I’m not American, and I don’t agree with these people either, but I don’t think that calling them lazy and ignorant makes any sense. In the fucked up democracy of the US it’s clear that the only way to get what you want for the coming 4 years is to vote for the least bad candidate. At the same time I can definitely understand that if you view both candidates was horrible, though one way more horrible than the other, you would feel conflicted about voting for either of them.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Assuming both candidates are still roughly equally “popular”. If both candidates wanted to start a genocide, but one would want to kill only 50% of the amount of innocents that the other would kill, how would you vote? Would you vote for the one who is overall the less bad option, which will in turn make you give your vote for something horrible. Or would you abstain and signal that the democracy as it currently stands has lost your confidence entirely, even if it means that on the short term the consequences might be way worse?

Not voting actually costs the democrats something, and should (if they want to win next time) force them to think how to better represent you next time.

It’s fucked up that your democracy came to this. It has become an annoying game theory dilemma instead of voting for the candidate that you actually believe in. Our system here in the Netherlands is certainly also not perfect, since we have too many parties and too long coalition negotiations, but at least I feel like it represents people way better. Anyone can start a party and capture seat if they represent a large enough niche.

Yeah but we can estimate how much it may or may not happen

I obviously don’t agree with them, but my assumption is that it has to do with maturity/innocence. An unborn child hasn’t done anything wrong. They’re full of opportunity and have a whole life ahead of them. A criminal sentenced for death has I some way done something very wrong. They’ve had their chance and failed.

Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic, if you feel like playing rollercoaster tycoon 1/2 on your phone. They slightly altered the UI to make it more touch friendly.

In the moment It was mostly concerned with the task at hand, which was usually drawing, listening to music and adoring the funky visual effects (no halicunations tho). But the most specific thing that came out of it was changed relationship with some of my friends.

One of them was, for instance, quite annoying. I seem to be quite sensitive to the stuff, meaning that I was the first one “in” and the last one “out”. He was the kind of guy to tease people a s a joke. It annoyed me before, but during the trips I finally realized how immature and annoying that stuff became. He was joking about me while I was in a vulnerable state and expected maturity from the people around me. The changed perspective meant that I finally got to look from the outside in and determine that I maybe should disengage from the relationship a bit.

It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend others to do it. I just won’t do it again because I now realize how much this kind of stuff kan really affect you. As long as you’re in the right headspace it can be a very cool experience. I still remember, after hours of chill music, how we all suddenly fell silent after an intense build-up followed by a heavy DnB drop. It felt physical, like I was suddenly pushed into the couch by the bass and couldn’t get out. Not sure if I’ll ever experience music in that way again.

Magic mushrooms, or any other psychedelic stuff. I did it three times, and in retrospect I’m not sure if I realized what I was messing with. Unlike being drunk, it actually feels like these instances actually changed me as a person. Not for the worse, but it’s still kinda spooky.

On the surface it was just some fun, my brain was being silly and everything felt much more vibrant. But beyond that it actually changed my views on people and concepts. It altered my relationships and ultimately who I am as a person. Looking back, thos stuff seems to put your brain into an entirely different mode of creating and removing connections. It’s not just messing with the “RAM” like alcohol, this stuff is writing to disk and making persistent changes.

Exactly. I used to think like this when younger, but I now see how stupid this mentality is. Basically anything we care about as humans is “non-productive”. Music, art, video games, musicals, movies, sports, etc. just because I don’t care about something doesn’t mean that it’s not important to someone else.

I think it’d because the Trackmania arcade mode doesn’t really let you affect anyone else. Everyone in the server is obviously trying to go as fast as possible,and to a degree also get as high up on the session leaderboard as possible, but you can’t ruin each others laps. And while finishing high on the session leaderboard is nice, the overall goal for everyone is to get a good enough time on the map in general. To beat your own PB, to get all medals. So essentially the real opponent is your past self. This leads people to get quite cooperative. Having discussions about how to tackle certain parts of the track, congretulating each other with setting a new PB, etc.

Playing against random people and especially with random people in other competitive games seems to generally get toxic. People blaming you for ruining their game, people getting mad. To me it’s very stressful. Even if I know that it shouldn’t affect me, and I’m never going to meet them again, it still does affect me negatively

At the moment basically anything competitive/ranked. I don’t want to compete online anymore because I know that I’ll have to go on an insane grind to get good. Only exception is trackmania because it somehow doesn’t upset me quite like other ranked online games. But even then I only play the “arcade” mode and not ranked

Yeah same, but with like 2K hours. At some point I was Grand Champion 1 or something. I could probably win against 2 noobs without me using jump and boost, but in the few moments I played against pros I got equally clapped. It’s insane to me how much better pro players are.

After Epic bought it the whole game slowly went to shit though. Psyonix once treated the game and its community as their baby, but it just became a soulless money printer without any decent innovation. So I barely play anymore, even though the core game is ultimately still fun.

Yeah I don’t really feel the difference either. Intriguing. Whether I’m wet from the shower or from sweat, it feels about the same to me. It’s only after it’s drying that there’s an obvious difference to me

I’ve unfortunately bought a phone (Pixel 8) now without a headphone jack. Already had multiple moments where I had to confront the consequences of this action. Why don’t modern phones have them anymore :(

Apart from the obvious stuff like wheels and fire:

I recently got my hands on an analogue camera (Canon EOS 300), which I’m now using to take some pictures. The first batch of pictures got back last week and confirmed to me that the device is still in working condition.

Besides that I also have an old Philips tape player that used to use until one of the gears snapped in half. I ordered a replacement gear but getting to the gear and replacing it has proven more challenging than hoped so I’m not using it currently.

And I still collect CDs, even though I also use Spotify.

I’m probably too old (29), but I do tend to buy CDs of artists I like. 2 weeks ago I was at a festival and bought 3 CDs (as well as some other stuff). Today I’m expecting another CD to arrive in my letterbox.

Because words have different weight for different people. I feel like Americans are so sensitive about words like “fuck” (and many other words). Here in the Netherlands I grew up with much more liberal use of swear words. So to me it’s way less harsh to say “fuck this rain” or something, it’s just a way to communicate my feelings about the rain, just like I’d say “kutweer” in Dutch. Saying it in a more eloquent way, i.e. “this rain is pretty suboptimal” would not accurately convey my feelings.

2K per year, subsidized by the Dutch government afaik, because International students pay way more.

Not anymore, since I got a real job… They do sometimes give some money as a present to buy something nice, but it’s no longer necessary. They did help me during my study though, paying the ~€2K uni fees every year and some other smaller stuff, so I could focus on rent, groceries, study material, etc. Combined with that, I had some side jobs to keep the study loan pretty small and manageable .

Based on anecdotal evidence, that was kind of the middle of the road. Some friends had very rich parents, who basically paid everything. Other people basically had to pay everything, which lead to huge loans. I think this level of support was pretty much optimal. It forced me to think about money instead of just buying everything I wanted, but also made it easy for me to focus on my study instead of surviving.

But we also don’t call our language “Dutch”, we call it Nederlands. It’s a relic of an old time, but actually German should be called Dutch and Dutch should be Netherlandish. It’d help a lot with the confusion of young German and Dutch people learning English for the first time haha. Would also resolve the confusion around “Pennsylvanian Dutch” being German.

Dutch is such a weird one. We don’t call ourselves “Dutch” in Dutch, we call ourselves “Nederlands”. This would be something like “Netherlandish” in English. We do call Germans “Duits” though, and they call themselves “Deutsch”. Somehow in English German and Dutch got a bit messed up. The reason is probably that during the middle ages we did refer to our language as “Dietsch”, so that probably stayed around.

What’s wrong? I find this a reasonable result. Most people looking for megabyte to bytes are actually looking for mebibytes, since the mega- prefix is literally just times a million but a lot of programs actually list mebibytes as “megabytes”.