And hormones in humans have severe life lasting side effects.
Not having hormones has pretty severe effects. Women who’ve gone through menopause (or had ovaries removed) and don’t produce hormones often get prescribed hormones to prevent things like osteoporosis. Men with low testosterone get prescribed it. Children who don’t produce hormones don’t go through puberty–in the past, they castrated boys with pretty voices so they’d never have their voice break, and that had severe health consequences on the boys turned into eunuchs.
I’m saying all of this because when it comes to “hormones”, you kinda have to be specific. You can’t just throw it out there like, “oOooOO! Hormones! Scary!” Otherwise you get into a realm similar to how people hear “dihydrogen monoxide” and don’t make the connection between the “scary science word” and the fact that dihydrogen monoxide is water and is necessary for life.
For me, what’s way scarier is, it isn’t that everyone is being quiet, it’s that there isn’t any one else out there, and we’re one of the first civilizations to develop.
Why would you find that scary?
Is it because of the ‘great filter’ stuff, that there must therefore be something ahead of us in time that wipes us out (like self-inflicted climate change)? Or is it something like humans being awfully flawed to go down in universal history as the “first” intelligent and technologically advanced species? Or something else?
I forgot about the kid’s shoes trick. It can be hit or miss…sometimes kid’s shoes aren’t made as well as they’re expected to be outgrown. But sometimes the toe boxes are bigger, which I appreciate because it sucks looking for 5 wide women’s. (And size 3 men’s isn’t always available.)
Funny thing…being short, I’m also not that strong. I buy furniture that I have the strength to put together/take apart and move solo, without helpers. Camping tables are lightweight and sturdy enough, and best thing–I can move them around with ease, I don’t even break a sweat which is awesome.
I ran Manjaro Linux as my daily driver a few years ago but slowly phased it out for Windows for some reason, and I’m finally back using Linux (currently Linux Mint). I gotta say, I don’t know why I ever switched back to Windows. There’s just so much freedom Linux gives you right off the bat that Windows is just plain...
I’ve nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn’t have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.
I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I’ve mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam’s own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.
The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield–it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn’t have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III…but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it’s supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it’s been rock solid.
I’ve played No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don’t feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)
Same here. I think they’re just too sweet for me, somehow? Which is odd, because I’ll eat things like acorn squash which get kinda sweet when cooked. ::shrug::
I’ve never been a huge fan of “adult animation”, or really animation in general. So I had to get over that hill of bias. But once I did, I found I enjoyed this show. Those Old Scientists on Strange New Worlds is actually what made me go back and give Lower Decks a second try.
Anyway, I’m excited to see where season 5 goes. I also kinda want another live-action crossover.
In the past, I probably wouldn’t be found out, but I’d probably also die more easily. I’d have to be in Tudor England to even have a chance of speaking the language. If it was a dice roll of going to where “my ancestors” lived, I could end up anywhere in Europe, and parts of western asia and north africa.
In the future, they might find me out, but I’d also probably have a much better time of surviving. I’d prefer to go to the future.
A translator app on a phone could probably make heads and tails of my English dialect (I mean, they can do that today), and travel would be as fast as modern travel or faster, so once I identified a locale that I thought I’d like I could try to get to it. Basically, more opportunity would mean more options to be safe, and to survive.
We might need to define “unhealthy” here. Mine is going to be different from other people’s.
Regarding food, I believe the pop definition of “unhealthy” is wrong. As far as I can tell, after having worked in the food industry on the regulatory side, and after having tried to understand nutrition from a truly scientific standpoint, the biggest goof people make is portion size, and, less commonly, having too “small” a pool of foods they’ll eat so certain vitamins/minerals are lacking. The rest of it with added sugars or fat or this or that ingredient being “bad” is smoke and mirrors. Portion size is really, really, really fucking important.
You can be healthy eating just about anything (even McDonald’s) as long as the portions are appropriate for your size and amount of exercise, and so long as your diet is varied enough overall to bring in enough vitamins and minerals. So, eating 3 super-sized meals at McDonald’s might screw you up because the calories are too much for your level of activity, but if you scale it back to 1 a day and keep the meal size “small”, or even eat a happy meal as an adult, you’ll be ok.
Regarding vitamins and minerals…in the modern day, people tend to be deficient in vitamin D because they don’t get enough sun, so that sometimes needs to be supplemented. And individuals will sometimes be deficient in iron or vitamin C. I supplement with C because I tend not to eat many foods with it, and D because I’m a vampire-like nerd that stays away from the sun.
Anyway. To get back to the question, I basically eat what I want, without regard for whether pop culture thinks it’s bad or not, but I pay attention to portion size and I do not snack. I’ve sometimes fallen into keto behaviors or one-meal-a-day but I don’t follow either with any dedication, my natural patterns just fall close to those.
Do I sometimes buy and eat things that are unhealthy for me? Well, by MY standards…not really. I understand nutrition, and I understand portion sizes, and it’s not all that hard for me to eat appropriately for my size without worrying about whatever the latest health food fads are blabbing on about. And because I understand what I’m doing, and I have control of it, I don’t feel guilt.
Personally when i’m looking for a community I sort it by top month instead of new because since i’m looking for an active community, it’l sort based on rankings of the posts in the community. (I assume based on the guide)...
I bet Covid got you a lot of fun data to play with re: “supply line collapse”.
I’ve always been interested in work like this–I took a class that covered lean manufacturing and kept thinking about how “just in time” inventory seemed like it’d be awful for a hospital, as the hospital would be MOST needed if supply lines collapsed, and JIT stuff seemed a dumb move. But I was only spitballing on the surface as an outsider.
I imagine if you took two seconds to contemplate how too many small businesses are run, you could figure out it’s shit management from your local companies and not this particular kiln operator.
I promise this isn’t a “OMG, AI!” question. But it involves kinda that thing.
A long time ago–probably over 15 years–I once read an article about some sort of…“evolved”?..method of generating novel antenna designs. Basically, the article said that the researchers said they had an algorithm or computer “evolve” some potential designs, and it spat out this really weird unintuitive design that was nothing like the human made designs. But it ended up working fantastically well or something when they actually prototyped it and tried it?
I’m sorry, I’m just laughing over the idea of some dude accidentally signing up for classes in assassination. I can believe it happened–but it’d also make a great story.
Make it so the guy is too timid to stop going (maybe because he was taking martial arts as a way to learn assertiveness) and you have a book or TV series about an accidental assassin.
Is it shallow, or petty, to decide based on name alone? Yeah, pretty much, but there’s probably something, a product or service or site, that the name has made you gloss right over it or jump to it ASAP....
Does judging books by their cover count? Seems like in the same vein…
In the 90s, I avoided Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series books because the Baen covers were awful, and at the time she hadn’t written books for any other publisher so I didn’t get introduced to her via that route. In the 2010s I finally read her books…and I was mad as hell that they’d put such ugly covers on them back in the day, because I would’ve been crazy about this series in the 90s!
I think part of the reason I use Zenni Optical online is because Warby Parker sounds like a place that’ll offer grandma glasses for stupid-expensive prices.
If someone will legit get hurt or killed by incompetence, you speak up. That’s time-sensitive, and you can’t afford to twiddle your thumbs just because you’re anxious or whatever. Immediacy of physical harm is the one situation where action is most important above all and even if you’re shy and withdrawn and generally don’t get along socially with people, you can’t cater to that in certain situations and you have to do something yourself to fix the situation if incompetence is going to cause physical harm.
In situations where an entire company is being incompetent as a whole or is doing something terrible, you leave/quit. Yes, it’s sometimes a choice between removing yourself from an immoral situation or starving–and I have, absolutely, chosen to be poorer and starving rather than be a part of certain things. But other people make that choice on their own knowing their own internal situation and context.
If someone’s just being dumb and the consequences of their dumbness are my own irritation or frustration but nothing that actually matters but my poor feelings, I often ignore it. There is no way as a human to fix everything that is wrong with everyone everywhere, so it becomes important to learn how to internally deal with your disappointment when you discover that the world is imperfect.
Online, I don’t believe really in “debate” (I don’t learn from active, aggressive live-action debate–it’s more likely to trigger me to shut down and STOP learning, which is bad), I learn more from reading other people’s convos. So I will sometimes respond to someone who is being dumb, not as a way to get into a debate with them, but to get my perspective out there so lurkers who learn as I do by reading more than interacting have something to chew over that’s better than the bullshit I saw. I don’t expect anyone to take my words uncritically–that’s not how people learn–I’m just massively disinterested in debate since it fucks up my own ability to keep pressing forward with learning. (Trauma in my past means my responses to stress are all fucky, so I jury-rig things to work around it.)
I got pics of my foot during surgery and pics of it a week after the operation. I’d love to share it with people and discuss how neat the human body is. I don’t want to subject people to it who aren’t interested in it, though.
I’m glad you’re healing well. I broke my foot earlier in the year in July…lis franc injury, but mild enough that they decided not to do surgery for fear of fucking up with the tiny foot bones (I got a lot of little breaks at the end of the bones which are nigh-impossible to put screws through without making it worse), which seems to have been the right call as I’m walking on it 4 months later.
I absolutely loved the doctors that got all excited and doctory talking about stuff! With me, I ended up with some of the history of lis franc injuries, which used to be common for soldiers on horseback, as they’d fall from their horse and get the midfoot stuck in the stirrup, breaking it.
I also had an unrelated small skin biopsy, and my surgeon was happily chattering away about doing it by hand so I don’t get weird skin flaps by the punch, and how the little cauterization tool worked. You know, as I lay there with bits of my flesh burning, lol.
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
In my experience, this usually fills in for something that people need to be true.
I’m not religious, but I’ve noticed religion can (successfully) act as a mental buffer to help people through hard times. To keep them from simply clocking themselves out during the lowest of lows.
Whether someone else likes that idea or not because it’s “lies” doesn’t really matter if it’s a technique for pure animal survival that works for some members of a species.
Personally, I’ve seen a lot of damage done to perfectly good people done via religious institutions, so I’d prefer if a formalized network of mental health services that was affordable and accessible existed. But, again, my preferences for the type of system that performs a function aren’t going to erase what happens in real life with real people faced with survival problems on the ground.
Huh–crossing my fingers then! It’ll be interesting to see if it actually gets into development.
I was thinking about casting Corwin, and after the finale of Loki, I kinda think Tom Hiddleston would do a great Corwin. I think he could portray Corwin’s arc of fighting for the throne at first just so his brother wouldn’t get it, to someone who doesn’t even want the throne wonderfully. He’d also do great as one of Corwin’s brothers.
But I’d also kinda like to see some newcomer knock it out of the park too.
Man, I’ve been stuck in this place where I really want to read those books (somehow I missed them), but I write SFF too and have some near-future thoughts that I don’t want to get tangled up with his stuff. (Part of the reason I went back and read the Chronicles of Amber was to keep my mind away from modern SFF while I work on projects.)
Some day I think I’ll just have to give in and read it and my own stuff is too close to his…oh well. I feel like I’d enjoy his work based on what everyone says about it.
I read the original two trilogies in the 80s so I’ve forgotten some bits, but what were the things that would be problematic today? I don’t think I remember any details relating to the above. Lessa is always one of the first people I think of when someone says “so and so was the first strong woman in scifi” and it’s a character that came 30+ years later.
So, when the books were originally published, it actually was pretty feminist/forward-thinking that Lessa got to lead Benden Weyr as an equal partner, and she’s the one that saved Pern, and she’s the heroine who gets songs sung about her. Sure, F’lar “saved” her by slaying Fax and bringing her to Benden, but she mind-manipulated him into it so it was really her using him as her tool, and then she went on to save the WORLD all on her own. And that was all pretty forward-thinking, when most SFF of the era had ladies being damsels in distress, or running around in chainmail bikinis.
The bits that haven’t aged well today is how Anne McCaffrey writes romance. Basically, back when the books were written, there was this cultural trope that “good” women didn’t want sex. Like, even if the main gal obviously wanted the romantic lead, you had to put up a show of resisting, of saying no, for some dramatic tension or something, because if you said yes too quickly you were a slutty slut just slutting around or the like. Good girls don’t say yes, even to the people they want, too quickly. And it was “romantic” for the man to be pushy and not take no for an answer.
So McCaffrey has a lot of her lead men “ravishing” their partners in some way after the female resists or says no, which reads as really rapey with today’s understanding of sex and consent. F’lar grabs and shakes Lessa physically at times (I don’t recall if he outright hits her at all or not–he might, once or twice. I’d have to re-read). And Jaxom basically rapes Corana–she says no, but he’s just so horned up by dragons and goes ahead anyway, and the whole scene seems to be some attempt by the author to “show” that Jaxom is as virile a lead as any other dragonman, even if Ruth is asexual. It reads as if she were afraid Ruth not being a bronze would make people doubt Jaxom’s manhood or something, so she writes a scene to supposedly “prove” it.
And then the dragonlust thing during mating flights initially suggests between the lines the queen rider is going to have sex with the bronzerider whose dragon catches her queen, whether she wants to or not. “Aliens made us do it” is totally an old-school SFF trope especially any time a human or alien is telepathic, but again, in modern eyes it’s super-rapey since consent and being able to say no is important.
McCaffrey rolled the rapey sort of thing back in later Pern books as social mores changed going into the 90s–but the books written in the 60s and 70s mostly didn’t age great when it came to romance/sex. So there’s inconsistencies between the Pern portrayed in the early Pern books, vs. the ones written before her death in the 2000s, with the early Pern having some of the “heros” doing kinda awful things, and the later ones sort of forgetting or erasing that.
I don’t think it’d be going against the spirit of the books to update the mores here, though, for a modern audience. Anne McCaffrey was obviously trying to be forward-thinking with certain things, and it’s honestly really hard to be ahead of your time when it comes to the social/cultural stuff, esp. in the pre-internet era.
Personally, if I were to update Pern for a modern audience, I’d keep some of the dragon mating stuff, like I’d purposefully keep some of the huge downsides of being telepathically bonded to a mind that is not fully human and which can cause a human to act in inhuman ways when the dragon gets over-emotional. Mostly so there can be this cultural tension between the Weyrs and the Holds so that the Oldtimer storylines work better. Dramatically-speaking, it’d be a great scene to watch a dragon get hurt–but it’s the dragonman howling and clutching his eye or something, when he clearly isn’t bleeding at all and is getting feedback from his dragon. (Or, dragonwoman…I think I’m recalling Brekke right there.) And there’d be a huge contrast between the weyrs who have fluid relationships with other riders that start and stop on a whim, and the Holds that are very traditional and still do arranged marriages and such.
Also, if the Weyrs are seen as hotbeds of greed and depravity, it’ll be easier to take Pern through a story such as Dragonquest where the Holds and Halls start to rebel against the people who saved them from thread. The Oldtimer storylines from the books. Cultural friction, where the planet’s heroes also act in ways that are strange and different to ordinary men and women, and a way to play with modern cultural concerns too.
But I’d do away with things like the Jaxom and Corana plotline because there’s tons of other ways to make Jaxom an appealing lead character that don’t involve the future Lord of Ruatha Hold abusing his power over a peasant girl. I don’t think a modern audience would consider Jaxom weak or feminine just because Ruth is ace/nonbinary. In fact, him having a possibly nonbinary dragon might be a super-interesting story to follow. ::shrug::
That seems common–books are optioned, then the project never gets out of the ground. Then the options are sold again for X number of years, and rinse and repeat.
Are you sure about that? Wizard’s First Rule was great, and they slowly (then quickly) started to unravel.
Richard being a white savior showing the mud people how to make tile roofs seems like it’d be nigh-unfilmable/unwatchable if it were rendered book-accurately cuz boy is it chock-full of veiled racism!
Stranger in a Strange Land was popular enough and written late enough in Heinlein’s career that I’d be somewhat surprised if movie options truly earned him more than book sales (I mean, “stranger in a strange land” and “grok” both entered common parlance)–then again, it’s possible Heinlein got a shit contract for that book, or there were some heavy-hitters optioning the movie for tons of money even if it never got made. He was savvy enough too that he might have jacked up the cost of optioning the book a lot if it was getting a lot of Hollywood nibbles. So maybe it’s not urban legend.
I bet some sci-fi author out there knows if it’s true or not.
I suspect the big thing that’s always held Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series back from being made into a movie or television show is Miles being disabled. Peter Dinklage could’ve played him, but he’s too old at this point for young Miles. And there’s probably not a lot of acting talent with dwarfism AND the manic charisma that playing a proper Miles needs.
I wonder if it’d work as an anime though? Lois McMaster Bujold reviews a lot of manga on Goodreads so I imagine she might at least entertain the idea if anyone ever approached her.
I think her Chalion series would work as an excellent series of shows, either live action or animated. Penric is, personality-wise, a lot like Miles, but easier to cast.
It’s unlikely Hollywood will ever touch Piers Anthony with a ten foot pole after some of the stuff he’s self-published in his later years. Like Marion Zimmer Bradley, the SFF world has decided it’s wisest to quietly forget him.
They’re only trivial to separate if you think the only “real” sci-fi is hard sci-fi. Star Wars, Star Trek, and plenty of other beloved sci-fi series that blur the lines would get lost in the infighting.
I mean, the “war” between sci-fi and fantasy has been going on for decades, and it’s always been ridiculous.
My entry into Discworld was Guards! Guards! and I’d love to see a really good rendition of that. I know a lot of people loves Vimes, and I do too, but I also love Carrot and his werewolf girlfriend and I’d like to see Carrot being Carrot.
I think Susan’s story as the grand-daughter of Death could be great, too.
I know Neil Gaiman has a great deal on his plate shepherding his own works onto the screen, but I wish he magically had a bit of extra time and energy to do something (besides Good Omens) of Pratchett’s.
Thanks that was a great analysis. Once you started in I did recall about half those details, but mostly I guess it needs to go on my reread pile since I’ve forgotten so much.
I find, when I re-read, one thing that stays with me is how vibrant and beautiful her narration is. I think the books are still worth reading, but that modern audiences who’ve been participating in more modern discussions around storytelling would recoil at some of the bits we sort of just accepted as being “normal”, as standards for what is “normal” have shifted. The spirit of the books always was forward-thinking, even if she got some stuff wrong.
When Anne McCaffrey did a signing in Chicago when she won her Grand Master award, I had a battered copy of Damia (from her Talents series), and she told me Afra Lyon was her own 2nd favorite character, behind Robinton.
I was on “The New Kitchen Table”, which is where her online fandom ended up in the late 90s for a while, but her fandom was HUGE and had already been around for nigh 20 years with Weyrfest and all at Dragon*Con so aside from the one in-person comment (after I waited hours in a line that twined around the bookstore–the only time since that I’ve seen a bookstore event line that long was for a Harry Potter release), I was very much on the periphery of the fandom vs. those who’d been in it for 20 years already.
You know, that’s totally valid. Some folks just have completely shit families and it’s easier just to not engage with the drama bullshit. And nobody should be guilted into spending money into that sort of nonsense.
All the people I spend holidays with are found family. Blood family can go take a hike.
And now I'm concerned (startrek.website)
What are your "poor person" money life hacks?
Let’s get a list going. Like with a Target debit card you can get $40 cash back and it takes 1 to 2 days to be withdraw from your checking.
If many extraterrestrial civilizations were nearby but trying to keep quiet, how would you suggest drawing them out?
What do you think would finally be their, “Enough, we gotta say something!” situation?...
Short(er) people of Lemmy--what are some lifehacks you figured out that've helped you out?
Here’s some of mine:...
I finally switched back to Linux as my daily driver after a couple of years of being on nothing but Windows.
I ran Manjaro Linux as my daily driver a few years ago but slowly phased it out for Windows for some reason, and I’m finally back using Linux (currently Linux Mint). I gotta say, I don’t know why I ever switched back to Windows. There’s just so much freedom Linux gives you right off the bat that Windows is just plain...
Those of you who work 8+ hours outside in the cold regularly, how do you dress for the job?
What tricks do you have to keep warm?
Sabriel vibes (startrek.website)
Sabriel is a great book. Go read it! About a dope 18 year old woman who has to save her father by being a reverse necromancer. So so good.
What's a food you forget you like? Then you eat it, and wonder why you don't buy it more often?
This post brought to you by cucumbers.
My first Linux desktop (lemmy.world)
I think it’s looking pretty good. Edit: My class is about to start so I’ll try to post my setup when I get home. Thanks for the kind words guys!
Sam Vimes "Boots" theory - also, I just want boot recs
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory...
‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 5 Voice Work Resumes; Tawny Newsome Tells Us About Recording Return (trekmovie.com)
In which scenario would you last longer before being outed as a time traveller?
Being dropped 500 years ago into your ancestors’ community....
Do you sometimes buy things that are unhealthy for you? (Most people do.) Do you feel guilty for it? or have you accepted it's a normal & kinda necessary part of your life?
When searching for Lemmy communities do you sort by new, old or top hour etc (lemmy.world)
Personally when i’m looking for a community I sort it by top month instead of new because since i’m looking for an active community, it’l sort based on rankings of the posts in the community. (I assume based on the guide)...
Those of you with lesser-known types of jobs...what do you do?
Also, how did you get into it, and what sort of education or certifications (if any) did you need?...
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Which things have you avoided or embraced on the name alone?
Is it shallow, or petty, to decide based on name alone? Yeah, pretty much, but there’s probably something, a product or service or site, that the name has made you gloss right over it or jump to it ASAP....
How do you deal with incompetence?
Especially paired with ignorance.
Are there any communities here where I can share NSFW medical images?
I got pics of my foot during surgery and pics of it a week after the operation. I’d love to share it with people and discuss how neat the human body is. I don’t want to subject people to it who aren’t interested in it, though.
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What are your thoughts on the concept of having faith in a Higher Power but choosing to distance oneself from established religious doctrines?
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
What's a sci-fi or fantasy book or series that you want to see adapted as a movie/television series?
I didn’t read this series when I was a kid, but I finally got around to reading Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber....
What are some holiday-related frugal tips and tricks you have?
…I know the title sounds like some clickbait crap, but I’m honestly looking for some ideas that I might not have thought about myself.