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[For those who don't know, Cenobites are the sadomasochistic torturers in the Hellraiser movies]

Most animals, absent contact with humans, would never know the feeling of having their ears deep cleaned or their bellies full all day every day. They'd never feel scritches and pets once they grow into adults. They'd never have a big fat human belly to sleep on in complete contentment and security, inside a warm and secure house, a house filled with soft furnishings they'd never otherwise feel. They don't even know that many sensations and psychological states are possible until we give them to them.

Ever seen videos of a cow playing with a yoga ball? They have the capacity for joy and play that they almost never get to express or feel. But we can do that for them if we want. Yet they seem to not know such things without kind humans showing them.

We suck when it comes to mistreating animals, of course. But those of us who love the hairy bastards must be like gods to them. My wee dog would surely never in his entire life know the pleasure of having that part of his back where his tail joins with his spine scratched if not for being around me, because he has no way to reach it himself, and dogs don't scratch each other. Cats being played like bongos would never get that experience anywhere else.

Well-treated pets must talk about us like "they're explorers in the further regions of experience; angels to some, even bigger angels to others".

All of this is true for wild animals especially, although I'd never advocate interfering with their lives in that way. But if you gained the trust of a bear and got to the point where you could scratch its back and maybe even relieve pain from a wound or something, it'd be like an entirely new lobe of its brain was born and activated. It would wander off thinking "what the fuck just happened??" in a good way. The fact that it's a bad idea to socialise large wild animals actually makes me a bit sad, because they'll never really experience any of the things our pets and domesticated animals will experience, and will go their entire lives without even knowing that their minds and bodies can reach such plateaus. They have all of this neural wiring that just never gets lit up.

It gives us a lot of power that can do a lot of good at no cost to ourselves (in fact, it benefits us as much as it does the animal in question). Pretty nice state of affairs, really. I believe it was Nietzsche who said "scritch the pet, and the pet scritches you".

Huge spoilers ahead!

The jury, in particular the main protagonist, seemed to wade into illegal territory more than once. But being a complete layman who's never been on a jury, I don't know for sure.

Doing one's own research and bringing one's own "evidence" into the jury room, and not presenting it to the prosecution or defence, seems like a no no. The knife the protagonist finds in a store and brings in to show his fellow jurists that the prosecutor was wrong about its uniqueness; this feels like mistrial levels of inappropriate. Making judgements about credibility based on whether or not someone was wearing their glasses in court by noticing their nose has the telltale markings of a glasses wearer, something not pointed to by the defence as worthy of note, likewise seems off limits.

Is it not the case that the jury has to work only with information and evidence presented during the trial? And in fact can be told to ignore certain evidence from the trial if the judge deems it stricken from the record? Is it expected or acceptable for jurists to come up with their own alternate scenarios and narratives that fit the evidence or are they bound only to consider the theories presented by the defence and the prosecution?

Perhaps in the '50s this was all above board but the law changed since then. Or maybe my movie-based understanding of juries is a Frankenstein mishmash of true and bullshit. Probably that.

Great film deserving of its place atop "best films ever" lists, and I even liked the '90s remake!

As I understand it (see: not at all), if you leave a spaceship with no suit on, you'd get baked like Marie Curie's ovaries from the radiation. It's mainly our atmosphere that protects us from most of the nastiest stuff. Would a giant cable reaching from Earth all the way to a platform outside the atmosphere become dangerously-radioactive over time? And if so, would that eventually cause the entire planet to get radioactive over hundreds of years? Kinda like if the hole in the Ozone layer were replaced with a Mario pipe.

And if that is the case, maybe we could forget the elevator aspect of it and just aim for a free eternal source of radioactive energy, like a really shitty Dyson sphere 👀

"How do we ensure our patient drops and loses ~80% of his pills and that he slices the absolute fuck out of his fingers in the process?"

They're locking my mental health goals behind a fidgety Saw trap built from scissors and miserliness.

I've had boxes where there were several single pills snipped from their blister packs rattling around in them. These pills in particular are tiny, like you can't even feel them in your mouth when you take them, but they expect me to be able to finesse one out of a single blister with at least 3 extremely sharp and piercing corners on it 😒

If you're a pharmacist and you do this, please go ahead and take the pills yourself, you clearly need 'em more than I do, ya sick fuck.

I need to load a second page to enter my password in some sites. Why is this? I even have a site I use that has the username, password and 2FA entries on separate pages that each need to be loaded one after the other.

My uneducated guess is that it makes it harder for bots, but I can't imagine it being that much of an impedance 🤷‍

Cheers!

For example, is there a 'laws dot gov' kinda URL I can go to and type "importing raccoons to Northern Ireland to create a self-sustaining population" into the search bar?

Or maybe something like a multi-volume book series I can check at the library to see if "raccoon husbandry; N. Ireland" is mentioned?

Maybe an AI chatbot on the local council's website that I can ask "is it legal to raise baby raccoons by feeding them from miniature wheelie bins to teach them where food comes from and how to open the lids"?

I'm not about to do anything [potentially] illegal, I'm just curious.

Cheers! 🦝

Is it an affectation that they're trained to deploy? (If so, why?) Or is it just a natural thing that happens in the very specific circumstance of being a politician on the campaign trail, and that's why no one else seems to do it?

I don't think I've seen it in any other context 🤔

Cheers!

This might be my most stupid question yet, but what the hell:

I'm reading about the GTA VI leaks on Wikipedia, and it talks about the various impacts the leaks had, one of which was low morale amongst the developers. Why is that? The response from the internet to the GTA VI leaks in particular seemed to be positive and caused renewed excitement in the game. Everyone [seemingly] understood that it was early, non-final work, but were nevertheless impressed/excited, as far as I could tell anyway 🤷‍ Besides, it's GTA, it's not like they're gonna break much new ground in terms of gameplay mechanics that need to be kept secret. Things were more or less set in stone in that regard in GTA III.

Why so sad?