i can forgive people for not referencing an ancient comedy that would take an entire paragraph of preamble to explain its relevant before making a point about a fictional story from a long time ago.

it’s not like it was a history.

IDK, it’s not impossible that someone who was born in the 80s will live go be freakishly old and outlive all the 90s kids.

not probable, but who knows, maybe they somehow avoided eating plastic based baby food or some shit.

always more complicated than the headlines would have you believe.

hell, Geralt spends damn near a quarter of the series straight up disarmed. one of the books is basically a legal drama about him trying to not go to jail after getting his sword stolen. don’t think he has his sword for about 99% of that one.

“gotta get my fuckin sword back” is a very common plot point throughout that series. not just for Geralt. ciri spends some time sword chasing too. i don’t hate it.

because that’s actually not in the books lol.

i honestly hate the show because it’s not at all accurate to the books either in spite of that being the bulk of their marketing. that said, the two swords things comes entirely from the games. in the books he makes comments a few times about the fancy metals in his swords helping kill monsters, but he only has one at a time.

but all of the same things could be said about Biden. he won. what changed?

the data does not support this conclusion. more young men did not vote for Trump, less people in total voted. almost no one changed their vote from last election. people were just convinced to stay home, which always results in Republican wins. both candidates got less votes total than last year, by a lot. i blame this on the “i refuse to vote for genocide” people that have just successfully accelerated that genocide.

the real metric that matters is that way way less people voted. not many people changed their votes from last time. many people are simply convinced to stay home, and as always, that results in a Republican win. the propaganda that was most effective was all of the “Kamala is no true Scotsman, so you should just not vote”. i believe this was lost by the people that “refused to vote for genocide”. i think that’s what accelerated the genocide.

they aren’t saying all media. they’re saying that the media conservatives consume is like that. this is about the media and information bubble that you clearly exist in.

you expect a layperson to be capable of that? you’re expectations are too high. that’s the level of detail aftter you just need to go read their own words.

the Harris walz campaign has pages and pages of details about exactly what and how they plan to manage that. go read that. it surely has the answers.

really? they’re almost as common as cigarette butts once were now. are you a hermit?

my ex spent time in a woman’s prison in Georgia. she used to describe pretty much exactly this. among many other horrible things. it’s funny, in America there’s this common perception that the other prisoners are the scary part of prison. no, it’s the guards. they would find any excuse to beat people and rape was a nearly daily occurrence for some.

the majority of her time served was before her trial or sentencing or anything. there is shockingly little difference between how we treat a person arrested, but still presumed innocent, and someone found guilty and in prison.

I think the Wikipedia article answers that question: “carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords could be attached.[6] A relatively small number have survived.”

they’re fragile and don’t last. i imagine the act of reading them probably wears them down quickly if they’re read often. you read them through abrasion. books are fragile too, but it’s possible to handle them carefully and still read them. can these be read by sight? I’m actually not sure now that i think about it.

this likely created survivorship bias. even in the cultures that we know to have used them surviving examples are uncommon. there could easily have been other cultures doing this or something similar, but we wouldn’t know before none survived the test of time.

edit: read further and there’s also this “and most quipu were identified as idolatrous and destroyed,” -destroyed by the spaniards.

classic.

man i gotta finish reading first.

“Various cultures have used knotted strings unrelated to South American quipu to record information — these include Chinese knotting, and practice by Tibetans, Japanese, and Polynesians.[10][11][12][13][14]”

i bet we could get a better answer by looking at the cultures that did this but weren’t fucked over by colonizers. Japan seems a good place to start. one of the few countries that looked colonizers in the face, saw through their bullshit, then had the strength of arm to tell them to fuck all the way off.

what numbers? Russia has been the aggressor in nearly every conflict they’ve been involved in. Russia and its puppets are attacking countries around them and no one else in the region is. that’s the closest thing to an actual claim that i made. the rest was just me making assumptions about his mindset.

i mean… that is one of the most volatile regions in the world in the 21st century and it is almost entirely putin causing that. if there’s little competition then it’s because he’s the only major power in the region stuck in last centurie’s mindset and trying to pull the rest of us back. everyone else being better now is a point against putin.

it’s like the rest of the world saw WWII as a lesson on how not to be, and he saw glory.

oh, that was a very different thing. in fact, i think it’s a shame that public reaction to that situation killed dolphin research.

there’s a really really good episode of radiolab on this. the experiment was actually extremely promising and groundbreaking. they had a dolphin spending his own free time practicing in the mirror making human words with his blowhole. he used the water to try and make a sort of lip, rotating the blowhole in and out of the water to shape the sounds. this dolphin was able to understand spoken language and was observably getting frustrated at his inability to say what he clearly wanted to.

the dolphin jerking thing happened because this was a dolphin actively in the throws of puberty. dolphins are intelligent, willful, occasionally evil animals. in nature they will masturbate themselves on shellfish and do other heinous sexually deviant things by human standards. the dolphin in the study was showing tremendous progress, but started exhibiting strong sexual urges. it got to the point that he was completely uncooperative. they jerked him off because he was cooperative after. there is no reason to believe the dolphin was explicitly attracted to the researcher and the researcher has said that she wasn’t attracted to the dolphin.

this story was highly sensationalized. so much so that it completely overshadowed the fact that THE DOLPHIN COULD TALK. he wasn’t very good at it, but that’s only because he lacked the hardware. to this day no one can get funding for dolphin research because of this. it left that much of a stink on the entire field. we have made almost no meaningful progress in this field since. THE DOLPHIN COULD FUCKING TALK AND ALL WE CARE ABOUT IS HOW GROSS IT IS THAT THEY JERKED IT OFF.

also very different from chimps raised by citizens with no real plan. this was an organized and funded academic study with many people working on it and many eyes watching it. this was not one of the things that we did to animals in labs at the time that was problematic. there were other things that actually were worth getting upset over.

alternatively, I’ve heard it’s a good emulator.

the horny brain will actively chemically supresses our “ick” reaction. we’re literally less capable of being grossed out when having sex.

mine just attached under my toilet seat. the water line connects to the existing toilet water line. it came with the fitting i needed and was easier than Legos to set up.

think i payed like $25 on Amazon like 5 years ago. i try not to buy from Amazon anymore, but I’m sure there are many reasonable options out there elsewhere.

eh, is got a little valve and i just turn it all the way. i like the cleanness.

what do you mean? there’s a million refillable options out there. have been for years. the popularity of disposables is mostly about convenience, habit (it’s similar to buying cigarettes), and laziness. it’s a great example of how much people just don’t give a shit. it’s actually waaaay cheaper in the long run to use a refillable one. gives a better experience with more flavor options too. but it’s maybe 5% less convenient to use. therefore only about 5% of users go for that.

i fucking hate human nature.

i have like 5 friends in trying to convince away from the disposables right now. I’m 3 years in, and may have one that would be willing to try it i bought it for him. it’s so fucking hard to change anyone’s buying habits. i don’t get why. these are all people that SAY they care about the environment. then i show them an easy to fix way that they are FUCKING INCREDIBLY AWFUL to the environment and they just shrug…

oh, there’s fields and fields of entire cars just sitting in all inhabited remote places. it’s becoming a real problem in Alaska. there’s towns there literally getting buried in dead cars because it’s too expensive to take them anywhere else.

generally if you think “i wonder if this type of thing is getting disposed of properly or if it’s a huge ecological problem” the answer is always the latter. the humans in charge don’t care about the environment. that’s not profitable.