They sell melatonin and passion flower extract next to the fish oil and multivitamins in the supermarket over here where I live - not sure why people think this is just an American thing

Yup - and given Dashi can have mushroom in it, you're not too far off either recipe wise either

I think people know, they just don't give a shit because they think they're entitled to have art and artists are arseholes for not giving them exactly what they want

When you put something out there, you allow for the possibility that people will see your work and incorporate it into their mental catalog of art and artistic process

...except when a person is doing it, they're doing their own thing to it. They take an idea or two and filter it through their own lens and stylise it

Think about it like this - when you do data scraping, you're still interpreting the results. You're looking at the data and going 'ok from this I can draw X and Y conclusions based on this and that'. AI art is like if we removed you from the process - we just shoved all the data into a black box and it goes ding "X is Y". If you asked it why that's so, it wouldn't be able to tell you. You can't see how it works so you have no idea if it's reasoning makes scientific sense. It would not be admissible in a paper.

If you pirate shit then you have no ground to stand on for complaining about AI training.

...don't most people kinda agree you don't pirate from small artists where piracy is actually hurting them? There's like, honour along thieves when it comes to piracy, and this is stepping all over the little guy who's actually hurt by this just to get your grubby little hands on something you think you're entitled to

The reason why umami is the word is because the scientists studying the flavour were Japanese so that's what their paper used to name it. I think the term spread around in the food science world before actually making it down to the layman

Back in the very early 1900s, the Imperial Japanese University was trying to figure out what exactly the 'core' flavour of Dashi actually was, and how to make something that tastes only of that to serve as a building block (like how sugar is only sweet and citric acid is only sour). That flavour is umami, and that building block chemical is MSG. Kikunae Ikeda, the head researcher for the project, would then go on to found Ajinomoto using MSG as it's base product, which is now a massive food conglomerate in Japan. It's name is actually the Japanese word for MSG

I mean if you tend to plug things in at the same computer a lot it's pretty easy to always plug things in right the first time, even when not looking because you just kinda know what way it's meant to be. And laptops usually have all theirs pointing the same way so you know one you know them all. If something has text on it, it's usually oriented in such a way that when plugged in you can read it. Or they have a little face and you know which way the face is meant to be facing

I have a similar "power" and while I'm not flawless, it's only really new or unfamiliar devices/computers that trip me up. Or plugs that don't actually have any identifying features and/or unusual ones

Obviously it probably isn't enough if you're in a small room where your suitcase is next to your bed, but for clothes you could try putting them in a vacuum bag (as in one of those plastic bags that you seal up and then suck all the air out with a vacuum)

I do it anyways because it means way more space in your suitcase but that would probably contain any bugs that are in your clothes

A more meta one - the Wikipedia list of Lamest edit wars is very entertaining. Entries include: is Hummus Israeli or an illegally occupied Palestinian dip, asking snakes what they think of the Israeli-Palenstine conflict, is 3 always an odd number?, Michael Palin vs Sarah Palin, and should we put a picture of a human bumhole in the article for anus and if so which one?

And why not fix whatever is keeping trees from growing, and then grow trees

I woild guess because that would require you to completely tear up the bitumen and anything underneath it like pipes and wires in order to make room for the roots. Trees are pretty big things y'know and it's not just what's above the surface that matters. You could put a tank like this in say, a train station platform that's raised well above the ground or on a building

Also a tub of algae isn't going to become a health hazard if it gets sick or infested and won't take decades to establish itself

In Norway and it's definitely becoming more of a thing. Growing up I never did it, but now I run out of lollies because there's so many kids out and about.

On the flip side, Norway does have their own Halloween style celebration where you go around dressed up and demand lollies from people door to door (julebukk - I'm not sure what the exact date for it is, and I think it varies depending on where you are, but it takes place between boxing day and up to and on new year's Eve) which I've definitely noticed has been declining the last few years. Maybe kids want to celebrate Halloween more than julebukk? Probably because on Halloween you can just, show up and demand shit while on julebukk you actually have to prepare a little song and whatnot.

Shame because like, julebukk is a) actually traditional and b) has some weird ass lore behind it. Like it's something about appeasing the Christmas goat (who may or may not be a demon saint Nicholas personally went down to hell to beat the shit out of until he agreed to help him)

A great Australian one that doesn't involve spiders or cunts is "tell 'im he's dreamin'", usually said in a real broad accent (you can change the pronouns around what more matters is the way you say it). Usually used whenever someone's asking too much money for something but can also be used for when someone's asking for too much in general and basically means "are you fucking kidding me that's way too expensive". It's from a great movie called The Castle. It also gave us the saying "[this is going] straight to the pool room" meaning "shit this is really nice thanks" (because the pool room is where you put your trophies and whatnot) but I think that's a little less common.

On the other side of the globe, Norway uses "Texas" to mean "crazy weird shit". There's also "kamelåså" which generally means "unintelligible (like a Danish person)" which is from this great comedy sketch about Denmark that's so good NRK decided they had to translate it into English just so people could make fun of Danish internationally (The untranslated bits are just danish sounding gibberish)

You can put mad Infront of all the cunts that don't have adjectives already to make them even more extreme.

"This mad cunt" for when your mate's done something really out there while "mad dog cunt" is real fucking bad for example

Alcohol, still allowed to advertise every where

Actually alcohol advertising is pretty limited in Europe due to EU wide regulations and some countries have even stricter rules, ranging from "not in public spaces" to straight up "no alcohol advertising at all"

Also I would point out alcohol is a big cusine thing and has been for centuries and you're nuts if you're upset schnapps are a thing but not strawberry cigarettes. Also like, flavoured vapes totally exist?

The closest thing to what you're talking about is grafting, but that's a specific thing that only works on certain species and I don't think can "glue" two entire halves of a tree back together, maybe just a branch at the most if you're very careful and lucky

It's why if you plant a seed from a random apple from the supermarket, you're very probably not going to get a tree that produces that apple. Most commerical fruit trees (including ones from your local garden centre) tend to have a bottom half that's hardy and resistant, and then a top half which was "glued" on that actually provides the fruit you want. The bottom half controls the genetic material in the seed, but the top half controls what the fruit will look like.

On the other hand, you can totally glue a snapped cactus back together, provided it hasn't been too long and the two halves aren't too damaged.

...now? Bud, they've done this for ages, both on mobile and desktop how the hell have you not noticed it? It used to be even more obvious on desktop because they'd put it up as the first item in the 'related videos', but they got rid of that so now you don't know what it's going to start autoplaying until it happens, which is mildly annoying when you're listening to music and can't see what's up next

Congratulations you're now a snake

Read the article and then the actual paper's abstract - this isn't like a mind controlled thing guys, it's controlled with your foot. Not quite a doc oc thing like the article makes it out to be

... I'm making a reference/joke to a specific book, written by the same guy who's responsible for the "imagine Sisyphus happy" quote, where the main character does go "fuck doing chores they suck"

I feel like whoever translated Lem's sillier works definitely deserves a massive hand because oh my god there is so much wordplay like this and it all carries over to english really well. Like all the drug names and made up words and Tarantoga's entire three page long ramble about 'futuology'/predictive etymology which I guess had to be entirely rewritten in order to work in English in The Futurlogical Congress

I don't think we've had a single good adaption of an Isaac Asimov story - Foundation the show is very clearly not Foundation the series and I Robot is...not even worth acknowledging and infuriates me because like, if they wanted to do a murder mystery about Asimov's robots and call into question his "laws", Caves of Steel is right there and it's great. I'd love a good adaption of Caves of Steel but nooo lets all adapt the nigh impossible to adapt because it's dense as all fuck Foundation instead because that's the story everyone knows.

Also because you've mentioned kids media - How to Train your Dragon. The original series was this fun and interesting world where dragons have existed along humanity since the beginning and were our friends and work animals and the main character was a legitimately weak kid who was more interested in being a biologist and was legitimately pretty good at it, being able to actually talk to them and he had friends and Toothless was this highly entertaining small sassy green thing who was like, the world's equivalent of a house sparrow. And then DreamWorks took the title and base concept of "dragons and vikings" and threw everything else out for a generic movie with a generic protangonist in a generic fantasy setting. The dragons are now big and scary but the main character goes out to prove that they're not big and scary and Toothless is now just a giant dumb cat who's the world's equivalent of an invisible fire breathing polar bear but it's ok because Hiccup is special and they replaced the fun gremlin Kamikazi with the generic female love interest character who's trait is being better than the boys. But because everyone adores it we're never going to get an actual adaption that actually follows the books are we?

Also Solaris deserves a good adaption that isn't actively hostile to anyone who isn't interested in avant garde Soviet cinema. Stanislav Lem's one of my favourite authors and because of that fucking film it's legitimately hard to recomend Solaris the book to people because they're like "oh I tried watching it and it was really boring and confusing and overly arthouse?"

Also also I haven't actually seen them but like, is there any adaption of Wuthering Heights that's actually like, accurate? Because I've read the book and every time I talk to someone who's only seen the movie or TV adaptions it feels like they're talking about a completely different story that's just like, "Austen but kinda deranged" and not the batshit anti-Austen sturm und drang trainwreck that is the actual story (and also they apparently kinda ignore the last third of the book with Cathy 2 and Linton and Hareton?)