esoteric-empiricist

[esoteric-empiricist]

very important psa

[esoteric-empiricist]

people always talk about evil clones like oooh a dark mirror oohh what if you saw what are cruel person you were/are capable of becoming. and well yes but what if you were the evil clone. what if you looked in the mirror and what you saw was so bright it blinded you. what if you had to know exactly how good you could have been.

[esoteric-empiricist]

if the usa used a national civil service exam to staff the government, the problem would be the entire government would be chinese. this wasn’t a problem in china bc they were already chinese

[esoteric-empiricist]

op turned reblogs off :/

[esoteric-empiricist]

i might just be bad at jokes, but is every story about a small group of people saving the world ubermensch like, on principle? or can you have a story about a cool person doing cool things as just. a fantasy that does not mean you actually want (or would trust) that in real life

Listen. Cool good art is gonna occasionally participate in fascist-adjacent Nietzsche-type ideology. Someone find the Adorno quote about closing the car door fascistly, I'm too cozy in bed.

[esoteric-empiricist]

yUUUUPPPPPPP theyre in the crevices now

[esoteric-empiricist]

new favorite hate anon decided i had "gone silent" by not responding to god-knows-what reply and asked "what happened to the strength of your convictions?" i've been repeating it to myself all day it's my new favorite thing. hey you stopped posting, what happened to the strength of your convictions? your convictions were so strong bro

[esoteric-empiricist]

I love softsynths because theyre frequently ugly as shit in a way few other things are

what is this.

[esoteric-empiricist]

decided to properly knuckle down and learn emacs lisp. im beginning to think this language might not be very good

[esoteric-empiricist]

Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit

“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.

In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.

…

When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.

Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.

The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)

All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.

Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.

But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”

[esoteric-empiricist]

[esoteric-empiricist]

i love when you can feel the disdain dripping off of a wikipedia article

[esoteric-empiricist]

when i was a kid i used to pray to god every night that he would “create an invisible hole somewhere”. to me an “invisible hole” was a deep pit that would look like regular ground until you stepped on it, at which point you would presumably fall to your death - an illusory floor. it was very important to me that it was just at some random location, because it had to trap a person i didn’t know and would never meet, though in my attempt to actualize my prayer through whatever focus my 4 year old brain could muster up i did start to imagine the future victim’s face as they met their sudden demise. i was not motivated by any potential personal gain, i simply wanted to test god’s power.

[esoteric-empiricist]

Idol of Gensokyo

[esoteric-empiricist]

in school they used to call me semipermeable membrane for my habit of allowing some things to pass through me

[esoteric-empiricist]

im not trying to "pit two bad bitches against eachother" i am trying to end historical revisionism. oh you saw how cute Clifford was as a tiny red baby puppy? but you dont like him so you replaced him with the more memeable dog? yeah okay. thats because you love stolen valour. tiktokers are not more important than the truth so heres some facts clifford was the SMALLEST puppy and love made him GROW. clifford was small enough to float on soap True but Snoopy was never that little enough. unless it was the biggest soap ever. well hers the truth i like clifford more. and just because the internet perfers snopy will. never stop me from being my BRAVE! self.

[esoteric-empiricist]

i started playing Disco Elysium and last night (the same day i started playing) i woke up to my stomach hurting so bad that in my delirium i thought it had to do with something from the game.

and looked it up…

i thought this was completely normal until waking up later after the pain was gone.