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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • My parents were separated since before I started forming long-term memories and I was raised by my single mother. We used to visit my dad’s side of the family for a week or so every other Christmas, I lived with him for a couple months as a teenager when my home life got particularly rough due to a profoundly toxic non-parent influence, and during stay that we ignored each other apart from the cliche “divorced parent and kid who don’t actually know each other at all trying to act their respective parts but neither knows how or really wants to or frankly likes the other one but they both know it’s polite to pretend” sorts of interactions (which were quite sparing even as those go). Neither of us has ever attempted to keep in touch with the other over the phone or in writing.

    To be clear, I don’t hold any of that against him even a little bit; that’s all perfectly normal on his end as far as I’m concerned. That’s all just there for context when I tell you that, now that I’m well into my 30s, I recently heard from my older sister who actually tries to stay connected to him that he’s begun boasting about how proud he is for having shaped me into the man I am today. And, like, I’m not even on social media so I’m not a person he’s even capable of keeping tabs on from a distance if he tried. He fully has no idea who I am. He not only doesn’t deserve to take credit, he doesn’t even know what he’s taking credit for. I’m just so automatically an extension of himself by virtue of my DNA that he goes around telling other people that he’s proud of me.

    (A more technically accurate but less entertaining answer to the question is that he’s politically a Libertarian.)



  • I am very aware of the differences in quality but am mostly okay with bad equipment and/or bad settings. The most important thing is to be able to clearly see and hear what’s supposed to be clear and only especially incompetent or especially pretentious media doesn’t get mastered to work well on shoddy displays and/or speakers by those standards.

    The one thing I absolutely cannot tolerate is HDR mode on TVs without enough of a maximum luminance to actually do HDR, so they and up looking way worse than SDR.

    The idea of not caring about binocular quality is truly mystifying. Binoculars’ only job is to make things as easy to see as possible.


  • What these questions are missing is that the government didn’t start from a place of neutrality, they started by enforcing the institution of slavery. They didn’t go from having no authority over slavery to having all of it, rather the authority they had remained static. The only variable for the amount of authority then is that the classes of “slave” and “slave owner” stopped being a thing, so there were no longer slave owners that had absolute authority over slaves.