ramming into the back of the minivan with the autism awareness sticker like are you aware of me now sandra
WITNESS ME [totals my shitty honda]
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#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)) #autism
The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it – victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done – humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.
It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow. In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).
Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.
For a long time, there was no hope – only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.
In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.
It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it – but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.
An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.
A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.
And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.
At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Raška, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.
The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.
The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.
They found none.
35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.
This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world – was destroyed.
You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.
Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.
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#Tumblr traditions #anniversaries #illness tw #history #proud citizen of the Future
A snack fishing game for children at a mall. The price to play is around 58-68 RMB (9-11 USD), depending on the child’s height.
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#and on a lighter note #food #games #adorable #flashing image #I want to ride one of these #the prizes are neat and all but mostly I just want to fly around on a harness
You’re momentarily confused because it sounds like a thing that you just read on a news site
You go onto their blog; every single thing that you read, as far back as you can scroll, is just things that have actually happened. There’s posts about vaccine protesters; posts about NFTs; posts about January 6th; posts about the pandemic; about Trump; about Brexit; about fucking Harambe for God’s sake
You look at the notes on each post; a few of them are people panicking like this is news to them; most of them are variants on “Oh shit, I need to look at the blog name!”
You select a random reblogger, and look at their Tumblr; it’s full of happy, well-adjusted people, but you just can’t seem to reblog any of their posts; every time you try, you get a message that you’ve never seen before:
“You are not authorized to share in this content”
You hit the back button, but it takes you back to the top of posts-from-a-darker-timeline
In mounting trepidation, you check to see if there are any new posts
There’s one: a fake(?) tweet from the leader of your country, lamenting the massive loss of life in the freak storm that just hit your city
You put your phone down
You look out the window
In the distance, you hear the wind starting to blow
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#storytime #death tw #unreality cw #apocalypse cw #…so what you’re saying is that I get minutes-to-hours-scale advance notice of disasters #(mixed in with some noise about changes to Tumblr’s formatting and other such minor issues‚ but still) #that’s often not enough‚ and it #might turn out not to be enough *this* time in which case I will have no further opportunities to make use of it‚ but… #…like‚ I stand a much better chance of surviving the freak storm now than I would have if I hadn’t read the tweet‚ right? #I don’t have time to evacuate but I’ll get a head start on bunkering down #in the future (if I survive that long)‚ I’ll set up my phone to react to a new posts-from-a-darker-timeline post in a manner #approximating the way it would react to an emergency broadcast #get as many other people as possible to do the same #(the exact details depend on what circumstances allow one to view primeverse Tumblr) #(if we can only get my phone to do it‚ that requires different implementation than if anyone can just point any device at a particular URL) #in fact‚ I should at least dash off a quick post about this immediately‚ in case I *don’t* survive the storm #leave some breadcrumbs for others to investigate #(”you can view primeverse posts but not reblog them” sounds like a job for the fundamental theorem of software engineering) #(can I screenshot them? point a camera at the screen and take a photograph?) #((…honestly‚ ”a friend posts a screenshot of a tweet that hasn’t been written yet and then #immediately dies in the disaster the tweet describes” sounds like a thriller-novel plot hook in itself)) #((maybe I’m just the prologue to *that* story)) #tag rambles #fun with loopholes #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #story ideas I will never write
Santa is on strike due to global warming. All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger. Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.
One view of the internet that I find important is that it’s an amoral ecosystem of ideas, many of which are poisonous to you and can have effects ranging from ‘making you waste your day angry at someone’ to ‘causing you join to a cultish crusade for or against some political ideology that renders you incompatible with large swathes of mainstream society’. If you are a very online person, you cannot just take content as you go, otherwise the hungriest and most efficient predators will snap you up and consume huge amounts of your mental resources. If you are Very Online, the internet will radicalize you by default.
The fact of radicalization is neutral. Certainly there’s nothing guaranteed to be good about the things you already believe and the ways you act; there are extreme-relative-to-society viewpoints and movements floating around that will, in my view, make you a better person. But the majority will not, just because there are more bad things than good things, more incorrect things than correct ones. There’s nothing that says morally righteous movements (or the ones that will make you more thoughtful and happy) are more memetically powerful and good at capturing the imagination and belief system than the immoral.
If you read an unusual claim online, there are two equally important questions to ask about it – the first, of course, is “is this correct?”, and the second is “if I take this seriously, and become the kind of person who believes it, how will it change my life? Do I accept that?”
For me, the thing that most sets my attention vibrating with caution is contempt or mockery. There are some times when I think contempt/mockery is the emotionally appropriate thing to be occupying my mind – but it’s uncommon, nowhere as frequent as the internet would have me be. And contempt easily worms its way in my mind – “these people are contemptible” is a lesson I learn keenly and quickly because I’m afraid of being mocked and want to know what to avoid. Is sincerity cringe? Is being vegan obnoxious? Is being into this particular show embarrassing?
I hate a lot of stuff and love to complain, and am given to understand this is a common human trait, so there’s nothing surprising, or intelligently malicious, about the fact that the internet is brimming with jabs. But, even more so than the real world, the internet tends to amplify contempt – you get to see the wittiest comments someone made in the past week making fun of something, with numbers that indicate that a boggling number of people approved of that statement. You get to see compilations of the stupidest comments the people you dislike said, captioned “this is what they really believe”. In my brief forays to break out of my Democratic bubble in college, I followed some conservatives on social media, and the most surprising thing wasn’t that their points were convincing – I didn’t find it so – but the idiocy of the US liberals they tended to respond to. Some of the most embarrassing people in the world shared something like my beliefs, and they were getting attention in the other camp, same as how their worst people got the spotlight of shame on mine.
So when I see something online practically designed to evoke anger or contempt in me, I don’t treat it as the same kind of thing as anything else in my life. This is a radioactive piece of space rock thrown at me by a vast machine that gives me nice things and friends and is known to function in ways that attract radioactive debris and centrifuge it out at my face. Yes, this screencap of an obnoxious person probably corresponds to a real thing someone said, but treating it primarily as a real thing someone said that I have to have an opinion about, rather than a radioactive space rock that the machine spat out at my face, will have terrible outcomes for my worldview, priorities, and personality.
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#infohazards #politics cw? #that one post with the thing #I’m not sure *what* I think about this post‚ but I definitely think about it
Brinens and Things 