2nd place winner of most hummus eaten in 2024

matcha originated in China about 1200 years ago, açaí has been consumed by Indigenous communities in the Amazon for centuries, and Dubai chocolate was invented by combining chocolate with knafeh, an 1100 year old SWANA snack.

western (usually white but seemingly not in this case) people love to call nonwhite foods suddenly becoming popular in western mainstream culture "industry plants" as if they haven't always existed.

"What have you done?"

Stray cat breaks into Lynx’s enclosure at zoo

these two felines were introduced at 6 weeks old in order to give more enrichment for the lynx and for education purposes, however they got along fantastically from the start and were eventually moved to permanently live with one another.

a much less exciting story, but a much cuter one as well.

The heatwave is killing me here

I guess God wanted the little robot to enjoy some sushi 🍣 🥲

But to extend the metaphor a bit further, Imagine Caine is a person living isolated in the middle of nowhere without internet. He's desperately lonely, so he raises a bunch of ducks he captures from a nearby lake because they are his favorite animal.

The Ducks keep dying. He does not know why. The ducks peck at him whenever he tries to pet them. He does not know why. He tries to build the best possible coop for them, but they keep plucking their own feathers from stress.

He loves them, but no matter what he does, no matter what he tries, the ducks are miserable and keep dying and want nothing to do with him. But he doesn't want to let them go, he has nothing else in his life. He has nobody else in his life.

Now the metaphor breaks down when you remember the humans can actually talk to Caine, unlike ducks. But honestly that only would help so much, Caine had pretty much zero context to comprehend most of the things the humans talked about as being important to them.

Caine pretty much saw most of the human's complaints as being a case of Preferences rather than "I need things to change so I don't abstract from the stress". And given Caine does not really understand things like nuance and Unspoken Meanings, he was not going to get that unless somebody spelled it out for him directly in those terms (Caine my beloved AuDHD disaster dentures).

Caine literally had to Google humans in their natural habitat before he had even an inkling of what they were actually upset about.

I always thought the Blue AI here is meant to represent the idea of a perfect Ideal Self that Caine thought he needed to become before he could be loved. Caine internalized it when he consumed the Blue AI, and this is him shedding that idea as the first step of self-acceptance.

The thing about an Ideal Self, is that it's normal and fine to have one, but it needs to be realistically achievable. If you set your goals impossibly high, and believe that you'll never be complete or worthy of love until you reach them, then you're setting yourself up for a lot of frustration and pain. Worse, it leads you to believe that you should be superior to everyone else, which actively hinders your growth and damages your relationships with others.

I know some people wanted the Blue AI to be another sentient entity that "possessed" Caine during his worse moments and the secret evil, but i wanna say you misunderstood. The story was always meant to be about Caine. When we actually see the Blue AI, it's just this small blue orb. It has no face. It has no lines. It remains the same from its time of development, while Caine's made his own choices, and grew, and changed. Caine is so much more than the Blue AI because he became his own person a long time ago.