Speaking of mind blowing… I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you’ve said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn’t relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I become able to “see” even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I’m sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think “Ooh that’s pretty.” Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.

I thought that that’s what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!

I don’t mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I’ve only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You’re saying that you can see anything you want… Excuse me because I’m going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.

But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I’ve always been good at “using my imagination”? I love reading fantasy novels and they’re not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? I’m better than most people at geometry. Strange.

Interesting… I can’t do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child’s crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn’t bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.

Edit: And now that I think about it some more, the same is actually true with sounds. I can, for example, imagine the feeling of hearing a woman’s voice, but I can’t hear the voice. And the same goes for sounds that aren’t speech. I can imagine the feeling of hearing one piece of metal hitting another, but if I try to hear it the best I can do is the sound of myself saying “Clang!”

I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let’s say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)

Bing used to be better than Google for a time but it has gotten worse too to the point where I use Google again. Edge is, IMO, unfairly maligned. It’s a perfectly good browser, although Microsoft begging me to use it is quite annoying.

Do people actually like pizza with the crust so flaccid and the cheese so melty that it drips off? A good slice doesn’t come apart before you can eat it.

(Any innuendo is deliberate.)

I used to work for a guy who was never wrong. He didn’t talk much but when he did say something, it was always correct. He still hedged a lot, so he would say “I’m not sure you’re right; I think the answer might be X.” What that meant was “You are certainly mistaken and the only reasonable answer is X.”

The PSF is (presumably) already required to comply with Federal anti-discrimination laws. Am I misreading the text or does it not actually create any new obligations for the PSF if they were to accept the grant?

Only the foreign objects need to be removed. British rectums are for British objects.

easy work in an air-conditioned office

despair

There’s a filter but I’d say it’s a “dedication” filter rather than a “sanity” filter. People on here generally seem to put more effort into understanding the causes that they support than the average person on Facebook does, so they avoid making the most basic mistakes. However, their causes are still often far out of the mainstream (“crazy” in a colloquial sense) and their understanding of why someone might disagree with them in good faith is often rather poor.

I think blaming billionaires for this is incorrect. Look at Lemmy: this place is very much a silo. I’ve been actively participating here for over two years and in that time I have encountered one or two people who supported Trump (the ones posting in /conservative/ before it apparently got taken over). I routinely get called a fascist for being a mainstream Democrat. I’m not complaining (after all, I choose to be here rather than in a more comfortable silo) but clearly being a federated open-source non-profit isn’t solving the problem.

Some billionaires got rich by enabling people to join online silos, but those billionaires were doing what the people wanted already.

I’m glad to live in a time when full plate armor is no longer necessary to approach a woman safely.

I paid $15 a month to haul bulk cargo in a freighter.

That… doesn’t seem bad? No one would mind if he also put some vegetables in there and called it a pasta salad.

Checkmate feminists.

Why would the dude go to a graveyard while wearing a suit of armor? Is it in enemy territory? Did he have to fight his way in?

I don’t think Garfield or anyone is going to change an adult’s well-established sexual orientation, but the idea that children growing up in a society that normalizes homosexual attraction will be more likely to develop inclinations that otherwise would have been suppressed seems reasonable to me. It’s supported both by the prevalence of what we would call bisexuality in certain cultures and by my own personal experience - I distinctly recall being young and trying to decide whether an attractive character in a picture was a flat-chested woman (and therefore OK) or a long-haired man (and therefore not OK). I had internalized social expectations before I even knew what the differences between men and women were and so from that point my sexuality developed to be strictly heterosexual, but I think that I might have become bisexual if those social expectations had not been taught to me before that formative time.

I saw a guy once with no gap between his beard and his chest hair.

We’re not the first organisms to alter the atmosphere and cause a mass extinction. The first ones were cyanobacteria and the gas they released was oxygen. They caused

a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80%

We’re descended from the survivors that adapted to a high-oxygen environment but to this day there are many microorganisms that die if exposed to even small amounts of oxygen.