selfmaderibcageman

[selfmaderibcageman]

[selfmaderibcageman]

There’s beautiful boys out there and I want them to live in my basement or on my couch and I would provide for their food and possibly health insurance but not their retirement

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Do you condemn the enemy?

I hate them so

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you should be addicted to shutting the fuck up

You wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid

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pc still broke have this real old soumaeda comic from 2021

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Angel vs. Minx 😙

OCs from Dancing With Death

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what she does in her spare time

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i very much enjoy the dagger † mark. its like if the asterisk had its own shadow the hedgehog

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one of the more interesting (to me) structural artifacts of many Taiwanese gangs having developed out of very Thrasher-esq play groups is that while they’re still organizations fundamentally obsessed with relational hierarchies they’re also relatively more egalitarian compared to their counterparts. it is considered polite for me to call a man old enough to be my grandfather elder brother while Green Gang guys are out kowtowing to people 10 years older than them

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commenting hetslop under someones wedding photos

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i blame it on your love, i do

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Yeah i feel a little poisoned But i keep on rocking

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Thinking about the Colima Spider Vessel. they really captured her humble expression

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happy pride month to the killing game gang too..?

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Re: this: it's like...

"But I just don't have it in me. He was a predator and I was prey, and it's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion. Though he died for our sins, I cannot miss Jukka Sarasti.

I can empathize with him, though. At long long last I can empathise, with Sarasti, with all his extinct kind. Because we humans were never meant to inherit the Earth. Vampires were. They must have been sentient to some degree, but that semi-aware dream state would have been a rudimentary thing next to our own self-obsession. They were weeding it out. It was just a phase. They were on their way.

The thing is, humans can look at crosses without going into convulsions. That's evolution for you; one stupid linked mutation and the whole natural order falls apart, intelligence and self-awareness stuck in counterproductive lock-step for half a million years. I think I know what's happening back on Earth, and though some might call it genocide it isn't really. We did it to ourselves. You can't blame predators for being predators. We were the ones who brought them back, after all. Why wouldn't they reclaim their birthright?" - Blindsight.

Siri, I don't think you've really thought this through.

For one thing... That "vampire domestication" video gave an off-the-cuff estimate of one vampire for every ten humans and I suspect if anything that's a substantial over-estimate of the historic vampire population, and that was a hard cap because of predator/prey dynamics; a vampire is smarter than a human, but are they ten times smarter than a human? Because they'd need to be around that just to collectively break even.

More to the point, Siri, did you miss the part where vampires are less social?

Because being social is a huge multiplier of effective intelligence.

What's the biggest advantage a human hunter has over any large animal they're likely to encounter in the wild? Answer: their gun. Most human hunters are not smart enough to start with nothing but their hands and no pre-existing knowledge of guns and end up with a gun. Actually, my guess is there is no human smart enough to start with their hands and no pre-existing knowledge of guns and end up with a gun, because humans were around for many thousands of years without inventing guns and when guns were invented the invention built off earlier inventions. Best guess for the smartest known human is William James Sidis, who had an IQ estimated at between 250-300. There were almost certainly humans as smart as William James Sidis before around 1000 CE, but apparently none of them ever invented guns. A gun is the product of sociality, of culture.

The real killer app of humans is culture. A species that was substantially dumber than us but smart enough to have culture might be about as successful as us; it might take them longer to get to building skyscrapers and putting people on the moon, but as long as they could accumulate knowledge they'd probably get there eventually, and the difference between "goes from flint-tipped spears to moon rockets in 10,000 years" and "goes from flint-tipped spears to moon rockets in 30,000 years" is trivial in cosmic timescales. A species of totally non-social super-geniuses would almost certainly never get past Stone Age.

I think Blindsight vampires are, if anything, a pretty pointed rebuttal to the Randroid idea of the brilliant lone genius who doesn't owe the mundanes anything because they're just so smart. Just about every ancient vampire was a brilliant superhuman genius, but because they couldn't leverage that intelligence effectively they were stuck being basically the Paleolithic-to-Neolithic versions of Leatherface and his family. It would be, in a way, a poignant illustration of what Stephen J. Gould meant when he said that he was less interested in the convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the fact that people of equal talent have almost certainly lived and died in fields and sweatshops.

Ironically, this insight seems to me to go to some rather Blindsight-esque places. If you want to grasp the true essence of the power that made us such a successful species, don't imagine somebody doing something individually clever, imagine somebody shooting a wild animal with a hunting rifle they could not build and which's workings they do not understand except on a "how to use it to kill something" level.

That it was humans and not vampires that inherited the Earth was completely expected and predictable; it's exactly what I'd expect a smart alien who visited Blindsight Earth in the late Pleistocene to predict as the most plausible future. Between a less individually smart but more social sapient species and an individually smarter but less social sapient species, my money would be on the individually less smart but more social species. Again, this seems to me like an actually kind of on-brand for Blindsight insight: that individual cleverness we're so proud of and value so much of is over-rated, what really made us successful is the same thing that makes eusocial insects successful + a slow vast process of knowledge accumulation.

Somebody on Spacebattles.com once made this criticism of Blindsight: "When you get down to it, Blindsight is (like Ayn Rand) an excellent book for geeks because it says that those things that we geeks tend to have difficulty with (like social relations, feelings and all that girly stuff) are not really important, they're even holding humanity back, and stuff we're good at (like logical mathematical formula and game theory) are awesome. Vampires are the ultimate of this, they're so uninterested in feelings they're barely even sentient..." And, y'know, I can see where they're coming from.

That said...

I think often what's happening with people who are tempted toward that elitist misanthropic computer-wannabe mindset is that they're neurodivergent and they're reacting to basically ableism. They've been called things like "emotionless" and "robotic" as insults, they've spent their lives hearing neurotypicals call their own neurotype "humanity" and talk about how they think it's awesome and people who don't share it are intellectually, emotionally, and/or morally defective. If you don't have feelings you can't hurt, and it can be very tempting to respond "no, fuck you, my way of being is superior actually, I'm tired of listening to you jack off to how you're very proud of being the sort of person who has a visceral negative emotional reaction to statistical thinking and would respond to moral dilemmas by choosing the option that objectively makes everything worse but allows you to feel like your hands are clean."

Siri reads to me as exactly the sort of person who might have had that experience. And if you look at it that way and think about how Blindsight is ostensibly Siri's words, it's really easy to read it as strongly influenced by that psychological woundedness and resentment, like it sounds kind of misanthropic because part of Siri is taking vicious, vindictive pleasure in being able to knock the NTs down a peg.

And, like...

""That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

Perhaps dreamstate wasn't such a bad word for it…"

---

"In some sick surrealistic way I had more in common with Sarasti than I did with any human."

Siri all but explicitly looks at Sarasti and goes "OMG, we have similar/parallel neuroatypicalities!" Like, that's barely subtext, it's pretty close to being just text.

You really think a neurodivergent person would just do that? Just obliquely express some of his own emotions by talking about other neuroatypical people?

Pairs well with the thought I had earlier, that Sarasti may be doing something similar with the Scramblers.

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getting an awkward handjob from siri keeton and it feels exactly like when you jerk off