Damn right. Airwolf intro is the best ever

Vibe nanobots is where the fun really starts

The traditional way is to scoop out your eyeballs and blast bug spray into the sockets. Can’t say I recommend it as they just tend to take refuge in the brain, and if you don’t kill them you’ll really piss them off. Better just to cancel all your TV subscription services and read 18th century literature for at least 6 hours a day. There is a fair chance they will just get bored and leave of their own accord.

As a doctor, I can assure you there is never any buildup of eyelashes behind your eyeball. The spiders eat them all.

Might be a cloudy nuclear winter

B : backslash

D : delete

G : gneiss

H : hour

L : llama

N : nave

P : pterosaur

R : rote

U : urn

V : veldt

X : xerographic

Z : zero

“I’m feeling lucky, give me the dee”

Blender.

10 years ago it was scarcely believable that a FOSS package for such a niche purpose could be so fucking good. And it got better in the meantime. If Blender had existed when I was a kid I would have probably spent every waking hour creating stuff with it. As an adult, I get limited time to do that, but I appreciate that it exists.

15 years ago was when I stopped using facebook. It had the potential to be a great way to organize and maintain social connections, but instead it was a toxic environment promoting the most annoying shit, particularly when posted by frequent users trying to broadcast their lives to the world. Simultaneously it did a great job of hiding anything I’d actually be interested to know. Fuck knows how bad it has become in the meantime. It was striking how much it seemed to bring out the worst in people, and equally remarkable how so many people just wanted to wallow in that.

“die” sucks so bad as a word. I propose we change it to “douse”

Jokes on you when you’re mid tasting and you notice the whoopee cushion on a different chair

Yes, I don’t believe there is a line such as you have mentioned because the difference between engagement and compulsion is only a matter of degree and varies from one individual to another. Indeed the link you gave illustrates how some individuals exhibit unhealthy compulsive behavior from overuse of an engaging product. Games are not generally considered to be “addictive” in the sense that it would warrant legal sanctions. The same could be said of social media addiction.

For clarity, I’m just talking about addiction here, not any of the other problems such as disinformation or active promotion of unhealthy or dangerous behavior. I think it’s odd that the reporting is primarily focused on addiction, because it’s the totality of these things that really makes it worthy of legal intervention.

I think your core issue is confusion over what addiction is and is not.

That’s right. Because if your definition of addiction is broad enough to include compulsive use of social media, there’s a lot of scope for confusion. That is a case of media companies using psychological tricks to get their users/viewers coming back for more, which is not fundamentally different from a lot of TV programming techniques. There are variations of degree or complexity, but it’s the same game, and one which we’ve routinely accepted for years.

Don’t you care about spreading misinformation online?

How is that relevant?

If a TV program ends a series on an unnecessary cliffhanger, should there be legal consequences? How about if a smartphone game has timed events to encourage the player to come back regularly? While I agree that these things aren’t typically beneficial, I don’t think legislation is always the answer. There’s a huge gray area around the question of whether a feature is beneficial or just designed to increase compulsive consumption. Trying to legislate something so ambiguous is bound to produce bad results.

I think the problem is how to separate those things, particularly in a legal sense. Social media could come under “compulsive use” but not physical dependence. But so could a lot of games and TV shows, insofar as they are trying to make you feel a strong urge to keep playing/watching which doesn’t derive from providing value (better entertainment). There’s so many products that use every trick they can to keep you consuming, should we legislate against them all? It would be nice to do something about all of that but using the law to do it can only lead to overreach.

You even get a free cremation. Saves time and money!

The balls are there so you can act out fun choking scenarios with your 3 year old kid.

We don’t talk about the homunculus

AI my ass, they just don’t want people to bypass the paywall

You have used the safe word correctly. Now please identify all the squares with traffic lights in them so we can email you a six digit code in order to proceed