You’re already asking good questions, which means you’re doing a lot better than many of the people who adopt without thinking. You’re also looking for an adult cat, which means you aren’t going to have to deal with a kitten’s destructive exploratory phase (although, fair warning, adult cats can still be destructive if you don’t prepare properly).

One thing I would say is that you should consider two versus one cats. Some cats don’t handle being alone for a long time well and can become unhappy, while others prefer not having feline company and would be just fine alone for ~48 hours. A good shelter or adoption agency may be able to tell you whether a cat prefers company or solitary.

Like some other commenters, I would strongly suggest going to local shelters and discussing with them. They should entirely understand if you aren’t able to adopt immediately and be able to discuss particulars with you.

I mean, you can argue some semantics about “peaceful”.

What it is undeniable is that it prevented global powers from going directly to total war, resulting in a much diminished number of casualties (both soldiers and civilians) compared to the World Wars. Nothing since then, even if we summed up all the wars going on around the world at any given moment, rival the unthinkable numbers of dead who piled up those conflicts, nor - if I can speculate a bit - would they have rivaled another worldwide industrialized conflict.

But.

Does that actually mean the world is “more peaceful”?

One can argue that the undeniable reality that you are much less likely to be killed in a war between nations today means “Yes.” One can also argue that peace should not be measured by cold mathematics: That the continued existence of smaller-scale conflicts around the world, internal conflicts within countries, or deaths from non-national conflicts such as the ongoing gun violence epidemic in the US or deaths caused by polluting megacorporations mean it has not gotten “more peaceful”; the risks have just changed.

I suppose it depends on how you are analyzing all of this, in the end.

Just one note: I don’t know what the nature of your thesis is, but you might get more nuanced results by something like assigning each book in a pair a 1-5 score. Right now, an answer of “I like #1 better than #2” could mean a few things:

• #2 is just awful and I hate it.
• Both are really good, but #1 is just slightly better.
• #1 just slaps and nothing could compare to it.

Disclaimer, I am not a physicist, just a guy with interest in sci-fi, science, and too much free time.

is their any theory centered around our frame of reference having a past but not a future?

So, the answer is, yes, this is actually kind of a common theory on how time actually works. Maybe.

This has to do with physics, and the fact that no two observers have the same perfect frame of reference. For most of us humans, our frames of reference are close enough to be identical on a day-to-day basis. It’s even close enough for (most) science. But it’s not true on a perfect level. For instance, special relativity says that time passes differently for objects in motion; GPS satellites have to correct for the fact that their onboard clocks are experience “slower” time than us observers on Earth. Even astronauts “lose” about ~1/100th of a second for every year spent on the ISS.

What’s this got to do with the future not existing, though?

So we know no two observers have a perfectly identical frame of reference - there is no objective “truth” of when something occurred. Cool. Now what? Well, what we can talk about is historic light cones. Because the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, we can determine how far from you a photon departing your actions would travel. Places that photon would reach at any given point in time following your action are said to be within your historic light cone, and in common parlance, the past. The boundary of how far that photon is reaching at any given moment is, from your frame of reference, “the present”. But since nothing can exceed the speed of light, it is impossible for an observer to view beyond the present, into the future.

The catch, of course, is reference frames. You used a plural - “our frame of reference”, “we’re blazing a trail forward” - but the reality is that each of us has a minutely different reference frame and is blazing a minutely different trail. Again, for almost any day-to-day purposes this is irrelevant… but there are certain scientific experiments which exploit or even rely on this absence of reference frame.

Cool, what about time travel again?

In my first comment above, I mentioned something called closed timelike curves. Those are an actual thing: By severely bending spacetime, you can theoretically cause a photon to “curve” around and end up at the same point in time it was produced, now in its subjective past, while mathematically not violating quantum physics.

This is where things get kind of freaky and headachy; if a photon can be sent into its subjective past, doesn’t that imply a future now existing, in which that photon will be generated? The answer is, not in the frame of reference of that particular photon. A historic light cone of that photon being generated, now in that photon’s future, still exists; but that photon is now generating a new, detached lightcone…

Like I said, headachy. I also have to emphasize that while the math holds up, there’s ample reason to believe CTCs don’t exist, chief among them that our mathematical understanding of quantum physics may still be imperfect.

tl;dr: Yes, absence of reference frames means that each distinct observer is blazing their own trail, which spreads into the “past” at the speed of light. The future, exceeding the speed of light, is unobservable. This framework does provide a mathematical concept of how you could send something into your subjective past, but such a means is still theoretical at best.

This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox (“You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?”). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.

Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn’t even all of them:

• The closed loop theory: To maintain the loop, you will in the future build a time machine which will allow you to activate the machine in the past, maintaining the loop. Past you may even be unaware it was activated from the future.
• The Parallel Universe theory: When future-you sent information into the past, they did not send it into their own past but rather into a universe in which you do not send the information back in the first place.
• The Timelike Curve theory: Because there is no common reference frame for “time”, each quanta of “you” is experiencing a different reference frame. The historic light cone of your future self sending the information back exists, and if you could follow those photons backwards you would find him doing this. But future you, in your frame of reference, will never see the machine activate.
• The Emergent Time theory: Time is not a linear path, but a function of entropy. By inverting entropy, you have caused a reconfiguration of the universe into a version in which the machine is inactive.

Right? I try to stay away from it so a few unread pages can build up and I can devour them all at once, but I never manage to stay away for long…

Been following Jay for a few years now - he used to lurk the Worldbuilding community over on Reddit, so I ran into him a few times back before I migrated to Lemmy. Runaway is some really fantastic stuff, and the sheer effort of depth put into minor details of the world make it stand out. (Seriously, check for the small details of how the characters emote - it’s fascinating.)

At this point I only wish more of it would come out faster, but again given the sheer attention to detail and quality of art, I’m just delighted to have it at all!

It really is an interesting question, yes! Fires started by frictional heating are pretty uncommon in nature, but early humans could pretty readily see that objects placed near a fire would begin to smolder and burn just from radiant heat.

It really depends on when we were able to take intellectual leap of realizing that all heat is equivalent, and fire is not a prerequisite of making new fire.

We don’t know. Hell, we can’t even narrow it down to a specific place with certainty. There is strong evidence in human settlements for use of fire anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 1 million years ago. When, exactly, is hard to ascertain; for instance, some sites which are claimed to hold the oldest evidence have been criticized as resembling the aftermath of wildfires.

It is also depends on what you mean by “discovered”: Early proto-hominids were almost certainly aware of fire and the concept of burning, so are we counting from when they realized “hey, I can take a burning thing and put it where I want it, and it will spread burning there?” Or are we only counting from when fire began to be used as a tool (e.g., for clearing brush or cooking)? Or when humans discovered how to start fires in the absence of a natural source?

When it’s posts you agree with, it’s honest users. When it’s posts you disagree with, it’s astroturfing.

I joke, but unfortunately that seems to be the most common metric for a lot of people. If it’s a position “no one would really support” (in their view), then support for it must be astroturfed.

Sorry, I think maybe my point was misunderstood. Trust me, I’m in full agreement with you: Like the comment I was responding to was saying, trying to simply frame “positive” masculinity in terms of feminine traits doesn’t seem like a good idea. There needs to be a positive reference for actually masculine role models and ideals.

Like, literally everything you said is something I totally agree with.

My concern is that, specifically, initiatives which idealize working-class providers and fail to recognize the way automation and computerization have significantly flattened the jobs market (especially well-paying, working-class jobs), are intrinsically doomed because we don’t have an economy which widely supports men acting as supporters for a family. If we idealize a working provider but simultaneously leave things in a state where a man can’t provide for his family, what I fear we’re actually left with is swaths of men feeling unfulfilled and angry at those in charge for bringing them to this point.

W-Wait, what is this? A well-thought out, constructive, sympathetic comment? Here? I don’t believe it!

Real talk, though: This is an incredibly solid post and I really appreciate you taking the time to actually write all of these points out. It’s rare (or, subjectively, it feels rare) to see an admission that a major shift in how this topic is approached is needed, and I feel just a bit more hopeful seeing someone else put in the time to go this deep on it.

I would only make two add-on comments to your points:

• With regard to point #6, I agree with the concept - but we have to be careful of how we phrase this. Unless it comes with a major effort to utterly restructure our economy in such a way that either a man’s value is no longer measured in his ability to be successful in a paid position, and/or we restructure our economy to make success more viable, I fear that efforts to support “working class heros” are doomed to become awkward failures as automation continues to steamroll the viability of those positions.

• One point I don’t see brought up here, though it is touched at in (1) and (8), is that we’ve got to modulate how we discuss so-called “toxic” behavior. When so many seemingly minor behaviors are met with the same levels of disdain, villainization, and even punishment as things like actual sexual assault, it ends up feeling deeply isolating, undermines the point that is trying to be made, and pushes men towards the worst actors.

I don’t know if it was that short term, but I’ve always been rather concerned with the sharp degree of hostility and even outright hatred that seems to be tacitly accepted or encouraged.

I cannot express enough how true this is. The key animators in a lot of Anime studios are overworked, but there are also “grunt farms” which handle the heavy work of filling in the animations. Even US (and really, everyone else) studios farm out a lot of work to these houses, who take the barebones stuff the main staff have assembled and turn it into a polished product.

Yeah, I struggle with Organic modeling. I think it’s because I was trained in parametric for engineering, but I just mind-blank when approaching “how do I make this complex shape?” in Blender. CAD’s approach feels very straightforward and intuitive; I know where each feature is defined and can tweak it fairly easily. Blender… doesn’t. And I know it’s definitely not me, because I’ve seen people do very powerful things with it.

Like, I’ve run through a lot of the tutorials, and every time they get to “Okay, time for you to make this simple shape on your own!”, I immediately slip back into CAD modeling mindset, which isn’t really compatible with Blender.

I’m in a similar boat right now - I use the Student Edition ($60-100 a year, depending on sales, locally installed vs. using the cloud-based 3Dexperience).

It’s not a bad deal by any means, but I do wish I didn’t have to deal with annual reinstalls and perpetually worrying Dassault is going to decide to take it away.

3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don’t hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I’m not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they’re hard - but basic modeling features.

Hell, I’d even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are “free but terrible” and “you need a mortgage to use this”.

There’s a submarine comedy called Down Periscope from the 90s. The story is, of course, absolute ridiculousness (albeit highly entertaining ridiculousness).

I’ve repeatedly been told by navy veterans, however, that it comes closest to portraying actual life in the navy - in particular, that virtually every character in the film is someone you can (and likely will) actually encounter in the navy.

“But you just like… screw stuff together, right? Cut the basic materials to make the parts, put it together, box it up, ship it out, right?”

• Someone I legitimately spoke to once. We were talking about assembling TVs.

I find that people who’ve never assembled anything more complex than Ikea furniture or something more technical than changed a pipe or switch in their home, tend to think production exists in exactly two levels: Low-tech, hand-tools-at-most labor which can be easily spun up because “anyone can do it”, and ultra-high-tech stuff like computer chips which need highly specialized factories, but where a few factories can mostly satisfy nationwide demand.

Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Low (gear). The 5 “standard” positions the standard automatic gearshift levers could be set to. Versus the weird stuff like dials or push-buttons that are incredibly hard to operate by muscle-memory if you aren’t looking right at them.