I totally lost my ability to tell whether or not I was hungry. I don’t keep a regular meal schedule anyway so it was hard for my body to adjust back, I think.

32 hours after making a dumb bet. It messed up my appetite for months afterwards. I got $20 though. Not worth it.

That’s a strange assumption to make. No, they are not all taxi drivers, shop owners, or carriers of anything especially heavy, to my knowledge.

USA, Bangladesh, Austria, Singapore, Japan

I’m extremely skeptical that tens of millions of people, a huge percentage of the working population, make any significant income from TikTok. Do you have a source for that?

I mostly agree although rather than saying author intention is a vital aspect of art I would say it can be, but that the raw, uninformed experience is almost always more important

So often I have friends read a book or watch a movie and say “I don’t really get it, it doesn’t make sense, I didn’t really like it” and then some time later they’ll come back and say “actually, I read the Wikipedia article about it and now I understand. The author actually intended it to be about [xyz]”
Um, what? If those themes and ideas were not evident in the original story, then what does it matter what the author intended? Surely the author also intended to write a cohesive and understandable story (and evidently failed, for you). Surely the author intended to convey those themes in the story itself. You didn’t enjoy the movie, you enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about the movie.
If author intention actually matters to non-meta media analysis, then that totally undermines anything the author actually does to convey the ideas in the work itself.
If (to make a specific example) my friend watches Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and concludes only from the Wikipedia article about it that it’s abstractly about Oshii’s loss of religion, then that totally ignores everything in the movie that does or doesn’t convey those themes just to create a shallow interpretation based on what the author was allegedly trying to do.

I don’t know if I’m remembering the plot correctly but I think you can control the actions of only the target individual and only in a way that’s reasonably possible

Yeah but it depends.
An elementary school near me recently replaced their chest-height chain-link fence with a 10ft steel bar fence with spikes on top. There’s some benefits to a fence, but the spikes just make it seem menacing. And I guess more abstractly, it communicates that school is a dangerous place that’s walled-off from the rest of the world rather than a place that’s just like any other part of society. This is in the USA, I should mention, so maybe the cynical message is more accurate.

Blade Runner.

Maybe it was more impressive when it came out, but I watched it for the first time a few months ago and it was shockingly below my expectations for the reputation it has. Confusing plot, forgettable characters, a (very cool! yet) shallow, uninteresting setting.
I had heard that famous “tears in the rain” monologue some time before watching the movie and thought “wow, that was awesome. I can’t imagine how much better it is with all the depth and context that the movie will add.” Nah, it’s from a character who we know basically nothing about and comes out of nowhere with no connection to any part of the story-- if anything, the context of the movie detracts from the cool monologue by turning it into a “what is this guy even talking about” moment.
Thematically it had potential with questioning the line between the humans and human-like robots, but they don’t go anywhere interesting with it. When it’s a theme that’s been explored by everything from Ghost in the Shell to Fallout 4 to Asimov, I’m gonna need at least a molecule of interesting development to happen before my jaw drops.
2/10, not recommended.

Are they called shelled peanuts because they have their shells? or are they called shelled peanuts because they’ve been shelled, unshelling them? It’s literally ironic…

Yeah I don’t expect so many people to have the same opinion but for me I didn’t really like anything in 2023. My personal “golden age” is 2006-2011 and I can pull up any year at random (say, 2010) and find a bunch of personal favorites (second season of K-On!, best season of Hidamari Sketch, The Tatami Galaxy, my beloved B-Gata H-Kei) and other stuff I think I might enjoy (Katanagatari, PSG, Kuragehime, etc.)
Whereas the only things I liked in 2023 were the Hibike! Euphonium movie and (to a much milder degree) Frieren.

Probably not a widespread belief, but yeah 2023 is the worst year for anime imo

I think of 2023 as the worst year for anime. Not a single good show out of what I watched and the ones that I heard were good I’m just not interested in (Jujutsu Kaisen, Zom 100, Bleach, etc).
Compare 2023 to any single season from 2006-2011. So many classics compared to… Frieren? and that’s about it.

Not that I’m upset about it, there’s enough gems anywhere from late 70s though ~2017 to keep me occupied indefinitely

No loot, just 3 exp

I’ve never seen this before and I don’t know what it’s from

I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.

I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.

Do you mean English loanwords or when people switch back & forth?

Your thumb is an arrow pointing at where you want the screw to go. After you curl your fingers, your fingers are arrows showing the direction to turn the screw

In elementary school I read this book called “Flawed Dogs” and it was unforgettably wild. It’s about a dog who escapes some kinda confinement by jumping over a barbed wire fence and loses his back legs in the process, and then joins a dog gang and does dog gang activities. Also one of the dog gang members was a cat in disguise.
Honestly I should see if I can find a copy of it and reread it. It was pretty wild.

edit: I looked it up and maybe I have a lot of the details wrong but it’s still pretty wild

Probably my favorite anime
Also, it was directed by Hideaki Anno (Evangelion, Gunbuster)