I use inaturalist. You essentially take a pic, upload it, add info about its location and stuff, and it goes into a feed where others will see suggest the scientific name.

Yeah. In middle school I was gonna be an NBA player 😂

I’m sorry:(( I’m dumb.

I have Dredge already, and I had bought Animal Well for $18 last night. That left Inscryption as the final game in the bundle. Steam dynamically prices games in the bundle and since I already had two games, I saw the bundle as $7 and got confused.

I literally just refunded animal well, waited for the refund confirmation, went to rebuy animal well in the bundle, and saw the bundle was now priced at $24 (because I still already have Dredge).

Sorry I got your hopes up :(

Bah. Bought Animal Well for $18 last night, but just saw now it was included in a bundle for $7.

Edit: praise steams refund policy

Edit2: Jesus christ I’m an idiot

Damn.

Idk about curated playlists but I use soulseek to share files with my friends.

I like the same genres, I can recommend you some albums I’ve been liking if you want

I enjoy these types of movies. The most recent one I watched was Terry Gilliams Days of Heaven. I saw it described as a visual poem (This is accurate) about a boy running from his past with his girlfriend and sister, arrives to work as a farmhand on a Texas farm during harvest season.

I enjoy Tarkovskys films, those are generally quite slow but philosophically dense. Stalker, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev. I haven’t seen the rest.

I also enjoy abstract documentaries. Baraka is a dialogue-less epic showcasing the alienness of human culture. Amazing visuals and music. Life changing for me. In this genre, I also love Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil – a directors reflections on memory and time. A more serious, focused documentary following several men responsible for the mass execution of communists in Indonesia in the 60s as they act out their atrocities for what they believe will be a great action movie, called The Act of Killing directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, is also powerful and surreal. These three films had a drastic effect on me personally are the greatest documentaries I’ve seen, though not much happens in them.

More recent slow movies I’ve enjoyed: Past Lives, about childhood love. Scored by Daniel Rossen of the indie band Grizzly Bear, it is a beautiful and different outlook on love. Very touching. Not much happens.

The other is The Brutalist, an epic about a Jewish architect escaping the Holocaust and moving to America, seeking the American dream. Haunting, looming.

Edit: Richard Linklaters films generally have very loose plots. I’ve only seen School of Rock and Boyhood though. Love Boyhood.

Ye love yer rules, do ye?

Who’s posting this Israeli propaganda

Thank you so much. You’ve given me some things to think about. Wayland may be the way to go…I probably want to upgrade from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04, too, to get a newer version of GNOME. It may be that I want to move off Ubuntu…but that will be a whole process…

We’ll see how it goes…thanks again

hahahaha

nvidia, fuck you

thanks anyways

Whoops sorry. Yeah, I’m running with Proton. Pretty sure with the native version you can’t play online. I’ll try prime-run, but I’m not sure it will help – fairly certain Rocket League is using the NVIDIA GPU (btw, I can’t actually find a manpage for prime-run or nvidia-prime – do you know what game-performance does?)

Thanks

Edit: Thanks for linking that protondb page. Didn’t know that existed. Finally found another reference to a different issue I had with RL (controller rumble during boost cuts out after about 2s) that Ive researched before but couldnt find any info. Now if only there were a solution lol

It’s fantasy, part of the fun is the mystery of this strange looking technology and how old, used, and dirty it is. Makes you wonder, what kind of history did this object see?

Relevant aside: I just learned Lucas renamed Star Wars to Star Wars: Episode IV in 1981, before knowing he’d help make the three prequel films. It was just a stylistic choice, to make Star Wars feel like just a small piece of a larger epic.

Once you explain the mystery of the technology away, or the mystery of the rest of the saga, some of that magic disappears.

Sometimes backing in seems easier than backing out

Can you recommend me a starting point? For someone who has no experience with these games, or any Japanese games besides Soulsgames and RE4 remake.

Feel free to roast me in the process.

I found this fact particularly fun. thanks for sending me down a lil rabbit hole.

I think totally. 100%. If Wikipedia is to be believed

An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people that perceives themselves to be different from other groups based on shared attributes. These attributes include having a common language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment.[1][2] The term ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism. It is also used interchangeably with race.

Then I think that your ethnicity could be based on the internet communities you exist in.

Its directly related to things like the slow dissolution dissolving of regional accents we see due to the internet and the general melting, appropriation, and reappropriation of cultural aspects we see facilitated by the internet.

Hey, no need to apologize! I totally get it.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, even with your cynicism :) I agree, any altruistic behavior fits within this context of evolutionary behavior and is ultimately driven by the need for individuals to survive long enough to reproductive age. To be honest, I’m actually not sure where we disagree. I think, maybe, we are interpreting Kropotkin differently. To continue with the idea about horses – I think the problem with your posit (horses protecting their young) is that it isn’t only the horses who have offspring who form the circle, but also horses who don’t have offspring. This might sound like I’m saying, “See, since even the horses that do not have offspring join the protective ring, we see that altruism occurs in nature,” but as you pointed out, this too is an evolutionarily driven behavior. It’s not necessarily selfish in the eyes of the individual (I don’t think), but it’s an urge, driven by generations and generations of horses who exist on a spectrum from least social (do not participate in the circle) to most social (participate in the circle, and many more social activities), in which those horses that are more socially participative are more likely to reach adulthood and reproduction.

I can’t remember if Kropotkin addresses the violence that happens in the natural world, but I’m pretty sure he reconciles it. I don’t think he outright denies competition in Mutual Aid, even though I can see how you come to that conclusion with that passage. I agree with you, it is easy to look at opposing examples of competition rather than cooperation in the natural world, even among the same species. Especially when it comes down to resource scarcity – then you start seeing less cooperative behavior. I think Kropotkin’s point is not to deny that competition exists, but to push against the idea that that is the only thing that exists. The way I understand it, he was writing in a post-Darwin time, when the scientific community was taking Darwin’s ideas and applying them to society with Social Darwinism – survival of the fittest not only in nature but in social life, as well. So instead of a “noble savage” kinda idea, where Kropotkin is saying “everything in nature is peaches and roses,” he is more saying, “look at all this cooperation in nature that is being ignored by the ‘survival of the fittest’ camp.” Anyways, that’s how I read the book – but it’s not really captured in that single quote.

Funnily enough, your exact example with ants is one Kropotkin uses in Mutual Aid! He basically goes along the evolutionary ladder, from least complex organisms to most (although, beginning with insects I’m pretty sure) and shows the cooperation within various species, not to deny the existence of competition, but to show that it isn’t the only, or even the most, important force in evolution.

I guess my one last point is illustrated like this: if competition for resources were the primary force driving evolution, wouldn’t we see a continuing trend of individuals in a species with more and more physical strength, brutishness, competitive nature, and rejection of cooperation? In other words, wouldn’t we see a phasing out of cooperative behavior in favor of individual antagonisms and competition for resources? Here I’m thinking of my house cats – we’re in the process of introducing them, at the moment, and managing their anxieties about the other. Even though Bella is very territorial, each day she is showing more and more signs of acceptance of Suzie – through cat language of course – slow blinking, flopping on her side, chirping when she walks up to her. If competition where the only, or the most important driver of evolution, I’m not sure we would see this kind of behavior from Bella – I’m not even sure these cat-signs of flopping slow-blinking, chirping, would exist! Of course, they occur with more frequency as she slowly realizes resources are not scarce, that she can coexist with this other cat Suzie, and that she’ll get treats each time she has a positive interaction ;)

Anyways, thank you for your thoughtful reply. I’m curious to hear what you think, it’s been fun chatting. I think even if you’re skeptical of Kropotkin from that passage, it’s still worth reading the book in whole. You probably wouldn’t find that you agree with everything, or even most, but at the very least, I think it’d be an interesting insight into how a person thought post-Darwin, pre-WW1.

When i was a kid, my grandma lived with us. She’d listen to this piece of garbage non-stop. She had me parroting the drivel he spouted. Nothing could make me forgive this dude for poisoning her mind, and nothing will make me forget how she helped make me into a hateful little kid. Glad they’re both dead, only hoping my own mother doesn’t take up the mantle with my nieces and nephews. She does not understand the harm and the trauma she perpetuates.

I don’t really agree, but I do understand where you’re coming from. I do think you’re right in pointing out that all these behaviors give the individual a more likely chance to survive, but I also think that is exactly Kropotkin’s point. That these social behaviors were naturally selected, the individuals who displayed them were more likely to survive.

But where I disagree is in the fact that the individuals themselves aren’t consciously thinking, “this is what will give me, an individual, the best chance to survive.” You see what I mean? For example, the horses forming a circle around the young to defend from wolves – they’re not thinking, “I need to protect myself.” They have an instinct to protect the young, so the young go in the center. If an adult were purely individualistic, it would enter the circle, itself, right? Or if my neighbors house is on fire, what’s most advantageous for me as an individual is to run away, but I feel compelled to yell for help. Or kittens – wouldn’t they be better off as individuals if they just killed off their siblings, so that they could have a full mouth? But no, being raised with other young kittens allows them to learn to hunt through play, to groom themselves, and to learn socialization tactics and reading body language, which further increases their chances of survival when encountering other cats as adults.

So yeah, you’re totally right in a sense, animals act in these ways because their ancestors passed on the genes that predisposed them to acting this way, and those behaviors make them more likely to survive because they (the behaviors) made their ancestors more likely to survive. See what I’m getting at? Kropotkin’s point is that it is evolutionarily advantageous to engage in social activity and cooperation.

I totally buy it, personally. You ever think about why we blush involuntarily? Or why we feel so wretched when we think we haven’t been accepted socially? Why it feels good to just help someone, or when we wince when we see someone else in pain? We’re social animals, built to socialize. I mean, we all speak a language! We naturally are compelled to talk baby-talk at babies. We touch each other, even in platonic, non sexual ways. These social behaviors are rewarded because they helped us survive, yes, but we don’t think about them as actions we take to increase our chance of survival. We do them because they feel good, because they’re supposed to.