In a Neal Brennan stand-up special (Piped link) he mentions he uses a Pavlok to shock him every 3 minutes on stage to remind him to smile.

I heard of it from a Reddit comment about an easter egg location in Diablo 3 called “The Fowl Lair.” It’s filled with chickens and a single Greasy Pig.

The Chicken and the Pig

The fable of the Chicken and the Pig is used to illustrate the differing levels of commitment from project stakeholders involved in a project. The basic fable runs:

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.
The Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”
Pig replies: “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”
The Chicken responds: “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”
The Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”

This wasn’t an innocent request for interesting topics to follow, it was taking the stance that only serious topics get discussed here and it’s boring:

I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.

It wasn’t a demand, but certainly requesting that we “let our hair down a bit” and that they “often get bored of the Fediverse.”

This post could have been phrased as “What are some good non-political or news related communities?” And I’ll gladly accept the label of being elitist if it’s because I have minimal expectations that people explore for solutions before complaining and implying it’s everyone else that needs to change. You can’t browse all without easily bumping into the things I listed, and if you aren’t aware there’s different filtering options there’s always a sidebar link instructing you how the platform works.

I’m not the one complaining about being bored and requesting that everyone else amuse me. All those things I listed are things that are regularly posted so what’s the issue?

Yeah, where’s the fun? There’s no posts about owls/bats/invertebrates/cats/dogs, no cooking or food posts, no pictures of people knitting socks, nobody asking general questions, no articles and pictures about space, no discussion around movies/tv/books, nobody ever posts about gaming of any kind, there’s no memes to be found anywhere, no poems or short stories, no digital/traditional/AI art.

For some reason browsing news/politics/technology always seems to revolve around depressing and infuriating topics which is different from every other platform.