Note that boring is a very subjective assessment but yes, interest is key.

Here in Germany, traditional names for pubs are often either animals (stork, eagle, bear, lion, trout, deer, etc.) or the original owner’s name.

Not nearly as colorful as some of the other examples here but I’m not aware if there might be regional differences. My region might just be particularly boring in this regard.

Here we see conservative politicians hard at work solving imaginary problems.

Meanwhile the planet is burning and oligarchs are siphoning off our remaining wealth, destroying the very foundations of our society. But we can’t let people have nice things!

Killing half of the world’s other species on our way out?

Everyone.

Only in shithole countries.

Yep, that’s another great question. Personally, I like the idea that art is any form of human expression that exists for its own sake. Not in order to be instructive or useful or to make money but simply because the person creating it felt like it (obviously this is an ideal and real life motivations vary).

More pragmatically, one might ask what art is good for, but since you didn’t, I’m not going to ramble here.

That said, there is the question I raised in my comment whether the work needs an audience, someone to behold it, in order to fully become art. I believe it does. If you paint a picture in the dark and hide it so nobody ever sees it, I struggle to accept it as art.

What’s your take on these questions?

In a good game they do, but those effects can be abstracted rather than simulated to save processing power.

This is the correct answer. It seems like matter and energy exist regardless of our attentions but the rest comes down to ontology. What is a thing? How does it come into being? How does it cease to be?

Next, ask yourself “do things need to be made of matter and/or energy to exist?” What about Mickey Mouse?

Then you move on to questions like “does a piece of art exist if nobody has ever witnessed it?”

And finally, the psychiatric ward. 😜

Yeah it’s been a few years since I played it but I can’t remember having to do that.

Nice. When I played it on VR for a bit it seemed like it might be a very enjoyable game even without that gimmick.

1. No.
2. Are saxophones better for music than pianos?

Fuck me, that was depressing. 😭

Charlie and the Fucking Chocolate Factory has a certain ring to it.

Or Fucking Neverending Story (can’t we all just empathize with that? 😅).

This makes me wonder what everyone’s mental image of a worm farmer looks like.

My intuitive association was Steve Urkel (I mean, the suspenders!) but a Google search suggests a more hirsute look for the average vermiculturist.

No, my solution would be to vacate the area post haste. I was just referring to meco03211’s posting in which he wrote

If you took the explosive out of a grenade, put it in a metal pot with the lid welded on, and detonated, you’d just have a mangled pot.

Given your theory that the type of explosive used makes all the difference, I would definitely watch a Mythbusters episode about that (if there was one). 😉

With sufficient reading comprehension you (and the five people upvoting your posting) would have noticed that nobody is claiming a grenade in a pot would be harmless. The claim was about removing the explosive from the grenade and detonating that inside the pot.

While I have no evidence to support that claim I have seen someone putting live ammunition in a pot and making it cook off. That experiment clearly showed that cartridges are only really dangerous when used in a firearm. I expect the physics to be very much the same here.

Me, too, and I find it offputting when someone else does it. 😄

No but you have bigger problems than the two you mentioned. There is so much injustice baked into the system that you will never get rid of it without some kind of revolution.

Maybe a velvet revolution is possible but I firmly believe it is impossible to fix the U.S. through gradual change.