The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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  • 109 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Those are used with urine, not blood. Urine is yellow-ish, but since it’s just a drop, it doesn’t stain the strip; instead, the blue tip changes colour as it reacts with the glucose in the urine. Then you compare that coloured tip with a chart, and you get an idea of the concentration of glucose in your body. Picture related:

    I remember seeing those bottles in my bathroom all the time as a kid (my sister is diabetic).

    These almost look more like ph or ketone test strips…

    It is roughly the same idea as the one behind the litmus test for pH, indeed. The difference is which substance you’re putting there (Benedict’s reagent vs. pH indicators) and which substance you’re testing for (glucose vs. H₃O⁺ / OH⁻).




  • The only time that I remember dreaming with my phone, I was trying to turn it off, while its real life counterpart rung furiously.

    I’ve dreamt some times with my desktop though. Such as:

    • my cat pulling out the mouse from my computer, sitting in its place on the mousepad, and then meowing loudly (she does this a lot when she’s play-hunting)
    • throwing potatoes on the screen, so I could get some French fries in return
    • keyboard gardening: the keys were subbed with small pots full of dirt, some with small versions of plants. A lot of them were pepper plants and I was trying to cross-breed them.




  • I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.

    Here’s how I see it working.

    Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.

    The multi owner can:

    1. edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
    2. make the multi public or private
    3. use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
    4. use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms

    By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)

    You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.


  • If I were to watch Dragon Ball Z now, I’d probably drop the series. I still remember it fondly, but it’s too slow.

    The first two seasons of the Pokémon anime aged well for me. Individual games, too. But the series as a whole felt from an “I know all 386!” to “…it’s a Tentaquil”.

    Chrono Trigger went from “it’s okay, it’s fun” to “…I spent my whole life underrating it, didn’t I?” So did Final Fantasy VI.

    Same deal with Dostoyevsky. I guess you need some maturity to understand things.

    Baudelaire, though? Hard pass.

    I still love 1984 and Animal Farm, but I want to drown 90% of the muppets talking about them.

    I can’t stand Legião Urbana any more. Pink Floyd on the other hand aged well, so did Nenhum de Nós.

    To be honest I was never too much into movies. There’s one or another thing that I like (Modern Times, 8 1/2, The Shining), but it’s mostly unchanged.




  • All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

    What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

    For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:

    • compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
    • affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).

    The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

    Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.




  • Ah, got it.

    The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)

    Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.