I won’t stop eating meat, eggs, or dairy, but if we can take the whole killing and torturing animals out of the process, I’m all for it.

Once we’ve got affordable synthetic equivalents (and I mean equivalents; synthetic milk you can make proper cheese with, cold meats, steak, ribs, eggs, anything you can make with an animal), we should outright ban using animals for food.

(Except for birds, of course. Fuck birds. Should’ve gone extinct 65 million years ago with the rest of the dinosaurs, the bastards.)

Ever seen a ferrofluid, which follows the shape of magnetic fields? Same thing, but with gravity.

Of course, that only accounts for a fraction of those 16 meters… but there’s a lot of ocean water. Get it moving (because the Moon and the Sun move, and the Earth rotates under them, and there’s a whole lot of ocean currents on top of that, due to differences in water temperatures and salinity, and coriolis forces, and winds, and whatnot) and it builds up a lot of inertia.

Push it into geography that keeps narrowing and narrowing like a funnel, and the only place it can go is in, and up.

Water gets in there, wants to get out, but there’s a whole damn ocean pushing it in, so it has no option but to keep accumulating into the funnel.

Also, having the geography look a bit like a Tesla valve that’ll easily let water in but not so easily let it out probably doesn’t help either; place’s bound to get close to overflowing, before it can empty itself out.

Guaranteed to keep your water cool.

I couldn’t possibly remember specific apples.

I could describe to you the Granny Smith variety (the only one I like), or maybe the Golden or Gala (the other varieties common in supermarkets around here), but not particular apples, unless I had actually tried to memorize their details (which would look like a list, not an image).

Maybe I don’t care enough about apples.

I could describe my old pets (I did care enough about them to remember them), but, again, that’d look more like a list.

Not see it, no. I could describe it, from memory, if I had looked at it for long enough and paid enough attention (especially if I knew beforehand I’d have to describe it), but obviously I wouldn’t be seeing it. There’d be no image, just a memory.

I’m pretty certain the visual processing parts of the brain are not involved when I imagine or remember stuff.

I mean, there’s a lot of image processing going on in the retina and optic nerve (edge detection, contrast highlighting, and whatnot) that’s obviously not available when not using the eyes (which makes it very hard for me to imagine how this seeing images in your brain thing works), then a lot of spatial and temporal signal processing (motion detection, noise reduction, speed classification, and so on) in the thalamus, then there’s several layers of visual cortex doing the rest of the image processing, pattern recognition, and whatnot, and then there’s the rest of the brain (mainly prefrontal cortex and parietal and temporal lobes), which actually deals with that information, stores it, recalls it, and whatnot.

I imagine the whole retina-thalamus-visual cortex bit isn’t significantly involved in the way I “visualise” stuff, while it might be more involved for people who “see images” in their brains.

All the processed stuff (concepts, descriptions, dimensions, spatial and temporal relationships, and whatnot) is still there, though, just not the raw visual data (which would be superfluous in most cases anyway, unless I was trying to do something like recall a written page I hadn’t read in order to read it later, which I can’t do but you or someone with photographic memory might), so I’ve got everything I need anyway.

See, if I imagine an apple there’s no images. There’s just… the concept of an apple, I suppose.

I know what an image of it would look like. I know what light shining on it (photorealistic, phong, gouraud, take your pick), or water beads on its side would look like. I could draw it for you, if I didn’t suck at drawing. Make a decent vector image of it, sure, with the right software.

But I don’t see it. I’d need eyes for that, and my eyes point towards the outside of my brain, not the inside.

No, I’m not taking about effort. I’m aware the brain does it automatically, and puts it in the same energy budget as the rest of the reading experience (though now I’m wondering if the brains of people with aphantasia consume less energy when reading).

What I’m saying is that there’s so many more layers to books than to film that being “forced” by your brain to see books in a visual way might produce a limited experience when compared to someone who can enjoy a book as, well, a book.

More importantly, whatever you’re visualising is made up by your brain… based on the author’s descriptions, sure… but those descriptions might be incomplete until the very last page.

If you’re viewing the book like a film, you’re necessarily making up details that can conflict with later descriptions by the author, which means you’d either have to change your visual representation (akin to a recast of an actor, which is often jarring) or ignore the author’s description (I had a friend who, having read The Hobbit, somehow imagined Gollum as a sort of gelatinous blob; I suspect this is what might have been going on there). Again, this seems like it’d lead to a lesser experience than just experiencing the book like… a book.

Seeing a book like a movie seems extremely limiting to me.

There’s so much more depth to books than to film. Limiting them to the visual aspect would be like ripping off 90% of the pages.

Yeah that wasn’t aphantasia (someone with aphantasia would have no problem understanding your model; probably even less than someone without it, in fact); that was them having their heads so far up their own arse they weren’t able to see and think properly (and lack of experience doing the latter).

There are.

We can’t see magnetism. Or most of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We can’t hear too low frequency or too high frequency sounds.

We can’t perceive gravity (other than by its effect on our body), or the strong or weak nuclear forces.

There’s a flood of neutrinos constantly going through us without us noticing.

There are whole ecosystems of minuscule animals and bacteria living on and in us, which we can’t see.

We can’t even see the very air we’re breathing.

How could you possibly read for fun if you can’t picture what’s happening?

Probably better than people who need to visualise stuff.

There’s much more in books than just the visuals. There’s the story, there’s the characters’ thoughts and personality, there’s the author’s style, and influences… they’re infinitely more detailed and nuanced than film or TV.

Limiting them to the visual aspect seems like a disservice to both reader and author.

And, anyway, I know what’s happening, it’s written right there on the page, why would I need to visualise it?

And what if I imagined it a certain way, and later the author describes it differently than I imagined it, or adds some new detail that was missing in my mental image? Personally (if I experienced books like I do films) that kind of thing would completely pull me off from the story…

And what if the book is set somewhere alien to our senses? How do you visualise Flatland? Or the other universe in Asimov’s The God’s Themselves?

Frankly, needing to visualise books seems more like a handicap to me.

Yeah, pretty much the same here. I can imagine shapes, smells, textures, whatever, but it’s entirely different from seeing, smelling, or touching. Concepts, not images. Feels like the same part of the brain I’d use to, for instance, write a computer program. No issues visualising and designing 3D models either, or imagining what something in a book looks like.

Same when dreaming; I could describe everything in my dreams (if I had time during the few seconds after waking up when I still remember them) as if I had seen, heard, and felt it… but it was a completely different experience from actually seeing, hearing, or feeling it. Which means I can never mistake a dream for reality (which I suppose means I lucid dream too), because it’s immediately obviously different (and I’m on the bed, with my eyes closed).

One rich asshole called Larry Ellison…?

It’s the only viable option given how much we’ve fucked the planet up.

Stopping (not reducing) emissions won’t stop already ongoing feedback loops, it’ll just prevent going full Venus.

If human civilization simply ceased to exist it’d still take millions of years for temperatures to go back to pre-human levels.

Sequestering enough carbon or increasing albedo don’t seem like feasible options.

We need to put a shade between Earth and the Sun, it’s the only option that seems possible before we collapse, and it would achieve immediate results (of course it’d also give companies an excuse to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere, since the problem would be “solved”, so we’d be back on track for Venus style runaway greenhouse effect in one or two decades).

We’re 100% fucked.

always lonely

I don’t know, some rodents seem to make it work. Naked mole rats, beavers, prairie dogs… (I wouldn’t include herd animals, though; sure, they’re always surrounded by others, but there’s no sense of community, it’s always everyone for themselves, and screw whoever’s slowest… perfect example of being alone in a multitude)

Not that I recall, no.

My first one was a 65MB (or was it 85MB?) 3.5’’ parallel ATA one, and while the enclosure might have been shaped around the platter(s?) (could have been a later one, though) I don’t recall the motor being distinguishable.

Whole machine (my first PC proper) was a 286, 16MHz with turbo on, possibly 1024KB of RAM (I recall setting up autoexec.bat to ask me if I needed extended or expanded memory on boot, but could’ve been in a later machine; pretty certain the memory was on socketed DIPs on the mainboard, not SIMMs, in any case, so it can’t have been much, and 640KB was supposed to be enough, anyway), CGA, 5.25’’ and possibly 3.5’’ floppy drive, DOS… 4.something, I believe.

Good times.

Nero burning ROM.

Meh, burning CDs… ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

(To be fair, neither did I, probably; my earliest hard drive was already IDE, I believe, and those seem to have already had autopark, but the old lore was that you parked your hard drives before moving them, or the heads would scratch the surface, so park them we did.)

If you held them by a side and shaked them, they were definitely floppy.

Batman is a lunatic occasionally playing rich playboy to finance his crusade against crime, born from untreated trauma.

And most of his villains are just as insane as him.

Gotham is basically a vicious circle of maniacs driving each other further insane.