#and on the infinitesimal chance they're right

[salteytakesonmanga]

I remember the years and years and YEARS of speculation when we knew next to nothing about Roger and people had all sorts of theories about what the connection was between Roger and Luffy.

It turns out none of the theories came anywhere close to the profound connection between these two people. Even now we still don’t know what that connection really means. Rereading this I find myself admiring how carefully Oda layered these hints. He never rushes his hints (to our enormous chagrin) so this early on giving us anything to link Luffy to Roger is plenty. But at the same time, this is basically the first time Roger has been mentioned since the VERY FIRST PAGE OF THE MANGA.

[ms-demeanor]

hi, hopefully this isnt a stupid question -- this is only my second election i'm voting in, and i'm a little confused about results. is it actually confirmed that trump has won, or is it just almost certain based on the counted votes? bc i know that provisional ballots (like mine) probably arent immediately counted, and there was that thing about votes needing to be verified because of signatures, plus to my knowledge the electoral college doesnt vote til december? i'm probably just grasping at an infinitesimal chance of things not being shit, but also i do actually want to understand and google is not helping :( if you can't explain no worries, you just seem to be knowledgable & willing to answer questions haha

This is absolutely not a stupid question.

So everything is currently pointing at what is most likely, not at what is 100% certain, but it's like 99% certain. There are still votes being counted, but in the states where the election has been called it has been called either because enough of the ballots have been counted that the remaining count wouldn't change the results, or that the area is historically so strongly in favor of one party that it's exceptionally unlikely that they'd flip the other way (for example, they're still counting california's ballots but you're more likely to get struck by lightning five times today than california is to flip red in this election). The places that have not yet been called do not have enough electoral votes for Harris to win the election.

The electoral college is exceedingly unlikely to flip their votes against the state/district vote; "Faithless electors" is the term for members of the electoral college who would vote against the vote they are committed to for their region. It was something discussed in both the 2016 election and the 2020 election and flipping the electoral college without winning the election was the motivation behind J6. As shitty and bullshit as I think the electoral college is, if you're going to have one and you're going to have the rule of law, you can't hope for faithless electors because what you're hoping for at that point is that the people representing you are acting directly against the choice of the voters.

I want you to listen to me. I have been voting in presidential elections since 2004. Presidential elections always suck. Who the president is does matter, and does impact your life, but you genuinely do not have a ton of influence over that so you can't let it throw you into despair and inaction, because we should be active and political and protesting the wrongs of the world even if your favored political party wins. Vote in local elections, work with your local community, and if your local community sucks too, work with online communities to both give and get support.

Whenever something like this happens, people pass around the Mr. Rogers quote about looking to the helpers. I like that quote. I think it's good, I think it's hopeful, I think it helps! But I also think that sometimes it's even more effective if you look for how to help. Who are you the most scared for after this election? Who are you worried about in your community or among your friends? What can you do that might make their life easier? What can you do to protect people like that in your community? What don't you know that might make you better prepared to help them in the future?

One thing that I think is a fantastic way to prepare to help is to either begin or continue learning a language that you don't know. I am working hard on my Spanish because I live in California and there are a ton of Spanish speakers here who I might be able to help. Is it directly aiding anyone right at this second that I'm practicing conjugation? No. But it might help someone who is being harassed by a cop, or who is unhoused and needs help, or who is being abused by an employer at some point in the future, and I can get myself ready to help. Learn how to use naloxone and pick up up an inhaler; you might not need it now, but it'll make you ready to help someone who does need it. Order free covid tests every chance you get, even if you don't need them, because then you can give them out to people who do need them. Plan B has a multi-year shelf life. Pick some up so that you've got some on hand if someone needs it.

Maybe there's nothing you can do right at this exact second (though if you are able to donate to gender affirmation fundraisers, border kindness, abortion funds, bail funds, etc., you can absolutely do that), but you can get ready to help someone who will need you someday.

[milogreer]

the thing about morgan and obscura is that i want obscura to feel like the most treasured person on earth and i know he would treat them that way. because for all that morgan is guiding them through learning how to live with their sight, obscura is the one leading the dance - they choose the time/place, they set the pace, and he meets them exactly where they're comfortable. a real slow burn with them would be so rewarding and i want it so badlyyy

i've talked before about the intimacy of "time is a song" and i am not an essay writer, i am a rambler, so if this is repeating points from that post, that's life! i just wanna talk about them again, more so this time in the context of "consulting with a seer" and how morgan sets the tone for their following relationship right off the bat

You don’t have to answer any of my questions, you don’t have to ask any of your own, this meeting is what you want it to be. But—you’re the one who reached out to the Department. Not the other way around. Clearly you wanted… something. No one’s keeping you here, you can leave at any time, you can tell the Department to go kick rocks and never speak to them again. But you’re the one who asked to meet with another Seer. And now you’re saying… nothing. Is it me? The Department asked that I be the one to speak with you given that we’re the only two Seer Obscura in existence right now, but if anything about me personally is offputting, I’ll gladly ask that a different Seer be the one to help you. Getting you whatever support you’re looking for is the only goal of all this. If someone else would do that better, then that’s what I want for you.

the consistent reassurance that obscura can dip whenever they want to. like from minute one his top priority is making sure they're as comfortable as possible because he knows the anxiety that comes with being a seer obscura

To be Obscura is incredibly rare. To be a Seer Obscura is unheard of. The chance of you or I existing at all is infinitesimal. The chance of us existing at the same time is unfathomable. But we're here.

it's hard to even find the words for how this makes me feel LMFAO it's .... it's the inherent soulmateism of being the only two people alive experiencing the same thing. and the fact that it involves someone who maybe not even necessarily believes in "fate" if i'm understanding ?? like he hates the term "Known Outcome" because he doesn't believe the future is fixed and totally knowable, but he acknowledges how insane it is that they've been brought together despite the chance of it being literally unheard of. ykwim. am i talking nonsense

You and I have a unique circumstance that we face. One that no one else can really understand. [...] It’s just you and me. That said, nothing about that fact is an obligation. Being the only two Seer Obscura doesn’t mean we need to be friends, or even have a relationship at all. It’s your life to live as you choose. If you want guidance, understanding of a shared experience, maybe even friendship eventually from me… then I would like to get to know you. To help you where I can. But if you don’t want those things, if you came here for an answer, and you got it, and you want to go back to what you know, I completely understand. You don’t owe anyone anything by virtue of being who you are.

and back to the gentle insistence that nothing is expected of them - if obscura wants to turn and run, pretend this never happened and continue suppressing their sight, they can. it's entirely their choice. but he's also giving them the reassurance that they aren't alone if they don't want to be.

like. i think what really gets me about all of this is that it's so genuinely selfless of him? because imagine meeting the one person who could truly understand you on a level no one else ever will, someone who by all accounts should not even exist in the same space as you, and then completely sincerely telling them that if they have no interest in sticking around, that's okay. you know? like i imagine the majority of us would at least try convincing them to stay. but he doesn't. he puts all the cards in their hands and lets them choose how to proceed, and he doesn't hound them when they vanish for a while after this meeting. everything happens on obscura's time; there's no pushing them towards anything they don't want

i think obscura is ... fragile, perhaps? and i think they need careful hands and a patient heart and morgan could be everything they need. i want them falling asleep on his couch after a late night talking and i want him to gaze at them fondly before putting a blanket over them. i want brief hand touches when they pass him something and to hear his breath catch in his throat at the contact. i want more instances of that tense pause before "...i want to know you." i want him to make silly jokes just to make them laugh and then to get starry-eyed when it works, and when they try to cover their mouth to hide their smile, i want him to tell them they have a beautiful smile (without telling them not to hide it). i want them to almost kiss but be interrupted by someone's phone going off or otherwise interrupted so they turn away, flushed and awkward, and they don't talk about it again. i want them to kiss in the rain, soaked and shivering but not caring about anything but the way they feel on each other.

sigh. where the hell was i going with this. i don't know. i just think they have so much potential for a life changing slow burn. i cannot believe they make me feel so strongly when they've only had three audios

[fostersffff]

Made it to the third level of the Reverie Corridor, and based on how Act III ends for each party and where I've gotten to in Rean's story, I'm gonna take a stab at what the hell's going on:

Trails to Azure and Cold Steel III and IV establish that causality exists and can be tracked thousands of years into the future, even accounting for manipulations (see: KeA rewriting causality to have the SSS survive the Sun Fort), and Cold Steel IV reveals that the nature of the world is that there is no world, just Zemuria, and entities like demons and McBurn are from beyond Zemuria, and that Ouroboros and a few other key figures understand and can seemingly observe the world beyond Zemuria. This isn't quite a multiverse, but it's similar in concept (and boy is it strange that "multiverse" has become a mainstream enough concept that it can be used to simplify this).

The key points I've encountered thus far in Trails into Reverie are:

Novartis revealing that the supreme leader contacted Ouroboros- not the other way around- and apparently did it by hacking the Astral Code, which is Ouroboros' fucked up world hacking program.

All of the duplicates created by Novartis are mechanical (McBurn, Arios, the Emperor)

Rufus was affected by Ilya's dance, but Lapis was not*

Rean's party was convinced that Mecha Mishy was more "real" than would be expected, considering the circumstances

The Mecha Mishy thing is, funny enough, the biggest thing for me right now, because it implanted the idea that there may actually literally be a multiverse, or something like it, including one where Mishy (and Mecha Mishy) are real, and that it's already possible for things from beyond Zemuria to enter, what with The Divergent Laws. Combining that with the fact that Ouroboros is purportedly not behind the whole thing, and instead it's largely just Novartis acting independently after being captivated by how advanced the supreme leader's tech is even compared to Ouroboros leads me to the following:

The Supreme Leader is a Rufus from beyond Zemuria where the Great Twilight was not prevented, either because Osborne or Rean failed to take out Ishmelga, or because in this alternate Zemuria the plan was never to take out Ishmelga. The consequences of this are naturally Very Extremely Bad, and Rufus is thrust into a uniquely powerful position as... well, The Supreme Leader after the fall of civilization. Using the resources at his disposal (including the Black Workshop and Schmidt, who would've stuck around in this version of events), technology advances dramatically, just like they speculated, but the population has declined so severely that there is no "rising from the ashes". It literally was the end of the world and now they're stuck in it.

However, their technology became so advanced that they were able to peer beyond their own Zemuria, and said "hey, we can apply what we've learned to another version of Zemuria and everything will be great!", and the Zemuria the games take place in is literally the only one that didn't succumb to the Great Twilight, especially since the final Black Records are like "there is an infinitesimally small chance this will not come to pass if you are Big Heroes". Which also makes me believe that's the point of the Reverie Corridor and the operator (which I have to assume is AZOTH, the "causality engine" who wrote the Black Records), who's going "this situation is so fucked that you guys are allowed to use The Hyperbolic Time Chamber as much as you want to mitigate this because Jee-Zus".

Not entirely sure how the eighth Divine Knight factors into all this, but it doesn't contradict what I've put forth so far, and only suggests that Rean's roll is- as expected of Rean Schwarzer- extremely important.

*There appears to be a meaningful difference between Lapis and the duplicates Novartis creates, but I think it's safe to assume that Ilya's dance just doesn't work on non-organic life, so the playable (native) Rufus is not a robot.

[small-strong-bookish-butch]

I started listening to Maintenance Phase likeeee 3 work days ago and I'm very !!!!!! about it

Anyway let's see if Apple sues me for typing out all these transcript screenshots

TWs for fatphobia, diet culture, abuse, concern trolling (?),

���We have sort of very conveniently, as a culture, just collapsed our definition of health into our visual assessment of our own weight" —Aubrey Gordon

"Nobody gives a shit about the resting heart rate or the LDL cholesterol readings of someone who's skinny. [...] I think people can genuinely believe thay they are concerned for fat people's health and that that belief can be rooted in faulty information and biased beliefs that they have been fed and sort of consumed pretty uncritically for most of us for our whole lives, right?

There is this sort of like, noblese oblige that happens with thin people, right? Which is sort of this belief that I have cracked the code on being thin and you have not. So it is my duty to instruct you on how to have a body that is less like yours and more like mine.

I started writing, you know, for that audience, for people who were good, thoughtful, kind people who have never really thought critically about the ways in which they think abut and interact with and treat fat people. [...] Like, how many times have we just seen a random sentence in a random artticle that's just like, 'da-da-da, fat people are unhealthy, da-da-da', right? It's one of those presumptions that sort of doesn't even need unpacking anymore. There's a lot of people who believe this because this is something we've all been told a million times. And it's actually more complicated than that. Believe it or not, it's not as simple as every fat person is unhealthy and every skinny person is healthy, and every fat person needs you to tell them that they're unhealthy constantly. 'If we shame them, then everybody will not be fat anymore.' These are things that a lot of us believe without really interrogating them. Well, I mean, that's also part of what's helped me pretty immensely in feeling okay in my body, is doing this kind of research, right? And finding that actually, those messages, those specific actual messages, are part of what's keeping us fat. And so is trying to lose weight.

"One of the most striking statistics I came across, when I was researching a big long article that I wrote about this two years ago now, I think, is that 1/3 of quote unquote 'obese' people have completely normal health markers, like they are not unhealthy, they do not have any of the risk factors, and around 25% of skinny people do have the risk factors. This is all one big scatter plot.

[...] I think about constantly is that actually the fatter you get, the less likely it is that you will become thin in your lifetime, right? For women my size, there is less than a one tenth of one percent chance that we at any point in our lives get to what is considered a quote unquote 'healthy' or 'normal' BMI, right? So we are talking about infinitesimal likelihood that this will not succeed, and all of our treatment of fat people is predicated on the idea that this is not only possible, but if you can't do it, it's because there's something wrong with you. And it's necessary. It's like, no, you have to do this thing that is almost sure to fail and is likely to make whatever you have worse.

There's something that happens when I am with a person who is willing to say the word fat. I know that they are not so afraid of my body that they will just act out of their own weird biases. If someone is willing and able to say the word fat in good faith, that tells me that they are as much concerned with how l identify myself as they are with projecting their own beliefs about fatness and fat people onto me by calling me 'fluffy' or 'more to love' or whatever. The sort of challenges that fat people face don't come from a word. They come from the ways that we treat fat people. And if we can't talk about that in a direct and honest way, we are always going to fall short in addressing sort of what fat people need.

And honestly, like, my first response was absolute terror that he had noticed [I was fat]. I was so terrified that he had said anything about my size that I felt like my whole job in the world was to get people to forget that I was fat, which is an impossible task. I had spent 20 some years hiding from my own body. That is an impossible task.

I mean, the sort of the basic presumption of every, you know, billboard 'eat five fruits and vegetables a day' poster we've ever seen in our lives is it is bad to be fat and fat people are unhealthy.

There really aren't any positive messages about like, 'Leave fat people alone' or like 'Fat people are fine' or 'Somebody else's health is none of your business.' All of us have grown up in this just toxic sludge of like being fat is the worst possible outcome for you. We have sort of been so careless with the way that we talk about fatness and fat people that we are now at the point that instead of when we talk about health risks, we're actually talking about people. And when we talk about people, we're talking about them as if they are health risks, like human health risks."

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I always have a moment, if I hear a comedian mention the word "Tumblr", of briefly panicking, as I remember that technically they use the same internet as I do and apparently are allowed to see this website. I usually relax if it was before 2015, though. Lots of people knew Tumblr existed before 2015. For some reason, around 2015, maybe slightly later, everyone believed that Tumblr stopped existing. So if it was before that, I figure it's fine. These day they are probably one of the many people in the world who assume Tumblr doesn't exist.

I'm sort of joking about this - as in I do genuinely have a moment of freaking out from hearing them say the word "Tumblr" because I briefly and irrationally somehow feel like they can see me, but I also know there's no need to be genuinely worried, as in real life just because they mentioned a website's name doesn't mean they're on here searching their own name. No one's doing that on Tumblr. It really is why I love this website. No one is here. No one is looking at us. It's not like Instagram where you're posting on the same site where the celebrities you're talking about have their own fucking account.

Except for David O'Doherty, who does have a Tumblr account that he must log into regularly because it has his tour list and that's kept up to date, but he hasn't made any new posts on there in years, I'm pretty sure he just updates the tours and then goes away. It's probably fine. Oh, and there is another comedy-adjacent person who has a Tumblr account and whose name I'm not going to write because I know he does Google himself, he once emailed me to tell me so, and I freaked the fuck out for like a week straight because apparently sometimes in real life they can see us. But it's all right, I'm pretty sure he only looked at one post, took a video off YouTube, moved on, it's fine. It's absolutely fine. It's absolutely fine and I'm not worried about it. No one's looking at me. That guy does have a Tumblr account of his own that was actually updated regularly, though, so that's a bit different. That might explain how he ended up finding my post that mentioned them on here. Most of them don't so they wouldn't come across my posts. (That guy was also very very nice when he emailed me and I love his work and think he seems very cool, which I'm adding on the infinitesimal chance that he's somehow reading this again, extremely unlikely but I'm vaguely paranoid - I'm also saying that because it's true though, he's great and I still listen to his stuff a lot, it's fine, he was nice, I'm just horrified at the idea that any famous people would ever know what I say about them, that's why I hide in this corner over here.)

So there was that incident. There was the day I discovered DO'D's blog, which did freak me out until I saw how long ago it was last updated. There was one time when Russell Howard referenced a Tumblr post on TV, which freaked me out for about half a second before I remembered that it just means one of his writers found a Tumblr post and put it in the script, Russell Howard doesn't personally write that whole autocue. Russell Howard is probably too important to even run his own Twitter account. He's not here.

The worst scare I've had - besides the time a guy actually emailed me - was when I heard Daniel Kitson in 2018, which was far too recently, say the word "Tumblr" to say he disliked someone who had a Twitter blog and a Tumblr blog dedicated to how great he is. That actually did seriously freak me out for a few days (he wasn't talking about me or anything, I made this blog in 2020, but still, didn't love to hear that Kitson apparently searches his own name on Tumblr and gets mad about people having blogs about him), though I felt better when I first heard his most recent show, in which he promises us he hasn't Googled himself since 2019. He wouldn't lie, right? It's probably fine. It's probably fine.

Anyway. As far as moments where I'm listening to a comedian I have posted about on Tumblr and I hear that person say the word "Tumblr" and for a split second my blood runs cold as I think "What the fuck do you know about Tumblr?" - as far as moments like that go, this sure is one. Brief panic, followed by moment of "it's 2014, it's fucking fine, I'm sure they've all forgotten we're here by now", followed by "Jesus Christ, Ian, what the fuck have you been reading, that side of Tumblr is not meant for your eyes", followed by "actually, I still haven't been able to find a list of air dates for their radio episodes but I have a document where I'm saving all the context clues in the hopes of narrowing it down enough to label all the episodes with dates, the fact he described that particular post as 'new' can be a context clue if I go to that blog and dig up that post and find exactly when it went up", followed by, "Jesus Christ this section of the internet should really not be for anyone's eyes, what the hell, look at all those things people wanted to do to David Mitchell, but yep, found the post, it's from late February 2014, that tracks with everything else, I think I'm in the right ballpark on these air dates."

The work of a comedy archivist is hard. Sometimes you have to go through some trenches to get a context clue for an episode air date. You do what you have to do.

[onthewaytosomewhere]

Find the Words

Alright so yeah I've been tagged and well I'm a sucker for tumblr tag games so here it is lol

tagged by: @typicalopposite

rules: find your given words in your WIPs and post a snippet containing the words, then tag others with their own sets of words :)

my words: laugh, tomorrow, wonder

I only two of these words in my WIPs that have more than just a few bits written - I was certain they would have all been there but guess not (at least not in fic)

I had them both 3 times in my College AU so I'm gonna cheat and give them all so I don't hafta choose lol (they're not too angst-y lol)

laugh

Alex’s laugh in response makes Henry’s ever-present butterflies flutter, and he really must get them in some semblance soon before he makes an utter buffoon of himself. Well, more than he already has in the years he’s had this sadly unrequited crush on his kind-of-friend-by-association who is so straight Henry has not even an infinitesimal chance.

Henry takes hold of Alex’s hands and holds them between the two of them. He smiles reassuringly across the space between them and takes a deep breath. “Well, I guess we both had a friend plan – too bad neither of us was smart enough to communicate it.” The laugh that escapes Alex surprises them both. “I think maybe we’re already there though, if you can forgive me sequestering myself away, in my usual avoidance technique. I will make every effort to not do that the next time I get too in my head. It’s always been the way I dealt when things got hard or more than I knew how to deal with. I will admit I’ve had feelings for you for the last two years or so – I always told myself it was just a crush I’d get over but this year I realized that wasn’t the case anymore – "

-this one is from Alex's tales from the college AU (which is a separate doc - so they didn't all come from the same one lol)

The laugh escapes Alex before he can catch it, and he smiles across the table, realizing that he didn’t mess this all up after all. He reaches across the table and grabs Henry’s hand in his, “Just remember who said it first, sweetheart.”

wonder

(apparently I had plenty of variations of this word but these were the only 3 just 'wonder')

“Good morning, Alex. I’m certain I’ve repeatedly asked you to stop with the ‘your majesty’ thing, and if you need to sit closer to see, you really should. Just because I felt like a change doesn't mean you must suffer.” Henry swore he had heard a muttered, “I know nothing but suffering,” but there was no indication that Alex had spoken when he glanced his way. That, of course, was his downfall, the one thing Henry knew he needed to avoid had already happened, and this time, it was Alex’s damn eyelashes that were driving him to distraction. Luckily, the professor came in to start class, forcing him to focus on something other than Alex and the things, the dirty, dirty things he wanted to do to him. Somehow, he made it through class without embarrassing himself, even when Alex got into a verbal sparring match with one of their classmates about how poetry could be seen in many political officeholders' speeches. Watching Alex debate something linked to a topic he cared so wholeheartedly about generally made Henry weak in the knees. The passion Alex displayed often made him wonder what it would be like to have even a fraction of that passion on him, in a way that was less arguing a point and more driving him to the brink over and over again until they both expired from the exhaustion that only came from a mind-blowing orgasm.

Pez turns towards him, so Henry is forced to look at him as he speaks, “I mean, how is it that the two of you spent over a month and a half practically living in each other’s pockets, and you still have no idea how that boy feels about you. Sometimes I wonder how you can be so completely daft when it comes to matters of the heart.”

“It felt like you hated me last year the way you took every moment to be a right prat. When we returned this year, it seemed like whatever I had done to make you hate me didn’t matter anymore. Then, when you came that first night to the library, and we continued to meet up here, I started to wonder if we could actually be friends. I had this plan to become your friend and –“

so now my turn to tag -

@adreamareads your 3 words are: bite, park, and show.

[someotherdog]

for / @pearldivrs participants / finn & emily! story / it's been a few weeks since finn's church camp burnt down and he discovered emily, soon finding out she was immune. now they're traveling on the road together to a rumored lab where a group of scientists are trying to develop a cure. setting / abandoned house in a small midwestern town where finn and emily have decided to camp for the night.

even when it was covered by her clothing, finn felt as if he could still see her bite mark. he felt like it was looking right back at him. taunting him, maybe. it had become a sort of totem; one he couldn't touch—at least not without it being incredibly awkward and inappropriate—but one that kept him going. one that reminded him why he was still living on after his camp was destroyed. emily and her immunity was his sole reason for living now. finn wasn't sure if god had abandoned him or showed him his new path in the most violent way, but he found himself with a new mission regardless: he had to keep emily alive.

he had to keep them both alive, which was harder than he had expected. in no way did he think it would be easy, but he had spent most of the apocalypse holed up in his church with a handful of other survivors, and they had held on for quite a while. finn had been under the mistaken impression that god was keeping them safe, and that was why his group had lasted for so long. he struggled with the thought that maybe god changed his mind, or that god was never real in the first place. well, as a catholic, he had to believe everything happened for a reason, that there was a plan for everything. it was the only way he could keep his sanity. that and emily.

just like every other place they camped out in since the start of their journey, the house was cold and dark. it was littered with memories and keepsakes of people no longer around to remember them. from the pictures on the wall, a lovely family had lived there. mom, dad, two sons. he should've said a little prayer for them, but didn't bother. though there was a infinitesimal chance they had all survived, the odds were so heavily tipped in favor of them all dying that there was no point for hope anymore. as far as finn was concerned, he and emily were the only two souls left on earth—until they came across other survivors, of course, and he was reminded of the evil that lurked the earth. sure, not all of the people left were bad or had nefarious intentions, but it was easier to assume any stranger was a foe instead of a friend until they proved otherwise. his trust could only lie in a twenty-something year old with a bite embedded into her skin. mother of god, pray for us.

in that cold and dark house, finn had preoccupied himself with searching the kitchen cabinets for something still edible. most of it was perishable, but some of it was still usable, even after its long ago passed best-by date. collecting all the food they could safely eat and arranging it on the kitchen table, he was sorting through it when there was a sudden thump overhead. it caught his attention instantly. though they had already searched through the rooms for any infected or other survivors, there was a possibility that they missed something. or that emily hurt herself in some other way. walking out of the kitchen and into the hall, he stopped by the stairs. listening for another second, finn heard nothing but was still concerned. "emily!" he called upwards, head tilting. "are you alright?"

[obey-me-snippets]

"Congratulations," Ezeria says as they enter the library. "You four have made it to the semi-finals of potential boyfriends."

"I'll be honest," Satan says. "I can understand why Belphegor is here, but I'm not sure how I feel about the other two guys being Leviathan and Mammon."

"Yeah," Belphegor agrees. "They're the biggest pieces of trash in our house."

"Hey!" Mammon snaps. "We're right here."

"Yeah," Leviathan says. "Don't lump me in with that scum."

"Oh my god," Ezeria laments. "Can you guys shut up for one second? You'd think you'd be more excited."

"I am excited!" Leviathan beams. "I knew there was a small, infinitesimal chance, but this is even better than getting an ultra rare, limited edition card first pull."

"Ugh, you are such a nerd," Belphegor groans. "Don't you ever talk like a normal person?"

"His loserboy swag has bewitched me," Ezeria says bluntly. "Stop giving him such a hard time just because you're jealous."

"Thank you...?" Ezeria can't tell if Levi is grateful or offended.

"I'm not jealous," Belphegor snaps, but his sour expression says otherwise.

"Well I am," Satan states. "Though I would prefer that I didn't get here through my 'loserboy swag.'" He raises his eyebrows questioningly as he says it. "I would much rather bewitch Ezeria in other ways."

"See, that's why you're here, Satan!" Ezeria praises. "These guys are cute and all, but it's so refreshing to have someone be straightforward with me about their feelings."

Satan smiles smugly.

"Doesn't hurt that you're a smooth talker, either."

"I'm a smooth talker too!" Mammon blurts out, clearly through with not being at the center of the conversation. "I make Ezeria blush all the time."

"Do you, though?" Belphegor sounds skeptical.

"Yes!"

"I've never seen it."

"You're always asleep!"

[mlynar-nearl]

yooooo anon here did u see the gamepress article abt wheres dorothy?? i read it jn and damn....... future event life is looking. wow. kinda messed up. ngl im not too happy abt it w the constant reshuffling like.... i really think they should've ran dorothy with cc then put dh rerun afterwards so they can stick to the sched more like,,,, i didn't see it before but now theres even a chance that mlynar would be pushed back until behind texalter,,, kinda iffy.

not that dead weeks (i personally count cc as a deadweek lol) are bad but like man.... im just kinda iffed. it is like a hope of mine that we can eventually match up w cn in such a way that the cny ops fall tgt w cny period so i can have the festive period luck upon me 🥹 and summer ops dont matter bcs it is summer everyday anyday here lol but yeah i want cny ops during cny so after i lao yusheng i can gacha and hopefully come out with nice luck (ok sorry off topic)

anyways thoughts on the schedules so far? (have a nice day as usual hehe)

i don't put much stock in gamepress, or datamines, personally. i've been around in arknights for long enough that people thought from datamines that darknights memoir would be in october of 2020 and it wasn't until january of 2021 and things like twilight of wolumonde got shuffled because of it.

my theory on the schedule stands, and it's that cc is a dead week to give everyone a breather on dorothy, and she's gonna overlap with the dossoles holiday rerun, followed by mlynar and near light rerun. or even that they have enough time to space all of that out slightly more.

why? because this game is predictable enough with its limited ops that limited ops on the english servers try to hit on the anniversaries and halfiversaries. it's only rational based on their past behavior- and that alone- that they're going to do il siracusano at the end of august for the halfiversary. this is the whole reason they moved gavialter up. every time arknights has made a big schedule change like this it's to put up a limited operator for an anniversary.

that leaves them months to throw in everything that got pushed back for gavialter. read: dorothy. contingency contract is right now rather than dorothy because arknights' scheduling is usually pretty kind. they like to take a little bit of a break before throwing a new operator at you, is all.it gives people a chance to recover slightly before dorothy. i'm really not that worried, and i think a lot of people are overblowing it because in my mind there is a infinitesimally small chance that anything but the schedule returning to usual after putting il siracusano on the 3.5 anniversary happens, with chong yue and lin releasing on global 4th anniversary. apart from this, i don't think that the LNY ops are ever going to be actually released on a LNY date, lmao. unless some more schedule shit happens. who knows. they're probably going to want the LNY ops to be halfiversary ops, unfortunately...which is a bit of a shame.

anyway, yeah, tldr, i don't trust gamepress with anything except doing the math to calculate that i have everything to e2lv90m9 mlynar (i do) and people love worrying like there isn't enough time between today and august to fit in everything that got rotated because the arknights team likes making limited ops exist for anniversary events.

[missmagooglie]

NOPE. Look at those numbers again - they are nowhere close to "running out of money"

Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but this is right out of the emerging technology playbook, and it's easy to see from just the information contained in the headline what bunk it is. There's no way for them to go bankrupt within the year when they have several decades worth of funding to blow through. $700k is a lot of money to be losing every day, but with 10 BILLON dollars in funding, they have nearly 40 years to figure out how to make it profitable. They can afford to lose money in the short term, because it's part of their long game.

AI's goal right now isn't profit, it's exponential growth. They are hemorrhaging money right now because they are in their kudzu stage - spread everywhere, choke out any alternative options to using their technology. The goal is to make AI an indispensable part of our daily lives as quickly as possible, and only once we've gotten so used to it that we don't remember how to live without it will their attention turn to monetization of their products and technology.

In the meantime, new money will flood into the industry through investments. Anyone with a little cash to spare will buy into the hype and invest in any company that has AI in the name because they believe that if they get in "on the ground floor" they're going to become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams when AI "takes off". (Word to the wise - the chances of you actually becoming wealthy from one good stock pick are infinitesimal.)

This is the "market disruption" playbook, and pretty much every emerging technology company of the past few decades has used it (some more successfully than others). The company offers products and services at prices that are too good to be true (including "free") and eats the loss while they drive competition out of business and get their consumers so used to using their services that they can't imagine doing it any other way, then they pivot. They raise subscription fees, introduce "tiered" memberships, sell advertising space and user data.

And even though people get pissed off at the changes, because they're used to "too good to be true", they're now at a point where they can't walk away without making a sacrifice - this streaming platform has their favorite show, so they're gonna suck it up and pay the higher rate. This social media platform is their primary form of keeping in touch with old friends, so they swallow the placebo of marking their profile as "private" and pretend they believe that will keep their data from being scraped. This rideshare app drove all the cab companies out of business, and anyway they don't remember how to call a cab the old fashioned way, so they'll pay for "surge pricing" because they don't know how to get home otherwise.

AI is losing money on purpose right now. They don't want your money (yet), they want your attention. They want you to use AI reckless and with abandon until you don't remember how you did things before AI. They want to reshape society so that not using AI is at best wildly inconvenient and oftentimes impossible. They want you to need AI like it's electricity, because they want to be in a position where they own the electric company and can charge you whatever they want for the thing you no longer know how to live without.

Use AI or don't, but if your goal is to push back you should know what you're up against.

ChatGPT is running out of money because they haven't actually figured out how to make money with the plagiarism engine they created.

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

[queen-scribbles]

Swiped from @starlightcleric to do with Ody

Rules: If you're tagged, make a new post with links to music and/or lyrics describing the following:

An event that defines your character's past

How your character sees themselves

How others view them

Their closest relationship (platonic or romantic)

A major fight scene

End credits song

I wound up doubling for a couple of them bc I couldn't make up my mind��� Also, behind a cut bc I did lyrics/commentary.

(art by oasiswinds)

All Who Remain (Beware of Darkness) [Her brother's death.] You never know the last time you’ll see someone/So give them all of your love/'Cause they’ll disappear Odessa and her brother were close growing up, and his death galvanized her into really throwing herself into her work, entrenched her loyalty to the Empire. Which in turn made the events of the class story even more painful; being betrayed by the cause her brother had supported, she has supported so ardently stung.

Wander (Home & Harbor) // I Am Not Okay (Jelly Roll) I don't know if I can see the stars anymore/I know they're shining somewhere out there/And I can't tell you what the sun feels like /And I don't know if I even care This one's a little bit about her after losing Chance in the later verses, a little bit about her general state of mind after mid-Act 2. There's this growing sense of... directionlessness as she's confronted with more and more evidence that shakes her faith in the Empire. She always wanted to serve, but that dream is souring and she doesn't know what to do or where to go with it cracking like this. So she turns double agent for Kothe, but his instructions are largely "wait for orders and shore up your cover" so she feels like she's treading water or wandering an endless desert with no hope of progress. After long enough in that state she wonders if she should just... accept it will always be like that. But there's this infinitesimally thin thread of hope that it can and will get better. She just has to care long enough to find it. When it's all said and done/ I'm not okay/ But it's all gonna be alright/ It's not okay/But we're all gonna be alright The overall tone of this song is someone struggling but determined to hold on to the hope that things get better and that's so very, very much Ody's mindset from about... EoO onwards(she was getting better, then Shara being in NC sent her spiraling again). She knows it can get better, be better, life is not all loss and pain, but she has been through the wringer and it's really hard to remember sometimes. (There's a line in the first verse about "If I say I'm fine just know I've learned to hide it well" that's so very her. Bury it and press on.)

Superman (Rachel Platten) So put your armor on the ground tonight/ 'Cause everyone's got to come down sometimes [The Alliance] I was extremely tempted to do I'm Not Calling You a Liar as how Intelligence views her, but let's go with something more positive. :D There are many people in the Alliance who care about her and wish she didn't have to do so much(even if Rass is the first person in ages to straight up say "Take time for yourself"). Lana and Theron are both subtly keeping an eye on her, and there's a half dozen people more than ready to be a listening ear if she ever asks for one.

Dancing with You Ghost (Sasha Alex Sloan) // Time (2CELLOS) Never got the chance/To say your last goodbye/I gotta move on/But it hurts to try/How do I love, how do I love again? [It's Chance. It's all Chance.] I've mentioned how much Chance's death wrecked her, right? :) She did not deal with that well at all; maybe not actively suicidal, but not particularly invested in staying alive for a while there. She's getting better. Slowly. But it's still hard. He was... something good, something steady, something normal at a point where not much else about her life could be characterized by any of those words. She loved him, and he loved her, and she truly hoped at some point they could be together, not stealing visits whenever it felt safe. And then he (seemingly)lost her. And then she (really)lost him. With their last goodbye being her slipping out with a whisper and a kiss, fully expecting to see each other in a months. And she didn't even really get to fully grieve, bc she had to hit the ground running with dismantling the Eternal Empire, so there are moments for a long while where it still doesn't seem real, until she remembers. She's finally starting to open up to the idea of moving on, but it's so terrifying and it hurts so much let him go and try again. Time is instrumental, but it fits so perfectly the vibes for the wordless cinematic sequence in my head that rolls from when Ody leaves Chance's place for the (unbeknownst to them) last time, through the scenes of Wild Space expedition, Chance dealing with her "death", her being in carbonite, his actual death, Lana busting her out, up to the conversation with Theron that confirms her suspicions Chance was KIA.

State of Me (Lacey Sturm) Look at the state of me/ You can't deny it/I'm gonna walk out/So follow me now/Just get behind me This is what plays during her fight with Hunter at the end of the class story and you cannot change my mind. It has such good Climatic Fight Song energy.

Inner Gold (Lindsey Stirling ft Royal) It comes back to me sounding like a song/ I knew once/ Singing louder than the tales I've been told/ Each note is a song of my inner gold The vibes for this really fit her outlook upon switching her loyalty to the Republic. Even if there is that later... treading water feel that sinks in(no pun intended), she is confident in and happy with her decision to switch sides. (I need to write her talking to Elara, they would have FASCINATING conversations >.>). It's also where she's eventually going to end up, as sort of her healing process mood. She might have to claw her way to a better place but she is Going To Get There. Feels very end-credits-y for her.

[yourlocalpileofcrows]

People often discuss the moral implications of the Season 5 finale and how neither option was technically better; I've always thought that the 'right' choice is obvious, but apparently not; they should've released the fears to other universes because chances are that they're already there. The chance that the fears were only in their universe is infinitesimal and even if they contained the fears, since the multiverse is canonical, there must be 1000s of near identical universes where the alternate versions of themselves released the fears, making their efforts futile. there's also a (fairly large) chance that this wasn't the first time all of this was happening and another universe had already released the fears, which is how they came to be in their universe in the first place.

Maybe I've just thought about it too much amongst all the brain rot and I shouldn't be dissecting what is supposed to be an unanswerable moral question, maybe I misunderstood the whole multiverse thing, but that's just my 2¢ on the matter I suppose.

[teencopandthesourwolf]

SENSING YOU

sterek, 950 words, teen, angst, derek hale POV, derek's self-loathing of epic prepositions, PTSD, panic attacks, grounding exercises, emotional healing, they're in love your honour, pre-slash.

authors note: stiles gets derek to name 5 things his senses are aware of, to try and bring him back from an escalating panic attack.

.

"The rain."

Rain, like there has been a year-long drought. Summer downpour hitting the huge skylight with such force, the sound is almost unreal. A cacophony. Each drop that reverberates is actually a tiny glass arrow and all of them— billions of them—have been aimed at the loft and its many window panes. All searching for their target.

Derek feels every last raindrop just as much as he hears them. 

Regardless of his mutated cells, Derek knows that, really, he is made of something much thinner. A thing even more fragile than glass. And he has been fractured. For a long, long time now. There's dozens upon dozens of the hairline cracks, splitting right through his confidence. His resilience. His dignity. Derek has his very own version of Lichtenberg scars, but these ones are etched right onto his soul and refuse to fully heal. There are so many parts of him that if he broke completely, right here, right now, the sound would be deafening. 

Self-preservation for Derek has become somewhat of a chore which, left to his own devices, he would not be scribbling down on his to-do list.

There's also a heart that beats too fast, echoing throughout the large space where Derek sits, attempting to be present. The beats are rapid, but currently much steadier than his own.

Derek is still shaking. 

"You," he says next, only looking up briefly. "I see you."

When Derek chances another glance, Stiles' mouth only hitches a little, at one corner. His eyes, though, shine with a gentle smile—smooth, amber stones set in cool ivory—even in the low light, despite looking directly at something so very dark.

He's so fucking special. 

Stiles is working hard to be still, Derek sees. Derek knows. The kid is still blinking too much though. Derek can see his front teeth tapping an uneven rhythm at his bottom lip, trying desperately not to chew on it. His bony knee, beneath deep red sweatpants with cream GO-FASTER stripes, is infinitesimally vibrating, rather than the usual wild jiggle.

Derek sees how much Stiles cares and wonders why. Wonders how. He takes a deep breath. In through nostrils, out through mouth.

"Pity."

Stiles shakes his head. "No. Try again."

Derek shuts his tired eyes. 

"Concern."

"Try harder," Stiles' voice is firmer yet still quiet. 

Derek's jaw clenches, keeping pace with his erratic heart.

Stiles waits. He always waits. 

"Love," Derek whispers.

"That's the one, Big Guy."

Derek inhales deeper and more even.

Stiles' love is fiercely scented. Like freshly spilt blood and spices and smoke. Like he'll do anything for an asshole who is not even the same species as he is. Hell, it even smells like it's real. Derek needs it and is scared of it and knows he doesn't deserve it, even if Stiles' pheromones forever scream that Derek is seven shades of wrong about the latter.

The top notes, they're wild poppies and adoration and desire; the heart notes are  earthy and solid, trusting and full of tenderness, sandalwood and white sage incense; and the deep and musky, almost damp smells are the base notes that hum like an autumn redolence, like fire and rage and cloves and a conviction that winter is and will always be coming.

Stiles now reaches, slowly, let's his hand hover just above Derek’s. Patient as ever.

Derek now reaches out too, holds that hand, acknowledging its presence. Stiles' presence. His own.

Stiles is here. Not alone. 

"Anchor." Derek carefully but tightly squeezes the long-fingered hand now in his grip. "My anchor."

Stiles takes the hand Derek's holding and places the palm of it to his cheek, his lean face leaning into Derek's touch.

Derek finds his other hand wrapping itself around the base of the kid's skull, the tip of Derek's thumb brushing lightly at the short, wispy hairs that curl against the grain at the neckline of flannel shirt. He brings himself and Stiles together, foreheads meeting. Now he is allowed, touching Stiles is instinctive—and it's almost everything he needs to be able to feel like he can breathe again.

Then Stiles bares his neck and Derek is there, burrowing his nose and soothing the canine inside of him, rubbing his whole face into the kid while gulping deep breaths, scent for scent. Stiles is holding Derek down by his thighs and it's a thousand times more centering than any grounding exercise. Derek is part wolf—but he is all primal. His hands smooth themselves up and down slender but muscled arms, his legs pushing against the inside of Stiles', before he gives in and grabs ass and hauls the kid into his lap.

"Want you," Derek growls.

"Last one, Der. You need to finish this." These days, Stiles has restraint Derek could only dream of.

Derek's breaths are ragged again. He attempts to steady himself with what he has learned so far. Tries to focus again. He's still twitchy, yes, but less so. 

"Taste," he huffs.

Then it dawns on him. 

In their efforts to stop his panic in its tracks—for him to regain a handle on his slippery self-deprecation dial—Derek realises that by finishing the task and finding an example for his fifth and final sense to experience, it'll mean he actually does get to have Stiles. Stiles will give that to him, a gift.

Derek will relish warm and soft cinnamon kisses, filled with trust and both sweet and sour, with mint gum and unbound affection. He will devour hot and fevered open-mouthed kisses, laced with frayed nerve-endings, cheap candy and desire.

Still agitated. Still tense. But Derek is calmer now. Able to hold onto what's real. 

He cracks his neck, breathes some more, then silently requests with a ready look.

"Taste," Stiles iterates, licking his lips.

.

(barely edited bc that seems to be how i roll these days)

[witchpair]

"I don't understand," says the middle-aged, caucasian, blonde man named Mitchell Young who is apparently an alien.

He--and yes, his pronouns are he and him--is sitting on the other side of a glass window by a stainless steel chair and table set in a sterile quarantine chamber. His small crew of seven are either spaced throughout the small observation room, following Young's conversation with rapturous attention, or engrossed by various earth online media in the privacy of their temporary living quarters.

"You're saying," continues Young, with an expression that can only be characterised as profound disbelief. "That your genetic material is double-stranded, and your amino acid synthesis derives from a three base system?"

He puts a hand in his hair. "Do you know how nuts that is? Three? We use ten! And you-" His accent, which you've found to be oddly South African, is getting thicker by the word as he gestures with one hand in a vaguely circular motion at you, "-look like...that."

He's gesturing with both hands now. "Like us."

You hold the results of the crew's blood tests loosely in both hands. They're shaking. The only sign of that cocktail of nerves and excitement that you're failing to hide behind your calm proffesionalism.

"I think it's astonishing we use the same biological terminology at all, let alone the same language. Considering we're built from very different stuff," you say, level. "And I don't know how plausible you'll find this, but Zoroastrianism has been a dead religion for three millennia."

Young's eyes widen briefly before he reaches to his chest and touches his dog tag.

"Ah. You've got a good eye," He looks back up at you. "twenty-twenty?"

"Yeah."

"Pilot?" He asks.

You tilt your head slightly. "Yeah."

"I figured," he nods. From the look on his face, you can tell he wants to say more. You let him continue.

"Isn't it strange that different organisations on both of our planets are so similarly structured so as to produce similarly distinct people?" His fingers are tapping his lower lip. "How could I have possibly guessed you were ex-air force--am I right? Ex-air force?"

You nod. Slowly.

"Right, exactly. How could I have guessed based on--excuse the term--vibes alone? I think you could tell as well. You honed in on me because you got the feeling I was the biologist."

"Takes one to know one. I suppose," you respond.

"Right." He says with a slightly self-satisfied grin.

He leans forward fractionally into the microphone. "Despite how infinitesimally unlikely it is, across this empty and uncaring universe, we're one and the same. All of us," says Young, grinning now with an unreserved joy.

Momentarily, you're left breathless by the same joy of recognising the self in the other on a species wide scale and you grip your papers tighter. But before you have the chance to respond, there's a whisper at your ear.

"The PM wants you on the phone," says Eilidh, who has seemingly materialised next to you.

"Sure," you mutter back, then into the microphone. "Excuse me."

Young moves out both his hands as to say 'please, by all means'.

As you move away from the mic the other scientists jump at the opening. "Any of yous a maths person?" Is what you hear before you leave the observation room, lead by Eilidh.

"What does she want, then. I've only just got the blood tests back," you ask as the two of you swiftly navigate seemingly endless fire doors and corridors.

"Just what you've found so far, like. I'm sure she knows you're all busy, but there's fuck all else in the news right now. And number ten wants to be sure they're ahead of the press on everything, you know, like."

You nod. The two of you get in the lift and Eilidh punches in the floor.

You stand in silence with the mechanical whir between you. You're coming down from the adrenaline. Of talking to an alien.

"He's wrong." Eilidh says, suddenly. "I don't think you knew he was the biologist."

You look at her sideways until she elaborates.

"Like, I don't think that's why you were staring at him," she says, giving you a meaningful look.

You narrow your eyes at her, before looking away and shoving at her shoulders, muttering an embarrassed 'shut up'.

It turns out all alien life has evolved the same way, they’ve developed the same languages as us, the same advancements as us, and they look exactly like humans, and because of this, the first aliens to visit earth are extremely confused.

[garblegox]

• Humpty Dumpty Elegy 10 | Five Books On 🙉"Monkey Brains"🙈 •

Whatchu know 'bout incels?

If your answer to that is, "nothing." then I'm impressed. It's a dirty dirty word to describe dirty dirty people. Ignorance of them is a sign of a good soul. Bless your heart.

"Incel" is short for "involuntarily celibate". That name alone should be a bright red flag.

Now, most of the time when this word is used, it's just a way to call a dude unfuckable. Which is always useful. But there's so much more to it than that. It's not some passive state of being. It's a philosophy and a subculture for the most rotten shitbags on the planet.

The way they see it, they're not celibate by any choice of their own. The only reason they're not getting their peepees touched or smooched is because society is rigged against them. Because women are hypergamous automatons who all want exactly the same type of dude (Chads or Tyrones). Because they've got physical defects that absolutely nobody will overlook. Because they're neuroatypical. Or according to some, because they're not white... or because they are.

Take the heartless and practical cynicism of the "Red Pill" brought to us by the Men's Rights Movement and MGTOWs, then add nihilism, racism, pedophilia, zoophilia, rape/murder fantasies, a proprietary blend of quack evo-psych to make it all official, and thus you've got the Incel movement. Also known as, "The Black Pill".

[Here's a handy glossary for all the newspeak these gimps use]

Their problem isn't simply that nobody will give them a chance. But that even if they do get a woman in bed, it's a diabolical trap. That there's no point in even trying, because women just get knocked up by Chads, and then get a brainy betamale to raise their kids. Or that it's all an elaborate scheme to rope you into alimony, child support, or to have you thrown in jail over fake sexual assault charges just for sympathy and attention. Long story short, women are scary, don't go near them. But they should still paradoxically smooch our peepees, even as we're running away.

And this is where I get to my main point: "Involuntary," my motherfucking ass. These are just celibate narcissists, afraid to be rejected, afraid to lower their standards, afraid of catching feelings over someone and getting dumped, and afraid to admit that they're cowards. Assholes with a pathologically external locus of control; endless victims of fate, rather than of their own choices.

I originally thought incel forums were places for those with severe mental disabilities, or ghastly physical disfigurements. Which didn't offend me one bit. If a dude with werewolf disorder wants to commiserate with a guy who has an untreated cleft lip, I say more power to 'em. It's gotta be hard out there.

But that's not what they are. People don't blurt, "incel!" at those guys. They blurt, "Oh dang, that sucks, well uuuh... good luck I guess." Those real-deals make up an infinitesimal fraction of the incel movement, which the rest hold up as emblems. The remaining majority are two types of guys:

The first type of guy isn't evil. He's just lost. I had a friend like this, we'll call him Kabbage. Kabbage wasn't disfigured at all, he was just a bit thicc, pimply, had a big fat nose. He was also debilitatingly shy and anxious. But under all of that, truly one of the best people I've ever known; smart, creative, sensitive, a beautiful soul, double-plus dad material. If he lost the weight and cleared up his skin, he'd have very little to worry about. Plus, girls don't really mind a big nose, it's masculine. He's the one who introduced me to their subreddit before it was purged.

My reaction was immediate disgust and condemnation, and I assumed he showed me so we could rip on them together. But he got quiet, changed the topic, and I haven't spoken to him since around that time.

Kabbage, I hate to say, was a coward in many ways. His parents were identical to the Glouberman family from the show, Big Mouth. He struggled to ask for salt & pepper at other people's dinner tables, so as not to offend anyone. Imagine how scary he found asking a girl out. He felt lonely, and liked the sympathy he found among the incels.

The second type of guy IS evil. Humpty was this type of guy.

If I had to pull stats right out of my ass, I'd say the incel community is made up of 0.01% disabled/disfigured guys, 5% Kabbages, and 94.99% Humpty Dumpties.

And I'd feel no particular need to shit on these guys, if not for the incel community's growing body count. Most famously, Elliot Rodger, and Alek Minassian. The latter I've mentioned already, because Humpty was a fan. He said if Minassian succeeded in his plea of insanity, based purely on his autism, that'd open the door for a spree killing of his own.

There's more than two killers, but I'm a strong believer in strictly trying to forget about these losers. The best punishment is to send their names to oblivion, ignore any statements or manifestos they made, and just heap praise and sympathy on their victims. Suffice it to say, too many spree killers are proud incels.

Yes, I am embarrassed to have spent time with Humpty. I know how terribly this reflects on me. The RCMP would probably be coming after me with some questions if they weren't all busy kidnapping and murdering First Nations women.

But GREAT NEWS! Humpty is fucking GONE! Humpty admitted to Wednesday that he never gave a shit about us or any of his ex discord amigos 😃. So Wens told Hump to officially fuck off! Yay! They were going to do a pity vote to maybe let him back into the discord this June, but not anymore. He wasn't reading this series. He never planned to. I don't have to act like I care about his wellbeing whatsoever. YISSSSS! Go skip rope you worthless fucking rotten egg!

I will still send him a link to this when he inevitably winds up in prison. But now I'm officially writing this for everyone else's benefit.

With that out of the way, what's all this "monkey brain" shit?

It depends. Like "incel", it's a question of who is saying it.

To some, it's a pop-psychology buzzword. A reference to Paul MacLean's "triune brain" model of brain evolution. The idea that our brains evolved layer after layer. Starting with our instinctual "reptile" layer, then developing into our emotional "mammal" layer, and culminating in our rational "human" layer. When people say "monkey" they mean the lower "mammal" layer.

To others, it's a Buddhist concept along very similar lines. A state of mind that is, "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable". While it's along similar lines, there are no Buddhist incels. Humpty was the least Buddhist dude I've ever met. He didn't throw out "monkey brain" to keep track of and tame his negative impulses.

Maybe some people came here thinking I had five books on that one scene from Faces Of Death...

nope.

To incels like Humpty Dumpty, "Monkey brains" is vague and versatile. Based on the dog-shittiest pseudo-psychology in existence at this moment in history. A simple get-out-of-introspection free card; an exemption from all moral responsibility. Almost like demon possession, it wasn't me, it was my gersh dang monkey brain what done it again.

Incel monkeybrainology is a confused mix of genetic and cultural determinism; a denial of the fact that one of the many wonderful things humans evolved to do was act civilized; a half-assed bastardization of modern neuroscience; and a complete romanticization of the worst sides of every impulse.

You don't just suddenly find yourself an incel (I don't give two shits about the Donnelly Study. It's a worthless woozle hunt). You find incels, and work your ass off to join them and conform to their blackhole gravity well of despair.

While I couldn't drag Humpty Dumpty out of that well, I might still be able to talk some sense into the Kabbages among him, or people that know some Kabbages. People aren't incels because they're unfuckable; they're unfuckable because they think like incels. OR, they're comfortably celibate, but not comfortable enough to admit it.

In fact, Wednesday is a perfect example: He describes himself as maybe the ugliest person on the planet. Now, I disagree, and think that's some obvious dysmorphia talking. But it's also true that Wednesday qualifies as "deformed" thanks to his crooked eye. He'll tell you it's been a real obstacle to dating. But here's the kicker: He's been slangin' dick since he started highschool. And for one huge reason: He's brave enough to constantly put himself out there; not too proud to beg; and not afraid to put in work only to lose someone. He didn't disqualify himself from a sex life before even trying. And you know, a pity fuck is still a fuck.

Wens could have given up from the start, and been a proud member of the incel community's 0.01% elite. But he's simply not that much of an irresponsible pussy. He worked his ass off for those peepee touches, and never once decided he was just entitled to them.

This is the one topic Wednesday and I tried the hardest to change Humpty's mind on, and made the least progress. This is a central pillar of the incel community. In this entry of the Humpty Dumpty Elegy I'm going to do my best to unravel the incel pseudo-biology/psychology that has thusfar gotten innocent people killed, and wasted the precious time of thousands of silly young men.

Meanwhile, for everyone else who is comfortably removed from the incel cesspit, and uninterested in wading through it, these are still five books that can give you a deeper and more endearing connection to this magnificent species we're all a part of. Modern psychology is founded on biology. A solid understanding of the latter can tell you more about yourself than any checklist, index, or diagnosis psychology has to offer.

• #1 The Moral Animal by Robert Wright •

Lets start with them genes, mommy 👖

It's probably unwise to be promoting evolutionary psychology on Tumblr. Evo-psych, or as it used to be called, "sociobiology" came into this world under a salvo of controversy. Its founder, E.O. Wilson was labeled a racist, sexist, fascist monster.

Academics, particularly feminist ones, lumped him in with social Darwinists (which shoulda been called "Spencerists" because Darwin had nothing to do with them), eugenicists, group-selectionists, genetic determinists, and any other goblin that made the 20th century so bloody.

To be fair, while the smearjob towards Wilson was wildly off-base, they did predict people like Humpty, and the blackpill movement. But not because Humpty is an orthodox sociobiologist. It's just that the old models of psychology made his warped philosophy more difficult to justify. And many of Wilson's critics had just as much of a bastardized understanding of the topic as Humpty does.

There was a fear that if you added a "hard science" like biology to a "soft science" like psychology, you'd get something especially dangerous and pernicious. But as Wright correctly pointed out, notions like "there's no differences between men and women" came from the social sciences, have done plenty of harm, and didn't rely on biology at all. Same with strict behaviorism. Social engineering is a risky game, period.

This is why it's so important for incels to get the full picture. Many of them say things like "It's evolutionarily adaptive for a man to have a drive to rape." but completely ignore the other side of that coin which says, "women evolved an equally adaptive hatred towards being raped".

Society is just a bunch of individuals negotiating compromises over their competing, often opposing, self-interests. Incels just want the world to compromise 100% to them. They're screaming babies.

Incels love to conveniently look at random primates for justifications for everything, ignoring the fact that each primate species is hugely different from every other one, including us.

When it comes to relationship fidelity, what are we? Winner-takes-all tournament animals like gorillas? Klingon-style rape monsters like chimps? Slutty bonobos? Or saintly Victorian gibbons, who pair for life and serenade each other from the treetops each day?

Answer? We're humans, asshole. We're the primates who evolved to build civilizations. We're the ones who have all of those possibilities within us, and more. And this is the point of Wright's book: Humans aren't inherently moral animals, but we're all potentially moral, which makes us one-of-a-kind.

A lot of our behavior evolved to be, "frequency dependent". Basically, as we grow up we observe the people around us to decide where we plan to fit in. When there's too many cooks, try your hand at being a waiter.

Like with the "Madonna/whore" or "Dad/cad" dichotomy, if you grow up around Madonnas, it might be wise to try being a whore. If everyone's a cad, try acting like a dad. If everyone has a hipster beard, you'll look cooler with a clean shave. There's not one "naturally" right strategy for life. It depends on the environment.

"In your genes" is practically meaningless a good chunk of the time. In the tug-of-war between nature vs nurture, or genes vs social environment, genes do only between 1/3 to 1/2 of the work in determining who we are.

This is why determinism is such a sin, genetic OR cultural. This book deals with the genetic side, while later on The Blank Slate deals with the environmental side.

A huge thing incels like to believe is that their placement in the social hierarchy has been completely determined for them. They believe they're stuck firmly on the bottom. In fact they romanticize their lowliness. That icon at the top, of a slouching bitchboy, is the symbol of their wiki.

This is how the black pill makes the red pill, despite all its flaws, look 100x more healthy and productive. A pickup artist would tell you there's no excuse for not standing up straight or grooming yourself, and a MGTOW would at least tell you to take ownership of your choice to avoid women.

Nobody is born a winner or a loser. Take the leaders of fraternities for example. Aka, "chads". If you tested their serotonin levels just before entering the frat, they'd be extremely unremarkable. It's only after they ascend the ranks do they have a surplus of serotonin.

Serotonin gives you confidence, similar to the effects of alcohol. People don't become leaders because they're full of it, they're full of it because they became leaders. We evolved it to maintain status, not to determine who leads and who follows.

And here's an important detail about male hierarchies: They're extremely fragile and dynamic. Today's chad could be tomorrow's homeless guy, reminiscing about the days he was hot shit. Bill Gates never had to be sexy to take over the world. Charles Darwin was a gentle little niceguy, with an ugly face, who didn't touch a woman until well into adulthood, yet he had 10 kids and was buried in the same cemetery as Isaac Newton.

The incel definition of an "alpha" = Duke Nukem... and that's it. Because once again, they're just stupid narcissists.

There are dozens of behavioral changes a man can make to encourage some endogenous serotonin production. Taking on responsibilities, setting and accomplishing goals, exercising and taking care of your health, etc. are a good start. In a way, this whole series is partially about facilitating that. But disturbingly their main focus is on cultivating "dark triad" personality traits. Based on the asinine belief that women prefer abusive men, and that that's the only way to keep them around.

Really, they just think like criminals. Criminals, especially the ones who commit impulse crimes like robbery, assault, or rape, actually have a massive deficit of serotonin, not a surplus. One hypothesis suggests that people in that state of mind commit crimes to kickstart their serotonin levels back up to baseline.

But like I've said, that's not a good excuse; crime is not a valid antidepressant. Ruining your rep and getting punished for bad behavior is a great way to lose all your happy brain chemicals. The dark triad scheme is a terrible gamble. This is where the concept of "reciprocal altruism" enters the picture, and it's one of the key details incels leave out when they discuss the evolution of human behavior.

Like with all other primates, the social hierarchy cannot be ascended alone. If you think you can just max your strength and ignore your charisma, you're in for a mutiny. There's no future in abusing your way to the top.

The incel sour-grapes attitude towards high status men is a fairly natural response. Generally speaking we all have a tendency to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to luck, and the reverse for others. They never look at a guy with a healthy social life and assume he earned it. They blame it on some halo effect, because he's got "hunter eyes" or some stupid bullshit like that. And they never look at their own awkwardness as a result of isolating themselves and trying to learn about people through movies, videogames, or god forbid, dating simulators [shudder].

We no longer live in a world where a high-status person will just straight up violently attack a low-status person for their hubris or insolence. Incels act like if the Alphas come by and see them standing up straight, they're going to attack them like an angry chimp.

Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense to conceal your high self-esteem, and brandish low self-esteem. It's a holdover from our more primitive tournament days. Back then, reconciliation was a better survival strategy for most people than overt dominance. Also, seemingly all cultures discourage boasting, and see it as something to grow out of. But what do people grow into? Just more subtle boasters.

I used to floss the albatross like Daddy Kane with the chain. I'm tryin' to jettison the ballast with the hazardous waste. -- Aesop Rock, Dorks

But once again, we don't live in those times. This is the beauty of an individualistic society. Nobody is asking you to stare at your feet. This is the danger of the naturalistic fallacy. On one hand, they love the idea that "it's only natural" for a man to be attracted to minors, or that celibacy is a pain worse than death, or that rape may be justified if that pain gets too unbearable. But then they also have to swallow the idea that evolution is fine with them staying subordinate to everyone forever, or that we're an anthill-like superorganism that has no particular interest in them creating offspring.

Nature gave us a frontal lobe for a reason. If you got a problem, you can think your way out of it. Whether you have to make compromises, barter, collaborate, or just read a god damn book. Fate is only real if you believe in it. If you do, then amor tuum fati, and shut up.

• #2 Behave by Robert Sapolski •

I can't tell you how silly it feels to take a book this comprehensive and robust, and focus it on sexless douchebags on the internet.

But it's where I came up with what I'll call the, "Incel's Dilemma". See, incels often have an above-average understanding of the science of human behavior, genes, and environmental effects. It's just that this info is conveniently selective, and poisoned by a powerful confirmation bias.

The more you know about all this, the clearer it is that you have control over your life.

Once you know what you have control over, to not improve yourself is no longer a passive thing, it's active. Once you know better, you suddenly become responsible to do better; it gets harder and harder to say your problems are not your own god damn fault.

So incels tiptoe like Egyptians over the responsibility landmines scattered all throughout the desert of their self-imposed shitty lives. They're constantly at risk of losing their beloved victim narrative. They're participants in their own misery, whether or not they want to admit it.

They look at data to confirm their hopelessness like a lot of fat people do to get out of dieting or exercise.

"95% of diets fail" What the fuck does that have to do with you? Take that as a challenge, not a cop-out. Any rehab center will tell you, most people relapse three or four times before finally achieving sobriety. It doesn't mean don't try, it means you've got at least three failures to get out of the way before you can succeed, so hurry up and get those failures over with.

It's all a big Texas sharpshooter fallacy with the data-driven incels. A look at Incel Wiki's "Demographics of Inceldom" might fool you into thinking these cunts have a point, but that's precisely how the fallacy works. Take a bunch of scattered data, and draw your own bullseyes over whatever suits your narrative.

Believe it or not, human life is not a 2D plane with some scribbles on it. It's far more complicated than that. This is that over-systematization Simon Baron-Cohen talks about. But for the systematizers out there looking for a data-dump, how 'bout an 800 page, 26 hour long book/audiobook? If learning face-to-face ain't your jam, here's plan B.

To blatantly plagiarize the introduction: This book explores the biology of violence, aggression, and competition. The ways in which humans harm one another, but also the ways we do the opposite. The biology of cooperation, affiliation, reconciliation, empathy, and altruism. Sapolsky started from a pessimistic nature, but tried to reign it in for the sake of his kids, and as he learned more on the topic he learned much of the harm humans do is not universal; He learned to be optimistic.

You can't understand much of human behavior without biology. But you also can't understand it all with biology alone. Same with neurochemicals, childhood trauma, social environment, etc. It's multifactorial; it's a complicated pain in the dick.

There are dozens of things that influence the decisions you make. Sapolsky breaks them down from one second before, seconds to minutes before, hours to days before, days to months before, and centuries to millennia before a decision.

One thing that blew my mind was the info on testosterone. Turns out it's not true, the idea that testosterone makes you aggressive. See, if I eliminate all the testosterone from your body, your aggression will disappear. When I give it back, it returns to baseline. However, after you hit baseline again, any extra testosterone I give you will do nothing to your aggression levels.

Incels love to believe high-testosterone = antisocial (dark triad/asshole chad stereotypes). But in fact it has plenty of prosocial effects. When subjects in a cooperation-based game are secretly given testosterone, they're more likely to cooperate and prioritize generosity and good sportsmanship. It makes you more likely to value social norms, and try to do "the right thing".

But here's the kicker, if you give someone a placebo and tell them it's testosterone, they become more antisocial, and less charitable. Suggesting that "toxic masculinity" is a cultural defect, and not a byproduct of too much testosterone. It's not only incels that think "asshole" = "manly". But biology and neuroscience beg to differ. Incels are just as confused as the average fatherless gangbanger.

What testosterone is best for is responding to challenges. It's that Teddy Roosevelt, "Walk softly and carry a big stick" type'a shit, or that Robert Deniro, "You talkin to me?" style. Testosterone doesn't make you start fights, or bully the weak and helpless, it's about minding your own business, and deflecting intruders. An immovable object > an unstoppable force.

Just like with serotonin, behavior mostly comes first; testosterone doesn't stimulate aggression, aggression stimulates testosterone. Prisoners tend to have higher testosterone than the general population. Not because testosterone makes you act more like a criminal, but because prison exposes you to daily challenges from aggressive people, forcing your body to produce more in defense.

The other mind-blower has to do with the vaunted and beloved neuropeptide, oxytocin. Long story short, it doesn't make one as lovely as people commonly believe. It makes you lovely to people within your ingroup, and pretty gross to everyone on the out. Like what you get in small rural towns; people are sweet as pie towards their neighbors, and venomous like snakes to the other 99.99% of the world they find foreign and confusing.

This book is just full of surprises. From the variety of roles your frontal lobe can play, and the effects of damaging it; to the counterintuitive influences of estrogen and progesterone, and what they do at different ratios; to scared hyena boners; to the reality of adolescence; to the devastating effects of "hospitalism"; to the psychology of bullies, the bullied, and the bullied who like to bully; to the effects of permissive vs authoritarian parenting styles, and their outcomes in different socioeconomic environments; to how much of our genetic code is completely unused, waiting for our environment to activate it; to the difference between "inherited" and "heritability"; to whether the "warrior gene" would be more accurately labeled the "pull your pants down in public" gene?; and much much much more!

After reading (and then re-reading) this book, one should never feel the need to return to a stupid fuckdump like the Incel Wiki. If it isn't clear yet that places like that are a textbook example of the Dunning Kreuger effect, and not a dose of clarity, then you obviously haven't consumed this book yet. Which I understand, it's as dense as a curling stone 🥌. But meanwhile, here I am, free of sympathy, arms akimbo, foot tapping, waiting for these incel pigs to catch up to reality.

As I've said dozens of times, I tried gently feeding all this info to Humpty, as a friend, trying to coax him into a more optimistic state of mind, and it wasn't too complicated, he wasn't too stupid, he just didn't want to hear it. He loves his despair. How the fuck else would this rotten bitch find pity?

I could go on, but this entry would wind up more than twice as long as it already is. I only covered nine of seventeen major chapters so far and suffice it to say it doesn't start leaning in Humpty Dumpty's favor. This book is absolutely nuclear; Sapolsky's magnum opus. I got halfway through this and it dawned on me that I'd need a second month to pull this edition of the Humpty Dumpty Elegy off. This is a monumentally large topic for a sweaty, brain-damaged fry cook to tackle all on his own.

If ya don't know, now ya know.

• #3 The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker •

Lets all just take a moment to fart in B.F. Skinner's general direction 🍑💨

I've spent nearly all my time in this series writing about the ways in which you can change yourself. And I stand by all of them. I'm not the same person I was before I read these books, and I don't believe it was all just a matter of time before this stuff sunk in; I had to work for it all.

Humpty Dumpty came to Wednesday, having seen all the progress Wednesday made since highschool, and wanted a piece, allegedly at least. For every one step I made to repair my state of mind, Wens made ten, simply by virtue of starting from a deeper pit of despair.

But it's crucially important that I take a moment and separate myself from the social constructionists out there. The people who think every mind is a blank slate, and infinitely malleable. They're the people who don't believe in a human nature at all. While I accuse Humpty and other incels of having a pathologically external locus of control, it's important to recognize that a 100% internal locus is just as insane.

Now, before we assassinate this crock of shit, lets give the social constructionists some credit, their hearts were in a very good place.

The "blank slate" hypothesis, right off the bat, completely undermines old justifications for things like slavery or aristocracy. It's extremely difficult to justify the idea that anyone was born to serve or be served if we're all made from the same starting materials.

Blank-slaters carry with them a perfectly healthy anxiety towards the idea of human nature:

If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination could easily be justified

If people are innately immoral, there's no hope to improve oneself

If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth, thus moral responsibility would vanish

If we're mere biology, then life no longer has meaning

All blank = all equal.

Though this idea of a blank slate is as old as Aristotle, it picked up most of its academic oomph during the 19th and 20th centuries. First in an effort to poop on colonialism, then in response to racist genocidal atrocities.

But there's a serious catch: If we're all infinitely malleable, there's no basis to say slavery is a miserable existence. A slave merely has to be conditioned properly so that they learn to love their role, like an animal in a Skinner box. A person only hates being raped because society told them to hate it. You're only fond of your individualism because we live in a greedy capitalist society that requires you to desire that lifestyle, so that you work/consume more. Etc. A soul? That's cute, go fuck yourself.

E.O. Wilson wasn't labelled a fascist because he promoted fascism in any way. He was labelled so because the "science" he questioned was, for a very long time, fascism's most prominent antagonist. But while social constructionists deserve points for picking the right enemy, they lose most of them for having little basis in observable science, and even more for having committed plenty atrocities of their own.

B.F. Skinner and Chairman Mao saw the world through a disturbingly similar lens. While Hitler and Mussolini got millions killed for some warped idea of human nature, Marx got even more killed based on the idea that humans have no nature at all.

Thankfully, social constructionism is dying. Even according to Wednesday, while he was in school training to be a therapist, they had a whole module dedicated to debunking the idea, which is beautiful news. But though it's on its way out, it's taking its sweet ass time, and all the while creating creepy little permutations that slip past people's better judgement.

Concepts like "The Lean Genome", "Connectionism", and "Extreme Plasticity", which I'll just let Pinker handle on his own, for the sake of brevity.

This doesn't have a whole lot to do with the incels' particular philosophy. They're way more likely to make a naturalistic fallacy, than a constructionist argument. However it's true to say that the culture we live in is still greatly influenced by these ideas. And this is the culture that spawned incels to begin with.

In school there's no sense that a student is the way they are for some natural or evolutionarily adaptive reason. There's one, maybe two ideal student types, and everything beyond that range gets slapped with a disorder label.

Teachers are mostly lazy shitbags. There's no filter for assholes or narcissists. They don't need to be entertaining, compassionate, or even have a solid theory of mind. If a kid is a little unusual, there's no impetus on the teacher to get inside that kid's head, and connect them with all the beautiful knowledge within their reach. Kids are just pigeons you need to convince to peck the right buttons and work for the same reward pellets.

These disorders fuck with people's identities, long past their time in school. To some it's a simple nadir that helps them find their zenith. It's useful to understand your own shortcomings, of course. But for many it becomes a mental prison.

A doctor told me I was sick. Why? I was doodling? Playing with and entertaining my friends? I found something more challenging to do than listen to the teacher repeat themself for the third time? Oh, no I know why, because I insulted the institution, and they wanted to insult me back. Ah, gg then.

This isn't just the authoritarianism Pink Floyd rapped about. We've traded fiery religious rhetoric for clammy psychobabble, and most parents are absolutely snowed by it.

It seems blatantly insane when you see it in that Uncle Buck clip. But we're not too far off from that in real life. We have still pathologized "twiddlers", "dreamers", "silly-hearts", "jabberboxes", etc. It's just that we've gussied it up with Latin or Greek polysyllabic words, all tucked into acronyms and initializations.

Parents have been taking a beating for so long with all this shit, too. Cultural determinism puts ALL the blame for someone's behavior on their parents. This is where the "concerted cultivation" style comes from, which Jonathan Haidt does an excellent job of exploring in The Coddling Of The American Mind.

All this is to say the millennial/zoomer generations are an anxious and uncertain bunch. We all seem to hate ourselves, and everything that comes most naturally from our hearts. We're ironically detached from our ironic detachment from our authentic detachment from our authentic selves. We're optimized for life in an institution, be it a school, corporation, gov't job, or prison. If you don't jibe with Skinner boxes, it's easy to get the impression that there's no place for you in this world.

The worst thing you could do, would be to take that negative impression, and romanticize it. Humpty was the king of getting beaten with a stick, and thinking the best payback he could give his punisher was taking the stick and beating himself, only harder.

"Oh yeah, you think I'm a muddy pig? Watch this, I'm gonna roll in some shit! Then I'll be a shitty pig! Take THAT!"

When behaviorism fails us, we often believe we're the ones that failed behaviorism. Forgetting, or perhaps never knowing at all, that it's an inhumane, dehumanizing, industrial process of extracting compliance. Many of us are defined by our troubled days in Skinner boxes, and it never occurs to us that we didn't belong in one in the first place, or that maybe we did the right thing by putting up a fight.

When I read incel forums, I see people who have been tragically disconnected from their own natures. Grasping at more and more data, more and more graphs, still convinced that they and their lives are mere algorithms or games.

It's not simply Asperger's; Autists can (slowly but surely) cognitively wrap their head around human nature, in a way that still preserves beauty and meaning, even if they don't feel the typical emotional response to those things. What we have here is an active corruption of people's concept of human nature, which I believe is responsible for an incalculable amount of suffering. Mental and physical.

"It's just my Monkey Brain again" is Humpty's version of fighting the power. It's one step further towards reclaiming his nature from a world that told him he didn't have one. But his understanding of human nature is so poor and underdeveloped, that it's almost as pathological as the allegorical cave he started out in.

• #4 Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari •

Wheat be whispering to yeast like, "psst, hey cmon lets go catch some monkeys"

Robert Wright did an excellent job of sticking up for evolutionary psychology in The Moral Animal, and spelled out how we managed to evolve a moral compass. Yuval Noah Harari skips the debate and puts all this scrumptious information to good use, telling the story of our species from the days when we were neighbors with Neanderthals, all the way to the present moment with its head-spinning exponential rate of change.

This book is a an antidepressant. I've found psychology, philosophy, and spirituality to be priceless assets in getting my head straight. But sometimes there's nothing better than than putting yourself in some ancient shoes. History, if you don't exclusively confine your focus to the last 200 years of dystopian jibber jabber, can be up there with psychedelics in it's mind expanding, perspective enhancing capabilities. I recollect some historical lessons the same way I do with epiphanies I've had on shrooms. With the same oceanic significance Sigmund Freud talked about.

We've been over genes, we've been over environments, we've been over the importance of finding the balance between the two. Now lets add to that complicated slurry of factors: MEMES!

More than just evanescent shitposts on a sandcastle of digital noise, whether spicy or dank, memes are the motherfucking glue that holds our silly species together. When we group up, we meme. Scoff all you like, memes are one of the defining characteristics of human beings.

Like Ernest Becker points out in Denial Of Death, humans are unique in their ability to believe in things they've never seen or experienced, like death and the afterlife. Beyond mere survival or reciprocation instincts, humans bond over shared myths, faiths, and fictions. We didn't just evolve to tell stories, we evolved to believe the ever-loving shit out of them. In fact, storytelling may be the key difference that helped humans overcome Neanderthals, despite being weaker, and having smaller brains.

Now before we move forward, I've discussed a lot of things that "influence" our choices. So what about free will? If my choice to buy Rice Krispies over Corn Flakes is one part genes, one part environment, and one part memes, where does "choice" come into play at all?

Well, it's tricky. As I discussed with Sam Harris', Free Will, it seems pretty clear that free will is just an illusion. Or rather, a fiction. But as Harris also pointed out, that fact doesn't really make a single damn difference in anyone's life.

That said, how can I tell incels anything they do is voluntary? They would also agree that their life is a series of factors beyond their control or premeditation. But that's the thing about free will, you either claim it, or you deny it. And the choice to do one or the other determines how society treats you.

When you act up, and someone says, "hey stop, that's bad." You can do one of two things, you can say you don't have free will, or you can own your decision. If you disown your free will, then you get placed in the uncomfortable, "defective object" category. OR, you can elect to stay in the far more dignified, "subject with agency" category. Defective objects get either fixed, abandoned, or destroyed, without any say in the matter, as dehumanized and hopeless as one can be. While the options for subjects with agency are greatly expanded, with all the benefits of a human who takes moral responsibility.

Free will may just be a legal fiction, but so are corporations. Our lives are dictated by dozens of imagined orders that leave nearly no trace on the physical universe. However that doesn't make them irrelevant or unreal as phenomena.

Imagined orders are fragile though, as you might expect. Which is why we evolved to be so gentle with them. Wanna escape an imagined order? There's not much actually stopping you, save for maybe isolation. The only catch is that you either need to convince others to come along and join, or you need to join an established alternative. Just don't join the incels.

99.999% of the time, there's no need for violence. That's truly something we don't share in common with other primates; big swole brutes don't really have much actual power. We oughta be grateful about that.

Our ability to tell stories marked what anthropologists call the Cognitive Revolution, which helped us outwit Neanderthals. That eventually led to the Agricultural Revolution, where we got domesticated by wheat, and misery as we know it began. But man, the smell of a bread aisle... Mmmm!

Don't let the second bit bum you out too much, it comes with great news! These two revolutions did something neat: They opened up niches for weaklings and dimwits! Wahoo! Pre-agricultural humans knew basic botany, astrology, zoology, bushcrafting, toolmaking, etc. Their general knowledgebase, let alone strength, would make most average modern people look useless. Nowadays, you can live a comfortable life specializing in asinine busywork. You don't have to know anything about your own food, shelter, clothes, geography, local flora or fauna, how to swim, hunt, or climb trees, etc. We "specialize and collaborate" as The Knowledge Illusion puts it. Or we, "work a bunch of bullshit jobs" as David Graeber would.

Incels feel left out because they're not Dwayne Johnson. Meanwhile it's mediocre nerds who are the powerhouse gigachads of civilization, and have been for millennia.

Some imagined orders are global, and frankly you shouldn't waste much time trying to oppose them, unless you're a real cocky coolkid who thinks you're going to be the next axis of global change that comes once only every few centuries. These would be the global monetary, imperial, and religious orders. And not to be a dick, but lets just go ahead and put modern science in the religious category, because it's really blowing up god's spot. Fighting these things is a losing battle. I say the only way out, is through.

So much of our pain is man-made, not natural. The upside to that is if we made it, we can unmake it. To you and me, there's no "natural way of life". There hasn't been for as long as we've been recording history. Which is why history is so useful to us. Everywhere you look in the past, you find people struggling with the cognitive and agricultural revolution. Some truths evolve, while others haven't changed one bit.

If we live by memes like they're microbes or viruses living inside our heads, then it's fair to say nihilism is a deadly pathogen. I disagree with memetists who say the success of a meme is determined by the effectiveness of its host. Like with genes, they don't give two shits about their host, only about replicating. When an incel goes on a killing spree, it's like a zombie virus, killing a host, and infecting multiple people after the fact.

Fundamentally this is all a question about happiness, this business with incels. They're searching for contentment just like everyone else. Problem is, they seem to only use science in their pursuit. But science is incapable of setting its own priorities. Its funding is based on whether it empowers the already powerful. Stephen Hawking can fuck off when he says there's no longer any need for philosophy. He was a dick.

What is happiness? Pleasurable brain chemicals? Meaningful self-delusions? Or some sort of Buddhist/Stoic mental judo? As always, I'm a real simp for the idea of trying to balance all of these things together.

But no matter how you chose to blend those into your life, you can always fuck it all up by forgetting two major caveats: Be very careful who you choose to compare yourself to, and disappointment is all about expectations.

Don't believe the pre-modern hype. A deadly toothache sucked dick. Be grateful and don't romanticize the past. Modern life has comfort, safety, culture, knowledge, etc. like early sapiens couldn't have begun to dream of. We're almost god-like, even the lowliest of us. There's still plenty of wilderness you could go run off into if you'd like. Shit, in North America, there's a wild boar infestation, you could be a well-fed nomad. But you don't want to do that, admit it.

The only problem with these improvements is that as things get better, expectations balloon, and disappointment follows at the exact same pace. It's a treadmill that spins as fast as we can run. One major fact about our evolution is that we as a species only used to compare ourselves to a few dozen people at most. A young human looking for a partner only had a small sliver of the tribe in the same league as them to make them feel insecure. Now we have a slideshow of perfect specimens in front of us every day, till we've seen more 10s than our Dunbar number can track.

Lets add, "connecting with our past" to the list of things that truly make humans happy.

His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. -- Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus

• #5 An Anthropologist On Mars by Oliver Sacks •

Alright lets end this bitch on a positive note!

Humpty started out as a friend. Someone who said off-the-wall crazy shit almost competitively, like he was always trying to out-weirdo you. We had a lot of fun. Wednesday said he alienated most other people, and had a lot to learn about socializing, but he was funny and interesting underneath it all. Which was true, for a couple months.

Our group's unofficial theme is "freaks with potential". Bring all your misfits and maniacs. We say, "Who are we to judge?" We've got plenty of autists, and you're damn right they get on our nerves, but in an endearing, forgivable, manageable way. Shit, we annoy them back, and nobody has ever thought of banning someone for being too autistic.

Humpty however was a whole different dimension of fucked up. To call him autistic is an insult to autistic people. He's not the type of cutie Amy Schumer tells heartwarming jokes about. He's hate on the spectrum.

The point is, I approached him from the best angle anyone can. Unlike scientists, we didn't treat him like he was a gigantic insect, under a dry dehumanizing light. We cracked jokes about pooping, and dicks, and stuff guys talk about when they really like each other. He wasn't a patient he was "my friend Humpty."

I'm always railing against the way psychologists, especially school psychologists, tend to just objectify everyone they're trying to help. Like the further the distance between you and a patient, the more "scientific" the process is.

She said, "When you start getting all expressive and symbolic it's impossible to actualize an honest diagnostic." I said, "When you start getting all exact and algebraic I'm reminded it's a racket not a rehabilitation" -- Aesop Rock, Shrunk

You don't go to a shrink to big yourself up and hear about how well you're doing. You go there to discuss how unwell you are. A good psychologist's #1 goal is to never have to speak to you again. But it's still a business, and endless treatment is always more profitable than a cure.

Scientists tend to get so distant and impartial that perfectly familiar things begin to sound strange and aberrant. Sacks says, "It's like saying a man has a proboscis in between his eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every 24 hours."

Oliver is marvelous in that his aim was to take off the lab coat and join his patients in their daily activities. Understanding them not by getting outside of their lives, but by getting inside.

What he learned by doing this was extravagant. As he examined his patients' disabilities he found in them unique adaptations, in some instances almost superpowers. Not deficits, but tradeoffs; alternative states of being. "Other forms of life, no less human for being so different."

A painter that loses all sense of color, even in his imagination; A hippie who can't remember anything post-1960s; A surgeon/amateur pilot with dramatic Tourettic tics; A man who was blind for the first 45 years of his life that regained his vision, and had to learn to reinterpret the world through his eyes; A man obsessed with his home town in Tuscany, with an exquisitely detailed 3D model of it in his head, down to the shape of the bricks in each wall; An autistic savant who can draw a whole cityscape from memory after glancing at it for seconds; and the famous Temple Grandin, an autistic woman whose deep understanding of animals helped her radically reform livestock facilities to be more humane.

As Sacks puts it, there's an assumption that all sickness is a "contraction" of life. But in the case of his patients, these illnesses focused their lives, defined their callings, and gave them a unique purpose or specialty. His findings make one wonder if some diseases are products of evolution, that actually contribute to humanity as a whole.

Like how Malcolm Gladwell talks about the memory benefits of dyslexia in David And Goliath. Would a dyslexic parent wish dyslexia on their kids? Hell no. Would they trade their powerful memories in for the ability to read fluently? Quite often, also no.

As any incel will tell you, narcissism has its benefits. They get laid more, make more friends, quickly advance in careers, etc. Granted, there's two big caveats: They often don't keep partners, friends, or careers for very long. And they don't get very far if they're the covert, sensitive type of narcissist; The type of narcissist that doesn't leave their basement.

But as Simon Baron-Cohen points out, autism has plenty of its own upsides as well. Arguably more. The systematizing nature of autists makes them fit to do tons of things "normies" often can't. The world is more and more in the hands of the systematizers, which makes them fitter than ever, in an evolutionary sense.

Many of the most famous and successful people you've ever heard about are/were either cold-blooded shitty narcissists, or equally cold-blooded annoying autists. Not successful in spite of their mental makeup, but because of it.

Ask not what disease the person has. But rather, what person the disease has -- William Osler

Wednesday once again comes in as a role-model in this series. His PTSD, while being an incredible source of pain in his life, also gives him an uncanny ability to communicate straight to the hearts of other traumatized people. He makes them feel respected, understood, and at-ease. So he started a career in therapy, and is currently working in a rehab facility. He's literally every client's favorite person. And frankly, everyone that knows Wednesday knew he would be.

It's not about what weaknesses you have, it's about how you compensate for them. Wednesday's PTSD makes plenty of other vocations difficult, if not impossible. But you don't need to be good at everything. As I keep repeating, humanity flourishes based on our ability to specialize and collaborate. Intensity is more powerful than extensity.

I believe my ADD has always been a powerful bullshit/relevance filter; My head injuries give me a creative edge, and the sort of recklessness that adventures are made of; Moving around so much may have made keeping friends in my life more difficult, but it's also made me a social chameleon who can always quickly make more; Fighting with my step dad strengthened my backbone to stand up against corrupt authority and narcissists; Introversion isn't a bad thing, I'm one of those rare people who actually enjoys being alone with my thoughts. I'm always studying something or journaling. These "issues" in my life may have sent me off course, but not backwards, not retrograde. They define who I am and what I'm great at. It's all about how you frame things. Feces is fertilizer.

The colorblind painter found a new style, after he eventually forgot about color altogether and his depression over the matter subsided. The change also massively improved his distance and low-light vision, making the world beautiful to him in a way you or I will never perceive; The hippie may have needed to be institutionalized to keep him safe, but he had the kind of demeanor his former Hare Krishna peers found to be saintly. Before they discovered his "enlightenment" was a pituitary tumor, he was seen as a spiritual exemplar; The surgeon's tics may have caused him to convulse and vocalize continuously, and beyond his control, but it also contributed to his precise and fastidious way of life, paradoxically making him an outstanding surgeon and pilot. You knew he'd never miss a step. And somehow when he was at work, his Tourette's would disappear; Even though the blind man regained his vision, it wasn't automatically good news for him. His eyes may have been back in perfect condition, but his brain still struggled to use them. He came to see the loss of his disability as a sort of curse; The Tuscan artist's perfect memory of his home town was part miracle, part black hole of nostalgia. He couldn't seem to talk or think about anything else, all day every day, making him mostly friendless. But in the end his home town lauded him as a hero, never to be forgotten in return; Steven Wiltshire, though he scores low on most other markers of intelligence, had a skill people payed millions of dollars to own a piece of; and Temple Grandin, despite having no intuitions about the thoughts or feelings of others, could empathize with animals, sharing in common their strictly visual way of thinking. She's done more to improve the quality of life for livestock than anyone you know of. Her findings also extend to the way we treat prisoners. And she's a powerful advocate for finding meaningful ways for other autists to contribute to humanity.

Humpty and other incels LOVE to hold up their disadvantages like, "Look, there it is, game over." Now, not all colorblind people have superpowered vision, not all autists are savants, just because the Hare Krishnas think you're cool doesn't always mean you're cool, etc. I'm not saying there's no such thing as a disability. But your calling is based on what you can do best. There's no such thing as heroism without adversity, and there's no way to demonstrate your fitness as an animal if you don't apply yourself to anything.

Incels want to give up. They want to hear their dreams are impossible so they can quit ASAP, and save themselves the energy. Comfortably numb; Fortuna's redheaded stepson.

The Freaks With Potential are all about highlighting each other's specialties. Humpty's only specialty was his bottomless well of self-pity. And that is the only opposite of potential we've ever found.

• End bit •

This was a fucking doozey to write. I don't double check the playtime when I pick audiobooks each month. So when I decided to focus on evolution and behavior, I unwittingly bit off a 92 hour reading project, not including the incel literature.

I realized as well that this month I'd be punching down on not just one guy, but thousands of them, so I wanted to be a bit more thoughtful, and careful with the points I'm making. Humpty truly is the pinnacle of piece-of-shittiness, with few others to compare him to. It's an exaggeration to call 94.99% of incels Humpty Dumpties. But that still doesn't get them off the hook. They're still counterproductive nihilists with nothing to offer but deeper despair.

When this is all over, and I start looking for things to write about in much shorter form, I'll definitely have to work on picking incel philosophy apart, piece by piece. Like, "hunter eyes", which I swear to god made me shout at the top of my lungs at my screen, "IT'S CALLED 'SQUINCHING' YOU FUCKING MORONS!"

I'd like to give a big shoutout to all the regular-shmegular celibate people out there, who aren't pointing the finger at anyone else. The ones taking responsibility for their lifestyle, and owning the consequences of their decisions, without bitterness.

Before the sexual revolution, celibacy was considered in many circles to be an impressive display of self-control. Now I'm not promoting the idea of going back to those days, but it really fucks up the idea that a sexless youth is naturally an excruciating one.

Soldiers, laborers, servants, various types of courtiers, etc. didn't get to date and hookup recreationally. They had shit to do, and weren't going around pissing and moaning about how horny they were. People kept this stuff personal, it was rare in entertainment, and FOMO was at a relative fraction of what it is today.

And what is a priest if not a celibate alpha male? While that may not be natural, remember humans haven't lived "natural" lives for as long as we've recorded history.

Plus, these fucks aren't just talking about 35 year old virgins, they're also talking about dudes who have fucked multiple times already but just not in the past six months, and married men in sexless marriages. The "official scientific definition" of "incel" is uselessly broad, with men that have very little in common, other than a desire to wallow in pity and shake their fist at the world.

Maybe celibate men are just being cautious, recognizing that they have time to wait a bit longer than women; maybe they're trying to work on themselves before involving another person in their insanity; maybe they're justifiably afraid of the corrupt family court system, or their own attraction to abusive partners; maybe they don't want to risk adding another human to a miserable dying planet; maybe casual hookups are an option, but they don't want to waste a woman's precious time; maybe they're afraid of humiliating themselves, etc, etc.

Who knows? But the point is none of those "maybe"s justify misogyny or rage. It's a cost-benefit analysis, and it's everyone's choice where they come down on these questions. You can be cautious, or you can be brave; patient or impatient; proud or willing to beg. Either way, nobody's making that decision for you. What you get out of life is based on what you're willing to put in.

I know a man with cerebral palsy, on disability payments, in an electric wheelchair and his head fixed in place, and he's got a girlfriend. I knew a drunk old cab driver with three teeth and not a skill to his name, and every month he had a new woman. There's someone out there for everyone. Unless the only thing that can get your dick hard is hentai catgirls. Incels are hypergamous too.

So boo hoo hoo. Fuck their tears. You're only an incel if you call yourself one, and give up.

NOW TO CLEANSE MY SOUL!

Next month (September, not August. Sorry, summer's a nightmare for me. I get 0-1 days off a week, and my brain is fried like a chicken parm) We're gonna talk about the soul! Or whatever the fuck that means to an atheist like me.

These last two months have been psychically exhausting. I had to stare right into the incel abyss, and all I had to comfort myself with was science. Shit got cold, right here in my heart. So we're gonna fix the bejesus out of that.

This August, I'll be doing shrooms with Wednesday and our mutual friend (pseudonym to be coined), then after we read about our souls, we're gonna read about psychedelics. I can't fucking wait.