You get to open a video-game style character creation screen and customise your body at will, to anything within range of human variation (no cat ears, sorry). This includes letting you set a new biological age, get rid of any physical health issues, and so on. Your new appearance seems unremarkable to anyone who knows you, all government databases with your picture are adjusted, etc.
You get 150 000 USD every year for the rest of your life without having to do anything for it. You don’t pay taxes on this money, it adjusts with inflation automatically, it appears entirely legitimate to any authorities, etc.
what do you choose, and also, are you trans or cis (if you’re tempted to answer ‘it’s complicated’, round off to trans)?
Choose:
My tag ramble was so long that Tumblr cut it off (apparently the current limit is 30 tags), so I’m dumping it into the main post body:
#I’ve been wavering on whether to reblog this for ages
#I felt kind of bad about piling on to Sofi’s notespam like that
#but it being context for the next post has pushed me over into “yes”
#I didn’t realise until after voting that the character creation is one-time-only rather than ongoing access
#which makes the correct answer less *obvious*
#but I stand by my vote of cis | character creation
#(as it happens I *am* considering doing a second puberty through this‚ but they’d both be estrogenic)
#(honestly I’d barely even need the magic ID updating)
#(29-year-old me in 12-year-old me’s body could pass for 29 about as well as I could in 29-year-old body)
#(the two mes look pretty much the same: it’s all a matter of how you act)
#((well‚ 12-year-old me was a little smaller‚ but within the adult range and her face was already more or less stable))
#(((ooh‚ I bet I could tweak it so that I *stay* five-foot-one this time around)))
#(((during my first puberty my body map never updated for my final growth spurt‚ and
#I’m not *dysphoric* about being two inches too tall‚ but it does get a bit disorienting sometimes)))
#anyway my point there is that…a lot of people in the notes are going “money can be exchanged for goods and services”
#but I think in this case that’s actually backwards
#while money and health do both feed into each other
#health can be exchanged for money to a much greater degree than money can be exchanged for health
#money can *maybe* buy you the *appearance* of 9 – 17
#–(depending on how much puberty I can get away with doing again without fucking up my brain)–
#more years of youth‚ but it won’t buy you the lifespan nor the functionality of it
#money can buy you the ability to *breathe* your homeworld’s atmosphere even during pollen season
#and enough of it can buy you the ability to *talk* while breathing it
#but it can’t really buy you the ability to eat and drink while breathing it‚ and that’s a significant handicap in itself
#(not to mention the street harassment you get wearing a prosthetic immune system (to keep your built-in immune system from freaking out))
#likewise‚ money can buy disease *prevention*‚ but not the ability to shrug it off once you’ve caught it
#the ability of money to buy more robust bones is extremely limited
#(have I ever broken a bone? no! but why settle for merely *adequate* bone strength when I can have *optimal* bone strength?)
#((…god‚ why is anyone who is not *actively dying* for want of resources taking the money over the health))
#((I was so very aware‚ that time last year that a ventilation floor grate broke beneath me‚ that if I’d been 80 I would have *died*))
#((but I was 28‚ and I got away without even a broken bone))
#((why would you give that up any more than you have to))
#the list goes on
#meanwhile‚ health can buy you a nice steady low-non-physical-barrier-to-entry job as a farmhand or dockworker
#(not *as* steady as magic income‚ yes‚ and I *do* care a great deal about that‚ but I care about health *more*)
#and I’m not altruistic enough to take more money than I need so that I can give the rest away‚ not given what else is on offer
Tags:
#reply via reblog #tag rambles #surveys #transhumanism #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in human capitalism #aging cw #death tw #poison cw? #injury cw #illness tw?
actually all of these are wrong. who says waughter. water has the same vowels as father not the same vowels as daughter
I say [ˈwɔɾɚ]. and I’m a normal american guy, who just likes to grill burgers and corn, drink a can of beer and/or corn, have a good time with boys and 91.7 megaacres of corn, as well as other wholesome american activities. a dialect of american so good it’s general. inferior dialects can’t compete with our C4 carbon fixation cycle
Tags:
#what *are* vowels? #we just don’t know #language #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”inferior dialects can’t compete with our C4 carbon fixation cycle”) #home of the brave
An evil wizard holds you at gunpoint and requires you to choose one of the following emotions to lose forever. You will not feel the faintest trace of it ever again. Which do you pick?
Mildly surprised by the results of this poll, given that it’s a dead heat between the three for me. I suppose it shouldn’t be entirely surprising that shame wins, since it is in some ways a very social emotion, and how others perceive us (and our worries about how they perceive us) occupies a lot of our thoughts. But though I would gladly dispense with all three emotions, if I somehow could, a small sense of shame seems the most useful, since it is at least sometimes a useful key to whether others might be put off or annoyed by our actions.
There was a woman born with a congenital condition that prevents her feeling fear interviewed on, I think Radiolab a while back; something that struck me about the interview was that feeling no fear didn’t interfere with her life 99% of the time; it certainly didn’t make her more inclined to play in traffic as a kid or anything. Her cognitive ability to predict and avoid harm was perfectly intact. They did indicate (though did not really detail) that there were a handful of occasions in her life where a lack of being able to feel fear led her into riskier situations, but this was more akin to what a naive or trusting person might experience–if anything, someone who feels no fear would be less likely to be, say, an adrenaline junkie who takes risks because they experience a fear response in a particular way.
I think if you were cognitively normal except unable to experience shame, you probably wouldn’t shit your pants more often in public (so to speak); you would retain your ability to predict which situations might cause you to accrue negative social capital and to avoid them. I think a lot of what fear and shame (and all our other emotions do) is help us cache those calculations, or reinforce the desire to avoid behaviors, but we don’t depend on them to act like, in basically sane and rational ways. If you had no trace of shame I do expect your behavior would be at least a little different, unless it was really working hard to restrain some deeply unpopular compulsion, but I don’t think it would actively incentivize acting in weird ways.
more than anything else this poll made me feel perplexed about how different I am than others. I picked anger because it seems, like, really obviously the best choice, but it’s the least popular! Shame and fear are both defensive emotions, in the sense that they’re designed to protect you from threats, but anger is largely an offensive emotion; I’m much more concerned about compromising my defensive capabilities than my offensive ones, since society doesn’t feel like the kind of situation where you can just plow through everything with a strong preemptive assault. I think maybe the square-jawed dynastic banker guys can pull that off, which is why they do so much cocaine? But it’s not, like, usual. Having no sense of anger feels much safer than the other two.
I suppose the results are complicated by people’s individual tendencies, though, too. Someone who has way too much of a particular thing would probably be biased to get rid of it, so at least some of this might be that the reclusive tunnel-dwellers of Tumblr have more fear and shame than anger on the balance.
Anger is absolutely a useful, load-bearing element of my life. It’s motive, in a way that the others are not; it’s one of the basic things that distinguishes between the world I live in and the world as I want it to be. Reducing that better world to a mere ‘would be nice’ is… extremely disturbing to me.
So I guess I can agree that it’s ‘safer’ to get rid of anger, in that it’s not likely to result in dangerous situations for you or anybody else. But it’s also a life of extreme complacency, in a way that’s directly counter to many of my core values. Without anger, there’s no sense of unfairness; without unfairness, there’s no aspiration to justice. Most notably, I really hate death, to the point of being slightly loony about it- without that, I’m fairly sure my baseline personality would look very different.
Man, reading this thread makes me feel like one of those colourblind people wondering why people are making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray.
I read through the notes, and almost *every* example that *every* person brings up for *every* emotion on this list parses as fear to me.
I’m reblogging this particular version primarily because of how surprising it is to see someone describe the-painful-awareness-of-the-gap-between-how-the-world-is-and-how-it-ought-to-be as *anger*, when as I experience it…okay, some of it is disgust† and a fair bit of it is simply pain (which is not exactly an emotion per se), but the rest is basically a *central example* of fear to me.
By the time I saw this post it was too late to vote on it, but I’d have gone with anger. I can’t say I’d be *fully* comfortable with “dealing with my inability to (safely, ethically, etc) satisfy my bloodlust†† by cutting it out of my soul”, but I have to admit it *would* be the most practical approach.
(I’m not going with shame because I absolutely do not understand what it would mean to cut out shame but leave fear intact, and I’m not fucking with that. At least there is *a* thing that it would mean to me to cut out anger while leaving the others, even if I’m not drawing that line in the same place as anyone else.)
—
†shitting myself in public would *also* be disgust, BTW: shitting myself in private does not seem like it would be significantly less unpleasant modulo bathroom access
#this also happens a lot when people are talking about sadness #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #anger management #surveys #unsanitary cw #violence cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
#Flight Rising #art #fanart #(fun fact: Fae dragons weigh about two kilos) #(I feel that it enhances the experience of looking at this art to know that)
In an ideal world, how would you like your body to be dealt with after death?
Tags:
#are you seriously telling me that 95% of voters die when they are killed #even in hypotheticals where money *and* access *and* bureaucracy-wrangling spoons are no object #that’s fucked up #death tw #surveys
If you vote please reblog and maybe put your age I’m the tags because I’m curious as to who this reaches.
Tags:
#oh god that’s a tough one #I’m going to go with ”All About Soul”‚ but it really is very close #I agree that Blazer makes an excellent point with ”And So It Goes” #also–these are certainly not the only songs that are way up there‚ but–I want to give a shoutout here to ”Code of Silence” #a song that is on the greatest-hits compilation in my *heart* #surveys #music #P.S. oh right my age #29
“Eli Jacob Crowley, the famed pioneer figure who spearheaded America’s westward expansion by blazing the Crowley Trail in 1838, was an awe-inspiring figure of a man, as stout as a four-century-old oak, as intellectually complex as the fronds of a Florida palm, as singularly focused as the trunk of a Giant Sequoia, though in all other respects, not like a tree at all.” (John Hardi)
“Talila Norpiros, heir to the elven throne and commander of her people’s armed forces, chose a slightly more risqué outfit that morning than she would normally wear to battle, theorizing that if she were presented as a sex symbol as well as a dynamic protagonist, the series might attract a few more male readers and finally make the New York Times bestseller list.” (Bridget Parmenter)
“It wasn’t fair to call Michael a scum-sucking monster from the deep, the miserable, fetid descendant of some unnamed demon who, after centuries at the very depths of the ocean, had somehow surfaced and found his way to Wall Street—it was accurate, of course, but he preferred Michael.” (Allison Bryski)
and my personal favourite:
“Once upon a time, there was a place where things happened; allow me to be more specific.” (John Wallace)
just fucking remembered contest again so nobody asked but here are some 2019 winner highlights
“It was a dark and stormy night, and since this was Miami in July and everyone had left their convertible tops down, the rain fell in Cadillacs.” (Andrew Lundberg)
“When the tall dark, handsome, buff, and wealthy cowboy moseyed into my “Blazin’ Six-guns” novelty shop, I felt a wave of heat flood through me, as if I had accidentally swallowed my sub-lingual nicotinic acid lozenge, causing the niacin to be released instantaneously, rather than in a more controlled, extended, low-potency dose, for which means the prescription had been written.” (Randall Card)
“Zajaxian Planetary Law required that war, if it must be fought, be fought not with bombs, bullets and blood, as on our own primitive Earth, but with serried banks of immensely powerful mainframe computers, even though they were bulky to carry and unwieldy to throw.“ (Jeremy Das)
“The High Gondonderil gazed on with horror as the Elgaborian legions marched at a single, pitiless pace into the once peaceful streets of Sar-Andrada, the capital city of the kingdom of Xanthil, located in a fantasy universe which might seem extremely confusing at present but which will doubtless make perfect sense to you, dear reader, once you realize that, like most fantasy universes, it’s basically just Tolkien’s Middle-earth with different names for things.” (Harrison Glaze)
would you look at that its time to talk about my favourite bad fiction contest!! here are some 2020 winner highlights
“The first thing I noticed about the detective’s office was how much it reminded me of the baggage claim at a nearby airport: the carpet was half a century out of date, it reeked of cigarettes and cheap booze, and I was moderately certain that my case had been lost.” (Paul Kollas)
“’You may know my true name,’ gloated Archmage-Emperor !Gfńatt’ Bdúnśṽiobfhńr to the foolish traitor who had dared try to end his glorious mage-empire’s reign, ‘but can you pronounce it?’” (Gideon Gordon)
“The sound of his raspy voice and the feel of his chilly hand on her shoulder made her shudder, like the wooden things on the sides of windows, but a verb rather than a noun, and with two d’s rather than two t’s.” (Kagte Minyard)
“Jarrod, lying in the bed next to Selina, on his side with his head in his hand, asked, ‘What would your husband do if he saw me right now?’ and Selina, who was watching her husband sneak up on Jarrod holding a tire iron with two hands raised above his head, replied, ‘Probably sneak up on you with a tire iron raised above his head, preparing to use it for something other than its intended purpose.’” (Randy Blanton)
it’s 2021 winner time and i want to be clear this time that “bad fiction” is not a judgment on my part, it’s the whole goal of the contest. the about page says, “…the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels.” i’m not insulting them. anyway here are my faves <3
“It was a dark and stormy … morning, Gotcha! – this is just the first of innumerable twists and turns that you, dear Reader, will struggle to keep abreast of as I unfold my tale of adventure as second plumber aboard the hapless SS Hotdog during that fateful summer of 1974.” (Louise Taylor)
“Our story begins in the cozy cottage of Bynnoldh-Dyr, son of Asgwitch-Torgwyr, in the idyllic elven village of Myrthffolwrd, but our book actually begins some two hundred pages earlier, in which you are pummeled by irrelevant history and unpronounceable names, because my publisher is paying me by the word.” (Neil B Harrison)
“As the dawn begin to break, Debby and Robert, their arms tightly wrapped around each other, watched in awe as the sky turned a brilliant pinkish red as the sun’s rays inched their way down the slopes of the craggy peaks of the Rocky Mountains, but this was Canada so the rays were centimetering their way down the slopes.” (Daniel Leyde)
“She had a deep, throaty laugh, like the sound a dog makes right before it throws up.” (Janie Doohan)
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #puns #overly literal interpretations #long post #violence cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
i got different answers when i asked my vegetarian sister, my vegetarian mom, and my vegan partner so.
if lab grown meat became widely available and easily affordable, would you eat it?
if you want to tag why please go right ahead, (i.e. you wouldn’t consider it to follow religious dietary rules and restrictions). i’m very curious because i’ve talked about this a lot with people.
Tags:
#I eat meat about once or twice a week and I am so hyped† for cultured meat #why‚ you ask? well‚ read my previous post #(do cultured mink fur next so those little bastards can stop breeding new variants of every goddamn epidemic that comes along) #((I suspect doing fur would be harder‚ but like‚ that is *the sort of line* along which we ought to be thinking)) #((*even if* one ignores the matter of animal welfare‚ I firmly believe we should wean ourselves off factory farming for our *own* safety)) #speaking as someone who makes less than the global average income‚ I would be willing to pay up to double to have my meat be cultured #†I continue to not be good at excitement qualia‚ but like‚ intellectually hyped #food #animal abuse cw? #illness tw? #surveys #proud citizen of The Future #(((P.S. also I suspect future-me will care more about animal welfare #and *I* care about *her* and do not want her to regret having been me #so that’s also a factor in why I eat so little meat))) #(((I think Ozy Brennan put it very well when they said #”when [people] can look up and think about something other than staying alive‚ the first luxury they buy is compassion” #I can’t look up right now #but maybe someday I’ll be able to))) #tag rambles
Brinens and Things 