I made a promise to myself that no matter what, I would love my children. It’s not my life, it is their life to live and find happiness and fullfillement. And if my children are happy, I am happy. Nothing more, nothing less.

I’m missing your point.

I paid exactly for what I was looking for, which was an affordable rugged phone, with hardware adequate for my daily needs for a few years.

Until today, I haven’t had any issue with the phone.

So I’m having a hard time understanding your remark.

Blackview

I sometimes float the idea in my brain to learn how to code. If I ever come to it, I want to debate and discuss my work with another human. Not a machine.

Personal preference.

I won’t hold my breath on it.

Up until this minute, AI has produced plentiful examples of how it can produce anything but good code.

I’d rather have a developer writing software, slowly, because they have an intelectual itch and want to try and see the outcome of their idea than the proverbial army of monkeys furiously typing away.

Nothing really deserves that much attention from you.

Reading that comment, the words you chose to express how you view reality, pains me as a human being.

I can’t imagine what you have been through in order to be weighed down with such a bleak view of life and the world.

We are, actually. We didn’t ask to exist. It was forced onto us by a cruel god that thought it would be neat to make humans.

We aren’t owed nothing.

I’m going to take a hit and say I made a poor job at explaining myself and clarify that, for the creed I mentioned, the creator entity did not made humans. What the creator entity did was set off the unfolding of reality as we perceive it: the Universe. Humans contained within it are off shoots of causality.

There was never a direct nor directed intention to create humanity, thus, nothing is owed to it.

The premise is that anything to exist is better than nothing. If the Universe was to be populated with barren rocks and flaming balls of matter - which is, mostly - without humanity to perceive it that creation mythos was already fullfilled.

If we think back to the dumpster baby, god created a child and threw them in a dumpster. For fun. It doesn’t get to wash its hands and say “I don’t owe them anything, it’s up to them to survive.” It’s still responsible for creation and it is derelict in its duty.

That premise is the premise of the christian, islamic, jewish, and all other self appointed omnipotent creating entities. Those entities claim to have created humanity, in their image, to ocuppy a world they devised for that specific purpose. A world created in such a way that, nonetheless, humans make use of their own agency to tamper and distort.

I’m not a believer but that is the short and dirty version of those myths: the world was perfect, until humans decided they weren’t completely happy with it. Which leads us back to pointing fingers at the creator, for making a poor job.

This is a circular discussion.

Who is responsible for birth defects?

Biology, genetics and environmental causes. And poor judgment from the parents. So, it depends.

For natural disaster?

I guess… physics, primordially? Followed by stuborness, shortsightness and stupidity of humans?

For sickness?

Virus, bacteria, exposure, malnourishment, and others?

These things aren’t choices […]

A good part is outside our capability to act upon, I will gladly grant you that. But there are parts where we can in fact influence the outcome.

[…] and we aren’t responsible for them, […]

The moment any individual realizes something shoul not be in such a way, that individual can take responsibility to avoid or mitigate it.

[…] they happen because god created a cruel world for us to suffer and die in. God created the dumpster and threw us in.

At best, reality is indeferent to what happens to an individual, a species, a planet, a star system or even a galaxy.

We have been setting our course in reality from the moment we achieved sentience and consciousness. We find things cruel, unfair, whatever, because they do not favour us. We’re owed nothing for existing. We take a debt towards each other in helping exist in such reality.

There are no gods nor higher powers to shift blame here. We’re here, now, and we have to deal with it. We can choose to try to make this world better for others or allow it to follow its own devises or even actively make it worse.

Individual agency. The stage is set: write and enact your own play.

You got my atention. Explain your point of view, please.

If such happens it is entirely on the responsability and choice of who did. No cop out, no resorting to a scripture to excuse actions, no easy forgiveness.

Tell me you are a broken human being without saying it.

I’m honestly sad for knowing you take life to such regard but there is more to reality and life than our own small sliver of experience and understanding.

I once read about an african creed that states the original creator of reality created it because it found something existing was better than only void - in the sense of absolute nothing - existing, and thus set what we perceived as reality into building itself and let it to its own devise, to never again interfere or meddle with it, to then disappear.

It’s a convoluted way to state: deal with your own mess; I just set the stage, you write and act your own play.

It’s a good way to deny people of the easy cop out.

The ancestors part always brings a smile to my face.

1. they were young, once, hence, they had sex, masturbated, etc.

You being alive is proof enough of the later. No room for judgement there: they’ve been there, done that.

2. the entire “cult of the ancestors” starts on the present.

If the person paying respect to past figures is concerned over such petty parts of life, that person is concerned over the wrong things.

3. you will, theoretically, become an ancestor one day.

Will you be bothered over petty things or be concerned with your descendants living well and happy, like you wanted, tried and wished for others?

I do enjoy the notion of teverence towards the ancestors. It’s like having a personal roster from which to choose and say “not doing what they did” or “they had worst and made it”. Or a personal fan club.

Laic

I don’t care about religion or beliefs. It’s irrelevant to me in my day to day life.

I have a personal code of ethic, developed through personal experience and reading several philosophy proposals, taking from each what I find useful and discarding the rest.

This is going to be a blast.

LMDE or plain Mint. Or just go for Debian.

It’s yours. Every single thing you can fix is one less thing you need to fix and adds towards your home being more yours.

I bought a house almost 100 years old, badly upkept throughout the years (someone thought it was a good idea to cover wood with cement without making sure it would not wick moisture), severely modified (it was divided into 5 separate apartments) and altered (I have a shower stall inside a bedroom!), it has a lot of work to be done and I sure have too litle time but I’ll be damned it’s mine!

Good for you, then.

Standard chili around my part of the world is this one.

Medium strong.

I’ve read you guys have a too sweet baseline for flavours, due to the overwhelming presence of corn syrup in everything.

Iberian cuisine, as in Portuguese and Spanish (fuck those guys; they can’t make proper bread even if you teach them!), can be spicy but adding heat to a dish serves to accentuate the underlying flavours.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a simple roasted chicken with lemon and mussels.

The chicken is just prepared by seasoning the chicken with coarse salt and stuffing it with a whole lemon, with the ends cut, and roasting in the oven. With the chicken ready, you just take the lemon from inside the bird and squeeze it over. Base flavours are lemon and salt, with the chicken fat binding everything together. You should complain the meat is a bit under salted; it means you are actually tasting it.

The mussels are prepared with white wine, salt and garlic. The garlic is chopped and slightly fried, just until fragrant, in olive oil. The mussels are thrown in, lightly salted, tossed in the base, over high heat, then the wine added and the pot covered to steam the mussels until all are open. Or can just sprinkle salt over the mussels on your plate. You want to taste the mussel.

These are basic dishes any child can eat. Not too extreme flavours. Adding a chopped chilli to the mussels base and a chilli inside the chicken will add a sligh note of heat to the dishes, embolden the overall flavours, but you will still be getting the base flavours after swallowing, lingering in your mouth.

Food should leave a memory. It’s supposed to be flavourful, not painful.