My head is full of normally useless knowledge. What did you want to know?
Recent Responses
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Most hopes are, aren't they?
Here's the thing: this website doesn't seem to load very fast. Sometimes, it doesn't load at all. I don't have the patience for it, to be honest, as fun as it is to answer to anonymous parties.
So, uh... it might make sense to see if this site has an RSS feed?
OH MY GOD I went to go find out if it had an RSS feed and the page-loading browser animation is just spinning and spinning. I'm a busy guy! Sort of! With a seriously challenged attention span!
So yeah. This place needs some more servers or something before it would ever be worth investing serious time into. As opposed to whatever I invested in it.
Goofy time.
(There. The page I was trying to load just popped up... blank. White page. Nothing. Thanks, formspring. Way to support your FREE SERVICE! Ha ha ha. Oh man, who can get mad about free?) -
It can still have some value. Sell it to a museum.
If they won't have it, stick it in your closet. Then you don't have to think about it again until you move.
And what if you need a broken something like that before then? Boom! It's still around.
You've cheated the sanitation works once again! -
That's a great question, and it reminds me of something that happened some time ago...
Just kidding.
Uhm, let's see. A good story needs to have a beginning, middle and end. They may not be given in that order, but they should be in there. There should be a protagonist who, by the end of the story, has been changed in some way... or have a good reason not to be changed.
Someone drew an arc that stories follow... I bet if you look around, you'd find that. That seems useful.
A good story should omit unnecessary details.
And if you want it to sell, it should have vampires or zombies in it. (Work fast, though, that piece of advice has a rapidly approaching expiration date on it. You're basically buying that one on the discount rack already.) -
I never thought that this was a question to required much thought, as the answer seemed easy to me. As someone who's already near-sighted and very much into music, I'd rather struggle with blindness.
I would certainly miss being able to easily read books and comics, especially since comics don't work in Braille, but with reader programs, much text on the internet would still be available to me. e-Books are proliferating, etc. I could adapt to that loss.
But I would miss music terribly if I were deaf. Just about every waking moment of the day, I have music playing. In my youth, I thought I was a writer and would push myself to create short works of fiction. I fell off that wagon, but ever since I started creating music mixes a few years back, I've been able to effortlessly put in the time and care to craft those and now I've got 62 of them under my belt. Listening to, arranging, and sharing music is the most consistent creative endeavor I've had in my life.
I'm not a religious person. I'm not even a spiritual person. But there are times when the right song, the right combination of elements will split my head open and I experience something that feels ecstatic and larger than me. The cosmic pinball games goes off and there are lights, bells, and bliss.
I don't think I'd be able to give that up. I would prefer not to.
... I've seen questions like this before, where a decision to irrevocably change your life is put to you, usually regarding something you have no control over. "If everything you ate tasted like only one thing...." My first thought is usually that it would be funny if the question merely sounded like a hypothetical, but the party asking was planning on following through.
Everything IS going to taste like Americone Dream. Should have put more thought into that answer, huh?
Here's the hot poker for putting out your eyes. I'm glad you said blindness because it's easier than deafening someone. Big weight off my back!
I gotta stop hanging out with other-dimensional imps with unlimited power and former royal dungeon keepers. -
Here are a list of suggested methods for resisting compulsions:
* Seek out and accumulate new compulsions to the point where it is impossible to accommodate them all. The compulsions you mention will be revisited less often as new compulsions are indulged, statistically. Or sheer exhaustion will compel you to miss certain actions and scheduled idiosyncrasies.
* Repeat the word "la" in your head and accompany that word with the tongue movement that would generate that sound. Compose any mental melody you wish, but your tongue tapping against the roof of your mouth will save it from your teeth.
* Clip your fingernails regularly.
* For skin blemishes, make use of cleansers and cremes. Ask a friend or business associate to help you into mittens, which should then be taped shut around your wrists as boxing gloves are tapped to boxing combatants. This will render you unable to worry whatever erupting dermatological nightmare you're struggling with.
* Revel in your repeated actions, as the time we have in these forms of flesh is limited. In the grave, you'll get no satisfaction from the succoring of your desire. Let your tongue bleed, push your teeth out of your mouth entirely, dig into your flesh and be glad for the pain you feel for the time you have to feel is so, so brief and the time you'll have not to feel stretches out over an eternity.
* Maybe hypnosis?
* Repeat as a mantra: "My tongue is heavy. My tongue is heavy." It will become to heavy to move. It will swell up inside your mouth so it will seem strange that you can still breathe, can still swallow. How does this enormous raft of a tongue even fit in your tiny ring of teeth?
I hope that at least one of these suggestions aids you in your time of discomfort. -
I've heard it said that some Native Americans viewed the color green and the color blue as more or less the same color. Maybe the shades are slightly different, but still... in the middle of a gigantic field of grass that stretched to the horizon, swaying in the wind of a cloudless day, they must have felt lost in a giant single-color sphere of experience.
And artists who paint and purchase dozens or hundreds of paint tubes build up a vocabulary of color that outstrips the average lay person. You might point at a car and say "Oh, that's a pretty red" and they might frown and say "It's carmine, actually." Because they have the vocabulary, they experience a wider range of color.
The same can be said to be true of breeds.
Every breed is a generalization of attributes. In fact, if we look closely, every dog is separate from every other dog. They even have different names, given by human owners. Some cats even have secret names they give themselves, as documented in stage productions based on rigourous scientific research.
So really, there are more breeds of dogs because more people have wanted to recognize more breeds of dogs. If there were a similar effort put forth to recognize cat breeds, the current breeds could be subdivided.
But while dog owners carefully breed their dogs for desired characteristics both for function (hunting, etc.) and aesthetics, no one has yet found a function for cats. That's probably the biggest factor in the lessened interest in their breeding.
I hope that helps. -
Every single person who you think of as a trusted advisor got their information from somewhere else. Maybe even from strangers on the internet. So why not cut out the middleman?
I'm touched that you might think of me as a trusted advisor, but as any honest advisor might tell you, I'm as likely to be a source of error as any other source.
Here's a fact: In the back of the human eye, there's a bundle of nerves called the optic nerve. It's surrounded by the rods and cones that take in light, but it doesn't take in light. It conveys information back to the brain.
So in the middle of your field of vision, there should be a corresponding blind spot, where you're not registering light from. But your brain adapts for this blind spot and fills in the whole, convincing your conscious mind that nothing is amiss and extrapolating what's probably there.
If you are sighted, every day all day you're being lied to by your own body. Your own senses are easily fooled. How can I, a being who you only experience through your easily fooled senses, really be a trustworthy source of anything?
But you can't live in a state of perpetual mistrust. It's convenient to trust and mostly it works.
For the most part, this can be said to be true of the internet. Find sources, verify them against other sources, compare them with your own experience and the experiences of those around you.
It'll all work out.
Probably. -
Dag, dude. I'm just eating a peach. I didn't think it was that big a deal, Prufrock.
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It don't remember enjoying being in after-school day care as a child. There were rare occasions of enjoying field trips while in day care during the summer... trips to aquariums, museums, Great America. But the rest of the time, it was just being stuck with kids, few of whom were my age. Just killing time until the parents got off work and could pick us up.
I remember endless games of Connect 4. Inventing a game where we would build "vehicles" out of Duplo-sized bricks which were built for sturdiness, as they would be tested to destruction against the creations of other children, the two of us ramming our creations against each other until pieces came flying off, until the entire thing crumbled in our hands. Fingers got smashed, sure. The building of "bricks" was banned, sure.
At the Catholic elementary school I attended, the day care got their hands on some arcade games, which were another favorite time waster. Donkey Kong Jr., Ms. Pac-Man, and a Tron game where you couldn't go left. I got so good at the light cycle game that I could charge straight at the other bike and just jaunt right-up so quick they'd explode into my trail, never having managed to do anything but carve a straight line.
I remember getting free bubble gum and competing to put the most pieces in our mouths. Of almost throwing up at the huge wad of gum that filled my mouth and started pressing against my soft palate, dripping back to tackle the gag reflex, threatening to go up my nose via the back passage.
I escaped via mundane means. At age 12, the family moved to Wisconsin and suddenly I only lived five blocks from school. It just made sense to give me a set of keys and let me walk home to let my brother in. Unless we forgot our keys, in which case my younger brother would get boosted up to the 2nd floor where he could enter the back door to my bedroom. That back door, inexplicably, was not attached to a widow's walk. Just a little patch of roof. Handy for breaking & entering, as I never locked it.
So there's that. -
Crying is a natural reaction to a wide array of emotions and whether you cry or not does not determine whether you have crossed the threshold from babyhood to adulthood. That is strictly determined by consent laws in the state or country in which you reside.
Regarding fan fiction, any individual is free to write whatsoever they like. The difficulty arrives with the question of whether or not it can be published and what "publishing" means. For this reason, we have created a judicial system and stocked it full of the argumentative, the avaricious, and the well-read. They'll be happy to argue about it until everyone runs out of money.
My suggestion would be to write as freely as you like, but mimic the early Christians and form a society within our society where you can share your writing and beliefs without attracting the attention of powerful interests.
Alternately, you could mimic early opinion-makers and publish under a pseudonym. Or mimic Batman and wear a mask and never get over how your childhood sucked.
Mimicry is the key, is what I've determined. -
We'll need to get DNA from both of them to determine at what point they had a common ancestor.
And we can follow them on Facebook to see if they're hooking up at present.
But there's not enough information yet to give a definitive answer. -
A list of useless objects, phenomena, behavior:
* Biographies for G.I. Joe action figures
* Personality quizzes on social media websites
* Donating a dollar to election funds with your federal taxes
* Hunting for ghosts
* Freckles
* Nerves in teeth
* Minors in philosophy
* Miners in philosophy
A list of useful things:
* MP3 players
* Apologizing for the slightest physical contact in a public space, even if under the breath
* Cell phones
* Rain
* Pollination by bees
* Muscle systems that evolved in opposition to each other
* The break-down of the bicameral mind
* Sexually explicit material -
I was one of the last kids in my elementary school class to know that there was no such person as Santa Claus. I don't remember the grade anymore... 4th, maybe? But a kid in the class made an off-hand reference to their parents being Santa and the teacher interrupted them saying that it was possible not everyone knew that. The kid seemed incredulous, so the teacher checked with the class.
"Does anyone here still believe in Santa Claus?"
Now, I was never an idiot. I followed the conversation just fine and realized the implication of the question. It's a question that wouldn't need to be asked if there were such a person as Santa Claus. Confused, I half-raised my hand and so did maybe one or two other kids-- I don't think my memory has filled them in so I wasn't the only one acknowledging that I was still living in ignorance.
And if I started to realize the truth when the question was asked, the fact that the classroom was full of arms that were not raised in support of Claus-belief started me down a path. Once home, I asked my mother if Santa Claus were real. Rather than give me a straight answer, she went into a back room and got a book that she must have squirreled away for just such an occasion.
Its title was "Is There a Santa Claus?"
An avid reader, I tore through the book, which told the tale of the real life Saint Nicholas and ended talking about how we celebrate his generosity and legacy and so on and so forth each Christmas. But it seemed to dodge the central question. Of course there was a St. Nick, I knew that... that wasn't my question.
My mom seemed almost a little sad and confused when I gave her the book back and asked again. Unable to avoid it, she admitted that there was no Santa.
And I was crushed.
It wasn't the loss of that red-suited figure that wounded me. It was the sudden realization that something I had never questioned in my life because it had been told to me as fact was in fact untrue. That my parents had been lying to me, tricking me, making me a fool... and why? Was the value gained in that belief worth the sudden feeling that I couldn't trust anything they said?
I could draw a line from this moment to my eventual parting with the Catholic belief that had also been given to me and perhaps we could consider it the seed of a lack of trust, a cynicism, that I still have regarding authorities and honesty.
So there's that.
Also: 3 seconds spent on Google - http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/mt-edward/cadbury.htm -
This is what the internet was invented for. To enable you to find the answers to these questions. But apparently you're too busy, so here you go: The Marcels (Cornelius Harp, Fred Johnson, Gene Bricker, Ron Mundy, and Richard Knauss) are responsible for adding the former to their rendition of "Blue Moon" and The Edsels (George 'Wydell' Jones, Larry Green, James Reynolds, Harry Green, and Marshall Sewell) are responsible for the latter, unless there was some uncredited song-writing going on for either outfit. This took all of five minutes of research. Seriously, you could have answered this for yourself. Does your mommy still dress you? Does she pre-chew your food and let it drip into your open, crying mouth?
You sicken me. -
I will take this occasion to contemplate. Here, then, is a partial list: curry, shabu shabu, the flesh of a human being, anything that is still alive and wailing while being devoured, a swarm of ants, durian, a box-spring hog, crackers, chips, peanuts, whale meat, uncracked pepper, anything that requires chewing, anything that requires slurping, anything that will eventually be digested...
I could go on. But I won't. -
The ugly little truth about drug addiction and all attempts to outlaw chemical substances is that the reason that all drugs work on the human body is because we've already got these chemical receptors built into our very neural system that have been designed to accept the drugs... and that's because the human body already has analogs-- if not the chemicals themselves-- already inside of it. The drugs wouldn't work on us if we weren't already making them ourselves. We just don't have ready access to them or their effects. There have been times when patterned carpet has seemed to be undulating for me. That's a fact. There have been times when I've wondered if I'm a particularly complicated avatar for some other being and every task I'm faced with is some sort of mini-game that they enjoy playing with. Right now, I'm playing the type-letters-into-a-glowy-box game and I think I'm winning. So to answer your question: I have no idea. How could I know what "real" is?
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The anonymity that this website affords makes the asking of clarifying questions difficult, but based on my years of problem-solving, I would guess that you are either a mouse or a middle-manager. If the former is true, then I would remind you that as an omnivore, there's no reason to limit your diet to cheese. It's negative media stereotypes that convince you that cheese is a staple of your diet-- and it is not. You can eat fruits, grasses, insects, seeds, corn, grains... the world is your oyster. Go eat an oyster. If, alternately, you are a middle manager, then to find the cheese, you should find an underling and assign them the task of locating it. Then go back to checking your email. If you are a cheese with a broken heart, looking for a beloved and now lost fellow cheese, please see our earlier response regarding broken hearts.
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There are many theories about this. Some believe that the best unguent is time itself, applied liberally. Others-- those who have spent time studying at medical institutions-- have a variety of clamps to apply, sutures to stitch, shunts to place... but I personally think the best answer is to turn the question on the questioner and say "What do you have against broken hearts, Mac? Some of my best friends are broken hearts!" And it's true. We have a club. We keep scrap books of stuff stolen from ex-lovers. We write poetry in anonymous weblogs. Perhaps you've read our work?
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