My years are ticking by. I feel this comic hard.

A thousand dollars seems fantastically reasonable for a well-engineered home-gaming machine that can play current gen PC games at high quality. I spend that much every several years on upgrading or building a new PC.

My complaint is not the price, I think the price is fair. Let’s talk wages.

No need to look it up, fact-check or confirm this or verify context. It was posted with a picture of the man so it must be true.

I bet some early humans did trip balls and come up with new ideas and new ways to use rocks and sticks and abstraction.

But the reality is, our brains expanded because there was no other competition for resources or territory anywhere that could match other tribes of humans. We had eons of bloodshed, of violence and barbarism that favored those who could outthink their opponents and predict what other humans would do.

All of our mental strength comes from predictive capability. Our brains are not recording/calculating devices, they are simulators. All of our thoughts, all of our memories, are just simulations being run over and over and trying to connect with other associations and input. Understanding this is really important too, because when you realize this and really internalize it, you can break free from those countless millennia of survival instinct and calm your brain and not ruminate or dwell on problems, which is just your brain running simulations of your worst experiences and worst predicted outcomes over and over.

Your brain runs simulations to explain how you feel. It doesn’t have to even make sense, it just takes a feeling or sensation you have like sadness or anxiety, and it starts attaching stories to it in order to survive. It does this automatically, but you can train it to stop, you can live in a moment and let the feeling pass through you. It can give you back hours, days or years of your life.

Every “rising” company has a few people like this, a few key players who know the field or have such niche expertise that they get given the largest leeway and most room to do whatever they want, as long as the results keep coming in.

The catch here is that the more successful the company gets, the more power and flexibility they have to get the exact kind of employee they want. So if you dream of being in this position, be careful and don’t let it go to your head just because you were free to join the meeting 10 minutes late in your pajamas in the early days.

I used to want a Jeep, the comments in this post as well as this insight into the subculture have turned me right around.

he found a patch of snow and parked his jeep on it, regardless of if it crossed multiple spaces. He believes that only his jeep can park safely on snow so that it’s somehow taking advantage of an unused space in the lot, when really normal cars can park on a couple inches of snow just fine.

This is one of those strips where it serves the joke better to not look at the images, they’re not where the gag is. That said, it could have been drawn better to help more readers get the joke. The artist is saving time.

I am not advocating for anything here but an awareness of how much of our society is an unnatural product of culture and social communication.

Mental framing can make you hate the presence of something totally natural and normal. Where else can we see that effect at work? That’s the question I’m asking here, I don’t want this falling down some kind of weird slope where I’m arguing against fucking bathing.

Absolutely, but there was a time in our species when we could make that differentiation. To have body odor is natural, we certainly didn’t have soap and didn’t always live near water sources, but what we consider body odor now would have been normal and not unpleasant at the time, meanwhile odors that are actually caused by illness would stand out.

This is all of society. But with the added last panel where a camera is pointed at the guy who wants to be mad, and dollar signs ticking up because watching people who want to be mad over having solutions is big business.

For further evidence of this fact, it needs to be reiterated that components of perfume and cologne are some of the vilest shit you can imagine. Whale vomit, ass-juice of mammals, and so on.

This is because our whole idea of “smell” is a really odd social construct, and the things we think we smell aren’t necessarily objective. A strong smell can mix with another smell and suddenly your brain forgets all social context around it. I could go on for hours how weird it is that we cover up so much of our natural smells when we spent the vast majority of our evolution using scent and body odor as a perfectly natural, normal tool for communicating with each other.

But social influence is stronger than evolution. Some people take this knowledge selectively and ignore in other places, but it’s the heart of many of our broader social issues. This is why even though we spent the last million years or so piled in communal dens and caves, sweaty bodies in contact with each other night and day, we now gag when we pass someone who identifies as a Magic The Gathering player.

I’m sure quality can vary wildly, but the one I have right now seems to keep water hot for the whole house even when people are taking simultaneous showers. I also imagine there are some really efficient tank heaters out there too.

I think at the end of the day, all we can really agree on is that synapsids were really weird looking animals but probably would be like any large land animal who bonds with anyone who adopts them at an early age and were likely affectionate and loving despite how terrifying they were.

Newer homes have tankless constant water heaters and it’s the greatest thing in the world.

Be aware that there are a LOT of worms in the silt, which can be hundreds of meters deep.

There are vast stretches of the Abyssal Plane under the ocean that have no real laws or governance. No healthcare companies, no AI, no partisan politics, nothing.

Yeah also blocked 'em. There are some absolute knobs on this site. I swear on reddit my block list was over a hundred deep after 10 years. Here it went up to a hundred within a couple months.

It’s the smaller-community vibe makes trolls and people with personality disorders feel like they get more response fucking with people. People on larger sites I think they are more hesitant to get scrutiny from larger numbers of people, which really betrays how insecure they are.

You’re just egotistical and self-centered. But if I were being dramatic I wouldn’t have bothered giving you the hard truth of reality: If you don’t make the most basic effort towards clear communication, especially if you’re doing it on purpose, people are going to gloss over what you said or not take you seriously, and you will get ignored and shut out of further communication.

Like I’m doing now.

If your choice of self expression makes me stumble when trying to read it, I am not making extra effort. This is how most people feel. It must feel spectacular being so incredibly smart in a world full of first graders. You must be fabulously wealthy and powerful.

I couldn’t read it, but also I don’t care enough to try.

So the moral of the story: you do you, but don’t whine if a lot of people don’t absorb your information. At some point you have to ask if you’re just performing for yourself or if you actually care about what you’re saying on a broader level.

I love how the word “daddy” has been as ruined as the word “step sister” or “step brother.” We cannot have nice things.

I mean, we can have nice things but we tend to always try to find ways to fuck them.