There’s this ad I keep seeing that I really despise. It’s for teeth-whitening toothpaste. The actress is wearing a white coat then holds up a tissue to her teeth, lamenting that her sparkling white teeth are ‘still yellow’

They cut away to teach you how toothpaste works, because surely you’ve never heard of this newfangled thing, and when they cut back she’s no longer wearing her white coat and says how much whiter her teeth are.

It’s transparently obvious that the wardrobe and tissue are just to give you something whiter to look at. But like… your teeth aren’t supposed to be freakishly white. It’s just something that Big Toothpaste wants you to feel bad about the way your body is. Also, using whitening toothpaste when you don’t need it can damage your enamel and cause you long term problems.

Well as long as Bill says it’s cool, I guess I don’t have to form my own opinion

Yeah, gimme the works, hold the olives

In this economy!?

Surely you’ve thoroughly thought this through though?

Can confirm, they must have a satellite office outside my bedroom too

I was probably a child when I last read it, so I might have some details wrong, but here’s how I remember it:

A child is given a toy rabbit. A fairy visits the toy rabbit and gives it the gift of awareness. The child and the toy bond with each other and grow to love each other. Unfortunately, the child becomes dangerously ill, and after the sickness their possessions must be incinerated to prevent contamination. This includes the toy rabbit. However, the fairy arrives at the last minute, declaring that because the rabbit learned to love it was therefore a real rabbit, and with a wave of her wand transforms the toy into a living being and whisks it off to the woods were it lives happily ever after with the other rabbits.

So I guess my question is this - Do you think the velveteen rabbit and the fairy are real? Or is the fairy’s magic an invention of the child’s mind?

I think the narrative required the velveteen rabbit to be burned because it was so horrible. To the grown ups it’s just velveteen, but to the child it’s a dear friend. Even as children we know that being burned is horrible. So the child invents a solution where their toy can live happily ever after even after it’s thrown in the fire.

I think there’s definitely some Heaven and Hell symbolism to be had too. The velveteen rabbit was damned to hellfire unless it accepted love into its heart during its life. Then it is granted into the afterlife. In fact, you could say it was reincarnated into a higher spiritual form.

The story explores coping with loss as seen from the point of view of a child. Even though the velveteen rabbit was just a toy, the child has given it a soul. If you have a soul, when you die you go to the afterlife and live happily ever after. It’s a comforting story to a child, and one that many people around the world have believed throughout the ages.

Isn’t showing the sun your grundle purpose enough?

Anecdotally, I have two pairs of glasses where one has the filter and the other does not. I experience less eye strain when working at the computer with the filtered glasses. There’s a definite yellow tint to them, but you don’t notice after a while.

However, I 100% believe that it could be the placebo effect, so take from that what you will.

…no 🥲

I’m doing a lot better now though

When I was a kid I saw an elderly man get hit by a car. He rolled over the top, which I guess is safer than being run down, but he got a lot of air and hit the pavement hard. Just kept rolling over and over. My parents shooed us away from the scene, but I can’t imagine it ended well for him.

One time I was riding a bus that rear-ended a motorcycle. I didn’t see the collision itself, but the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

We often take for granted how dangerous traffic is. Your life can end in a moment doing something we casually do every day.

I was working in a department store when a middle-aged woman collapsed in front of me. It was really warm, heat exhaustion I supposed. She looked like maybe she was drunk because she was moving kind of erratically, so I went to see if she was okay and she just fell. I’ll never forget the sound her head made hitting the concrete or the fact that she didn’t even blink. Remarkably, she was okay and was up in a few minutes, walked away and everything, really surprised me.

The thing that probably fucked me up the most though was some videos on YouTube. I was working for a video analytics company, and we were trying to build an image classifier that could detect firearms. Well, you need data for that, so we were scraping videos of gun crime. Mostly what we were looking for was armed robbery. Lots of videos put out by the local police of somebody holding up a convenience store, and that wasn’t a big deal. But every now and then you’d find a video of someone getting shot and that really affected me. Eight hours a day of looking at gun crime with the occasional homicide peppered in was a recipe for disaster. I definitely needed therapy after that job.

I think I remember that bit, Martin was trying to convince us that “apes together strong” but the boys weren’t having it. He used the two-syllable pronunciation too, which I’d relate to using the N-word with a hard R.

I don’t really relate that bit to “taking the word back” though because I guess I don’t think of Martin as being gay. I mean, he’s 10 years old so he probably isn’t really anything yet. Then again, he is often shown to be effete and I’m sure some of the kids have called him gay before.

To me that joke was all about shock factor. It was like saying “Hey, look at this dirty word we just got away with saying on television! It’s not dirty because we used it correctly, instead of the way you expect to hear it!”

Queer person checking in. I too dislike the F-slur because like you say, it takes me back to the worst periods of my life when that was the worst thing you could call a person.

When I was a kid, the common way to express that you didn’t like something was to call it gay. And usually it had nothing to do with gayness either, it’d be like “You signed up for soccer instead of hockey? That’s pretty gay.” “Math class is gay.” “Homework is gay.”

Even before I knew I was queer that bothered me. And the funny thing was if you called someone out for it, they’d weasel out of it by saying they didn’t have anything against gay people, you just call things gay if you don’t like them. They just didn’t see how that was wrong which made it even more frustrating to me. Like, they admit that gay = bad but then say they have nothing against gays? Well, what more can you expect from children?

Nowadays it doesn’t seem like things being gay is so bad. I’ve definitely proudly called things gay, and it feels like the word ‘gay’ is being taken back. So with time maybe that can happen with the F-slur, but for me now it’s still a super triggering thing.

What a precious little goober

A lot of people in this thread appear to be pretty hard on themselves. There seems to be a trend of people who want to be nice, are trying to be nice, but don’t see themselves as nice. If that sounds like you, then I’ve got some good news for you:

You are a nice person.

If you’re sincerely making the effort to be a better person then that’s admirable. Self improvement is hard. Too often people are quick to judge based on the result of your actions rather than the effort that’s put into them. To put it another way, we judge people by their actions but judge ourselves by our intentions.

Treat yourself to the niceness that you’re trying to show to other people. You’re doing the best you can. You’re trying to be a nicer person which means you’re trying to grow. From tiny seedlings grow mighty oaks, and the seedling shouldn’t be shamed for starting its journey. Rather, it should be encouraged to keep growing.

If you find it difficult to be nice, but you’re trying to be a nice person, I’d say that’s a lot nicer than being the person who dismisses another for not being ‘nice’ enough.

I just shared this with my wife because she’s an artist and hates AI as much as I do.

Apparently she made an account last night.

So like, tofu in the shape of a foot?

Dilbert just trying to mind his own business

Sometimes the author doesn’t supply a moral, but that doesn’t mean the reader can’t come up with one of their own.

So this castaway is probably fucked. But hey, they were fortunate enough to have a TV. That TV gets access to the news, which manufactures dread for the castaway. Is their raft one of the ones affected by the recalls? Is it losing air right now? Will the castaway be dead in a matter of days?

Now what’ll bake your noodle: is the castaway better off with this knowledge? For the rest of their trip they’ll be worried about losing air and their raft sinking, sure. But if you’re stranded on the open sea you’ve probably only got a couple days left anyway, and it’s not like there’s anything they can do about it anyway. They’re in a sinking (heh) situation with no way out.

So the news was able to inform the castaway of their supposed fate, but the castaway is powerless to do anything about it. Is it better to be informed, or to be blissfully ignorant? Is this a story about people who know their fate and are powerless to stop it, like Cassandra of Greek myth? Or is it perhaps a larger moral about the state of television news fearmongering for a captive audience that can do little to help itself?

But I dunno. This guy’s probably fucked.

“Red tape” is a pretty common idiom here. It’s similar to bureaucracy, but it’s more like the useless stuff you have to deal with in order to do something.

Say you want to update your driver’s license and you need to bring in some ID and fill out a form. That’s regular bureaucracy.

If you want to feed the homeless so you have to get a permit for an event, prove your volunteers have food-handling training, fill out forms for your volunteers, notify the police that there will be a public gathering, schedule an inspection of the facility, etc, that’s red tape.

Another way to look at it might be that Bureaucracy describes the system in which offices communicate with each other, and Red Tape are the tasks/forms/whatever you have to complete in order to get what you want approved.