Okay, fair enough.

I fail to see the distinction. By OPs prompt, we’re getting attacked no matter what once his plot armor expires.

Sea levels rise the same everywhere. And not in 10 yrs it won’t.

Ooh, I get to choose the location?

Fairly close to the North Pole. Our people are adapted to it, assuming the island has always been there somehow. Nobody else is, making the logistics of trying to invade an absolute nightmare for anyone on Earth.

Now we just have to feed ourselves somehow in the event of a naval blockade, so a lot of investment into ballistic missiles and submarines to make a blockade as difficult as possible and hopefully keep our trade open during the summertime. I assume we’re fully reliant on imports that can only come in during that seasonal window. Fishing alone probably can’t sustain a population that large, and nothing is going to grow up there.

Assuming an invasion has to occur in 10 years and cannot be delayed, whoever tries is kinda fucked though.

If North Pole is cheating, then in the middle of the Pacific with the same plan. Probably can’t resist something like the US though in that case.

The answer was — and is — not to let that panic us or force a change in policy: to keep calm and carry on.

When you’re dealing with a bully, there are times when you have no good alternative than to just punch them back. We have intelligence services and cyberwarfare departments too, if I’m not mistaken.

Just imagine if you ordered a jack and coke, and you had no way of knowing if they’re actually going to give you watered-down diet coke and the mildest single malt scotch they could find, or cherry coke and a really intense rye, or anything in between. And at every new place, it’s just a gamble what you’ll get.

That’s kinda what its like.

IPA wackos, I can’t stand this places IPAs because they don’t put a whole roasted chicken in the cup with the beer.

… yea okay, that’s fair.

Still though, IPAs run a huge gamut for some reason. I feel like the degree of variety you find in the IPA category is really strangely big. Like, if I order a stout or a porter I know about what I’m going to get, flavor-wise. But with an IPA it can run from fairly mild to way-past-grapefruit-juice.

Depends on what type of bullshit.

On one end, if the bullshit is just “my partner wants me to give a fuck about them”, and you don’t want to have to do that, then decent sex might be enough to make you consider changing your mind, if you’re also compatible in other ways.

On the other end, if the bullshit is “my partner has psychotic breaks and chases me around the house with a chainsaw”, I don’t think any quality of sex would really merit consideration in the bigger picture, given how short your lifespan might become.

So, there’s something of a scale there, and it partly comes down to what you personally consider bullshit to be. People won’t agree on that, it’s a personal thing.

Conspiracy being a real phenomenon and the manufacture and spread of conspiracy theories to help one particular narrative are two separate concepts.

MKUltra and Illuminati running the world/flat earth/young earth/great replacement/etc are two different types of things. You have to ask who benefits from spreading the idea around. Flat/young earth is a particularly easy example, certain religious movements benefit from convincing people those are valid ideas.

I think you can reach out via txt, just format your message to subtly acknowledge that a response is unnecessary. So, instead of wording your message normally as something that would begin a back-and-forth, word it more like an old fashioned letter, or something else where a response isn’t expected. Can talk about whatever, updates on you, your thoughts about this or that, hopes she/her family are doing better, etc etc. Then just end with an old sounding “hope this finds you well” type of thing. Just avoid non-rhetorical questions or anything that pressures her to return contact. When she’s ready, she can write you back.

Yeah, this has always bugged me too. It slows down our accumulation of old content, which is one of the big draws of platforms like this. People love to go to reddit for answers to questions originally asked years ago, and they could potentially use Lemmy for that too, if our backstock got substantial enough. As a much smaller userbase, though, we kinda need every thread we can get.

Yeah, but I like to try to use it to move in a certain direction emotionally. Like, instead of pure sad, I’ll put on something sad and wistful to move a little in that direction, or sad and angry to shift a little that way, depending on my current needs.

Like, this is sad and wistful, with a touch of determination:

https://youtu.be/es9MQweZzvc

This is sad and angry:

https://youtu.be/6NXnxTNIWkc

This helps avoid wallowing in the pure sad feeling, which I don’t really like.

Big yellow flame probably indicates its not getting enough air mixing with the fuel for complete combustion. I’m guessing something got clogged up with soot, or possibly rust. Look around at all the little holes the gas comes out of, see if any of them are clogged up. If you find some, something like a safety pin can probably get them opened up.

5/10 interestingness gets 0 seconds of watch time for me, there’s just too much quality content produced in my topics of interest every day for me to keep up with. I already have to miss some 7/10 projects just because there’s only so much free time in a day.

Regarding the time question, for something that barely crosses the “okay I’ll watch it” threshold, 10-15 minutes is probably what I’ll give it. It can be longer than that, I’ll just skip through parts of the video for the gist to decide if I want to give it more time.

Worth noting though, that for extremely interesting content, a 15 minute duration actually dissuades me from watching it, as I doubt there’s enough time to cover much of anything at a decent level in that little an amount of time. So like, for a neat history vid on a topic I’d like to hear more about, if it’s 30 minutes or less then I’m less likely to give it a chance, unless it’s covering something super narrow where there wouldn’t be as much to talk about. But if you’re going to cover a major historical event, you better be at least a half hour. There are some exceptions to this, Indy Nidell(sp?) is a good example, but it’s my general rule.

Yes, absolutely.

I’d probably take something like 10% of it and go ahead and enjoy spending that, you can get some cool stuff for 1.5k that you can enjoy right now.

How you want to invest the bulk of it depends on your plans, but don’t forget that things like a reliable car or a computer you might need for future schooling are also “investments” of sorts into your future.

I’m not so knowledgeable about all the different sorts of investments out there, so maybe someone else can help out there. Knowing what your medium-long term goals are will help them fine-tune their advice though. Are you planning on any sort of post-secondary education or job training?

I find it useful to remember that entertainment products are designed to be both understandable and fun, where real life was not designed to be understandable and fun.

With that in mind, no, I would not.

Yeah, every once in awhile I check my starred pages just to see what random things got fat fingered onto it. It’s mildly amusing.

Yeah, I won’t say it’s impossible or anything. I just think there’s other reasonable explanations too.

Personally I just avoid mentioning China when I’m over there. lol It’s easier to keep everything civil if you avoid naming names, and China is a particularly sore spot for them. You also can’t forget that free speech is not a foundational part of their ideology like it is ours. They’re more about seizing the means of production than the free contesting of ideas.

It does feel a little like walking on eggshells.

I kinda doubt it. Let’s not forget this is a global community, and Marxism-Leninism has different levels of support in different parts of the world.

If this was a state-funded project, I think the development would have gone a lot more swiftly, and the leads would be even more puritanical in pushing their beliefs. As it is, I’ve argued pretty extensively from a liberal perspective on .ml before, even personally with dessalines, and while they don’t exactly love me over there, I’m careful to respect their rules and they haven’t banned me.

I think they really are just idealistic supporters of communism, mostly from places where that’s a little more common.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

Vampires…? Uh, garlic. lol