve to like butts, though?”. Evolutionary biology, the field that would consider questions like these, is unavoidably pretty heavy on the speculation side — given that humans have evolved to be such social creatures, we can’t really separate out the sociocultural aspects of development from the genetic side, and that makes asking evolutionary questions on large timescales to be a tricky endeavour.

Edit: This isn’t to say that asking these questions is pointless to do. I appreciated your question precisely because it’s the kind of thing that cooks my brain (and I enjoy that)

As 3D printers become increasingly commonplace, I have noticed various ways of accessing a 3D printer without having to own one — my local library has one nowadays

Role models are complex. For example, my late best friend is a huge role model for me: he was always in his friends corner, and was tremendously kind and dependable; he was also a dumbass who was overly focussed on everyone else’s wellbeing, meaning that he’d ignore his own struggles until he couldn’t anymore, and then he found it hard to communicate his needs or accept help from the droves of people who loved him and would jump at the chance to support him. I think sometimes the best role-models often have a hefty dose of anti-role-model in them too; in the case of my friend, my goal is to emulate his virtues while avoiding the pitfalls he so often ran into.

If you ever have a partner, friend or family member who does sewing/knitting/similar, you should tag along with them on a fabric/yarn shopping trip; I bet you’d have a lot of fun. Some people are just more tactile, and leaning into that isn’t harmful and can help a lot of fun

“I was lowkey hopping a commenter might suggest avoidance”

I’m proud of you for having the self-awareness to recognise your avoidant instincts and taking steps to counter that (i.e. by asking for advice from people). That might not feel like a victory, given that you were hoping people would give you “permission” to lean into the avoidance, but I’m familiar with the kind of hope you describe: it’s a shameful kind of hope, because deep down, you know that people aren’t going to advise you to ghost her, and that indulging your avoidant instincts probably aren’t productive — the shame comes from the tension between knowing what you should do, and your wish to instead take the avoidant path, which I imagine has served you well over the years as a go-to coping strategy, albeit a maladaptive one.

The tension between who we feel capable of being vs. who we’d like to be is quite uncomfortable, but it certainly shouldn’t be shameful. Building up healthier skills and habits is a marathon, and it does not require perfection. I hope that you are able to find the strength to take the approach that you understand to be the best, even though that will mean defying your instincts. It will feel clunky, and uncomfortable, but that’s just the discomfort of growth.

I hope you’re able to recognise that asking for advice here isn’t a sign of failure, but a show of your strong resolve to improve — I’ve found that asking for advice when we already low-key know the correct approach is a way of holding ourselves accountable: you want to communicate clearly and healthily; you also want to curl up so small that you can hide from this girl rather than talking to her. This conflict exists because for whatever reason, you’ve recognised that your people pleasing tendencies don’t serve you or the people in your life very well. Regardless of how you proceed from here, I’m proud of the steps you’ve already taken to improve yourself. I say this as someone else who had to learn these skills as an adult due to messy family stuff. It’s bloody awkward, and stressful, and it takes a long time; that’s why recognising the small steps forward is good

I possibly disagree — I’m a part time wheelchair user (as well as other disability related devices/aids) and I’m always fascinated by how dynamic and relative the concept of “accessibility” is, even if we’re only considering the perspective of one person. For example, for me, using my wheelchair often means trading one kind of pain for another, and depending on specific circumstances, that might not be worth it. Being disabled often forces you to get creative in hacking together many different solutions, balancing the tradeoffs such that the “cost” of using one tool is accounted for by the benefits of another. I wish I could recall some specific examples to share with you, but I have seen friends be incredibly inventive in using regular items in a context that makes them into accessibility devices, if that makes sense.

This is all to say that expensive hardware, learning curves, unpleasant tradeoffs like friction of wearing — all of these things are core to my experience of most accessibility devices I’ve ever used. For any prospective accessibility device, the key question is “given the various costs and inconveniences, are the benefits of this thing worth it?”. Even without knowing much about this specific device, I would wager that for some disabled people, it absolutely would be net helpful.

That being said, you raise a good point, in that “accessibility” is often used as marketing hype, and in its worst form, this looks like disabled people’s experiences being exploited to develop and sell a product that doesn’t actually care about being accessible, so long as it has the appearance of such for investors. I’m not saying that’s what this product is doing, but certainly I am primed to be wary of stuff like this.

Even besides the exploitative instances that I allude to, you’re right to draw attention to existing products on the market. It’s possible that some disabled people struggle to make use of devices that would be “good enough” for most (and maybe these people are who this new device is aimed at helping), but with accessibility stuff, it’s far too easy for well-meaning people to jump to making new gadgets or tools, instead of meaningfully examining why the existing “good enough” solutions are inaccessible for some. A specific example that’s coming to mind is someone I met who had a super high tech prosthetic limb that was so hilariously impractical compared to her existing options that this new one literally never got used. She said that it’s a shame that such an expensive bit of kit is made functionally useless by much more basic designs, but she’s learned that excited engineers are rarely receptive to being told about the practical problems with their new devices.

TL;DR: i think your instinct to be cautious about invoking accessibility is wise, though my own caution comes from a different context

Edit: I watched the video and I feel less dubious of this device after learning that this particular project arose following an email from someone who was mute and would find something like this useful. It helps that CharaChorder’s chording keyboards are established (albeit super niche) products, and this project is less about a fancy new device, and more like “chording keyboards like ours allows for faster typing than any other method, with training. Maybe this means it could be an effective text-to-speech input method. Let’s find out”.

I have a little crease line between my eyebrows from furrowing my brow (when squinting, or thinking hard, or frowning grumpily). I used to feel insecure about it, especially because I have vague memories of family telling a child-me that frowning so much would make ages related wrinkles worse if I didn’t stop while my skin was young. (In hindsight, it is hella fucked up that a child was stressing about this)

I have come to terms with my little frowny line now, and even feel somewhat fond of it, for how “me” it is. An ex-partner helped me reach this conclusion by telling me that he found the frown line cute because of how it reminded him of my thinky-face (or my stubbornly grumpy face). At the time, the comment didn’t impact me much, because of course someone who was in love with me would find my idiosyncratic facial expressions endearing, but it eventually clicked that it’s not that these aspects are objectively cute or not, but rather that they are so intensely idiosyncratic.

I can relate to, and respect the grumpy lady at the DMV. When you know yourself well enough, it can be quite fun to play with one’s personal “brand”

For this sentiment to be coming from a parent of one of the hostages is significant though. I’ve heard from friends who have lived in Israel that the media landscape is quite homogeneous, and that Israelis face a huge amount of suppression and social stigma if they speak up in favour of Palestinians (as opposed to criticizing Netanyahu for not ensuring the return of the hostages).

“There is some truth in this. […] Nevertheless, call us Slavs and there will be blood.”

I can respect this kind of energy

I appreciate you calling out this kind of stuff. It seems like in this instance, OP was just joking, but I’m deeply nervous at how many people are genuinely believing and propagating eco-fascist rhetoric nowadays.