invertedporcupine said: There are cases where it’s not an act. Some of these people live in serious viewpoint bubbles. I have seen, verbatim, the claim “Even the craziest atheist believes in souls” written in all seriousness.
ironically the craziest atheist probably does believe in souls
I was taught that atheists all ACTUALLY believe in god, but they’re lying and saying they’re not because they don’t like the rules. when you push them they all deep down believe, even if they’re lying to themselves. (hence that ‘no atheists in foxholes’ thing.)
(another reason i was infuriated by that post that suggested only white male atheists don’t believe for intellectual reasons, poc/ women don’t believe because they were harmed by the religion’)
If by “soul” you mean the locus of your consciousness, morality, and cognition, which cannot be destroyed without destroying you, then yes, souls are absolutely real. They’re called “brains”, and we really should just start calling them souls to emphasize that point. (Eg, “exposure to lead is known to cause permanent soul damage, especially in bullet form.”)
This is in alignment with my other point of noting that if a lich is someone with their soul in a material phylactery, then we are all already degenerate lichs whose phylacteries are our bodies and who do not yet have access to immersive proxies, but who can already act by proxy without endangering our phylacteries (and by extensions, souls) by various forms of telecommunication, which would make one a form of cyber-lich.
Tags:
#religion #discourse cw? #if I were one of those people who puts a bunch of cryptic-but-accurate descriptors in their header #I would absolutely be adding ”cyber-lich” right now #worth putting up with the entire rest of this thread for that last post #fun with loopholes #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #death tw?
#art #comics #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #death tw? #(upon reflection I guess I can see a way ”stalactite” makes sense?) #(something about the threat of sharp things falling from above)
so tonight I’m at synagogue, listening to the Purim Night reading of the Book of Esther, like you do
and near the end of this chapter my brain presents me with the following:
nooooo ooooone plots like Haman calls the shots like Haman plans a genocide by casting lots like Haman
(It only works with the Hebrew pronunciation of Haman, which, like Gaston, is accented on the second syllable.)
By the time we get home my brain has added:
for there’s none so well-favored and kingly yes, we all can be certain of that he’s so rich that his pockets are jingly and he looks really sharp in a three-cornered hat
*face in hands*
Petition to sing this every year at Purim.
I shared this with my dad, and he added:
No one’s spruce as Haman, Nor abstruse as Haman; No one’s half as good tying a noose as Haman! He’ll use gallows in all of his decorating! No one else hangs as well as Haman!
niiiiice
@maryellencarter, here it is, and thanks for the reminder to reblog it this year.
Tags:
#Tumblr traditions #Purim #Judaism #death tw? #I still have never actually listened to the song this is parodying
One of the vanishingly few benefits you get from living in the frozen North of Canada is that it’s simply too cold for a lot of pesky things. Valley fever? Too damn cold. Poisonous scorpions? Need to be kept above zero at all times, the losers. Subway-sized rats that can take out a schoolyard in less than fifteen minutes? Won’t get fifteen feet before a Dire Owl chucks them into the air to be flash-frozen in the troposphere.
This means that when you buy something especially sketchy from a warmer place, you don’t have to worry too much about disinfecting it. Just leave it outside for a night, and then shake it and watch a cascade of dead roaches fall out. Their pleading eyes (burst from ice forming inside their optic nerves) will look at you guiltily, yes, but it’s not your fault. It’s Mother Nature’s, and if you can’t hang with her, then get out of the kitchen. Or something like that.
Now, this phenomenon hasn’t always worked in my favour. Last summer, I was besieged by an infinite wall of pesky mosquitos. The eggs from these annoying little shitheads can somehow survive the worst of winter, and it’s boring and time-consuming to kill all of them manually, like our ancestors used to.
In a warmer region, these pests are purged by dragonflies the size of an Eaton’s and/or eaten by lizards that sneak into your house and live there, like pets but not. This is simply not possible here, but I foolishly believed I could import a small box of praying mantises sometime around May, when the permafrost covering my driveway just started to break up.
Praying mantises are, in theory, the ultimate badasses, peak predators of nature, invulnerable to anything that the world can throw at them. However, it turns out the shipping company also uses the same technique as me to disinfect packages, making my own efforts largely superfluous. When they got here, all that remained was a box of dead bugs. They didn’t stand a chance. Up here, prayers don’t get answered, because the moisture in your words freezes them solid and they smash to bits on the sidewalk.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #our home and cherished land #storytime #bugs #death tw? #unreality cw #that last line is a hell of a thing
They’re only 16 feet above sea level, they already have issues with salt water incursion into the freshwater supply, and there’s a Superfund site 750 feet away from the water supply for all of Miami.
And I wasn’t joking about the storm surge either. Tampa is 80 feet above sea level, Miami averages 16.
The only advantage of Miami is that the mayor of Miami has explicitly said “Fuck those Commies who ruined SF”.
/There’s some personal reasons for this as well, but I really don’t want to have to move to Miami.
I respect you and your weird outlooks and choices but “Let’s all the rich people go move somewhere teetering on the brink of absolute infrastructure catastrophe where the mayor PROMISES not to tax anybody” has possibly the highest entertainment value yet
I know right!
This was 1992, when FL’s population was 2/3rds what it is now.
The South is a couple of strategic ports, a series of *inland* cities because hurricanes… and Florida, 20 Million people sitting out on a stick. It’s already a 2-day drive to evacuate from Tampa to the state border when a hurricane hits. Everyone who moves there is crazy, but all the people who want to employ me are *moving there*.
Aren’t a bunch of tech companies moving to Austin? I’ve certainly heard more mumbling about Austin than Miami on twitter, but maybe that’s just my bubble.
I know everybody thinks us tech workers are rootless, atomized yuppies who are only in San Francisco etc. because that’s where the jobs are, but I actually like Seattle, and I know plenty of people who feel the same way about the Bay Area (housing costs aside).
(That said, everyone else should take OP’s advice and move to Miami so I can get a cheaper condo here)
I mean, I liked NYC before my knee blew out and I was no longer capable of standing on moving trains right as the local Armenians started having nightly gunfights and my entire industry evacced the dying, collapsing, suddenly crime-ridden city.
/NYC used to have a crime rate less than the national average.
In the year of our Lord 2021, a material-enough-to-have-to-upend-your-life-for percentage of tech/finance companies are *still* planning to make you live in the same state as them if you want to work for them? That’s fucked up.
(My dad worked tech in San Francisco for a while, but that didn’t mean he *lived* there, *god* no. He lived in *Canada* like a *sensible* person.)
((no offense to my friends in San Francisco, I assume you’re making the best of a bad situation))
—
I mean, I guess if you’re used to California even Miami might seem like an improvement danger-wise? Like, on a scale of 1 to California, Miami is what, a 9?
“Arranging for rich people to live in incredibly disaster-prone environments” doesn’t sound like an anti-communist position at all. That’s just using hurricanes/earthquakes/wildfires instead of guillotines.
Tags:
#getting an IFRS-based accounting designation is increasingly seeming #like a kind of precommitment against the San Francisco Gravitational Field and its descendants #”nope‚ my credentials don’t transfer to the States‚ you’ll just have to go on without me‚ so sorry‚ byeeee” #(renouncing my U.S. citizenship would be an even stronger oath to never move there but I’m still not sure if I’m willing to go *that* far) #((a few years back my dad refused a job offer from Google that was conditional on moving to SF)) #((better to work at Uber Eats here than to work at Google there)) #(((well at the time it was ”better to be unemployed” etc: Uber Eats came later))) #on a scale of 1 to California my area is maybe a 2 #there’s occasional ice storms you have to watch out for and that’s basically it #(*knocks on wood*) #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #reply via reblog #apocalypse cw #death tw? #murder cw?
Concept: villain receives one of those “neither man nor woman etc.” prophecies and thinks they’re terribly clever for going “aha, that doesn’t rule out nonbinary people”, so they spend the next few years being terribly suspicious of anyone with non-traditional gender presentation, and then they’re murdered by a teenager.
Tags:
#fun with loopholes #story ideas I will never write #gender #death tw? #murder cw?
homestuck canon is so wild that you can tell me virtually anything happened and i’ll believe you. like you can say “terezi murdered dave” and i’ll be like “that sounds about right” and actually i’m gonna have to refrain from writing the rest of this post because i just remembered that terezi did, in fact, murder dave
Tags:
#Homestuck #death tw? #murder cw? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I don’t speak much Homestuck and cannot *personally* vouch for this) #(but the person I reblogged this from *does* speak Homestuck and seems to think this is legit) #((I *think* if I’m interpreting his tags right Terezi murdered a version of Dave from a twig of the main timeline)) #((or something along those lines))
it’s not even subtle, as 2020 approaches my blog is full of these incredibly smug foreshadowing comments, real Pratchettarian bullshit like “don’t worry, a horrifying death is the last thing that will happen to you haha”
This is a misunderstanding, Mr. Argumate. You didn’t cause 2020 by posting, rather, you posted because 2020 would happen – it primed your brain for it.
Unfortunately this phenomenon tends only to happen in a way that can’t be used to act on the information effectively – partly because there are multiple possible futures, and the very effect of the information travelling backwards alters the future, even very minutely.
Ultimately the ability can be cultivated, but it’s really only useful for writing science fiction.
So in Goblin Squad D&D yesterday, our Barbarian had just… the stupidest, DUMBEST, most terrifying, absolutely godlike thing happen to him.
This is a story of numbers, but it’s still beautiful.
We were fighting a dragon.
The dragon is hopping around while the Barbarian is just racing around trying to catch up to her
Dragon finally decides, no, really, fuck specifically THAT ranger and goes hog fucking wild on me (I LIVED!) but holds still long enough for the Barbarian to finally rage and LEAP ONTO HER BACK and go STAB
Dragon sees this and goes, “Oh. Sick.”
and just goes VERT
Pro: I am not tanking anymore
Con: She instantly moves FOUR HUNDRED FEET STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR…. with our raging Barbarian holding on for dear gottdamn life
One round later, she’s another 160 feet up, still getting stabbed by a Barbarian who has somehow held on, now getting attacked by ballistae and we’re all starting to get CONCERNED
Because if they take that dragon down, that is 560 feet our Barbarian is also falling out of the sky, and he is not attuned to the ONLY THING WE HAVE that can save his fucking life from that height
I’m sitting there doing math, trying to determine if 560′ is enough to kill him outright, silently being very grateful we still have exactly ONE diamond to rez his ass
and the dragon just goes VERT again, ANOTHER four hundred feet in the air
The Barbarian, now finally free from any potential collateral, cackles, as he is at long last, unshackled by the restraints of his conscience.
He has a tattoo, you see, which allows him to cast Fireball once per day
centered on himself
with a save which he autofails
But he is a tiefling.
And this fucker still has 160 hit points by the time it’s done exploding. But the explosion sends him backward as he fails the Athletics check to continue holding on and he begins to fall.
He falls for 3 fucking rounds and we can only watch our friend fall to his certain death.
The DM… has to roll ninety six d6s
let that number sink in for you
NINETY. SIX. D6s. They normally roll with real dice, you can hear the clickety clack through the discord, but they had to get out a fucking app for this because they do not OWN ninety. fucking. six. d6s.
It comes out to 402 fucking bludgeoning damage he takes on impact as he leaves a Barbarian shaped crater in the center of the forum, 10 feet wide, 5 feet deep, a cloud of dust and broken brick shooting out as he lands.
And do you know what happens next?
Do you know what the fuck we see as the dust settles?
We hear a cough, and a see a thumbs up come out of the crater. 1 hit point left.
402 damage. Raging as he landed, halved to 201. He had 160HP left, it only brought him down to -41, not enough to kill him outright (you have to get equal to negative your max HP), AND HE’S LEVEL 12, which means he has access to Relentless Rage: the first time you’d drop below 0 HP, if it doesn’t outright kill you, you have to roll a Con save of 10 or higher to instead drop to 1 HP. He rolled an 11.
He fell almost a THOUSAND feet from the air off the back of a fucking dragon, took NINETY SIX D6 FALL DAMAGE, AND LIVED.
His arena name lived up to the hubris of this fucking swan dive. All hail ALTANIN, THE UN-FUCKING-BREAKABLE
Tags:
#D&D #storytime #death tw? #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
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