'Safe' Modes in Video Games Tackle Fears of Spiders, Deep Water - "Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, and thalassophobia, the fear of deep water, are two play modes that have been implemented across a slew of major titles from developers like Electronic Arts, Warner Bros. Games, and PlayStation Studios... "Hogwarts Legacy," the massively successful Harry Potter-themed RPG, became the latest game to introduce an arachnophobia mode to its accessibility options. When activated, the mode softens the appearance of spider enemies by changing their physical profiles, removes their "skitters and screeches," and renders their corpses invisible... "Star Wars Jedi: Survivor," a game from Electronic Art's Respawn Entertainment studio, began working on an arachnophobia mode close to a year ago, after a developer became unable to work on a level due to their own fear of spiders... Guerilla Games' "Horizon Forbidden West" is tackling thalassophobia through an update that improves users' underwater visibility and allows them to breathe while submerged"
Gamers aren't what they used to be
The Rules of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Cartoons - "The rules are made only slightly less interesting by their fiction; according to Wikipedia, long-time Jones collaborator Michael Maltese said he'd never heard of the rules."
MAGA Declares Madison Cawthorn Vindicated After Senate Room Sex Tape Report - "Supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have declared former Representative Madison Cawthorn, who previously claimed that leaders in Congress invited him to an orgy party, vindicated after a tape of an alleged Democratic aide having sex in a Senate room was leaked this week. Cawthorn was entangled in controversy after making comments in March 2022 that leaders who he "looked up to" in Washington, D.C., had invited him to an "orgy" and did cocaine in front of him. Two months later, the congressman lost the primary to state Senator Chuck Edwards, who eventually won Cawthorn's seat in the general election. Meanwhile, The Daily Caller released a leaked video on Friday that it obtained of two men having sex inside a Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building."
Meme - "Good looking women: Norway, Sweden
Good food: Greece, Portugal
Good at war: Germany, United Kingdom
Good looking women & Good food: Italy
Good looking women & Good at war: Finland
Good food & Good at war: Japan
Good looking women, Good food & Good at war: France
None of the above: Spain"
The Science Behind Ma La Xiang Guo: What Makes Some Stalls Better Than Others? - "Singaporeans are so obsessed with ma la xiang guo, a male friend tells me one day. So many girls on Tinder put their love for ma la in their bio like it’s a personality trait!... determined to figure out the secret to a flavourful ma la xiang guo, I approached three chefs from Food Republic’s ma la xiang guo stalls. Turns out, the secret to a flavourful ma la xiang guo—one that keeps customers returning and even makes its way onto a Tinder bio—truly lies in the science behind its third word. In English, ‘xiang’ means fragrant. According to Jeffrey Tan, 47, this fragrance is derived from the oil. The owner of Flavours of Ah Chew at Food Republic in Capitol Piazza says, even if the hot pot base is excellent, or the chilis are plentiful, the entire dish could miss the mark if the oil isn’t as fragrant as it could be. Simply put, mere oil could be the fundamental—and underrated—ingredient which elevates a passable bowl of ma la to something potentially life-changing... But creativity is more than knowing the right ingredients, making fanciful dishes, or bringing in the latest fads. It is firstly about understanding the taste buds of customers. Each area in Singapore where Jeffrey owns a yong tau foo stall comprises a demographic with a different palate. This is determined by a range of factors, including age, gender, the time of day that they visit, and their occupations. To arrive at the perfect paste for his stall, he conducted a blind taste test among friends from Singapore and China. But he reiterates that one has to constantly evolve in F&B; if it can be better, he will make it better. Jeffrey also injects creativity into his offerings by trusting his “excellent and creative” employees to differentiate their offerings and cater to their varying demographics. For example, Flavours of Ah Chew makes their yong tau foo ingredients by hand to appeal to those who prefer authenticity, because the ingredients are made individually outside a factory. They also make a fried onion oil that, according to him, draw certain customers to his stall... Sichuan experiences colder climates in general, so one can afford to have more ‘ma’ (numbness) in the dish. The ‘ma’ generates heat in the body that’s necessary for staying warm. Singaporeans, however, don’t take to ‘ma’ that well, though we are huge fans of ‘la’ (heat; spice). Echoing Jeffrey’s take on how different demographics in each area affect the taste of the final ma la xiang guo, he shares, “For this outlet in Parkway Parade, not many people can take ‘la’, because there is an older crowd. But in Clementi, with a younger crowd, they tend to handle more ‘la’.” Like Jeffrey, Mr Liu shares that his ma la xiang guo recipe has gone through “many rounds of stringent food tasting to ensure quality”. Some stalls use a sauce that requires Chinese medicinal herbs, such as fennel seeds (่ด้ฆ) and zi cao (็ดซ่), and so that it can ‘repair’ and detoxify the body, but all stalls are inevitably different in their approach. What about your oil? I ask, remembering Jeffrey’s quip that oil is the underrated—and perhaps most important—ingredient. “Add butter to make it fragrant,” Mr Liu says. “Regular vegetable oil is not as fragrant.” In this age, ‘authenticity’ is a word carelessly thrown around, as though assimilation or ‘fusion’ instantly reduces the quality of any cuisine. But the beauty of food, like culture, is that it’s ever-changing. So it seems that one of the most pertinent factors in creating a successful ma la xiang guo is being able to cater to Singaporean taste buds and the climate, without completely abandoning the Sichuan flavour... the unpredictability of ma la xiang guo is a result of human nature—and that’s the sheer enjoyment of the dish."
Humans feel more empathy for dogs than for other humans, study suggests - "A recent study suggests that humans tend to feel more empathy for dogs than they do other humans in general. However, the study also found that humans tend to be equally empathetic towards dogs as towards other children. The research was presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Researchers suggest that the tendency to see dogs as characterized by dependence and vulnerability cause them to elicit empathy from us, in a way similar to how the helplessness and vulnerability of children tends to elicit empathy."
Is keeping dogs allowed in Islam or not? - ""Raising or keeping a dog inside the house is not allowed in Islam under any circumstances, and even prevents the Angels of Mercy from entering the house, and deducts a large amount of a Muslim's worship reward on every single day," Dr Ali Mashael, Chief Mufti at the Department of Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities in Dubai, told Khaleej Times. However, a dog may be kept and benefited from outside the house for permissible reasons, such as farming, hunting or herding as explained by Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him), he said."
Reining in Japan’s unstoppable urban sprawl - The Japan Times
Meme - Arabic Menu:
"Chicken dump truck
Dumping thickness
Accuracy of sheep meat
Baking with honey
Bread waved Adeni
Green dish
Applied to meat
Tonh applied
Moza Restaurant
Blindfolded, ordinary
Maasoub Qeshta
Royal Blindfolded
A period of masters
A period of cream
My property
A regular Erika
A luxury sofa
Bubbles Ubelha Qeshta
Its loop is in Comflex
Haini
Tomato meat with hummus
Boycott
Boycotting cheese
Slicing of chickpeas
Normal doubt
Metal suspicion
She is suspicious of cheese
Thank you, Hummus
To feel it
Eggs of an oven
White eyes
Eggs fried
Peas with Tuna
Baza Sada
Popular problem
Tuna beans
White beans
Beans, gentlemen
White peas
Tune with cheese
Tuna is a problem
Taouna
Salat
Fahsah
Friday
Not a problem
After one day
Foul white jar
Foul flip red
Fol on Wushu
Foul with hummus
Foul metal
Fool Industrial
Ful problem
Foul with cheese
Liver sheep with chickpeas
Heep sheep
Liver with cheese
Hbashi Hashi
Liver liver with cheese
Worried
Halklq Hashi
Frying cheese
Stir fried with hummus
Tomato meat
Meat tomatoes with cheese
Tomato meat with hummus"
Neil is so used to be the host #shorts #neilpatrickharris #kaleycuoco - YouTube
Thread by @StephenPunwasi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The West has no clue how far it fell behind. For example, how long does it take to build a train station?
๐จ๐ณ: 9 hours ๐จ๐ฆ: 7 years snd counting, and no sign of a station exists...
How long does it take to sink a train station underground?
In ๐จ๐ฆ or the ๐บ๐ธ? Probably at least a decade. In ๐ฏ๐ต? About 3 hours.
How about that construction site by your home that’s been blowing dust around for years? How long does it actually take to assemble a 10 story tower?
In the West? About 2 years after approvals. In China? A day.
How do they build bridges in your town? Because this is how they’re assembled in Asia.
Those are easy though. What if the government needs a high tech research facility for the military? ๐ฎ๐ณ does those in 45 days.
It’s not because we don’t have smart people. Tiny Mile is Toronto-based, and they build robots that make deliveries cheap & accessible, which will be a game changer for mobility impaired people. Toronto banned it, now they’re in Charlotte & Miami. We hate talent. ๐คท♂️
Plutocracies force people into a handful of cities because it’s lucrative for large landholders to create scarcity when none exists. Countries focused on national growth connect their cities so productivity takes priority.
High speed rail by country.
๐จ๐ฆ: 0km
๐บ๐ธ: 80km
Oh hey. Young adults on TikTok are starting to wonder what the heck is happening in the West. It’ll soon start to settle in that a new park or a couple bike lanes won’t fix this. Neither will stacking people in smaller cubes. What happens then?"
Lesley Honey ❤️๐จ๐ฆ on X - "This one too, of a Dutch highway underpass."
Stephen Punwasi ๐️๐๐☃️ on X - "Netherlands, Ireland, and Germany are doing some really cool stuff when it comes to infrastructure. Also surprised that Spain has one of the most extensive high speed rail networks."
Clearly, Japan and the Netherlands can only do things quickly because they use slave labour and cut corners, and their infrastructure will definitely collapse in the next few years
Meme - "You think you can hurt me I was bullied at fat camp for being fat"
I Lost My Virginity to David Bowie - "Decades before Drake dissed Tyga for dating 17-year-old Kylie Jenner, and R. Kelly faced multiple allegations of having sex with minors, the most visible rock stars in the world blithely made it with girls who were barely out of junior high school. It was all glorified in the pages of a glossy magazine called Star, which reveled in the underage groupie scene for five issues. Other publications, such as the rock ‘n’ roll bible Creem, flicked at the Sunset Strip doings without so much as a wagged finger. Hell, in 1973, a leisure-suited Tom Snyder devoted an entire show to interviews with some of LA’s highly desired teenage groupies. Starting from the age of 15, Lori Mattix ranked among the most desired of these so-called baby groupies who were helping to satisfy the sexual appetites of Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and others. She hung out at the Playboy Mansion and modeled in the pages of Star. In time, she and Sable Starr helped inspire Kate Hudson’s character in the film Almost Famous... He focused his famously two-colored eyes on me and said, “Lori, darling, can you come with me?” Sable looked like she wanted to murder me. He walked me through his bedroom and into the bathroom, where he dropped his kimono. He got into the tub, already filled with water, and asked me to wash him. Of course I did. Then he escorted me into the bedroom, gently took off my clothes, and de-virginized me. Two hours later, I went to check on Sable. She was all fucked up in the living room, walking around, fogging up windows and writing, "I want to fuck David." I told him what she was doing and that I felt so bad. Bowie said, “Well, darling, bring her in.” That night I lost my virginity and had my first threesome... I was an innocent girl, but the way it happened was so beautiful. I remember him looking like God and having me over a table. Who wouldn’t want to lose their virginity to David Bowie?... My older sister was fucking lowriders and surfers; my dad was deceased; I was with rock stars. Besides, I had been the last virgin in my high school. In some ways, I was not different than one of the Kardashians...
THRILLIST: Do you think in retrospect that he might have exploited you?
No. I feel blessed. I feel like I was protected rather than exploited. I feel like I was very present... I didn’t think of myself as underage. I was a model. I was in love. That time of my life was so much fun. It was a period in which everything seemed possible. There was no AIDS and the potential consequences seemed to be light. Nobody was afraid of winding up on YouTube or TMZ. Now people are terrified. You can’t even walk out your door without being photographed. It has become a different world."
Meme - Batman: "Hey, do you mind if I use your bathroom?"
Catwoman: "Sure thing, Batman"
*Batman sees kitty litter*
Catwoman: "Something wrong Batman?"
Batman: "Wait, where is your shower?"
Catwoman: "*mlhap* a what?"
Amy Edmondson: Psychological safety is critically important in medicine - "When Amy Edmondson, then a PhD candidate at Harvard Business School, set out to study the relationship between error making and teamwork in hospitals, she expected to find that higher performing teams made fewer mistakes. What she found instead, she told attendees at Learn Serve Lead 2019: The AAMC Annual Meeting, was the opposite: Better teams — as measured by a team diagnostic survey — reported higher error rates, not lower ones. “That forced me to think: Maybe better teams don’t make more mistakes. Maybe they’re more willing and able to talk about them,” said Edmondson, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Further investigation proved her right: The highest performing teams did, indeed, cultivate an interpersonal climate in which everyone, from the lowest ranking employee to the highest, felt empowered to speak up. She called this climate “psychological safety,” and she has since conducted dozens of studies that show that it is a critical component of successful teams... She cited numerous instances in which the failure to speak up had grave consequences – from the NASA engineer who knew about the defective rocket boosters but was unable to alert higher-ups ahead of the Challenger disaster, to the countless employees at Wells Fargo who were under such pressure to sell the bank’s financial services products that they lied rather than stand up to their supervisors."
Genetic architecture of human thinness compared to severe obesity - "Obesity-associated disorders are amongst the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Most genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have focused on body mass index (BMI = weight in Kg divided by height squared (m2)) and obesity, but to date no genetic association study testing thin and healthy individuals has been performed. In this study, we recruited a first of its kind cohort of 1,471 clinically ascertained thin and healthy individuals and contrasted the genetic architecture of the trait with that of severe early onset obesity. We show that thinness, like obesity, is a heritable trait with a polygenic component. In a GWAS of persistent healthy thinness vs. severe obesity with a total sample size of 2,927, we are able to find evidence of association in loci that have only been recently discovered using large cohorts with >40,000 individuals. We also find a novel BMI-associated locus at PKHD1 in UK Biobank highlighted by our association study. This work illustrates the value and increased power brought upon by using clinically ascertained extremes to study complex traits and provides a valuable resource on which to study resistance to obesity in an increasingly obesogenic environment."
This won't stop the people who claim obesity is 100% inherited and those who claim it's 100% under one's control
Meme - "The "Ship of Theseus" article has been edited 1792 times since it was created in July of 2003. At present, 0% of the phrases in the original article (seen below) remain."
Sarah Osment on X - "today i asked my class to come up with a pair of terms that share a denotative meaning but whose connotative meanings differ and one student offered BUTT DIAL and BOOTY CALL anyway that student's the professor now"
French school asks parents to stop throwing children over the fence when they're late - "Trillade Primary School, in Avignon, has asked parents to stop throwing their kids over the 1.8m-high fence to get them to school."
Meme - "DUDE DIED, BUT THEY MADE HIM GO TO WORK ANYWAY
*Robocop*"
ACLU Speaks Out -- Finally -- Against FBI Raid on James O'Keefe - "The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) spoke out Sunday against an FBI raid on the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe more than a week before, calling it a threat to press freedom and the First Amendment to the Constitution... Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley wrote Nov. 7: “Regardless of how one feels about Project Veritas, there should be calls from media outlets for some answers to these basic questions. Likewise, Congress should be seeking such answers as part of its oversight responsibilities.” But the establishment media were slow to speak out... Critics say the ACLU has become increasingly partisan in recent years, sacrificing core civil liberties principles to a left-wing agenda. In the ongoing Kyle Rittenhouse case, for example, the ACLU amplified claims of “white supremacy” in the Kenosha shootings, without evidence."
From 2021
Meme - Alia the Noticer @Aliathewhite: "The First Thanksgiving. The original Native American's showing White Europeans how to cook *black Native American woman putting roast chicken in the sink and washing it with Dawn soap*"
Meme - "Drinking water from a friend you've known for 10 years *drinking water from bottle with lips not touching it*
Eating the booty of a girl you met 30mins ago *face in middle of a watermelon wedge*"
Ally Brinken on X - "Your fetishes are nothing to be ashamed about. Unless your fetish is being humiliated, then you should be very ashamed you nasty little pervert."
Meme - Women posting their L's online: "Moure Pheen: This a L in itself because we all know y'all never season the food right or better. *white woman cooking*"
"The reason you believe this is because the only time whites ever cook for you is in public school and prison."
Meme - "ON HODGE-RIEMANN COHOMOLOGY CLASSES
JULIUS ROSS AND MATEI TOMA
ABSTRACT. We prove that Schur classes of nef vector bundles are limits of classes that have a property analogous to the Hodge-Riemann bilinear relations. We give a number
of applications, including (1) new log-concavity statements about characteristic classes of
nef vector bundles (2) log-concavity statements about Schur and related polynomials (3)
another proof that normalized Schur polynomials are Lorentzian.
Since the dawn of time, human beings have asked some fundamental questions: who
are we? why are we here? is there life after death? Unable to answer any of these, in this
paper we will consider cohomology classes on a compact projective manifold that have a
property analogous to the Hard-Lefschetz Theorem and Hodge-Riemann bilinear relations."
Shandong University’s “Buddy Program” Controversy is a Vivid Example of Why Uncalled for Altruism Backfires - "The Chinese Internet has been boiling recently with droves of users eager to weigh in on the latest goings-on at Shandong University. What might sound like a lousy remake of Gossip Girl is a totally true story in which a provincial Chinese university was accused of sweetening up foreign students by providing each of them with several “study buddies” of the opposite sex. Shady right? But taking into account all the flabbergasted comments from the representatives and students of the university alike, it appears that this is just another case of excessive benevolence gone wrong... A notice issued by the school in 2018 made its way to Weibo, where it went viral. It stated that thanks to the “Buddy program” 141 Chinese students were successfully paired with 47 foreign students, mostly of the opposite sex. As it was found later, the registration form for the program stated explicitly that the buddies should be of opposite genders in a sentence that reads like an amateur Tinder bio – “make foreign friends of the opposite sex”. Ironically, the majority of foreign students in the program happened to be male, with most of their Chinese counterparts being female... Most Chinese, however, found the situation insulting, demanding that foreigners be treated equal to everyone else. Apart from the buddy program, Chinese universities provide scholarships and roomy accommodations to attract overseas students, while these luxuries are often not available for locals. Representatives of a more extreme crowd used it as an opportunity to throw in a couple of racist slurs mainly targeting African students. Some rowdy foreigners did not shy away from making foul shots either, including buddy program participants themselves, as a screenshot circulating online suggests."
Meme - "But without actually having eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we could not have known it was "wrong" to disobey you.
THE FIRST LAWYER"
