???

Fair enough. I meant that there’s two "realistic"s out there. There’s what’s scientifically proven, and there’s what pop-culture has led us to believe; they overlap but the latter is significantly less required to tell the truth.

How childlike are teenagers? More than you think thanks to Dawson Casting. Why do Aluminum Christmas Trees exist in the Peanuts universe? Because that was an actual ugly fad back in the 1960s. Why do cars always explode when they crash in movies? Because it looks cool and reminds people that the Ford Pinto was a death trap and so could their Tesla be.

Pop-Culture is art, not science, but most of us (myself included) take it for granted that what is and isn’t fictional is easy to spot because real people sit on chairs but only action movie heroes can survive jumping out a plate glass window to escape an explosion. Sadly, fake news exists because fiction has never been 100% clear on what is fake in movies and books, and since 2016 neither is reality for some odd reason (Life imitates art, go figure).

If every Aluminum Christmas Tree was just a wry commentary on the commercialization of a Christian holiday, World War One would never have happened. If the poles for traffic lights weren’t designed to shear off and fall to the ground if a car drives into them, there would be a lot more road fatalities, yet people deride Grand Theft Auto, American Truck Simulator, Crossout and other games with drivable vehicles and destructible environments for unrealistic traffic lights that you can push over by driving into.

Science, as accurate as it is due to only trusting the verified and being willing to de-verify whatever turns out to be misinformed, is not the default coding language of our brain; We are usually very emotionally-motivated, so people believe in everything from a flat earth conspiracy to “science is my one true god because my parents abused me and were constantly going on about Jesus and sinners to cover up that they were bad people, therefore all religions must be evil” to “capitalism is inherently good because I saw my neighbours dragged into the night to never be heard from again by the Soviet secret police” (for the record, I hate both systems but monarchy and anarchy don’t appeal to me one bit either so… eh).

So yeah, tl;dr, take it from a fiction writer that people will often believe anything that speaks to them, and therefore our definitions of “realistic” were quite different.

I really did mean “realistic-looking, but not reality” as much as you meant “scientific consensus”, and I get why that’s easy to confuse… sometimes I just forget when posting on social media that most people don’t have a good memory or the desire to memorize things from fiction as disparate as Aboriginee mythology, Hypnopspace Outlaw, the Backrooms, Paprika and Inception, all well enough to remember every single one of them (and many others) involves dream magic/super-tech of some sort. My apologies for forgetting you probably don’t write fiction for a living.

Fair enough. Just know one thing. The unconscious mind seems to be not just incredibly powerful, but reality-defying to the point that myself and my dad have gotten information related to events we would not experience until years later in dreams, and in general lucid dreams are often stranger than fiction.

You don’t have to believe anything, I’m just pointing out oneirology (study of dreams, and in an actual scientific manner rather than something shady like astrology) is both a real field of study and like trying to catalogue all the different ways lightning can be put in a jar; frustratingly resistant to the scientific method.

And that’s just in anthopological and psychological fields, what about the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space? It’s unlikely there’s anything truly alien or magic on other worlds or in deep ocean water but so is the presence of life at all. In short, we might also be living in a world which isn’t as realistic as we’ve been led to believe reality is.

Change.org petitions to not deport people from Canada, who either would be killed by their own government or hurt by other people due to endemic homophobia and transphobia in their culture after being deported to their home country, or, in one case, because he turned 18 just before his parents and younger siblings were granted citizenship.

Worst part is why; I’m half-European (my family were farmers and possibly feudal landowners at the wealthiest, political upheavals forced them to expatriate themselves a half-dozen times in the early 20th century so my dad’s nationality is vague) and half-Colombian (and my mom’s family tree is itself very mixed race), so I know how important immigration is for both the immigrants and the recieving nation. I’ve never held anything against anyone that they were born with since around 2007 and I have never tried to justify that dislike of severely mentally handicapped people from back then at any point, then or now.

Finally, I live in Western Canada and have a lot of empathy. It seems that, while I’m not going to hold it against all French Quebec residents, there are some Québécois who are fucking cruel when it comes to deportation. I’ve talked to a guy, Caucasian as paste, who has been illegally reported to Immigration twice because he’s from Ontario and lives in Quebec, and that’s just how Immigration - which is HQ’d in Quebec for no good reason - treats people who look similar to themselves, let alone the dozen different times an upstanding potential skilled worker migrant from a “person of color” background has been nearly deported despite a clear-cut case of being in life-threatening danger if they are deported.

Fortunately, most of the petitions succeeded in putting pressure on Immigration Canada to hand out exceptions to rules because of the circumstances and because most of the country is all too aware of how much bigotry has taken hold in Quebec.

I mean, I don’t want to generalize and I’ve never known much about Francophone history, but I somehow can’t help but wonder if French aristocracy both on the other side of my country and over in Europe have always tended to be sociopathicly narcissistic. Hearing about some of the things the French government has just tried to enact has me feeling like we’re in some sort of home stretch of the end of the world, or at least a historical turning point that will go down in the history books of the 23rd and 24th century the way Napoleon’s reign or the American Revolutionary War is portrayed in modern media.

Also, before anyone says it, I know every country has had corrupt leaders throughout history. It just seems to take a special kind of arrogance among leadership for “The rich bitch thinks we weren’t allowed to eat cake without permission, when we can’t afford the bread?!” to be a plausible accusation at multiple points in time and space with the only common thread being the language spoken, but since that could be said about English easily I apologize if that feels accusatory. You’re not the language you speak or the flag you fly, just please don’t let power go to your heads everyone.

Was going to mention this, I see you beat me to it.

The one that led to McBling and Reality TV. I wouldn’t try to force fashion to remain shiny bubblegum pop grafittipunk/shibiyapunk futurism to stick around or, I just think it had more staying power under normal conditions that was lost solely due to the nature of life from 2001-2008.

People don’t change fashion at the drop of a hat for financial crises, that just strengthens counterculture and futurism. They change their tastes suddenly when innocent people die in a new and unexpected way. That’s why art from the time period just before and during the Black Death is filled with more cynicism than even the past 7 years (roughly since Trump was elected), why an Oriental symbol of peace was ruined by the Nazis, and why the climate crisis has made FairPhone the only smartphone brand that survives without shoving ads down your throat.

Or at least, so it seems to me, I’m not a sociologist. What I also am not is petty or authoritarian, I’m not trying to make everyone wear 30 year old clothes or check their emails on an iLamp computer. I just know I’d like to see a world where people don’t have to rely on mass production to provide the things we need to live, because then you’re required to change your stuff out the moment it’s broken or obsolete.

My point is, I was trying to say your idea would make planned obsolescence and obsolescence in general themselves a relic of early civilization, so limiting such a world to one genre or style of product that only remains popular for ~10 years before becoming nothing but zeitgeist and nostalgia feels needlessly restrictive. I can see how it could be taken the opposite way, sorry about that!

Simulate one human life, from beginning to end, in a way that allows unethical experiments to be dismissed as recurring nightmares by the individual, and not cause permanent damage to this simulated person. When their life ends, I’d arrange to talk to them, explain everything, apologize for the necessity of the experiments, and offer him immortality and/or freedom with no strings attached. He can get a biological or robot body, or stay virtual, but it’s not up to anyone but him/her/? at that point.

I’d be fine with my life being an experiment under those circumstances as long as the results were put mostly to saving or improving lives, but I’d never be willing to put someone else in that position if I didn’t; if you couldn’t find a person like myself in real life with that opinion on the possibility, it’s unjustifiable. If, however, you engineered their life just enough to strongly encourage that level of altruism, and made it comfortable and not dehumanizing when not involved in an experiment as well as having a ban on cruelty and gaslighting in doing the experiments, and apologize for having to resort to these measures at all, I could see the person not being overly upset.

Whether it meets the code of ethics for scientific research is another matter.

Only if I get to live in a treehouse that’s bigger on the inside, become my persona character, and dress like 9/11 never happened and Y2K aesthetic continued until '08 or longer.

I’d upload everyone. I’d also give them something for their trouble, since apparently all religious people and all hardcore atheists hate the sci-fi story I wrote where humanity’s descendants resurrect everyone who ever died that was ever part of the Homo genus; the body their heart truly desires would be their VR avatar, though with delicious ironic caveats because if what your heart truly desires is money or power or fame over all other aspects, and that’s been detrimental to others, deserves to be trapped as a virtual solid gold statue or somesuch forever for being a selfish fuck.

Basically, what if heaven and hell were not places, but literally whether being your true self truly makes you happy? That hell is if you needed to rethink your shallow, fake or otherwise hollow-feeling lifestyle but didn’t do so soon enough and now you’re stuck looking and feeling like what you slowly come to hate about yourself or at least who you were when you died.

Why? They have dump trucks and dams in Africa, you know. Or did you think this was before Africa became the world’s fastest-growing and biggest market for cell phones?

That’s the new guy. Old guy’s being driven home after he got plastered at the retirement party. RIP, I hardly knew ye (I live in Canada, lol).

I know, right? God I am so done with arguing about how (or who gets) to decide what kind of society we live in. I just want to talk about OpenTTD, Star Citizen and pics of Lego builds.

Unless they have a reason to lock him up to protect their own interests, the Supreme Court is probably not going to do shit. That’s WHY Trump picked them, as an “insurance measure”, and unfortunately it seems to be working.

Maybe so, but… That might be because China and America have too much international power. Power attracts the corrupt and global power attracts the most corrupt on the globe.

Digimon World 2003. I never owned a PlayStation (was a Nintendo-only fanboy for years until I bought a PS2 in the mid-00s a year before the Xbox 360 was announced) and tried to run an emulator of it for over a decade before it was fully supported. I also had trouble because I found out the only English version that didn’t have that stupid “once you start fighting the final boss, you can’t explore the game world anymore” thing they used to do in JRPGs was the European version. Now I can actually play it, even using gameshark codes, easily… if I could only find the time to play it!