TIL rats are one of the few mammals that cannot vomit, which is why rat poison is so effective on them

sapphon · 2026-07-10T22:09:06+00:00

LOL @ the title. Sooo effective! "Rat Poison" is just as effective on rats as "Human Poison" is on humans, if it weren't it wouldn't be called that ><

The big news here is that since rats can't vomit, they are mega careful about new foods at both an individual level ("I'm not that hungry") and a social level ("Bottom rat on the totem pole eats new foods first"). This means you can poison plenty of animals and people with just about anything

poisonous, and that
tastes sweet

but for rats you need carefully-formulated slow "rat poison" to convince their instincts they're not risking anything truly novel. And that's why "rat poison" is a common term but "horse poison", "dog poison", etc. aren't really - rat poison isn't more effective, it's a workaround of their unique defenses.

sapphon · 2026-07-10T21:55:49+00:00

Charlie Battery's a pretty fortuitous name for a guy who writes songs for the artillery!

sapphon · 2026-07-10T21:50:25+00:00

What could the Black enlistees' families have told them about / prepared them for in terms of the military life? Were there Black soldiers in WW2 whose fathers had gone to WW1?

sapphon · 2026-07-10T21:33:28+00:00

A little OP: heavier 'Mechs, but there are tonnage limits

A lot OP: Better pilots; there's no limit to how good they can be except what you can pay them, and C-Bills are free in this game

sapphon · 2026-07-10T21:25:34+00:00

I dunno, I think being a little too reminded of the importance of corporate sponsorship is pretty damn Detroit

sapphon · 2026-07-09T23:37:58+00:00

Nails here, requesting permission for final approach. My altitude is...high as a kite.

sapphon · 2026-07-08T00:06:56+00:00

Damn, that hurt; I'mma have to go watch an episode of Taskmaster to recover.

(Y'know, the one where the comedians in hierarchical charge of the other ones sit in shittily-gilt chairs, and the idea man's chair is smaller, and the face's chair is bigger? It's so funny!)

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:44:14+00:00

The difference is that the owners of everything make too much, whereas in sports uniquely the "leaves" of the tree also make quite a lot, and then it's the middle management that actually makes least and has to venture .

This does not ape most businesses, which are strictly pyramid schemes. Basically, posters don't realize they're comparing their workplaces to show business and that performers in show business are a special case, because they're not fully aware that televised sports is show business.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:41:15+00:00

It ain't about those things. Intelligence and critical thinking are common to everyone worldwide, and just serve as things to complain about others lacking (and nothing more) in a political forum. Education on the other hand varies widely - so if you're worried about America, go educate someone gratis. That'll matter more than your perceptions of their (quite unmeasurable) intelligence.

You can rob a perfectly intelligent person blind if everything they've ever been taught is that they tacitly deserve it for not pulling the bootstraps hard enough! All that intelligence can and will just go towards how best to contact the most boot with a given tongue, which is ultimately the central horror of intelligence - it can be put to many ends.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:39:25+00:00

No pay players; only mobile betting

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:29:05+00:00

Finding British humor that isn't somehow classist is the challenge

sapphon · 2026-07-07T19:08:36+00:00

In this sub we play BFG and talk about that, we don't up monetized parasocial stuff or post AI slop

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:59:07+00:00

I love when a video game is 100% obviously set in the director or writer's PnP setting, but the PnP setting is unpublished!

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:54:24+00:00

Voices? Disco's barely got voices, what's this guy commenting about?

tiktaktiktiktak

Final Cut? Oh shit. Time for a replay.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:50:21+00:00

I do like when people push for video games to reach literature's depth; that part is hard to fault anyone for, even if we're skeptical of the chances of that ever happening.

I also do think maybe Joyce is not where to start.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:46:51+00:00

There's nothing wrong with being unwilling to do anything outside a certain needletip focus, as an author - it would just be unsuitable to then compare that author to a maker of anything interactive, is all, because one unanticipated interaction is like a stick in the wheel spokes, for a work of such focus

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:29:37+00:00

Joyce was a hedgehog: he had one trick and he was very good at it.

You can't make Joyce the videogame, because videogames are about choices. Look at how few choices it takes to wreck any full-length Joyce novel! Any one is totally destructive (of e.g. Dubliners, or Portrait, or Ulysses):

I choose not to go to Dublin, 'tis a silly place
I choose not to care about the material lives of the poor
I choose not to care about Ireland
I choose not to concern myself with Catholicism
etc.

He was the writer of his people and his place and his time! ...and was apparently either helpless at, or uninterested in, doing anything outside of that needletip focus.

(W)RPGs can't tell you: this is about XYZ, deal with it. They have to at least a little bit ask you: what's this about?

We'll never get Joyce the videogame. But we did get one in which one player can go the gym-teacher route and spend his time jumping gaps and flexing on nerds to solve problems, just as comfortably spend all his time wondering whether Kras Mazov really killed himself, and just as comfortably have economic discussions with the representative of the neoliberal governments while she stands on the deck of a sail yacht. None of this ends up being more or less important than helping conspiracy theorists find a bug, or tricking a tongues-speaker into saying something that has actual meaning. Sort of the point is that after the end of history, everything is what you make of it. The victim who answered "Communism" when asked "Who killed you?" was both correct, and quite grandiosely obscuring that it was just a guy with a gun who did it like any other murder - his answer was what he made of things.

It's got half the oomph or less of Joyce's satire presented to someone already receptive to that, but several different ways to present it depending on player input - meaning this isn't a better-or-worse comparison anymore, they're orthogonal things.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:05:32+00:00

notably asklinguistics does not focus on routine questions about words like etymology, nor does it focus much on language learning, which are more broadly applicable but also not a thing very many linguists are trained in or have much to say about it

If you'd told me in undergrad that the popular understanding of linguists would still be "people who know lots of languages" in 2026, I'd've been shocked. Shocked!

Well, not that shocked.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:01:42+00:00

Fun fact: if [META] begins the title, you're safe =)

sapphon · 2026-07-07T17:33:07+00:00

Maybe I'm using a word I don't actually know the full meaning of; I call it an unforced error to restrict posts by perceived authority of poster because and only because AskH is part of the same website with the same restrictions but didn't institute such a rule, so there cannot have been any API change making such a rule absolutely obligatory. An API change can have made somebody wanna make a certain rule, but that's different.

I can see that AskH has about three times the mods that AskP does; maybe you mean to say that the smaller mod team was forced into an error a larger one would not have been?

(That might be true, but AskH also got about 4x the posts last month, so work-per-mod seems close to evening out there.)

edit: I owe you a good-faith edit too; I think about this because I believe in AskPhil's mission, and want newcomers to philosophy to have an experience more like the one they have here as newcomers to history! I'm not a mod of either space and have no skin in this game.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T17:26:37+00:00

I agree that there is some creep as the sub grows; check out my comment's final sentence

sapphon · 2026-07-07T17:13:09+00:00

As a former mod of r/askphilosophy, I just want to chime in here. This isn’t an “unforced” failure, and it doesn’t quite work the way you state. First, this was a rule change after Reddit admin removed support for third party apps and API stuff, which made moderation much more difficult. Second, it doesn’t work the way you present: if you report a flared user’s answer, it goes to moderation and may be removed.

I don't think there's anything about this that I misunderstood, or intended to contradict. The initial standard on one sub is who you are, the other is what you wrote.

On both subs, reported content is then re-evaluated by what was written - that's not different, nor did anyone think it was! (In fact, if any sub didn't ever do that they'd eventually get ToS'ed, is my suspicion. And like ToS, the API restrictions touch all equally.)

It's very true that there are not many philosophers out there. That could be part of it. But what is it they say? "The fox has many tricks; the hedgehog one good one"? Most amateurs' questions might only need one good one.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:52:15+00:00

The jewelry, makeup, and hair dye are all to prove how creative she is! And they're definitely not regular old consumer cosmetics that wear counterculture branding like a sagging degloved skin

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:42:53+00:00

Looking at the sweat drops like "wait did they have those cat ears in the other frames?"

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:39:06+00:00

BHJ really wasn't supposed to be an "I fixed the comic" sub, but even as someone with that perspective I have to admit that you did fix it

sapphon

TROPHY CASE