And OP is yet another account that was created incredibly recently just to post a handful of comics.
It started happening with the new year. Tons of account getting created, in various instances, and posting comics to a variety of different communities.
Idk maybe it’s someone trying to boost Lemmy’s rate for content and just drive the growth of the platform, but something about it just doesn’t smell right.
I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit
That is not the goal of keto at all. People can choose to add calorie counting, but that’s an additional step. Calories are a unit of thermal energy. It’s how much energy is released when the food is burned (more technically, oxidized). The most basic way to measure this is to burn it in a way that directs the thermal energy to a container of water, where it’s then pretty straightforward to measure the temperature change and do the math.
As a vague heuristic to measure the energy in food this is… Sometimes useful, sometimes not. What your body actually does is break down carbs into glucose, and things like protein, fat, and alcohol to ketones. Those eventually get broken down further into Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is the basic fuel source your cells mostly use to do things. This is not the same as an oxidation reaction.
More importantly though, when you reduce caloric intake you risk some negative outcomes, which is where we start to mix between physiological and psychological. A lot is based on genetics: if you are lucky enough to have the right genes, you can reduce caloric input or increase caloric output and see weight loss results. Unfortunately, a lot of people like myself don’t have such genes. Instead, when we reduce calories are bodies starts to use processed designed to survive famines- slowing the metabolism, reducing the amount of energy expended, storing as much energy as possible (as fat). If you stick to it long enough, you will lose weight eventually. The problem is that your body makes it harder to stick to it.
Hunger is one of the most basic, primal driving factors baked into the relationship between our body and mind. Caloric restriction can make people hungrier. It causes a lot of diets to fail. It also makes it hard to keep the weight off.
What keto does is gets your body used to treating fat as a source of energy to be used rather than stored for later. So I don’t have to count my calories, I just make sure that what I’m eating has relatively few carbs. Personally, I prefer protein-heavy foods over fat-heavy, although some keto people would argue that doesn’t count as strictly “keto” anymore. It’s not because I’m a gymbro who needs protein, but because protein makes me feel full and satisfied. I don’t have to count calories. I don’t have to be hungry. I don’t have to keep track of every little thing that I eat and think about whether I can afford to have a drink at the end of the night. Compared to caloric restriction (weight watchers), the minute-to-minute decisions are way easier and the day-to-day decisions go away.
It’s not for everyone of course. The academic research, like with every other diet, is mixed. When you get off keto you’ll probably gain some weight back. I’m sure there are some medical conditions that it makes worse. My wife happens to have a lot of issues that are improved by keto (epilepsy and PCOS. Kidney stones too, though the research on that is more mixed).
Started with guitar 21 years ago. Don’t remember the exact timelines, but I picked up bass and piano within a couple years. Then drums and singing. Dabbled in mandolin, banjo, cello. Most stringed instruments, especially those in western music, are pretty similar so they’re pretty easy to switch between. I even dabbled in clarinet because my older sister left it with my parents when she moved out, but I never put that much time into it.
My talents in each have waxed and wanted over the years. Guitar was always my primary preference.
The problem is that everyone and their mother can play guitar. It makes sense- tons of households have guitars lying around. Acoustics are a really cheap and easy entry point- any college student can pick one up and learn a few chords and start trying get attention. It fits in your dorm or in the car you’re halfway living out of. There’s also plenty of cheap box kits of really low-quality electric guitars + small practice amps that are affordable for parents, with the added benefit of making kids use headphones so you don’t disturb the neighbors. Drum kits, by contrast, are expensive, big, difficult to move around (band practice pretty much always has to be at the drummer’s place), and loud. So drummers are usually hard to find.
So I spent time in bands as a bassist and keyboardist. Two separate times I had wealthier friends who played guitar and had younger brothers whose parents purchased a drum kit, but those brothers never learned to play, so I ended up behind the kit even though I couldn’t really practice on my own time. For a while I was the basisst in a band where the left-handed drummer didn’t have room in his house, but there was room in my basement so I ended up messing around and learning to drum left-handed a bit too. I’ve been the lead guitarist, but only rarely outside of my solo stuff.
Bass is very similar to guitar. Different style, and I do think it’s important to change your approach and technique (I don’t use picks on bass), but a lot still translates. With keyboard I was never classically trained or anything- I mostly just learned guitar, bass, and vocals parts on keyboard. I put a lot of time into programming software synths. Often I would just match what those instruments were playing with a different texture, or just play chords underneath. As a keyboardist I would also be in charge of like, punctuation and sound effects. The kind of little extra things you don’t notice on an album and often gets cut out of live shows.
I think I’ve been a decent singer. I initially took lessons with the intention of just being a background vocalist and maybe doing some acoustic open mic nights. I joined the choir in college and got selected as the best Bass to represent the school at an event one year. I kind of accidentally ended up as the lead singer of a few bands just by being the best singer in the band. Never just the lead singer though - always play drums or bass or guitar too. Singing is a lot of work- I needed to stay in shape, watch what I ate and drank (especially on the nights of practice or performance). It’s easy to identify mistakes as you’re playing an instrument, but for singing I would have to record myself and listen back to it a ton. I learned from my choir director all the little details to listen for- pitch drift, sloppy pronunciation, breathing issues, etc. And Satan forbid I catch a cold before a show. Right now I’m out of practice, so while I could totally rock out a karaoke night at a bar I would need a couple of months notice before playing a real show.
Another case of extroverts treating introversion as a mental illness
This is not a problem unique to keto. Plenty of diets have enough loopholes for you to technically follow them while being incredibly unhealthy. There’s a reason the term “junk food vegan” exists.
“Keto” itself has a ton of different forms, but the main goal is to move away from processing food into glucose and towards processing food into ketones. That effectively means cutting carbohydrates. A lot of these pretty much everyone agrees are bad for you: sugar, corn syrup, starches. That isn’t unique to keto. What is unique is cutting out other carbs. Fruits, and some vegetables (I’m using casual categories here), have been bred over thousands of years to have a ton of sugar in them. Grains like wheat, oats, and rice are probably the most significant and weird things that keto cuts: these have been efficient sources of calories for humans for thousands of years, the foundations of civilization, yet are not compatible with ketosis.
In order to maintain the same caloric intake, that means increasing fat and protein (technically alcohol too lol). If you increase saturated fats (dairy, red meat, coconut and palm oils) that’s unhealthy. The healthy way to do it is to go for unsaturated fats: fish, poultry, seeds, nuts, most other vegetable oils. It also happens that red meats are the ones that are significantly worse for the environment and economy. Seafood and poultry certainly have their own environmental impacts of course, and are more expensive per calorie than grains. If you can stand to get away from Western cuisine, there are plenty of insect options that are great sources of protein (shrimps is bugs after all). But articles like this (I can’t confirm because it’s behind a paywall) almost always project out the worst-case scenario that all of this increased protein intake is coming from beef, the worst source. Beef and pork should absolutely be reduced to luxury items people eat on rare occasions, or perhaps not at all. Fish and poultry can definitely be part of a sustainable future: there are a lot of conditions like epilepsy that BENEFIT from getting more protein from animal sources.
That’s all just talking about macronutrients. The other components are micronutrients and fiber. Leafy green low-carb veggies like lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts. Dietary fiber is listed under carbohydrates on US Nutrition Facts but does not count towards the “Net Carbs” that someone on keto should be looking at. Mushrooms are good too.
Someone can eat nothing but Oreos and still be vegan, and someone can eat nothing but beef jerky and cheese and still be keto.
It’s also worth pointing out that the sugar industry spent decades and billions of dollars convincing Americans that fats were much worse than they actually are, which led to its own terrible consequences. There are healthy amounts of fat that a lot of boomers are still terrified of.
These food guidelines have always been more about economics than health anyways. It changes with the political influence of the various agricultural industries in America.
He co-founded Palantir with Alex Karp (and others). This article is about Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. Peter Thiel is a chairman of Palantir’s board, not CEO.
How is Alex Karp connected to South Africa?
He had a reasonable voting record up until the stroke. He did well as Lt. Governor of PA although that office doesn’t do a ton. He did well as mayor of Braddock before that.
His own wife was an undocumented immigrant and now he’s supporting ICE. It’s wild what brain damage can do.
The Dems had control for a few months in 2011, and that was when they passed the ACA. That was the only point in my lifetime they controlled the government.
The last time before that was 1961-1969. Which included such legislation as the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, though in sure you can find plenty more that was passed.
Not to mention that the Dems have absolutely been discussing progressive legislation. It’s failed to pass, passed and then been vetoed, or even at times been passed and then struck down by conservative courts.
It was suspicious how many accounts claiming to be left-leaning all of a sudden in like, July 2024 decided to suddenly buy the lies the GOP had been selling for years that Biden was old and senile just because he has a stutter.
The DNC does need to have better primaries though. Which means people PARTICIPATING in them. But also not allowing people like Bloomberg to buy their way in. To actually HOLD primaries like they didn’t for Biden’s incumbent campaign.
Had to scroll way too far down to find someone asking this question.
I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a Democrat politician saying something like this, but let’s name and shame. There’s also a lot of Democrats calling for ICE to be defunded. Plenty of right-wing rags are dragging on AOC and Ilhan Omar for “promoting lawlessness” by calling for ICE to be defunded and reformed. Here’s an article describing what the Dems are doing to try to do to stop further funding to the DHS. Articles of impeachment have already been introduced against Kristi Noem.
The real problem was that in 2024, 1/3rd of the country voted FOR this shit and is loving it, and another 1/3rd of the country stayed home either because they didn’t care or just didn’t think Harris was a good enough candidate to be worth voting against fascism. So here we are.
They make some good points about how we view “classic” games too.
A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like “look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they’re almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!”.
Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I’ve tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.
On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being “revolutionary for their time” often don’t hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it’s possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.
When I look back at what I’ve played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don’t think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say “wow that’s a Control-like” game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that’s the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.
Most bad games aren’t really a terrible experience. Usually, it takes a few minutes, maybe an hour max, to realize “wow this game is bad and not worth putting any more time into”.
I think the worst games are the ones that can suck you in with the promise of being good. For me, that was Catherine.
The game has 3 main phases. The main “gameplay” is 3D block pushing puzzles that are presented as dream sequences for the main character. They start off simple, but add mechanics and complexity as you would expect from any good puzzle game. Then there is the time you spend with the main character awake hanging out at a bar, talking to other characters as a social sim game. The characters seem varies and like they could be interesting. Finally, there are animated cutscenes that are pretty good looking that show what your main character does throughout the day, between waking up and ending up at the bar every evening.
The biggest problem is the writing. The main character starts off as a pretty shitty, selfish asshole. At first I played hoping to see him learn and grow as a character. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen I instead started to hope that he at least suffered some consequences for his actions. But… No, he doesn’t. He just stays an asshole the whole time. None of the other characters really go anywhere either. And while the gameplay started off good, it quickly burns through all of the block pushing mechanics they thought of and turns into a repetitive slog. It really felt like they only made the first 1/3rd of a complete game and decided to just copy and paste that to pad out time instead of actually finishing the game.
OP’s account was created 4 days ago and has only posted comics that clearly have controversies baked in tk make people mad and generate a lot of comments.
I’ve noticed a huge influx of accounts exactly like this in the past couple weeks. I don’t know who it is or why but it’s weird.
I hereby grant you the title of “Gaytekeeper”
Oh look another account a few hours old spamming a bunch of comics, usually with controversial inaccuracies or divisiveness.
There’s been a huge influx of these accounts lately. Add this one to the pile.
IUD’s can be great too. My wife has used them for years. Reduced period frequency and severity, higher effective rate of contraception, no need to worry about taking a pill late or missing one. Her gynecologist said it will probably reduce pre-menopausal symptoms too when she gets older. And it’s pretty easily removable.
There was a couple of weeks when she was sore from the initial placement, and the same whenever it gets changed. They keep on getting approved to last longer and longer- the most recent one was good for 8 years, but there’s a good chance it will get extended before it needs to be replaced as more research is done.
Not for everyone, but great for a lot of people.
Debut album from EX EYE, the instrumental, post-everything quartet led by renowned saxophonist Colin Stetson and featuring the otherworldly drumming of Greg Fox. EX EYE seamlessly weave between precise, clockwork intricacy and aggressive, ecstatic abandon while taking the listener on a cathartic, thrilling journey to total transcendence.
I love self-checkout.
In college I worked at a big department store in the front-end, and eventually became a manager. I trained people on how to use the cash register, and it was the one thing that pretty much everyone with a pulse was expected to do. And it was the easiest thing to train. Why is this?
There have been decades upon decades of software design involved. I have a ton of criticisms of capitalism for how it often over-optimizes things or optimizes for the wrong things, but POS software is something that (at least in my time there) was mostly free of the bloat and nonsense that management usually tries to cram everywhere. In every programming course I have ever taken, one of the first examples taught is sone sort of basic POS interface for something (usually a pizza shop). It’s universal and one of the most translatable skills- the POS system I used at my uncle’s pizza shop was very similar to the one I used working at a bowling alley, and also similar to the one I used at the department store. Which is also similar to the software used at every store with self-checkout I’ve ever been to.
The worst parts of cashiering for me was the human interaction. Touching the toy that someone’s snotty child has had in their mouth throughout the whole shopping trip. Getting hit on by people I wasn’t interested in. People in a bad mood looking for someone to take it out on. As a customer, I always hated dealing with slow cashiers, or the rare cashier who didn’t know what they were doing, or the cashier that was super chatty and bubbly. My goal, on both sides, was always to minimize the time spent facilitating the transaction so we could all get on with our lives.
From a management perspective, we had 14 lanes but usually only 2 or 3 open at once on a weekday. If there was a sudden rush we would call up more employees from elsewhere. Weekends we would have more staff, maybe 6-8 cashiers for most weekends. On Thanksgiving weekend we would usually have to have about 16-18 people on the schedule- enough to cover breaks, help to restock receipt paper, coverage for people calling off, etc.
All of these problems are solved by self-checkout. I do see the problem where this is costing jobs. It’s often helpful to have humans around who can answer questions or deal with problems. Most stores I’ve been to lately have a combination- a section of self-checkout lanes with somewhere around 4-12 lanes overseen by 1 employee, plus some number of lanes with cashiers.
In theory this should lead to cost savings which should be passed on to the consumer. More efficiency means increased productivity, so we all need to be working less, right? The problem is capitalism- the people with power take these efficiency gains as profits for themselves instead of sharing them with society. There have been plenty of studies showing things like how we work more hours on average than a medieval peasant, or showing that if labor hours went down from productivity gains we would be working ~11 hours per week.
Receipt checking is a separate thing. Costco has 2 employees check me out: one to unload and re-lpad the cart, one scanning things go the register. And a 3rd person at the door checks my receipt, even though I didn’t do any self-checkout at all.
Part of the pain is transition. We still have 80 year old people trying to write checks, or who never moved on from the days when you had to manually swipe the credit card imprinter. In a couple decades these people will be gone and will be replaced by Gen Alpha adults who think I’m weird for carrying a piece of plastic on me instead of having a smartwatch with my accounts tied to it that just automatically pays.