Awareness not cynicism, yes. Very important for self growth.

The head in the clouds of over optimism and the head in the mud of cynicism are two extremes that’ll both extra super duper fuck you over.

Reality has both good and bad things.

Most people hear that you have to learn to pull your head out of the clouds, but honestly the cynics need to be beat up more about their cynicism because that attitude ALSO lays the foundation for shitty times.

If you go into things having decided they’ll suck beforehand, you contributed to that outcome by not creating, seeing, or seeking better things.

And it takes time and work to kill off the parasite of cynicism if it’s already wrapped around your soul. But it’s hard work that must be done.

Solar panel and battery tech are finally mature enough to keep small electronics powered off grid near indefinitely now if you take the time to understand its capacity and build properly.

If your system is too small you might run into problems cooking, charging a car, gaming, or running an ac, basically things that draw huge amounts of power, but it can run a freezer, phone and laptop, and led lights pretty well. And those things can get you 75 percent of the way to feeling civilized if weather or disaster affects your neighborhood power.

So I’m a fan of this stuff, we are nearly in sci-fi territory with it, and think smart people with a backyard and some space should consider it for storm preparedness and the like. The tech will only improve with time, there’s some recent developments with new battery tech on the horizon that are hopeful.

When I’m elderly in 40 years, I hope to live in a home with plenty of solar and a huge house battery setup in the basement. If I can cover all my electric off grid including cooking, I would feel very rich and secure.

Buy up all the media outlets, especially Fox, and ACTUALLY turn them into progressive propaganda outlets.

Once actual progressives are in power, Lobby for government with the teeth to break up my big media empire monopoly and prevent a new one from forming.

Make a trust in each state to have local news outlets with good journalists.

Fund something to help find and stomp out propaganda bot/slave centers in other countries.

Lobby to regulate the fuck out of AI to stop its use as a programmable propaganda slop machine.

You know, I just realized how dumb it is that I grew up on TNG and yet have never written a bald dude into my sci-fi.

I need to stop sucking and do that.

Excuse me, low balls simply happen when you get older. It’s a natural facet of aging!

I’ve been fascinated by pterosaurs lately. The book Pterosaurs by Mark P Witton is great.

Pterosaurs interest me because of their wing morphology. Instead of having the wing membrane between all the “fingers” like a bat, it’s attached to their equivalent of a pinky finger in such a way it can fold up enough that they could use all four limbs to navigate on land. They just have such an interesting body shape that no animal today really has.

They also got much bigger than birds. Like, to the point that I want to write a fantasy book where the premise is that dragons are like …the only pterosaur that survived extinction. Because it would be cool to have a dragon that’s directly not related to modern reptiles, birds, or mammals…but still is speculatively based on a flying animal that did once exist.

I was surprised by the video on another site AND I had sound off and that video still haunts me.

Pterosaur is a good one to look up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur

I got bifocals.

They’re already not strong enough :(

Me: The bowl’s empty, isn’t it?

I’m using Boost.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy

That’s awesome! And a huge relief I’m sure.

I went to Costco and got 7 shirts and paid only $38ish total.

Plus $3.05 for a giant slice of pepperoni and a pop.

Downside: I didn’t get the pants I was hoping to find. But oh well.

For mine, it was resistance to various flus and sicknesses.

Most of my family has shit for brains, and I’m convinced the only reason they survived up to me is having all the good genes for physical health.

Too bad mental health didn’t get points put into it too …

I thought the ac was broken in my work truck for several days in July because I forgot I had turned the heat on one chilly morning and for some reason my eyes repeatedly didn’t catch that dumb temperature dial still turned to heat. I kept pushing the ac button on and off and then just ended up sweltering because I basically had the heat on in July.

That dumbassery will humble me for a while.

This.

The weird stuff in my experience is due to past crap you haven’t processed, current crap you can’t get away from because you’re a minor or disabled or don’t have a job with money, or a mental thing you’ve not discovered the right way to deal with. OCD for example can give people bad intrusive thoughts about terrible things they nonetheless would never do, it’s not about being a neat freak like pop culture thinks.

Talking with someone can help.

Personally, I’m a writer and there’s supposedly evidence out there that bibliotherapy can help.

Cataclysm DDA.

I was kind of musing in a corner of my mind that Jesus acting as a sacrifice to god…really only makes sense in a cultural context where basically everyone around you is already sacrificing goats and chickens and bulls and whatever to their gods.

When that cultural context is removed (as in our culture where generally nobody slaughters animals as a sacrifice to any god) the whole crucifixion thing comes off as…weirdly pagan.

Like, HAVING to have a human/god sacrificed to god to…remove sin I guess…it only really makes sense if you have the cultural expectation that sacrificing things to some god is…just what you DO to get rid of sin or stuff that’s harmful like curses or whatever?

I’m not a bible scholar, and I know there’s tons of theology that’s already argued about Jesus “dying for our sins” into infinity.

I’m more vaguely looking at this from a layperson secular standpoint, where I’m thinking about the cultural context of “sacrifice” as it pertains to 2000 years ago, and how it pertains to now in our current culture. Like…wow, the culture and how we see things has totally shifted and the Jesus died thing is a really weird boondogle/relic of those ancient mindsets, isn’t it?

I read somewhere that for some people they also get better with age.

And for me that was true. My intrusive thoughts were worse as a teen and twenty something than now.

Then as I matured I relaxed, and also got proof from my own past behavior that I don’t act on any of it, which made me relax more.

Sloth is another word for neglect.

And sustained neglect can do terrible things.

Think a parent watching TV or playing with their phone and their child suffering from their inaction.

“I’ll do it tomorrow” can have huge repercussions when the thing needing tending is important.