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
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
Since I’ve decided to make a tiny R2D2 for my robotics class I spent the morning finding .wav files of the different sounds he makes but the original file names I knew would get confusing
so here I am sitting here psychoanalyzing and personifying as many of them as I can because okay yeah he’s beeping and chirping but what was he feeling
much better
You are a delight
what does it say about me that i think i know which beeps you’re talking about in all of these
It means you are learnéd in all the important disciplines.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Star Wars #(I am not learned in the important disciplines) #(but this is still funny)
OH
So this guy’s purpose in life is to hang out in a Pokémon Center on Poni Island and tutor one move that only one Pokémon can learn, a Legendary postgame Pokémon from a Hoenn one/four generations ago. And that Pokémon naturally knows that move anyway.
Fuck me, I’m getting a new job. I’ll be standing in a Dunkin Donuts on Staten Island tutoring Spanish. But only if you’re early 19th Venezuelan military leader Simón Bolívar.
Tags:
#Pokemon #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I do not actually speak Pokemon) #(but the post provides enough context to make the joke at the end funny)
@eka-mark said: tell us more! what’s so cool about Saturn?
:^)
Saturn has atmospheric helium-3, a relatively light gravity well for a gas giant, and an excellent system of moons. And pretty rings, just as a bonus.
Jupiter has none of these things, except for helium-3, and it’s horrifically radioactive.
Europa is the much-vaunted reason to go to Jupiter, but it’s really overrated, especially as a colonization candidate. If you could dig all the way through its ten miles of ice to get to the ocean, you could set up an underwater base hanging from the ice plate that is the surface, which would be cool as shit, and ten miles of ice would be a radiation shield impervious to anything short of the sun going supernova.
Which is good, because standing on the surface of Europa is approximately the radiation equivalent of standing in the immediate vicinity of the Fukushima reactor during its meltdown incident. Do not go to Io.
Europa’s hardly the only moon with a subsurface water ocean anyway. Callisto, which is a further (and therefore less radioactive) moon of Jupiter, might have one. Ganymede too. It kind of seems to be a theme with jovian moons, really.
It’s not just the Jovian moons, though. Guess who else has a moon with a probable subsurface ocean? Saturn. Enceladus has cryovolcanoes and an icy surface and recent data suggests there’s an ocean that spans the whole thing under there.
Like Jupiter, most of Saturn’s moons are tiny rocks that are only called “moons” rather than “asteroids” because they’re orbiting saturn instead of the sun. That’s a good thing- it’s also the case with mars’s moons. All of the handy things about asteroids apply to those too. Having lots of moons is good in general, really, because it means you have lots of objects very “nearby” to one another in space, so each one is easy to reach from the others.
But the real reason to go to saturn is, of course, Titan.
Titan is probably the most habitable place in the solar system, aside from Earth. It has an atmosphere made of 99% nitrogen! 1.5 atm of pressure would take a some getting used to for an earthling, but you can live in 1.5 atmospheres. It’s cold, cold enough for liquid methane, so you have to wear a really warm coat, but barring significant advancements in spacesuit technology, that’s a lot less encumbering than a full pressure EVA suit. The thick atmosphere and shielding thanks to saturn’s magnetosphere mean low surface radiation. As a bonus, the low gravity and high pressure mean you can fly just by strapping wings to your arms.
From a terraforming perspective, it’s way easier than mars. You’d just have to warm it up (which the convenient sort of terraforming problem, the sort that can be solved by using lots of nuclear fire) and add oxygen in order to get an earth-like atmosphere. The surface is covered in ice, so you’d even have water oceans! It’s like friggin’ Earth Lite.
They make coats that warm?
> As a bonus, the low gravity and high pressure mean you can fly just by strapping wings to your arms.
Hey spouse look
Tags:
#space #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”hey spouse look”) #(everyone knows Alicorn’s fetish) #but in all seriousness this is a neat post
The United States is about to elect a new president. I’ve previously polled UK Grindr users on Scottish independence, the 2015 generalelection, and Brexit. This time, I decided to poll US Grindr users on who they think should be leading their country.
The following is a representative sample of the replies.
(Identifiable faces have been censored.)
For every state, I aimed for a number of responses equivalent to each state’s number of presidential electors – from 55 for California to 3 for Delaware, Vermont, Alaska etc. A few fell a little short as I was banned (my 10th Grindr ban to date) just before I could finish, though most matched or exceeded the target. The number next to each state is the number of responses I received, though the percentages are only taken from the responses that can reasonably be interpreted as a decisive answer – undecided voters, non-voters, and evasive responses are listed separately. Major candidates who received 0 votes are also listed.
CALIFORNIA: 53
68% (21) Hillary Clinton 6% (2) Donald Trump 6% (2) Bernie Sanders 6% (2) “Yo momma” 3% (1) Gary Johnson 3% (1) Barack Obama 3% (1) John F. Kennedy 3% (1) “Myself”
0% (0) Jill Stein
2 Undecided 4 None of the above 3 Not eligible to vote 13 Evasive or unclear responses
0% (0) Donald Trump 0% (0) Jill Stein 0% (0) Gary Johnson
1 Evasive or unclear responses
0 Did not respond
SOUTH DAKOTA: 3
100% (2) Hillary Clinton
0% (0) Donald Trump 0% (0) Jill Stein 0% (0) Gary Johnson
1 None of the above
1 Did not respond
NORTH DAKOTA: 2
100% (2) Hillary Clinton
0% (0) Donald Trump 0% (0) Jill Stein 0% (0) Gary Johnson
1 Did not respond
WYOMING: 2
100% (2) Donald Trump
0% (0) Hillary Clinton 0% (0) Jill Stein 0% (0) Gary Johnson
1 Did not respond
MONTANA: 1
100% (1) Donald Trump
0% (0) Hillary Clinton 0% (0) Jill Stein 0% (0) Gary Johnson
8 Did not respond
WASHINGTON, D.C.: 2
100% (1) Hillary Clinton
0% (0) Donald Trump 0% (0) Jill Stein 0% (0) Gary Johnson
1 Evasive or unclear responses
3 Did not respond
The overall US-wide vote is as follows.
63.25% (191) Hillary Clinton 17.88% (54) Donald Trump 3.31% (10) Jill Stein 1.99% (6) Gary Johnson 1.99% (6) Bernie Sanders 0.99% (3) “Yo momma” 0.66% (2) Deez Nuts 0.66% (2) Cthulhu 0.66% (2) Mickey Mouse 0.33% (1) Evan McMullin 0.33% (1) Vermin Supreme 0.33% (1) Don Bacon 0.33% (1) Barack Obama 0.33% (1) John F. Kennedy 0.33% (1) Ronald Reagan 0.33% (1) Vladimir Putin 0.33% (1) Eric Andre 0.33% (1) Beyoncé 0.33% (1) Harambe 0.33% (1) Mighty Mouse 0.33% (1) Patti LuPone 0.33% (1) Prince 0.33% (1) Cardi B from Love & Hip Hop 0.33% (1) Jesus 0.33% (1) Katya 0.33% (1) “Space raptors” 0.33% (1) “A giant meteor”
In addition, 1.99% (6) voted for “Myself”, although these aren’t lumped together as they refer to separate individuals – namely, “WOOF!”, “MiamiLatino”, “nICE GUY!!!!!”, “2017 ready now”, “no pic don’t”, and “DatFckboi”. 0.66% (2) also voted for their own penis – 4 if we count pictures of a respondent’s penis as an actual answer to the poll.
Not counted towards the percentage are the following responses:
19 Undecided 60 None of the above 9 Not eligible to vote 181 Evasive or unclear responses
“Evasive or unclear responses” can be roughly divided as follows:
55 Miscellaneous evasion 41 Explicitly declined to answer, “none of your business” etc 25 Irrelevant or incomprehensible 18 Too horny to engage politically 13 Total bewilderment 12 “Anyone but…” (10 Trump, 2 Clinton, 1 Johnson, 1 Stein) 7 Overt hostility 3 Nudes
Here are the number of states candidates win when only Grindr votes.
Hillary Clinton: 42 (6 as part of a tie) Donald Trump: 13 (7 as part of a tie) Bernie Sanders: 3 (3 as part of a tie) Jill Stein: 1 (1 as part of a tie) Evan McMullin: 1 (1 as part of a tie) Deez Nuts: 1 (1 as part of a tie) Beyoncé: 1 (1 as part of a tie) Ronald Reagan: 1 (1 as part of a tie) ″A giant meteor”: 1 (1 as part of a tie) ″My big fat cock”: 1 (1 as part of a tie) Gary Johnson: 0
In the electoral college, this should translate into the following numbers of electoral votes. When dealing with ties, electors are divided evenly between candidates.
Finally, here is the electoral map, according to Grindr.
Hillary Clinton comfortably clears her target of 270 electoral votes, and the Democrats are re-elected. Grindr is, for once, with her.
Tags:
#long post #nsfw text #nsfw image #Grindr #oh my god they’re doing a series of these #I remember seeing one of the previous ones #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #election 2016
So I said a while back that whitehouse.gov petitions are basically a way to assign the white house essays and now I’m imagining if The West Wing was set like ten years later and there’s some petition that’s getting lots of votes and Toby’s really hoping it doesn’t clear the threshold because then he’ll have to write the response to it so of course Josh covertly leads a drive to get it more signatures just to fuck with Toby I am writing crackfic what the fuck.
Tags:
#West Wing #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
i was just woken up by a vague howling noise coming from all directions, audible from inside my room, under the covers. it’s hard to pick out distinct human voices- it’s possible that the buildings themselves just started screaming. the fireworks that started going off moments later prevented me from getting back to sleep
i haven’t checked yet but i’m going to assume this means the cubs just won the world series
Tags:
#baseball #home of the brave #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
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