I was just notified of the corollary that eating 18 shrimp rounds up to cannibalism.

Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.

I’m a full bottle of wine in (which is not an invitation to remind me of what day of the week it is) and I will have to take the time to ingest the post in its full madness tomorrow, but the you managed to summarize my main objection to the simulation hypothesis very quickly and very succintly:

Are the implications really that intriguing, beyond a “that’s wild duuude” you exhale alongside the weed smoke in your college dorm?

The simulation hype is not just unfalsifiable, it doesn’t even have implications. Most religions at least have some normative claims or claim instrumental utility to go with their metaphysical claims, like “don’t eat shellfish unless you really need to or you will have a shitty afterlife”. The simulation hypothesis is just “maybe the math that described how stuff works is being calculated by a computer”, as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on silicon, an abacus, some rocks in a desert, God’s own analytical engine, Microsoft Excel, or if our physical universe is actually the outermost reality out there. From our context it’s an intellectual dead end. At best, we might find a way to exploit the bugs and features of our simulation for our benefit, and that’s not a novel concept either. It’s called engineering (among other names).

Well you know, it’s not quite perfect. For a movie set in Morocco, not too many Maghrebin in the main cast, which also adds a bit of hypocritical bitterness in the pivotal La Marseillaise scene. It’s a powerful moment of resistance against the nazis, but also they’re singing the French national anthem in a colonial protectorate of France.

It’s an all-time classic, but we shouldn’t get carried away and ignore its flaws.

Oh my god, that is right on the edge between making all of this either a lot more depressing or even funnier.

Actually, I kinda want to say more than that.

It’s a movie about a guy who has grown cynical from years of anti-fascist action, though he’s bit tsundere about his allegiance. In the end he chooses to bear the jealousy over his lover and abandon his life of convenience and comfort to fight for what’s ultimately right.

It’s a movie that resonates all these decades later, forgoing easy answers for a real stance. And it’s amazingly quotable.

Also remembered this video essay about it.

Not to make too hot a take, but Casablanca is a really good movie.

This Adolf guy kinda had me when he was just a dude traumatized by war who liked buildings and was kinda shit at drawing them, but his political takes were full on yikes and he quickly lost me when it came to the arts as well.

Yeah, as a kid I was kinda the archetypal nerd. Short, fat, airheaded, besserwisser, straight A’s,* into manga and video games. My best friend for most of primary school was the guy with even better grades, but tall, handsome and a national championship level athlete.

Then puberty hit me pretty early and suddenly I was about median height for my age, I could do pull-ups while most of my classmates couldn’t, and even though I wasn’t that fond of gym class, I was mostly motivated enough to get a decent grade just for trying a little.

The nerd/jock thing always felt like an American thing from an older generation that wasn’t taken seriously. Maybe it was acknowledged by an overthinker like me, but to even bring up the distinction was kinda nerdy itself. It definitely wasn’t the defining social divisor in my adolescent life.

*Or rather, nines and tens on the weird 4 to 10 scale Finnish primary education uses.

Funeral? Poppycock, KPIs are great. Bloodwork is coming in excellent. Perfect cholesterol, low leukocytes, beautiful plumage. So what if he’s braindead?