Bay 12 Games Forum

... sucks to be you, then :V

... are you sure? I guess it could just not have rolled out to my area by now or somethin' (which would be incredibly strange, considering we're basically in the same area insofar as that stuff goes), but I just checked a couple videos and it's... not doing that.

Is it genuine happiness to be hooked up to a machine that continually stimulates your pleasure centers, all of your physical needs taken care of? Or to go into a perfect virtual reality, but you never actually interact with other human beings, just simulations of them (you cannot tell the difference from within the machine, of course), and is a paradise for you?

The latter pretty much definitely would be genuine happiness, providing it didn't have notable downsides and was either indefinite or consensual. If you can't (and, perhaps more importantly, won't be able to) tell a difference, insofar as you're concerned there is no difference.

The former almost certainly wouldn't be -- there's more to happiness than raw pleasure and met survival requirements. Social needs, improvement/accomplishment needs, etc., etc. It might be a good basis to build off of, though -- if not necessarily a infinite pleasure tap, something for explicit management of emotional states would probably be an absolutely incredible (if obviously abusable) tool for improving lives and helping people be happy. It's basically what most non-recreational psychoactive drugs are trying to do, after all, and those help out a lot of folks pretty tremendously.

Ahh... avernum's friendly giant talking spiders are always pretty good for a mood lift. Bout the nicest eight legged human-sized sentient monstrosities you'll find in fiction. And arguably the best part is you usually a person or two who's been driven more or less irrevocably insane from meeting them ::::3

*shrugs* Would still say that, correct or not, that still describes something better than what was before it. Even with the "gated communities" of the internet, you still get a lot of exposure to other views and whatnot, massively more than what insular societies would see just a few decades back. Before, it was entirely possible -- and damned likely -- to go pretty much your entire life in one of those little ponds, except the ponds were defended often to the point of violence. You still have many places in the world, even with internet exposure, that are like that -- even in the goddamn US I've met what's probably dozens of folks now that's shared stories of spending twenty, thirty years, their entire formative years and much of their young adulthood, without ever meeting/getting within speaking distance or exchanging any words of note with, say, a liberal, or a hindu, or a black person, and talked to older folks that literally spent everything but the last decade or two in that kind of situation. Nevermind anything substantial or any "clashing or meshing", it just outright didn't bloody happen.

From just about everything I've seen over the last near-three-decades now, even the most echo-chambery and protected of internet echo chambers doesn't even remotely approach how insular things can -- and pretty often do -- get outside of it. The ease of communication and equivalent actions to movement, the general lack of reliance on conforming for goddamn survival... stuff like that makes a genuinely massive world of difference when it comes to mitigating those flaws that blurb was talking about. I'd say pretty strongly that if you think the internet exacerbates those flaws, you haven't seen much of their manifestation in the wild

It's definitely often used rhetoric, anyway. Can't recall how scripturally supported it is, though, heh.

... also, hasn't it been noted quite repeatedly that the scriptural basis for free will is... pretty shaky? Doesn't seem like the best platform to use to contest vis-a-vis the scriptural support for a separate fairly-shaky interpretation, heh...

It can go on a lot more than sandwich, certainly. I've put jelly in ice cream before :V _{it was good, though it took some effort to get it mixed in properly}

It's delicious on waffles and pancakes and whatnot, too, though considering it's perfectly viable to use those instead of normal bread to make a sandwich I'm not sure if those wouldn't count, heh. S'other stuff, if mostly involving baking and similar endeavors. Haven't tried much of the fancier things you could attempt with it... mostly. Pretty sure apple jelly is delicious on meat, if my memory isn't tricking me, so long as you go fairly light. Ends up basically being an impromptu apple glaze, which is just goddamn great on certain meats, particularly ham.

Eehh... there's roughly three, maybe four, major fruit spread words I'm faintly aware of, at the very least in my part of the US. In descending order of usage frequency, there's jelly, which is jam without the nibbly fruit-bits in it, jam, which is jelly with nibbly fruit-bits in it, preserves, which is more or less jam taken to the next level, and occasionally marmalade, which is... something to do with oranges, iirc. I mostly know it as "that one fruit spread I don't eat".

We also have that linked sort of jelly, of course, we just usually call it jello (or the particular makings name) :V Sometimes with pudding stuck on the end.

Or just straight up gelatin. Or a few other things. The wobbly stuff comes in a lot more names. Stuff in the fridge right now calls itself parfaits.