I was going to say something about head/eye coordination…but the snake I used to have could strike at a dead rodent and miss.

So you have a good point.

You know, I just realized how dumb it is that I grew up on TNG and yet have never written a bald dude into my sci-fi.

I need to stop sucking and do that.

Excuse me, low balls simply happen when you get older. It’s a natural facet of aging!

Pterosaur is a good one to look up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur

Me: The bowl’s empty, isn’t it?

I was kind of musing in a corner of my mind that Jesus acting as a sacrifice to god…really only makes sense in a cultural context where basically everyone around you is already sacrificing goats and chickens and bulls and whatever to their gods.

When that cultural context is removed (as in our culture where generally nobody slaughters animals as a sacrifice to any god) the whole crucifixion thing comes off as…weirdly pagan.

Like, HAVING to have a human/god sacrificed to god to…remove sin I guess…it only really makes sense if you have the cultural expectation that sacrificing things to some god is…just what you DO to get rid of sin or stuff that’s harmful like curses or whatever?

I’m not a bible scholar, and I know there’s tons of theology that’s already argued about Jesus “dying for our sins” into infinity.

I’m more vaguely looking at this from a layperson secular standpoint, where I’m thinking about the cultural context of “sacrifice” as it pertains to 2000 years ago, and how it pertains to now in our current culture. Like…wow, the culture and how we see things has totally shifted and the Jesus died thing is a really weird boondogle/relic of those ancient mindsets, isn’t it?

I read somewhere that for some people they also get better with age.

And for me that was true. My intrusive thoughts were worse as a teen and twenty something than now.

Then as I matured I relaxed, and also got proof from my own past behavior that I don’t act on any of it, which made me relax more.

Sloth is another word for neglect.

And sustained neglect can do terrible things.

Think a parent watching TV or playing with their phone and their child suffering from their inaction.

“I’ll do it tomorrow” can have huge repercussions when the thing needing tending is important.

There’s another treatment on the horizon though that grows entirely new teeth. There’s an article with a pic of a ferret showing an entirely new tooth that was grown. I think it’s a research group in Japan that managed it?

These techs together mean some pretty exciting things coming in a decade or two for shitty teeth when the technologies mature.

And they’re all grey.

My friend had a grey SUV that for the life of me I could not find in a parking lot. So many gray SUVs that all look the same…

I hate the vehicle color trend of Depression Grey. And blue. And mold green.

I admit I only know what a Stigmata is because the commercial with the guy with the bleeding hands was cool. Killer ad campaign to release them on Halloween too!

It’s the Batmobile!

I block individuals pretty freely, and it generally improves my experience online.

The reason I block is because I’ve lived through bullies and a shitty family, and I am familiar with the techniques bad people use to eat up my time/overwhelm me.

These days, I am also secure in myself and my emotional responses in such a way that I no longer feel bad or guilty (as I was conditioned to growing up) when I remove these people from my life. They are not owed my time or eyeballs.

I figure that if they behave in such a way that other people (such as me) decide it’s better to remove them from their life and block them–that’s their fault, not mine.

I also know my intellect well enough to understand that I’m not losing something irreplaceable intellectually if I block. I actually am better at learning and improving myself in a form that is NOT debate, or live, or putting pressure on me in the moment, because stepping away from the immediacy of something gives me the tools and breathing room to actually think.

So folks yapping and fretting about echo chambers forming if you block and curate your experience is weird to me…even pre-internet I went out of my way to learn new things. If you’re in an echo chamber, you chose to be there, it doesn’t happen on its own. And blocking asshats won’t magically put you in an echo chamber unless you’ve chosen to be in one already.

Live debate with unpleasant people who often in this day and age have ulterior motives, including a desire to provoke an emotional response that will hinder one’s thinking ability, is a technique used to manipulate others. By blocking and opting out of such things online, I can keep my temper more easily and use my brain instead.

So yeah. I block freely, whenever I feel like, and I’ve stopped feeling bad about it because I have quite a bit of experience on the internet now, and have seen the patterns in which people engage, and a handy block button is basically the only effective tool to manage it with.

I also block communities, but that’s mostly just so I can browse Lemmy in public without looking like a degenerate with all the porn subs hanging out in the open.