Are you stressed or anxious? Dogs often pick up your background mood better than you do yourself.

But what do you actually mean by “ignorance is no excuse”? You said that any system other tah democracy conflicts with the statement. But the standard meaning (the fact that you didn’t realise you were breaking the law isn’t an meaningful excuse in court) absolutely applies in autocracies or whatever. The point is certain actions are illegal and doing them will get you in trouble, whether you knew in advance or not.

I feel like you’ve got another meaning in mind, can you try and express it clearly?

I’m not sure you’re interpreting that phrase in the way other people are. I think the standard interpretation of “ignorance is not an excuse” is “not being aware of a crime being illegal is not a legitimate defence if you commit that crime”.

You seem to be thinking more about freedom of information, or education?

I’ve been looking at some selfhosted blogging options like Ghost because that seems easier than finding a suitable provider.

And for op, go for it! The more ai and advertising ruins the Internet, the more valuable I find real people just sharing their thoughts without trying to profit from it.

Love it! Broddrick is great in it, and his perspective helps keep the more legendary character and plot line believable. Looks gorgeous too (the film, not MattyB)

I watched The Thief of Bagdad (1940) recently, and was kinda shocked at how much I enjoyed it. There’s a whole world of effects, such as using painted backdrops, that don’t look “realistic” but actually do a lot more for creating fantastical vibe than even perfect modern cgi.

It also highlights the main problem with most “effects heavy” movies, in that they often focus on the effects instead of the story. And when that happens, it doesn’t really matter how good they are, because fundamentally they’re distracting from real core of the film. TToB has genies, monsters and flying robot horses, but they’re all used judiciously and reinforce a sense of wonder, even when they look a little janky to modern eyes.

Compared this to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which was celebrated at the time for it’s Harryhausen stop motion effects. Sure, the effects are pretty cool, and at the time must have been very impressive, but it’s too obvious that the audience is meant to be wowed by them. At one point two animated monster start fighting each other and I just didn’t care. Aside from the novelty of the effect this scene wasn’t building the vibes, they’re weren’t any significant stakes or character growth, it was just “look at what we can do!”. Yawn.

We’ve got goats that are basically our resident lawn mowers. Moving then around the property is much less effort that mowing lawns or trimming hedges, they’re amazing. And pretty darn cute. And the grass grows back much lusher than if it’s mowed, with all the goat poop that they tread into it.

I’d say, they’re like digging your own latrine. A totally effective solution, as long as you’re physically able and your needs aren’t exceptional.

I’m not sure I understand? The country depends on urban infrastructure for sure. But population density plays a big role in how necessary services are provided. You have to be very remote and rural in most western countries to not have electricity, because it’s easier to connect wires than be fully self-sufficient in energy generation. But waste pipes are harder to scale over distances, and septic tanks provide an affordable local solution. I’d love for the local council to install and maintain pumped pipes for all waste, but it would be a huge and unnecessary expense for the community.

Similarly, wherever people cluster, you can make efficient transport solutions that serve the. But if someone lives hours away from the next habitation, it’s hard to create a soloution that’s more efficient than them driving to the nearest transport hub. And if we could get rid of 99.9% of cars owned by people not in that situation, I don’t think we need to worry to much about the few farmers who still need them.

I basically agree with you, the more public transport provided, the less people need individual transport. But as a society, there are times when the right transport soloution for a specific household is pretty much a car. There’s no point in having busses driving out to my rural property multiple times a day, just for me not to use it most of the time.

That doesn’t mean it needs to be a private car owned by me. A government funded by taxi service would still be more cost effective than empty buses. When I lived in another part of the country, that’s what they’d replaced the busses with due to lack of demand.

But it’s a complicated transition. Currently I mostly use my car and trailer to get heavy building materials, and recover architectural salvage. Sure, I could buy a new staircase and have it delivered on a lorry, but is that really better for the environment than dismantling an old one and taking a couple of trips to ship it my property? There could be solutions, such as municipal vehicle rental. But sometimes a car or van is the sensible middle ground between a bike and a bus.

I’d say it’s more like, wanting a car is like wanting your own septic tank rather than a connection to municipal sewers. In an urban area it would be an insane waste of space to have individual septic tanks. But in the country the cost of building and maintaining infrastructure for just one household would be incredibly wasteful.

I think people should learn sign lanaguve causes it’s cool. But if it’s really for at-home, antigovernemnt planning, why not just put your phone in the other room, or the fridge? Sure, it’s a minor inconvenience to take it out your pocket, but that’s basically nothing compared to spending a few years being fluent enough in sign to hatch plans.

Same, really enjoy my miyoo mini. Not expensive and hours of old school fun. After a while I did start looking at more powerful handhelds to try and play n64 and early PlayStation games, but they all seemed too pricey. But it really depends what you want to play.

My experience in the UK was the gruyère was a bit bland as a cheese. But since moving to France that’s changed completely. Gruyère can be of widly different qualities and aged for different times for very different end flavours. The opposite is true of cheddar, which in Britain is a big spectrum of flavours and textures, but often in France is a pretty bland ‘burger cheese slice’ affair.

While I believe that we’ll see autonomous humanoid robots eventually, we’re pretty far away from any practical version of that. What were much more likely to see in the next few years is fauxautomation, the ‘mechanical turk’ con, where the reality is the robot is controlled by a human.

And not only is a bullshity part of hype, it’s also pretty worrying. Not just as a privacy and safety nightmare (do I really want a ‘ai’ robot servant who’s really being controlled by some dude in a data centre in India?), but because I can see a future where people are fine with that. Just like we’ve outsourced shitty and exploitative factories overseas, while still enjoying the cheap production costs, I can see lots of assholes being fine with having a robot servant, even if it’s being controlled by some exploited kid in a robo sweatshop. It’s just outsourced slavery.

Obviously, you do you. From Google image search it seems like the world is fairly evenly split between up and down, and although I think handle up is more sane, and a little bit safer, there’s no right answer. But I grab knives off my rack in a single motion, ready to chop.

Most people’s hands can easily rotate thumb up or thumb down, so I don’t see how the direction of the handle makes much difference. If you’re used to one, it would definitely feel clunky to swap, I know I’d find grabbing a downward facing handle a bit akward.

I guess the issue with those types of actions is that it leads to consequences that the people currently in power would be happy with. If people can just stop paying taxes on mass when they don’t like the government it pretty much gives permission for it as a political protest from now on.

I’m not saying that it is definitely a bad idea to give the public a veto on any government policy they don’t like, but it certainly promotes small government. Part of the point of government spending is spending money on things that some people don’t want, whether that’s ‘obamacare’ or the Pentagon. A government that was worried about avoiding any sizable tax strike would never be able to spend money on anyrhing but the most basic and widely accepted expenses. Even “law and order” which is often one of the few roles libertarians support spending on isn’t widely accepted anymore with ‘defund the police’.

Secondly, although part of a strike or protest is about causing disruption as a stick to put pressure on agreeing to demands, part of it is also on performing “costly displays”. Posting memes may raise awareness for an issue, but its unlikely to sway people to your side as literally setting yourself on fire. One is easy, one is horrific, and when someone does something ‘costly’ it let’s people see how much this matters to them. And asking me to not pay my taxes isn’t a big ask, it benefits me (in the short term at least), while with a labour strike you are usually sacrificing pay to make a point, which shows how important it is to you.

What sort of psycho puts them blades up? That’s crazy.

I’m not sure if they’re what you’re looking for, but their are various little mental exercises you can do depending on what your trying to achieve.

Relaxing visualisations - if I’m trying to sleep and I’m too worked up about something to relax, I close my eyes and visualise a peaceful scene, e.g. being on a warm tropical beach, the heat of the sun lulling me to sleep, the gentle lapping of the ocean… It doesn’t always put me immediately to sleep, but it helps get my brain out of the problem-solving stress mode.

Sensory engagement - if I’m feeling anxious and getting stuck in a panicky loop, I try to engage my senses. Notice four things around you that you can see, three you can hear, two that you can smell, and a texture you can touch (a stone wall, your jacket’s fabric). This works well because when I’m stressed my brain doesn’t want to be told to “calm down”, it’s trying to warn me of danger. So instead of forcing some relaxation, I engage my senses, checking my surroundings, and generally there is no danger, just the hubub of normal life. This reminds my lizard brain that although being worried about missing a deadline is stressful, I’m not in immediate physical danger and should calm tf down.

Sense of perspective - when we are in an emergency our sense of time shrinks so we only focus on the immediate problem. As we relax, we become better able to consider the larger future. This is great in a crisis, but also leads to dumb overreactions. So, if something goes wrong, and in the grand scheme of things it’s actually not a big deal, but to me right now it feels like the worst, I use this technique. I visualise my surroundings and then begin zooming out, viewing my self from above, seing the room and then the building, the pulling out like a map tool, seeing the area, the country, the globe. I sometimes continue, visualising the solar system and the milky way. After that, it feels a lot easier to shrug and accept that whatever embaressment or frustration felt like it was going to ruin my day is, in fact, just not that important.

I enjoyed Wolfenstein 3D’s quitting messages, “Chickening out already?” or “Press N for more carnage. Press Y to be a weenie.” and the like.