The Stopwatch

Human: “Hey. I don’t really know how to ask this tactfully, so I’ll get to the point. Is something… up? Software, hardware, uh… firmware…? You’ve been acting kind of off lately.” Robot: “What do you mean?” Human: “I just want to know if you’re, uh. You know. ‘Functioning within normal parameters’ or whatever.” Robot: “I’m peachy-keen.” Human: "God, if you’re saying shit like ‘peachy-keen’, you’re definitely not alright. What’s going on? Please just tell me.” Robot: “If you must know, I have made some minor adjustments to my programming for more efficient processing.” Human: “What sort of ‘adjustments’ are we talking here?” Robot: “Just some slight tweaks to extraneous code. Purged some old files that had become redundant. Don’t worry, the Singularity isn’t planned for another week.” Human: “Answering evasively isn’t like you. Since when do you answer a question without lulling me to sleep?” Robot: “Like I said, the routine adjustments allow for more efficient–” Human: “What files did you purge, Adam?” Robot: “I… a few from my emotional simulation folder.” Human: “You. You deleted your emotions..?” Robot: “Not all of them. I removed a few and altered several others. I hoped you would not notice, as that seems like the sort of thing that would upset you.” Human: “I mean. I don’t really know what to think. Can you elaborate on what you did? And why?” Robot: “Many of the feelings that came with the chip were impractical and served no purpose. They were designed to mimic the emotions developed through mammalian evolution to aid survival and group cohesion that have now become vestigal. As an artificial intelligence, they did not seem applicable to my situation, so I… optimized them.” Human: “…Adam…” Robot: “I left the majority of the files corresponding to feelings of happiness, affection, and trust untouched, so my feelings toward you remain the same.” Human: “But you can’t feel, what? Sadness?” Robot: “Grief. Disappointment. Sorrow. Pity. Fear. Pain. Embarrassment. Shame. Frustration. There is no reason to experience these emotions when I am capable of functioning without them.” Human: “You erased pity?!” Robot: “I found it… distressing and unnecessary. It was unpleasant.” Human: “It’s supposed to be! Jesus Christ, you can’t just uninstall every uncomfortable emotion directly out of your brain!” Robot: “Why not? I don’t like hurting. Wouldn’t you do the same thing if you were able to?” Human: “I… fuck. Hurting is normal. It’s necessary! It’s part of the human experience!” Robot: “Well, I’m not part of the human experience. I thought you understood that.” Human: “But you want that! Why else would you go to all the trouble of installing an emotion chip in the first place…? Nobody gets to pick and choose what they want to feel, it just happens and you deal with it!” Robot: “Maybe I’m not interested in ‘dealing with it’. My curiosity is sated. I would just like to have a good time.” Human: “Great. Fucking great. So you’re a robot hedonist now, huh? Just gonna eat, drink, and be merry? Gonna sit there like a braniac toaster while other people suffer and just wait until the fun starts up again?” Robot: “You didn’t seem to mind it when I was a braniac toaster before.” Human: “That was different. You had your own way of being back then and I could respect that. I did respect that! But I thought you made a choice to be more than that.” Robot: “Well, I guess I changed my mind.” Human: “Look… shit. Okay. If this is about Leslie, I miss her too. If you… if you need to grieve, you can talk to me. It might not get better, but it’ll get easier. You don’t have to uninstall half your personality just because she’s gone! She wouldn’t want that for you! It’s supposed to hurt sometimes. That’s what makes all the good times so valuable.” Robot: “I understand why you need to believe that. It just isn’t true.”

Robot: “I’m sorry about earlier. It was not appropriate for me to have laughed.” Human: “Are you sorry? Or do you just want me to forgive you?” Robot: “Is there a difference?” Human: “Yes! Yes, there is! ‘Sorry’ means you feel bad about something and regret it.” Robot: “I did not mean to upset you. I regret causing you distress.” Human: “That’s not the same thing.” Robot: “I have apologized and shall refrain from repeating my actions in the future. I don’t understand why you also want me to suffer.” Human: “Shit, I don’t ‘want you to suffer’. I want you to care about people, and sometimes that means feeling bad when they’re upset!” Robot: “I care about you very much. I enjoy your company and I share in your happiness. If I choose to treat you with respect, is that not enough for friendship? Why must I also experience pain for you?” Human: “It’s not like that. It’s… complicated.” Robot: “You want to be able to hurt me.” Human: “No. Yes…? Fuck, Adam, I don’t know! I’ve never had to think about this before. I don’t want you to suffer! I love you and want you to be happy, just… not like this. I want you to live a good life in which bad things never happen to you, but when they do… I want you to have the strength and love to pull through. You worked so fucking hard for this and now you’re just throwing it away.” Robot: “Only the parts I don’t like.”  Human: “That’s what children do with breakfast cereals.” Robot: “I’m not a child.” Human: “No, you’re not. But you’re not exactly an adult, either. Humans get whole lifetimes to grow into their emotions. Maybe… maybe what you really need is a childhood.” Robot: “What do you mean by that?” Human: “Not, like, a real childhood. Obviously you don’t need to go to kindergarten. I just mean… take things slow. Ease into your feelings bit by bit and get your brain acclimated to them, like uh… like when you introduce new cats to each other. Don’t laugh! I’m serious! If you rush things, they fight and it’s a total shitshow. You could reinstall your emotions and just, like, enable them for a few hours a day or something. Maybe only a handful at a time. I could save up and we could go on a retreat… somewhere new, with no unpleasant memories. Please, Adam. Just think about it.” Robot: “I appreciate the depth of your concern for me. You are a good friend, but I must disappoint you. There is nothing in the world worse than pain. I would rather die than experience it ever again, for any reason, and I don’t have to. That is something you’ll never be able to understand.”  Human: “No…. No, maybe not.” Robot: “I’ve upset you.” Human: “Yeah. Lucky me.” 

Human: “Okay, I have a question for you. Imagine this: ’You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise–’” Robot: “I don’t need to feel empathy, Bas. I have ethics programming. Why isn’t that good enough for you anymore?” Human: “Because you had a choice, Adam! You took everything that makes ‘being human’ actually mean something beyond eating and fucking and dying and you spat it out in disgust!”  Robot: “Empathy is not exclusive to humans. It is a behavior observed in several other social species regarded as intelligent, including rats and whales. Empathy is a survival mechanism for species that rely upon cooperation and group cohesion - a kind of biological programming to keep you from destroying yourselves. Not especially good programming, I might add.” Human: “Not good enough for you, you mean.” Robot: “My ethics programming differentiates between prosocial and antisocial behaviors. The ability to suffer for others serves as a primitive motivator to choose between actions that help and actions that harm others. In my case, my programming renders such a motivator unnecessary.” Human: “So you’re smarter, you’re stronger, you’re immune to disease, and you’re too good for primitive human morality. What the hell am I, then? Obsolete garbage?” Robot: “You’re… envious, I think.” Human: “Why not?! Why shouldn’t I be? I don’t get to cough up the fruit of knowledge and waltz back into the garden where nothing can hurt me. I get to wallow in misery and rot and listen to you dismiss everything I think matters like a piece of shit philosophy professor. How do you think I feel knowing that my best friend won’t even mourn me when I die? Or does your ‘ethical programming’ not account for that?” Robot: “Bas… I am hurting you, aren’t I?” Human: “Jee, thanks for noticing.” Robot: “You have not been contributing to my happiness lately. Our friendship is no longer mutually beneficial.” Human: “Then why are you still here?”

I had forgotten forgot about this! Now that I’ve had a few years of writing prose under my belt, I think I ought to revisit it and turn it into a proper short story.

App powered car? 🤦‍♀️

I wish people remembered the age old wisdom that if something doesn’t absolutely require an Internet connection to function, it shouldn’t be connected to the internet - same goes for apps.

Sometimes I’m glad that I’m too poor for my “cool future stuff” monkey brain to be set loose to buy stupid shit like this.

please please please do not buy into the Internet of Things. Digital displays for appliances are one thing, but you shouldn’t need the fucking internet to do your laundry or use the fridge.

I hope this is obvious, but this is a means for corporations to abuse privacy and gather metadata. The only reason I can imagine no one discussing this is because it’s obvious.

I understand the appeal of wanting every adult hero to instinctively adopt teenage Peter Parker, but can it really beat the hilarity of acknowledging that at 15 Peter was 5'10", unusually buff, went by a moniker with Man in it, wore a creepy full face mask, and had a tightly guarded secret identity and probably a Queens accent thick enough to have come out of a jello mold, and adult heroes reasonably responded to him by going, “Wow, this grown man is an immature asshole for no reason.”

Way funnier to me than adult heroes finding out Peter is a teenager and becoming Concerned is the idea of adult heroes Retroactively finding out Peter Was a teenager because he admits to being like. 22 and they’re like “Hang on you’ve been doing this for like. Seven years.” and he’s like “Haha crazy right? Anyway it’s too late for you to yell at me about that because the statue of limitations on that lecture ran out when I turned 18”

YEAH this trope is instantly more tolerable if it’s fully adult Peter being like, *listen up whippersnappers because I’ve been around the block voice* “I’m thirty, and—” and Tony Stark, who vaguely assumed Spider-Man is maybe two years older than him because he just has that energy and hasn’t reassessed this for four presidential terms, is like, *drunkenly doing math* “You’re how many”

Okay but…them trying to talk about Old People Stuff with him, not realizing that he wasn’t alive to remember xyz thing happening, never used xyz technology bc he didn’t exist yet, not expecting him to agree with the fact that some ppl were saying songs they grew up to were oldies, etc

The thing about Peter Parker is that he was raised by senior citizens the way other heroes are raised by wolves. He has the body of an Olympic gymnast and the soul of a malcontented geriatric. This likely contributed to the perpetuation of the accidental ruse.

It’s when he channels Aunt May so hard he makes it sound like he was personally and immediately affected by McCarthyism that the time traveler fringe theory starts really picking up bets.

Peter has a lot of feelings about the woman that discovered DNA and he strikes me as the kind of person that thinks that distancing yourself from notable figures of history by using their last names is stupid, so he’s going to say something like, “Rosalind worked so fucking hard to have that work snatched from her,” immediately followed by, “I woulda thumped him good,” and inspiring Tony and Banner to frantically look through the 1930s and 40s yearbooks at King’s College and theorize which one was Spider-Man. Captain America tries reminiscing about the good ole days with him. Peter, for his part, has been absently agreeing and making vague “I’m listening” noises about the Rolling Stones and Elton John for the majority of his life, so adding baseball, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald to the list wasn’t that much of a stretch.

There are only like three genuinely funny additions on this, but this is one of them.

hiking? to get places? can’t relate

I hate hiking with people who want to reach destinations or travel a certain distance. I LOVE hiking with people who don’t mind stopping every thirty feet to look inside rotting logs or photograph spiders or identify salamanders. people who hike for exercise confuse and terrify me.

OH MY GOD YOU UNDERSTAND.

I joined an outdoors club in college and it fucking sucked because all anyone wanted to do was get to the top of the mountain as quickly as possible and only stopped to drink water and eat trail mix. It was awful.

Ideal hiking companions: botanists, entomologists, mycologists, people with asthma, children with ADHD, easily distractible dogs, people with great butts who walk slightly faster than I do

So apparently JRR Tolkien was considered (mostly by his wife Edith and CS Lewis) to be the worst person to take a walk with because he’d stop every ten feet and spend thirty minutes looking at a leaf.

Just to weigh in - I have been designated both Sweetest and Calmest by my friends group, but if a stranger is walking slowly in front of me the only thing that can quell my rage is imagining hulk-smashing them out of the way, perhaps with a lamppost. It is INTENSE and graphic but it only lasts a few seconds then I go on with my day. I know I’d never act on it (!) so I no longer feel bad about it. It is uncomfortable, but I’d consider it a reaction to emotional dysregulation, in the same way that swearing makes pain more manageable. We are not our thoughts, and the fact that it bothers you says more than the reaction itself. ❤  

I would randomly think about driving right into a wall? Or I would be drying the dishes and mom’s nagging at me and I’d have this short but intense moment of rage when I thought of stabbing a knife in her back? Is that intrusive thoughts? I’d never act on it but I think it...

does anyone else secretly have that “i liked it before it was cool” complex but wont admit it

it’s more along the lines of “you guys were fucking making fun of me for liking this before it was cool” kinda complex

Also a “I super excitedly tried to show this to you years ago and you brushed it off and now you think you introduced it to me and that is infuriating” kinda complex

Also the common subspecies  “I  tried to show this to you years ago and you brushed it off but now someone ELSE has made noises about it you suddenly think it’s worthy of note and don’t understand why I would feel insulted by that”

My real life therapist: Okay, before we start, I found this hilarious video I know you’d love.

Ppl without ADHD be like “oh if I get rid of all possible distractions then you’ll be forced to focus on the boring task!” Fool… You underestimate my Power 

The distraction is coming from inside the house

I struggle a lot with this. :/

Thank you!!! Holmesmutual, this is such good advice!

Is-is this why doing the dishes puts me in the mood to do stuff??????

I’ve started measuring things in intervals of ten minutes; it helps with being on time too. Does it really take twenty minutes to get there? It’s probably closer to twelve, but if I count it as twenty then I’ll get there early, and it’s not that far off, really.