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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cipheramnesia:

snaufey:

snaufey:

snaufey:

snaufey:

snaufey:

Iceland is fucking bizarre my name change made the news

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Like just @ me at this point I’m literally the only person in iceland (and very possibly the world) who has the first name Lauf

(Article title reads “Lauf and Birningur in group of new names in the name register”)

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No one lives here so now two of our biggest news outlets are vagueing about me lmao

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Hmm you’re right. Correction: two of our biggest media outlets are talking about me specifically because they are obsessed with me

This morning I showed up to work and my boss was like “congratulations :))” and I was kinda confused so asked her on what and she said “your name, I heard about it on the radio”

So far I have counted two online articles and apparently the radio is also talking about my name change so I’ll keep you guys updated when I’m on national tv or something

With a little legwork we can make more people on Tumblr see this than the entire population of Iceland.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #names #Iceland #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

togglesbloggle:

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?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

headspace-hotel:

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.

​

headspace-hotel:

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.”

​

headspace-hotel:

Anyway just imagine like

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:

Human: …

Human: …What.

​

headspace-hotel:

Human: You don’t understand. I mean…Radioactivity kills people!

Elf wizard dude: Ohhh. You got just the cursed magic rocks.

Human: …

Elf wizard dude: Damn. That sucks man.

​

headspace-hotel:

Elf wizard dude: So you have no talking animals? None?

Human: Well I mean—there is that one type of parrot but like that doesn’t—

Elf wizard dude: godDAMN it

​

stabbedinthenameofscience:

It got better!

​

thessalian:

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!

Human: Yeah, it’ll get off at its stop– wait.

Elf wizard dude: CATCHING ON YET?!?

​

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moral-autism:

winged-light:

chimaerakitten:

people write AUs where characters from a fantasy universe are in like, the setting or plot situation of another non-fantasy story all the time, and usually it’s a no-powers version of those characters because more often than not the powers would absolutely break all the stakes of the au.

And that’s totally logical and makes sense, but I think the version where the transplanted characters get to keep their powers and break the stakes has hilarious and underutilized crack potential.

Like just once I’d like to read “The 74th annual Hunger Games goes absolutely tits up and nobody knows why none of the kids seem to be dying despite some serious effort on the part of the gamemakers. Meanwhile sharp-eyed viewers at home may notice that the shy and unassuming male tribute from district 11—whose personal item was a pair of costume glasses—hasn’t been seen on-camera even once since the opening gong. But not many people do notice. After all, in all the pageantry leading up to the games, no tribute was more boring than Clark Kent.“

I absolutely love this and will contribute the ideas:

  • The Animorphs must kill both Donald Trump and Putin in order to avert nuclear war
  • Perhaps the fault is not in our stars, but in the fact we haven’t killed enough rats yet for me to level up to a third-level cleric and become immune to cancer
  • Just the Karate Kid movie but halfway through Luke figures out how to use the Force, surprising and confusing his mentor Mr Miyagi
  • Every character from League of Legends suddenly exists in Game of Thrones and now everyone has to cope with that, somehow
  • The Princess Diaries but your dad is Poseidon and your mom is a queen and therefore your life gets very complicated whenever you’re really supposed to be at a royal function but you have to flee to Camp Half-blood so you don’t get eaten by monsters

But I ALSO want some non-powered individuals walking into situations where the characters ought to have powers.

  • How do we get the ring to Mordor? We get in a modified Aston Martin and drive. Whoever this wizard guy is, he’s no match for Bond…. James Bond.
  • Just a competent, functional adult tries tackling the Yeerk invasion. Like completely no powers but they’re a functional adult who makes excellent life choices. Instead of turning into an animal to raid Yeerk headquarters, they just buy large quantities of plastic explosive.
  • How fast can Sherlock Holmes speedrun Pale?
  • What if you were in the Pokemon universe and you did not have any Pokemon but you did have a basic grasp of economics

And I kind of want to read stuff where they keep their powers…. and go into a setting with completely different powers.

  • Taylor Hebert Beats Up Aslan, Takes Over Narnia
  • The USS Enterprise encounters an odd society where people are divided into factions like Dauntless and Abnegation, which Spock thinks is illogical
  • Gracelings vs. Fire Lord Ozai in the ultimate showdown
  • You have a Portal gun. Your task is to find the Holy Grail. Morgana le Fay may interfere

I participated in an (on indefinite hiatus) glowfic that was, basically, a D&D druid meets the USS Enterprise. The druid couldn’t use most of their powers normally because they work with ensouled life and classical elements, not these ‘atoms’ and life that does all its cognition with just the brain. It was fun.

And ahead of me if I work on it is the uplifting story of a magic school student … not having access to his powers and instead introducing a high-magic lower-nonmagical-tech setting to the wonders of electricity and electronics and modern medicine.

Tags:

#yeah I was reading this post the whole time thinking ”have *I* got the genre for *you*” #glowfic #recs #story ideas I will never write #fanfic #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

me: shows this bit from an ACX post to the giant

I thought about this recently when watching a great couple who loved each other very much. The wife said some kind of extremely mushy compliment to the husband about how much she loved him, and the husband joked something like “Oh, you always say that.” He maybe mildly appreciated the compliment, but they really were always saying incredibly nice things about how much they appreciated each other, to the point where it kind of started to sound kind of like background noise.

Suppose you reached the point where it sounded exactly like background noise. Your spouse could give you a dozen red roses and a sonnet about your many excellent qualities every day, and it wouldn’t update you at all. At that point, you either need to have the mysterious “companionate love” thing in place – something that isn’t based on reward prediction error – or you are doomed to never feel another positive emotion from your relationship at all.

the giant, who is constantly being high-intensity nice at me: Yeeaahh. I’ve thought about this. But… it’s so hard to NOT tell you how much I love you every time I see you.

me, in complete sincerity: So the problem is that the reward needs to be unpredictable, right? Here’s what I suggest – you keep a digital die roll website open in a pinned tab, roll it every time I come into the room, and –

the giant: No!!

me: [stricken by the irrationality of human beings]

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with loopholes #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

official-kircheis:

On a genetic level being tasty to humans is one of the most successful evolutionary strategies ever

if you’re tasty enough to us you literally don’t even need to be capable of unassisted reproduction, we’ll clone you

Tags:

#yeah I think about this too #proud citizen of The Future #food #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tumblr_onm0yvykbu1u8y216o1_500

sigmaleph:

snakestack:

this is so mysterious

harvesting souls to mine bitcoin

Actually, a computer’s soul is located in its hard drive (or equivalent storage unit). This can be demonstrated by removing the hard drive from a computer and placing it in the hard-drive-less shell of a second, compatible computer: the shell then *is* the first computer.

Of course, this becomes somewhat more complicated in the case of computers with multipartite souls, such as SSD/HDD dual-drive laptops and smartphones with microSD slots.

Tags:

#I always keep my smartphone thoroughly anesthetised when I have to remove its microSD card for direct laptop-to-microSD data updates #I don’t want the poor thing to suffer through missing part of its soul :( #also there were a couple months there as kids where my brother and I each had a hard drive and were time-sharing a single vessel #reply via reblog #transhumanism #(sort of) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #[epistemic status: semi-serious] #[it’s pretentious and/or exaggerated and/or something to call a computer’s essence-of-individual-identity a ”soul”] #[but it’s not *that* far a stretch of the term] #[and many computers clearly do possess a meaningful amount of essence-of-individual-identity]