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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • regarding your edit there, I guess most people stopped reading at ‘essential oils’ without knowing where this was going.

    this is one (the only?) actual medical use for these things - their main thing is that they smell in a certain way that is consistent, so you use them to retrain your sense of smell. that’s it. no taking internally or applying to skin or whatever. just take the stopper off the wee bottle, sniff and repeat for as many bottles as you can be arsed.

    when I had covid-19, I didn’t have so well defined scents on hand, but I did have several colognes I could sniff, and I knew fairly well how they were supposed to smell and could use those to gauge my senses. fun times, they were…




  • Yeah I loved EUIV early on, but have left it alone for a while. Now, whenever I get the urge to play again (and I do), I have a look at everything that popped up in the meantime and it’s just overwhelming. Sure, I could play the snapshot I have but then the game keeps getting patched so you get stunted new mechanics that need the DLCs to function properly. I could revert to a previous patch, but what was the patch in march 2021? Do I still find it in the steam options?

    And if you want to bite the bullet and just buy the whole DLC collection it’s around 100 euro for a couple of years. or something like 300 for the whole package? I do appreciate the quality that paradox churns out though.

    This is why I’ve been holding off on getting victoria 3.


  • straight razor, my man. used to get terrible razor burn and lots of small cuts from disposables (of all types, and the whole Gillette 5 stacked blades are just a very expensive scam imo). switched to a nice straight razor and it’s a whole new world. love the ritual, too.

    downsides would be the cost (but you never pay for a disposable again) and the slightly steep learning curve. also may be frowned upon in a carry-on on an airplane, and I don’t trust baggage handlers to not brutalize my checked in luggage. so I just go feral if travelling for a couple of days or use an obscene amount of bubble wrap.



  • Aside from the Shub-Niggurath worship (I’m more of an Azathoth person, myself), I agree with most things here. I’d just add to the list, group B I guess:

    • aquatic animal husbandry and aquascaping (freshwater preferably, saltwater if you are really masochistic and have money to burn on corals and expensive equipment)
    • model railroading

    I feel these are more ‘apex’ hobbies, wherein you need a bit of everything (chemistry, electronics, an artistic sense, lots of patience) and they will occupy most of your time. You’d think electronics and aquaria are not the closest things, but just you wait until you feel the need to build an LED lamp with simulated day/night cycles and moonlight, controlled by an arduino.

    The barrier to entry is fairly low - there are starter sets available and I’ve found that hobby shops of this sort are usually staffed by very knowledgeable people, eager to help newcomers. And, you can go as deep as you want and still have fun. You will also learn an absolute fuckton of things about what you choose to model with your hobby.

    An honorable mention for homebrewing, which I don’t even regard as a hobby at this point, but more of a necessity, like cooking.


  • you’re fighting a losing battle. ‘having kids is a good thing’ is the only piece of propaganda that is distributed to probably every human. and probably the oldest one, too. it’s also a base instinct, sort of hard to override by reasoning, as anyone who’s ever been horny or hungry can probably attest. this is probably the best example on here related to the posted question.

    for what it’s worth, I do think you are correct




  • add to that that google turned to crap nowadays and just pushes meaningless bot generated content in the top pages… it’s getting almost impossible to use it to find stuff. not sure about other engines because I only started recently being search-engine-curious, so no idea how they were like before


  • Your philosophical dilemma is valid, but I would point out that pointing fingers is the best choice we have in this matter. Say, indeed, the ones fucking shit up do have intellectual disabilities, they still continue doing it. Reprimanding them for it is perhaps society’s way of trying to get them to stop. Sort of like in the case of a child I guess - children being considered in this argument as having not enough understanding of the consequences of their actions. Equate, if you will, ‘goddamn it Billy, stop running in the street’ to ‘goddamnit grandma, stop voting for idiots’.

    The problem then is that Billy may listen, but grandma is set in her ways and has the notion that age brings wisdom regardless, so she’s less inclined to listen to what the equivalent of Billy for her has to say.

    I see no alternatives for this (that is to say, an attempt to correct erroneous behaviour) in the context of the aspirations of modern society.

    As a thought experiment, in the most extreme case, what would we do? Test everyone for lead and remove, for example, the right to vote across a certain threshold? That doesn’t take into account the baseline intellectual ability of individual (which can vary across a population) and the degree to which said discovered lead levels would affect them. It’s entirely possible that a lead-laden ‘smart’ brain still has more capability than a pure but idiotic one. Not sure how we’d ever assess that. Not to mention the system would be exploited as soon as possible to channel power.

    We could of course, stop pointing fingers and forgive them, for they know not what they do, and it’d probably have about the same effect.



  • It’s easier to tell people to just use a rubber when on antibiotics rathern than explain to them that it’s only for some unpronounceable substances for most of the population and have them memorize a list of substances for which it’s safe to go on as usual - azithromycin is safe, amoxicillin is not. They may sound fairly similar to a layman.

    It’s because some substances (in this case, antibiotics) mess with the units in your body that process them and prepare them for excretion. They may inhibit or induce them, but these units process a whole load of other stuff. Including birth control, which can lead to less activity from the birth control pills because they’re inactivated quicker (in case of induction) or the biotransformation to the active form is slower (in case of inhibition, for prodrugs that are inactive as is, but have active metabolites, no idea if this is the case for birth control though).

    A similar thing happens with alcohol, for example, which is why you should always be honest with exactly how much alcohol you drink or what other drugs you take when talking to an anaesthesiologist, or any doctor prescribing you any sort of medicine, lest you risk ineffective anaesthesia or treatment (the first one is worse imo).