also don’t forget that placebo work even when you know it’s placebo

This right here. I’ve had problems with pain relief medicine simply not working since I was a child. A couple years back I started drinking caraway seed tea whenever a headache was JUST going away, and even tho I know dang well that caraway seeds do jack sh*t against pain, my body now somehow associates the taste with “ok, headache time is over” and I can drink that stuff to MAKE headaches go away.

100% placebo, 100% aware about it - still works.

PS: why caraway seeds? Because it is the least likely “tea” you can be offered in everyday context. If I had used something as common as charmomile or green tea, I think the effect wouldn’t have had a lasting effect.

Ohhh nice! Thank you for the link ^^

Just to add another factor to the ongoing discussion: artistic talent isn’t uniform and never was. Just because only/mostly “immature” art survived from a certain century of human history, doesn’t mean that there literally was no realistic art present at the time. Since you mentioned the statues already…

These are from the same era (around 200 BC), but as you may have guessed, made by different artists =P The statue is called The Dying Gaul by the way.

As for painting examples, I guess the Rothschild Canticles^[1] book illustrations represent best what most people nowadays would call medieval art. Not exactly realistic, a little goofy … perspective? Never heard of it. Proportions? Who cares. And who needs shading anyway?! As long as you can still distinguish a human from a cupcake, it’s “eh good enough”.

I guess that was also what you meant by “immature” art, because it is the same art style as those goofy weird pictures of knights fighting giant snails and rabbits riding cattle into battle and the like.^[2]

That book is dated to be around 1500–1520 so it would be easy to assume that people at the start of the 15th century didn’t have a realistic art style yet. But you know what else was made in that same era?

The Mona Lisa (1503–1506).

One dorky meme-esque style, and one realistic, modest and easy-on-the-eyes style in the same century, probably even the same decade. But they were used by different artists.

Now you might be thinking that those art styles might have been intended for their respective purpose or something along the lines: that the goofy, simple art style was used for nothing but amusing little pictures, and the more realistic style was for “proper” art, because noone in their right mind would spend 100+ hours painting highly detailed nonsense just for sh*ts and giggles, right?

May I introduce you to Joseph Ducreux?^[3]

I guess most of you will have seen that meme by now, but this is a real painting made by a real artist - and it is far from the only one. Ducreux created an entire series of similar self-portraits in … unusual poses and situations.

… so yes, at least that one guy DID indeed spend dozens if not hundreds of hours (plus material costs) painting amusing nonsense for his own entertainement. He was, in a way, the victorian era equivalent of a shitposter (and I mean that in a good sense!)

Long story short: one can’t just claim that “they didn’t have X art style in Y century” because the truth is much more facetted than that. It is way more likely that each and every era of human history has had people with insane talent who were able to create art as realistic as possible with whatever tools their lifetime had to offer, and also a bunch of “eh good enough” art or stuff that was deliberately stylized for fun. How we percieve said art today depends mainly on what artworks have survived up until now, and/or how popular the surviving art is. (Everyone and their grandma knows about the Mona Lisa, but how many of y’all knew about the Rothschild Canticles?)

If we don’t know about any realistic art from a certain period of time, it doesn’t automatically mean that there was no realistic art. It may have been lost, forgotten or it exists but it’s just not popular enough to be well-known.

Oh…yeah, that does look a lot closer to it. Thanks for pointing it out ^^ I’m going to edit the post.

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Eat them dry while maintaining eye contact to assert dominance.

Hyrule, preferably the version from Breath of the Wild. I mean, yes there is the whole Ganon thing and one shouldn’t go too close to the castle, but the rest of the kingdom is pretty chill, and apparently you can make an easy living by just lazy foraging in the countryside, or by selling a handful of acorns and bugs at random stables, or by growing a grand total of eight pumpkins.

I’ll take a life as a homeless but well-fed drifter on horseback anytime over … this. gestures vaguely at the current state of the world

Abso-friggen-lutely. But don’t forget that blahajs need a special diet so if you want to share a cup with them, you need something like this: (100% vegan and alcohol-free as well. AND zero calories!)

Cute dog/cat videos on the internet and a lemonade?

Plushies count too.

It’s okay to use any other beverage as a substitute … and any other pet for company. It’s the spirit of the holiday that counts ♪

Not sure if that really counts as “a game” for this community, but I reactivated my old Neopets account after a long hiatus. The site is still broken AF but just as fun as I remembered, and there is talk of an upcoming plot across the boards.

Star Wreck: Deep Space Nein.

Exactly this worked best for me back in the day ;) I’m German and while we have some mandatory English classes, they’re …well … not good. Blunt, boring, 1:1 translations of German sentences, and at least the teacher I had first also had a VERY thick German accent, pronouncing stuff WAY too harsh (“Zis is nott how yoo shoold zound when zpeeking inglish for forks zake!”) so other than learning a few basics, the lessons weren’t at all useful to me.

…but I’ve been an avid fan of the Zelda franchise even back then so I decided to play Ocarina of Time in English after a first German playthrough. Barely understood the dialogue at first, started to recognize certain keywords after a few days, and once I was halfway through the game my brain kinda switched to “English mode” and I actually learned words and grammar in a natural way instead of trying to force myself to understand what the hell a “singular past tense adverb” is.

Long story short, school tried to teach me how to translate German thoughts into English sentences before speaking them out loud. Games, movies, books and music taught me to THINK in English so I wouldn’t need to translate my thoughts first.

The same way I’m currently trying to learn Spanish by the way, which already works way better than any classes ever did.

My personal pet peeve is pre-installed, un-removable software and apps. My current mobile phone for example has apps that link to twitter, facebook, amazon etc. none of which I will ever use, but you can somehow not delete them. Why do I need to have that virtual junk in my phone?

How old is that data?! France and Ireland should absolutely be red as of now. And don’t get me started on Germany. Can someone please update this horribly outdated map to 2024?

When I had to move out (long, unpleasant story) I had the opportunity to get a nice, cozy appartement with low rent almost immediatly, but during the interview it turned out that they didn’t allow pets and wouldn’t budge, so it wasn’t an option for me and I politely declined.

They still tried to pressure me into signing the rental contract - calling me multiple times a day to ask whether I wanted to rethink my former decision again, eventually giving me a 24 hour deadline and demanding that I sign ASAP or they would pick someone else. That was the point I told them to go F- themselves as I was NOT going to leave my 13 year old tomcat behind or surrender him to a shelter. They didn’t take it well. (…and suddenly they claimed that noone else wanted the appartement and that they desperately needed someone to move in very soon yadda yadda … so much for “we’re going to pick someone else if you don’t sign today”.)

Best decision I’ve made that year. The landlord I have now is a super chill dude and I still have my spoiled furry little bastard with me. I’d rather have lived on the street than leaving a four-legged family member behind.

No idea what became of the other appartement but I pity the people who will have to put up with that passive-aggressive nonsense for lack of alternatives.

Imagine being cleaning staff in that office. You accidentally drop something during your night shift. All the chairs start driving themselves across the room at 4 AM while you’re completely alone in the building.

“Heart attack” would be an understatement for the reaction I’d have.

Movies:

• Kubo and the Two Strings. Some of the story elements are a bit too obvious, but the overall story is charming and the art style (stop motion with puppet-like characters) is just plain cool.

• Kirikou and the Sorceress. Wonderfully weird with an interesting story

• Triplets of Belleville. The entire movie is “told” without words, except for a single sentence right at the start and one right at the end.

Games:

• Terranigma (SNES). Main characters revives / creates an entire world that was doomed ages ago. It’s kind of bittersweet when you’re done reviving the continents, plants and animals and then the humans start f*cking stuff up. Great music and visuals too, despite being 16-Bit style

• Ōkami. One of my all-time favorites but due to minimal marketing, not many people are aware that this game even exists. Charming art style and interesting gameplay concept.

It’s astounding that one can learn really cool and interesting stuff by posting random nonsense to the shitpost community, lol. Thanks for the link! That was indeed new to me ;)