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Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2026

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  • In a number of places, it’d be great in a number of ways.

    The big issue, as usual, is cost. Want a house? Fast growth wood frames can be built in a workshop/factory, stood up quickly, capped with more fast growth wood roof frames, skinned with thin boards made from woodchips and sawdust, or just chickenwire and cement, roofed with tar, and slathered in cheap acrylic paint. The engineering is all off-the-shelf at this point because it’s so common.

    Want a U-house? You’re going to be digging. Digging down a foot or two isn’t that big of a problem but tends to get more difficult the deeper you go, so expect a lot of excavation costs compared to the stick-built house. Then you have to make all those walls strong enough to hold back the surrounding earth. Get ready to spend a lot more time doing engineering tests to make sure the retaining walls will hold, the water won’t turn it all to mush, etc. There is an earth pressure underground just like there’s water pressure in the ocean. Then there’s the roof. If it’s really underground, that’s a lot of weight to support. All that support has a material cost. All the engineering work to make sure it’s safe has a labor cost. Hiring workers who have the kind of training needed to do more than run a nail gun and a paint sprayer has a labor cost. The finding of those people at all can be a difficult task for the contractor/developer, and can be quite difficult when most house builders haven’t been doing that kind of construction.

    And at the end of all this you have to get someone to pay for it. Getting people to pay even the same cost as the stick-built house for a house that doesn’t fit into their dreams of looking like the vision of success implanted in their brain by the pop culture of their youth is way harder than just cutting corners and being the Walmart of housing. Being a slacker sometimes pays incredibly well. Greatness can never succeed in capitalism because the one-size-fits-most model is always more profitable.


  • My ‘favourite sport,’ by means of being the only thing called a ‘sport’ I don’t find utterly boring, is sepak takraw. It has elements of hacky-sack which I like, and while I wouldn’t do them myself, pros regularly do backflips as part of the game, so it’s actually not painfully dull to watch either.

    My favourite ‘exercise’ is just walking. When it’s not overly hot out, it’s quite pleasant but quite good for you in comparison to the amount of effort it takes.


  • Layers of depth in a fluid is the best metaphor I have.

    The ‘top’ ‘layer’ is the ‘loudest.’ It has the word-thoughts. If I want to solidify ideas and plans into an expressible form, it happens here. Almost everything that comes out of my mouth is formed into word-thoughts first, and then repeated aloud. If I want to ‘rubber duck’ a problem, I do it here. Sometimes ‘bubbles’ come from below and disrupt the structure of these thoughts.

    The next ‘lower’ ‘layer’ is the image space. Things I am actively imagining are here. Images, 3D forms, music, conceptual mapping, etc.

    The next ‘lower’ is the semi-conscious. Thoughts I haven’t established fully into expressible thoughts or images are here in half-graspable form. Sometimes it feels like something lower pushes elements up into this space as ‘important.’ Sometimes those things are pushed up strongly enough they press into the layer above.

    I can sometimes sense things happening deeper down, parts that are processing inputs in ways my metacognition can’t perceive.

    Across the whole space is a certain turbidity representing emotional disruptions and physical mental hindrances like lack of sleep, etc.


  • Up and down votes are intended as indicators of quality that people abuse as markers of taste. If you downvote because the post/comment is unhelpful/useless/etc. that’s just voting as intended. If you are about to downvote because something is hateful, just report it to the mods instead. If you use certain clients, like Voyager, you will also see cumulative totals for your personal votes on users, which can be a great way to spot people you shouldn’t interact with, and probably just block. If you can’t tell the difference between people who are willfully nasty vs ignorant, maybe focus on learning to tell that rather than participate too much.





  • Tapping into another response her but adding on: there are a lot of bits of werewolf media that make little jokes about ‘the time of the month’ for werewolves. It’s an easy little joke to make. (Angua from the Terry Pratchett novels) But the other elements of werewolf tales are far less feminine. #notallwomen and all, but there isn’t a very prominent portrayal across all of fiction of women’s anger as savage or brutal the way there is with masculine anger. The most common portrayal of an angry man is shouting and open violence. The most common portrayal of an angry woman is the silent seethe or the shrill read-to-filth, rarely with open violence. The only sector I can think of that portrays women’s cycles as turning them into something to be feared is boomerhumor comedy about how wives and girlfriends become scary and irrational every month. There are older ladies who might have internalised that enough to identify with it but targeting them with that portrayal would be at odds with the demographic that seems most interested in supernatural fiction which trends young.