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I have probably mentioned this, but IMHO portal was invented by Terry Pratchett.

Discworld, Book 22, The Last Continent (1998)

The wizards looked at the gently rippling surface. There should have been several feet of solid wood sticking out of it.
“Well, well, well,” said the Archchancellor, going back in out of the cold air. “Do you know, I’ve never actually seen one of these?”
“Anyone remember Archchancellor Bewdley’s boots?” said the Senior Wrangler, helping himself to some cold mutton from the trolley. “He made a mistake and got one of the things opened up in the left boot. Very tricky. You can’t go walking around with one foot in another dimension.”
“Well, no…” said Ridcully, staring at the tropical scene and tapping his chin thoughtfully with the seashell.
“Can’t see what you’re treading in, for one thing,” said the Senior Wrangler.
“One opened up in one of the cellars once, all by itself,” said the Dean. “Just a round black hole. Anything you put in it just disappeared. So old Archchancellor Weatherwax had a privy built over it.”
“Very sensible idea,” said Ridcully, still looking thoughtful.
“We thought so too, until we found the other one that had opened in the attic. Turned out to be the other side of the same hole. I’m sure I don’t need to draw you a picture.”
“I’ve never heard of these!” said Ponder Stibbons. “The possibilities are amazing!”
“Everyone says that when they first hear about them,” said the Senior Wrangler. “But when you’ve been a wizard as long as I have, my boy, you’ll learn that as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.”
“But if you could get one to open above another you could drop something through the bottom hole and it’d come out of the top hole and fall through the bottom hole again…It’d reach meteoritic speed and the amount of power you could generate would be—”
“That’s pretty much what happened between the attic and the cellar,” said the Dean, taking a cold chicken leg. “Thank goodness for air friction, that’s all I’ll say.”
Ponder waved his hand gingerly through the window and felt the sun’s heat.
“And no one’s ever studied them?” he said.

Many behind the scenes videos can be found here https://www.trollbridge.film/behind-the-scenes
*doublepromote a *quality film inspired by Terry Pratchett's series of Discworld *books

gee bob

don did
news is true
we know
he did
too bad you don't - can't - won't

the obvious is obvious
even to the average

the obvious is bob
isn't even average

some real for bk33
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1ZIdEedKME

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
- Terry Pratchett

"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters." -Terry Pratchett

Oh well. At least it didn't get violent.

I find something deliciously surreal about a bunch of kids wearing MAGA hats when none of them are even old enough to have been alive when America was supposedly at its greatest. Entitled little snowflakes

For about 10 years now i've had severe stomach problems, to the point of sometimes being all but housebound. At some point in my attempts to try and find some resolution, i came across the idea of a gut flora transplant.

I never did it because you've got to find someone healthy with a great diet and i suppose bowel regularity, which is difficult in itself because those people are rare and the subject is embarrassing.

But if you're crippled with stomach aches, woken up 7 times a night going to the toilet (and then not even doing anything), then putting someone else's shit into your own bum is nothing. As Terry Pratchett once said about Alzheimer's - it's a desperate situation, and he'd eat the rotting arsehole out of a dead mole if it meant a fighting chance.

For anyone interested, i stopped eating gluten for a while and had minor improvement. When i ate gluten, i'd get feverish and flu-like, joint pain, headaches, sweats and excruciating stomach pain. I figured it was coeliac disease and hoped i would fully recover before long. I didn't, but 2 weeks ago i also cut potato (nightshade vegetable) from my diet and i have been stomach ache free since (that is, 75%+ of the time my stomach feels painless). Apparently lectins are problematic.

If anyone has ever had severe pain for a very long time, they'll know the utter relief and joy of being pain free. It's hard to describe, but for a few days to a week, it's a euphoric feeling.

Yep, but we learned not to be. In the words of the late, exceptionally great, and much missed Terry Pratchett:

Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are . . . well . . . human beings.

While this is a nice idea, it's completely ass backwards.

I approve of the sentiment, but most of what's said here is fundamentally untrue.

First up, your body is not just "your body", it's "you". There isn't "you" and "your body". YOU are your body. No more, no less. At least until we find a way to digitise consciousness, you (as in the thoughts, memories, attitudes, personality) are inextricably linked to the body you inhabit, and even if you could remove your consciousness from your body somehow, would that even be "you"? Or just a reasonable copy?

Second, part of who you are is your background. Not race, that's bullshit, but your culture. The environment you grow up helps define your values. That's not to say you a prisoner of those values, but it's naive in the extreme to believe that they aren't a massive part of who you are (even if it's a part you might not like or agree with).

Finally, sadly, yes... babies are racist. They will inherently show a bias towards others who look similar to them.

We are not "all the same, but divided by societal labels". It's the other way round. Left alone, humans will naturally tend towards conflict, fear of the other, prejudice and heaps of other horrible traits that actually turned out to be useful (if morally wrong) in an evolutionary sense.

It is society that brings us together.

Terry Pratchett said it best:
"Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are . . . well . . . human beings."

Terry Pratchett had a pretty good explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIILp0jiXGs

Reminds me a little bit of Terry Pratchett. Best watched full screen.

It's a demonstration of human nature, really. That's exactly how human men are genetically encoded to treat women.

I'd argue that our genetic encoding would make us treat women as resources and in a much more violent fashion too.

I think the "don't hit a girl" attitude is a construct of our societal/cultural nature and it's an attempt to civilise the animal instinct to "take a mate" without regard to the females wishes at all.

I would imagine that over a long period of time, this was an important first step. Yes, it's still misogynistic, but I'm guessing it's preferable to simply fighting over females and then mating with them.

But you'd hope that we'd have moved past that by now.

Otherwise, you're just an animal that happens to walk upright.

It would be nice if we were animals that had learned how to think as well, but I fear Terry Pratchett got it right with this quote:

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

One of the most common arguments I hear is that people would have their parents or grandparents "put down" to get at their inheritance quicker, which says more about the mentality of the people who put forth that argument than it does about euthanasia.

I actually read a comment from someone who said he wouldn't read Terry Pratchett because he was "morally reprehensible". When asked about it, he sad it was because Pratchett supported being able to choose when to die.

He felt it was more moral to force not only him, but also his friends and family to suffer the indignity of watching him lose his mind and become a pale imitation of his former self.

In some ways, I find I have sympathy with the fundamentalists. They may be wrong and in some cases even evil, but at least they're honest.

Ever read Terry Pratchett? One of his characters, a witch who is often the authorial voice, has a great line about religion

Now if I’d seen him, really there, really alive, it’d be in me like a fever. If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched ‘em like a father and cared for ‘em like a mother…well, you wouldn’t catch me sayin’ things like ‘there are two sides to every question’ and ‘we must respect other people’s beliefs.’ You wouldn’t find me just being gen’rally nice in the hope that it’d all turn out right in the end, not if the flame was burning in me like an unforgivin’ sword. And I did say burnin’, Mister Oats, ‘cos that’s what it’d be. You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just…bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors.

No problem. I've got a few jokes for you straight off the bat - what's brown and sticky? A stick. What's ET short for? He's only got little legs. Did you hear the one about the constipated mathematician? He worked it out with a pencil. Doctor doctor, i feel like a pair of curtains. Pull yourself together! What's black and white and eats like a horse? A zebra. What's black and white, black and white, black and white? A penguin rolling down a hill.

Hell, Tim Vine does hundreds of one liners in half an hour and the majority of them are not at anyone's expense.

I think you've confused what you find funny with the term "humour" as it were. You may only find shadenfreude funny, and so you think all humour is shadenfreude, but it is patently obvious that things can be humourous without being at someone's expense and i find it almost petulant to be asked to prove it when it is so obvious. You almost certainly know loads of jokes like that. How does Bob Marley like his donuts? Wi' jam-in. I stood there, wondering why the frisbee was getting bigger and bigger..... and then it hit me. What did the fish say when he swam into the wall? Dam.

From what i remember of Lenny Henry's standup (like him or not) in the old days, he didn't often tell a joke at someone's expense. Tommy Cooper used to make people laugh by doing bad magic tricks. Les Dawson used to make people laugh by playing the piano badly as only a good pianist can. Terry Pratchett makes me laugh by conjuring up funny situations in a fictional world. I laughed at the Big Lebowski when he shaded the pad of paper to see what secret notes Jackie Treehorn was making and it turned out to be a doodle of a man holding his own cock. What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh. I bought some new viagra eye drops, cos they make me look hard. What do you call a man with a shovel on his head? Doug.

I could go on and on and on, but i don't get paid for this and i have other stuff to do, but i hope i've opened your eyes to whole new realms of comedy where people don't get hit in the face with stuff. Where are the Andes? At the end of your wristies. Why didn't the skeleton go to the party? He had no body to go with.

I'm so confused by your request for proof that i feel like someone's asked me "Air? What air? There's no air, i can't see any!"

I'm utterly dreading to read your reply if it says anything along the lines of "That ET joke is offensive to short people! That skeleton joke is offensive to people with eating disorders! The penguin joke is offensive to the penguin you pushed down the hill!" Please don't embarrass us both by doing that, we both know those jokes aren't offensive. (Or very funny, to be honest.)