TIL that the characters of Vasquez in Aliens (1986) and the stepmother in Terminator 2 (1991) were played by the same actor, Jenette Goldstein, apparently donning brownface for the earlier role
😳
Boots should really come with an exhaust so that with every step you're pushing air/moisture out the back end. Nothing like a big pipe or anything, just a wee hole and a sort of bladder that fills with air when you lift your foot and pushes it out again when you step on it. Sure, you'll sound like you're stepping on farting mices everywhere you go, but if you just cough with each step you should be fine.
SOMA still lives in my brain 10 years later.
It's a very dark part of conspiracism in general. The same tactics, both conscious and unconscious, are used to evangelise these ideas - and defend them despite being indefensible - as are used in all conspiracy theories and "alternative" views of established fact.
So, it has less to do with the available evidence, and more to do with personality flaws. It's not even about reasoning skills or intelligence - the more intelligent you are, the less likely you'll be to change your views because you're so good at generating narratives that support your position. It's a deep flaw in human psychology that can't be reasoned away, and trying to combat these ideas with facts just reinforces them and gives them credibility (which is why no one with any sense debates Holocaust deniers anymore). It's like when a schizophrenic person hallucinates; you don't want to do or say anything that makes the hallucination seem real, you don't want to say "where is the creature? Here? I'm stamping on it, is it gone? I don't see it!" you simply accept that they're hallucinating and don't engage with it beyond that. Extreme example, but the logic is the same.
I see Big Gym is at it again.
they do if u kiss me
Most of my teeth are destroyed, decades of neglect due to mental illness. I've been hearing about lab-grown teeth for the last 25 years and always hope it happens soon, but the progress sees to be genuine this time. I just hope it doesn't cost insane amounts of money to get teefs grown.
The Paranormal Activity and The Conjuring serieseses. I find them extraordinarily tedious and so formulaic that they seem better suited for people who have never seen a horror film in their entire lives.
Not so much "scary" as "disturbing", but Spoorloos (1988), aka The Vanishing, is billed as being suitable for 12-year-olds. Definitely worth watching (and definitely worth going in without any information). In fact, it was that film that made me de-discount anything aimed at 15-years-old or younger. I was thinking "if they can't even swear then how serious and atmospheric can it really get?" but I was dead wrong.
Dr. Reddy's hard, bulbous, throbbing capsule will take away your anxiety.
Ahh, so it's like they're reading from the order/prescription, and say "ok he needs pregabalin - tick - and it's 150mgs - tick - and it's hard capsules - tick", or something to that effect?
Why does the pharmacist add these little ticks/checkmarks with a pen on my medication box?
For a second, I thought "maybe they indicate which bits of the braille are relevant" and then I took a long walk and thought about my life choices.
Imagine if he devoted even 20% of that time to something that mattered or improved his life in some way.
Plato in 300: kids today!!!!!!!!!! 😡
This is an angle I've never considered before, with regards to a future dystopia with a corrupt AI running the show. AI might never advance beyond what it is in 2025, but because people believe it's a supergodbrain, we start putting way too much faith in its flawed output, and it's our own credulity that dismantles civilisation rather than a runaway LLM with designs of its own. Misinformation unwittingly codified and sanctified by ourselves via ChatGeppetto.
The call is coming from inside the house mechanical Turk!
Can someone ELI5 why pre-Newton mathematics wasn't up to the task?
Quite proud to say that I've never ventured into any of the chans. They frighten the fuck outta me, frankly.
My favourite show back in the day!
Lower res, for sure. Modern GPUs/drivers and some media players can do a decent job of making them a bit nicer to look at 'on-the-fly', too.
Is it so she can say repugnant things about minorities and spread conspiracy theories about matters of public health, or is she actually concerned about Turkey's ability to influence bsky into denying access to individuals for political reasons?
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume she didn't even mention Turkey in her 'talk'.
When I was a kid in the mid-90s, my mum won a pair of rollerblades that were in my size from a raffle at the local shop. I wore them and loved them for about 3 days until I was chased and threatened by homophobes 🤷 That was the end of that 😒 I'm not trying to fight off gangs of older kids on my own while wearing bewheeled shoes. I'm not even gay, but wearing rollerblades was akin to licking bumholes back then, apparently.
Eric Weinstein has left the chat in tears.
Why do certain animals react aggressively to their reflection in a mirror, but seem to understand that their reflection in a body of water (e.g. while drinking) is just that?
And does this negate the "mirror test" idea? That is, an animal failing to recognise that the creature in the mirror is themselves, but can recognise themselves in water, shows that their problem isn't with the concept of reflectivity or "self", but something about the mirror's version of themselves that they can't quite grasp?
A follow-up question: Does an animal recognise its own shadow, and does this count as a kind of "self-awareness" when their shadow is moving around in the world but they don't lose their mind over it?
Thank you!
TIL that the discoverer of radio pulsars - Jocelyn Bell Burnell - lost out on her Nobel Prize because her thesis supervisor took the credit
Why did/do sites such as the pyramids in Egypt or the Roman colosseum end up in an abandoned state, only to be "rediscovered" later?
As I understand it - which is not at all - the pyramid complex in Giza was always next to a bustling inhabited city, but the complex itself seemingly went ignored/untouched for centuries. Same goes for famous Roman sites. Why were these objects and sites not reused or maintained or destroyed until relatively recently? Where did everyone go, and why weren't they living in and around these structures this whole time? And if they were, why didn't they do anything with the sites?
I understand that empires and civilisations come to an end, but they aren't the result of wholesale genocide, and even if they were, the genociders would surely move into that area next and continue living in the pre-built cities and towns. But that doesn't seem to be what happened.
Why is humanity out of the picture in these monumental and impressive sites for unbroken periods of deep time?
Cheers!
This is what happens when an extremely literal person polls an extremely sarcastic populace
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk Belfast named happiest city in the UK: Instagram pics show it as smile capital
Belfast has been named the smile capital of the UK according to a detailed analysis of snaps taken throughout the city.
Pets hate the vet clinic and groomer because they smell the combined terror/anger of a thousand other animals who've been poked and prodded in that room
Dogs especially have an insane superpower of a nose, they surely smell the fear and even just regular body odour of all the previous animals who've come through there in the last week. I don't know if the cleaning protocol of even the most fastidiously-hygienic clinics could get rid of that 'doggy Holocaust train' smell. It puts me in mind of my own struggles with autistic sensory overload. It must be the equivalent of someone like me being walked through a door and out onto the stage at Wembley Stadium without anyone telling me what was about to happen. At least in my case, I'd see the crowd, whereas the dog only smells the ghosts of animals past and has to imagine what might have caused their pheromone bukakke.
The same goes for the vet/groomer themselves; they surely emit the screaming echos of slaughterhouse stank like a pealing church bell every second of the day. They are absorbing pure animal terror into their clothes and onto their skin like an adrenochrome-fiending Clinton.
Is it possible to have the 'dark message mode' not darken images?
Certain images often appear in a weird photo-negative form or, as is the case in the following image, simply a very dark form, when the reader is set to 'dark message mode'. Is there a way to prevent this?
Dark Mode Enabled
Dark Mode Disabled
When I receive an email from a friend which has an image displayed inline, this darkening effect doesn't occur. Only seems to be the images in confirmation emails from shops like Amazon, i.e. ones that aren't attached to the email/stored locally.
Thank you!
Is there a demonstrable evolutionary pathway between the mouths/throats of animals like us and those which have 2 sets of jaws, such as certain eels?
You can look at certain structures in one animal and show how they're made from repurposed parts of an earlier animal (like fish gills becoming human ears). Can that be done with humans and those animals with Xenomorph double-mouths? Can you say "in humans, this particular piece of tendon in the neck is what eels reused for an additional mouth" or something along those lines?
Thanks for your time!
Is there some special process by which musicians/producers arrive at an agreed-upon tempo for a song recording?
When playing live, songs are usually much faster than the album version, particularly for rock and metal. When you listen back to early demo versions of those same songs, they're usually a fair bit faster than the final recording, too. So at some point along the way, someone decides "ok, we're setting the tempo at X BPM when we record this for real", which is - apparently - not the tempo that came naturally to the musicians originally, or afterwards when touring the album.
How do they decide? Is there a rule of thumb producers are working with when it comes to the speed of a recording?
Cheers!
Can message filters archive incoming messages 'correctly'?
I have a filter that moves certain incoming emails to the Archives folder. But it just places them in the root folder, and doesn't sort them into their respective YYYY subfolders the way it does when you use the Archive button on a message. Is it possible to have Thunderbird do the 'proper' archiving via a message filter?
Thanks for your help!
YSK that if you hover your mouse over each segment of Wikipedia's IPA pronunciation key (typically found at the beginning of an article), it will let you know how it sounds in the tooltip
I've always been afraid to even click on that thing, it looks like arcane academic patois that isn't meant for mere mortals. But the tooltips make it very accessible.
The tooltips only appear to work on English words, however.
Would you welcome an option to reattain achievements on games you've already 100%ed?
It's kinda sad that a game you love can only be 100%ed once, forever. I propose an option (and it should really be optional) to reattain the cheevos for a game you've already maxed. The original achievement unlock info should remain, but if the in-game pop-ups could be set to begin again, and for the next unlocked cheevo to add a little star or a +1 to your cheevo icon or something (even if it's only visible to yourself), that would be awesome.
Anyone else wish they could 100% a game multiple times or am I just too autistic for my own good? 👀
Is there really a difference between my understanding the phrase "go for a walk" and my dog understanding the phrase "go for a walk"?
I've had a few people tell me that although the dog and the person are both imagining the same thing - going for a walk, and all that that entails - the dog is merely associating the sound of the phrase with the activity.
But... isn't that... what language is? What's qualitatively different between the human and the dog here? The human is undoubtedly making connections and associations far more complex and expressive, but at bottom it's all just "sound = thing", no? 🤔
I don't speak Spanish, but I know that when I hear someone say something that sounds like "andallay!", it means "hurry up". I don't know what the word literally means, or how to actually spell it (well, I do now that I looked it up: ándale), or its etymology or whether or not it's a loan word from Chinese, but I know from experience (and cartoons) that it means "go faster". Am I a dog to a Mexican in this scenario? My understanding is as perfunctory as my dog's understanding of "go for a walk" is. But we wouldn't say t
A very low-resolution image is probably way harder for a painter to convincingly replicate than a pristine HD image of the same scene
In computational terms, a low resolution version of an image is almost by definition 'simpler', with fewer colours and details intact, but it seems like it would be much harder to do a convincing 1:1 replication of it in a painting compared to recreating a 'clean' HD version.
Or am I way off the mark? 😆 I'm not a painter, obviously. Seems like getting all of those weird JPEG artefacts right would be something of a novel skill for a traditional painter (or even a digital painter, for that matter).
Is Unreal Engine 5 really as bad as people seem to think it is? If so, why?
I hear nothing but bad things when the topic of Unreal Engine 5 is brought up. It's also true that the games I've played which use this engine have suffered from poor performance to one degree or another, so it seems like the complaints are well-founded, but I don't actually know.
Is it a bad engine, or is it just not being used correctly by either the devs when they design their games or the players when they choose their graphical settings? Or a bit of both? What's actually wrong with it, in layman's terms?
Cheers!
Why is it that clasped hands tends to be the norm for praying? 🙏
I know not all praying religions have their adherents join their hands, but I think it's the case for most. Many cultures even use clasped hands in day-to-day life as a sign of deference or pleading (which I guess makes them "social prayers").
My only 'armchair anthropologist' theory is that hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability. But that doesn't make sense in a religious context (although it does in the social context), because how would you ever be a threat to any god in the first place? 🤔 If anything, you're displaying arrogance by saying to god "yeah I COULD fuck you up, but just for this conversation, I'm gonna decommission my arms, arms which I have to register as deadly weapons by the way".
A secondary question on this topic is what is the function of praying hands in the praying process? If you say a prayer without joining your hands, does it not reach god? Or does he hear it but he's like "uhhh,