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It can fall under the same umbrella. Unrealistic beauty standards being set by the “rich”, who some people look up to as role models. If there were something that you could do that you might be able to afford, like botox or lip fillers, that you believe would make you more beautiful, closer to your role model… If that sort of thing matters to you, then yeah, you might go for it. I can even take the same analogy of watches above, because there are definitely cheap imitation versions of the gaudy diamond-encrusted ones.

I was sort of thinking more like this though with respect to extreme alterations…

It’s definitely a status thing, but I think the extreme it’s been taken to has more to do with an erosion and warping of reasonable beauty standards than anything. More of an act of “because I can” than anything. I think a lot of the people who you look at and think “what the fuck” actually think they are making themselves more beautiful and attractive. I don’t think someone who has everything and can get whatever they want would purposely make themselves look grotesque, but I’m neither rich, nor a psychologist, so maybe I’m totally wrong…

It’s kind of like how there’s a gaudy stupid looking hyper-expensive version of everything, like those giant hideous watches with diamonds encrusted on every surface… Someone think’s it’s beautiful or shows status, but most of us probably just think it looks stupid.

The Bogdanoffification has been happening for a while…

Pub cheese would like a word.

Also, I think you might be hard-pressed to find anyone who would consider sugary cake sponge to be “bread”. (Something something Ireland’s supreme court ruled that Subway’s bread isn’t legally bread for tax purposes due to its high sugar content)

It’d be like layering up some sourdough slices with sweet sugary icing slathered between them, most people probably wouldn’t call that a cake.

It wasn’t super relevant to the story, but yeah, I could just browse the files right on their PC, definitely a “Not intending to share it for free” kind of situation, completely devoid of any authentication or security.

Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network… I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own “secured” network lol. I’m fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.

I think it was just an odd way of making him seem more human and normal. Also the fact that he doesn’t mention anything about it also happening in his previous lives leaves an interesting open question that could either lend credence or hinder his whole backstory… At least that’s how I interpreted it.

All in all, though… one of the less awkward and more impactful sex scenes in a science-y book, which is much better than the usual ones I remember because they’re terrible and awkward and don’t fit in with the surrounding plot lol

It’s ironic that I have an anecdote that I recently read that feels very fitting here.

Permutation City by Greg Egan. Post-human digital consciousness via uploaded brain-scan becomes possible, and there are interesting questions about how the “sense of self” is derived, and how much someone can change themselves before they are no longer the same person. There are many different characters that deal with a newfound immortality in different ways, and either embrace, or shun, the ability to change themselves at a whim to fit their needs or wants. It’s a very prominent part of the overall plot and is prevalent right up until the last sentence.

Also, separate from that, I have the exact opposite feeling as OP. When I’m reading a book, I feel like my world is expanded in new directions. I tend to see certain things from slightly different perspectives in the context of what I’m reading. I’ve been reading Greg Egan’s entire body of work (after reading Diaspora and absolutely fucking loving it), and some insight and thoughts I had about the book Quarantine actually pushed me to make positive changes in my life that have been really hugely impactful, and I don’t think I would have had the courage or drive to make them had I not been thinking about my life in such an abstract manner.

Costco bought RAC in a stunning buyout in 2437 after Costco’s CEO Harambe Memelord Disney Jr. offered RAC’s CEO Squiggy John John John John Johnson a 2-for 1 deluxe latte coupon and an extra big-ass fry.

I would unironically love if there were enough people in my life that also wanted to live that way to make it viable… Also the lack of functioning payphones these days would be challenging.

The place (at least in the USA) where I’ve found the most functional-looking payphones was actually Hawaii… And even then, so many are decaying and non-functional. I’ve had a silly idea to go back and just roam around and photograph as many as I can.

It’s funny, I was JUST hankering to take my SW out to browse the airwaves, and then I log on to see this post.

I have a Halicrafters S-119, still runs on tubes. Picks up 2-16MHz.

I already spent some time rummaging around for my antenna, but I can’t find it and don’t have a spool of wire handy, so I’ll need to work on that. Last time I had it set up was a couple years and 2 moves ago.

That solidifies my suspicion that it’s a standard Android feature… I also don’t get many spam calls, and only distinctly remember performing that action on this most recent phone.

Based on OP’s comment “…I always assume that rejecting the call outright will also be detected as a deliberate action and therefore a person is on the other side…”, I figured maybe they didn’t know about that feature and/or have an iPhone and they somehow don’t behave that way.

I also miss the old days of Android… I got a smartphone specifically to play Pokemon go in 2016 lol, up until that point I was still rocking one of those Casio Gzone indestructible flip-phones. Walked into WalMart, bought the cheapest LG whatever phone I could find (Android 5 I think?), caught a bazillion Pokemon. I remember buying multiple batteries for longer sessions, because you could just pop the back off and replace it on the go.

They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they’re not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don’t think you can even install programs like that.

I’ll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!

I don’t know if it’s a universal thing, I’ve never bothered to research further. On my several-year-old Oneplus phone (Android), if I single-press the power button, it mutes the ringer and vibrate but the call doesn’t end or reject (I could still then go and answer or reject the call normally, it doesn’t affect the user interface, just the ringer/vibrate). That’s how I’ve been “rejecting” unknown calls for a long time. A simple, elegant solution that doesn’t give the caller any hints.

I have no idea if it’s a QNAP-wide issue, or just some specific models, I haven’t bothered to do that much research. I’m guessing that the discs WOULD spin down if you have that option selected if they weren’t constantly being pinged a couple times a minute. That constant pinging is the part I can’t seem to track down.

An excerpt from a post I was reading while researching this sums it up prettt well: “700 posts about spindown/sleep/standby not working in the QNAP HDD Spin Down Forum. No one seems to be able to resolve it. Qnap clearly couldn’t care less.”

The only solution that I’ve found that seems to work is to install some other operating system on it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a turn-key NAS, and is slightly outside my comfort zone right now. I just ordered a kill-a-watt, so I’ll see how much power it’s taking with/without drives and go from there if it’s worth my time to dive into an OS swap, or building a custom rig.

If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I’ve been searching for months and haven’t found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I’d like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD’s, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I’m assuming it’s some log being written to, but it’s not anything visible in the file system, and I haven’t been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.

I’m tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig. Other than the disk spinning constantly, the TS-462 does everything I need perfectly.