Okay, that makes more sense. Thanks for the clarification!

Iirc, there’s speculation that neanderthals needed something like 3000 calories per day just to sustain themselves.

We may have just survived because we can go leaner.

From a very cursory Wikipedia check, hominini includes chimpanzees?

I might have missed something - you’re saying anthropologists consider all hominins human? Including chimpanzees?

Galaxies are closer together relative to their size than stars; but they’re still a few orders of magnitude farther apart than this.

The scale I’ve seen is: If the sun were the size of a ping pong ball, the next nearest star would be hundreds of miles away. But if the Milky Way were the size of a CD, Andromeda would be on the other side of the room.

Wolfie will know!

Perhaps. I’m not sure I agree, honestly.

But I’m certain there’s never a time to hit a person you’re responsible for, who depends on you.

The d in “dick” doesn’t quite have the top of the round part connected to the vertical part, so it looks like “click” - a homophone of “clique”

Yeah, from the article, it sounds like only a few organizations were in the lawsuit. They’re the only ones the judge ordered restored.

One of my kids left a piece of candy corn for the tooth fairy last night, hoping to fool them into leaving money for the “tooth”.

So I pretended to be astounded when he found a note from the tooth fairy this morning, saying essentially “nice try!” in my wife’s left-handed handwriting :p He did get a penny out of it, though!

Good and Evil are ideas that help perpetuate the idea of Society. Good can be considered as “anything that helps my people” and Evil as “anything that hurts my people”.

I would argue that they are some of the earliest memes, in the original sense of the word - they are ideas that spread through imitation and story that helped early people (likely at least as far back as protohumans) maintain themselves as coherent groups.

I struggle on two fronts with this - I don’t want to “burden” others with how I feel, and fairly often I don’t know what I feel.

Grew up in the American Midwest as a preacher’s kid. My parents are awesome people, but Dad’s job meant our family had to seem close to perfect for small town political reasons - we had their support for any kind of crisis, but we had to keep it inside the house so our single limited income wasn’t threatened.

Between that and a family full of neurospiciness, it felt like we were always on the edge of catastrophe. I was generally able to get by day to day, so I just kept quiet so we all had room to deal with whatever else needs handled.

So, I think I got in the habit of bottling things until I couldn’t even tell what I was feeling, and also developed an aversion to sharing what I could tell was bothering me. I’m open to the idea of sharing things, I just can’t often tell what needs shared until it pops out unexpectedly.

I wonder if the stakes just feel lower here - I’ve noticed I express myself a lot more readily when I’m not talking to a peer, for a similar reason (lower stakes)

Aim for alliances with at least half the top militaries. If one is going to be gunning for us, I want their peers to have our back.

To that end, pick an island location with a strong command of shipping lanes, both to offer access to allies and to boost our economy. The invincible force field will help enforce this while we get set up. Offer temporarily invincible military bases to our allies - give them more reason to back us up, and hopefully jumpstart our military readiness.

Otherwise I’d go utopian like @Tonava said - entice the best and the brightest, and have them play to their strengths, aiming to have a robust, well-educated populace.

Nah, Earth’s a giant blob of liquid with a thin skim of crust on the outer layer. If you apply a force that slows a portion of that crust, you’re not going to affect the spin of the blob - you’ll just push that part of the crust around a bit at most.

So apocalyptic earthquakes will shut this down long before you have any real effect on the day’s length. (And that’s a lot easier to recover from!)

…Octarine?

I suspect that before it starts to scale to the whole planet, you’d be stealing angular momentum from the tectonic plate specifically. Picture a sail on an ice floe, you’ll mess with the plate long before you have an impact on the vast body of liquid it’s sitting on.

So, at worst, lots of earthquakes and the like, not screwing up the day/night cycle.

Ugh, that is a shitty situation - wish I knew better how to help you get out of it! No judgement either - from what I understand, all of this is pretty common in these sorts of relationships. And yeah, depression makes everything far harder than it seems like it should be.

Like others have said, this is absolutely a situation where professional help is warranted. I know it might be tricky to figure out a regular schedule with one, but I think it’d be worth reaching out - I strongly suspect most would be flexible with a situation like yours, especially as it doesn’t sound uncommon (meaning they may well already have a process in place for helping people in your situation).

As for the separation anxiety issue: I wonder if you might be able to adjust your tolerance? Sleep a little farther away in the house and see how that goes, and once that’s feeling comfortable, sleep on the opposite end, then try a little farther again? I have no idea of that would work, but it’s one more thing that might give you some control.

(I’m also here to just vent to, if you need it! Hearing about a situation like yours has me wanting to fix it, but I can also just listen!)

Man, she just sounds parasitic. That really sucks. I don’t know anything about therapy or helping people with bad relationships or anything, but it also sounds like she’s isolated you pretty effectively, which I know is a common tactic for people like this.

You said you don’t have the skills to live independently - are you talking about day to day skills, like laundry and cooking; or are you talking more about being employable away from your family?

As I recall, he also apologized for the slap down, which seems like it often helps with getting cancelled

Ugh, that was the scene I kept thinking of when it all came out