“Oh, Mary!” on Broadway in NYC a couple weekends ago.

“Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage”

&

“So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell
Blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you could tell?
Did they get you trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found
The same old fears
Wish you were here”

I’ve ridden in a few Waymo’s before, in SF they can be more dependable or easier to get than other ride options. I never felt like I was ever in danger in one.

Within my handful of experiences with them I’ve never had to use the help button or features to request assistance from a tele-operator but it was clear that they weren’t trying to hide the function from the passengers as the feature was explained and clearly labeled.

A friend who uses them often told me of the one time he needed to ask for assistance when their Waymo was stuck behind a doordash scooter with its hazard lights on that was either delivering or picking up and blocking a turn lane in downtown SF. The Waymo didn’t know what to do to get around it, my friend hit the button for assistance, a voice came over the speakers asking how they could help, my friend explained the situation and the tele-operator drove the car to safely navigate the situation. He said it was probably 1.5-2mins of tota inconvenience with 75% of that time was him wondering if he should hit the help button or not.

I understand a lot of AI implementation, such as Amazon Fresh or other business models have been hiding offshored human assistance within their “AI” features, which I do agree with you is deceitful but my experience with Waymo was not that. They did not hide or obfuscate that function and feature of the service but actively informed the passenger of its existence.

Granted, I haven’t ridden in one for almost a year at this point and I only did so in the SF market so things may have changed since or are different elsewhere.

Also, I can’t say that I follow the news intently about Waymo, I know they have run over a couple cats but I hadn’t heard anything about them killing people. Has that happened?

I think it is possible but just not probable.

I’d like to believe that at least.

Brown noise helps me stop random intrusions and provides calm and focus. I use the Star Trek TNG Enterprise D engine noise piped into my earbuds, headphones or home speakers.

I go into a meditative state when it gets really bad, like pushing everything to the side and focus past it all.

I’m 47, I don’t know how old you are but I’ve struggled with this throughout my life along with the other sensory stuff I have (emotion > color, Concept > shape, perceived emotion > color, mirror touch, texture > color/shape and a few other types of synesthesia). I have found that practicing to calm my mind, mute my senses and practice holistic balance in my life has greatly improved my quality of life.

I do not know how debilitating this is for you but it greatly affected my life. Realizing that I cannot stop my mind or isolate myself and live a fulfilling life. I learned to acknowledge these things and live with them as a benefit. The best analogy is that I surf the waves of my thoughts and no longer let the waves crash over me. Or like emotional/mental aikido. Learn to turn it to your advantage and empower you instead of letting it overwhelm you. Figure out triggers, isolate them and understand them.

Anyway, if you struggle with this you are not alone. There aren’t a ton of us out there but there are others. Don’t fight against it but learn to live in balance with it. When I did my life greatly improved. I have skills that no one else has and while people do not know what it comes from they can tell that my insightfulness, pattern recognition, logical decision making, memory and creativity are very different from the usual sort.

Apologies if this comes off as preachy, you may have your thing on lock already but 7 out of 10 times the person who I am discussing this stuff with who has something similar doesn’t. I will always be learning new tricks or hidden features and I am always looking for tips from others I interact with in the wild.

DM me whenever.

I am the same way, it is a constant slideshow of vivid images, videos loops, complex shapes and colors projected into my vision. Whatever I am thinking about has these associations, like my brain works on complex hieroglyphs and not words. Which seems to be backed up by science as neurological studies into language processing show that metaphorical image/sensory association happens before language processing within our brains. Language is a translation layer after all the sensory input.

I thought everyone was like this until my preteens when I would reference some aspect of it to others and get weird looks back.

Sounds like it could be a form of ticker tape synesthesia with a less vivid variation of hyperphantasia.

According to lore anyone over 30 who is still a virgin becomes a wizard and that is why there are so few wizards about.

So your competition would be a wizards battle. No offense but I’d buy tickets to that event.

This is an aside that is not really a response to your message.

Most people assume that because something isn’t easy to make explode that it is also isn’t easy to turn it off.

I’ve always assumed this isn’t true, that the two things are asymmetrical.

If it was built by the military or some other professional outfit that makes explody things, and not hobbled together in a cave somewhere, then the people making it actually don’t want it to explode for the vast majority of that things existence. Bombs are designed to only explode under very specific circumstances and there should be many off switches to prevent it from accidentally exploding or to accommodate for people changing their mind after activating it.

Like, you should need codes, special keys, synchronized activation switches and a countdown to make bombs blow up but I always assumed the designers of such things would build in so many failsafes that there would at least be a very prominent off switch that is clearly labeled on the outer shell… heck, there would probably be several depending on the size of the bomb.

Anyway, I always imagined that if I was alone with an ICBM I could disarm it somewhat easily during the countdown. I’ve never really researched whether my assumption is right because I’ve never thought I’d ever actually find myself alone with one during a situation like that. I could be wrong 🤷‍♂️

Heck yeah, I went to the launch party for it at the PlayStation Store in SF. They gave away these dog tag things.

My friends and I played this game so much using the PS2 network adapter thingy before moving to the Xbox for Halo 2 over Xbox Live.

Btw, your figurines, and the framing/setting of the picture, are pretty rad.

So you make these as a hobby?

Are all of the models you make similar characters just in different settings/outfits/poses?

What kind of printer do you use?

This happened about 16 years ago.

One of my buddies is a semi well-known photographer who was editing some photographs on his laptop while he was over at my place. One of the pictures he was editing showed the feet/toes of one of his subjects prominently, not the focus of the shot but they were easily visible. I knew he was going to post the picture to his socials once he was done as he did that for most of his shoots for marketing purposes so I joked, “I wonder if anyone would notice if you were to add an extra toe to that persons foot.”

So he photoshopped an extra toe onto one of the subjects feet and posted it. There were many comments about the photo but no one has ever pointed out the sixth toe on the most forward foot of the subject.

Every few years I check-in on that photo to see if anyone has said anything yet about it, still nothing. I do like/thumbs up that photo each time and then wait a week to remove my like/thumbs-up as an inside joke so he gets the notification from me on that photo as a notice that I am still keeping tabs on the outcome of my suggested joke.

In response he does the same thing to a very old profile photo of myself that I hate on an old social account I no longer use but check in with every couple years.

Him and I only get to catch up every several years when our paths cross but we communicate more through that thumbs/liking joke on those two photos more often, which is kinda fun.

Yeah, those are the things I miss too. It feels like being a bit outside of a bubble looking in sometimes.

And then those early days of Facebook, where it was actually useful and engaging, I miss those days too. But the world is a different place now and the slippery slope is too slippery for me to feel comfortable getting anywhere close to that slope.

Lemmy is the only platform I engage with. I closed down or abandoned all other platforms around the same time you did. My quality of life has greatly improved since, though I do still miss certain aspects sometimes.

Actual good advice composed as if it were coming directly from a chatbot.

That’s some masterful white hat trolling right there.

Copenhagen is a rad town, I’d recommend visiting if you have time before you have to accept/decline the offer.

Out of all the Scandinavian countries it is the one I would prefer to live in above the others. It shares a land border with Germany, so Central Europe is easily accessible and if you are in Copenhagen then Sweden is just a drive across a very long bridge. Due to this I’d say Denmark is the more culturally open and mixed than the other Scandinavian countries.

Got ya, no worries!

I can get into one of those rhetorical “you” soliloquies as well from time to time when incensed about an issue. I completely understand and I’m glad we are fighting the same fight.

Yo, I think you are attacking the wrong person here.

I don’t know where you read into what I said and got off track because I am not the strawman you seem to be painting me as…?

I am totally on the side of the refugees in these scenarios, I never said otherwise. The subtext of what I was saying was it is a good thing for any culture to be open to outside influence and the Scandinavian countries have been isolated culturally more so than many other areas of the world. Honestly, one of my favorite pastimes while living in Sweden was calling out the Swedes for the racist bullshit, and very specifically around this exact topic.

They opened their borders for refugees because they had space, stability and wealth to share with those in need. That does say a lot about their culture and wanting to help others but the system shock it caused created backlash that has yet be be resolved. You can’t treat some citizens one way and another set of citizen another. I did not say the social safety net shouldn’t be provided for them as I believe they should have every right as equals in their new country. I honestly wish my opinion on the matter could be used to stop this schism on the opposite side of the world to where I currently live but I don’t have that ability. Racists are gonna racist and as much as I hate that I am powerless to stop it worldwide.

I grew up around many cultures; many of my friends parents were first gen immigrants and didn’t speak the native language but they tried. I don’t fault them one bit for not learning it, languages are hard. I’ve learned 4 as an adult, none have been easy but my interest in foreign languages started when learning foreign words/phrases around the dinner table at my friends houses growing up.

Oddly Swedish was the most difficult but not for the usual reasons. I tried to speak it but Swedish people would inevitably hear my terrible accent and then just assume I know English and respond that way. Hard to practice when everyone under the age of 60 speaks fluent English and want to show it off. But that is Swedish pride for you, I can’t dismiss that maybe they opened their borders to refugees with the assumption their life was so much better than what the refugees were used to that they would of course want to assimilate to Swedish culture. Which kind of is the basis for the whole problem, they didn’t expect the refugees to have a different opinion and made no space for them to do so. Which is also why they need to assimilate towards each other, not only in one direction, and that takes a few generations worth of time.

It kinda feels like you parroted what I said back to me but… angrily? It feels like you’re working something out that doesn’t really have anything to do with me. It’s ok though, I think we are both on the same page.

I lived in Sweden for a bit and have travelled through most of Scandinavia over the years, what that person is saying is true. Saw it first hand and it had only gotten more of any issue in the last 20 years.

99% homogenous culture with 99% literacy rate with a big social safety net and high taxes to pay for all the high quality of living. Then you take in refugees over and over again in the past 30 years. The refugees are being put into the same neighborhoods, they form communities since they are all suffering the trauma of displacement together. The communities want access to the huge social safety net but not have to pay taxes or assimilate/learn the native language. Both sides feels abused by the other and the problem just gets bigger and bigger over time.

It makes sense and every Scandinavian country has been dealing with it for a while now; it is a huge struggle for them. It is a challenging hurdle that none of them have been able to figure out how to resolve it.

Take Sweden for example, you have 9mil people living in a country about the size of California. Lots of room, resources and stability. Then 200k refugees need a place to call home. They have pride for their homeland and don’t want to forget it. The Swedes have just fundamentally altered the foundation of their society in a statistically significant way by bringing a very different cultural heritage, background, traditions and people it a mostly unchanged political system based on hundreds of years of tradition. There is a lot that both sides have to adapt to as it is a new paradigm for each to accept.

That’s a tough nut to crack and historically speaking one that is usually solved over a few generations as tensions calm and the two cultures mix. The ones who grew up with the two cultures always being present are usually the ones who resolve it once they are decision makers. Or it is constant tension until violence erupts and everyone always hates each other from then on. Flip a coin but I have my fingers crossed that Scandinavia figures it out. It is a beautiful part of the world that could use a bit of outside influence to spice up their geometric architecture and people.

PS I can’t remember the population of Sweden off the top of my head so I just guesstimated. No idea on # of refugees, just picked that one out of a hat to illustrate a point. 200k could be about right, could be lower or could be higher. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯