Tha Wilkuz Zone

Wilkes, 30, MS, Computer Tech, He/Him/His, INTJ, Cancer. A gamer living in Southeast US. I play a lot of table top and video games. Currently Playing: Ark: Survival Evolved, Hades' Star, Final Fantasy XIV, and Stardew Valley. I'll post anything. Updated Sept 2020.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

how it feels to message a friend who's having Problems that you can't do anything to help with.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

hill i will die on forever: the trolley problem is a good and interesting thought experiment with relevance to real life.

during covid, the J&J vaccine killed a very small number of people due to rare side effects. the decision was made to pull the J&J vaccine and stop distribution of it, despite the almost certainly larger number of people who would die of covid while waiting for another vaccine dose.

this is a real life trolley problem! we decided to let more people die of covid instead of killing a smaller number due to side effects. and there are considerations other than abstract moral philosophy at play - legal ramifications, questions about faith in drug companies and the medical system, etc etc. but to everyone who says "well obviously everyone would pull the lever", sometimes people en masse decide to let the trolley run over the bigger group!

[somewordsarebiggerthanothers]

[abyssaldyke]

It's spring now which means the kids in my city have started drawing hopscotches on the sidewalk and as a rule I do every hopscotch I see because 1. Use it or lose it (ability to scotch) and 2. If a child got down on the hardscrabble streets of Boston Massachusetts to draw a scotch the least I can do is use it, but in doing the hopscotches, I've learned that about 50% of them are the typical 8-10 step scotch and the other 50% are. Somewhat avant-garde. And of course I'm not vetting the entire scotch before I start it so sometimes it's like haha 8 steps woo! Childlike whimsy! And sometimes they're 20 steps or 30 or they've got a section with three squares instead of two where you have to do a little Charleston to step on all three, or, memorably, FORTY one foot squares. A full BLOCK of jumping on one foot but I'm no quitter so once I've started Jigsaw Junior's fuckin hopscotch gauntlet I'm there til the end just a daily pot smoker in her thirties jumping kasa-obake style through an affluent suburb while some little proto-kennedy watches from his bedroom window rubbing his sadistic little third grade hands together and cackling. It's amazing. I love spring.

[anxietyproblem]

[parkchanwoohoo]

Realizing that I am not employing enough of my free will to become a nuisance at work

[raine-of-auroria]

Me watching this:

[cowboybarbaryn]

I’m not letting this rot in the tags

[thehopefulquotes]

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.”

— C.S. Lewis

[rederiswrites]

Look, it's simple. If a person has to actively work to make money, they're not "the rich" and they're not the problem. A surgeon making $200k a year still stops making money if they stop showing up to do surgery, because they're still selling their labor. The radical discrepancies in how we value different skills are certainly a problem, but the guy who makes money when he doesn't even get out of bed is the one making money on the value of other people's labor.

[monsieurenjlolras]

Time for my favorite chart!

[your-naked-magic-oh-dear-lord]

Notice billions ain't even on there. Outliers something something.

[quotefeeling]

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

— Carl Gustav Jung

[perfeqt]

“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.”

— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

[thoughtcascades]

nothing boosts my confidence like being around people who know even less what they’re doing

[halondrus]

[willgrahamscock]

“I would die for my kids” your children want an apology

[willgrahamscock]

your made up scenario isn’t real (shocker) and makes no difference when your kids are starving for your acknowledgment of the pain you caused them. you’re only performing the role of a good parent, without having to actually do any heavy lifting

[willgrahamscock]

[aaaangel444]

[kleenex4u]

[laviniafosterpeck]

[softlyfiercely]

i love how weird kids are. they make up the most bizarre stuff when left to their own devices and it's never what an adult would naively predict a kid would do in their imaginative play

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

10/10 no notes. kids are amazing

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I used to watch a toddler and this one time she decided that my arm stretched across a doorway was a magic portal to other lands. My arm was a boom gate type of thing that had to raise up to let her go through the portal. I was like, cool, we're gonna go on adventures in some imaginary world full of stuff she likes.

Nope, she spent an hour troubleshooting and repairing the gate, which was broken in multiple ways. We never activated it.