thrawn

I imagined it was we have muscles and just like we move our arms and get tired. That doesn’t specifically require food. It’s just part of the overall process.

Hm, to my understanding, moving arms a lot does increase caloric need. Like how walking or running burns calories and leads to weight loss. With birds, flight burns more energy than walking, so I’d expect the same to apply to humans.

I’ve never met anyone who has had wings or been a hybrid before. Shouldn’t one of them have achieved flight and made news by now? Part of the skepticism is not seeing how you know several with what could be described as superpowers or features yet most people have never seen one.

Have you considered x-rays to detect the bone structure changes?

I definitely agree about the cat. In your shoes I’d do anything to ensure Mitten stayed around as long as possible. I’d definitely recommend still taking pictures every day, next to something for size reference or your measuring method. The scale measures are astounding to me— are you sure they’re not both stepping on? If I’m reading it right, that’s a 5lb increase in 20 minutes on the same day? That’s a great system by the way, much better than manual scale measurements.

I’m not a mental health professional and wasn’t there so I wouldn’t want to incorrectly comment on the visits with your mother present. You mentioned multiple agreeing that you’re mentally sound— have any disagreed?

One last thing if you don’t mind. I had only looked at a few recent posts, but I went back through most of them because your experiences are unlike any I’ve seen before. You mentioned a Starbucks building you owned, what’s the story there? Also, are you a parent?

Thanks again for taking the time to respond

Hey, thanks for the response. I hope you don’t mind some more questions. I’m worried they’ll come off as somewhat disingenuous because to the non-magic believers, they sound inherently so. While I don’t currently believe any of this to be possible and am still concerned you may be experiencing a lapse in mental health, I am as open minded as a nonreligious person with a stem background can be. I don’t know everything, after all.

I’m quite interested in the logistics. Do you have aerodynamic concerns? Most, if not all flighted beings are lighter per volume than humans. How about energy concerns? Despite being lighter than humans, flight is a large energy expenditure for birds. Will you need to eat more?

Is there weight gain associated with wing development? When will they be fully ready for flight?

Why wings and not like, Iron Man style thruster flight? Flapping wings is a deliberate action, I’d think, and could be exhausting.

Where’d you meet the others?

From your answer, it sounds like your psychiatrist believes in magic. I have not known psychiatrists to do so but I’ve never had one myself. Where’d you find her, and have any of your concerned family members discussed it with her? Have you gotten a second opinion? She said it’s your truth, but something like wings and true flight isn’t subjective.

If the wings do manifest, please send pictures and do not attempt bird style, push-from-nest flights. Takeoff is the hardest part and it would be best to begin flight while your feet are still on the ground. If you have the strength to take off from rest, you’d be fine midair. Full disclosure, I say this because as a skeptic I do not want you jumping off roofs. It would also be bad if you were hit by aircraft or vice versa— actually, how do you plan to communicate with aircraft?

I also noticed in your history that your cat has doubled in weight without getting fatter. I would very much encourage you to take a picture of the cat on top of the scale every day to monitor this, and possibly post them if the trend continues. I’m concerned the cat may actually be gaining weight in an unhealthy manner without large day to day changes. I’ve gained a significant amount of weight quickly before and often needed to refer to my regular progress pictures to truly appreciate the difference.

Thanks for reading all this, and hope you do not mind the massive amount of questions. If you answer them, I will probably have more, but you may tell me to stop asking at any time.

Hello, apologies for responding to an old comment.

How go the wings? Have you seen others with similar wings?

Would you be willing to elaborate on your psychiatrist’s thoughts?

I’m not looking to make fun of you, I am both curious and somewhat concerned. To most of us, this sounds completely impossible.

Hey, it’s Credit One, a notoriously predatory bank. Interest rates are high, fees are aplenty, and they’re not exactly kind. I’m in the credit card hobby and they’re famous for being shit (but situationally useful if you’re trying to rebuild credit). If you’re one of those and use it properly then cancel it, it’s fine. If you don’t pay it off, the balance balloons.

This person will continue to compound interest and fees until they charge off the account, sell it to some collector, and eventually one of the collector human centipede segments will sue them. Some banks will occasionally let go of debts, but a Credit One charge off will probably see this individual trying sovcit tactics in court -> judgment -> wage garnishment eventually.

I used to hang out on the dph subreddit and it was one of my favorite drug subs. A little bit depressing because of the side effects and how many of them had already suffered significant brain damage though.

I miss the drug subs like /dph or /heroin. I read them for years since these very much interest me— there’s so much of the human experience I will never try— but I fear permanent side effects and am not much of the drug type anymore. If only I could try it and rewind time with the memories intact.

Plus the dph memes are great.

Not to get conspiratorial but I genuinely think that media outlets are pushing this narrative to pretend that money doesn’t dictate everything. Having Star Wars fans fight each other draws attention away from the money focused behavior of every single large corporation.

Disney doesn’t care about the reception itself, only the financial implications and brand damage (which has poor financial implications). Online complainers and review bombers have almost no power whatsoever: I don’t remember seeing anything about that when it was happening, and it did not do significant damage. Online complaints/review bombing happens every month and can actually be helpful, e.g. Velma season 2.

The show blew $180mil— larger than the budget of Top Gun: Maverick— and had significantly lower viewership than all of the other SW D+ shows. Season 2 was guaranteed to do worse. That’s all that matters. Good movies and shows, well liked by critics and audience alike, have underperformed and had their sequels cancelled. Furiosa just happened and lost nowhere near the money that this one did. It’s just capitalism.

And yet I’ve seen more articles about this show now than I ever did when it came out, claiming nonsense about a creative risk adverse Lucasfilm and overstating the power of anti-woke lunatics that complain loudly while accomplishing very little. This shifts blame from executives who wrote a check for this show to spend a shocking near-$700k per minute of runtime. Shifts it right to other viewers— other regular people— with a different opinion on the show, now fighting one another about whether they were too critical. All while tricking people into thinking that racist or sexist whiners have more power than they really do.

I don’t even blame Disney for cancelling it, I would have too. Just think it’s odd that the conversation is dominated by audience feeling and not audience funding.

Also, for another fun stat, I searched up Acolyte’s budget and found this:

You could produce the entirety of both Clone Wars (133 episodes) and Rebels (74 episodes) and still have 15 million dollars left over, or you could pay for 7 episodes of Acolyte

This same blasé approach to budgets is exactly what got Disney into the box office mess last year during their 100th anniversary. Flop after flop after flop that could have been avoided with restrained budgets. It was executive failure from start to finish, and yet they’ve mostly avoided consequences by shifting the blame. Thousands of regular employees were fired but most of the executives were fine.

If I were truly thrown into this scenario, my first step would be accepting likely death. Even if you maintain status quo and do no good, you’ll be killed by the next guy in line. There’s nearly no way to both satisfy the current oligarchs and maintain enough power to prevent being replaced by one of them. There is also no way out, as Russia has carried out assassinations in foreign countries. Not that you’d make it onto a plane.

So I really would try to do all that. I’d tell them that whatever force got me there also gave me time to enact failsafes so that, if I disappeared, every property that every Russian billionaire owned would make unexpected contact with drones. Then I’d go ahead and post Putin’s files with every billionaire’s dirt and holdings hoping to start some fires they’d need to put out before coming for me. From there, an aggressive push towards democracy by appealing to the people in the hopes that they’ll back me, which might buy a little extra time.

I think this secures a few hours. They won’t want to move against a complete unknown that suddenly became president. That’s enough to call Biden (allegedly to negotiate US withdrawal from Ukraine in exchange for election interference in Harris’s favor) and send him every bit of data on the military that I could. That might be enough deterrence to buy more time: “the US military knows everything now, so killing me might have consequences.” I’d CC several other NATO members, but for time’s sake Biden is probably the one to call.

Maybe I could get some bodyguards that appear loyal to me, maybe not. But every bit of bluster I could muster, I’d throw it down out the gate, then start trying to fix the country before they call the bluff.

Yeah, I still die quickly, but even a single step towards improvement is worth my life. An easy decision to make when it was forfeit the second I became president. Even if I failed miserably, merely dumping presidential documents would have been worth it. Perhaps it’d get the ball rolling.

Edit: I missed the part where everyone loyal to Putin would be loyal to me. That opens up a ton of space to actually set up these failsafes or move against the oligarchs myself, as well as secure the Kremlin with men more or less actually loyal to me (by wiring them all a million USD on the spot with promise of more). Putin put down a rebellion from one of the most powerful oligarchs, so there might actually be a way to survive long enough to do many of the things on that list. I’d probably not dump the oligarch files and keep that on a disappearance failsafe then proceed mostly the same hoping to generate serious, potentially irreversible momentum before dying.

This is such an odd endorsement to seek.

I don’t see a huge amount of people who would trust the strange protest candidate enough to simply obey and vote for Trump. Especially because among his supporters who are largely 1) protest voters or 2) prone to conspiracy bandwagons, how many will remember who he endorsed in three months?

Lemmy is relatively slow with breaking news and misses a lot of the fluff that other sites would have in between truly noteworthy things. For addiction prevention, this is pretty great— if I missed a couple days on Reddit, the entire conversation was different. Here on Lemmy, I can show up a couple days later and still see the big things from the previous days. I can respond to notifications days later without feeling bad. I never really feel out of the know unlike Reddit, and if I was incentivized to log in because of that, I’d definitely say Lemmy is less addictive.

Lemmy moves slowly. I can come here and comment on things from two days ago cause it’s still pretty high up on the list. I think that would reduce the need to be up to date.

On mostly anonymous social medias, what’s the pressure to be connected? Back on reddit I wouldn’t log in for weeks at a time

Yup. It’s easier to blame anti-woke than to admit to poor business decisions. Disney only cares about burning $180 mil + marketing and getting brand damage in exchange. Bloated budgets are the killer of movies, and movies actually make money whereas streaming shows don’t. A movie needs to make 2-2.5x the budget to break even, and when you’re blowing that kind of money without collecting ticket prices…

$180mil is more than the budget of Top Gun: Maverick which made $1.5bil. Inside Out 2 had a slightly larger budget of $200mil and has made over $1.6bil so far. The Acolyte made nothing and didn’t drive sales, so it was a poor investment.

People who really liked the show could try a gofundme for Disney, request merch to buy, or if they’re extremely wealthy give them $200mil to make another season. Looping Acolyte while asleep to pump viewership would’ve helped too, as you basically noted— Velma received a lot more hate but with high viewership and lower budget, it got a second season. In capitalistic America it’s difficult to convince a company to make less profit, much less discard hundreds of millions. Money is all that matters.

Thanks for this summary, I haven’t followed this and didn’t know what it was about. Sensical format and structure, extremely helpful in explaining a crucial difference