I’ve always wanted to try both of those.

Yep, I drink mead, i.e. honey wine. It’s really good, doesn’t give me as much of a headache as beer these days. Sometimes it’s too sweet, I haven’t found a good dry one around here though.

I played around with Gentoo a few years ago, got it working but then got annoyed with some binaries taking too long. Wanted to build a machine I couldn’t hack though, and now there’s a repo with precompiled bins if you ask portage nicely, so I figured I’d give it a shot again. Maybe it was the mead but I forgot to do that for gcc though. oops

What a coincidence, I’m drinking mead and installing Gentoo. Currently compiling gcc, always takes forever, maybe I should’ve gone with the recompiled binary for that one lol.

No ragrets.

You know the corollary to Arthur C Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which is “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology”? That’s what I think the explanation and manipulation of the electromagnetic force and strong and weak nuclear forces basically are. We just figured out the rules for how magic works, and now we manipulate them to make rocks think and show us pretty colors over vast distances, and can also explode cities with glowing rocks and weird gasses. Also we can make potent potions from strange biological and chemical essences that make the body do what we tell it, mostly. And we’re getting better at it (and would be getting better at it faster if it weren’t for metaphorical dragons getting in the way).

Just because we can explain it doesn’t make it any less magic.

Yes.

“Forever” unless the knowledge is out of date, or you don’t use it and forget, or until Alzheimer’s or some other dementia happens and everything disappears (or until your death, I suppose, but gold also tends to change hands around that time).

Two inches per year is more than some old couples get, good on them for keeping the spark alive for so long.

The real question is if the darker purple is in front or if it’s the lighter purple.

I mean, being trans is perfectly valid, but I think gender dysphoria itself should be classified as a mental illness so long as it brings significant pain/distress to the individual, the solution there is just gender reassignment, surgery, hormones, etc. I don’t think there should be stigma in calling it such, it needs treatment the same as anything else. People with ADHD have a mental illness and get meds, sometimes therapy, people with poor eyesight have an ocular dysfunction of some kind and get glasses or surgery or whatever, none of it should be that big a deal. The point is it can be diagnosed and treated.

I think the response to shit like “transgenderism” being a mental disease should be “well at least their/our dysphoria can be treated now, what’s your excuse?”

All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

My wife is my ex-girlfriend, but we’re still dating. She gets mildly amused when I point this out, but she might just be humoring me.

Same for me, my only difficulty is discerning whether the commenter is promoting relevant discussion or doing some variant of gishgallop or sealioning.

It’s not enough to reign in assholes, the system has to be designed in such a way that carriers of “dark triad” traits (i.e. the usual bad faith actors in a system) are still incentivized to contribute to or improve society without gradually dismantling it to increase their wealth/power/status. That’s a hard problem to solve.