Great now you just have Loss.

We have made the same mistake over and over again when dealing with conservatives, which is the assumption that they give a micron of a shit about definitions and facts.

They are not living in a fact-based world, and we resent them for that because they are benefitting from the science, facts and reason that has build the world they cherish.

But we can make far more effective arguments if we meet them on an emotional level in these debates. I’ve seen more progress made in debates by progressives asking them what they would do if their own son or daughter was gay or trans than all the graphs and statistics in the world.

Or at the very least, call them heartless, weird, child-hating, freedom-hating, etc.

Grok, is this true?

I am reminded of the detail in The Office where Michael Scott is stirring sugar into his diet coke.

Platypuses - Now have added echolocation, flight, extra limbs, and bioluminescence. Too many skill points to spend, no build guide.

Kiwi birds - Will have finally switched places, now they are large eggs that give birth to a smaller bird.

Armadillos - Form a union with pillbugs and turtles, finally get better pay and benefits.

Golden Retrievers - No change to perfection, now the dominant life form.

Giraffes - Short necks and really long legs.

Daddy Longlegs - Surprisingly, develop more balanced proportions and are called “Paternal Medium Legs” but are still quite horrifying and love to hide under your bed.

Zebra - More tasteful patterns, like a nice vellum eggshell with fine, elegant pinstripes and a watermark with floral trim.

Ungulates - Even MORE stomachs.

Cetaceans - why not even bigger?

Cephalopods - Starships and philosophy and tragic poems about how short life is.

Bivalves - even less brain, brain make feel bad, brain bad

Felines - Find and domesticate the nearest dominant life form

Murmurations of birds and schooling fish - Horrifyingly surreal swarm intelligences that can take the shape of things like pointing fingers and signs to communicate or a big pair of cartoon scissors that chase you.

A lot of genders are very unstable though. Some genders can be violently dangerous, prone to reactivity, or won’t even survive very long in the real world.

Us?

“If you arrest pedophiles, there won’t be pedophiles anymore.”

Did someone say that seriously? Who knows, but if I take a screenshot of the imagined dialogue, it will feel real and that’s what’s important.

They’ve been doing this for the last decade.

Step 1: Do something outrageous and horrible that hurts many people.

Step 2: Profit.

Step 3: Publish some kind of very timid, mild, barely visible retraction or admission somewhere that nobody will ever see or care about, knowing full well we live in an attention-span economy and you can literally buy whatever levels of visibility or invisibility as you want from media outlets.

It’s pretty much worthless to read media and news that isn’t by one of the very few remaining journalistic organizations, and even Reuters and AP have had issues.

I weep for the passing of truth and reality. I kinda thought we would go in the opposite direction a quarter century into the 21st millennium, but here we are. Reckon I’ll go down to the local alchemist and pick up some leeches and mercury to keep the miasma at bay and balance the ol’ humors.

I tried to point this out and everyone got grumpy. It must be nice being so attractive.

Google maps is one of the only applications that has literally made cry. The other is excel for entirely different reasons.

Exactly, you can go on Google Earth right now and view the past.

But that’s boring, doing it with light is way better.

I get that it seems cooler, but you would be looking at recordings with gathered light either way.

… But still! the idea that it’s at least hypothetically possible to actually see our own past is very exciting!

We… we have tools for seeing our past. We have extensive records of imagery from as far back as we have orbital satellites. You can go on Google Earth right now and look at older maps.

I mean, I get why it would be cool to see a reflection from the past, but literally every reflection you see is from the past. At a certain distance from your reflective or distorting surface, you’re going to need major image processing to make out a clear image of the planet, so again, at that point it’s far easier to just look at recorded images or videos.

There is a much cooler idea though that you can exploit from this principle: you can use a star or other dense object in space to work like a light-lens, we could build this now but it would be a very expensive and long-term project, because we would need to send a series probes out past the distance that Voyager 1 has already traveled over 40 years. We would also need to know ahead of time what our target is so we place the probes in the right place, placing the sun between the probes and the target at just the right distance.

If you take the distorted light from around the edges of the Sun and reconstruct it, you can theoretically see details of continents and other surface features of Earth-sized planets in entire other solar systems, which would be fantastic.

Alternatively, and slightly cheaper, put a satellite into orbit and just record everything on the ground it looks at, hang onto recordings for 10 years.

Yup. The number times we’ve seen shared credit for discoveries and shared nobel prizes simply because two teams were doing the same but unconnected work is amazing, and it points to how there is a cutting edge that will be in the same place no matter how you get there.

I haven’t had any religious inclinations since I was a small child, but I don’t think we would be humans without narratives written to guide us. If it wasn’t bibles, it would have been other stories and fables people would have used to both guide people’s morality as well as justify every bad thing people are gonna do anyway.

Nothing is black and white, and I still think faith is worth respecting in others, I sometimes wish my mind was that “clean” that I could get anything from reading mythology.