Nice!!

Not every type of epilepsy is photosensitive.

In fact, it’s an extremely rare form of epilepsy.

Also tonic-clonic seizures are only one of many kinds, and they are not fun.

Shows the interesting power of cultural context and perspective. Like how alcohol and its consumption is incredibly normalised and accepted despite the fact it’s literally poison and kills over 100,000 people each year in the US alone.

I barely use any these days.

At first they were really cool and seemingly had unlimited potential with a wild and unknown future as numerous brands competed intensely with their own take on the formula.

These days, they are ultra expensive glass rectangles that exist to serve you endless ads and harvest every piece of info about every facet of your life. You also have to pay enormous subscription fees to get half the functionality they used to have. I just got an iPhone on a deep discount from my carrier and I stopped giving a shit about phone tech. Processor speed, camera specs, “AI”, whatever. It’s all trash to me now and the technology doesn’t excite me in the slightest. Carriers and manufacturers have choked all the life and enjoyment out of smart phones.

Google is an ad company so this is was a given.

But think of the shareholders!!

Average users do not even remotely care about federated software and/or decentralisation. That is techno-babble to them and their eyes will glaze over if you try to market that to them.

That being said: Mastodon does a shit job at explaining how it works, how to use it, and what its advantages are. The Joinmastodon landing page just assumes you already know how a fair bit about instances work and what federated software is and does a very poor job explaining it. And even then, most users won’t care either way. They just want to click a Join button and be done.

It is not wrong nor necessarily bad to constantly question things and to desire to look deeper into information presented to you

But continued denial of something that is extremely well understood, studied, tested, and researched isn’t healthy skepticism - it’s wilful ignorance for the sake of soothing one’s fears.

The human brain (the brains of most creatures, really) is now better understood than it ever has been and new technology is making studying it easier and faster than ever before. At no point, past or present, has there ever been even a tiny minuscule sliver of anything even remotely similar to a soul or afterlife being detected or observed. What we have observed, however, are the parts of a brain that are responsible for emotions, memory, personality, logic, reasoning, etc dying and ceasing to function.

The brain is an extremely awesome and complex thing but it is not powered by magic. I am trying my best to not mean any disrespect here - like I said I believed in an afterlife well into my 20’s - but the entire premise of an afterlife is basically magic. It’s fantasy. It makes the crushing pain of our own death easier to deal with.

I am pretty damn sure. Your brain, everything that makes you you, is a biological computer (for lack of a better word) of which we have an extremely comprehensive understanding of how it functions and the processes, both biological and psychological, that form a personality. There is no magic sauce or spirit that leaks out into the void when you die. It is your biological circuits ceasing to function and decaying.

I say this as someone who believed in an afterlife well into my late 20’s. It is a belief we tell ourselves to cope with the reality of our own mortality. We will die and there will be nothing, so we tell ourselves that maybe there will be something because it makes the pain easier to handle.

Hell yeah.

I cancelled my Adobe sub and stopped using their products several months ago. The presence of AI “features” wasn’t the reason, but it is certainly nice to not have to deal with them.

Also obligatory: Fuck you Adobe for not paying me for using my stock images to train your AI.