@AFKBRBChocolate - eviltoast

Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023

  • 47 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There are just so many factors that go into a person’s experience of life. Even something as simple as being on the older side or the younger side when you first start school can have a giant impact.

    When our youngest was just at the age where she was allowed to get up and turn on the TV by herself and watch something while we were sleeping, 9-11 happened. I left the house early for work that morning. When my wife got up, our daughter was terrified. They had repeatedly interrupted Nickelodeon to show the planes hitting the buildings, and she was too young to understand that it was the same planes being shown over and over - she thought planes were falling out of the sky all over and crashing into buildings. She was waiting for one to hit our house. It took a long time before we realized that’s what she was thinking. At 27, it’s still left lasting issues. If she had been younger, she wouldn’t have seen it, and if she had been older she would have likely understood better.





  • I only partially agree. Yes, with the recent debates featuring Trump frothing at the mouth and saying completely insane and hateful stuff, if a debate doesn’t have that it’s worth connecting on. But people do care about content.

    With this debate as an example, lots of people commented on the “sanewashing” that Vance was doing - trying to give plausible explanations for things Trump has said or done - but it’s just not as outrageous as what we’re used to. And the Republican base was largely happy with that he said, even when it was demonstratively false.

    I think people care, but it’s twigs being added to a pile of logs.




  • It’s interesting, they used to think that having a big vocabulary or knowing multiple languages delayed having Alzheimer’s. It turns out that family often first become aware that a person is developing Alzheimer’s because the person starts regularly forgetting common words, but people with big vocabularies can come up with alternatives when they can’t remember one, so their family doesn’t recognize it as early. When those people are diagnosed, they end up being further along.


  • Right, that’s the thing.

    I honestly believe part of the problem this country is in today started when the news media felt they had to give equal time to every issue. I remember lots of segments on climate change where they had one person on each side, and I could understand most people coming away believing we just don’t know. And it’s not just climate change, they did that with everything.

    So here we are, polarized like never before, with so many believing that every opinion is legitimate. Sure, you can believe what you want, but if you believe the world was created 6000 years ago, you’re just wrong. You’re entitled to believe something wrong, but that doesn’t make it valid. A legitimate news site should reflect that. A climate denier or a creationist shouldn’t get equal time. Same with do many issues.




  • The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

    Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.