#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #bugs #unsanitary cw? #death tw? #(I’d never heard of spotted lanternflies before) #(I looked it up and apparently my area’s winters are right in the grey area where spotted lanternflies can kind of sort of maybe overwinter) #(so I may or may not be seeing them soon) #((apparently they are known to fuck up apple trees‚ grapevines‚ and stonefruit trees))
I still toss and turn about this all the time, by the way- it’s probably the most enduring obsession of my childhood, and a nontrivial chunk of what drove me to things like geology, programming, ratspace, and even stuff you wouldn’t expect like a fondness for time travel stories or Li Po poems.
One neuron is just a cell. Many neurons, arranged just so, is a person. Qualia, interiority, volition, values, all spectacularly inexplicable in physical terms. A whole world of imagination, captured in miniature as a net with just the right pattern of string. It’s so fucking goetic. Arrange these symbols in a circle, and a demon appears, using some dread fire to give meaning to form and animate base matter. “The hard problem”, they call it.
My hard problem isn’t that it works, as such. This, I can accept, although not with full equanimity. It’s that it demonstrates something about the cosmos, because everything demonstrates something about the cosmos, and I cannot for the life of me see through that fog. The universe is not billiard balls and it’s not negative-probability waves moving through fields, because when you arrange symbols in a circle you can summon a demon. That was there from the beginning, latent at the big bang that kicked us all off. But all we have is this one thing, this tiny little biosphere on a tiny little world that stumbled blindly in to the right incantations, and everywhere else we look it’s just billiard balls as far as the eye can see. This is not to say that ‘is there extraterrestrial life?’ is the most important question, though of course it’s instrumental, and the Fermi Paradox is maddening in this context as well. But the deeper question is, ‘why in the everliving tiddlywinks does a universe with a demon-summoning ritual in it pretend to be mechanical except in this one narrow thing?’ Where’s the rest of the magic system?
And now we’re closing in on perfecting the ritual ourselves, not understanding a damn thing of course, only marginally less blind than the evolutionary process that first succeeded in us. We zero in on intelligence, the one part of all this that we’ve managed to make tractable in analytical terms, and use that to bootstrap ourselves toward something that hopefully, hopefully shares all the rest. Demons summoning demons (of course it spirals out to infinity almost immediately, how could it not?), and maybe the new ones will be able to tell us what the universe is and how we happened within it. Makes sense as a strategy, I suppose.
Tags:
#philosophy #that one post with the thing #(yes I *did* dig up this post and the last one as part of the same train of thought) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #apocalypse cw?
concept: there are lots of different worlds and all of them have different levels of access to magic. Some are just all over the place and some have no magic at all.
You would think that we would be one of the strictly non-magical worlds, but actually, that’s not the case—we don’t have like, a huge excess of magic, but we have, like, dreams, and the placebo effect, which puts us pretty solidly in the “Numinous” world category.
This post brought to you by the placebo effect, which is completely insane if you think about it for more than like 3 seconds
but for some reason we insist on thinking of it like “so people’s symptoms improve, but like, it’s Fake” rather than “HOLY SHIT humans are so powerful, they can improve the symptoms of their illnesses just by believing they are being cared for.”
Human, suddenly sucked by portal into a Magical Land: damn I wish I came from a magical world lol
Elf wizard dude: hahaha bro what are you talking about
Human: well, my world is just—
Elf wizard dude: what about the magic rocks????
Human: What magic rocks?
Elf wizard dude: You know, the magic rocks. The ones that generate near infinite energy by tearing apart the fabric of their reality? You know, like, uranium? You haven’t found those yet?
Human: Wait wait wait. That’s not—
Elf wizard dude: And like, come on, you even have some low level necromantic spells over there, like—
Human: We do not have necromantic spells, what are you talking about
Elf wizard dude: didn’t you say your friend was an EMT though? they do that shit all the time. Hell, you don’t even have to be like a high level caster or some shit, it takes like a few weeks to learn CPR
Human: Wh—
Elf wizard dude: You guys do have CPR, right?
Human: I mean yes but—what the—CPR is not necromancy!! That’s not how it works, it doesn’t bring people back from the—well I guess technically it does but that doesn’t—
Elf wizard dude: Next you’re going to be telling me Mothman doesn’t “count” either.
Human: Oh, right, and various of the corvids. Ravens and that. They talk too.
Elf wizard dude: And no sapient animals? At all?
Human: Well … I mean, depends what you call ‘sapient’. Crows remember who’s nice to them and bring them presents, and will get the whole flock to attack people who are mean to them, and cats basically conned us into lavishing them with food and attention–
Elf wizard dude: And that?
Human: Oh, that’s a pigeon. They’re really dumb, though.
Elf wizard dude: It’s getting on your public transport network!
ok seriously tho like. The placebo effect can work EVEN IF YOU KNOW YOU’RE GETTING A PLACEBO as long as you believe in the placebo effect itself.
Like, there is nothing about sprite that should soothe my stomach when I’m nauseous, and I know this, but if I’m feeling nauseous sipping sprite is one of the fastest ways to settle my stomach, because when I was little my mom told me it would help.
If that’s not a kind of magic IDK what is.
Tags:
#that one post with the thing #(personally my favourite anti-nausea spell is the scent of peppermint) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
the pandemic is at an awkward point right now but we’ve finally hit the sweet spot for an important opportunity, which is that it’s the best possible moment to mask in public using like a darth vader or daft punk or immortan joe kinda mask. you could set it up to also be filtered if you want it to actually work as a mask, but the important thing is the fashion statement
see earlier this wouldn’t have worked bc people wouldn’t have trusted that it was compliant, you had to wait for masking rules to be relaxed to the point where a lot of people weren’t wearing them. and later it won’t work because it relies on the shared knowledge that people do still wear masks a lot for health reasons; the soul of the bit is that people know it’s covid-related rather than just cosplay
so, get out there is what I’m saying. clock is ticking
Tags:
#yesterday I had an exchange with a customer: #Him: ”What’s the respirator for?” #Me: ”I have immune problems.” #Him: ”Oh‚ so it has nothing to do with– okay.” #and now I’m so curious what he was planning to finish that sentence with #I feel like it might have been related #(I *know* I’ve had at least one customer who was under the impression that I’d chosen a respirator over a surgical mask for the Aesthetic) #(it’s quite possible that a *lot* of them are under that impression‚ and it just mostly doesn’t come up) #I really don’t know what’s going to happen to the abovementioned shared knowledge #apparently SARS-1 made a lasting impact on the masking cultures of the places it hit #and yet people in the Roaring Twenties forgot the lessons of the Spanish flu quite rapidly #I suspect there’s going to be a lot of geographical variation #for one thing‚ some people live in places where they see me around town‚ which is certainly a reminder #(I saw people’s reaction to seeing me when they walked into the restaurant in the spring and summer of 2020) #(the way I was a living public-health notice) #tag rambles #covid19 #clothing #transhumanism #illness tw #discourse cw? #amnesia cw?
“If I had time travel I’d kill Hitler” “If I had time travel I’d stop my favourite politician getting assassinated” you’re all thinking way too small. If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half of the planet.
pfffft, you call yourself a supervillain but you’re STILL using chrome? dumbass! everyone knows REAL evildoers switch to firefox!!
I already reblogged this post but this tag made me laugh for 10 minutes
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself))
(it’s about a kink caption which is picture of a dude in his underwear talking about ‘slutweed’, which is, ofc, weed that makes you slutty)
two replies:
i found this blog back when this screenshot was circulating just to see what kind of unhinged shit they were posting and it was all in this genre of making men brain dead and desperate to fuck. some of it was written from the pov of the guy losing his capacity for intelligent thought and read more like a horror novel than porn. i am an archaeology student btw
that’s why bottom povs aren’t very common. It’s not a fun time for us usually
hm.
(screenshot from readonlymind.com’s tag page. i have no idea how representative that is of like, the broader internet, i just picked it because i happen to know it has tags for that, and also because making people ‘brain dead and desperate to fuck’ is definitely the kind of story you find there)
(i’m just saying. maybe it’s just not a fun time for you)
Mm, Read Only Mind got conquered by the Affini Compact has a distinct audience that I *do* suspect skews more bottom than, say, the Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive.
But also yeah, a lot of people are in fact into the idea of having that done to them.
But also also…hmm…*reads over replies very carefully*…if I’m *very* generous I *can* see the second one as being an outburst of frustration about how hard a time they’re having finding porn that *isn’t* aimed at people who fantasise about being the top in an erotic horror. (If I’m being honest with myself, though, I think I’m just projecting.) First one definitely does seem to just be mocking, even if it does in fact suck how often I run facefirst into horror when I was looking for fluff.
—
…I appear to have written so many commentary tags that I ran out of tag display limits. You know what, here:
#if you’d asked me two days ago I’d have included a bit about how every work of erotic fiction has *something* subjectively wrong with it
#it’s not like it’s *exclusive* to horror about turning people into mindless sluts
#every porn has something (usually many things) in it that’s squicky or where it’s obvious that the author’s view of what’s hot is thirty degrees clockwise of yours
#nobody’s tastes are ever going to be a perfect match
#you just have to make the best of it and try to find works with tolerable good-to-meh-to-ugh ratios
#and try to cope with the growing sense of frustration in the back of your mind muttering about how *none* of these people have any fucking *taste*
#if you’d asked me two days ago I’d have said that
#yesterday‚ however‚ I came across a fic on AO3 that is‚ in fact‚ perfect
#there is nothing wrong with it (that is to say‚ grating about it) whatsoever
#no horror‚ no rape‚ no genitals‚ no BDSM‚ not even a tickle scene
#and the *choices* about where and how to place the narrative focus are…they’re…they’re *correct*
#it reads like the porn *I* would write if I were good at writing porn
#I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is a thing that exists
#I feel like I’m repeating myself here because I already wrote a glowing review for my comment/link roundup
#but I haven’t posted that yet‚ so from the perspective of the rest of you this is the first I’ve mentioned it
#I guess what I’m saying here viscerally is that “Give These People a Break” in the AO3 Anonymous collection is a new bar in quality and every other MC writer in the world needs to get on its level
#(*yes* including the writers who think “MC” stands for “motorcycle club’’‚ why not)
#and what I’m saying here intellectually is that I acknowledge that they won’t do that because actually their tastes are different from mine and Their Kinks Are Okay
#but it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between venting and kinkshaming from the outside
#(P.S. to be clear I have nothing against affini fic)
#(many of them are quite good)
#((”Abscission“ especially is well worth reading for the proverbial articles *alone*))
#(but it *is* striking how large a percentage of the front page it makes up)
@sigmaleph replied: “@brin-bellway i am not confident on anything like exact ratios but i certainly never had much trouble finding bottom pov stories on emcsa, either”
True, yeah.
(again if I am being honest with myself here, in large part you happened to stumble into the feelings I was already having about having to wade through that kind of stuff in hopes of finding something decent(ly appealing to me), plus the state of “holy shit” I have been in over finding something far-beyond-decent for the past like 24 hours)
Tags:
#anyway I am approximately four different kinds of tired right now #I had better go to bed‚ which should at least help with *some* of them #good night #replies #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #nsfw text #venting cw #discourse cw?
Brinens and Things 