I got that, yes.

It’s certainly a bad place, by the looks of it.

Not pain, but if I do anything less than strictly sensible I often feel I have an obligation not to correct it, because I should learn not to do whatever the thing was in the future. Trouble is, I never remember the thing itself. All I teach myself is it’s not ok to try to do things better than I did last time. That’s unhelpful. I know why I do it but my psychologist terminated service because she didn’t feel she could help me anymore so I don’t know how I would stop.

Wait, what?! HRT isn’t even PRN! Why are people treating it like polyjuice? I have never heard of this.

It might seem harmless, but the purpose of a joke is to draw a distinction between those who get it and those who don’t, fostering a sense of community. In this “joke”, the in-group is people who don’t know something; the community ideal fostered there is that knowledge is undesirable, that anything that seems unintuitive to the uninformed mind is inherently ridiculous. The “joke” has no effect if it doesn’t do this. Entertaining the idea without challenge is dangerous.

I might not find a joke funny, or I might not have the necessary context to appreciate it; that’s “not getting” a joke. If it’s possible to have too much context to appreciate a “joke”, it’s at the expense of people who know more than the audience.

If I’m not meant to think about it until understanding emerges, then that means it should be immediately understandable without thinking. It is not.

I know this is a joke, but wrong about what, exactly? I don’t get it.

Also, and maybe this has something to do with the joke I’m not getting, the way complex numbers are motivated in school is a lie, and a stupid one. Mathematicians were perfectly comfortable with certain equations having no solutions; the problem was when their equations told them there were no solutions when they could see the solutions: the curve x³ - 15x + 4 crosses the x-axis, but Cardano’s cubic formula gives up due to negative square roots. Imaginary numbers were originally no more than an ephemeral reasoning tool, and were only reluctantly accepted as entities in their own right because of how damn useful they were.

I’m 26 and if there’s no death door in my Afterlife, I’ll spend the next hundred thousand years inventing it. When I’m done, I’m done.

Excellent shirtpost. I am physically revulsed. (Are there tags on Lemmy? You should probably tag this. I know the joke is better if you don’t, but people clearly don’t get it.)

Seriously though, while maximising good in the world is obviously a good thing for humans, the Afterlife runs on balance over virtue: half the beings there are literally evil incarnate, and they need human suffering to survive. We all think it’s sad when a seal gets eaten by a polar bear, but if no seals get eaten, the bear dies. It seems cruel, and it is, but it’s also utterly irrelevant: everyone goes to the Good Place, and their existence there is thousands of times longer than their existence on Earth; so even if they live the most miserable, gruelling lives imaginable, it counts for nothing in the long run.

Also, trying to get points means you can’t get points, so the idea is DoA anyway. (Yes, that was in S1 and they changed the system in S4, but it was never stated that they changed the scoring itself.)