I remember seeing a video of a rubber arm experiment that goes through a series of exercises to convince someone’s mind that a rubber arm placed against their shoulder is theirs, while the real one is blocked out of sight. Once these phantom sensations are in place, the organizer then hits the rubber hand with a hammer, causing great shock in the subject but no real harm. The immediate panic is exaggerated by the fact their mind can’t actually move “their” hand out of the way when they see the swing coming.

Another study had organizers shine a harmless light on participants’ arm for a few minutes and see how they react, allegedly for some sampling purpose. The twist was that they would have the real subjects stay in a waiting room beforehand and watch actors leave while appearing to be in considerable pain from the session where the light was targeting. They then experienced a significant burning sensation from the “laser” despite the organizers insisting it was harmless. Some would go as far as to raise their voice and demand the experiment stop.

The idea is that people can be convinced that something is painful just from others’ reactions to it. This may have been what the organizers were actually testing for, and the electrical shock wasn’t real or was barely large enough to felt. But OP was just immune to being influenced. I would expect the ability to follow cues from others has strong correlation to success at socializing, so considering they use 4chan OP might actually just be built different.

I only played Stellaris off and on, but I went years without buying an expansion and always thought the new systems were complete and better than what they replaced when I returned. Breaking current saves is frustrating, so I guess you would need to delay an update if you had one you planned on returning to.

If you didn’t know, you can roll back to older versions of steam games with some work. A few games have a built-in system, but most of the tile you have to manually replace files after redownloading the old versions.

I like most of these changes. Several jokers that immediately justified building around got toned back.

Magician giving two lucky cards instead of one makes lucky cat a lot stronger, and it’s getting buffed independently already. Steel joker nerf and glass joker buffs seem good too. Campfire nerf is harsh, but justified.

I’m surprised hologram isn’t getting nerfed. It quickly pays off with already good stuff like DNA or even certificate, and even without much synergy just buying standard packs makes it strong.

The vampire and midas mask nerfs seem overly harsh though. It was a powerful combo, but it required two specific uncommon jokers and time to scale. With both parts being harder to proc, and the payoff being cut in half, I can’t think of a situation where you would really want vampire. I guess if you have face card synergy you could run midas mask for a while until you have most of your deck golden, but even then I would be tempted to swap to something else pretty quickly. Golden cards just don’t have much payoff. I would have buffed the devil tarot to target two before the magician for the same reason.

Ideally, an audience would pick up on the bad-faith side not addressing arguments, engaging in personal attacks, making unjustified claims, etc. and be unimpressed. The interrupting especially should prompt some intervention by a moderator, but usually they don’t have a means of preventing it from happening other than chastising after the fact so it still relies on some degree of human decency.

I’d still call it a debate, just a poor quality one.

Strictly speaking, incel refers to someone involuntarily celibate, regardless of gender. Femcel is the common 4chan term for female incels. It’s been used to describe the often misandrist subculture of r/FemaleDatingStrategy as an example.

For anyone else curious but unfamiliar, this is from “The Second Coming”, a poem by W. B. Yeats written shortly after WWI.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)

That’s true, but the information age allows us to be more keenly aware of problems that aren’t just local. Our new ability to be online has contributed to an uptick in mental health issues.

Fortunately, being able to shine a spotlight on problems in the world also puts pressure on us to improve. We do have issues like financial inequality and global warming that have recently gotten worse, but if you look at trends like violent crime, illiteracy, global hunger, extreme poverty, child mortality, or deaths to many longstanding diseases, it is hard not to realize that we’re actually collectively doing a good job of making the world better.

Milk in the US uses a different pasteurization technique the most of the rest of the world, so we need to keep it refrigerated while other places don’t until it’s opened.

Second this. It is free for federal, and iirc $15 for state. Also, you can upload submissions from Turbotax if you used them before so many fields will be pre-filled out. I actually preferred the freetaxusa experience to turbotax having used both.

Audiobookbay and smart audiobook player is my setup too. I probably got it from a similar thread. My only annoyance is using audiobookbay’s search can be annoying sometimes, but altogether I love both.

For these types of threads, I usually upvote things that are actually hot takes with some justification or unique insight. People that post an extremely popular decision or just insult something that a lot of people see value in get downvoted. Mostly it’s moderately common takes or unusual opinions with no elaboration, so I don’t vote on those.

https://i.imgur.com/O6vSrvq.jpg

Congratulations on escaping a bad situation! Stories like this have become all too common, but I think sharing how it gets better does some good. I honestly haven’t given much thought about where I want to spend my golden years, but financial independence is a big goal of mine.

And as for that last part, we’ll have eternity to appreciate the simplicity of death. I wouldn’t be too eager to be done with the world of the living when there’s a lot of cool stuff out there to explore and not much time to do it.

Without knowing more about your life, this kinda sounds like burnout to me. It is very common is tech fields especially. I would recommend trying to dial back on work if it’s killing your soul like this.

I worked at a high-paying dev job right out of college that consumed my life and put me in a very bad place mentally. I could not sustainably output what I needed to, and evetually I got fired. But walking out of the meeting I could not stop smiling from the tremendous relief I felt (this was when Covid was big so I had a mask on fortunately). It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was unemployed for a few months afterwards which is probably the happiest I’ve ever been. I didn’t travel or do anything noteworthy besides starting a small passion project. Finances weren’t an issue since I had a lot saved up and low expenses covered by unemployment.

After applying to places in no rush whatsoever and stressing my newfound appreciation for work-life balance in interviews, I ended up getting a job at a nonprofit government-adjacent company with full work-from-home and basically no time tracking. I make less but I can go through things at a pace I can handle and it makes a world of difference.

So if you have felt this way for a while I would recommend taking a break before committing to abandoning civilization. People with tech jobs like us tend to have options so don’t feel like it has to be misery or the wilderness. Because I can promise you there are places that will allow you to live as a human being. And it may just reignite your passion too. If you still feel like it after stepping away for a time, you can always escape society more dramatically later instead.

Also, I don’t want to diagnose you or anything when I don’t even know you but there could be some overlap with depression here when you lose passion for life and just generally become jaded at the world like this. Make sure you are communicating how you feel with people you feel comfortable around. Remember that things can always get better, although it sounds like you have been thinking about how to achieve that plenty already. But if things aren’t getting better, you might need to be the instigator for that change so I wouldn’t be afraid to go for it after exploring easier stuff first. Maybe just give camping a shot while you figure this out.

I didn’t mean for this to get so long, but your post resonated with me a lot I guess!

So many posts right now are “DAE think Lemmy > Reddit?” If anything, people are more anonymous here, so it is only a matter of time before the amount of users brings in more toxicity. But just like reddit, users can avoid toxicity outrage baiting, and other issues by joining better (smaller) communities instead of echo chambers.