That’s not a definition of middle class at all.

Christ that’s the point of what I wrote and the point of this post. That’s some reddit-level density my friend.

If you define “middle class” as having a phone and a car and a job, then yes, there are countless middle-class families who get some form of assistance.

Middle-class, working families who live in their fucking car.

containing loli

It wasn’t containing loli, it had generic hentai and some horse stuff. I was there and saw it, about 1000 hate-watchers immediately screamed “LOLI” and it stuck.

I think to be fair the artist was a known artist who had done loli and there was a character who was underage in some show but didn’t look more or less underage than ALL hentai, but people don’t necessarily save porn based on what other works the artist has made or what the storylines say. It was a pretty desperate accusation, people REALLY need to hate people who have different opinions.

I started at advanced, I was born hating everything and scowling at imbeciles who didn’t think about the world. I am trying slowly to get back down to “beginner.” It’s been difficult.

Just got back from Southeast Asia, I’ll take this any day.

I have owned many cats, and I have huffed deeply of them all.

Cat fur, cat toes, cat bellies, all have these unique and wonderful scents that are probably more connected to our emotional connections to them than the actual nature of the scent itself. This should teach us a lot about social conditioning and our senses.

Good nutrition too. That’s a cat that gets the best and it shows.

Hot tip for humans: You too can have healthier hair if you eat better, get sleep, exercise and reduce stress!

(Unless you have baldness genes, in which case, shave that shit and own it.)

As the older “uncle” of the family, I get called to handle a lot of things, like unjamming a garbage disposal (you stick a broom handle in and push until it moves again) to changing a car tire (the instructions are LITERALLY printed on the body of the car) to very basic things like removing insects and spiders from the houses of adult families, to fixing electrical problems (breakers tripping.) And of course, fixing computers… miles and miles of fixing computers. Usually just installed programs that need to be removed or setup that needs to be completed, the age of viruses seem to be slowing but they still call at odd hours asking for help to remove a “virus” when it’s just an app on borderless window mode.

I never thought of any of this as “man skills” I always thought this was just shit you had to do as an adult. I was prepared for helping kids just getting started, not grown-ass men and women with arms and legs and presumably careers with responsibilities.

I would say I’m surprised people can even wipe their own ass anymore but I have read some posts about people having to deal with boyfriends who think touching their own butt is “gay” so really I am not surprised by anything anymore. Is it any wonder why politics is so incredibly stupid? It’s a reflection of larger society.

No, you don’t.

You miss who you were when everything looked like this.

You were young, you were discovering the internet like a new frontier, every new app you tried or new album you found or new comedy website was like discovering a new country. You could while away hours without responsibility or care or trauma, or at least nearly as much. You were not cynical and jaded yet.

Nostalgia isn’t a longing for when things were simpler, it is a longing for when you were simpler.

I am almost appreciative that Linkedin just overtly embraces the synthetic and manufactured cultural dance we do in business, like nobody expects anyone to do anything but show their most pretentious and carefully cultivated images. You don’t log into Linkedin expecting to see a video of Uncle Jim ranting from the front seat of his truck about immigrants, and that’s almost beautiful.

It brings me back to an age when people actually tried to conform just a little for the sake of social progress, people kept their shit to themselves and worked to be part of a system. It was as close as we ever were to being even remotely socially conscious.

Kind of like asking if we can stop picking up stones and rocks and using them to beat each other and instead use them to build homes.

This isn’t a new fight. There will always be people who take our tools and abuse them by using them to hurt others. That’s what we’re fighting against, people who use our tools to hurt people instead of doing good. Unfortunately, if we just let people who collect stones and sticks for hurting people be, and not push them out of our village, they will just grow in number and strength so we can’t just block it out, we can’t live and let live around those who would take your life if they grew strong enough.

If it’s tiring and annoying to see people have to always yell at the club-and-rock-wielding thugs and throw rocks back at them, you don’t have to get involved, but don’t decry those who DO have the courage to throw rocks back. If they didn’t do this, the rocks would start hitting you next.

I used to watch Thought Slime a lot, even donated to them a few times… then started watching videos from the people they’ve “called out” on stream, followed a rabbit-hole of people who were hurt and never apologized to and realized they’re just another youtube dramafarmer clicks-at-all-costs, no discrimination, storyline-crafting liar. Like everyone.

Free yourselves humanity, stop watching streamers.

edit: I know the parasocialism online runs really deep and just saying this is going to get some people losing their shit to defend their fav streamer, I literally don’t care, you have to be aware that every streamer has an army of knights to defend them, and I don’t like engaging that way and am not going to spend my time arguing. I’m not out to change your mind, just explain why I changed mine.

I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying, but it kinda sounds like an engineer trying to make their career/passion into more than a clever trick which comes as a result of learning how to abstract information to better manipulate the world.

“Engineering” isn’t a fundamental quality of the universe, it’s a word we have made up to describe honestly a lot of different things. There’s nothing wrong with calling what humans learned to do “engineering” and it wouldn’t be inaccurate, but I’m saying you can simplify that more, to just the quality we learned, which is how to take information from the past and from right now to synthesize pictures of tomorrow, and then abstract that conclusion to share with others. Being able to share abstract conclusions about future events is a far, far more profound skill, there’s no parallel in nature, not even “kinda” like beaver engineering. Engineering comes from this ability, so I’m just trying to describe the order of carts and horses.

Shame we won’t make it.

I think the invention of engineering is what finally broke evolution

While true, we can be more specific here what quality or trait allowed us to become engineers. Being able to engineer is by itself something that can even exist in genetic memory, instinctual. There are a lot of animals that do engineering, but have never come anywhere close to what humans do. Beavers, birds, ants and termites arguably are better engineers than most humans on an innate level. (I’ve also known some engineers who are incapable of some very basic life skills.)

What separated us from evolutionary processes and also allowed us to become engineers is the capability to abstract information and use those abstractions to predict the future, extending our “reach” of influence into the further future than most animals can calculate. This required us to develop strong continuity of thought and experiences and with this also came the ability to analyze and compare complicated events to find patterns. This gave us a huge edge when we were surviving around predators that were able to easily dominate us. Nowadays these abilities mostly cause of mental health conditions as we try to use tools designed for navigating glaciers to navigate a world of social media, zoom meetings, Tinder profiles, electric car recalls and democratic electoral politics.

The impact of human fertility cycles ("concealed ovulation’) and human evolution is a vast, deep field of study and speculation in itself, but I am making some very sweeping generalizations here, referencing people’s capability to choose when to reproduce on the broadest levels, not that there was a period or specific instance of this having an impact… more like, it made a difference over very large scales of time, as evident by the fact that our breeding cycles are nothing like most other mammals.

We had the tall stride thing going, we had the super-endurance thing going already, we had gotten good at tool-use like many other primates, in that we could use sticks and rocks to beat things and poke things, just like modern chimps and apes. (Modern primates also throw stones, it’s not the evolution-killer on its own that the meme is making it out to be.)

No, the REAL thing that soared us beyond all members of the animal kingdom is how we started abstracting information and sharing it. IE: language, writing, and the cognitive processes behind those skills that allow us to plan ahead. Not just planning ahead, but being able to set up actions far in advance, like planting seeds because we know a plant will come out of it. Moving our camps to where animal herds migrate to so we can stay close to the food, and just the day-to-day actions like preparing a fire in advance so you can see when it gets dark, bringing things with you to use later, having an idea how to ration food, being able to share your plans with others, communicating your movements to other hunters, and yes, all this made us exceptional hunters. When other primates were still mostly foraging for plants and bugs, our ancestors used this “thinking” thing to start getting massive doses of meat. Amino acids, proteins, high-density fuel, food for growing brains.

Not to mention, we’re the only creature that chooses when to reproduce. We used this foresight to plan our futures and our families. This is a massive changeup from how nature has handled reproduction. For the vast majority of life on Earth, breeding is just this thing that “happens” at certain points and everything leads to that event, and nothing really has control over how that event plays out.

Breeding is still a big deal for us, just look how horny we all are, but we decide when we’re going to have babies, and while it doesn’t seem a big deal here and now, it was a game changer when we were migrating packs of hunter-gatherers, following the seasons and the herds of animals.

Our story of how we got here is without question the most fantastic story ever. You are the product of over four and a half billion years of uninterrupted successes. A family tree going back a thousands of millions of years without break, surviving apocalypses that have turned our entire globe to ice, to fire, to water and other unimaginable catastrophes that sometimes lasted for millions of years.

So now you made it, your billions of generations of ancestors secured your survival against all odds, whatcha gonna do with it?

You mean you don’t have to like Kamala? I’m voting Kamala.

Not fond of her, but she’ll do better than Trump by leagues and miles and make history while not rocking the boat or affecting any meaningful change. Libs will love her, she’ll be a democrat party darling. I bet she gets a second term.

I will cast my vote between tears but nobody ever promised preserving democracy will always make you feel good.

In fact, I am close to launching into a really hard condemnation of every last one of you lazy-ass motherfuckers who expect everything to always play out like a 2-dimensional anime plot where you’re the good guy so you’re supposed to always feel good, and any struggles are easily overcome, and if it doesn’t play out like that, then you go full doomer-mode and grab your soapbox to preach how pointless life is just because you’re lonely but too scared to talk to a girl. Go back to your discord safe-spaces and let adults out here make the hard choices.

Should have took a lot more.