this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

Anonymous asked: y’know what I wish? I wish theists who do that thing where they act like any atheist they encounter or hear of is their defiant teenaged child, dissing religion to shock them personally and not out of any sincere belief, would get a fucking grip.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

sincere disbelief, really

 

argumate:

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

 

cromulentenough:

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’)

 

nuclearspaceheater:

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?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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transgenderer:

so strange to me when people pretend that reading subtitles doesnt severely affect your experience of a show. like, unless its very low on dialogue, youre gonna spend most of the time staring at the bottom of the screen. like, its totally valid if thats a valid tradeoff for you, or if it isnt dubbed, but it clearly IS a tradeoff

 

sigmaleph:

today on posts from a parallel universe: ????????

this has not been a problem to me, ever*, and I watch stuff with subtitles on all the time (including stuff in languages I am fluent in, because parsing audio is a pain sometimes.)

*(ok technically I had problems with subtitles when I was a tiny child, which I’ve always attributed to not yet being able to read very fast. Maybe this is an acquired skill you need and I picked it up early because of American cultural imperialism and my parents (correctly) hating dubbing)

 

brin-bellway:

I was *already* missing most of the details of what was happening on the screen [link], so there isn’t much to lose by turning on subtitles.

 

maryellencarter:

Oh yeah, reading subtitles absolutely severely affects my experience of a show, because I can actually understand what anybody is saying and therefore what’s supposed to be going on. ;P

I think the original post is about anime due to the “if it’s not dubbed” bit, but like… I have somewhat accidentally never watched an anime in my life. We’re talking 100% spoken English media here, for me. I just have bad enough auditory processing that the “tradeoff” is between understanding while only looking at the characters 90% of the time (rough estimate, but I know I can read a Terry Pratchett novel in four hours, I read *fast*), or not understanding at all.

(I also have a *lot* of issues with dubbed media. I would always rather hear the original inflections since I’m going to be reading subtitles anyway. Is hearing completely different voices and performances supposed to affect your experience of a non-English-original show less than “the one-inch-high barrier of subtitles”? :S)

(I mean, I will grant, ability to read fast and comprehend what you’re reading is frustratingly rare, at least in the US. One of the big things that’s driving me crazy at my job is being told by the support team “it’s unreasonable to expect us to read all that” when I ask for help and try to give them the information they’ll need. So maybe it’s a more average experience to find yourself absolutely hobbled by subtitles. But really… that doesn’t sound like a subtitles problem.)

 

brin-bellway:

I think you’re being overly uncharitable. People who have a harder time with text or images than with audio deserve sympathy too.

Note that I *didn’t* say subtitles don’t make it harder for me to parse visuals! They *do*, and I can absolutely see how someone’s sensory processors could be set up in such a way that subtitles do more harm than good. It’s just that *my* sensory-processing bandwidth is so small and so text-weighted that *most* of the things being sacrificed are things I would have had to sacrifice regardless, and *many* of the benefits received in exchange are things I needed.

(I recently read a *transcript* of a TV episode after watching it with subtitles and discovered that–despite the subtitles being helpful on net–I had *still* missed some of the dialogue. I’m really not that good at interacting with stories on a synchronous basis in general. Real life is *somewhat* easier because it doesn’t run on Chekhov’s Gun rules: the background details I missed very often *don’t* ever become important.)

 

maryellencarter:

i probably am being overly uncharitable. reading comprehension / reading speed is a sore spot with me anyway for a number of reasons, and ever since we went to work at home and therefore text-only support at work, those reasons have been piling up, to a point where being outside the standard deviation on that bell curve is a huge part of why i’m in a major depressive spiral and currently unable to work. (well, being outside the standard deviation and other people being *assholes* about it. but also just having to answer the same question five times when i’m trying to get help, and then being penalized for having long calls.)

anyway. yeah. i guess this one hit more of a sore spot than i realized, one where i don’t have a lot of sympathy to spare right now. :S

Tags:

#*hug* #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #depression #discourse cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slumbermancer:

basically, i think the general rule of thumb is: if someone REALLY wants the blood that’s inside of your body, and they’re like… a vampire, or a dracula, or some sort of mansquito, then that’s probably okay. a dracula and a mansquito are made for removing things like blood and swords from inside your body. that’s basically fine.

if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out. 

unfortunately this will not deter a really big frog, because a really big frog is full of things like prizes, and value, and quite a lot of hatred, and it would REALLY rather like to replace any and all of those things with your blood, and basically by any means possible.

Tags:

#a classic work of surrealism that I have apparently never actually reblogged before #fixing that #blood #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

whatsdifferentincanada:

 

Tags:

#yes but only if it has butter chicken sauce instead of gravy #fuck gravy #fusion cuisine all the way‚ baby! #(yes butter chicken poutine *is* a thing and it is *amazing*) #(very rich though) #food #our home and cherished land #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ivanaskye:

to anyone who needs to hear this,

you look EXACTLY like a leaf

your eye spots ARE absolutely terrifying

when you raise your front legs you DO look bigger than anything, even a tree

Tags:

#bugs #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #unreality cw?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

https://brin-bellway.dreamwidth.org/89538.html

@rustingbridges replied:

tomatoes really don’t travel well

they’re one of the fruits where the supermarket variety is the supermarket variety because it survives the trip, not because they’re good

meanwhile tomato plants are really low effort. if you have favorable conditions you can do literally nothing

—

Where are you *finding* conditions that aren’t full of weeds and wildlife-competing-with-you-for-the-food and the occasional blight? A greenhouse?

(…actually, that might not be a bad idea. I *have* heard of people building little personal greenhouses in their backyards, and nothing keeps squirrels from taking one bite out of your mom’s tomato and walking away like a fucking *door*, right?)

Re: surviving the trip, home-grown zucchinis taste about the same but we’ve noticed the shelf life is *vastly* longer. Store-bought zucchinis start to shrivel up and go soft within a few days of bringing them home; home-grown zucchinis can sit in the fridge for several *weeks*. Makes it a lot easier to plan your meals.

Honestly, probably a good part of my problem with gardening is that, because *Mom* loves home-grown tomatoes for some fucking reason, they end up the focal point of the garden and a great deal of my gardening-related labour is thoroughly alienated: I never see the fruits *or* the vegetables of my labour.

A garden optimised for what *I* thought was most worth growing would have zero tomatoes and more garlic and zucchini, with perhaps just enough potatoes to keep in practice so that I can put potatoes in the victory garden. And probably more perennials like mulberries. And possibly mushrooms. And I would want to do a bunch of research and expert-consultation regarding which weeds are secretly edible, since anything *that* easy to grow sounds like something I should take advantage of.

(I’ve been meaning to do some more digging into how to eat dandelions. I’ve heard you can put the new greens in salads and the petals in pancake batter, but I don’t normally eat salads *or* pancakes. Can you just, like, munch on a raw dandelion flower straight-up? Can I fulfil my childhood dream of eating a pretty flower I found in the backyard?)

@larshuluk replied:

Yeah, you can just munch any part of dandelion – I often do that when I’m reading in the garden. Older leaves get bitter and shouldn’t be eaten in big amounts, and roots need cooking. Flower is just fine though.

—

Hell yeah!

—

This is another area where I like a lot of the things the communing-with-nature people are putting out but for completely different reasons. I want to know more about the natural world around me *so that I can exploit it better*. Which wildflowers can I eat? What’s the name of that one plant where when you run through a field of them it sounds like popcorn popping? Can I eat those too?!

(I never stopped wanting to stick interesting plants in my mouth: I just learned to resist it, to assume everything was poisonous until proven otherwise. And for the most part, nobody ever taught me which interesting plants I didn’t have to resist.)

Tags:

#let👏six👏year👏olds👏eat👏pretty👏dandelion👏flowers #replies #gardening #food #my childhood #poison cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

pileofknives:

60e9b70ad31cf6fcdfbc096968b31a07c3e80e26

“I bet it doesn’t hurt that bad, I don’t have time for this shit.”

 

whatifweanarchist:

“at least one”

 

sexhaver:

now this is a gender binary i can get behind

 

carnival-phantasm:

Very generous of them to describe it as the “Thinking Period”

 

retiredmahoushoujo:

ad067ad5ab66686b5e20ed26c13546a34d9bb97e

They correctly excluded the outlier Electroshocks Georg

 

shacklesburst:

everything about this is extremely underpowered, except for electroshocks georg, who, by now, must be extremely overpowered

 

rustingbridges:

you’d think they would have been able to get more than 50 undergraduates to do. it doesn’t take a long time and requires answering no surveys

Also, psych researchers have a reputation for lying their asses off to the subjects regarding [what a study is actually about] until after it’s over. I would seriously consider pressing the button once or twice just to see if they were telling the truth about it being a shock button.

(Not sure if I’d *do* it, but I’d seriously consider it, and I would definitely wonder if it was some sort of covert test that I was failing by not pressing it.)

Tags:

#the first draft of this post only had commentary in the form of the tags #”basically what shacklesburst said” #”I’m not comfortable with the gender-focused framing here but I’m reblogging for Electroshocks Georg” #but–while I’m still primarily reblogging for Electroshocks Georg–I realised I did in fact have something to say #reply via reblog #the power of science #sexism cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Spiders Georg

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

seat-safety-switch:

Winter is always this horrific balance. On one hand, it’s too cold to wash a car. You’d have to be stupid to be out there in -20°C, running out of your house with a bucket of boiling water, trying to get to your panels before it instantly freezes solid just from touching the outside air. On the other hand, the city keeps putting road salt down like they own a dividend stake in the abstract concept of salt. You need to wash, and yet you can’t.

Now, I also know what you amateur scientists are going to say. “It can’t rust, it’s too cold for the endothermic reaction of iron oxidation to occur, you’re fine to wait to wash the car when it warms up.” Then it’ll be rusting! Do you also wait for your enemies to wake up before you stab them to death? Don’t answer that. Also, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that Mars is red because it’s made of rust, and it’s hard to get a lot colder than there, too.

Most “car people” just shrug their shoulders at this problem and buy a cheap winter beater. This vehicle is sacrificial, they say. It does not bother me that it is corroding away before my very eyes, because doing so prevents my nice Lexus from developing spots of rust as well. These people also must have a “parts kid,” just in case something happens to their firstborn, because every car is special and unique and deserves to be preserved. Plus, if they keep buying up and destroying all the $1000 rust buckets, then what am I going to drive?

Last week, I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find myself in possession of the answer. I would simply add a sacrificial coating to my vehicle, encasing it in an inch of bulletproof and saltproof epoxy. So far, this method has worked really well. The salt just slides right off it, and onto the car behind me. There’s just one downside: since the doors no longer open, I have to keep the window rolled down all the time so I can get in and out. You might think this is “cool,” like the Dukes of Hazzard, but Bo and Luke never had to deal with trying to get a pregnant raccoon out from the back seat of their Volare.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #unreality cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what