Instigate

Many forget that a meme is simply a concept or idea that grabs hold within a human community and is propagated and promulgated. Patriarchy is a meme. Capitalism is a meme. Doing ‘bunny ears’ behind someone’s head in a photo is a meme (h/t Parker and Stone). Doing cave paintings of animals is a meme. Fashion of an era is a meme. Our entire social structure runs on memes.

You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.

Exactly right; sex work has always existed (relative to the existence of currency/bartering tribute and some semblance of homo sapien societies) and will always exist in some form. There have always been those who are willing to be in relationships with sex workers and those that won’t. The landscape has changed, but the world’s oldest profession remains.

Simps don’t suck; they do the dating world a service. Anyone whose concept of self-esteem is so external that they derive it from the admiration of strangers is not someone who is ready for a serious or monogamous relationship. Simps help identify those people and weed them out of the regular dating pool.

Straight men can, and should, touch each other more often (CONSENSUALLY. I can’t stress that enough). Hugging, holding hands, playing with one another’s hair, giving a gentle backrub etc. between straight men should absolutely be more normalised. We’ve been conditioned that any physical affection between men is a sign of sexual attraction, when history (and many extant cultures) show us that men can physically love one another without any sexual attraction whatsoever. The only reason we’re touch starved is we’re too afraid to be vulnerable with other men.

Being an incel is a choice; mental illness is not. You wouldn’t refer to incels as disabled and it’s similarly unfair to refer them as being mentally ill. Being an incel is just another form of bigotry. Racists, sexists, queerphobes etc. aren’t mentally ill. The most generous descriptors I could give them is that they’re either misguided, brainwashed, or both.

I also think it’s not great to equate incels with mental illness. I have CPTSD, depression and anxiety and none of those make me act like a fucking misogynistic twat. Inceldom isn’t mental illness, and equating it to or calling it mental illness does a whole lot of people a massive disservice.

I don’t agree with your position that my ultimate penalty was congruent with my crime. EDIT: nor that it represented a just outcome.

The area in which I was speeding was a distributor from our major city, with no pedestrian, bike or parking lanes available. I had exactly zero chance of hitting a child running out from behind a parked car because there’s no capacity to park cars on that road nor are any pedestrians present on the road. I was also driving on a wide corner, where speed/velocity can be easily distorted by many factors when measured from a stationary perspective, so I cannot be sure that the reading was entirely accurate. There are no pedestrians allowed on the distributor either; nor is there a walking space or lane. My only chance of causing injury or death to others due to my minimal speeding was in a collision with another vehicle.

This instance is the only time I’ve ever been fined for speeding in my seventeen years of driving. I’ve personally driven ~5km/h over the limit without any further fines or punishments, including past police cars with active LIDAR guns pointed at me and through speed cameras, indicating that there is simply no viable reason to stop and fine drivers who are over the limit within a reasonable margin of error.

Beyond all of the above, I’ll note AGAIN that I was happy to pay the $560 fine (which I deemed appropriate but costly, and costed me $80 for each km/h over the limit while I was earning $13/hour) but fought only the suspension of my licence. I didn’t believe that a single instance of driving 7km/h over the limit justified a suspension, and I still agree with that idea.

My issue was the severity of my punishment with reference to my crime. I definitely committed a crime (yes, I am a criminal), and deserved punishment for doing so, but I disagreed with the severity of that punishment. That doesn’t infer that I learned nothing; nor that I am uncaring of my fellow citizens.

I don’t think I’m a great driver, mostly because I’ve taken Low Risk Driver courses, have a Bachelor in Psychology (including driver/traffic psychology) and am acutely aware of the effects that driving hubris has on capacity - statistics often show that those who rate themselves as ‘better than average’ drivers are more likely to commit traffic offences. I do, however, know that I’m a competent driver which my last sixteen years since this event without demerit should indicate.

By the way, I’ve been a child protection caseworker for almost a decade now, and so to infer that I don’t care for the safety of children might not be the best argument to make.

Not if she’s got the Black Death.

The logic is that road deaths go up during holiday periods (which is sadly a statistical fact here) so they ramp up enforcement and double the penalties for those periods to try to correct for it. I’m not a huge fan of the idea, but from a purely statistical and scientific standpoint it does at least make some amount of sense. My individual circumstance is a bit of a curveball because my punishment was way outstripping my crime, but I do have some understanding for the idea of double demerits. I think my issue was that what should have been a one-point offence (doubled to two points) became an eight-point offence just because I was on a provisional licence. That part I’m still very salty about.

Yeah, I was on my P-plates (provisional licence) at the time where you have can have up to seven demerit points before losing your licence. As a P-plater, every speeding offence automatically is moderated to the maximum value, four points, and because it was a ‘double-demerits’ weekend (for public holidays), that four points was doubled to eight points. I received more demerit points than km/h I was over the limit.

For reference, if I was on my full licence and it wasn’t double-demerits, it would have been one point out of a total twelve. Instead, I got eight points which suspended my licence. Thankfully the magistrate I had was reasonable and granted my reduction - that also meant I didn’t have to pay court costs and I represented myself, so the whole thing cost me the initial $35 court booking fee. I managed to get something that resembled justice out of it, but I’ll still have a bitter taste in my mouth because of the whole rigamarole for a long time to come.

I challenged a licence suspension in Australia when I was 19 years old. I gladly paid the $560 fine but I would’ve lost my licence for three months because I was driving 7km/h over the limit on a ‘double-demerits’ weekend. The magistrate sent me to a fortnightly driver’s course for 12 weeks, all the while I kept my licence, and after the course was over I fronted court again and successfully argued my three month suspension down to four weeks.

I’m pretty sure that going to court over traffic violations is a thing in any country that allows going to court over traffic violations.

FYI in most Australian jurisdictions, you can’t demand that the individual police officer who fined you attend court to defend themselves. That part is most likely a US thing.

One of the more believable greentexts I’ve read, and likely for this reason.

We’re biochemical foundries. It’s pretty damn cool.

Yeah, if “toxic + toxic = toxic” made sense then table salt would be extremely dangerous.

Sodium = extremely volatile and usually explosive metal when interacting with water (more than half of what makes us)

Chlorine = gas at room temperature that can kill you in minutes at concentrations of 1000ppm or more

Sodium + Chlorine = Sodium Chloride = delicious table salt that makes food yummy and helps power our neurons

To be fair, forcing everyone back to the office and then giving them individual offices kinda makes less sense than forcing everyone back to the office to all work in one space together. At least that way it’s actually encouraging human interaction - if you’re working from a private office you might as well be working from your private home.

Not suggesting that any of that is a good idea at all though. Forced working from an office is now officially an antiquated idea.

Yeah, I’d almost say it’s an essential purchase. I buy a fair few online titles and I’ve found my 128Gb SD to be a bit lacking. I’m considering upgrading to a 256Gb or 512Gb but they’re still too expensive at high transfer rates.

If you have to choose between capacity and transfer rate for an SD card for a Switch, go for transfer. I had an old slow card and that was abhorrent for load times and stuttering on games that were stored there.

I recently bought an adjustable clip to clip the Switch (sans joycons) to my Pro Controller and it’s super comfy for long periods of gaming. I’ve also seen people use 3rd party joycons that are shaped more like the Pro Controller handles which seem comfy too.

You’re right, the base Switch isn’t all that comfy for long periods of play, but there are both ways around that and it can also be played docked, which I think are redeeming features.

Further to this - it doesn’t download cart data to the Switch/SD card, but it does store save data, update data and DLC data on the Switch/SD card. So while BOTW may not download its whole 10Gb onto the Switch, you may end up with a few Gb in other data that’s locally stored.