Can you still buy a star? Obviously dubious that you actually own it. But certainly bigger than anything on earth and a bit tricky to deliver.

He was TOO good at the satire. On the left dum-dums thought he was actually right, while on the right dum-dums thought he was on their side.

Also, I think people are hitting their limit of joking about the collapse of democracy and civil society. I know I am. I know there are now movies, TV, and books that I might have found interesting in less interesting times; now it all just hits too close to home. John Oliver can hit those “too close to home” topics and move on to other things. But it always felt like when Colbert was doing his conservative pundit schtick, he was trapped in it. It was harder to laugh along with him about other things that weren’t specifically about that kind of satire. He might have had some more material of a particular idiom if he’d stuck with it, but that idiom can wear thin.

Aggressive is modifying “virtue signaling”. I guess I could have been more clear by adding an “ly” to make it clear that aggressive was an adverb.

But, honestly in my experience there is ALWAYS someone finding some new way to understand your comment so that they have something to argue with. I was both making a joke AND making a point. Complicated, I know.

And it is something to criticize: OP asked about “X”, commenter replied about NOT “X”.

I downvoted your comment because it’s doesn’t really add anything to the conversation, it’s just aggressive virtue signalling.

Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.

You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.

It’s amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren’t really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.

Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read. A detective (wait was this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, maybe? I don’t remember, anyway) is looking for a person and asking around. I stead of carrying around a picture of the person they are looking for, they compare the person’s features to a list of celebrities and just go around asking if anyone has seen someone that looks like that celebrity. Point being lots of people have surprisingly similar features and there really are “doppelgangers” out there.

But just try explaining that to some stranger that just caught you staring off into space directly at their face because they look like a person you had a crush on in college, only you’re an old fart now and they don’t look like that old crush would look now, but like the memory you have of them. “You look like someone I know” always sounds like a pickup line.

Focusing at a point behind the image is exactly what we’ve always done for every other magic eye poster because it only requires relaxing your eyes (staring off into the distance) for the image to pop into focus. Cross eyed viewing is damn near impossible on any screen at less than an arm’s length away without significant eye strain or external devices (like the stereoscopic viewers that photogrammetrists would use to view these kinds of images without inducing a migraine) and since the dot is on top holding a finger up as a guide ends up obstructing the entire view unless your arms are growing out of your forehead. The wall eyed view has none of these issues.

I appreciate the post and your effort. But, the images themselves are frustrating and have killed my initial reaction, which was to share them further. Because I’m nearly the only person I know that wouldn’t loose interest in the explanation for “correct viewing” half way through. If they were wall eyed stereoscopic images, I could just say “Magic Eye”, they’d remember Mallrats, see the schooner, and go “Ooh neat.”

We killed our trajectory because the cold war ended and we were no longer engaged in an arms race involving rockets. Once capitalism figures out how to exploit space for infinite growth we’ll get back on track assuming we don’t great filter ourselves first.

I just assumed that this was near where they joined a photo from the top of a set of stairs with a photo from the bottom of a set of stairs.

Legitimate reason? Really?

That was the one thing that removed my ability to even try to suspend any disbelief in the fantasy. Like I couldn’t even think of him as more than a one-dimensional caricature, let alone empathize with him. I was okay with Thanos just being some powerful guy seeking powerful objects to become more powerful. I might even sympathize, not empathize, with that. It was evil to be sure, but understandable. But, as soon as they revealed what he actually wanted to do with that power the whole thing just fell apart completely and became a total farce.

It was just bad logic that doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny. Like why didn’t he just double the resources? Why did he think the universe wouldn’t just eventually return to pre-snap populations, because it’s not like he also slowed population growth?