Yeah, they are a lot cheaper than I expected. I appreciate the push and I’m very tempted, but my final excuse is just that I’m hella ADHD. I’ve got a long history of picking things up only to quickly put them back down and I’ve grown to be very careful when I think of getting into anything new. It’s why I’ve mostly played small instruments, they’re cheap and easier to store. I gotta think about it and talk to some people.

Thanks for the tips! I never heard of a trumpet mute. Unfortunately I’ll have to work on getting another trumpet as well as a basement before I try your suggestions. I’ll still save your comment, maybe one day I could try again.

I hadn’t considered it that way, but it’s probably the same for me. The vast majority of my coding knowledge and experience comes from modding and writing web extensions.

I can relate. I pretty much only set short term goals. I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with not having long term goals. It is frustrating to feel as though I don’t really have the option to though.

As far as the learning to program thing, I’ve had the same goal before and I only ever made progress on it when I was medicated. If you’re not already, it’s an option to consider.

I learned in this order: clarinet, trumpet, piano, penny whistle, kalimba, guitar, and harmonica. I don’t actually play most anymore, the joy of music to me is in performance and I was never good or passionate enough about instruments to perform with them.

My favorite always was the trumpet. I love the sound and the feel of it. It’s just got a punch and energy that I haven’t gotten from other instruments. I haven’t played since I was a teen though because it’s just too loud for me to be able to practice without bothering people.

I think western design is a result of aiming for the most realistic look possible. It limits the amount of artistic expression and results in less immediately attractive characters.

Eastern design is like 60% realistic 40% anime and that gives them enough room to create doll like characters that have exaggerated or unrealistic features that people naturally find attractive.

Most days, drugs of some kind. I go for walks every Sunday with my camera though and take photos and spend the week editing them too. I also try to take short trips too. It’s pretty cheap if you sleep in your car and just explore the town looking for photos to take.

Things are looking really bad, but I try not to let it hold me back. I’ve already spent a good chunk of my life paralyzed by anxiety, so I’ve learned to push past it.

I’m not a huge metal head, but “Trapped Under Ice” by Metallica is probably my favorite. I’d strongly recommend the entire Ride the Lightning album though. Pretty much every song is great.

AI in fiction is a boring concept to me. It’s presented either as “What is a person?” or “What if we create an evil god?”. To me anything with feelings is a person and the other is just a chrome paint job on evil god characters in non sci-fi genres, so it’s just a speculative dead end.

AI in real life is much more interesting and its proliferation makes fictional AI seem even more bland. Real life AI is first and foremost not intelligent and probably not even close, that said we have no rubric to grade it by because we don’t even really know what intelligence is yet. That said, machine learning algorithms highlight patterns in the world and in our behaviors that are fascinating just because they show just how complicated the world and people are in ways our brains just passively process. Kind of like how QWOP highlights just how difficult and complicated walking is.

I primarily write in cursive.

I remember reading a long time ago about a study where a group of artists were individually taken on a ride in a car and then asked to draw a specific thing after they finished the drive. The experimental group was taken along a route that secretly had images planted on the side of the road related to what they would eventually be asked to draw. They found that while those artists didn’t remember seeing the images, what they drew was clearly influenced by them.

I feel this could be a similar phenomenon. Maybe they’d heard the name Thalia in the past and kinda absorbed it without recognizing it as a normal name because they didn’t know anyone with that name.

I’m a very anxious person and I kinda liked the Taco Bell AI drive thru thing specifically because it was way less pressure even if it was annoying. There’s plenty of other stuff I simply won’t buy because I don’t want it enough to overcome my anxiety.

If the chatbots are reliable, I’d much prefer them in most shopping scenarios. So this makes sense to me.

Gundam handles death really well in my opinion. Specifically the original series, Thunderbolt and Iron-Blooded Orphans.

What could possibly spook The Heritage Foundation of all groups to make this tiny leftward shift just a few years after their big evil strategy was released? They’re still an evil organization, but they’re that last group I’d expect to say the government needs to spend more money on more people.

I haven’t tried any, but it seems like an inevitable endpoint. I’ve long held a rule that I can’t meet a cow in person because they look so cute on the internet and if I met one, I fear I’d have no choice but to go vegan.

I feel like the ethics of meat consumption is inarguably bad, but it’s a fundamental part of my diet and meat is some of my favorite stuff to eat. If I could eat meat like stuff that’s indistinguishable from the real stuff, that would be ideal.

Yeah I didn’t mean to imply they’re all exclusive to where I live, but the opossum anecdote is actually from a person I met from Ohio funny enough.

I’d wanna be a parrot. It’s an easy fit for a kids show. They can fly and they live for like 80 years which is probably better than I’ll do as a human. Sounds perfect to me.

I live in the US northeast coast in a touristy area. People have been surprised to see: white beach sand, seashells, docks, boats, seagulls, deer, opossums. I could go on. I get most people don’t live coastal, so none of these reactions surprised me except the white sand one. Apparently a lot of lakes in the mainland just have dirt at their shores. Never would’ve guessed.

I started wearing glasses at 17. I technically didn’t need to wear them all the time, but I just did because it was immediately much more comfortable on my eyes. I have a bent nose from a break and I got a little irritation from it, but the relief on my eyes was easily worth it.

My eyes aren’t super bad, I can actually be okay without them for most of the day. Neither eye is super bad, but I have a high astigmatism factor or whatever they call it. That makes my depth perception really funky and I can’t read anything at a distance.

I can’t really remember what difficulty I had at first besides the my nose hurting and getting used to the frames being in view. It definitely never made me nauseous though. You should probably talk to your eye dr about that.

I generally cook at home and maybe 1-3 times a week I go out to eat or pick up food. I’m anosmic (no sense of smell, very limited sense of taste), so I struggle to cook whole meals for myself and pretty much can’t cook anything other people can eat. That means what I “cook” at home is almost exclusively simple food like sandwiches, pasta, and frozen/premade stuff. I never get delivery, but I live in an area where I’m a 10-20 mins drive away from like 100 places selling all kinds of food.