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[GiglameshDespair]

It's easy to talk about going back to a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle... on the internet.

[Bumber]

My family has to put down our first (oldest) cat tomorrow night. She has pancreatic cancer or something, has stopped eating, collapses frequently, and is extremely thin. She's lived long enough I suppose.

We've had to put down a cat before (for lung cancer,) but he was kind of a urinating asshole. I still cried.

[Orange Wizard]

IMO being deprived of life is way worse than having a crappy life.

Is that your actual opinion or just a regurgitation of Ecclesiastes 6:3?

If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life's good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.

I'm saying literally the opposite of 6:3.

[Calidovi]

well then, i said something stupid on the internet may that not be the first nor that last time

What I tried to communicate was that the hunter-gatherer life has, at least, the potential to be just about as horrible as the life of the impovershed. Right now your argument revolves around idealism and romantic portrayals.

Firstly, though, why don't we establish what makes life fruitful. No point in comparing life-span and ease of communication when both of those can be considered as double-edged swords.

And yes, I plan to take an anthropology course. Maybe when I stop being 14 and speaking brainlessly.

[SalmonGod]

well then, i said something stupid on the internet may that not be the first nor that last time

What I tried to communicate was that the hunter-gatherer life has, at least, the potential to be just about as horrible as the life of the impovershed. Right now your argument revolves around idealism and romantic portrayals.

Firstly, though, why don't we establish what makes life fruitful. No point in comparing life-span and ease of communication when both of those can be considered as double-edged swords.

And yes, I plan to take an anthropology course. Maybe when I stop being 14 and speaking brainlessly.

I'm sorry if I replied a little sharply.  It is hard to keep in mind that some of the people I'm communicating with are as much as 20 years younger than me.  It doesn't help that I've been on the internet for 19 years, myself... which leads perhaps to a subconscious feeling that the internet has grown up with me as much as I've grown up with it... when consciously, I know that's not true.

I'll re-iterate, though, that nothing I've said is rooted in romanticism.  I don't have delusions about life as a rugged primitive adventurer.  In fact, the first thing I'd be doing if there were any serious social breakdown is raiding a pharmacy to hopefully score enough insulin to buy my son a few more months of life after mass production and distribution of the stuff shuts down.

You'll just have to excuse me saying something stupid once in a while also, when the only time I get for myself to enjoy any of these modern luxuries I'm supposed to be so thankful for is when I give up sleep for it, and the rest of my waking hours are spent working under intense pressure.  The reason I bring up comparison to hunter-gatherer life is that at least you can hunt and scavenge.  In the modern world, everything is owned, monitored, and controlled.  The consequence for not accepting the circumstances I'm complaining about are you don't have access to anything, even space to exist in -- in other words, a situation worse than life as a primitive hunter-gatherer.

My sad for today is I brought a shitload of work home for the weekend.

5 hot deliveries to monitor
13 shipments to track and clear customs
15 entries to audit
Bunch of record-keeping details to clean up
Training/Work instructions/Document templates to write/modify

I'll probably get the bare necessities done, be a jerk to my family for demanding my attention whenever I'm not focusing on work, angrily shirk responsibility for a few hours one night or the other, and then spend all next week anxious about when I'm going to get shit for the stuff I didn't get done while struggling to stay on top of daily operational stuff until the next weekend when I find once again that there's too much busy work to do for catching up on longer-term tasks.

I just have to keep telling myself that eventually my people will be trained.  They'll have the skills to work independently and take turns covering weekends, or even handling crisis and unusual cases.  I won't have to audit all their work forever.  I won't spend all day every day answering questions or guiding people through things, leaving my own work for after hours.  Every time I managed to find the time to document and formally establish a process is a weight permanently off my shoulders.  It will get better with time and I just have to grit my teeth through this initial stage.  But damn there's still a long fucking way to go.

[itisnotlogical]

I'm off from my last day of work in about two and a half hours. Now that the moment's approaching, I'm having mixed feelings. I love the people here a lot, they've been my best friends the past year and some months. But I gotta try and follow my dreams, at least for a little bit, and I can't do that and pull nine- and ten-hour graveyard shifts every night at the same time.

[scrdest]

The reason I bring up comparison to hunter-gatherer life is that at least you can hunt and scavenge.  In the modern world, everything is owned, monitored, and controlled.  The consequence for not accepting the circumstances I'm complaining about are you don't have access to anything, even space to exist in -- in other words, a situation worse than life as a primitive hunter-gatherer.

Only insofar as there's far fewer people around. If everyone woke up tomorrow discovering space magic or whatever teleported everyone to an untouched Earth and erased all memories of technology, it would very quickly cease to not be owned and controlled - not monitored, but that's only for want of monitoring technology.

US population density is around 35 people per square kilometer - and that's below world average - and that means if you scattered everyone in the US equidistant to each other, your free space is under 100 meters in any direction. Even assuming everyone clumps into families of 2 parents + 3 kids (not far-fetched and gives a nice 7 families per km2) you get a total of 267 meters at most in one direction (between the opposite corners of your square) before you bump into an area some other family has to survive on. Not a whole lot.

When you have so goddamn many people in one place, resource ownership becomes a necessary evil, because paying someone is a marginally less bloody course of action than telling you and all your friends to go bash them and their friends' skulls in to acquire them and risk having done the same to you by some other guy.

Yeah, if you look at some societies, you have communal ownership of the land - but even then you have territorial conflicts, just between groups and not individuals. Ownership, in absence of an external source of force, amounts to the capability of the owner to chase off people nicking their stuff with a club. Even today, legal ownership is essentially a license to have the state send people to chase off people nicking your stuff with clubs, it's just that the club-wielders are not personally involved in the conflict.

So yeah, TL;DR if that's your problem, then it's not an issue with the society not being hunter-gatherer, it's the issue with the population being far too huge to support that kind of system.

[Arx]

For some reason, every program that relies on the installer downloading more stuff breaks on my laptop. This is becoming extremely irritating.

Edit: haah, unbroke it! This is satisfying.

Edit again: Exam stress and movie-style make-up combine to do a number on acne, wow.

[Jopax]

So I'm going out to see Ex Machina tonight, was kinda out of the blue since I found out the movie is screening nearby about an hour ago. Also managed to find some people willing to go see it with me. But then I started drawing and it's going really well and I need to leave in like ten minutes and ugh I just wanna stay home and draw for the rest of the evening because I haven't felt like this in a while aaaaaaa.

Somewhat related to that is that I asked my sister if she had any charcoal for me to borrow, she said no since she hasn't really done any arting in a while, to which my mother commented from he sides: "She's grown out of that phase, you seem to still be in kindergarden."

:V

[Spehss _]

Somewhat related to that is that I asked my sister if she had any charcoal for me to borrow, she said no since she hasn't really done any arting in a while, to which my mother commented from he sides: "She's grown out of that phase, you seem to still be in kindergarden."

:V

Yer mum sounds like a bit of a snarky bitch. :v

[Eric Blank]

Fucked up big at work last night, put someone's gas prepay on the wrong pump and someone else pumped it, then I panicked and didn't know what to do for the customer, the manager had to help me. End of the day my til is 30 dollars short or something.

And then later when she was chewing me out I broke down and cried. I wish to God I could control my emotions and reactions like a proper adult.

I am so going to get fired at this rate.

[SalmonGod]

So yeah, TL;DR if that's your problem, then it's not an issue with the society not being hunter-gatherer, it's the issue with the population being far too huge to support that kind of system.

This is true, but it's also not completely as simple as that.  It also has to do with everything being owned (especially if you interpret debt to its logical conclusion) by a minority of that overly large population.

[Rose]

Just finished reading the final Diskworld book.

[TheBiggerFish]

Just finished reading the final Diskworld book.

Ahem.  Discworld.
I want to, but have no monies on Amazon.

[IcyTea31]

Night of Ancient Fires. Feeling too depressed to attend.

Bonfires and fireworks are kind of boring when you think about it. Bleh.