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@lain@lain.com AS A HELLDIVER PLAYER I WANT TO ENGULF ALL BUGS IN FLAMETHROWER FIRE AND NAPALM

I mean ... unless you're allergic to bees.

You can also develop a bee allergy at any time. A lot of bee keepers keep a bottle of liquid/children's Benadryl around just in case (if you feel your throat closing up, chug that shit). Every once in a while, we'll get a message on the local bee keeper mailing list about how someone developed an allergy, and they're selling/giving away equipment for cheap.

Starship Troopers: "The only good bug is a dead bug."

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bald niggas when bee:

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@hj @lain that's real

Yeah, that's sort of a refutation of "perception creates reality" -- whether you perceive bees positively or negatively they can still sting you and those stings can still kill you under the right conditions.

Actually, the same goes for humans. Many people think it's strangers who are dangerous, but statistically speaking you're more likely to be hurt by a friend, family member, intimate partner, or acquaintance -- the people who you think are friendly and safe.

It's one of the difficult things you have to accept if you work in science, technology, or engineering, that objective reality is the final arbiter of objective truth. No matter how much or how persuasively you argue your point, if your code doesn't compile then your code doesn't compile, if your mechanism doesn't do what it needs to do then it doesn't do what it needs to do, if your chemical formula doesn't result in the chemicals you need then it doesn't result in the chemicals you need.

I knew a guy back in school who was deeply autistic, but his brain went around in circles. He'd get the wrong answer on a test requiring math, and he'd argue that he did the correct things to get the answer even though he obviously didn't. If he took those answers and tried to apply them to a real-world situation, he'd just have the wrong outcome.

Now that doesn't mean that perception is meaningless. How you personally choose to see the world is going to affect how you interact with the world and that's going to have a big effect on your outcomes. For example, if you apply for a job because you think you can get it but don't apply for a job because you think you can't, only one of those two choices can result in you getting the job. If you try to make a new friend because you think people are good to know, or if you lock yourself in, only one of the two is likely to result in meeting new friends. The same person in the same situation can feel bad about a situation or good about a situation based on how they see it, and that has a big effect on how their lives go. Therefore there's a subjective truth that can be somewhat pliable, and it can change the way you behave in ways that have an effect on the objective world.

In spite of my examples, the world is more complicated than just seeing everything positively and acting as if everything will always turn out ok. The stereotype of the naive young person heading to the big city only to be crushed by the reality is something that actually happens, and negative perceptions don't exist just to hurt you, but to help you identify threats and protect yourself from things that can actually hurt you. My autistic friend never graduated despite his perception being that he answered the questions correctly. Another friend came to the big city from a relatively safe relatively affluent small town and was shocked when his car was broken into and all his stuff was taken.

Part of life is navigating these paradoxes -- you have to accept that objective reality doesn't care what you think is true, but your subjective perception of reality changes how objective reality plays out at times. You have to accept that being cynical means you pass up things that could have been good, but being optimistic means you accept things that turn out to be bad, and there's no math equation you can run to determine exactly how to live because there is no one correct answer. Objective and subjective are both true in a sense, cynical and optimistic are both true in a sense, and in different sense all 4 are also false in a sense.
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