I don’t think anyone but you has even remotely implied there’s some overall gold standard presented by penguin behavior that needs to be compared to humans. Simply the fact that other species have homosexuals, and those pairs can raise a “family” successfully. Compared to your mentioned standard humans don’t do so great sometimes either.

I’ll also offer the “sameness” of everything at malls. Let’s say you want jeans. There’s five shops that carry jeans. You want “normal” jeans, iow, not torn, not bleached, etc. Each shop carries jeans, but they are all some version of torn, worn, bleached, etc. For all the variety, they’re all the same.

Plus, mall overhead and branding makes the shops quite often more expensive than you might find at something like a Target or even a Kohls.

I’ve found that taking my kids to the mall to check out clothing we more often than not buy nothing despite visiting a half dozen shops. It’s all variations of the same thing along with being designer pricing.

How you know you live in a really small and remote town.

They are. I’ve seen phones being on magnet mounts or held on the steering wheel with videos playing.

mIRC/IRC is still going, right? Haven’t used that in probably a decade.

My favorite is the fan mounted to the boat blowing the sail causing the boat to move. I mean there are a shitload more experiments in fun episodes that are far better and more entertaining, but this one is my favorite because it flies in the face of logic. It shouldn’t work. My brain rejects the possibility. But physics and fluid flow work otherwise and I found it pointlessly infuriating only because I’d been unassailable in my confidence that it couldn’t possibly work. Yet there it is with a perfectly logical explanation. I still find it irritating even if I accept the reality of it. (Episode 165 if anyone’s wondering)

That said, I still follow Adam on various platforms. That enthusiasm and joy of discovery is all still there, along with some maturity and some life observations. Literally the only celebrity figure I follow.

You bleed rainbows when cut.

I don’t know. I’ve seen a few examples of women who have radically changed their looks via skillful application of cosmetics.

I don’t know what to do with that. On one hand, society expects them to use available techniques to change their appearance to meet standards of beauty very few can ever accomplish. Otoh, it’s dishonest because irl they’re not who they seem to be, so an app that shows them without makeup might be useful. But the catch-22 is that the app may not be right, or that we judge too harshly based on an unattainable standard.

Man, Beauty is fucked up in the West. CGI, photoshop, photo manipulation have destroyed reality in favor of manipulating what desirability is.

So copying everyone else’s work and rehashing it as your own is what makes a PhD level intelligence? (Sarcastic comments about post-grad work forthcoming, I’m sure)

Unless AI is able to come up with original, testable, verifiable, repeatable previously unknown associations, facts, theories, etc. of sufficient complexity it’s not PhD level…using big words doesn’t count either.

I understand there’s a right way to do it, but allow me to assure that the two murky trays behind this bar were not acceptable by any means. I didn’t want to get too graphic, but glasses went from the customer hand, a quick slosh and a rub in liquids that would make any civilized health department shriek, wiped “dry” with a filthy rag that had just wiped the bar top, filled with the next drink and handed to the next customer.

This is the kind of stuff where you see it in a movie like so: the scoundrel hero walks into a dive bar in the spaceport, orders a drink, the camera makes sure you see the pustulent, greasy alien clean the vessel using the above process. The alien pours a questionable liquid into it, and slides it to the observing hero who has been keeping a stone-faced expression but for a hint of discomposure as he receives the drink. After the briefest pause in frame to let you know he questions what he is about to do, he downs the beverage. You can’t help but cringe along with the hero and think licking the alien might have been safer.

(Am not comparing or suggesting Montenegrins are in any way shape or form like the hypothetical alien)

This was my thought. DNA isn’t stable so it’s a lousy storage medium. Degrades over time, mutations in living organisms, etc.

I wouldn’t say at all cost, but Montenegro isn’t fun. Russians have built massive hotel resorts on the beaches there, the locals are unhappy that they’re there so they don’t like tourists. They’ll try to fight you on the beach because you’re not local. Get hassled by the cops because you’re not local, but you’ll be able to buy your way out of your problem if you’re lucky. People don’t want to talk to you, everyone is pretty cold and borderline rude. Go to a bar for a drink and you get a glass nominally washed/rinsed in tubs of soapy water behind the bar that the previous 100 glasses went through and hasn’t been changed out. The landscape is beautiful in a hostile sort of way, but there’s just not much reason to visit. It’s not even particularly inexpensive. The hotels will try to charge you for everything, including a scuff on the wall that you didn’t do, a chip on a planter on the balcony, etc. ridiculous money grabs.

So unreliable except for what 98% of the world uses it for?

We live in a system that monetizes everything, then seeks to restrict access to those things in order to profit.

Knowledge is just one casualty.

All-out war, synonymous with hilarity.

A troll account is still a troll account spreading misinformation. That’s not “fun”.

It’s infrastructure. Too inconvenient to find a spot to charge, the apartments where you live probably don’t have chargers, your workplace doesn’t either…

I think for some it never takes hold. Ours are in the early teens and it’s barely starting to register.

A hard thing I try to get my kids to understand. The bus time is at [what:ever]. That’s when the bus leaves. Not when you roll up to the stop. Not when you step out the door. That’s butt-in-seat-leaving-time. If you’re walking up to the stop and the bus is pulling away at bus:time - too bad, so sad. That applies to many things that require you to be on time for. 5 minutes early is on time. On time is too late. Astonishing what a difficult concept that is to get across.

They just need to come out and “lease” the game.

“Buy” should no longer be on any selection as far as live service games go, or any game dependent on developer servers to operate.