Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023

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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Several people have mentioned budgetary restrictions, which is a huge part, but there are practical considerations, regardless of budget. Even with a big budget, it’s only recently that they’ve been able to make convincing non-humanoid aliens that interact with other actors (mostly through CGI). Earlier, there were good examples of movie monsters or aliens that were done with stop motion or puppets, but not in a way that they shared the screen with the human actors in a meaningful way. Can you imagine if, say, the Vulcans on the original Trek series were wildly non-human - how silly it would have looked? The technology just wasn’t there to pull it off.

    Also, most aliens, even in books, are some variation of earth life. They’re reptile-people, big spiders, intelligent bugs, or whatever. I think that’s mostly because it’s pretty hard to envision something truly novel/new. So lots of books, movies, and shows come up with some rationale for why everything in the galaxy looks like some kind of earth life to excuse that.



  • Sharing an overly personal story because I think it’s funny.

    When my first marriage was swirling the drain, and my wife and I hadn’t had sex for a number of months, I was visiting my parents, who were in their late 60s at the time. I noticed that my mom kept getting up to go to the bathroom, so I asked my dad if she was okay and he said she had a yeast infection that was bothering her and they didn’t know what to do about it. I told him that those were generally pretty easy, she can get a cream that will take care of it in about a week. Not much else to it other than avoid sex for a couple weeks.

    My dad looked incredulous. He said “A couple WEEKS? Like two full weeks? No sex at all for TWO WEEKS? If we don’t do that, will it go away on its own?” My dad, pushing 70, was having a hard time coming to grips with the thought of going two weeks without sex, while I was in my 20s and hadn’t had sex for four or five months.

    I remember driving home and thinking, “Well there’s something I didn’t need to think about.”






  • I’m my late teens and early twenties, I had several occurrences of gay guys hitting on me, to the point where I started to worry that there was something about me. It seems funny to me now, but I really did have a period of wondering if I could be and was just repressing it because of my Catholic upbringing. But ultimately I realized that I just didn’t find guys attractive at all, and even the thought of kissing a guy was kind of a boner killer. So I get what you’re saying, even though on the surface it sounds funny to say you wondered if you could be gay.

    Sometime later I ended up with a couple of close gay friends, and I mentioned it to them. They said it was probably because I put out a very non-judgemental vibe and didn’t seem like a homophobe, so it probably didn’t seem risky to hit on me.




  • I’m just barely a boomer, but I’m also a software engineer/manager. Sometimes younger folks assume I need help with computers/tech, or are surprised when I’m knowledgeable about them. It’s starting to change for me, too, though. I haven’t kept up with newer languages, and as a manager I really don’t write any code outside of the occasional Excel VBA, so I’m getting pretty stale.