I didn’t realize people had been shot for not using literally figuratively. Plus one could argue that people waving the Confederate flag 150 years later means the war wasn’t fully finished, but I’m not here to debate politics.

I don’t understand why you compare “literally” to “really”. They’re two different words that are used differently. I really don’t have any problem with using really as an intensifier because it aligns just fine with using it to indicate fact. “It’s really hot outside” -> “The heat outside is real.” “He’s really the murderer” -> “His being the murderer is real.”

But using literally in your example adds absolutely nothing to the sentence. “It’s literally as hot as the sun out here” and “It’s as hot as the sun out here” convey the exact same meaning, except one has an extra word that degrades other uses of it. If your sentence could replace the word “literally” with the word “figuratively” and you would intend the same meaning, you should either use “figuratively” or nothing there at all. That way when the word literally is used there can be no doubt that you mean “in the literal sense.”

How can it literally be settled if people are still arguing about it? Unless you mean figuratively? Good to know people two and a half centuries ago could write poorly.

Because both meanings are opposites, literally is a more specialized form of homonym called a contronym. Unlike a contronym such as clip where it’s to tell whether the speaker is talking about clipping things together or clipping stuff off of something based on their use in a sentence, literally and figuratively fit into any sentence the same way. In any case where the speaker’s words could be interpreted ambiguously to be literal or figurative and they add literally to clarify they can’t because someone could mistake their literal literally meaning to be a figurative one.

That means the literal use of literally is functionally lost, and for what? So folks have another way to exaggerate? I don’t care if a language evolves, but if it’s going to I think it should evolve in such a way that expressing certain ideas isn’t lost, especially if there isn’t anything real to be gained. I literally don’t understand why people are so gun-ho to defend using literally figuratively.

Weezer - Pork and Beans

When it first came out it was a distillation of a bunch of cool stuff on this Youtube thing. Now it’s a time capsule of nostalgia for a time when creativity ruled. Plus it’s one of my favorite Weezer songs.

I’m pretty sure Luke gives an insincere “hi” to R2D2 because he’d rather be running down to Tosche Station instead of doing farm work.

He doesn’t blink when R2 gets shot during the trench run, but his face always conveyed to me that he’s scared shitless to now be alone with fighters on his trail while focusing on pushing through that fear because now he is the last hope for the galaxy.

Before attacking the Death Star, doesn’t Luke tell the technicians take good care of R2D2? “That little droid and I have been through a lot together”, or something like that? Are those the words of someone who doesn’t care?

I only got through the first quarter of book one, is there a lot of dark humor?

It took me a while to figure out. I had a bad habit of scrolling r/popular for (effectively) infinite content, and I tried trimming it down to just stuff I liked by muting communities until one day it started giving me a simple error when I’d try to mute something. I searched around after a while and that’s when i found out about the limit. Reddit itself says nothing about the limit existing anywhere.

You can’t block any community you don’t like on reddit because there’s a limit on the number you can mute. I know this because I hit that limit before I deleted my account.

I’ve been waiting till midterm elections since at least January to start making predictions.

The people who say the brain stops developing are wrong and I used to be one of them. The study that belief is based on didn’t look at anyone older than that, so the real conclusion is that the brain is still developing at 25 and data has not been gathered on older people.

As far as I can tell people are still capable of learning into old age, so the brain is likely still capable of development.

It was middle school when I realized “you can only be cool if you’re not trying to be cool,” which I then said in an effort to sound cool. By high school that had sunk in better and I accidentally ended up popular, I think. That was when I first started looking past what people do to try looking cool.

In college I got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death while listening to Dark Side of the Moon with blindfolds and peaking, and found that the deeper level of existence was that there isn’t one. Most things in life can be as simple or as complex as you want, and I had been trying to make it more complex than it is.

But the thing I keep finding is that for as simple as most things actually are, people are consistently more complex than their surface suggests.

A week ago my cousin was in town and I had a one on one conversation with him for the first time in our adult lives that started with him showing me his relatively popular Instagram photos from the past couple years of him running the rave circuit. But as we got to talking about it, he revealed that he didn’t give a shit about his popularity, his ex-boyfriend was the socials guy who wanted the clout of being with a hot rave guy. He had become disillusioned with pretty much his whole life, but you wouldn’t get that just looking at his socials. And for as shallow as his ex is, if you peeled back the layers of bullshit he’s built around his life, there’s probably some interesting thoughts in there.

I guess I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with all this. When I make an effort to understand, most people I meet drop the facades and spill their guts pretty quick to me. I might be uniquely weird for that ability, but I don’t know that it’s narcissism on their part so much as trying to be cool and grappling with never succeeding because of that trying.

It would be interesting if you took a photo of something, drew that image from memory, then overlaid your drawing on the photo.

It might be normal but it shouldn’t be normalized.

About as much as is left over after the pasteurization and filtration the milk I drink goes through I guess. Is there a safe threshold that all commercial milk rests above?

The wikipedia page doesn’t go super in depth, but it seems like somatic cell count is just a measurement of how much infectious schmutz is in milk? Why is this concerning?

You know how much your truck jostles around better than me, but there are crockpots with rubber sealed lids and locks to keep it shut that might be good!

I’ve only minored in philosophy, but last weekend I watched Waiting for Godot for the first time with my mother and as soon as the intermission came she turned and asked, “Jaycifer you’ve studied philosophy, what insights do you have so far?” I definitely feel that it carries an expectation that I think deeply about everything.

What kind of assumptions do you deal with? Do you mind if I ask what area you focused on?

Maybe it doesn’t come through in text, but that Liechtenstein question gives me zero impression that they’re trying to show off. It just seems like how someone would ask if they think they might know something but aren’t sure. What am I missing here?

“Alright guys, I’m capturing the objective from the enemy!” Enters monotone robotic voice: “All your base are belong to us.”

Pulls out guitar and starts strumming “See ya later, raider. Back down there in Speranza. Gonna share your mom’s lasagna.”