Why do my cats like this toy?
Nepenthe @ Nepenthe @kbin.social Posts 1Comments 505Joined 2 yr. ago
Nepenthe @ Nepenthe @kbin.social
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I thought it might be a hint that the whole situation was an illusion — Loki was tricking Sylvie, or Sylvie was tricking Loki, or someone else was tricking them both
Th...that would have been amazing. And it would have totally worked. I have been robbed 😭
Sylvie is more in control than he is, but that really isn't amounting to all that much. You could say Loki's intervention has thrown a wrench in every plan, but uncertainty is still her entire sphere. The one good thing to come out of it was watching them try and fail to trick each other. This was one of the things I most enjoyed and it really didn't go on as much or as long as it should have because the writers needed to ship them in a manner that didn't have to be as obvious as they wanted it.
Two Lokis feels like a definite case for a slow burn. Nothing so attractive as a whole season spent unable to outwit or outperform yourself, which would build more of a semi-respectful rivalry of the two, but they made it obvious 2-3 episodes in. It's not awful, but it's heavyhanded.
As much time as I spend thinking about social motivations/interactions, I'm a little aggravated at myself that I let it get to me as much as I have. It really shows to me how insidious it can be. People only really interacted with each other to prove their opponent was wrong and stupid and bad, and because doing this was the easiest way to be rewarded on reddit, of course that's going to make it seep into things.
Being a dick is a fun activity that makes you a part of a group, and humans love being liked more than they love most things in this world. Being empathetic just makes you feel really bad and kind of confused. By making me consider the other side, you're making me feel bad :(
So the rare times I got downvoted a lot, it was usually me telling people to look after/stop being assholes to each other. Sarcastic know-it-all comments? Popular if they were short and quippy, unpopular if they were long and academic. People like to be liked, and if you want most social media platforms to like you, you have to be really mean and borderline illiterate.
Funny to see you with the Loki take by the way. Didn’t realize you were the same person.
I'd been meaning to respond to this thread for maybe a full day before I saw you around over there, and that was apparently the reminder I needed. It was amusing. This place has already gotten large enough in a month that I've lost track of some people I used to see positively everywhere, and knowing that's the way of things makes me a bit sad, but I'll enjoy being able to recognize people while I can. I look forward to it too, I hope you have a nice weekend :)
Lamentis is by far my least favorite episode. It has some pretty moments (his visually pleasing use of magic, the dance party), but nothing about that was either one of them being in control of absolutely anything.
And you're right, they're supposed to be the god that has the plan. Watching not just one but both of them run around like chickens with their heads cut off and lament (har har) their fate while everything they try repeatedly fails was original but annoying. The writers need to be pushing way harder into underdog than kicked puppy. Hopefully, now that they've got the Character Development ™ out of the way, they'll do that.
Also...what was the thing where he stops a building from falling with his mind? What was that? Where did that go? He's never done that before, to my knowledge, it's not really his kind of power. He never does it again. Nobody talks about it. He just lifted the larger half of a skyscraper by thinking at it, which is again visually cool, but I'm sorry?
I'm sorry someone was heavy-handed with you. It's a bummer they blew an opportunity for a good dialogue. I think in some communities calling someone "stupid" is correctly not allowed, so I'd need a little more context, but calling people "stupid" is also pretty common.
Trying to dig through a couple years of notifications for proof mostly just told me I got a LOT more awards than I realized, and I eventually gave up. But it wasn't aimed at someone else, or I wouldn't have had a problem with being reprimanded for it. I make it a point to try to be as civil as I can be, and I was literally being derogatory towards myself.
I am not allowed to be mean...to me....for fear of being ostracized. This decision was stupid enough that I pretty much just consented to say whatever I stood by from now on, since all punishment was being treated like a toy anyway. As a generally anxious person, I consider it a significant character improvement if we're being honest.
I should thank you as well, and I'm glad this didn't just devolve into the standard internet interaction, since I was originally only seeing it from my angle and we did definitely start on the wrong foot. I think after spending so much time on kbin, the shock of checking up on my one kebble sub and seeing how deliberately shitty the kind of places I used to frequent really were really stood out to me a LOT. As in, there are subs I used to check frequently that I would block if they came here.
It would take a lot to make me start slinging insults at anyone except myself, but I recognize there's a fine line between "enjoys debate" and "tends to pick fights" and I've been making conscious efforts not to bring the performative reddit snark over here. I still have to deliberately backspace over things now and again and edit things that came out unintentionally harsh the first time, but it's the person I prefer being.
While I actually really loved the ending (there's no way they can go anywhere but down after that), I agree with @jakeeric that it really doesn't feel like Loki at his normal potential, and it bothers me. It's nothing like a bad show, but the character they're pushing out of their depth is the one single character who's whole point is that they're literally never out of tricks.
That is who he is not just as a Marvel villain, but in mythology. The entire purpose of him as a god, historically, is to keep everyone on their toes. It's a near-impossible sell and would require some very skilled storytelling to make palatable because this kind of sweet, helpless behavior destroys who he is at his core.
The only take I've seen that made me more ok with it in the sense that it was at least believable was a psychology video focusing on him. I could have sworn it was cinema therapy and can't find it anywhere in YouTube at all now, driving me crazy, nevertheless go check them out anyway, they're amazing.
Anyway, the only way out of being ridiculous is that video he's forced to watch. He spent his whole life chasing acceptance and acted out for lack of it and in response to betrayal. That video not only showed him images of himself as a flashy savior before his own heroic death, it showed him his family accepting him, which was something this Loki never got to hear.
It's fully believable it would heal something. It's the kind of thing that always made him go good for a split second before he went right back to Preemptive Strike mode.
Problem is, I don't think it would heal this quickly and drastically. Not thousands of years of bad habits over the course of a half hour, before a heartfelt sharing session with captors whose proven superiority sets off every fiber in him.
They simply don't have the kind of time it would take to cross that kind of bridge, so seeing the badass bastard Loki everyone came for turn very quickly into a flustered sensitive boy with a Hallmark love interest feels contrived and more than a little frustrating. I'm watching for trademark grandiosity, sick fight scenes, and surprise turnarounds that almost never happen, but snuggling does.
This IS technically the point — they've diverged from the static dictates of who they're supposed to be in a way that crashes the narrative. One of the crimes was literally wanting to be a lawful servant because a god of mischief can't be good. As soon as they go Hero, they leave or they die.
And it's such an interesting take that I can't even say I dislike it. But by intentional design, it's not really about Loki Loki any more than "what if James Bond retired and took up flower arranging and never did spy stuff ever again" would be a James Bond movie. Understandably, fans would be impatient.
I can't WAIT for this to come out. I'm slobbering to see more of this and I should probably re-watch it sometime. But I want my damn Loki for a few minutes.
It's ok, guys. This time they're making the whole facility out of SNES controllers.
Props to the journalist for keeping the written version of a straight face while having to include such paragraphs as
If a space station could be designed to withstand the sulfuric acid in the clouds, Söhnlein says, hundreds to thousands of people could someday live in the Venusian atmosphere.
alongside quotes describing the Titan as "a calculated risk" that is "not deserving of a negative connotation" because without previous experience handling brittle carbon fiber vessels whose single window was rated for a third of the intended depth, "certification would only have served to give the vessel the illusion of safety, which could have led to complacency."
Can't wait to hear Söhnlein and friends livestream it as their living pod is slowly eaten away by venusian acid, upon which time they, like their seafaring colleagues, will become extremely portable indeed.
I mean, they're quite literally not, though. All it takes is luck, firepower, and someone willing take out Taylor Swift.
I'm sure it will have to get one fuck of a lot worse before people in that tax bracket catch it from their own security, but if enough people are self-sacrificing for long enough, they may even have to outlaw guns or something. Which would at least give my wretched corpse a chuckle.
Not to be a downer, but they probably already have the intersex flag.
I'm going to go with maybe, still, because I'm not about to go all half-cocked over one single paper and other studies have come out unable to replicate the atrazine results, but the majority of those studies were funded by Syngenta, the company who makes atrazine. In general, do not entirely trust any company's investigation of itself over a multi-million dollar product.
The researcher who originally made that discovery has accused Syngenta of hounding and intentionally discrediting him, which sounds entirely mentally ill until you remember how much people really like money, and the comments I found legible in their unsealed post-lawsuit documents are..concerning??
Semi-related to waylay the impending conspiracy theory whatever, here's an archived Nat Geo about how mercury poisoning apparently not only impacts reproductive viability in female ibises, but also turns the males homosexual for no reason. Chemicals are fun.
I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Niño will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?
“It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.“
—Prof Lesley Hughes
When a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.
The cause in both these statements is that global warming will NEVER be an immediate threat. Humans are wired for immediacy, and if the threat is not a right now thing, they switch to ignoring and adapting. Our psychology is wired to try to address the tiger and to adapt to what is unfortunately continual environmental collapse.
Those who understand we literally cannot do that and that a great many of us will die are not equipped to handle that information without simply sinking into increasingly immobile despair, because...what the fuck can I do about it?
I already eat little, don't even own a car, my worst offense is having internet but it's necessary for work. My other options are to become homeless again or Amish.
People in many countries are suffering greatly already from natural events that have been kicked up to 20. All I can do is watch. And I do. But more and more as someone who has a large stomach for suffering, even I'm beginning to evaluate what good it's doing me, as a civilian, to watch.
I can't help, or I would have. Whatever's going to happen to me in the future is unavoidable. My choices then are between Despair and Not Despair. This is why the masses won't pay attention. They don't have the bandwidth for the entire planet.
The politicians, however, have no excuse for this, and had we less tendency to shut our eyes and stomp our feet and more biological ability to plan in long term, they would be on pikes in the 00's.
It should count. It has water in it, and it's enough in one place to count as being wet rather than just humid or something. Now I'm wondering if stuff like sweat would work.
Oh yeah, I think it was our 2nd or 3rd line that extended way out several miles from the actual memorial and that area is a bunch of chain stores.
The recorded scope of the actual battle is a little bit hazy, but (not a military buff) I hadn't realized how large the borders were known to be, since the park was already huge.
I think about it every time I pass the Zaxby's now. Someone lost everything at that Zaxby's.
". . . . countless Union soldiers died on that floor, and they died because they were fighting the Civil War to end slavery. And I think that place should be treated with a tremendous amount of respect for the dead."
The revolutionary war reenactments at the battlefield near my house always have a pizza truck.
“If anyone had been laying a series of graves in Arlington National Cemetery, what do you think people would say?”
If I were a ghost and I saw some poor living person huddled up, taking a nap on my grave, my instinct would be to wish them well. They probably need the respite and I would be charmed to have provided that to the needy.
This offer extends to anyone looting/eating my corpse in whatever future civil war/societal collapse. It's fine by me, shit's hard. Live how you can
I want to be fired for sending an acronym in which one of the letters stood for a swear. Not even the dumbest thing that's ever happened to me.
I explained my reasoning when asked, which usually led to me being called a slur or something similar. . . . This doesn't even touch the issue of people who swear they were "banned for literally no reason" and then run around reinforcing the reputation of "mods are power tripping jannies who hate free speech."
Ah, my daily reminder that I really can't stand people and cruelty scales with intelligence. I really wish you didn't have a point. The one time I ever was irreversibly banned, it was over something moronic: I had referred to myself as stupid, and "stupid is a slur," and that was the end of the decision. I can't even make that shit up, it's the event that made me stop caring about being downvoted, etc. because no one was taking this seriously anyway.
But 95% of people who have to ask...probably already know, yeah. I don't envy that in the least.
You asked for doughy buns, you got doughy buns
The language nullifies Food and Drug Administration guidance allowing the drug mifepristone, which is used in medical abortions, to be sold by mail and at retail pharmacies.
"Some states allow [mifepristone] to be mailed, some states don't, but that should be a decision with the states and the FDA, not Congress," said Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.).
"If that language stays as is, we won't be able to vote for that appropriations [bill]," said Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.).
Well, that's an interesting development. This is so out of left field for what the party has continually committed to that I thought a comma was missing.
Not that I'm in ideological agreement and don't see the danger in leaving an issue of health up to a state's opinion, but I'm forced to respect that they're standing by the "small government" schtick for once instead of only when it suits them.
I think we're talking slightly to the left of each other, yeah. I think if it was intended as a casual joke, it didn't come off that way to me, especially coming as it did in response to my remark that both groups had a near-identical reputation for acting shitty.
Banning someone is just banning them, we agree. The logic I took from that was that, though both admins and mods could be ass, only one side was paid not to be ass and that fact alone should be reason to separate them.
Which obviously I'm never not going to fight about, because it leads to stuff like
• Bezos: revolting person, paid to look after his employees but makes them piss in bottles because he's hiding a piss kink.
• Political/religious group of your choice, every abusive parent, etc.: good people, being utterly shit to everything around them til they blessedly die is more of a hobby.
The saddest part is this is a completely believable position for an internet stranger to take, so I just went ahead and believed that.
The context also probably comes off WAY differently if you happen to have been a mod yourself, e.g. implied wartime flashbacks I hopefully never have to relate to.
Being a mod or an admin is not about "the social contract." It's about enforcing rules either as a paid employee of the site or as an unpaid community volunteer. Being a jerk is just being a jerk, regardless of what position you're in as you act like a jerk. I just don't see the relevance here.
I would argue that it is about that. Your ability to inspire confidence in and work with the people you're supposed to be moderating hinges in part on your ability to act fairly and decently.
80% of us are here because the CEO of Whatever Platform couldn't do that. Reddit still works. My old boss lost her entire workforce in a day sans one person because she couldn't manage that, even though she was technically able to run a store without hitting bankruptcy. Perfectly kingly rulers have died because they were pieces of shit.
Not discounting that modding a large community seems a horrendous experience, that doing that unpaid is probably wrong, and that trolls don't reproduce the way zombies do.
I am saying if you want power at all, it's to everyone's benefit that you know how to handle whoever's at your mercy. It's implied in the job
I honestly don't think mutual respect should be predicated on whether one is being paid or not, so...I'm not sure I'm going to do that. Or at least, very loudly for reason of grammatical accuracy instead of that one.
You'd be suggesting u/awkwardtheturtle — an unstable, camping powermod with a habit of pinning their own wildly sexist comments to the top of every thread and then insta-banning anyone who had a problem, whose shittiness caused a whole petition about it — should be ok, actually, because they're not (officially) paid, and that I should do whatever strikes my fancy here as well.
If any person doesn't want the stress of abiding by the social contract, they really shouldn't be interacting with others, but instead they deliberately accepted a position of power.
Yeah, mine LOVES stick-like things more than anything else. But they have to be just right.
Chopsticks and skewers. Those fishing line/feather toys, but only the handle part, not really the toy part. I gather and replenish a whole collection of sticks when I go walking, but they have to be skinny little twig branches. Too thick to withstand her attack, and she isn't even interested.
She also loves pens/pencils, but only when I'm using them and only the one I'm using. So I suspect that one's a bonding thing.