I’ve been wondering this on and off, and I figured I might as well get around to asking:
Are other people’s imaginations shut down or impaired when they’re sick?
Mine is: I pretty much don’t have visualised fantasies at all when I’m sick, and what fantasies I do have are much fewer in number and much less vivid. I can think of possible explanations that lead to both “this is a very common experience” (maybe it’s part of the cognitive issues that come with the brain’s convalescence mode) and “this is a very rare experience” (maybe it’s my brain’s way of resolving the conflict in the instinctive How to Respond to Illness code between “get lots of rest” and “avoid getting pregnant”, forcing a loss of libido by rendering me incapable of sexual fantasies (and, as a side effect, non-sexual fantasies)).
Anyone know how common imagination impairments are when sick? Failing that, anyone have anecdotal experience about whether this happens to them?
Tags:
#oh look an original post #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(as far as I know I am not currently sick) #(*knocks on wood*)
sometimes there’s an ad on my dash and I don’t even realize it cuz yall shitpost so much that I can see a highly detailed graphic of rheumatoid arthritis and I just assume it’s the New Meme™
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
my favorite d&d thing is when someone flubs like a really obvious perception roll or something and the dm gets to be like, “well, you’re pretty sure you’re in a room but you could be wrong”
it is either really wet or really dry, you’re not entirely sure
One time a guy in our party rolled a nat 20 on a perception check, but there was nothing around he didnt already see, so the DM said “You’re not quite sure, but for a few seconds it seems like you’re standing on a giant’s table, surrounded by 5 Giants. Your party seems to look stiff and fake, and Large papers and Dice are strewn around you. Then, everything goes back to normal.”
I used to play 3.5, where Trapfinding was a rogue thing. Whenever our rogue flubbed a trapfinding roll, our DM would say, in a cheery voice, “You detect none of the traps!”
one time, my COMPLETELY non-magic using rogue rolled a nat 20 for arcana while checking out a magical sword and the dm was like “somehow… many years ago while robbing a house, you came across one very specific book about magic this one time and memorized it god knows why”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
Asking a non-religious Reconstructionist Jew about appropriating Hanukkah is kind of like asking Elizabeth Warren whether it’s okay to wear an Indian headdress.
There’s probably an official halakhic opinion about this, but if celebrating Hanukkah is appropriating Judaism, then having scrupulosity attacks about whether your celebration is wrong and searching for an official halakhic opinion about it is definitely appropriating Judaism, so maybe you shouldn’t check.
My own feeling is that if there’s ever some resurgence of anti-Semitism, I would rather Christians think of Jews as the friendly people with the beautiful rituals who drew them into their circle and invited them to share in their celebrations, than as the scary people who screamed “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION! ONLY WE ARE ALLOWED TO DO THAT!” every time they tried to light a candle.
Also, there are a bunch of prophets who say things like “There shall come a day when all the nations of the world shall bend the knee together in glorious worship of the God of Israel”, and I imagine that upon the fulfillment of the prophecy, one of the Jews turns to all the nations of the world and gives them a lecture about cultural appropriation, and then God facepalms.
Tags:
#pretty much #@Jews glorifying bloodlines and martyrdom: you’re not just endangering yourselves #you’re endangering *me* #fuck off and stop trying to drag me down with you #(the defanged version of Hanukkah is all well and good) #(I approve of candles and singing and gifts and I do these things myself) #(I do *not* celebrate a man who murdered someone for doing exactly what I would have done in their place) #(I will worship Zeus if I deem it necessary and you have no fucking right to stop me) #rants #tangents? #Judaism #antisemitism #raw nerves
So you all know that I’m a fan of Atlas Shrugged, but I don’t think I’ve told the story of how and why I first read it.
Once upon a time in senior year, I was an atheist at a Catholic high school, a brilliant asshole ready to Discourse with anyone who held still long enough. Fortunately it was a Jesuit school, so lots of people held still long enough. And this Jesuit school had a yearly senior retreat called Kairos, where a bunch of students and a handful of teachers would disappear from Tuesday to Friday and do Stuff. I knew approximately jack shit about Kairos, because it was under a very heavy no-spoilers norm and nobody leaked spoilers, at least not at me. But it sounded cool, because the word was in the front of those Time Quartet books and I was a huge Meg Murray fangirl, and anyway I have never been able to resist a secret meeting. So I signed up.
Now, the general impression I got from what little people would say about this Kairos thing was that it was about opening up emotionally and getting close with your classmates, and also something something God, and that it would permanently alter your brain. None of my friends were going because they were all sensible people whose response to “mindhazard warning” is not “I want it inside me”, and I was exactly as alienated from the rest of my classmates as ~asperger’s plus a whole lot of effort could make me, so signing up for 96 hours of Deeply Serious Neurotypical Jesus Party was the equivalent of opening a .exe you got off pyRatBay.ru. So of course I resolved to be as charitable and open-to-it and nonsnarky and taking-it-seriously as I could manage, and then start in on Atlas Shrugged as soon as I got home. Y’see, my very liberal parents had warned me against all things Rand when I was in middle school, citing mindhazard. And I had previously read The Fountainhead and hadn’t really understood what was going on (because I was too distracted by Dominique’s various issues to focus on the plot), and Atlas was advertised as “Fountainhead but not for pansies”. So I decided that immediately after doing one potentially brainfucking thing was the best time to do another one, on the theory that they would either 1) cancel out and leave me net unaffected or 2) stack weirdly and fuck me up extra hard, and either of those sounded like fun.
Without spoiling too much, Kairos was a potentially mind-altering trip. I had a few moments of feeling not totally alienated from humanity in general and my classmates in particular. I also learned that my classmates were very unlucky people and that my father fundamentally Gets me as a person and is the same type of person, but that’s another and much less bloggable pair of stories. It started out pretty fun, but my suspension of disbelief contrarianism was wearing off pretty hard by day 4, as was my ability to enjoy … stuff in general? I was some mix of overstimulated, sleep-deprived, emotionally exhausted from fighting my introversion, and generally mentally contorted. The fact that my boyfriend was in town the weekend after was deeply healthy and necessary, because at that point I really needed some social interaction I could enjoy without putting in intense effort to be both faker and more genuine than I ever normally get*. So I spent the next day using cuddles as a mental walware scanner and the day after reading Atlas Shrugged, which turned out to be impossible to put down. All told I spent about 96 hours in Christian Extrovertopia, 24 resetting, and the next 96 in Objectivistland. I think the Rand did cancel out the Kairos a bit; at least it got rid of the “You Must Love Everybody” effect. And then my model of Dagny Taggart took up residence in my brain and has basically never left, but has at least stopped commenting on literally every experience I have.
TL;DR:
*explanation of what I mean by this available on request.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”either of those sounded like fun”) #Christianity #Atlas Shrugged #storytime
Okay friends today we are gonna learn about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty field from the air
there’s a building under that weird lump
that’s cool! That’s really cool! But not cool enough
At some point somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as units”
holy fucking shit!!!
the British had used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting them
okay time to get into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever, that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of 30,000 men
what’s really cool is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof radio”
the last couple of days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code, and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist” when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’ fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a lot of noise
the ghost army had special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix tape
step 4: fuckin partying!!!
see the thing about impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit, the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans so successfully that they actually got shelled
I’mma leave you with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than anything I could ever write:
On another occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said ‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
The Ghost Army of WWII is a great book. There is also a documentary called The Ghost Army that may still be on Netflix. These guys were awesome.
Tags:
#history #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
Is that why I’ve seen barely anybody talking about this show? Because the Americans haven’t seen it yet?
Well. That explains a lot.
Tags:
#now that I think about it #the one person I know (other than my mom) who has mentioned actually watching it #is Canadian #well #okay then #ClassDW #home of the brave
Anish Kapoor has long been known for his large-scale, intensely colored artworks, but his penchant for being proprietary has long irked others in the art world.
Earlier this year, Kapoor sparked outrage from artists all over the world with the announcement that he had made a deal to become the only person in the world allowed to use the blackest pigment of black paint ever developed. Known as Vantablack, the unique carbon nanotube-based pigment is produced solely by a British company called NanoSystem, and was originally developed for military technologies. However, Kapoor made an agreement with the company that he is the only person allowed to use it for artistic purposes.
Needless to say, that made plenty of other artists furious.
“When I first heard that Anish had the exclusive rights to the blackest black I was really disappointed,” artist Stuart Semple tells Kevin Holmes for The Creators Project. “I was desperate to have a play with it in my own work and I knew lots of other artists who wanted to use it too. It just seemed really mean-spirited and against the spirit of generosity that most artists who make and share their work are driven by.”
Like Kapoor, Semple’s work often uses vivid shades of color, and for years he had worked with scientists to develop increasingly intense pigments to use in his artwork. So as a response to Kapoor’s exclusive deal with Vantablack, Semple decided to release his own special pigment, known simply as “Pink,” the Irish Examiner reports.
While “Pink” isn’t based on nanotechnology, like Vantablack, Semple says it is the pinkest pink pigment ever created. Now, in an effort to thumb his nose at Kapoor, Semple is making it for sale to everyone in the world—except Kapoor, Tom Power reports for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q.
By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor.
To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make it’s way into that hands of Anish Kapoor.
can you imagine
Tags:
#I’m not sure how to tag this #except for #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
