I always assumed that it was supposed to be ambiguous between them for humor purposes

You can find plenty of weird furry fetish art on the fediverse too if you find the right instances, that’s just an internet thing.

I’ve never actually had alcohol, don’t even know what it tastes like. Not for age reasons (I’m 25), but the thought of having my faculties/inhibitions lower triggers my anxiety disorder a bit, and I don’t like being around drunk people, so I’ve always been something of a teetotaler.

If the holy wine (I forget the proper term for it) is supposed to be the blood of Jesus, does that imply that if you concentrate that wine and then run an engine off it, you have a Jesus fueled car?

Forget that, what powers them? Something that can be read with a close by scanner makes some since since I figure you could induce a current in one, but the kind you sometimes see in movies that constantly sends out a signal that some satellite can clearly track anywhere in the world, and do so for days, weeks, months or longer, would need one heck of a battery I’d imagine? And in a very small space too

I don’t think I’ve personally encountered anything too weird, but a family member of mine apparently once had a coworker named “Orangello”, who had a sibling named “Lemongello”

This makes me wonder what happens if a person with dual citizenship that includes one country that makes name changes hard and one that does not, legally changes their name in the easier one. Do the two countries end up disagreeing over what that person’s name is, or is there some kind of international agreement on recognizing the same names to prevent confusion for law enforcement and such?

I’ve actually heard a story from a family member once about briefly encountering a kid with that name and pronunciation. So either funny coincidence to meet the same kid, or there’s more than one set of parents out there that thought that was a clever name idea somehow.

I used to see them every so often on people in stores and such when I lived in NC, I moved to MA sometime around the covid lockdowns and havent seen one in person since, though Ive encountered people that like Trump vocally enough that Id not be that surprised to see one.

Ive usually seen “Expat” defined as someone working in another country, but explicitly with the intent to be there temporarily and leave once their time at that job ends, rather than moving there with an intent to stay and join that society. Which, granted, doesnt seem to be what OP is actually talking about in this case.

Because having a revolver or a rifle or something is going to really do anything if the government comes after you personally.

Any actual resistance movement capable of achieving much is going to find a way to arm itself regardless of if the country theyre from allowed guns during peacetime or not, they seem to in other countries that such things have formed in after all. Could be through illicit purchases from elsewhere, or homemade weapons, or theft, or whatever else, it always seems to happen.

to be fair, he had more checks on his power then, had less motive for revenge against the justice and electoral systems, and is now even more crazy. Im hoping it will be just some incompetence and international embarrassment, but Im worried that it might be more.

Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?

Back when computers were nowhere near capable of teaching kids, one can handwave away issues with the tech by saying “when the tech is ready to do this, it will be great” essentially. When the tech is at the point where it can sort of do something, but not do it well, one instead imagines how badly things might go if one tried the notion right now instead of at whatever point in the future the technology is good enough to actually do a good job.

I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.

While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

Theres someone I sometimes encounter in a discord Im in that makes a hobby of doing stuff with them (from what I gather seeing it, they do more with it that just asking them for a prompt and leaving them at that, at least partly because it doesnt generally give them something theyre happy with initially and they end up having to ask the thing to edit specific bits of it in different ways over and over until it does). I dont really understand what exactly it is this entails, as what they seem to most like making it do is code “shaders” for them that create unrecognizable abstract patterns, but they spend a lot of time talking at length about technical parameters of various models and what they like and dont like about them, so I assume the guy must find something enjoyable in it all. That being said, using it as a sort of strange toy isnt really the most useful use case.

“hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”

-“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”

I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.