I could, but I don’t personally care that much about Vantablack.

There is a group (person) that makes an actual super deep black paint called Black 4.0 and if memory serves correctly they actually started with a jab at Kapoor by originally making the Pinkest Pink paint and banned Kapoor from buying it. Looks like they have a lot of different paints these days and are definitely worth checking out.

As much as I dislike Kapoor, technically Vantablack isn’t a pigment or regular paint by any means. From my understanding it is actually carbon nano tubes with who knows what else mixed in it and I believe it’s actually very dangerous to be around without proper PPE. So in that sense, it makes sense to me that he “owns” it.

Still don’t like the guy though.

Have you ever looked into psilocybin?

https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/04/18/small-doses-of-psychedelics-for-cluster-headaches/

https://americanmigrainefoundation.org/resource-library/can-psilocybin-treat-cluster-headache/

I’ll look them up, thanks for the recommendation!

I came to the same conclusion about my usual disinterest in books stemming from me having Aphantasia. The only kinds of books I’ve been able to consistently get through are very comedic in their writing style (e.g. Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Dennis E. Taylor, etc.). I think the focus on humor instead of visualizing the story and its world is what helps me when it comes to reading books.

Pretty strong case of Aphantasia here, it never even occurred to me that people actually saw things in their minds eye and thought it was more a metaphor or something. I do, however, have a very talkative internal monologue. I have a friend who has no internal monologue paired with Aphantasia, I always enjoy talking with them about their experience and how it differs from my own.

It’s really interesting to me how people’s internal experience can differ and how we can never truly know what these different experiences are like.

I’m no scientist, but I don’t really know how you can have a study of a psychoactive drug and the participants not be able to guess if they had the drug or the placebo.

Seems like a lot of effort.

You’re right, I don’t, but it sure as hell makes it a lot easier to keep the hundreds of games that I have purchased organized. Not to mention I don’t have to manually keep each of the 95 games I currently have installed updated or have to worry about backing up game saves or having them available across multiple different devices with zero effort from myself.

Steam isn’t perfect, but it does add a massive amount of value for consumers like myself who take advantage of a lot of the different features that are mostly unique to Steam as a platform.

Also, I believe when a developer releases a game on Steam they are given the opportunity to use Steamworks, which provides a lot of potentially useful tools for a game deceloper.

It’s a developers choice to release on Steam with DRM, Valve does not enforce it, there are games with no DRM on Steam.

Half baked features? I don’t remember the last time I tried using one of Steam’s features that I listed (and others I didn’t list) and it didn’t work incredibly well.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe DRM generally only causes problems for paying customers and I’d be much happier without it, but I think Steam’s DRM is one of the least invasive solutions that currently exist.

“…their useless proprietary launcher.” Steam is by far the least useless launcher out there. Steam has so many incredibly useful features such as remote play together, community controller layouts, the workshop, cloud saves, family library sharing, etc. Not to mention that they continue to keep adding new features that no other launcher is even close to having such as the new game recording feature that is currently in beta.

Sure, Valve charge a pretty decent amount to game developers for the sale of a game, but they provide a load of features in exchange.

Firefox has been, and still is, my primary browser since before Chrome even existed so, definitely not FUD. Also, it’s generally not Firefox’s fault either, but instead the developers of websites that don’t work in Firefox are usually doing something that isn’t standards compliant.

First to come to mind is that I can’t log into the account management part of the pet boarding company I use when in Firefox. Another scenario is that a lot of movie streaming sites won’t give Firefox video higher than 720p so in that case, Edge is often the only browser that can receive 1080p video. From my understanding the movie studios are the ones to blame for this.

I only have Chrome installed for the rare occasion where a site doesn’t work in Firefox. I feel like we’ve gone a bit backwards as of lately in building websites that are browser agnostic.

Looks like the USA is still about $10 trillion higher in GDP than China.

Pretty interesting that 4.2% of the world’s population generates 25% of the world’s GDP. Looking only at the numbers, it’s pretty cool, but when you look at the reality of it, it becomes a lot more messy.

Same for the big metal tea dispensers. I had some very nasty looking stuff come out of one of those while filling up a cup one time and it made me never trust fast food drinks again.

I used to not think it was much of a problem, because the people running the restaurant I worked at in highschool and college put such a strong emphasis on keeping everything clean so it never even croased crossed my mind that things could be that bad.

As a fellow night owl that gets pretty deep into the late night, I’ve had the idea that it is actually good to have a small percentage of the population awake while most of the others sleep to help keep watch. I don’t have any way to prove this, but it’s something that I feel makes sense.

You know what I miss? I miss StumbleUpon, it turned up so many cool websites back in the early 2000’s and actually seemed to be good at recommending sites based on categories you subscribed to. I may have been a bit of a power user as I ended up on the top stumblers list one or two times. Those were definitely some of the good days of the Internet.

Alcohol, Cannabis, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, Ketamine, 2C-B, and DMT in that order. I don’t know if there is anything else I’m interested in trying other than Mescaline and even then I’d probably only consider doing it if it was San Pedro.

In most states in the US it’s perfectly legal to own and possess spores of psilocybin/psilocin producing mushrooms, what’s technically illegal is growing and harvesting them. There are quite a few legal (check for your state) online sites where one could acquire spores for… mycology.

Also, it turns out, people have figured out how to grow a variety of mushrooms at home, culinary or otherwise, using different “teks” and it’s gotten to be pretty easy. If one were to be truly interested some simple searches would most likely turn up any information needed.