Yeah thanks for the COVID-19 there, buddy.

I had a very realistic visual hallucination once (hypnopompic). I was coming out of a nap while I had a fever. I looked over, and beside the bed was a young woman staring at me intently. She leaned over to bite/eat me, but calmly and without any emotion. As soon as she got within touching distance of me, she started to vanish, from the centre-out, and within a couple seconds was totally gone.

I was really struck by how real she seemed. She looked exactly like a real person.

But I just knew she wasn’t real (the same way that you just know things in dreams). Because of that, I didn’t find it scary at all. I remember being a little curious what kind of sensations I would “feel” when she actually made contact with me, and was a mixture of disappointed/relieved when she vanished at that point. But strangely(?) not scared.

We will see!

Traditionally it’s been a day for young people to go out partying and clubbing in costumes.

But last year 67 people were crushed to death and we had an official week-long period of mourning. We will see how Halloween is treated this year.

I don’t know that this one really counts. First, as stewie said, Edison didn’t electrocute Topsy (though he did film it).

But anyway, what “stupid prizez” did Edison win? An enormous pile of money and immortal fame and admiration?

Assuming you’re a man, 32 is definitely not too old. In my personal experience as a 40-something, 32 is right around your peak.

Are you hot? If the answer is “no”, that’s fine. Most of us aren’t. But it means that you’ll have to do a little bit more work in figuring out what kind of people (women?) are attracted to you, why they’re attracted to, and what might be the best way to meet them. The answer may not be Tinder.

I don’t think “greed” is quite the right word. “Greed” would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable. But they’re not: they’re trying to make themselves profitable at all. That’s not about greed, but about surviving. You can’t survive unless you stop hemorrhaging money at some point.

Maybe the question is “Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they’re going to become super-shitty one day?”

just assume everything actually costs 20% more and tip.

And by “everything”, you mean “not actually everything, but you’d need a 400 page manual to describe what gets tipped and what doesn’t”.

Before getting home Internet access, my “online” world was BBSes. Local BBSes, of course, because we couldn’t dial long distance without repercussions. My favourite demogroup was Future Crew and I hated that it took months (or sometimes never) to get their releases on our local BBSes. Even with Fidonet, a lot of BBSes would only sync with remote nodes a couple times a month to save money, so it was slow going.

I remember a few days after we got home Internet access, I was eating breakfast and I suddenly had a thought. Wait…doesn’t Future Crew’s BBS run an FTP server? I think I saw them mention that in one of their nfo files. If they have an FTP server, I could just…connect to it. Like, directly, myself, from my house.

The implications of this were so strong that I started shaking. I couldn’t finish my breakfast.

I ran downstairs and booted up the computer and typed in ftp.mpoli.fi and…there it was. Future Crew’s home BBS was just available for anyone in the world to connect to. I navigated around a little bit and found a song I hadn’t seen before on any of the local BBSes. I started the download, and it worked, and a blazing 3kB/s. I remember I just started crying at the implications of what a worldwide network meant.

I think we’re going to see a lot of strong reactions to progress. I mean we’re already seeing some of that. Neo-Luddites (are Neo-Amish next?), TradWives, dumb phone culture, etc. I think it’s going to pick up. Some good and some bad.

Okay, so what are the good ones? I think we’ll become more family-oriented. I think we’ll re-realize that meaning in life comes largely from our relationships, and our families will become a bigger part of that.

A spin-off of that is I think family dynamics will be generally better. Fewer people overall will have children, as those who aren’t really into it won’t feel pressured to do it (they can still have nieces and nephews and whatnot). But those who do have children will be more deliberate and passionate about it. I think parenting quality overall will improve, and parent-child relationships will be better.

I think our economic system is going to get a major upgrade. Every year that passes, it becomes more and more obvious that the rules we have in place aren’t sustainable. The rich-poor divide is growing. Mental health is worsening. Climate change is worsening. Owning a home is now a luxury of the top 10%, and will probably be a luxury of the top 1% very soon. Eventually it’s going to get so bad that nobody can deny it needs major changes. And it will change.

I know some tankies on Lemmy would love to jump in and say “so finally we’ll smarten up and embrace socialism”, but I don’t think we’re quite that stupid. But we’re going to fix some of the rules and corruptions.

Now I’m imagining Linus sitting in his basement and suddenly some nerd just pops into existence behind him. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going to watch over your shoulder.”

Yeah by “barebones” I meant “the bot is just me manually pressing ‘edit’ when someone scores” haha. Need to find a game where I know there won’t be too much scoring…

Subscribed! But yeah, not a tonne of activity.

That’s a good point about a game thread. I think making a game thread where there’s a stream available to everyone might get some people interested. I’ll look at making a barebones game thread there in the not-too-distant future and see if anyone bites.

I think dating should be more accidental, as well. Meet someone at the bus stop and ask them out, that sort of thing.

Barry Schwartz (if you want more boomer opinions, look him up) made the excellent point that it’s very difficult for us to be pleasantly surprised these days. Everything we do now comes with expectations. Before a date, we look at their profile. Before a meal, we look up the restaurant ratings. Before buying anything, we read all the reviews, etc. Before we experience anything, it’s already been marketed to us. It’s great in a lot of ways, but it means that the best we can ever hope for is to be not disappointed. It’s becoming very very rare that something will exceed our expectations and we will be pleasantly surprised. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has impacts on our psychology.

As it relates to dating, I think it’s nice when you stumble upon a good connection when it’s least expected, rather than swiping through 1000 pictures. And on your first date, you should probably have no idea what the other person might be like.

Also I’ve found that, when an “All”, a bunch of posts will come flooding in several seconds after the rest of the page is loaded, and none of them will be sorted correctly.