Peter Funke? The famous anal-rapist?

I experienced it pretty profoundly when taking a plant systematics and identification course. I had always loved plants as a gardener, so the added knowledge of general plant anatomy lit a fire in my brain.

Now when I would learn a new plant, I would notice it everywhere, even out of the corner of my eye while driving at speed on a highway.

I’m still a slut for the thrill of learning a new plant.

This one works if you are an inbox-zero sort of person. Write a script to send yourself an email daily. Have another utility look for your reply. If you go too long without replying, have it trigger whatever other emails/actions you would like to happen.

My boyfriend said I needed to be more affectionate.

So now I have TWO boyfriends!

Being both already I would tell said genie to take a hike.

I’m going to say yes to both versions of your question. Infinity is still infinitely bigger than any expressible finite number. Plenty of room for local anomalies like long repeats and other apparent patterns.

I’m in love with Stanford Beer and his saying “The purpose of a system is what it does”.

So yes, if most of us are depressed and anxious then that is what the system is for.

Here’s how I think about it lately.

Just because society is falling apart, that doesn’t mean my social life needs to suck.

Nothing ever ends really, not until the last hominid gasps her last breath (and even then evolution may try again with other uplift eligible species).

Someone is going to live through this great upheaval. I predict it will be those who can build and keep good real-life networks of family, friends and general acquaintances.

Let it all burn down. I will sit by the fire with those in whom I see the image of the beloved.

12 Monkeys with Bruce Willis. Not exactly amnesia but extreme confusion and lack of emotional control. Some of that was due to time travel and some due to the extreme emotional trauma his character experienced.

A stack of Freshmen magazines with the address labels torn off, along with one woodworking magazine. People love discovering old porn. It’s like a gift to the future.

Ooh, since this is a safe space for dorks, I would like to be pedantic myself. Thank you for the opportunity. The oxygen catastrophe was caused by cyanobacteria-like organisms, which are photosynthetic, but are not plants. But it’s true, all bio-mass matters!

The Azolla Event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event. I mean it is cool and the major climate shift it helped create certainly caused some extinctions. But plants can change the world, never forget!

I meditate as part of a dedicated yoga practice. When I am doing a group practice, i arrive early and perform a physical warm up and then spend ten minutes in a seated meditation before the class begins. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my workout to get my mind firmly rooted in the immediate experience.

They need a fifth man. Let me check my calendar…

You sound like you mean well, but this is not helpful advice. You are essentially telling someone who is obviously a conscientious person and struggling that they have a character flaw.

Move over bacon. Now there’s something meatier!

You are correct. People these days are idjits.

‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.

That’s exactly right, you have to know enough about the subject to smell a bullshit answer.

It’s great as a mental prosthetic. When I am tackling a new complex topic like say a new cloud platform I’m learning, i can test my understanding of the implications of a change to the console settings. I tell it what i think and ask it to check my understanding. Really speeds up my learning, but I don’t rely on it exclusively. I will write my own dang emails, thank you.