Sorry for the vagueness of the post! In trying to find the name of the eel in question, I typed “eel two mouths” into DDG and got this Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngeal_jaw

Having read through that article, it seems to be yet another example of a fish gill becoming something else haha, gills are apparently like the most plentiful LEGO brick in the box (from evolution’s perspective)!

Knowing my luck, probably cancer.

IS IT TRUE??

The moon, or just into space where I can float around and see Earth from a good distance.

Do you remember being a very young kid, of maybe 4 or 5-years-old, and riding your bike without stabilisers for the first time? Riding around your neighbourhood with that feeling of limitless time and seemingly bottomless reservoirs of pure joy? Or the first time you played a video game? Or the first time you went to the cinema? Basically any fun and novel experience. You could almost physically feel the birthing neurons branching through your brain in real-time like orgasmic, electrified roots. The joy of simply having your consciousness come ‘online’ more and more.

Well, I’m in my early 40s now, and I haven’t felt that way since I was that very young child. But I don’t think it’s because I’m too jaded to enjoy things anymore, it’s that I’ve experienced almost everything there is to experience in a normal everyday life, and there’s not much left that is so new and shocking to my consciousness that it will trigger that magical experience again. And so there is no further branching of neurons and no further giddy joy at simply doing something hitherto completely foreign to my brain.

I think visiting space, and especially landing on the moon, would give me that feeling again. It would be the last truly novel experience I definitely have not felt before, and it’s not one that I can sorta kinda experience vicariously. I mean, I’ve never killed anyone, but I know what an abyss of unquenchable guilt feels like, I know what the terror of being caught after doing something bad feels like, I know what it feels like to be so haunted by trauma that I have nightmares about it for years after. So I can just extrapolate from that and get a general idea of what it must be like to have done something that awful. My imagination can conjure up those sorts of ideas if I want it to, and while I won’t get 100% of the way there, I can create a ballpark estimation of it. But going into space - leaving everything and everyone who has ever existed behind - and being somewhere so literally alien to my evolved senses, that’s not something I can get a handle on just using my imagination.

I could be wrong of course, and going into space might simply be like visiting another country in the shittiest, most cramped Ryanair flight imaginable, but it’s the only thing I think has the most chance of giving me one last brain-bukkake before I clock out.

Shame it’ll never happen 🤷‍ Maybe I’ll start a twitter account sucking Elon’s fetid little dick and he’ll invite me to use one of his rockets one day. Then while I’m in space, I’ll take out a trans flag and play a shitty cover of Nazi Punks Fuck Off à la Chris Hadfield 🫡

🍊

I agree. I’m talking more morally and less legally. I’ve seen countless videos where a woman is feebly tapping or shoving a man, the man is clearly physically unbothered and unhurt, but his ego is bruised, so he KOs her with one punch. Then the comments come flooding in about how she deserved it, “equal rights equal fights” etc.

It’s not a fair fight. Of course there are exceptions, there are exceptions to everything. But for most people most of the time, a woman hitting a man is nowhere near as physically impactful as a man hitting a woman. The ‘toolset’ is undeniably different.

If a 5-foot man slaps a 6-foot man, and the 6-foot man laughs and then beats the shit out of the smaller guy and stomps on his head, most people would look down on the bigger man for taking it too far with someone he could easily beat and who presented no real physical threat to him. It’s like that. I’m not denying the agency of the woman, or saying that her assaulting a man is fine, it’s that the response to it from the man is usually an order of magnitude more severe with half the effort. And again, I know there are exceptions to this. Men can be abused and beaten by women, domestic violence against men should be taken more seriously.

In street/bar fights, where a woman is picking a fight with a man, the man is rightly restrained by societal pressure to not unload on her the way he would if it were a man picking a fight with him. This isn’t sexism or baseless gender roles or any of that, it’s because most of the time, untrained men are wielding a sledgehammer to an untrained woman’s carpentry hammer (untrained in combat sports, I mean). So in that way, it’s not a double-standard despite sounding like one, no more than it’s a double standard to not beat the shit out of another man half your size when you would beat the shit out of him for the same offence if he were your size or bigger. Not that we should beat anyone up, of course! But it happens and will always happen, so it’s nice to have at least one broad rule in an otherwise-ruleless endeavour: men shouldn’t beat the shit out of women unless they really need to, to defend themselves from an actual threat, a threat to something more than their ego or temper.

P.S. Thanks for replying without calling me a misandrist or telling me to kill myself 💗 Genuinely appreciate it!

Loneliness.

Men hitting women is different from women hitting men.

I don’t care if people - even strangers - see me naked. I don’t walk around nude or anything, not because of shame or embarrassment, but because I don’t wanna inflict such a visage on anyone against their will. But someone having seen my dick doesn’t make me embarrassed at all. For example, if someone walks in on me changing, or if someone yanks my pants down as a prank out in public, none of that bothers me in the slightest. In fact, I sometimes feel like I have to pretend to be a little embarrassed just because I worry that people will think I’m into public exhibitionism or something. It’s better for the other person if I pretend to be shocked/panicking. It’s weirder for them if I just stand there with my shlong out and start talking to them like nothing is out of the ordinary. But I really don’t give a shit.

Would be cool if the official Wikipedia mobile app integrated this functionality! It does have a ‘random articles’ card, but it’s nothing like this.

Not sure ‘addiction’ is being defeated here, though 😆 Like if I’m addicted to sausages, giving me bacon instead isn’t really solving the root of the issue. The issue being those sexy, sexy pigs.

Organising to do what exactly? A majority of the US population wants this nightmare. The Trump administration is expected to destroy norms and institutions to bring about their bigot’s utopia, they ran on that promise.

It’s really that dire. It’s beyond the reach of the checks and balances that have kept things somewhat on-track up until just after 9/11. Checks and balances are precisely what the voters want to delete from the courts.

If Trump wants a 3rd term, he will get it, and his voters will not be moved by marches or sit-ins or AOC exquisitely calling out the scum and villainy from the floor of the senate. Either talk Luigification, or let the people post their fucking memes in peace.

so waht? a litle plastik never would harmed my mindal health??

but why do i have overwelming urge to aslep in recycling bin??

Do your smaller-than-average feet have any appreciable effect on your mobility? If not, I have to wonder why we need these clown-ass feet at all. Waste of meat and leather.

What I like about this moment is that the people who ought to be fearful are indeed the ones who are fearful. I mean shit, Elon is posting Tweets about how great CEOs are actually, health insurance companies are removing pages from their websites that identify leadership, it’s a lovely little pocket of schadenfreude where we can all take a breath and prepare for the next 4 years.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Felt like I was fighting for my actual life in that game.

It’s the path of least resistance to achieve Musklessness. The second two of the positives you listed are actually negatives to the average Joe. Choice paralysis, overwhelming number of apps and servers, these are things that put people off even trying, especially if there are easier-to-use alternatives that are familiar and instant.

Mastodon is great, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of convenience. Too much copying and pasting and clicking through to different instances in order to read old posts etc. It needs to be more cohesive in a way that doesn’t require constantly leaving your timeline or going into the settings.

It’s also the case that the Twitter diaspora who are famous tend to choose BlueSky, and that brings a lot of people along with them.

And it’s also the case that Mastodon doesn’t have much of a marketing campaign outside of word-of-mouth, whereas BlueSky does.

😆

I can tell if you’re Catholic or Protestant by the way you pronounce the letter H.

Thank you, really interesting!

On a side note, I always through Stack Exchange was just for computery stuff. Didn’t know it covered everything!

Your kid’s first musical instrument. It’s counterproductive and false economy to buy them a piece of shit guitar or tuba or whatever it may be, in the belief that “if they like it and want to continue with it, I’ll buy them a better one in the future”. You might well turn the kid off the instrument for life if their instrument is harder to play/maintain and worse to listen to than it ought to be.

If you want your kid to be enriched by music and to be creative, buy them a decent mid-range instrument. Make it so that the kid can’t wait to pick it up, don’t make those crucial early days of learning the instrument feel like eating watery gruel for months with an expectation of pizza at some point down the line. A shitty instrument will be an additional barrier the kid will need to deal with every time they use it. Get out of their way, buy them something serviceable. If they lose interest regardless, well at least you know they had a fair shot at it and it wasn’t the crappiness of the instrument that caused them to abandon it. And you can always sell or donate the instrument if they really don’t give a shit about it.

The best instrument you can reasonably afford is significantly more likely to hook your kid than a £50 piece of junk would. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to be well-made, pleasant to play, and easy to tune/maintain/clean/whatever the case may be.