It means puzzled and/or confused.

Many authors seem to think it means amused mixed with some confusion or puzzlement or something else like that.

Some dictionaries have started to include definitions along those lines, which is correct to do if that is becoming a common usage. But that makes the word bullshit because it no longer conveys a clear meaning. Unlike some words that gain new meanings through misuse, it’s usually not clear which meaning is intended from context. Usually I can easily imagine a character’s response to something to be either of these definitions so I often can’t understand the author’s intention. I often find myself taken out of the story while I try to understand which meaning I should use. Because of this I think the word has become useless and shouldn’t be used.

Bemused

It’s used incorrectly so often that even when I suspect it’s being used correctly I can’t be sure. At this point it’s ambiguity makes it a bad word choice.

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“A Transport For London camera study of 7,500 cyclists at five junctions found in 2007 that, contrary to popular perception, most cyclists do not run reds: 84% of the cyclists stopped at red traffic lights.”

This surprised me. I haven’t noticed that many cyclists running reds. The tone seemed to suggest that was a good statistic for some reason. That is way too high. If 16% of cars ran red lights my life expectancy would be about three days. I’m in favor of cyclists bending or breaking rules to protect themselves but I don’t think running reds qualifies. Everyone should always stop at reds. I’m a bit of a scofflaw when it comes to some traffic laws but that’s too far.

Absolutely, I shouldn’t have used cheap as a synonym for bad, or vice versa, that’s my mistake.

There are a lot of very good wines at low price points, especially from underappreciated regions. A little experimentation will result in finding some great value.

The same goes for the whiskey. There are a lot of distilleries out there with great offerings far below the price of the big names everyone recognizes. Especially when you take fads into account. Many bourbons and Japanese whiskeys that used to be good buys are now ridiculously priced.

Yeah, but…are you saying you never want some shitty nachos?

I can only speak for myself but I’ve eaten at Michelin star restaurants all over the world and enjoy fine dining whenever I have the time and I love it, but sometimes I just want taco bell.

Alcohol, on the other hand; good Scotch and wine has ruined the cheap stuff for me. I can’t drink cheap, or even mediocre, whisky or wine anymore. If it’s not very high quality I’d rather just have something like a gin or vodka cocktail.

I get what you’re saying, but assuming you’re talking about medical doctors, they’re a bad example. I know three doctors well and they’re all dumber than a sack of hammers. Becoming a doctor doesn’t require much intelligence, it requires the ability to stay in school long enough (and being able to tolerate gross stuff from other people’s bodies).

What do you call someone who got all Ds in medical school? Doctor.

Vilnius is fucking amazing. I really enjoyed my visit to the three Baltic nations recently. I’m glad I got there before all this started kicking off.

Coincidentally, I hope, several places I’ve visited in the last 15-20 years have become sketchy to travel to for one reason or another within a year or two after my visit. Maybe I should just stay home for the good of the world.

If we can verb nouns, we can noun adjectives!

I think it started with people saying “I would like to (do something very illegal) to (some person) in Minecraft.” Thinking that saying “in Minecraft” would shield them from any repercussions because they only wanted to do it in a simulated environment. Eventually some people would just shorten it to things like “…in Minecraft” and leave the obvious part unsaid.

Seriously, I’d like to know too. I’ve always thought that you got them and then you were done. But maybe that was counting on there not being a bunch of disease vectors walking around.

But if we fixed it where would we get all our slaves undocumented workers?

Don’t take my word for it. Even though your instance is defederated from them you can still go to hexbear.net and search locally for posts about Ukraine.

That shit kills me. I was reading something on hexbear about some recent anti-gay stuff in Russia. It was all about critical support, and not just Russia. They also talked about critical support for Nigeria, despite them having the death penalty for gay people, because they’re “anti-imperialist.”

Why doesn’t it go the other way? Why can’t you give “critical support” to countries making strides in human rights while criticizing their economic policy?

To me, their priorities seem pretty fucked up. Between exploitative economic policy and killing or imprisoning people for existing as themselves, I know which one I’m going to be “critical” of and which one will cause me to refuse support for a country in any way.

That’s because your instance has blocked hexbear and lemmygrad.

I think the average bullet wound might result in slightly higher medical bills than the average car accident.

I was disappointed when this happened but now I’m glad I can’t find it anymore. I had become lazy, just putting it on everything. Now I have a variety of sauces I choose based on what I’m putting it on. There are a lot of good sauces out there. With proper pairing you might not miss Sriracha at all.

The thing I love about this, the thing I always find funny whenever this comes up, is that these midwits are just too dumb to make the obvious argument. The argument that is “in their face” and “being shoved down their throats.”

There is a rational, coherent argument to make their point. It’s one I disagree with. It’s one that, in my opinion, can only be made in bad faith with no purpose other than to be a concern troll, but it’s there.

They always bring up Adira, Gray, Jett, Stamets, Culber, and anything else that’s gone up their ass but never any of the actual social commentary because they’re so thick it went over their heads and they didn’t even notice it. You can see it in this thread. They mention the characters and people respond with “but they’re just existing, how does that bother you?” They just bring up the characters again to a response of “yeah, we heard you the first time, what are they doing that bothers you other than existing?” And it just goes in a circle.

There was never an episode of ToS where Uhura talked about how hard it was to be a black woman as a bridge officer, because it wasn’t. That’s the whole point. In the future Star Trek wants us to imagine a black female officer is completely unremarkable. Whenever they wanted to engage in social commentary about race relations in the 60s they had to invent an allegorical race, time travel, or use some other device to make their point.

The same thing is happening in the newer series. All those characters are just existing. Their sexuality and gender identity is completely unremarkable in the future Star Trek shows us. If those dipshits had two brain cells to rub together they would see the new series are full of allegories about not just tolerance, or even acceptance, but appreciation for beings with non-conforming expressions of self. If any of that did manage to trickle through their thick skulls they probably just twisted into “yeah, people shouldn’t make fun of me for having a relationship with a waifu pillow.”

If they weren’t so stupid they could easily give a half dozen examples and say “it’s too much,” “I got it the first time,” “focus on something else for a change,” or whatever other bullshit justification they came up with to oppose these themes. It would be a bad faith argument that I would disagree with but at least they could pretend they’re not bigots, instead of their current position which seems to be “I’ve got no problem with these people, I just don’t want to see them.”

I saw Starship Troopers shortly after it came out. Other than knowing his name and that he was a well known sci-fi author, I wasn’t familiar with Heinlein so I assumed he was a satirist. I picked up one of his other books and read half of it thinking I just wasn’t getting it before I suddenly realized “oh shit, this guy is being sincere.”