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ButteryMonkey

@ ButteryMonkey @piefed.social

Posts
2
Comments
174
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • 'It looks bad': Trump panics after support for deportations tank in private GOP poll

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  • Several states don’t have party registration, my swing state included. That changed after I first registered to vote so I’m not sure what my registration looks like now; I can’t change it even if I wanted to. This has the effect of making everyone in the state, at least those who registered since the change, an independent voter, even if they are party loyalists. They simply don’t have a choice to be anything but independent.

    So while it may be true that there are no undecided voters, that’s not really what they are looking at.

  • What are your best 'strange noise from the woods' stories?

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  • It’s not noises.. but hope it counts as creepy!

    My mom was big into ghosts and stuff (not something I believe in. I’m very skeptical of things that are unproven or that I don’t have data on) so I was sort of raised with creepy nonsense being pointed out.

    We lived one place way out in the woods, not near any major roads or anything, smack in the middle of the property we had, and the back of our property butted the back of someone else’s property so there was just woods for several miles in that direction, no paths or roads or anything. I’d explored it several times because, well, that’s what kids do when they have nothing else to do. Trespass.

    My mom did a bunch of digging into the history of our property and found out that the person who built it back in the 1850s or whatever had died in a fire out in the woodshed in the middle of winter after something caused the house to be uninhabitable for a period or something (i don’t recall the details but given what she unearthed about him, my bet was he was just a drunk and set the place on fire while passed out, either from a lantern or smoking, died of smoke inhalation before he woke up). He built the foundation of the place himself and left a handprint in the mortar between the boulders, I assume that’s why my mom latched on to him to explain any weird stuff. At one point she found a silver baby cup and decided it was his from childhood for some reason. Anyway she tried doing seances and stuff, had a creepy friend who was taking advantage of her, you know the drill.

    My bedroom faced the back of the property, and for four nights shortly after one of these seances and around the anniversary of the guy dying, there were bright lights moving across the top of my bedroom walls for hours, like cars were repeatedly driving by, but the only major road out that way was a highway several miles away, and light from the roads had never come in my windows before. And this light was really bright. Like the cars were driving by a town lot. The motion was too smooth to be someone with a flashlight, it had to be cars. Never happened again that I’m aware of.

    I still don’t know how it happened, but it was in winter so I have to assume something about the conditions that week made the light carry farther than normal, maybe reflections or something carrying light from a different direction, coupled with super dry winter air. Very creepy timing. Probably wouldn’t have stood out in my mind if it hadn’t happened so close together.

  • What's the dumbest/silliest reason you got in trouble for in school?

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  • I got detention multiple times for reading in class before they basically gave up. I was getting good grades and paying just enough attention to the classes I read through that if called on I could participate, but it was boring and slow, and books kept me from being disruptively bored. I barely stopped reading all day and would burn through 1,000 page books in under 2 days (the public library gave me a second card to use for inter library loan to not use my normal checkout slots on shipping days :). Thing is, detention didn’t have a no reading rule, because in a school that would be silly, so I’d just… keep reading. So they called my mom who was like yep, they just read all day here too, so they stopped trying to punish me for it. My English teacher had the right idea and didn’t care if I read the assigned books or paid attention in class as long as I did the vocab tests and wrote up a one-page report on every single book I finished. Far more work, but much better suited to what I was going to do anyway.

    I also got in trouble multiple times for wearing absolutely nothing other than pj pants (like yea shirts and stuff too but never jeans). I contested them giving me detention for it, and got off because it wasn’t an official rule in the handbook, something I’d explicitly checked prior to my wardrobe shift to comfort and giving no fucks. They changed the handbook the next year and I switched to solid color athletic pants in obnoxiously bright colors, and I again got in trouble, and contested, and same thing got off because it wasn’t explicitly mentioned.

  • xkcd #3194: 16 Part Epoxy

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  • Would it be possible to make powdered magnets work..? Not as an adhesive, probably, although that would be pretty neat actually..

    Like I know magnets are magnets because of the alignment of many many atoms, but say you powdered the magnets, somehow kept them from clumping up (because of course they would) and then applied a low-level magnetic field (or something a magnet would stick to, maybe?) to whatever you were setting the powder in, could you hypothetically make a magnetic table or something with it?

  • New Years Eve

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  • Here’s like 20% of them

  • And I'm free...I'm free fallin'

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  • Fair enough :) maybe that’s different or maybe I’m just weird. I’ll never know 😁

  • I'm not an artist. If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me, is it still slop, vs just asking it to do everything?

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  • First of all, your skills may not be where you want them yet, but you made art (and it’s pretty good besides; drawing is hard), you are an artist. An artist early in your journey, so think of all the aspiring art students that make just terrible stuff while they learn, and be happy you aren’t doing it for a career while improving. :)

    That said, I don’t really see what the AI added to it. Sure it colored it in, but you could have done that too, and it would have been another chance to hide some of the blemishes that you don’t care for, and give it more of your own personality. The personality is the art, as much as the thing that gets made.

    It doesn’t have to be perfect to be progress. Keep drawing, keep drawing the sorts of things you want to get good at, and think about how you’d like to color them, and just try it out, use crayons, colored pencils, markers, or maybe a digital image editing program. I’m sure there are some good free open source programs for that. You don’t get good without lots of practice, so train those muscles to do the fine motor skills you want them to do, and train your brain to think about what colors would be best for what you are trying to depict (something AI can never really do for you).

    If you like the ai stuff for yourself, enjoy it, but personally I’d be put off by it being used in a book. Even bad art that’s hand made is better than AI, imho.

  • The forbidden fruit

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  • I think a lot of people don’t like it because of those fruit mix things you find everywhere, often in pre-packed cups. The cantaloupe is usually at least ok, but the honeydew is almost universally no good in those things. Always hard and rarely sweet, like they only pulled from next to the rind.

  • And I'm free...I'm free fallin'

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  • Have you ever stuck your head out a moving car window, into the high force wind, and found it very difficult to breathe? That’s what I imagine sky diving is like (not something I particularly want to try), and a ‘chute would slow that enough for comfortable breathing, I imagine.

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  • I’m a huge fan of people wearing skin-tone yoga pants that don’t match their own skin tone, but do match the skin tone of a common major population. Like black or Hispanic people wearing buff-colored pants in areas of mostly Caucasian people. Because initially it just doesn’t register that it’s not the right color and you still see it as nudity. And that’s just a fun juxtaposition to me.

  • Poor baby

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  • My partner once sleepwalked into the kitchen to get food (bad habit of sleep eating, probably due to alcohol) and I just watched them because they were talking nonsense so I knew they were asleep. My sister was also a big sleepwalker/sleep talker, so this was fairly routine for me.

    At the end they offered a plate and said “here, do you want some?”

    They had unboxed a new wireless NES-style controller that had been sitting on the counter, plated the controller, and offered to me as a snack. Had no memory of it the next morning.

    Been a running joke ever since when we try to decide what to eat.

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  • I got a degree in STEM that hasn’t been useful to me. Turns out the sorts of jobs I got it for don’t really exist anymore/around me, and where they do, they pull from other more traditional graduate and post-graduate pools. At this point it’s been long enough since I got it without working a role related to my field that it’d be pretty hard to get hired into even if the labor market wasn’t falling apart. So I switched gears and applied my breadth of knowledge to a different goal, and that’s a work in progress. Time will tell if it’s successful.

    But I started when I was in my mid 20s, and it was a very good time of my life, even with a lot of negative life events in that time. If I could be a professional student, I would have loved to.

    However, I tried to pursue a masters through online courses, but I wasn’t really excited about the specificity of it (I’m more of a generalist), and I wasn’t in the right mental state to do it properly, so I withdrew. So who knows if professional student would have really worked for me or not.

  • What's the craziest thing you've seen on public transportation?

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  • Does that cause a lot of damage, either to the rails or the … tram bits?

  • Buffy is climbing olive trees today

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  • Parents, have you ever said something hurtful to your child that you "didn't mean to say"?

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  • It sucks thinking that way but I totally get it. I’ve been aware since I was like 15 or so that my mother only had me because my older sister was a marital rape baby. She told me this directly.. she was a shit parent and clearly hated doing it, but she genuinely never intended to do it in the first place, and used protection religiously when not being forced (clearly; she had my sister at 31 in the 80s and was catholic so no abortion). Then they just sort of decided to have another so the first wouldn’t be alone.. wish they hadn’t. Sister and I haven’t spoken in almost 20 years now.

    That knowledge has been an albatross most of my life. But she died in my early 20s so I can’t even get closure about it now that I know I want it. Just have to let it go. Nothing can be done about it anyway, choices were made, consequences shook out.

    Needless to say, I’m child-free myself. I’m about as warm and nurturing as she was…. Lol

  • FBI seeks interviews with Democrats who urged US troops to defy illegal orders

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  • Oh cool, very normal.

  • Dreams

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  • I’ve never had either one of those dreams.. or car crashes, or only wearing underpants, or anything else I’ve heard is super common.

    Being lost in a crowd, though? Oh yeah. Conversations I don’t want to have? Yep. Back in school as an adult but it’s actually a gothic-style creepy graveyard with a major storm brewing? Absolutely.

    I’m curious about those dreams “everyone has”, but I don’t think I want to have them myself.

  • What valuable resources are out there for men to learn about themselves?

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  • Excellent, thank you for the suggestion :)

  • What valuable resources are out there for men to learn about themselves?

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  • This is correct. I want to see what kind of resources are out there which men find helpful, and would want to share with other men. Doesn’t have to be specific to men. I know what I’ve found that’s helpful for myself, but I don’t have the perspective to know what someone with a mostly different life experience than my own would find helpful.