Chlamydia

If you’re cynical in your rumination then there isn’t much to ruminate about.

Don’t you hate your life

Cynicism is a vent. It’s cathartic where is truthful. There’s no point being angry “at god”, there isn’t one there. You can be angry at people, but only if it serves you. If the anger is pointless it’s easier to discard it. If it has a point (you’re going to complain to someone’s superior) then it can be a useful motivator. I hate discomfort, so I work until I’m comfortable. I expect people to be self serving (this doesn’t require any energy on my part) and I’m pleasantly surprised when they’re not. Neither an I self serving, when I do things for others it feels like I’m sticking two fingers up at a system that would rather I’m a self centred ghoulish consumer. I guess it could be summed up as having very low expectations. But rather than being depressing I find it has the effect of creating joy in everyday mundane things.

Have you tried cynicism?

Cynicism is expecting the plumber to screw you over and being pleasantly surprised when they don’t

Theres restraint and then there’s also suppression. You can find encouragements to restrain oneselves going back to proverbs in the bible or the ideals in Roman society.

Although controlling yourself was seen as advantageous in general, men were not expected to supress their emotions, quite the opposite. It was fine to be angry or vengeful or lustful or in love etc just as long as it was directed at someone lower in the social hierarchy.

Christianity probably had a hand in supressing those outlets, though looking at history is doubtful that the majority of the population were ‘pious’ like that.

Where it seems to have taken a notable turn is during the Victorian era. The social expectations of ‘proper’ behaviour started to constrain the outlets men were ‘allowed’ to have. Not just on the battlefield, where controlled marching into musket fire was more important than ever, being stoic in everyday life was becoming an ideal to restrain vice. Prostitution was becoming more taboo, as was gambling, and violence in general… at least in “civilised” society. Which in turn was possibly driven by the industrial revolution moving everyone to cities where living close together made these "sin"s more visibly awful.

Warfare had always been awful, but there was honour in man to man struggle. What got far worse from the 1700s on was needing an army to not crumble in the face of impersonal volleys of musket fire and canister shot from batteries of canon half a mile away. The era of feats of strength was over. Now you could get horribly mangled at random for standing in the wrong place. This was the origin of the British “stiff upper lip”, the ability to meet misfortune with indifference. The beginning of widespread supression of emotions.

From the Victoria era, add in half a century of industrialised warfare, the grimness of which had never been seen before. And by the 50s/60s society was dealing with very broken men who had been traumatised and given no better advice than “be a man and suck it up”. Which has disastrous consequences, not just for men but also domestic violence and abuse or neglect where things tipped over.

The hippie movement rediscovered men’s ‘softness’ but wasn’t practical. The eighties was practical - created an outlet in the deregulated business world of working ruthlessly and making personal riches - but it lacked “wellbeing”.

It’s really only in the millennial and gen z generations that this historical trauma is distant enough and society’s ideals have changed enough that we can even begin to have public conversations about men going to therapy or crying on a friend. This would have been sappy even in the 90s.

At the meeting:

“The AI could just crawl documents etc?”

“Don’t be silly… most people’s documents are cloud based now… and not necessarily with us”

“We could scan the text while they Edge?”

“I’ve told you about saying that that way…”

“Ok. we could scan the text while they use Edge to browse?”

"Use Edge? What planet are you on. Even I use Firefox. Simple truth is we have no visibility of what used spend 90% of their time doing "

“…”

“…”

“You know… we could just take a screenshot at regular intervals?”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“You know that’s such a ridiculously shit idea it might just work…”

who just wiggle their mouse every so often to keep the monitor on or whatever people do to pretend to be busy

Just use powershell to make a down cursor keypress every few minutes and put the screen on a long work-related webpage article like a normal programmer under surveillance…

Soon on Amazon…

1m USB-C CABLE HEATER!! 0.99c

($5.99 shipping)

This is the correct answer.

I don’t think what they said is actually a problem, it’s just a back-justification for the original trope. Daisy chaining them and strictly sticking to only the few appliances that would fit in one extension strip is fine. But that’s complicated to explain, it’s better to just tell people not to do it rather than expect them to understand what’s going on

A couple things that can happen…

• plugging in too many appliances over several daisy chained power strips trips the circuit breaker because too much current is being drawn

• if the country you live in has lax electrical safety standards then, yes, perhaps you can overload the daisy chain without tripping the main circuit which would lead to overheating

Two friends of mine met getting in opposite sides of the same taxi during the chaos of the 2005 London tube bombings. They decided to share the ride and it was love at first site. Got married etc.

Don’t know anyone else where it happened like in a movie like that.

Closest is one other friend, having just met and spoken to a girl for about twenty minutes, was just astonished at her take on life and general outlook and said (only half joking) to her “are you my wife?”. He later told friends “I just met my wife”. It was kinda funny because she was a very intelligent and sorted go getter and he was a bit of a bum. But he sorted himself out over the next 3 years and they did in fact end up getting married. Sorry I guess that is kinda like a movie lol…

This is just the early versions we’ll look back on and laugh at even when the successful versions have taken over EVERYTHING.

so VR equipment is getting lightweight and powerful enough for high realism. AI is just about generating compelling reality on the fly. Augmented realty is just about working smoothly thanks to modern hardware.

Now give everything another 10 years development.

We’ll be tapping up compelling 3d ‘personal shoppers’ and ‘personal customer service agents’ that feel more like butlers and servants because they ARE. And they’ll be 100% generated and pretty easy to talk to, especially compared to waiting on the phone or trying to type chat.

Perhaps Zucks metaverse dream will be located in there somewhere. What if in that time we nail 3d video chat - perhaps a dose of AI and VR ‘learning you’ so it gives you realistic micro gestures without having to scan your face aggressively.

I can see it all becoming a lot more believable. And chatting to company AI services like you would a person becoming the norm.

And someone will be like “ha, remember the ‘metaverse’ back in 2023/4?” and someone else will point out all the technology they’re using right then and there is owned by meta. In fact I bet there’ll be a TIL post about it in 2035…

Almost any “pop” news / science / gossip / chat / lifestyle article site with ad and pop-up blockers off. Just. Jesus Christ. What the fuck. The fact that some people browse the internet like this… AND the fact some people actually made it in the first place…

I wouldn’t mind it being legal but oh my god I can’t stand the smell of weed

*IF* they had pulled it off well we wouldn’t all be here making fun of it. It would have been cool Well… by cool I mean let’s say for argumnets sake they absolutely nailed the virtual hangout, so you got something that felt holographic it was so real. It would be cool to hang out with your friends that way (if being together wasn’t an option) and it would be more bearable than zoom for a work meeting. At least it might have made non-verbal cues flow better and making virtual converstaion less of a ballache. If it had been flawless then it might have galvinised the movement to make working remotely the new default

Unforunately they didn’t pull it off. But it was worth trying is all i’m saying…

There’s always been frauds and dipshits. I had a front row seat to the dot com boom and bust and it was not dissimilar to the bollocks going on now. Except the richest people made OS/hardware (Gates, Allen, Dell) or were traditional investors (Buffet)…

Better check the TOS doesn’t include acceptance of various concentrations of piss…

Tim Berners-Lee, lying on floor, groans

files finger nails

Instead of Chat how about ‘Utterance’ or just ‘Speech’?

Also the other characters response shouldn’t be a different object should it but a different type? Perhaps you should have CharacterSpeech and NPCSpeech inheriting from Speech? And Dialog holds a collection of these?

I take it you’re not planning on becoming a domiciliary nurse?