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 took it to be a coyote. They go after sheep sometimes. Also, they are associated with being trickster figures in mythology.

This is a TF2 reference.

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/ÜberCharge

The emperor’s new battle strategy

When games go too far with this, it can encourage exploit or cheese strategies, or at least strict adherence to a meta build. This can actually mean resorting to a solution with less skill needed, since the game has already been effectively solved. A still-challenging situation that doesn’t demand perfection can be reasonably done with unoptimized preparation and adaptation.

Oh, today I learned!

No one has mentioned Vivaldi yet. I haven’t found it slow in the years I’ve used it. It does hog memory with the amount of tabs I open, but no more than any other browser I’ve used. Fortunately it has inactive tab suspenders as an option to help with my bad habits (natively now, and through chrome extensions before that). Also, it is undoubtedly the most visually customizable browser I know, so it being ugly is really you making the sandwich.

If this was just bait, I guess it got me. If not, anon could try Tor if they value privacy, or maybe something minimalist if they really care about performance.

That’s not really how these stories went, at least for the ones involving mortals. The gods used favored mortals or demigod children as proxies instead. So maybe you could interpret Athena turning one of Poseidon’s lovers into a hideous creature as her way of punishing him.

Depending on the telling, Poseidon/Neptune had sex with her in a temple dedicated to Athena/Minerva, and the latter transformed her as punishment. Then she may have just been chilling until Perseus came along to behead her for an unrelated situation.

Yes, it seems to be both to help the laid off folks add to their portfolio and a hope that its popularity will draw attention from a publisher. Seems like the best strategy available to them in the circumstances and I hope it works out for them.

This meme’s text has figures about “now” but doesn’t note that it is mostly a paraphrased quote from Deus Ex, a video game set in a fictional dystopian version of America in 2052. The speaker is not in fact talking about 2024 America. But even for the past figures, I would want citations.

The first part seems to be talking about tax sources as a portion of total taxes raised, which isn’t easy to search for. I did find a table that cited whitehouse.gov and recorded income collections compared to total GDP at least. It did peak in 1945, but only at 7.1%.

The US Bureau of Labor doesn’t seem to have records on self-employment before 1948. The only thing I could find talking about self-employment in 1900 was a blog post that said it was 50%. 90% self-employment sounds like a lot of subsistence farming and odd-jobs work, which isn’t exactly the ideal economic model.

The Deus Ex part is part of a longer conversation, but here is the relevant section:

JC Denton: Just answer the question.
Leo Gold: Don’t believe me? It’s all in the numbers. For a hundred years, there’s been a conspiracy of plutocrats against ordinary people.
JC Denton: Do you have a single fact to back that up?
Leo Gold: Number one: In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent. Number two: in 1900, 90 percent of Americans were self-employed; now it’s about two percent.
JC Denton: So?
Leo Gold: It’s called consolidation. Strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes, this can be done imperceptibly over time.

If you had lived at an earlier point, there’s a good chance your eyesight would have been better. Not just because of natural selection for genes or whatever. The modern spread of nearsightedness is primarily attributed to greater time spent indoors, looking at things close to you like books, and particularly during childhood. It is largely nurture instead of nature.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220927-can-you-prevent-short-sightedness-in-kids

The taste of their food and the beauty of their women made the British the best sailors in the world.

Actually, “earning a living” is an example of an idiom, and it is not meant to be interpreted literally. It just means aquiring the income necessary to pay for the basic expenses of modern life. You may also notice that people rarely find themselves inside of pickles or with butterflies in their stomachs, but before you get angry that someone is suggesting you should break your leg, remember that figurative speech is fairly common.

A lot of people got the game with the assumption it was coming.

Do you mean they bought Overwatch 1, with the anticipation that at some point after the release of Overwatch 2, they would add PvE? Because Overwatch 2 was free to play from the start. The only thing that you could “pre-order” was a pack that gave some cosemtics, some premium currency, and the first battlepass. At that point PvE was something they were still planning to add at some point but still had no date, so you could only use those bonuses for the PvP.

Thank you for the detailed background on that. People often resort to No True Scotsman claims to disavow bad elements from the group they support, or better yet toss them to their rivals. But honestly the more an entity is pulled away from center along the authoritarian/liberal axis, the less meaningful any left/right distinction becomes.

That’s the correct interpretation of that use of the word, and the quote in the post is meaning to use it in that way before pretending it’s a gotcha.

The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- “person”) and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word)

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.