Why did you put this in our brains. Why.

Synergize? Mult? Sorry, I don’t speak corporate.

Thank you for saying something. I didn’t know anything about this guy.

It also provides yet another reason why it’s important to keep artists’ names in their work. It’s not only for giving credit where it’s due, but for providing context when the artist has questionable leanings.

Not all of them do. I work with autistic kids, and sometimes we have to modify how we teach echoics (repeating what someone else said) because of it.

We may have a kid that we’re trying to teach to ask for help when they need it. So say, for example, we see them unable to open their lunch box. For some kids, we’d go, “Say, ‘help’.” The kid replies, “Help,” and we help them open the box.

But some kids will repeat exactly what we say, which means they end up going, “Say help.” So we have to change the way we make the suggestion. In this case we’d omit the “say” part, and just say “Help.” That way the kid will repeat just the important part, enabling them to communicate more functionally to get their needs met.

[Velvet ants] can be found worldwide with about 230 genera or subgenera and around 8,000 species worldwide. Over 400 species occur in the North American Southwest.

Velvet Ant Wikipedia page

Ah yes, r strategists, a classic of mice and cults alike.

Came here wondering the same thing.

What is this image from? Is there context to explain his pants being open?

This question reminds me of an exercise my elementary school class did once. We were told to pick an idiom and draw it literally.

I don’t remember what I picked, but my friend drew her mom’s favorite saying, “You drive me up the wall!” I can still vividly see the drawing of a lady with her eyes bugging out, driving vertically up a living room wall.

On a related note, the idea that all it takes is a simple line on the ground for a lot of disaster not to happen. Sometimes when another car passes in the opposite direction, I think of how freaking close we are, at the relative speeds we’re going, and I’m amazed/frightened that a line dividing our lanes, an imaginary border, is all that’s keeping us apart.

The bathrooms outside the lobby in my work building take this automatic crap a step further, with automatic soap machines. It’s hit or miss if any given one will have soap at all. (Thankfully, we have another sink inside my work itself that employees can use, but guests are fucked.)

Then when they do dispense soap, it’s the foam shit. So it looks like the sink just spit into my hands. Lovely.

Even if the vehicle traffic didn’t meet some imaginary quota, that says nothing of the pedestrian traffic. Just another signal of our car-centric society.

I know a 5 year old that came in proudly telling everyone, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a dwarf!” He then held his hand lower than his current height and said, “I’ll be this tall!” He’s short, sure, but he’s not in the little person height range.

I think somewhere between him talking about dwarf planets, and his short height, somebody probably said it as a joke and he took it seriously.

Or as slang for a tab of LSD

Sure, I’ll bite. My parents recently bought a new house. Every bedroom ceiling fan has a pattern etched into the plaster above it. This one’s my favorite.

Your stomach microbiome is plants

Which is why I spend a solid 3 hours a day facing the sun with my mouth held wide open. Gotta let my tummy plants photosynthesize somehow.

Yep. I left Reddit during the initial API crisis. I’ve left jobs because of my principles, even without backup jobs ready. There are tons of places I won’t shop (including Amazon), and it makes finding things I need difficult sometimes. I’ve also been vegan for over 20 years.

My mom’s the opposite. I grew up seeing her hypocrisy, and it upset me. She’d outright tell me, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Such a rich lesson for a young mind! I realized that a lot of people become hypocrites by repeating what others say without critical thought, and it turned me into a skeptic. So many people jump on the emotional bandwagon (see any hot button political topic for reference), but then later after hearing someone else confidently spout an opinion on it, they will stand with the opposite conclusion. If they’d stopped and thought the first time they heard about it, before opening their mouths about it, they wouldn’t come off hypocritical later on. But the distressing part is less that they changed their opinion, but that they still haven’t put any critical thought into why they hold it - it’s all just repeating others’ words. Which is why if a topic is brand new to me, I will refuse to take a side in it until I research it and come to my own conclusions. There are enough parrots repeating propaganda thoughtlessly, we have to be very careful with whom we trust.

My principles uphold the person I am. I came to them on my own, often going against the tide I grew up in. To me, the hardest part about having principles isn’t upholding them, but in dealing with those that can’t believe you actually have them. So many people seem to float on seemingly without a real sense of self, swayed more by those around them than by any sort of inner compass. I can’t fathom being like that, and those people apparently can’t fathom being like me.

All the more reason Lemmy is such a good place to be. We might not all hold the same principles, but at least many of us seem to have them.

I’d also like to note the seeming overlap of Lemmy’s populace with neurodivergence, which can coincide with, well, being a principled weirdo like me. ;)

2016 was an interesting year for me. I had an odd week of coincidences that appeared like a hypomanic episode that never happened before and never repeated again. The biggest one being that I was dating a guy who had just told me that his lifelong dream was to meet his favorite band. That week, I won a radio contest that got us tickets to a concert with a meet-and-greet at a tiny venue with that same band.

The episode prompted me to finally see a psych for the depression I’d been dealing with for most of my life. It started me on anti-depressants, which have massively improved my quality of life.

But the biggest thing was that the episode included a day of absolute clarity. I was driving and thinking, as I’m prone to do, when out of the blue everything just made sense. I could see in my head how everything was connected to everything else, and it was intense. But I’m a skeptic, and I needed to know that I was still grounded in reality, so I pulled over into a parking lot and called a friend. I asked him to help me make sure I was still making sense and I wasn’t going off the deep end. He’s a deeply rational guy, known to recognize bullshit, and yet as I talked on and on about the many puzzle pieces that now seemed to fit together, he remarked that yes, I was still making sense.

Key to it was the feeling that it was a sort of enlightenment, the same kind that religious folks might feel after years of meditation, or that some people experience through psychedelic drugs. There was a strong sense that I was not alone in that sensation, that many others had felt it before and that when they did, they had the same epiphany that we were connected directly. The sense of peace was incredible. I don’t believe in a god and that moment did not change that, but I did come away with a new respect for those who take their faith seriously and sincerely (that is, not like the christians in the US that use it to spread hate, but rather like the monks who give up everything to pursue their spiritual journeys.) I could feel the immensity of the universe, and see in my mind’s eye an infinite web that brought everything together. I could mentally travel that web from point to point, seeing all different perspectives at the same time. It was wild, and hasn’t happened again since.

Despite it being so brief, the few hours I spent in that state have impacted me to this day. Some things that used to bother me didn’t annoy me anymore. Finding patience became much easier. It also became easier to understand and connect to people.

One more weird thing that started that week and never stopped - I developed the uncanny ability to spot four-leaf clovers. I can’t count how many I’ve discovered in the ten years since, but if there’s a four-leafer in a patch that I walk by and all I do is scan it in my periphery, I will stop, reach down, and either point it out or pluck it to give to whoever I’m with. It’s like they jump out to me. It’s fun having a strange talent that makes people happy.

Thank you. I have a kid I work with that looooves space. To him, dwarf planets and regular planets are equally interesting. When we watch space videos that point out Pluto in some way, he’s just confused. Like a video about the 8 planets ending in a frowning Pluto.

The kid: “Why is Pluto sad?”

Me: “Well, bud, some grown ups are silly. They grew up thinking of Pluto as a planet and they don’t like that its status changed.”

But to him, Pluto has no reason to be “sad.” It’s got Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris to be friends with! But nobody makes a big deal over them (if they even are aware of their existence at all. This boy has single-handedly educated many of my coworkers about them.)

Point is, grown ups - let it go! Scientific reclassification doesn’t mean Pluto was ejected from the solar system or something. It’s still there and it’s still loved. It just plays with different friends now.

When I was very young, before I was able to read, I would see images in my mind associated with spoken words. Sometimes they were the literal thing that was being said, but other times the images were more abstract.

With Snickers, I pictured “sneakers.” But it was for more than the sound being similar - I thought the pattern on the bottom of the candy bar resembled the pattern on the bottom of shoes. So it all made sense in little-me’s brain.

That’s the case for me. The last game I’ve “completed” was a game where I can play through multiple different scenarios (Surviving Mars.) I have completed about half the mystery scenarios, and I love being able to replay it and have it be new all over again.