#PHILOSOPHY

[theabigailthorn]

NEW PHILOSOPHY TUBE TONIGHT

Hello tumblr heads!

New Philosophy Tube episode drops tonight at 1930 British time! I'll be in the live chat from 1900, see you there!

Abi xxx

[philosophybits]

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

[petitephilo]

[universoulreiki]

That is literally the lesson of this book

[angeleternity]

I feel things !!

[sugawhaaa]

SAN DRABBLE

🌙▪︎[Damn those eyes]▪︎🌙

Warnings//genre:: violence, knives mentioned, San is in love with you bc he's insane....

Pairing:: rich!San x fem!bodied!hitman!reader

A/N:: okay we got part two of the masquerade series and I think Yeosang will be next and possibly the last of this series 💪 I did have a Hongjoong one planned but idkkkk

Atz masterlist::🗡

Taglist:: @saddeneddimple @leo-seonghwa

🎧::

You were a hitman hired by a big shot of an internationally famous company. You were ordered to kill a man named Choi San. Why did the company want him dead? None of your business. You got a photo of him, nice and clear, 4k quality yet when you arrived at the exact location the company said, he was well hidden. A masquerade ball. Choi san would be at this ball on May 17th, arriving roughly at 7 pm yet the grand clock showed it was a quarter till eight and you could not spot this man. It would be hard to find a man you've never met behind a mask and feathers among nearly a near hundred people. Time to move on to plan b.

You started getting friendly, but not too friendly so as to not draw attention. You silently started to hint at your interest in a good man named Choi San. The groups of people seemed surprised you didn't know of this man.

“Oh Mr. Choi?”

“He's new money but he is so famous,”

“You should really look into him,”

All the women seemed giddy about the concept of San and this piqued your interest.

“New money you say? How did that occur?” You ask, trying to keep up your curious little lady vibe.

“His father passed away tragically, however, his father insisted he take the money,” a woman wearing a deep satin blue gown informed you. She held her mask up with the convenient handle on the side. The mask's blue matched that on her dress and there was a gold trim around the eyes and outside of the mask.

“Oh, what a shame,” you sigh with a shake of your head. “I would love to meet Choi san, passed off of all your positive judgment on him,” you say politely, slightly hinting to them that they should introduce you or something of the sort.

“Ah yes, he is just in the back corner by the drinks,” a younger woman in deep magenta points out. Her eyes are full of youth and innocence, a spark that has been missing from your eyes for far too long.

“Why thank you for pointing him out,” you bow slightly before making your way over to him. He stood close to the bar of drinks and held one hand behind his back, the other in front holding red wine, a dark clash to his white suit with a snake tongue-like ending to it. You take a deep breath before coming up to him. “Excuse me, are you choi san?” You ask politely and he turns to look at you, his eyes are mainly hidden beneath his white mask.

“That would be me,” he smirks slightly. “And you may be?”

“Ah, Y/N L/N, sorry for my rudeness,” you put a hand to your chest, drawing sans eyes to the black choker on your neck holding a deep ruby charm on the end of it.

“No apology necessary,” San bows slightly, almost like a nod in a modern conversation. "What is it you wanted to discuss with me?" He asks, assuming that you wanted more than friendly conversation.

"Ah, yes," you look down at your hands for a moment, taking in the dark velvet red gloves that wrap up to your elbows. "Perhaps we should discuss it in private," you suggest and San chuckles, that rich laugh that makes your blood heat up. San eventually leads you to a deserted hallway with rows of doors. He takes you to one of the rooms and explains that these are guest rooms used by people who wish to stay the night at these balls rather than go home after all the drinks and dancing. San had already booked himself a room so there would be no interruptions in here.

San closes the door behind himself before making his way to stand in front of you. A perfect opportunity...

"What is on your mind Ms. L/N?" He smiles politely and through his mask, you can see the purity in his eyes. You swallow hard, your hand tightening around the handle behind your back. San's eyes flicker down to your hand hiding behind your back and he sighs softly. He sits down on the bed in his room, leaning back slightly and holding himself up with his hands. This is the perfect opportunity to pull out your knife and kill him off. You grip the handle harder and swing it out from behind you, now revealing the weapon to San's eyes.

You pin him down to the bed, ensuring he can't wriggle away, before raising the knife above even your own body. Your eyes are locked right on his neck, your aim perfect. However, as you bring your hand down you down feel the knife make contact with his body. You avert your gaze to look at his neck, which should be covered in blood, you see his eyes looking up at you. "Can you really do it?" His expression is blank and you raise the knife again, attempting your strike again but now your hands quiver. "It's much harder to kill someone when they're looking right into your eyes huh?" There isn't an ounce of fear in his voice or expression, almost as if he knew this would happen and he mentally prepared for this beforehand.

You sigh, questioning yourself; could you really do this? Kill a man who is looking up at you with those eyes. Damn those eyes... "before you kill me," San starts, drawing your attention back to him. He raises a hand to your face and you pull back. "Could you let me see your face?"

His request leaves you momentarily speechless, however, it is quite frankly his last wish.

"No," you state and you can see the hurt in his eyes. "Because...I'll let you live. But you if you saw my face, I'd be severely punished," you put the knife back into its hidden pocket in the back of your dress. You stand up and turn to go to the door but San quickly follows, placing a hand on your shoulder. You turn to look at him and he pulls the mask off your face, the mask falls to the floor as you finally feel the warmth of him on your face. He looks directly into your eyes, for they are most familiar to him.

"I didn't plan on snitching either way, I know you're just a puppet,"

[noosphe-re]

Drawing is therefore the Idea—it is the true form of the thing. Or more exactly, it is the gesture that proceeds from the desire to show this form and to trace it so as to show the form—but not to trace in order to reveal it as a form already received. Here, to trace is to find, and in order to find, to seek a form to come (or to let it seek and find itself)—a form to come that should or that can come through drawing.

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, translated by Philip Armstrong

[independentanon]

"EVERYTHING IS NORMAL" "THEY'RE █████████ THE INTERNET!"

Sometimes you'll notice changes being quietly made to your favorite internet services. Be it a video platform, your search engine of choice, your favorite social network, or wherever you go to buy the things you need or want. Sometimes you'll also see changes in advertisements that were, suspiciously, only relevant to your own unique situation.

You know it in your gut that something definitely changed, but it was only worth mentioning in conversation. "This changed for me, did it happen to you too?" Some of these changes are experienced by everyone all at once, but others are limited to specific groups, and sometimes are rolled out in staggered waves, meaning only some people are affected at different points in time. By the time the change is fully implemented - when every person targeted for this change is affected - it doesn't even matter anymore. The companies making these changes could report them publicly if they wanted to, and all people could do in response is be annoyed by it but eventually accept it and move on. The idea of "boiling the frog" comes to mind.

Our services have been getting worse in some ways, better in others, but there's undoubtedly some changes that are bad for everyone but the companies supplying these internet services (and sometimes, secretly, the governments of various countries around the world).

For me, personally, I've noticed changes to Meta (Facebook), to Google (and its services, Google Maps and YouTube), to ChatGPT, to Twitter - oh sorry, to "X", and many more. These changes are relatively small and are mostly unnoticeable... but I noticed them, just like all the other little changes they've quietly rolled out over the years. However, these changes feel a bit more insidious.

With Meta (Facebook for me), it was that they started suppressing accounts that frequently posted political content. This became most obvious during and after the 2024 election.

With Google, it was how it seems to bury certain content that's relevant to your given search, such as proof - one way or another - that something was happening with our politicians that's valuable knowledge to the public, but apparently isn't relevant enough to be on the very first page (or is simply hidden away entirely). This isn't even mentioning that Google modified its maps service so The Gulf of Mexico now reads The Gulf of America...

With YouTube, it's how it prioritizes click-bait, rage-bait, heavily-one-sided discussions of political topics, rather than pushing the very proof (or at least the very best evidence) that paints the clearest picture these overblown discussions are about. It's clear they're prioritizing watch time and engagement instead of truth.

With ChatGPT, I knew they had to control their generative text AI behind-the-scenes for certain situations (naturally you don't want your service to be generating stuff like "kill yourself," hate speech, lies, etc...), but recently it seemed to change its sources when looking up news online, to the point that it now paints a favorable image of Trump and his people.

And Twitter... sorry, with X... well, I shouldn't even need to explain this one, but I will try. The richest man in the world bought Twitter, changed how some of the back-end works, dramatically changed which voices were suppressed and which ones were heard, allowing hate speech and misinformation to spread freely on the platform, even promoting misinformation directly by retweeting it... there's a lot to it, but just know that Twitter used to be less shitty than it is now. Now it's really bad.

The point I'm making is that a lot of these changes happened around or soon after the 2024 election, and the people controlling these companies showed up to Trumps inauguration. On top of their million dollar donations to Trump, they're also doing work on his behalf to mask what awful things him and his people are doing while simultaneously promoting the things that make them look good. In short, information is becoming less accessible.

All of this, of course, is ignoring what Trump and his people have done to our government-provided websites and services, like removing the constitution and more from whitehouse.gov, how they're scrubbing decades of data from the CDC, etc...

The worst part about all this is I don't know if I could even prove anything anymore. These changes have made it difficult to know what services can be trusted going forward.

These are terrifying times. If the censorship was bad before, it's so much worse now.

Although I'd usually go out and protest with these signs, I've decided not to do it with these ones. I'd practically be an actor or an NPC, repeating the same visual joke over and over. These are my first signs I won't protest with. At least, for now.

Nonetheless, don't forget to fly your flags upside-down, boys and girls and non-binary types. Stay safe, and fuck Trump & Co!

[obscurescholar]

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

— C.S. Lewis

[marta-bee]

Well, that's Kant answered then.

[lurasidonepoetry]

I think of him every hour of every day

[quotessentially]

From Augustine’s Confessions

[petitephilo]

[hoodiegal]

Speak softly and carry a big stick

[philosophybits]

It has often struck me when reading a good poem or some other work of genius that it was a good thing after all that I myself was not its author, for then I would not be allowed to vent my joy without fear of being accused of vanity.

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers