• Are you:

  • afraid of:
  • going outside at night

  No, but I find being outside in the dark depressing, like in a deep, dreadful, existential way, but only subtly, like it's really there yet it barely consciously registers. For similar reasons I find it really depressing when the sun's going down.
  - the dark

  I'm kind of afraid of the dark, but only if it's absolutely pitch black with no source of light whatsoever. Because what makes me afraid of the dark isn't what may be lurking there, but the fact that I can't tell whether my eyes still work. This used to be much worse when I was younger. One time I cried all night in a totally dark motel room, much to the frustration of my aunt..
  - religious

No, but I'm spiritualist/mystic/New Age/always interested in the metaphysical, paranormal, parapsychological..

I was Christian when I was growing up, because my mom was and is a fundamentalist Christian and sent me to Christian schools for elementary school and junior high, then eventually I started questioning various things about Christianity that didn't make sense to me, such as the idea that Jesus could pay for our sins...I mean, how can guilt be a commodity? Either one should be punished for their evil because they did it, or they shouldn't, and if they shouldn't, then why couldn't God, being omni-powerful, just choose to forgive us without having to sacrifice his son? So, I apostatized, but it took me a year or two to fully do it due to the fear of eternal damnation.

• Can you:
  • cook

Barely. I can cook eggs, grilled cheese sandwiches, and spaghetti (I throw in a whole jar of Classico pesto in with the spaghetti sauce, and it's delicious). If I looked up how or asked somebody I'm sure I could cook various meats or anything else there's a recipe for.

• dance

I can't do any "official" dances, but I can dance around like a maniac, intensely and elaborately, when I want to. I've never done this in front of anyone, though.

• draw

No. Well, I've drawn a few things in my life, not creatively, just realistic drawings of things I saw in front of me, and I did it pretty well. I could never draw like manga style or whatever.

• play:

  • any:
    • sports

  No, I hate sports. In junior high I would stay in the back of the line for softball in PE and hope to God the coach didn't notice that I wasn't taking my turns.
  - baseball
  - the:
  - guitar

  No, if I were to play an instrument, it wouldn't be a guitar; it's too weird and arbitrary. Even though I know it should be the guitar because girls love that sh*t.
  - piano

  No, but I took a piano class once and did pretty well. I never practiced at home like we were supposed to, and the teacher said I was doing better than everyone else in the class.
  - saxophone

  No, that's gotta be hell on the lips. Also you have to keep your cheeks full of air, and I noticed when I was a kid that every time I puffed my cheeks full of air it would feel like some air got in between my flesh behind the backs of my cheeks and it would be painful.
  - trumpet

  No, but trumpets sound nice af. Check out Gloria in Excelsis Deo played by Maurice André, it's sublime. It sounds like the trumpeteer is trailblazing on the forefront of consciousness/life/divinity in some angelic space.

• ski

No, I tried skiing once and I just couldn't see how people are able to do it. The skis were constantly getting crisscrossed or diverging away from each other. So eventually I just traded them in for a snowboard, and I liked that much better. I never went down the actual mountain, though, I just stayed on the bunny run. Which is probably a good thing, because I had just figured the way you're supposed to ski is to go straight down the mountain as fast as you can...only years later did I find out that you're supposed to zig-zag down the mountain to slow down your speed.

• speak a foreign language

No, but I took three years of Honors French in high school. But I've forgotten almost all of it. I also took a semester of Spanish in college, and during that time at a job I heard two people conversing in Spanish and I actually understood the entire conversation because they happened to be talking about things we learned in class, it was amazing. (I've since forgotten all of my Spanish, too, of course.)

• swim

Only doggy paddle, I don't get how people do whatever stroke it is that comprises normal swimming; I just sink. I can also keep my head like a foot or two above the water just by kicking my sleep.

• yodel

WTF no. But check out Walmart yodeling kid

• Do:

  • you:
  • have:
    • a nickname

  No, I don't like any of the nicknames for my name. But when I was younger I was called Nicky. I changed it to my official name, Richard, when I started at a new school in 5th grade, because I was afraid the kids would make fun of me for having an effeminate name. And not to mention that my last name is Nichols, so I was Nicky Nichols. I probably never should have changed it, though, I think I like Nicky better. Richard is so...stiff. But at least it's one of the very few male names I wouldn't absolutely hate having.
  - any:
  - siblings

  Yes, one of them is 14 years younger than me. I'm the oldest child.

  - pets

  Way too many cats. Only two of them are really mine, though, as in they live in my room.

  I told my parents many years ago they'd better spay the ones we had or it would get out of control, and they didn't listen to me, they didn't want to spend the money. Now they spend probably that much on cat food every week, and we currently have three litters of kittens. And we can't spay all the cats because some of them are feral and we can't catch them.
  - like:
  - muffins

  Eh, they're okay. I tend to come to the brink of choking to death every time I eat one. =P And often when I eat them they're the pre-made kind that probably have enough preservatives and other artificial ingredients in them to give Jesus cancer.
  - social networks

  Yes, I like Twitter, Facebook and Retrospring. And yes, Twitter is noticeably worse now that Elon has taken over. On Facebook I follow probably a dozen philosophy groups. On Twitter I follow a lot of special, unique, unusual people.
  - the place where you live

  You mean the house, or the neighborhood? I like that I never have to contend with snow or ice or bundle up just to leave the house, or risk frostbite or dying in a car if it breaks down on the way to somewhere, and I like that there are places to go late at night (though there used to be a lot more 24-hour places before Covid; now there's just one bakery) and everywhere you could want to go is within a few minutes driving distance, and not to mention that a publicly accessible pier to the ocean is within walking distance of my house, and I like that we live in a spacious $1.2M house (except that it's filthy and the cats ruin everything so it's worth more like $700K), but the one thing I hate about this city is that a good proportion of the people don't even speak English. This is a US city we're talking about.
  - to:
  - travel

  Eh, I could take it or leave it. It's kind of inconvenient, and the long hours driving are boring, and I'm always stressed out because driving is ridiculously dangerous--it's insane that this is something we as a society actually do.

  As for traveling by myself, I could never, ever, ever do that. I wouldn't dare even think about attempting it. I'm very worldily incompetent. I won't even take the bus by myself in my own neighborhood. I don't even like walking across intersections, I never know the right thing to do and I mess up and cars beep at me. =p

  - sing out loud when no one else is around

  I used to sing in the shower sometimes, the acoustics in there really make me sound good. I'd sing part of Safety Dance and one or two other songs which I can't remember now. I think one of them was Windmills of Your Mind.
  - video games

  Yes, I like racing games and Mario games. And a couple of fighting games. And flight simulators though I never actually use them. But I'm looking forward to playing MSFS again once our house finally gets 1Gbps fiber-optic internet. I actually bought an RTX 4090 mainly because my RTX 2080 Ti seemed underpowered for the latest MSFS. I bought GTA 5 and an Xbox controller for it (after buying a PS5 controller and not being able to get it to work), but I've yet to get past the mission you have to accomplish to play it. I probably wouldn't enjoy the game anyway.
  Here's a full list of my favorite games: Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario 64, every Mario Kart, F-Zero X, MRC: Multi-Racing Championship, every Super Smash Bros., Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario World, http://BeamNG.drive, every Clay Fighter, and SSX Tricky.
  - prefer to:
  - browse the Internet on your phone, computer, or another device

  Definitely my computers, cell phones are a PITA. And I don't own and never have owned a tablet.
  - live in a house or a flat

  Definitely a house. You can play loud music without worrying about it disturbing the people next to you; you have a yard; you'll never have to worry about somebody else's plumbing causing your own drains to back up or water to leak into your apartment, etc.; no noisy upstairs neighbors to keep you up at night; you don't have to take the stairs or elevator every time you leave or come back; etc.
  - take baths or showers

  I haven't taken a bath since I was a kid.
  - watch movies or read books

  Watch movies, though some things you just can't learn from movies, for example I'm on my third book on quantum mechanics right now. I used to read a lot of sci-fi when I was young (mostly Ben Bova, I think), but nowadays I only like non-fiction. I've always especially liked autobiographies, books by autists about their experiences with autism (Donna Williams and Tito Mukhopadhyay; Nobody Nowhere by Donna Williams was the book that got me into reading in general, it was the first book I read cover-to-cover maybe besides a few mandatory readings for school), and Neale Donald Walsch's works.
  - recycle

  Yes, of course.
  - think that late is better than never

  Umm...yes? It depends on the context, of course.
  - want:
  - more:
  - friends

  Idk, I think I have enough. Though maybe I'd like to talk to the ones I do have a little more often, and maybe even meet them in person. But as for making more friends, I'm veeery picky about whom I'd like to be friends with. All the friends I have now I made at least 24 years ago. They're probably ones in millions.

  - money

  Well duh.

  - things than you need
  - old times back

  Yes, no, maybe...they were both better and worse.
  - to know more:
  - about:
  - history

  Hell no.

  - new inventions

  I think I hear about new inventions enough. Though it would be nice to hear about all the good ones just to add them to my bookmarks or saved pages, in hopes that someday they'll go toward ensuring those great inventions don't slip through the cracks and get lost in time.

  - your:
  - future

  Hell yeah I'd like to know more about my future. But then, I think I already pretty much know how it's going to go down.

  - relatives

  Eh, I guess it would be nice to know more about my two of my cousins' psychic experiences. And it would be cool to fully understand what my cousin who makes six figures programming actually does.
  - your:
  - friends:
  - know:
  - [much, too much]:
  - about:
  - you
  Much? Maybe. Too much? Neh, not really.
  - your:
  - family
  Much? Eh. Too much? No.
  - friends
  Much? Not really.
  - hobbies
  Much? Not sure.
  - life
  Much? Some of them do. Too much? I'd say probably not enough.
  - like:
  - muffins

  I already answered this.

  - social networks

  Answered this.

  - video games

  Answered this.

  - you the way you are

  Yes and no. I'm far from what I'd want to be, but on the other hand, I'm enough exactly what I'd want to be that I'd never want to be anybody else. But...I do have crippling social anxiety and social ineptitude that make me miserable. That part I didn't choose about myself.

• Have you ever:

  • been:
  • caught:
    • cheating

  No. But one time the professor of a class in college, I can't even remember the subject now, sat directly behind me the whole time we were taking a test...I think he might have suspected I'd been cheating since my grades were so good. Another time a philosophy professor made me see him before class to prove to him that I wrote the essay I wrote because he thought it was too good. =P
  - doing things you shouldn't do

  Yes, at least things society says we shouldn't do--whether they're actually bad things to do is completely another matter.
  - mistaken for someone else

  Not that I remember, though one guy mistook me for a lady when he saw me from behind. I was thin and and short and had long, wavy hair.
  - to:
  - Australia
  - Austria
  - Brazil
  - Bulgaria
  - China
  - Czechia
  - Finland
  - France
  - Germany
  - Italy
  - Japan
  - Mexico
  - Monaco
  - Norway
  - Poland
  - Russia
  - Slovakia
  - Slovenia
  - Sweden
  - Switzerland
  - Ukraine
  - Venezuela
  - the:
  - USA
  - United Kingdom

  Yes to France, Norway, Germany, and the USA.
  - had an accident

Yes. One day I was getting into my friend's car in the passenger side, and I was so unhappy with my life and hopeless that I didn't put my seatbelt on (practically the only time I ever didn't) and I had the thought "I don't care if I die", and I purposely allowed it to sink down into my subconscious so that it would manifest. Then sometime during the drive, my friend sped up to go through a yellow light, and at the same time an old person driving in the opposite direction turned left right in front of us at the yellow light. I could tell we were going to collide, and I said, "Oh, shit", then we hit. Both cars were totaled, my forehead went through the windshield, and glass cut so close to my eye that it cut my eyebrow and severed my eyelid but didn't get my eye. Two of my front teeth were broken, my face was full glass, and I was bleeding profusely all over my Air Rescue T-shirt that I got from my dad. The old man was eventually wheeled away in a stretcher.

At the hospital, a doctor or nurse tried to glue my eyelid back together, and she accidentally glued my eye shut, so she had to pull it back open before it set. I totally freaked out, because I'm so protective of my eyes. As she was trying to pull it back open, one of the nurses said, "he's not gonna take it!" But they did somehow manage to get it open again. At the moment they were messing with my eye, the only possible thing I could do was utterly surrender like I'd never done before. The next day, my psychic friend Arlen said, "there's a lot less misunderstanding in the universe."

Like at least a decade later I pulled a half-inch piece of glass out of my forehead. I still have some scarring on my forehead from that crash.

I was in another accident, too, this one when I was only about 14. I was riding my Honda minibike blazing fast down the dirt roads to our log cabin in Michigan, and then came a kid riding in ATV in the opposite direction. I didn't see him in time due to the curviness of the road, and I steered as much toward the right as I could but I couldn't fully avoid him. I have no idea what exactly happened next, but the next thing I knew I was sitting on the ground in front of my bike, facing away from it, and my hamstrings felt pulled. I asked the kid on the ATV if he was okay (he was), and then I noticed that my arm seemed to be slightly broken. So I left the bike there and ran to the cabin. I told my aunt my arm was broken, and she didn't believe me, so it was like four hours before I got to go to the hospital. The doctor reset my arm without any anaesthetic (he said I took it pretty well), then gave me a cast. He kind of told my dad off for trying to get me killed by allowing me to ride my minibike around like that. =P For some reason, after a few weeks the cast started to make my fingers grow some kind of layer of dark dead skin all over them. I remember slicing it off of my fingers with a razor into the sink in science class and hoping nobody saw me.

• listened to:

  • classical music

  Is there, like, anyone who hasn't ever listened to classical music? I like some classical songs, most of it just seems mediocre. My favorite classical musician is Tchaikovsky, not that he made any of my all-time favorite classical songs, he just consistently made good music. I like cinema music better than classical, it's basically like classical but more dynamic, stimulating and interesting.
  - drum and bass

  Yes, I checked it out many years ago, I wasn't really thrilled with it, though there's one song I absolutely love that's classified as drum & bass, that's Lamb - Gorecki. I discovered it at the end of the movie I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer, which I never watched). It's a horror movie, and I've rarely ever watched horror movies, it's just not my thing. The song is a deep love song (it starts off "I've found the one I've waited for..."), and it starts playing as soon as the killer drags the last remaining protagonist underneath a table by her legs.
  - dubstep

  Yes. As I said on Twitter once, it took me two weeks to decide whether I liked dubstep or not. I don't exactly hate it, but I don't have many dubstep songs in my collection. The best dubstep song I've heard, though it's not really regular dubstep, is MUST DIE! - Octopus. To me it sounds kind of like a seething pool of machine larvae.
  - frenchcore

  I've never heard of that. Lemme listen now. I listened to one song, it sucks.
  - hardstyle

  I don't know what that is. Lemme listen. It's okay, sounds like typical "epic" music to me. Okay, now it sounds like...epic trance? I kinda like it, I'll keep this tab open.
  - J-Pop

  Never heard of it, probably not worth my time listening. If anything I'd probably just like the videos of hot Japanese girls dancing.
  - K-Pop

  It's just okay (it's nice to watch the girls dance, though), though there's one K-Pop song I particularly like, BLACKPINK - How You Like That. I especially like the part where she sings, "How you like That, that-that-that, that, that-that-That, That".
  - metal

  Duh, yes, of course I've heard metal. I don't really like metal; well, that's an understatement, I think all the ugly sounds and dissonance probably f-ck badly with your energy, and I hate metal. But I do kinda like some atmospheric metal songs, such as Summoning - Khazad Dum and Velvet Acid Christ - Decay.
  - music:
  - "from the 50's"

  If there's any music I like from the '50s, it's probably jazz songs.
  - "from the 60's"

  I think I like a couple of songs from the '60s. Yeah, one of them I reeeally like is Dusty Springfield - Windmills of Your Mind. I found out about this song when I was young, there was a metal rustic windmill with a music box that played a tune at yard sale, and my mom told me the tune was called Windmills of Your Mind, so eventually I looked it up and found Dusty Springfield's version. It was so entrancing that I was afraid to listen to the whole thing for a couple of weeks for fear that it would abduct a part of my mind into a space that it would be permanently stuck in. The song (not sung by Dusty) was made for the movie The Thomas Crown affair, which was about a genius with a free mind who planned a heist. I wrote a review of the movie and the later remake a long time ago here: https://inhahereviews.blogspot.com/2010/08/thomas-crown-affair.html
  - "from the 70's"

  One really excellent song from the '70s is Roberta Flack - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. It really takes me to the core of...all human experience. To the core of the earth.
  - "from the 80's"

  I like a lot of songs from the '80s, but I don't know which ones they are, so I'll just list one: a-ha - Take On Me (Techno Remix). Oh, here's a much better one, Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner. That song made me have a crush on Suzanne Vega, the freedom, the whimsicalness of it, the great melody, and the voice that sounds like a spiritual home I've yet to return to. This is the song that the group who made the mp3 spec used as a reference while making the spec. And here's a funny story: Suzanne Vega initially released this song on her own album a cappella, then DNA illegally used her song and added instrumentals to it without her permission, releasing it on their own album, which was a hit. So, instead of suing them, Suzy just took their version with the instrumentals and released it on her new album without asking them.
  - "from the 90's"

  One song I really, really adore from the '90s is The Kelly Family - An Angel. I also like Livin' Joy - Dreamer. Even more than that, I love Wumpscut - Thorns (Distant Vocals Version). And another one is Loreena McKennitt - Greensleeves. God, she sings that so perfectly. I once showed it to my friend, and he said it made him understand me better, or something like that. He said I'm too lonely. Linda Brava - Flame is a very sublime (and very unknown) song from the '90s.
  - nightcore

  Yes, or at least I've listened to di.fm's version of nightcore, which seems to be just regular trance music or whatever sped up. It was okay but I didn't stick to it.
  - punk rock

  Yeah, I've heard punk rock. I don't remember what it sounds like. I don't think there are any punk rock songs I like. Wait...is Avril Lavigne - Sk8er Boi punk rock? Because I really like that song. I think I remember hearing that Avril Lavigne was punk rock when she started out.
  - trance

  Trance used to be my favorite genre of music, once I discovered it and hence graduated from techno. I don't listen to it so much nowadays, but I do like some variations of it, like psy trance and goa-psy trance. And I still love DJ Johan Gielen's sets, such as Live at Sensation (White Edition), which I think are trance. And I recently found one trance set that 's the only one I know of that's as good as Johan Gielen's, by Armin van Buuren and Ruben de Ronde, A State of Trance - Beat the Silence
  - vaporwave

  Dunno. I think so.

• pet:

  • a bat
  • a bnuuy
  • a bunny
  • a cat
  • a coyote
  • a dog
  • a dragon
  • a ferret
  • a fox
  • a horse
  • a hyena
  • a lion
  • a lizard
  • a marten
  • a mouse
  • a raccoon
  • a rat
  • a shark
  • a wolf
  • an opossum
  • an otter
  • an owl

  Bunny, cat, dog, maybe rat, maybe mouse, caught lizards but not sure I've pet one, rode horses but didn't really pet them,

• ridden a horse

Yes, the first time I was in Texas and I was just a kid. I rode it for a long time, and when I got off of it my legs were stuck in the position of being on the horse as I was walking, so I was walking bow legged. My parents made fun of me. =P

• written:

  • a love letter

  No, not that I remember.
  - code

  Yes, though most of the code projects I've started I've never finished. Some of them were even ridiculously ambitious. Here's one I finished that I'm proud of, though: scribbles3
  - in Japanese

  No, I don't know Japanese. It seems a surprising number of people who are close to me have been interested in learning Japanese, though. I'm not. Though I was pretty interested in Chinese grammar at one time due to its flexibility and simplicity, I bought a book on it.
  - How:

• fast:

  • are you

  Probably not very nowadays, I don't know, it's been a long time since I've ran. But when I was in young I used to run really fast. I could even catch up to the best athlete in the class in flag football. And I would impress people by running and jumping clear over the our driveway. I thought when I was young that maybe I should try out for track and field at school, but I was way too shy and socially incompetent.
  - is your internet connection

  We don't have fiber optic here, only DSL, so it's a lowly...I think, 24Mbps. At first our neighborhood didn't allow fiber optic installations (or so I heard), now they allow it but it'll take AT&T a long time to get to our house because our neighborhood is full of canals.

• has your day been

Not bad, my friend (ex-g/f from 2006, the one I lost my virginity to) is visiting me from Norway. She's very different nowadays, extremely quiet. Here's a picture of her from 2006.

• often do you:

  • cook

  Almost never.
  - eat food not prepared by yourself

  Almost daily.
  - iron your clothes

  I've probably done that like once in my life. =P Funny, I just saw a post today (I can't find it) where somebody said something about how lucky we are that ironing clothes is no longer a thing.
  - take selfies

  Once every few years.
  - use condiments

  I don't know, probably at least one in every four days, to give a wild guess.

• many:

  • followers is too many

  NaN
  - open tabs do you currently have

  19, but a lot of them I just opened temporarily for this questionnaire and haven't closed them yet. Also that's not counting the ones open on my other computer.

• old are you

As old as LaDamaX. Actually, here's one for you: I was born on the same day of the same year as Ashton Kutcher. Which is funny because I've had a huge crush on Mila Kunis ever since That '70s Show came out in 1998, and he's now married to her. It's not only her looks, it's the way she talks, I've never been that intrigued by someone's voice and the way they talk for anyone else except Sarah Silverman.

• What:

  • [activity, activities]:
  • do you enjoy the most

  Showing my mom bookmarks I've saved for her, going to Starbucks with my mom and having a vente matcha Frappuccino with no whipped cream and watching the beautiful sexy young girls come in an out for an hour or two, answering questions on Retrospring, answering questions on Quora, writing essays, watching TV (South Park, Family Guy, Futurama, Mysteries at the Museum, Engineering Catastrophes, Strange Evidence, etc.), looking at porn, collecting porn, replying to people on Twitter, replying to people on Facebook, (lately) reading about quantum mechanics
  - apps do you use daily

None, I use my phone as little as possible. This week my phone told me that I've used my phone 7m more than last week.

• do you:

  • do:
    • for a living

  NEET
  - for fun

  See "what activities do you enjoy the most" above
  - on the weekend

  I never even know/care when it's the weekend.
  - like more,:
  - dogs or cats

  Cats are easier to take care of, but dogs are more loving. And cats purr when you pet them. And it's sadder when a dog dies than when a cat dies. Idk, probably cats. But maybe I'm biased because we have a bunch of cats and it's been like 16 years since we've had a dog.

  I still dream about that dog sometimes, I'm outside in the yard of the old house and he runs over to me and I pet him all over and he jumps and wiggles around in delight. But the dreams become more and more infrequent over time.

  He was a golden retriever that declared us his new owners in the wake of Hurricane Andrew. My dad didn't want him, but I set up a box on our porch for him and fed him anyway, then eventually he became ours (actually mine).

  In his last years, I felt so bad for him being tied or couped up all the time and bored to death that I started taking him for long walks on my scooter. I'd connect his leash to my scooter, and then let him just run around in whatever direction he wanted to go in, pulling me behind. But not too long later he developed arthritis that was so severe that he couldn't even get up to pee, and eventually we had to put him down. =/
  - shower or bath

  Answered that already
  - tea or coffee

  Neither, unless you count the matcha Frappuccinos I have at Starbucks. Or the small cans of Starbucks Doubleshot Espresso and Cream that I have almost daily. Straight tea and straight coffee are both too bitter to me, I can only imagine they must be the drinks of psychopaths.
  - think about:
  - Bad Dragon

  I don't know what that is.
  - cats

  It's interesting that they can be content just sitting around and staring for hours a day every day of their lives.

  It's also interesting that they sleep about 18 hours a day. And that they're the only animal that preys for fun and they prey on more species than any other animal.

  It's also interesting how they all have their own unique personalities, just like humans.

  And sometimes I think about how someone I knew told me once that she knew an animal psychic, and the animal psychic refused to work with cats because they're "too emotional."

  It's also cool how many different colors they can be, how many different types of patterns there are, and how randomly unique each cat's patterns are.

  Also, I often see videos of really ridiculously sweet cats online and wish that we had cats that sweet. But some of our cats are fairly sweet, so that's ok.

  One thing I've noticed about cats is that they don't seem to converge the directions of their eyes toward their target like humans do. They can be staring at something right in front of them and each eyeball will be pointing straight forward. I suspect their area of stereopsis (I think this is called Panum's fusional area) extends to their entire field of vision, unlike with humans.

  I once experienced this myself while I was psychotic, and it was truly awesome and shocking. I could suddenly see in true 3D with and perfect clarity with my entire field of vision. The car that was right in front of our car looked impossibly small due to perspective. And another time it happened I was in a store and saw all the items perfectly lined up on all the selves, and the sheer ordered complexity of all blew me away.
  - coyotes

  It's creepy how they emit such a chilling howl. I don't get why some people pronounce it "kahy-oht" instead of "kahy-oht-ee". What is wrong with some people?
  - dogs

  It's amazing how loving, supportive and loyal they are. We don't deserve them. They're like a gift from God. Well, not all dogs, but the best/ideal dogs.
  
  It's also scummy of humans to breed dogs that have congenital diseases like hip dysplasia and noses that are too snub for them to properly breathe through pugs).
  - dragons

  People who think dragons are a real thing are retarded. They don't bother to differentiate fantasy from reality. Let alone that it would be physically impossible for a dragon to fly given its wingspan relative to its body mass, and there doesn't seem to be much magic in this world.

  But, on the other hand, as my friend Organelle said, things that exist in this world crystallize from more subtle space around it in much the same way crystals synthesize from the contents of the solutions they're in. So, maybe dragons really do exist on some "metaphysical" level, hence the mythos in this reality, but they just couldn't quite make it to physical manifestation in this world. Also, dragons are very reminiscent of of real animals in this world, such as snakes and other reptiles.
  - '"fact" accounts'

  I would like them, except that all too often they repeat facts they've gathered from the internet that aren't even true. Factoids. And even worse, you never know which ones are true and which ones aren't except when you do. And if you can't trust what they say, are they even worth listening to?
  - foxes

  They look like small dogs. Maybe like a cross between a dog and a cat. They look like they'd make an attractive pet. Looks can be deceiving. =P
  Also, it's not their fault when they break into farmers' chicken coups and stuff. They're just doing what nature calls them to do. Yet farmers see them as a menace and shoot them.
  - lizards

  They provide a cool challenge to see if you can catch them. And it's fun how you can get them to bite your ear and just let them hang there indefinitely like an earring. And it's cool how they come in bigger sizes, from lizards to chameleons to iguanas to Komodo dragons. Komodo dragons are really cool. It's like they shouldn't exist. A lizard that large is downright prehistoric.
  - raccoons

  I hear they're one of the smartest animals, which is cool. And they look cute. My mom was saying the other day that it's a shame we (meaning humanity) never domesticated them. I'm glad they don't get into fights with our cats. They even back off when our cats are eating, like they know the food isn't for them. They sure get into a lot of fights with each other, though. It's cool how Rocket from Guardians of the Galaxy is a raccoon. And Guardians of the Galaxy are great movies.
  - society

  I could say way too much about society. Civilization should never have happened. Agriculture and technology have only made people miserable. The problem is compounded by, and in turn compounds, scientism, left-brain imbalance, rationalism, physicalism, being lost in representational thought, etc., which serve to quash all life and magic from the world. It quashes life through the paradigm that all things are made up of non-living matter, and are hence essentially dead, including plants and trees and even our own flesh. It quashes magic because the nature of magic is such that its manifestation is inextricably linked with its perception, and we deny its possibility in our paradigm. These thought patterns, together with our technological, domesticated lifestyle, separate us from Nature, spirit, God, ourselves, and each other. The acquisition of language was a pivotal point in our downfall, probably the first, but it wasn't the only one.

  Humanity is literally omnicidal. It is insane. We're destroying all life on Earth, at a rapid and exponentially increasing pace. Part of the problem is that we've set up society such that the least scrupulous (up to and including the psychopathic) people end up in the most economically (and, to some degree, politically) powerful positions. This is because capitalism establishes businesses as entities without conscience, which are to be excused us such, and businesses naturally higher the least scrupulous people as their CEOs because by design businesses only care about the bottom dollar, and having principles can only act as a limiter to what endeavors of profiteering are available to you. So it's a kind of social Darwinism of the evilest. These sociopathic CEOs are the ones running the world into the ground because they can never, ever make enough money.

  I could say a lot more, but I'd go on forever so I'll stop there.
  
  - surveillance

  It's evil. Totalitarian. I mean, having more cameras around actually makes me feel better, because violent criminals can't get away with hurting and killing people as much, but surveillance like what the NSA is doing is bad. The people who say that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about are wrong. Not all laws are just, and this mass surveillance is only going to act as a platform for the government to enact more and more totalitarian laws. I heard recently that the government (US) is trying to pass a law that would force corporations to act as spies for them, or something like that. I don't know the details. But the problem is only getting worse. Give the people a little breathing room, ffs. And the really sad thing is that after Edward Snowden put his whole life on the line in order to whistleblow the mass NSA spying to the public, nothing changed. It was like Atlas shrugged. Nobody cared enough.
  - the Internet

  It's a really neat invention, but it probably has as many negative consequences as positive ones. It brings us all together while separating us further. We can talk to anyone in the world at our fingertips, but we don't even talk to our friends face to face, or even with voice. People growing up on meme culture has catalyzed a lot of inclusionism, but the algorithms are creating echo chambers of ragebait that divide us more than ever. And policing words, being offended on behalf of others who couldn't care less, weaponizing being offended, canceling the politically incorrect, and virtue signaling have become more important than any actual social justice. And kids don't play with real things anymore, they're all growing up on cellphones and tablets. Our minds are becoming more virtualized. Too many people currently aren't "touching grass."
  - usually:
  - do when you're bored

  See "What activities do you enjoy the most".
  - have for breakfast

  I don't usually have breakfast.

• habit do you really find cute in a person

I can't think of any.

• is:

  • "heavier: a kilogram of steel, or a kilogram of feathers"

  They're the same by definition, duh. A kilogram is a measure of weight, and a kilogram is a kilogram, whether it's a kilogram of steel or a kilogram of feathers. The reason this sounds counterintuitive is that you're just not picturing enough feathers to make up for the weight of the relatively small amount of steel.
  - one thing you would like to become better at

  I wish I was as good at math and logic as I used to be. Something suddenly happened to my mind during a paranoid episode in 2006, and it's never been the same since. I was terrified of the possible consequences of every thought I had, and kept trying to correct them, while making more thoughts in the process, etc. etc., and then all of a sudden some major part of my mind or mental energy just uplifted out of my head and into thin air, and my mind was suddenly quite and at peace. Then when I slept I had a dream that someone was trying to mow a lawn for his job, and he kept saying, "which way do I go? Which way do I go?" and not moving anywhere. Ever since then, whenever I try to solve math or logic problems that I used to be great at before, it's like I'm unable to pick a plan of attack. I try to attack it from all angles at once, and the result is a clusterfuck.
  - the:
  - [best, worst]:
  - fast food chain

  Idk, I can't just pick one, because I have different favorite foods from different fast food chains. McDonald's: Bacon, Egg & Cheese McGriddle, French fries, Coke. Burger King: Cheeseburger. Taco Bell: Chicken Quesadilla. Checkers: Champ Burgher. Arby's: Orange Cream Shake (they only have it now and then), French Dip, Marketfresh Turkey & Swiss Sandwich. Arby's used to have a lot more things I loved, such as the Philly Steak & Cheese Sandwich and the Loaded Italian, but they keep discontinuing them. =/

  Really, I could narrow my favorites down to two if I had to: The Burger King Cheeseburger and the Taco Bell Chicken Quesadilla. I used to always get the Mexican Pizza from Taco Bell, but I don't like it anymore.

  - thing:
  - about:
  - society

  I guess the best things about society are the security, comfort, convenience, and entertainment, but I say that apprehensively as those things require technology, and I think technology ultimately is like the spice: it gives with one hand and takes away with a thousand others; i.e., it gives us a few overt benefits while being deleterious in a way more profound but subtle ways, and what's worse, as technology builds and builds, this effect only increases (there's a reason depression rates are rampant), and we're unable to see what it's really doing to us as it's happening.

  The worst thing about society is wage slavery, by far. Or the omnicidal devastation of our biosphere. Or the mass, abject, lifelong animal misery caused by factory farming. Or the suffering of human beings caused by our own mentality, being lost in our models rather than actually participating with life. For example, when we see a tree, we don't really see a tree, we see a generic instantiation of something we call a tree and know some "objective facts" about. Hence we don't even recognize it as a living, experiencing being offering unimaginable psychic possibilities, and instead simply chop it down for our convenience. To build an armchair, or because it blocks the view.

  - the Internet

  I already covered that with "What do you think about the Internet."

  - your:
  - country

  Best: The economy (actually evil though, since a stronger economy equals faster devastation of the environment), safety from war (also evil since it requires a multi-trillion-dollar-a-year Department of Defense), fair laws and a fair justice system (at least compared to a lot of other countries), the national parks, friendly people (people from other countries always say this)
  Worst: No universal healthcare, we work too hard, two-party political system (and one party is retarded and extreme and only survives due to gerrymandering and the electoral college), medical bankruptcy, student loan dept, wealth disparity, obesity, high number of religionists per capita, sexophobia (like ass societies, but less in some), a few times more prisoners per capita than any other state, lack of ranked choice voting, gerrymandering, government corruption, our foods are full of sweets and carcinogens, some of which are illegal in most countries, no paid maternity leave, ignorance, exploitation of other peoples, massive debt

  - favourite:
  - book

  It's written way too well, and the energy and intentions behind it are too pure, for it to possibly have been created by a human. And it's a guideline for life that reveals the big picture. It's Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1 or Book 3 by Neale Donald Walsch. (It's not religious.) The other books in his dialogue series are great, too.

  - movie

  I'm not sure what my favorite movie is...

  What Dreams May Come: It's a stunningly beautiful and hope-inspiring depiction of the afterlife, and has plot elements that don't exist in this world or in movies in general, but make perfect sense for an afterlife...one of them actually made me cry.

  I Heart Huckabees: It's a lively/energetic exposition of karma, synchronicity, and unity. And it has Dustin Hoffman.

  Joe Versus the Volcano: The story is so creative, whimsical, real, and magical. And it has a whole island full of people who drink nothing but oversized cans of orange soda, and at the time I saw it orange soda was my favorite drink.

  The Matrix Reloaded: It's just a tour de force of entertaining action and intellectual stimulation. I didn't care for the first Matrix film at all, I thought it was like candy for people who'd never had a philosophical thought before.

  - series

  I don't know what my favorite series is. I guess the one I've been enjoying most lately is Mysteries at the Museum. I just like learning interesting stories of things that happened in the past.

  - hometown

  I already answered the worst and best things about my hometown somewhere above.

  - ever

  The best thing ever is being able to be a human being with this wonderful body and to interact with others.
  
  The worst thing ever is having to be a human being with this disgusting death trap of a body, and hell is other people.

  - one can do if they're bored

  Worst: Torture an animal
  Best: Learn something new, or pick up a new skill.

  - way to prepare and eat eggs

  The worst way to eat an egg is boiled, but even that isn't so bad, I eat boiled eggs sometimes.

  The best way you can eat an egg is over medium in a sandwich with tomatoes, lettuce, bacon and mayonnaise and stuff, or over fried corned beef hash

  Or...no, the best way to eat an egg is deviled, with a 1:1 mustard/mayonnaise ratio.
  - your:
  - dream job

  Famous philosopher, famous actor, famous musician, or famous physicist.
  - favourite:
  - activity

  I listed my favorite activities elsewhere. I don't know which one would be the most favorite.

  - animal

  Idk, maybe the bald eagle or the quokka.

  - beverage

  Orange Cream Shake from Arby's, but they only have it now and then. Krispy Kreme used to have a similar one called Oranges & Kreme Shake.

  I also used to love the Vanilla Bean Coolatta from Dunkin' Donuts, but the last time I had it it sucked for some reason. ;/

  Every time I go to Starbucks, I get a vente matcha Frappuccino with no whipped cream. I've been getting it (I used to get the tall) ever since I saw someone carrying a green Frappuccino in Starbucks and thought it looked delicious so I asked him what it was. Before then I always used to get the cinnamon dulce Frappuccino.

  - board game

  I used to love checkers, because I was good at it, and it's easy to fully think about. I never played by the right rules, though, we didn't know that you have to jump a piece if you can. The first time I ever played with the right rules, on a website against some lady, I was smearing her a$$, and she sent me a message, "Are you having fun?" or something like that. 🤣 But I'm not sure I'm good at it anymore.

  I like chess, but I'm not very good at it (but I can still beat my mom and my friends), and it literally hurts my brain trying to compute all the cascading possibilities for each move. I mean how the heck do people do this?

  I like the idea of Go, because of its complexity in simplicity, but it's hard. Though the first time I played, I played against a friend who had been practicing, and I won. He asked me how I did that. I sorta just went by intuition.

  I like the idea of Othello AKA Reversi for the same reason, complexity in simplicity, but it's so hard to think about what will happen even in the next move, let alone for moves ahead. But one time I played against a computer just going on pure intuition, not even thinking about what I was doing, and I beat it in like 5 moves. Usually Othello doesn't end until you fill the whole 8x8 board, which takes 64 moves.

  I also once played some cellular-automata-like game where you have to click the right sequence of squares to make all the shapes completely disappear, and I went completely by intuition, not thinking about what I was doing at all or taking any time, and I beat it in just a few moves.

  - book series

  The dialogue series of books by Neale Donald Walsch.

  - console

  I guess the Nintendo Switch. I'm a lifelong Nintendo fan, ever since the NES, and my philosophy is that each subsequent console is better than the previous ones because it's more powerful.

  - food

  I don't know, one of my favorites is beef ribs cooked until they're falling off the bone with barbeque sauce.

  I also love Domino's pizza with extra tomato sauce, banana peppers, pineapple, bacon, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, black olives, and a few other things I can't think of at the moment, smothered in Domino's garlic butter sauce (one-half a cup per slice). I put so many toppings on it that one pizza costs around $40 dollars not including taxes and tip.

  Another thing I really like, that's pretty healthy, is a spinach wrap from Publix with mustard, turkey, spinach leaves, tomatoes, banana peppers, jalapenos, black olives, pickles, mushrooms, cucumbers, green peppers, and deli sauce. I get one every time I go to Publix. I have a half of one in the fridge right now. Eat your vegetables. Science says eating an adequate amount of vegetables prevents 90% of health issues. That seems way preferable to taking pills to compensate for your health issues, which have side effects up to and including death, and pills for those side effects, which have their own side effects, and/or getting surgery and going into medical bankruptcy...

  - Internet browser

  Chrome. Firefox is okay, but I just jumped right onto Chrome as soon as it came out because it was faster, and I haven't gone back. I also think its interface is sleeker. And all my bookmarks, history, cookies and passwords are in Chrome.

  - language

  Latin (it's just so badass) or French (the most beautiful language). Esperanto is cool too (it's so logically designed, you can construct many words out of more basic root words, and also infer their meanings from such).

  - name

  Idk, off the top of my head, maybe Christina, Cassandra or Ayesha. Lemme check my babynames page. Yeah, those are my favorites. For guys my favorites are Jayden, Christian, Sasha, maybe Shannon, and maybe Luka.

  - number

  7. I also like 10, 11, 17, and 100. 16 is also pretty cool.

  - piece of music

  I couldn't possibly choose. Uuuugh... Okay I'll say Fur Elise as played by Alfred Brendel. He really understands the piece better than any other player of it I've heard by far. Well, it's probably not really my favorite at this time, but it's probably the most timeless. For other favorites keep listening to that list linked to in the link.

  - programming language

  Python, x86 or C++. I usually code in Python, but sometimes C++ for really CPU-intensive things, and I used to code in x86, I made a whole BBS terminal program with ANSI support, Avatar support (not as in pfp's but as in the terminal emulator protocol), and a phone book. It also supported ANSI keyboard remapping which I used for my own entertainment on unsuspecting BBSers who wanted to use my program. And constantly it showed the actual ASCII data stream zooming from right to left on the bottom row of the screen. I don't remember if it supported ANSI music or not. One problem with it, though: it only supported up to 9600 BPS, because I didn't know how to use the UART and such for 115200 BPS so I just used the BIOS. The other problem with it: I somehow lost it. Funny thing is, I have every other program I've ever made. =P

  If I can include imaginary programming languages, then the one I haven't made yet intended for code golf that supports every programming construct ever invented (including both imperative programming and functional programming, among other things), an extremely terse syntax, and the entire Python standard library with every module and function name replaced by two-character strings. And you can execute a string just by calling it with () and calls it like a function. And you can grab a context from any scope into a variable and pass it to a function. And you can modify variables from within a function that aren't in the function. And you can modify the interpreter of the program as it's running, or modify the interpreter of the interpreter of the program, etc. etc., and all the levels of interpreter are coded in this programming language.

  - season

  Winter. I love the cold air (in South Florida, that means 50°F minimum), the Christmas trees and the Christmas lights. And, once upon a time, the fractal, electric feeling in the air and the Christmas music back when it was played more and it wasn't modern pop garbage.

  - snack

  Fuego Takis, Spicy Sweet Chili Dorito's, Salt & Vinegar Chips, Publix Granola Bark, Lindt 70% Cocoa Chocolate, Mozzarella & Prosciutto Paninis, Vlasic Zesty Dill Pickles...idk. The Takis, Dorito's and chips are too junk-food-y for me, the granola bark I hardly ever get, the pickles they don't seem to make anymore, and salt & vinegar chips put sores on my tongue...I guess Lindt 70% Cocoa Chocolate.

  - sports team

  I hate sports. Though I do have a small black Raiders bucket hat that I've had since I was a kid since I thought it was cool. I once lost it on Splash Mountain at Disney World and my aunt found it for me. =P

  - text editor

  Notepad, Wordpad, or Word depending on the purpose. For something quick and dirty, I use notepad. For writing my book of essays, I use word. I used to use Wordpad for text that had LF's without CR's because Notepad didn't display them right, or when I needed RichText. I hate the way Wordpad works now, everything is in a narrow column in the center. For Linux my favorite is gedit, because it's like notepad. I don't like vim or emacs, they're not intuitive at all. I just want to get sh*t done, I don't want to have to study the text editor.

  - type of cheese

  Parmesan, Swiss, Smoked Gouda, Chipotle Gouda, Pepperjack, Feta (I only ever liked one brand, all the others were too salty, and I don't remember what brand it was)

  Absolute worst cheese: Brie. Well, blue cheese tastes literally like toe jam, but even that goes well in certain salads.

  - video game

  I'm not sure, I guess F-Zero X. I listed all my favorites somewhere above.

  - way to eat a potato

  Loaded potato skins are pretty good. If it's a sweet potato then baked sweet potato fries, especially waffle cut.

  - website

  HMM. *Thinks long and hard*. *Clicks new tab to see what comes up* Idk I guess Retrospring.
  - first memory

  I'm not sure which was the first, I have a few early memories: 1. Asking my dad what school is. 2. Falling between a chair and with my head bouncing rapidly back and forth between the chair and the wall and seeing stars, 3. Running back and forth across the living room and on top of the chairs because I was excited that Christmas was coming, 4. Going to sleep on the couch in the house on the beach my dad grew up in when we were there for Christmas, with a penny in my mouth, and then waking up with the penny gone.. I'd guess I was around 4 at the earliest for some of these memories. And they're really just memories of memories at this point.

• kind of animals do you have

Cats.

• languages do you know

English.

• was:

  • the:
    • best day of your life like

  I can count on one hand the number of times I've been truly happy, and it was always brief. But here's the writeup I have of those various times:

  I've had four moments of true happiness in my life, and they've all been completely different kinds of happiness.

  One was when I was at my family's log cabin in Michigan, I woke up and I suddenly just felt soo happy, I have no idea why. I was just so happy to be alive. So I stepped out of the cabin into nature and being there made me so happy that I literally laughed out loud for a second, uncontrollably. That's the only time I've ever been so happy that I had to laugh at nothing.

  Another time was when I was swimming in the pool with my little sister (who's very intuitive), and she had me stay still while she dumped a pale of water on my head. I closed my eyes. You'd think there's nothing scary about having some water dumped on your head, but for some reason that simple act entailed that I had to trust her, a kind of surrender. I think that was the key to what happened next.. I suddenly felt divine happiness literally in my heart (heart chakra or maybe solar plexus chakra). It was so subtle yet so real and something that was so far from my normal miserable empty experience.

  Anyway while in this state I was watching the trees blowing in the wind, and I could actually see the happiness of the trees or their leaves being tickled by the wind and the sun, because it was the same happiness in my heart. So now I know that trees actually are spiritually alive and sensitive and enjoy life.

  Sometime not too much later I overheard my mom saying that my sister had told her that a pain she'd had in her hand for years was magically gone. I think it probably had something to do with the divine presence touching my heart while we were in the pool.

  The joyous feeling in my heart that time was a living energy, like there was a kind of inner motion to it.

  Many years later I read somewhere, I'm pretty sure in The Power of Now, that some special state of consciousness--I forget how he described or named it, something like bliss or enlightenment or connection to and love for all life--is often attained by people who spend many years suffering and then have a moment of surrender.

  Another time I had to walk through the cafeteria of my niece's elementary school while it was chalk full of children, and I didn't have my hat on which I usually liked to wear to cover up my baldness. I actually felt like I looked a little bit freaky, because I had long wavy hair and was also partially bald. So I was really embarrassed but I decided to have courage and just do it. A minute later when I was back outside of the building walking along the sidewalk, I could perceive this soft white energy filling all the space and surrounding everything in it, and I felt so at peace and comforted by this energy--like it was God or something--that I smiled a huge smile for this little girl that was walking by me from the other direction, and it was genuine.. It would have taken more effort not to smile than to smile. Again, this is extremely unusual in my experience. That's actually the only time I can remember smiling and not being forced to, besides when I happen to be laughing at something. By the way, I was also carrying an open black umbrella over my head at the time even though it wasn't raining. =p

  The fourth time I was truly happy (fourth in this list, I mean--this probably isn't in chronological order), I was in a mall and suddenly randomly I felt an actual glow/source of light in the center of my heart (heart chakra or solar plexus chakra area) and I guess it kind of emanated from my whole being in a way because this kid who was in front of me randomly said hi to me.. that like never happens to me.

  All of these moments of happiness were truly sublime, but they only lasted a few minutes or maybe less each time.

  There was also another time I remember that could possibly have been the happiest moment of my life, it was when I got back home after having been on vacation for a few weeks with some relatives. The door was opened and my mom was in the living room vacuuming and I ran to her and hugged her. I don't actually remember how that felt, I just remember what I did, or remember remembering it, so I'm not sure if it was the happiest moment of my life or not. Also I'm not sure if there were other equally happy moments during my childhood that I just don't remember.
  - [best, worst]:
  - thing you've eaten so far

  Best thing: Idk, probably something my dad made at some time and never wrote down how he made it so he'll never be able to make it again.
  Worst: Idk, I bought a clear container full of small candy-coated chocolate prolate sphereoids from Barnes & Noble or Borders once, and they tasted exactly like soap. Oh, wait, no, one time when I was a lot younger I was eating a slab of Salisbury steak from a TV dinner, and one part it had the most absolutely awful, disgusting taste I'd ever tasted. I still wonder wtf that was.
  - last:
  - concert you've been to

  Never been to a concert, never want to. They're way too loud, and I don't want to get (more) tinnitus, I'm very protective of my body and senses, and live music always sucks ass; I'd much rather just listen to the album version.

  And even if the live music didn't suck ass, there are very few bands that I like more than, say, 1 or 2 songs from. I'm very picky about music; most of it sounds like crap to me, so most of the concert would just be meh.

  And I don't think I want to be in such a dense crowd, either; I guess I'm kind of antisocial, and also I've heard stories of people getting bones broken, beer sloshed on them, etc., to say nothing of the possibility of deadly, terrifying crowd crush.

  One time I did see KC and the Sunshine Band playing live, though. I was just randomly walking around Coconut Grove once, and they happened to be playing on a small stage in the middle of the walkway, and I walked right past them. =P

  - song you listened to on repeat

  I think ATB - Twilight. I've listened to this song on repeat all day before. It sounded like some deep, existential part of my soul, so deep that it's essentially forever solitary, was actually experiencing a taste of happiness or joy for once in eons.

  - thing you:
  - ate

  Half a turkey wrap from Publix as described earlier.

  - did

  Answered 500 million previous questions in this questionnaire.

  - have:
  - bought

  I bought a deep, bright red plush bathroom mat and a greenish clear shower safety mat made of many connected odd-shaped, vaguely round pieces from Amazon for my friend who's visiting me from Norway.

  - done

  What, what in the actual f--- is the difference between the last thing I did and the last thing I have done? =P

  - eaten

  See above.

  - looked for

  A small diffraction grating cat-shaped window sticker to cast rainbows from the sunlight into the house that my friend since the early '90s gave me in a birthday card that I put on the window next to the door and then my mom took off the window to put on her car because it wasn't working where it was, and then lost.
  - your favourite song:
  - as a kid

  I only liked one song throughout my whole childhood that I remember, Tiffany - I Think We're Alone Now. One day my dad actually called the station and requested they play it and recorded it on tape because I asked him to. I still have the cassette tape somewhere. I was really surprised that he did that because I always felt that he hated me, so it meant a lot to me.
  - from a few weeks ago

  I don't even remember.

• would you do if you:

  • had:

    • one billion euros

    I'd start up some projects I've always wanted to do, such as:

    A not-for-profit business that specializes in helping people and communities start up their own employee-owned businesses, preferably not-for-profit ones, and also helps communities organize community projects, such as parks, museums and other things, by green-lighting them only if enough people pledge to donate enough money to fully fund the project, otherwise nobody donates anything. I would call this company Project Catalyst Organization, or ProCat for short. made a Facebook group for it a long time ago that I was going to link to, but I actually can't find it. =/

    A website showing all bills congress is going to consider soon, and allowing users to upvote or downvote them, or create their own modifications of them which can then be upvoted or downvoted by other users. The hope is that congress will actually pay some kind of attention to the will of the people as expressed on this website.

    A website called Rate My Idea, where users can submit ideas in all sorts of categories from philosophy to inventions to recipes, rate other's ideas, and list them per category randomly or by rating.

    The one described in the last four paragraphs of my essay About Ads

    More importantly, though, I'd create a political organization that aims to get corruption by large corporations out of government through campaign reform and other means, all mentioned in the sixth paragraph of the above essay. We'd run ads informing people of the problems and also supporting candidates that we think are good for the issues and maybe attacking candidates that we think are bad for them, and also would contribute to campaigns, lobby, etc.
    - one million euros

    Save it for living comfortably for the rest of my life. Also, I'd immediately buy a 45-lb 4"x4"x4" tungsten cube.
    - the ability to fly

    Show it off to as many people as possible as soon as possible, to show the world that magic really does exist. Or maybe that would be a bad idea, maybe I'd be shot down by some lunatic, likely a religious nutjob who thinks I'm a witch, or I'd be captured by the government and subjected to endless cruel experiments and dissections until I die.

  • were a dragon

  Find out what my world is all about and what I could do to aid the human race.
  
  - woke up with:
  - some drawings in your face

  Ask the people in my house how the f--- that happened/who did it, why. If nobody fessed up, I might just file a police report, or I might just consider it the biggest mystery of my life and let it go. Though, in actuality, if it happened now, the only thing different from usual is my ex is visiting me, and she's a little strange, so I'd just assume she did it and that she's crazy. If she denied it, though, I might ask her a couple more times in a certain way, but I wouldn't press the issue much beyond that, I wouldn't want to create bad vibes (in case it really wasn't her, I guess).
  - someone else next to you

  Depends on who. Is it someone currently living in this house or my ex who's visiting us? Nbd. Is it a stranger? I'd ask, "Who are you?", or maybe, "Whoa! Who are you!?" and see where it goes from there.
  - Which food do you:

• hate

I can't stand coleslaw, potato salad, pasta salad, onions (except caramelized onions), sour cream, or sweet and sour sauce. I also refuse to use Thousand Island dressing, even though I'm not really even sure what it tastes like. I also wouldn't eat insects or worms in any form, such as chocolate covered crickets or mealworm.

• love

Already answered this earlier.

• Who is:
  • the most famous person you have met

I've actually never met a famous person (what's wrong with me?? Everybody's met a famous person!!), but I've seen a few in person.

The guy who played Al Bundy on Married with Children came to my high school, and I saw him in the hallway signing autographs, looking bored to death and chewing gum.

I've also seen Bill Clinton and Janet Reno (former Attorney General) on the front lawn of the White House giving a speech while I was there with some relatives to visit the Smithsonian.

And I once saw someone saying some really sophisticated-sounding word salad in a philosophy IRC channel that reminded me of Chris Langan's CTMU (Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe) that I had read some of, and I told him that, and he private-messaged me, "that's my baby" and we talked for a while, so I kinda met the person who once held the Guinness World Record for highest IQ (196). They eventually stopped hosting that category, I think because it caused too much drama and contention, probably over who was the rightful winner.

And I've had a few brief exchanges with other famous people online..

My favorite author, Neale Donald Walsch, once replied to my reply to a tweet of his

Suzanne Vega once retweeted something nice I said about my favorite song of hers, and she "liked" most of my tweets to her

And Miranda Cosgrove followed me because of some things I said, and then unfollowed me because I was being psychotic in DMs, and then I immediately closed that account, and then eventually made a new one, which she immediately followed because of something I said.

And once I was in a small virtual chatroom with Tori Amos and said something just before she left about how highly I thought of her even though I never really liked her music, but I don't know if she saw it.

• your favourite:

  • Retrospring user

  Hmm, f00fy is a favorite lately because he's smart and likes a lot of my posts; Kate is always a favorite because she's smart, she's sexy, and she has a rich mind, a vivid imagination and a lot of personality; Jacqueline (don't remember her current handle, she hardly ever comes on) because she's really pretty and she earnestly answers others' questions by researching them and then writing up whole essays in response. I think most people wouldn't think much of it, but for some reason that's really attractive to me.
  - actor

  Johnny Depp, Gary Oldman, Miranda Cosgrove, Mila Kunis, a few others
  - artist

  Daniel B. Holeman, Thomas Kinkade, Hans Zatzka
  - comedian

  Louis CK, Conan O'Brien, John Mulaney
  - musician

  That's hard to say since most of my favorite songs are the only ones I like by the people who made them, or maybe I like one or two others by them. So should I just pick a musician who made one of my favorite songs? That doesn't seem right. And I wouldn't be able to pick a favorite song anyway. Should I pick the musician I like the most songs by? That doesn't seem right either, if none of their songs are in my, say, top 10.

  I guess I have a few contenders.

  Enya - I like a lot of songs by her, and she's unique in how her music really brings you up to a spiritual level. It's transcendental. And even the songs of hers that aren't my favorites, aren't that bad. I have somewhere between 82 and 107 songs by her, 25 of which are my favorites.

  The Glitch Mob - They made at least two or three great albums, and I actually have six albums and EPs by them.

  Robert Miles - I just like him because Children was one of my first favorite songs, and Dreamland I think was my first favorite albums, and his next album, 23am, was the first album I ever bought with my own money. I bought it not even knowing what it sounded like because I liked Dreamland so much. At first I was kind of disappointed, though it could have been worse, but then over time it grew on me. Then he made a third album, Organik, which was completely different and nobody liked it and everybody thought he should have stuck to what he was good at. =P

  Shpongle - I love at least three of their albums, I think. I downloaded their whole discography--everything I could find. Someone I know who really seems to understand the nature of things from having done a lot of psychedelic drugs said that Shpongle is really good at capturing the essence of the psychedelic trip in music.

  DJ Johan Gielen - My favorite trance artist.

  The Crystal Method - Honorable mention. They made one pretty bad-ass album, Vegas, and it was one of my first favorite entire albums, still one of the very few albums I actually love every song on. I discovered them probably in the '90s when I heard one of their songs on a car commercial, and luckily they happened to display the song's name and artist over the commercial. In retrospect, I didn't really realize how lucky I was--who even does that?
  - Why do:

• people climb mountains

It's an obvious challenge, it's so massive and real/directly physical, posing immediately obvious difficulties, but not ones that are too unpredictable or unpreparable for, and some people just love conquering challenges to feel good about themselves. There may be an element of "If I can do this, I can do anything," and also standing atop a mountain peak and looking down at the landscape for miles around you is the perfect metaphor for accomplishments and overcomings of challenges that bring you to new heights (so to speak), perspective and potential.

• printers never work when you need them

Maybe they never work, and you only notice that they don't work when you need them, because that's when you're using them, or using them a lot. Really, though, it's probably something more like the spirit of defeat that constantly confounds every endeavor of man, inspiring such aphorisms as Murphy's law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"). Why it does this, I don't know.

• they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food

The doctor says the delirium should wear off in about 15 minutes.

• Would you:
  • buy a cheese flavoured bubble gum

I don't even like bubble gum. Also, no.

• eat a cactus

Depends on whether it's edible, how it tastes, and if it has thorns on it. If it has thorns on it, and also if it's not edible, you'll have to pay me a lot of money. No, wait, I couldn't eat the thorns no matter how much money you paid me because it would poke holes in my esophagus, stomach, and maybe intestines, possibly killing me.

• rather:

  • be the best player on a horrible team or the worst player on a great team

  More the former, but neither is really a good option. The former would make me constantly depressed that my efforts are brought down by inferior teammates, and also I may not get the recognition I deserve be being on an unsuccessful team (or a team whose success level is not commensurate with my skill). And in the latter case, everyone on the team and probably all the fans watching would look down on me and resent me. But it really depends on whichever option would get me the most money, fame and sex.
  
  - live in:
  - a city or in the countryside

  I don't know, cities suck. There's higher crime rates, more noise, more pollution, everything around you is made of asphalt and concrete...but the countryside sucks too. You have to travel many miles to town to get anything useful, and God forbid someone need to go to the hospital, and everyone around you is a Republican, Trump-supporting redneck.

  On the plus side, everybody knows everybody in rural areas, I think? This is the kind of community we're lacking in today's society that's crucial for harmonious living.

  Also, I think being immersed in nature in the countryside would be very invigorating.

  I don't even know which I'd rather, since I've never lived in a city proper, only suburbia, so I don't know what it's like in order to compare. (I've never lived in the countryside, either, but it's simpler. I can imagine it.) If I can choose the suburbs of a big city, though, like where I live now, I'd pick that. I like the convenience of everything I need or want being a few minutes' drive away.
  - a flat or in a house

  I answered this earlier.
  - lose an arm or a leg

  I REFUSE TO ANSWER THIS.

Here are the questions that were removed. They're not in hierarchical format, because I don't know where f00fy found them so I'm just copying them from his answers.

• What do you do for a living?

I answered that.

• Where do you live?

I once heard it called Cuba North.

• Where do you work?

I answered that.

• Can you speak different languages?

Yes, I can speak English, pig Latin, and Jailbird. I could also probably speak in tongues if I really tried. Not that I'd want to, speaking stream-of-consciousness, repetitive, frenzied nonsense would be embarrassing. The pastor of our church has spoken in tongues a few times. He says "Mamacita" a lot. I felt embarrassed for him.

• Do you like the city where you live?

I hate anywhere on this God-forsaken planet, but my city is as good as any.

• What is your favourite programming language and why is it PHP?

I don't really like PHP because it doesn't really seem like a serious language. When I used it, it felt more like a toy makeshift language constructed in a week to satisfy the rapidly growing demand of low-quality web programmers. It's weakly typed, making it a clown language; all its functions are top-level built-ins, making it unkempt; etc. It's probably improved since then, but you can only change so much in a language. I still remember the time I used the sort() function once on a rather large list, and it would sort a certain portion of the list and then just leave the rest unsorted, no error or anything.

I'd much rather program in Python, and if I really want the convenience of intermixing HTML code and program code, I'll just use something like Jinja2.

One thing I really liked about PHP, though, is that $X means the value of the variable named by the contents of X, $$X means the value of the variable named by the contents of the variable named by the contents of X, and so and and so forth. That's really cool and like something I would do if I made a programming language. Though I guess it wouldn't really be necessary if they had proper hash tables/dictionaries.

• What is your favourite programming language and why is it Rust?

I haven't really tried Rust yet. I'm afraid. All the code examples I've seen of Rust looked extremely cryptic and advanced. That could just be because they almost all came from a secret IRC channel of elite programmers, though. The syntax also looked ugly, like I think I noticed unmatched <'s and >'s or something like that. And I'm not sure how hard it'll be to wrap my head around the borrow checker, I have no idea how it actually works yet. And, as much as I feel like I should try the next big thing, I'm not sure I can justify it when C++ does everything I need. I've never come into problems with memory safety in C++, I guess just because I've never done anything serious in it.

• What is your favourite programming language and why is it C++?

C++ is elegant, but I have a beef with it. They try to make the syntax actually simpler than it should be. For example, the syntax to define a constructor is just to make a function with no type specified that has the name name as the class. They should have made you explicitly declare that that's the constructor somehow! Or, I've seen an example where an someone put "const" in five different places within a line of code, and it meant a different thing for each possible position. I used to have more examples, but it's been a while.

• What is your favourite programming language and why is it Lisp?

I've never used Lisp, but it sounds cool due to its ability to self-modify. But it's a functional programming language, and I haven't learned functional programming yet. I'm not sure it's something that will come easily for me. Seeing people talk about functional programming code in programming channels makes me feel like it's really sophisticated, intellectual and advanced. And it doesn't help that satisfactorily explaining exactly what a monad in FP is and does is a known impossibility.

• What is your favourite programming language and why is it Pascal?

I programmed like one thing in Pascal, one function, I think back when I was in high school. I don't remember what class that could possibly have been, though, the only CS elective I ever took was BASIC programming. Pascal is okay. I got the impression Pascal was just a good programming language for teaching beginners the structure of a program. I'd use Delphi before I'd use Pascal because it's just a more modern Pascal.

I hear it's fast and it doesn't use pointers like C++ does, which comforts me because I still haven't completely wrapped my head around referencing and dereferencing on multiple levels. I had to literally do trial and error with asterisks and ampersands just to figure out how to pass a two-dimensional array to a function. =P

I actually installed Delphi once planning to use it, but I never really got into it. I think it's proprietary and it's expensive, so maybe I pirated it.

• What is your favourite programming language and why is it Swift?

I don't know Swift.

• What is your favourite programming language and why is it Ruby?

• I wish I knew what Ruby's appeal is. To me it's just like Python's ugly little sister. I guess it's only popular because Ruby on Rails is so good, and Ruby on Rails was written before Python became more popular? I call Ruby "ugly" because of its use of special character prefixes before certain variables.

• What is your favourite website and why is it Reddit?

Reddit is a cool idea, but I've never really gotten into it. I mean, I guess I visit it frequently just because I often come across links to reddit posts, including some in my Reddit email newsletter. But it's definitely not my favorite website, just because I've never really gotten into it. I guess it's just not my vibe.

• What is your favourite website and why is it Twitter?

The website formally known as Twitter is definitely one of my favorites, even though Elon has done his damnedest to run it into the ground for some reason. There's just tons of activity there and lots of interesting characters of all different types to follow. And the microblogging format makes things less tedious than having to, say, actually go and read somebody's blog. Though I'm really glad they increased the character limit from 140 to 280 a bunch of years ago, 140 wasn't really enough. 280 often isn't enough, either, but hey, that's the price you pay for the overall benefits of microblogging.

Of course, Elon had to go and compromise the whole purpose of the site by allowing people to make long tweets if they pay for a subscription, and even worse, for some reason they made it so that you don't get notified if someone replies to you in a long tweet (I'm glad I randomly happened to find that out before I bought a subscription and started replying to people with long tweets), but still, long tweets seem not to be the norm.

• What is your favourite website and why is it Facebook?

It's simple. Facebook is the new MySpace, and I loved MySpace, although Facebook isn't as good (despite being way bigger and more sophisticated). And also, Facebook is the way for me to keep connected to relatives and some of my friends. And you can find everything you could possibly want on there just by joining the appropriate groups. I'm probably in a dozen or so philosophy groups, and also the Dilbert croup and the Calvin and Hobbes group, and a few other entertaining groups such as Language Nerds.

I honesty don't get why everybody hates Facebook so much. I mean, I guess it's supposed to be because a lot of old fogies use it and use it to post and repost their conspiracy theories and misinformation, but I just haven't seen a lot of that. The stupidest thing I've seen on there is viral reposts, like "reply to this and copy this to your wall to see who your real friends are" or "copy this post and Bill Gates will donate $1 to starving kids in Nigeria", and even those I haven't really seen recently, especially the not the latter.

I guess there probably are also a lot more religious people on Facebook than Twitter.

• What is your favourite website and why is it YouTube?

Every video ever made and its brother is on YouTube, except for full TV show episodes and movies (and even many of those you can now stream for a price on YouTube), oh and also except for pr0n. This is especially useful given yt-dlp for collecting music. Most songs I ever want are on YouTube, and what's not I can usually get on Soulseek.

I follow a lot of cool accounts on YouTube, but I can hardly ever be arsed to actually check up on their new vids; for the most part I just follow links from IRC and other places to specific YouTube videos. I also don't use the feature to autoplay the next suggested video, because I primarily use YouTube for music, and most music sucks. If it's not already in my collection or in one of a few specific genres, it probably sucks.

I also love having my playlist of favorite songs on YouTube for others to hear, though it does have a few disadvantages.

(1) Videos get taken down or made private without any warning or placeholder in the list, so my playlist requires constant upkeep and is often missing crucial songs, which to me is like missing teeth. RecoverMy.Video is great for this, but it's still a pain in the ass.

(2) I can't include comments on the videos in my list to explain why I like them or whatever.

And (3) If I want a song that's not on YouTube in my playlist, I have to upload it to YouTube myself, thereby risking getting my account deleted if I get too many copyright strikes. I haven't gotten any yet, but I haven't uploaded many. One of my uploads was detected to already belong to someone, but instead of taking it down they merely monetized it for them. Another of my uploads was deleted simply because the name of the song was "Adrenochrome", even though the song doesn't have any words. It was deleted on the grounds of spreading harmful conspiracy theories. I appealed, and they decided again that it was a conspiracy theory. =P And now that's a permanent strike on my record, I think one more and I get my account deleted or something.

These 3 reasons are why I decided to make my own playlist of favorite songs, hosted on a server I pay for, at inhahe.com/playlist.

One other sucky thing about YouTube is the ads. I mean they just keep getting more and more ridiculous. More ads before each video, and longer times you have to watch. Are they seeing how far they can push it before they lose too many viewers, or what? I guess this is the problem with monopolies. Not that I have this problem with YouTube ads, I've never gotten them, I guess because I've always used uBlock Origin. I heard some people saying YouTube updated their site so that even uBlock Origin doesn't work anymore, but I never had that problem. I guess, though, it was because by that time I'd already started paying for YouTube Premium.

I only pay for it because I had read and verified that high-bitrate audio is only available for YouTube Premium, and I happen to be an audiophile. But oddly, when I use yt-dlp and then check the resultant .opus file, I see that its audio bitrate is 128Kbps or 258Kbps or whatever it is you're not supposed to get without YouTube Premium, and how would YouTube know that it's me downloading with the yt-dlp client without a login cookie? I have passed yt-dlp my YouTube cookie just to see what happens, and it makes no difference. So I'm not sure (a) if I should continue paying for YouTube Premium, or (b) if I'm getting the highest quality .opus files from YouTube I can get.