ArbitraryValue

@ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works

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ArbitraryValue,

I feel terrible when stuff I buy says it was made with love. Do I deserve the love of someone who never even met me? Do I deserve love at all? That’s why I prefer eating food made by unfeeling machines.

ArbitraryValue,

It was Ken’s movie and Barbie was only starring in it.

ArbitraryValue,

Did you know that you can be a landlord too, even if you can’t afford a whole house? There’s such a thing as a REIT (real estate investment trust) where you can buy shares in a company that owns and rents out real estate and sends you your share of the profits while you don’t have to do anything except give up the option to invest that money somewhere else, which is actually really important.

I don’t expect everyone here to be able to invest in the stock market; my point is that there are easy ways for even middle-class people to obtain income from rent and yet most of them aren’t doing that because other types of investments are usually better for them. Being a landlord is not some unique source of money for nothing; it’s one of many ways to invest your money in a productive asset and usually not the best one.

ArbitraryValue, (edited )

I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I expect that our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.

(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)

ArbitraryValue, (edited )

I hate how crafting systems work in most games…

What I want: meaningful decisions about how to customize my character’s equipment.

What I get: clicking all over the place like it’s a 90’s adventure game to collect pieces of shit so that I can put together a giant turd.

ArbitraryValue, (edited )

Isn’t that how most people socialize at parties? Some people can do it naturally, but I figure most people are pretending. I frequently ask myself “What would a normal human do in this situation?”

ArbitraryValue, (edited )

Nobody really knows why that’s supposed to attract a potential dating partner, but it’s really common

Back when I did online dating I wrote about playing computer games, not because I expected that to be attractive to the average woman (of course it isn’t) but because I was hoping to meet one of the rare women who shared my interest.

A friend of mine managed to marry a woman who agreed to have their honeymoon be a week-long canoe trip through the wilderness in Maine, complete with living off of the fish they caught. It can happen!

ArbitraryValue,

With a name like Pakicetus, he was doomed to become a whale.

ArbitraryValue,

I can’t help but laugh because apparently Democrats have voted to release large predators into the parts of the state where Republicans live.

ArbitraryValue,

For some reason I get ads promising ugly women. Does that mean I’m hot?

ArbitraryValue,

So drinking a real-world cow’s milk is ok, but drinking a Zootopia cow’s milk would not be ok because… the Zootopia cow is presumably a full member of society who earns a living by consensually being milked?

ArbitraryValue,

There was the same nonstop excitement there would be during an actual soccer match.

ArbitraryValue,

No. No. That’s not true. That’s impossible!

ArbitraryValue,

Almost ten years ago, I was walking and as a car drove by, a woman inside it yelled something at me. I couldn’t hear what she said but I assumed she was catcalling me. That memory warms me to this day.

ArbitraryValue,

OS ships with a browser.

Boo!

OS ships with a browser.

Yay!

ArbitraryValue,

I will only read a book if it has either robots or wizards. Ideally there would be both, they would battle, but one of the robots would fall in love with a wizard.

ArbitraryValue, (edited )

Fun fact: humans aren’t responsible for the first mass extinction caused by organisms polluting the atmosphere with poisonous gas. Blue-green algae did it first, with “a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80%”.

ArbitraryValue,

I don’t see anything impractical about the one that’s just an ordinary ammonite but with spikes.

ArbitraryValue,

One time I invited a girl over to watch a movie and she got mad at me because apparently that’s what guys say when they want sex? I just wanted to watch a movie…

The worst part was realizing how disappointed all those other girls will did come over and watch movies with me must have been.

ArbitraryValue, (edited )

Yeah, I feel like Avengers: Endgame was an ending for the MCU. I’m not complaining, because a good story needs to have an ending, but I’m also not motivated to see superhero movies coming out after Endgame (at least not cosmic-scale superhero movies - I’ll always have a soft spot for Peter Parker).

ArbitraryValue, (edited )
  1. I was surprised by how nervous some of the people who visited me from the city were when I lived in a slightly rural area. It wasn’t even that remote - I had a neighbor across the street! Telling people that there were no bears and a lot less crime didn’t convince them to relax.
  2. A moonless night away from any artificial light is dark. Can’t-see-your-own-feet dark, and also so quiet that you start hearing a lot of noises that you aren’t used to hearing. It’s really unsettling. But of course I just carried a flashlight.
ArbitraryValue, (edited )

The PETM wasn’t so bad, and neither was the Cretaceous hothouse Earth. Paleontology gives me the perspective needed to know that we’re not all going to die even in the worst-case scenario.

ArbitraryValue,

They don’t check your credit? They checked my credit the last time I rented.

Also you don’t need to photoshop when it’s easier to edit the html.

ArbitraryValue,

Why does imgur insist that that’s nsfw? I thought I was going to be hilarious trolled and then I was let down.

(Link is completely safe for work. You can open it in front of your boss.)

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