stray

Here in Sweden the government recently lowered taxes on groceries so that the stores would lower their prices for customers. lol

Our supply vendor works like that. Looking for brown paper bags? Here’s every brown and paper item in the catalog, along with some plastic bags!

I love that the name "mezzaluna" is so descriptive that I immediately knew what tool you meant despite having never encountered the word in my life. Nicely done, Italy.

Most of my art doesn't mean anything. I essentially run a procedural generation script like I'm a Minecraft server or a screensaver or something. The pieces that contain some meaning are usually limited to being visually pleasing or practically useful rather than having *artistic* meaning. The meaninglessness has made me very depressed for most of my life, but I've been making some progress recently on not giving a shit. (Shout-out to Erasmus from the Dune prequels. I feel your pain, buddy.)

The parents are also suffering from the negative medical effects of algorithms designed to manipulate and addict. You’re asking why a victim of drug abuse isn’t a more responsible parent.

I’m not trying to do a gotcha, but doesn’t your post also mean that Lemmy is bad and no one should use it?

The Mythbusters proved you can polish a turd, especially if it’s from a carnivore.

It’s literally satire. Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire

No one said we know everything about our biology. But we're made up of particles, just like everything else. We don't fully understand those particles either, but it doesn't make them not real or not subject to the rules reality seems to follow. They actually make little pills you can swallow to take samples at certain locations a long your digestion, so I suppose I could, given the knowledge and resources. Surgical sampling is also possible. But I don't see why it matters because all of the bacteria and archaea present in the body are made up of subatomic particles.

We're not actually individuals; we're massive colonies of cells that work in concert. Memories and consciousness are both products of chemical interactions that happen between the cells, and the cells themselves are conglomerates of subatomic particles. Everything about us is determined by particle physics, which can be expressed and predicted mathematically.

I don’t mean to argue against flowers, but why specifically Pennsylvania? What about everywhere else?

Oh yeah, that’s a good one. The best I had was like transportation, like a bus pass or bike parts? Maybe the “10% student discount” is an item under the category of “transaction discount”, and there’s lots of different ones that all show up like that on the receipts.

Transubstantiation? Transgression? Transcendent? Do they give you a 10% discount if you do some light transmogrification work for them on the side?

My T-shirts all have the tag at the bottom of the left seam.

Coughing can't possibly be a symptom of any illness because I sometimes cough without being sick.

You can find “leftenant” as a normal spelling in older texts. No one is sure why.

It was spelled with an R in the past, and they tried to change it to an L (because that’s how it “properly” should be according to its origins), but only the spelling stuck, probably due to everyone being illiterate anyway.

It helps to break it up. worce - ster - shire “Worcestershire sauce is the worst.” “Thousand island is worster.” “‘Worster’? Sure.”

Everyone has trouble with that one. There’s even a joke about it in Finding Nemo. I don’t imagine most English-speakers can spell it offhand.

eye-dee-uh It was I, Dia.

Schedule depends on where you’d like to blend into. You’ve got: skedjuhl sked-juul shed-juul shedj-yuu-uhl skedj-yuu-uhl Possibly more! I think the ones with two syllables sound most common/least specific to a dialect. SK is more American and SH is more UK.

For the books I would personally most like to translate, I think the problem is marketability. Nordic children’s/youth literature often contains nudity/sexuality and/or darker emotional themes which are often viewed as inappropriate in English-speaking cultures. In “Vi skulle vært løver” by Line Baugstø a young girl discovers her classmate is transgender, and for much of the book participates in transphobia before learning better and supporting her new friend. It’s a very well-told and realistic emotional experience, but would likely be seen as grooming by many English-speaking audiences. Not only does it support trans people, but it also spends quite a lot of time in the girls’ locker room. I think if you tried to give this to kids in the US or UK there’d just be a ton of controversy about it and it’d get banned.

I wonder this all the time. I can’t help but fantasize how I would translate things while reading, but there’s nothing to be done about it if the publisher isn’t interested. They could at least make it legal to distribute fan translations.

Is she a professional liveseamer on Stitch.tv?

Those things pop your ears, yeah, but they’re not what I mean, and they don’t make the noise. Oh well.

I taught myself to do this after reading about it in a short fantasy promo when I was little. An adult asks a boy what he can hear, and he says people talking, so the man instructs him on how to really listen to what is being said around him, to gather information without attracting notice. I’ve always wondered what that story was because I’d like to read the whole thing.

I didn’t realize that’s not a thing everyone can do. There’s a part of All I Want for Christians is You that’s just someone mashing annoyingly on a piano, and it’s so disgusting that I love it. It starts at about 0:58 on the YouTube Music copy, and then changes at about 1:05. It’s such an annoying sound in isolation.

Human skin contains photoreceptors, so this makes perfect sense.

Based on what I’ve read about senses, I think most of human sensory variance is born in the brain and is trainable to be much more sensitive than we’d generally expect possible given our comparatively weak hardware. Some of us have the supertaster gene, but no one comes out of the womb a sommelier.

Can you do that thing where you flex some internal muscle and hear a loud rumbling that I assume is rushing blood? It’s hard to explain. I think the muscle is related to the jaw, or maybe ear movement. It’s not externally perceivable, but it’s useful on an airplane.