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the spirit is not willing and the flesh it is not so into the idea either

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a while ago I read this sci-fi short story from the 50s where a guy is kidnapped and interrogated by aliens using a very sophisticated lie detector, but he realizes that the lie detector works off technical truth, and with some careful phrasing and misdirection, he manages to make them believe that humans are a race of immortal, overpowered, omniscient telepathic beings. and it works.

my favorite part is when he tells them that humans are "capable of transportation without the aid of spaceships or any vehicles, just by using mental power to control physical matter". it's true, we can. it's called walking.

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somebody should give me 10 thousand dollars and free top surgery

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i thinkit would be cool if there was an omegaverse but for salmon instead of wolves. Like when the time comes certain members of society get really juicy musclewise and get yiffy fangs and are suddenly compelled to return to the neighborhood they grew up in and 96 hours later show up barefoot in full starvation mode and ravaged by walking through interstate traffic to fuck whoevwr smells the best in the local burger king. Then afterwards they die and disintegrate to be eaten by seagulls in the parking lot

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Saw a post pointing out that the idea of a Saturday-Sunday weekend is in itself cultural Christianity being applied to the whole “secular” world, that in Israel the weekend is Friday-Saturday and in some Muslim-majority countries the weekend is Thursday-Friday or only Friday (in others it’s Friday-Saturday as well.)

Anyway to make a truly secular and inclusive world I propose a Monday-Wednesday work-week and a Thursday-Sunday weekend. I think anyone of any or no religion could all get behind this.

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"Saw traps for people with moral OCD" is a phrase that has embedded myself into my brain because, well, Saw traps for people with moral OCD are everywhere.

Stuff that basically amounts to...

"You have to listen to my opinions on [issue], or else you don't care about [issue]. (Constantly talks about how people like you are the absolute worst.)"

Anything that's functionally like, "you have to let me tear you down over things you can't control or you're a bad person."

Anything that's functionally like, "you have to let me vent to you whenever and however I want or else you're a bad person."

"If you enjoy X media/trope, you just hate Y people."

"Everyone knows that X thing is harmful/hateful; if you engaged in it, it's just because you were fine with perpetuating hate/harm."

"You should have just known better/should know this already!"

This thread over here talks about the inherent issues of putting this kind of stuff out there. The TL;DR is that it really only works on people who are mentally unwell and have poor boundaries, while just pissing off everyone else. It really doesn't matter if you're technically correct; you're still attacking people, and that means they're not wrong to block you.

I think that many of these Saw traps are created when people effectively write posts directed toward people who don't want to help, rather than the ones who do. Like, if you catch yourself writing an angry, shame-laden post, ask yourself: who are you writing it for and what are the odds you're going to change their minds? If your mental image is some smug fuck or angry reactionary, you're writing for the wrong person. Write for the person who's curious, who's willing to learn.

Also? Work on figuring out how to transmute negative feelings into positive, encouraging rhetoric. EG:

"Why is there no X positivity?" -> "Let's hear it for X!"

"No one cares about Y problem!" -> "Hey, we need more recognition of Y problem" or "I haven't seen many people talking about Y problem, so here's some info on what's up."

"If you don't reblog this, you don't care about [group]" -> "Please reblog this, it would mean a lot for us [group]."

And if you're really super duper frustrated and want to vent with a lot of nasty words and sentiments? Consider taking it to a private vent channel or a journal or somewhere that a stranger with moral OCD/scrupulosity isn't likely to run across it.

Remember, most people don't want to hurt anyone. More people are ignorant than malicious. People naturally want to do the right thing, so if you feel like you have to guilt them or shame them into it, there's probably a fundamental communication issue somewhere, or they simply lack the context to understand why what you're saying is so important.

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hey guys if you’re planning on making a vaguepost on the dashboard can you message me with the details and some of the lore behind the vague post you’re making. a vaguepost for the dash and a detailedpost for me. because i like to know what’s going on. if you do this i will automatically take your side because you’ve done the right thing by letting me know what’s up. thanks in advance ❤️

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"It wasn’t until about two years into the pandemic, when the “vax and relax” era was clearly not going to work, that I had to reckon with my system for organizing time. I couldn’t delay the future any longer; I couldn’t continue protecting the story of my life from the pandemic’s incursion. So I accepted the terrible fact that the pandemic was going to continue indefinitely and was not merely an event in my life but rather the container in which the rest of my life would take place. This was a difficult reckoning. It required that I come to terms with a great deal of grief about the failures of those around me; about what I lost and will have lost; a privilege in thinking that these were the sorts of world-historical changes that happened to other people, at other times. But it was also a reckoning that rescued the orderliness of time, for me. It was as if the clock was un-paused, and life resumed its forward march. I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory. The Pandemic became something temporally contained, its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And from the safety of hindsight (even if only an illusion), people began telling and re-telling the story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as self-soothing."

--Emily Dupree, The invention of Memory

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Preserving the Knowledge of the Ancients? I've found that most of the technical books published before about 1964 never had their copyrights renewed, so now are in the public domain.  So I am endeavoring to digitize and post some selected books relating to the "vacuum tube age" of electronics here.

Great resource for old electronics texts, mostly audio frequency stuff

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Lil punk.

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I won't get around to writing a properly developed post on it, but speaking generally and assuming broad good faith, I personally think the anachronism in Veilguard is fine. I know it's a deeply held bit of style for a lot of people, and many hold the directive about no anachronism as important to things feeling properly Dragon Age.

Personally, I never felt it THAT important. I roll my eyes at nitpicking about historically accurate costuming too, and I pause to wonder what IS "anachronism" in fantasy. I think a lot of the style of the games leaned so hard on it that, in some places, it was a substituting this rule in place of developing stronger individual style or voice. I love this series, but I don't feel like characters (notably once you got past core cast), locations, etc. always and consistently had a strong sense of voice, both in terms of diction but also in visual direction. I feel like even the music gets this a little bit, since Veilguard feels more musically interesting to me than many of the prior tracks because, I think, the soundtrack is allowed to feel a little less like vaguely European medieval heroic fantasy.

There's always been anachronism, but I think the strict reliance on adhering to a particular conception of what A Fantasy Story looks and sounds like really hampered, at least for me, in the development of style identity in a way that did feel more specific and striking for the story and characters it's trying to dress. I think being released from this directive does, because there's no longer what we being ourselves to the table from out familiarity with the genre and pattern recognition, however, magnify flaws in how Bioware always has treated the setting as just the backdrop against which these dramas play out—but that's outside the scope of my thoughts here. I'll just summarize that with: that's a consistent Bioware problem, and I don't think it's inherently wrong to approach worldbuilding as merely dressing the set for your story, though perhaps that isn't always the most successful approach here and I know many fans are very invested in the setting itself and its development, so that would put us all at cross purposes.

Don't get me wrong. There IS a place for that sort of directive, a rule against things that scan too modern. But then, I think for it to work, you have to have a very firm idea of your own voice, of your individual style and direction working with that directive, and frankly, I don't think Bioware EVER really had a super strong grasp of here.

I do think the character design especially and character voice suffered SO much in many earlier instances because of this directive. Meanwhile, I think it's interesting and striking to have things like, for example, Neve is clearly drawing from film noir and how that informs how I approach and think about her as a character and how appropriate it feels that Lucanis and Illario end on the stage of opera house. I feel like being released from having to worry about anachronism has, for me, produced some of the strongest instances of style in the series in a long time.

And I know a lot of people feel the OPPOSITE, which is a matter of personal experience and taste, but for my own experience, it always felt like the series was weighed down a bit by a notion of properly emulating The Genre. (We've all looked at the infamous browns and muds of Origins, a game I am fond of. This is why it looks and sounds like that, in my opinion.) This fear of sounding too anachronistic often left the series not really feeling, to me, like it's really had a firm sense of style or voice in the sense of it didn't always have an idea of what made it sound or look like itself, bc it was always afraid of being too modern while also feeling afraid to not look enough like a heroic epic fantasy.

I think getting rid of that and no longer fearing it has done a lot for developing a stronger voice with a look, sound, and feel for Veilguard that feels more specific and conveys story and character so much better and more confidently. Because, in the end, that's supposed to be what this is all in service of: conveying character and story. I feel like Veilguard, in being released from this restriction, has developed a stronger voice with which to do it.

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Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in grandmas florals and a vintage cut. Smelling like thrift stores and books and dried flowers.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in the macarbe. Art filled red with blood, and wardrobe filled black and silver. Jars of bones and hair and herbs.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in nature's song. The howl of the wind. The bold heat of the sun on their skin, and the smell of eucalyptus and petrichor.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in the sweat on their brow and the strength of their lift. The rush of adrenaline and endorphins. The beauty in their form and focus.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in the tap of their heels on tiles. The way their voice commands a room. Warm printer ink, signature signed.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in the paint on your apron and the beadwork your mother taught you. The songs you made up with your cousins over your childhood summers will be the lullabies your children fall asleep to.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in the layer of fat on top of your soup, the bubbling of yeast and the smell of onion, garlic, and rosemary.

Here's who the femmes who's expression lies in the strum of the bass and the bang of the drum. Grimey venues with sticky floors, full of screaming, sweat, and fiery passion.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in decedant fabrics galore. Velvets and satins and ruffles and lace. Rhinestones and ribbons. Leather and linens.

Here's to femmes whose expression lies in enjoying the simplicities of life. The smell of the jasmine tree on the walk home from book club. The changing of the leaves. The way their barista knows them by name.

Here's to the femmes whose expression lies in comfort and care. The softness they've carved for themselves. Matching pajamas and mismatched socks. Home is where the heart is, and where goldilocks finds her "just right."

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due to budget cuts we’re going to be replacing the tragic and cruelly tormented elven king chained to the peak display with working father of 3 tied to a chair. boss just told me about it