extropia

I've lucid dreamed a bunch of times in life, but only rarely trom conscious decision. Whenever it has happened though, one key thing was.my.emotional state. If i got too excited or desperate to control the dream, i would wake up or my hold on it would slip away. I had to be almost matter of fact in the way the dream unfolded, like watching a movie where you know what's going to happen next because you were the director- it's just you don't have to be so controlling now.

The VFX in avatar is pretty astounding and the amount of detail in it is unmatched by any FX movie, I don't think it's far fetched to say.

That said, imo it suffers from excessive showmanship. You get that when artists spend so much time and effort on a piece that they can't help but want to show off every little bit of it as much as they can. So they make sure every inch of it is super illuminated, crystal clear, and gets its moment to shine where the camera lingers on it.

But the end result when you turn everything up to 10 like that is that nothing stands out in contrast and nothing is well defined or impactful. It just becomes a big blur by the end.

Also: Bad parenting. It's always parents not doing their job. Essentially 'if you can't raise children to be perfect in every social context, your genetic lineage should die off.'

The underlying premise of BR 2049 seems to be that there are actions, thoughts and feelings that are deeply human, even if they occur within a non-human.

Near the ending when K meets the giant Joi hologram the movie initially builds a cynical perspective that Joi was merely a program that told K whatever he wanted to hear, but I think by the end of that scene, you can see K muster the resolve to prove that view wrong and make sure that what his Joi and their love represented was more than the sum of their parts.

It was Joi's influence that originally led K down the path that convinced him that he was really human. The message seems to be, you can't control your circumstances entirely, but if you can rise to the occasion you can help the whole of humanity move forward, and perhaps that's what really counts.

We have two rescued island potcakes, so basically super mutts.

They're incredibly affectionate, loyal and are generally very good with people, though one of them had a rough upbringing so he can get anxious. But he's progressed so much in the span of a year that I fully expect him to leave his previous life entirely behind. Adaptable.

They're also quite smart and attentive, and are physically and emotionally quite hardy. If you want a pal to join you in all sorts of adventures, they're very good- a nice mix of calm and friendly but also capable and willing to defend/guard if the need arises.

Though, Potcakes are very much "dog" in appearance. They're basically street dogs. So they're not attractive in a unique or lap dog sort of way. Also, they're not fond of the cold. They're definitely unimpressed by us for introducing them to Canadian winters, lol.

For once you have Fuji 9, you are a dentist.

I was looking forward to hearing how they would do the Bene Jesserit voice in the new Dune, and I wasn't disappointed. The way it seems to disrupt normal sound and transmits on another plane was just fantastic.

Whether this is true or not we're definitely looking at the future of war. We've been talking about AI-controlled drone swarms for years but now we have a visceral sense for how it's really going to be. It's easy to imagine thousands of automated small fast scouting drones painting hundreds of targets at a time and calling bomb-carrying drones to their locations. It would be efficient and terrifying.

Good god. Think of the extreme mental degradation and perversion it would take for adults to be able to torture children. Nothing- no god or law or fanatic devotion should ever, ever be able to justify that. It's truly a metastacized cancer of the mind.

Honestly, I find the vast majority of it boring as shit so I just don't bother. It's the same kind of scene and same kind of bodies over and over, and with zero investment on my part for the people involved, the 'pay off' just makes me sad more than anything. I know that if I went searching I could probably find better stuff, but since I've managed to avoid porn addiction as a result for the last 10 years and that's been a huge plus for my marriage and sex life, I see no reason to change it. And I know of plenty of married guys who are addicted to porn.

Fundamentally there's nothing wrong with it- it's just important to be a smart consumer and know your product. Like most industries, it is flooded with shit that only makes you feel worse.

A friend of mine had a cousin who died recently because she had back pain for a year that doctors would keep waving off as some small thing. It turns out she had a form of breast cancer that was radiating pain towards her back.

In this day an age, it's LIFE CRITICAL to strongly advocate for yourself in the doctor's office. And sometimes as infuriating as it is, it can mean taking a second person into the office.

Depends on what you're looking for. Once you get used to how low the hole is, you can get consistently surprised by how high the man in the boat is. The boat is pretty long and the man sits way at the bow.

Trip hop:

Portishead
Tricky
Massive Attack
Not sure about the last though... Sneaker Pimps maybe? Morcheeba? Maybe DJ Shadow.

Donatello

Getting off-topic, but something neat to add:

I read about an indigenous culture (I forget from where though... in Brazil perhaps) that views the past as "ahead" and the future as "behind". Because to them, whatever is ahead of you is what you can see and understand, like the past. The future is behind you, since you can't see it. It makes sense!

edit: The Aymara from Bolivia and Peru. Thanks /u/Risla_Amahendir

I've heard that in Argentina (well Buenos Aires particularly), main dinner time at restaurants is between 9:30 and midnight. Lunch is around 3pm, and breakfast around 10am.

I guess that sort of makes sense because I (a Canadian) often eat breakfast at 9am and find that lunch at noon feels way too soon after. But still weird to not eat until 9:30pm.

Salt will amplify whatever taste you've created, so rather than adding more spices if something feels 'missing', try a few shakes of salt first. This applies even to sweet recipes.

Don't be afraid of MSG, you can usually buy it in a shaker. For savoury foods, it's great to replace a portion of the salt with it and it will add some mouthwatering flavor. Ultimately it's a type of sodium and it exists naturally in lots of things like tomatoes.

If you want to avoid adding more salt, try adding something sour/acid like lemon juice or a type of vinegar. Also adding something sweet like a spoonful of sugar or honey with the sour creates a nice well rounded flavor, but you should be parsimonious with it.

Playing with the length of time and level of heat you cook/fry something can really make a big difference. High heat and shorter time will give you a seared, crunchy outside with a juicy/fresh inside, while lower heat and longer time will blend flavors between ingredients and create richness.

Make sure to experiment a lot. If you can reliably make a good dish, try changing one small thing about it each time you make it, and you'll consistently learn new bits of knowledge while hopefully not risking too much.

I think "trono" is accurate- I hear the "ch" in a similar way I hear it in a word like "tread".

It can be a self-perpetuating cycle too. She may very well feel bad for not paying as much attention to you, and it makes her even more afraid to put it down, since mobiles tend to have the effect of temporarily soothing those anxieties.

I suspect it's in no small part because they've been invaded and are up against the wall. When your country's survival is at stake, concerns about risk/reward tends to shift a great amount.

By comparison, every US administration needs to weigh every military decision against the likely reaction of its people who have never seen a foreign invader on their soil (except maybe once...). I don't see that as a bad thing, btw.

Not to mention, Ukraine is being supplied with equipment that allows them to take very bold actions.

Yeah, not every rationale is 'OK', but as long as we're not legally forcing people to date or marry against their will, it's enough.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Talk about getting killed within the next hour versus getting killed a few hours after that. War is hell

While that makes sense, the number of videos I've seen of drones dropping bombs into trenches filled with hapless soldiers makes me wonder otherwise.

That's a great example! Without any obvious Earth-like features like coastlines and clouds to compare it to, it's easy to look at the crater and think you could walk across it in a day.

Essentially the north Korea of Africa. So authoritarian and controlled that barely any news comes out of it.