#type environment
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I think the best example of power reveals rather than corrupts is parenthood. You have control over a helpless human who can’t leave you for years. People can be mean to their children in a way they can’t be mean to other other people. A child is someone you can scream at and hit without consequence, without them standing up for themself.
#ever since I was a kid I always thought children should be raised in a#boarding school#orphanage#type environment#probably as a result of my technology averse mother insisting I read mid twentieth century e#English school stories#and of course the best children’s books are about orphans#Harry Potter#a series of unfortunate events#his dark materials#I was envious of orphans#philosophy#children are people#parents#childhood#I don’t want kids because I don’t want to yell at people
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i've had so many conversations with people in fandom/creators' circles who are genuinely afraid to make the stories or art they want because they fear (often with good reason!) that their friends might kick them out of their circles, or worse, launch a public harassment campaign against them.
as someone recovering from this fear-based mindset, i want to affirm:
- friends who use implicit or explicit threats to maintain social control are not your friends
- communities that monitor your social media and ao3 to surveil you for perceived transgressive content are not safe communities
- the vast majority of people are NOT going to hate you if you make the art you want
- if you find yourself in a friend group that makes you feel afraid to speak your mind, it's in your interest to disentangle yourself from that group as quickly as possible
- real, honest disagreements between friends can be solved respectfully without the use of public shaming
- if you're feeling afraid in a community, it's likely that others are feeling afraid too. support your friends who may be struggling to leave an abusive fan or creative community, and let them know you're a safe person to voice doubts and disagreement to.
- if you're feeling like you'll never find a safer community of people, i promise there are others who feel that way too. it may take some time, but you'll find people who treat you and your ideas with respect. a good place to start is the people who make the type of art that you admire but that you're too afraid to make yourself.
ok that's all, take care of each other and be nice 💜
#and if you get mad at this post: you're the type of person creating the unhealthy environment i'm talking about 😭#fandom
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Memes shared by kids who grew up on starships I think they should have sea scout/land scout beef with kids that grew up on Starbases
#star trek#ds9#tng#wesley crusher type kids need more representation#it must be such a weird environment to go up in like cool but weird#like wheres that post about wesley being the weirdest kid in starfleet cos they're talking about a specific procedure and hes like#ha yeah reminds me of when the first officer got god like powers and aged me 10 years#that but every starship kid in every situation#yeah i grew up on one of yhe ships that prevented that romulan invasion i was playing dom jot on my padd at the time tho so i didn't notice
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The Skyhold frescos painted by Solas, lined up. [source and art credit: Nick Thornborrow]
#dragon age#solas#bioware#video games#the art is so good in this series#the murals and frescos. paintings on the walls. environment/level art and everything#theres so much meaning in the Skyhold rotunda murals#I remember when I played DA:I the first time running to the rotunda after every mission to see if there was a new mural#its gonna be so cool to see new elven murals and other new pieces of art of all types in the new game
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In the world of heavy metals, love is denser than hate!
#Poorly drawn SVSSS#SVSSS#luo bingge#luo binghe#ask#Is that right? Two different character tags? I think that is right.#I'm calling myself out with screenshotting the asks with the dates because my full ask box has become a problem I'm determined to solve.#I promise you that if I did not respond to your ask it was because I 1) *really* wanted to hold on to it to make a doodle reply#or 2) really was so touched by the message and got overwhelmed#So expect many year + old asks suddenly gaining a reappearance! I'm going to get to them ALL.#Back to Luo Binghe (both versions). You see...the substance he is made with has a chemical reaction to affection.#Like how a pokemon has multiple paths to evolution depending on it's friendship points or exposure to random stones#so to does he evolve into various forms. I feel like Bingge (Ht) would be a noble gas. Unable to form bonds#I could also see him as a Halogen-type of element! Highly reactive and only truly found in manufactured environments.#And Binghe (Lv) would be an alkaline earth metal (+2). Sturdy. Forms bond better but not freely giving them away.#this is the second time I've related characters to elements - and I am far less familar with Scum Villian so please feel free to chime in.#I could be way off base here and I am very down for someone to talk chemistry and character themes.#Thank you all for the love you have given my silly little LBH. It means a lot to me B*)#Don't...don't look too hard at the lack of mark on his forehead here. I gave up. It's just...hidden behind his bangs.
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You’re ok with people stimming in theory but are you ok with people stimming without using fidget toys? If you found out someone bites their nails, destroys their cuticles, peels the skin off their lips, picks at their scalp, picks their nose, would you think that’s gross? Even if you never see it and you know they wash their hands? Can you accept people stimming in ways that are very noticeable? People who make a lot of noises no matter how hard they try to be quiet, people who need constant movement no matter how hard they try to sit still, people whose stims draw attention even when they’re trying to be discrete? What about people who use fidget toys but draw attention anyway?
Are you ok with all of that or do you start to feel like those people need to practice self control? Deep down, do you not consider that real stimming because you know some people can stim in ways that are quiet, discrete, socially acceptable ?
Just something to consider when unlearning internalized ableism
#there’s also a difference between being overwhelmed by someone’s stimming and judging them personally#if you are overstimulated or close to it then someone making extra noise or moving a lot will probably add to that#but you can recognize that and try to move to a less overstimulating environment without blaming the person for stimming#you can’t use being overwhelmed as an excuse to make immediate judgments about different types of stimming overall#if you’re bothered by the idea of people picking at their skin or picking their nose without witnessing it it’s about the concept#autism#adhd#actually autistic#neurodivergent#actually adhd
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Obsessed with the way the passenger (2023) juxtaposes the incredibly serious with the comically absurd. And they exist simultaneously, never contradicting each other. I love how it manifests in the visual language of the movie, and is also at the core of the story! I think it's so important to the ethos of the movie that the genesis of Randy's life-altering trauma is sort of ridiculous. It being ridiculous does not change the emotional impact of it on Randy, and it's still treated with tenderness and gravity.
The sharpness of the juxtaposition feels sort of surreal or jarring at certain moments, but I think it's actually part of what makes the movie hit a real, emotional nerve. The thing that's been haunting you for years does not always seem so obvious out of context. Or sometimes the thing haunting you IS so obviously unspeakably bad that it's going to kill you, and the only way you can talk about it is to say something as trivial as, "I wanted to be a giraffe when I grew up."
A fuzzy yellow sweater and childhood sexual abuse. A lifetime of denying yourself agency or personhood, and a woman with a color-coordinated eyepatch for every outfit. A brutal workplace shooting and bedazzled stuffed animals.
Which speaking of, it's also why, in my opinion, the epilogue does work. It reverses the dynamic from serious with a side of comical to comical with a side of serious. Our focus is on the eraser game, the sillier part of Randy's traumatic story, while the lasting impact of violence lurks quietly in the background (Randy's still physically injured, he's still got the jacket). And then the last shot of the stuffed animals is the *chefs kiss* on top of the whole thing!
#anyway. i had to physically restrain myself from writing an additional four paragraphs about all the more subtle examples of this and how#Randy and Benson are both deeply serious and unserious characters and its what makes you care about them and also how the BBB environment#is such a perfect combination of these elements that i think evokes a very subtle commentary on minimum wage labor and and and#ive said it before because of this movie and i'll say it again. when is someone going to start a 33 1/3 type series for movies.#the passenger
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#tumblr polls#polls#Sorry if the wording is weird. I thought ''be considered X where I live'' would make the most sense since 'tallness' or etc. is sort of#subjective to the people around you or your specific culture/area/etc. And if I just said ''I'm tall'' or ''I'm short'' then#the response might be 'well how do I define whether I'm tall or not?'' or etc. But then most people could probably look#at the people around them in daily life they interact with and compare based on that to get a more literal idea or something#..ANYWAY.. lol.. as usual just thought of some random thing and was like.. hrmm... i wonder what the most common#feeling about that would be.#personally I'm not even short but I just want to be really really tall... like... 7 feet tall or something. In a fantasy world type of way#of course. so like a super tall elf creature. More realistically I suppose you get health problems past a certain point#so maybe I'd be happy with 6'2“ or so.#Absolutely no hate towards people with this preference but I've always had trouble understanding the idea of wanting to be shorter#so you're Small And Cute or this and that. or whatever the base reason is. I suppose I would understand it from a surivval prespective#maybe you want to be able to hide in your environment easier and blend into a crowd. I personally would like people to be inspired to run#away from me when they see me though gjhbj#In an average grocery store or something just a normal day but then some 8 foot tall wizard man walks in and so everyone#kind of backs away slowly = yaaay I get the aisle all to myself and can shop for my produce in peace.#(except for the fact that there's a subsection of people who would intepret it as spectacle and would run towards instead of away#and pull out their dumbass phones to film Weird Thing Happening. in which case. spell of 'phone melts into molten plastic in your hands#stop filming strangers in public without their consent' be cast upon ye. )
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(person that has never seen saw but has read yugioh voice) yeah? so he traps people in evil puzzle rooms? sounds a lot like a guy i know
#yeah. im into drawing absurd crossovers now#feat. the stupid fuckign chess meme#ik the doll thing is just a doll but i keep seeing shitposts online that treat him as if hes not. i think it adds to it#no idea whats up with the formattign we'll see if it fixes itself after posing#(edit: it did not i had to re-add the second image)#i think yami yugi would survive a saw trap no problem. it's his natural environment#for that matter i also think he would survive squid game (ignoring the political messaging here. sorry.). he does that for a living#i've thought out how an evil chess shadow game would play out. even if it's not actually explained in the drawing#theres a time bomb on each side. you can prevent/regain time on yr side depending on the type of pieces you take. loser explodes#yami yugi would get a pawn across the board unnoticed turning it into a queen bc of course he would. prompting the opponent to cheat#getting themselves super penalty gamed#ygo#dm#s0#yugioh#idr my tags help#saw#(i guess???????)
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Godwyn and Fortissax fucked + I have an idea WHY Godrick's genes are so weak (his closest relatives' too)
Short post but I really like this topic hfhfdsf Okay so I double-checked the description of Draconian Tarnisheds and Godrick's dialogue, and:
The notion about Tarnisheds with dragonic roots having shorter lifespans makes me think that this is the reason; dragons and human(oids) are not the best mix! Godrick's closest ancestors might have had actual connections with dragons! Since it IS possible:
Dragons can shapeshift, so yeah.. existence of dragonian Tarnisheds likely implies that Godwyn and Fortissax fucked fsdhfdhs I assume her not just because of them being close, but also because she is unique amongst Ancient Dragons in being dark-colored and these Tarnished have coal skin,
At first I wondered if Fortissax' color might have been an effect of corruption, but then, again: if all Ancient Dragons are just stone grey, Draconic Tarnisheds could have had stone grey skin then because whatever connection made Draconic people had to happen before Godwyn became Prince of Death! Her corruption should then be referring to her losing a lot of her skin, with so much more gold insides showing through, and dark skin of this type of Tarnished revealing her actual color! (+ also post ( x ) on WHY I believe Fortissax is a she)
As for Godrick's and his close relatives and ancestors like Godefroy! Whereas Ancient Dragons refers to the rocky dragons from Farum Azula, there is another kind of dragons - feathered Greyoll's kind of dragons!
I used one of the babies around Greyoll and Agheel as volunteers, but you can see the dragon's body Godrick uses is certainly the same type of the dragon! Again, wings of Ancient Dragons for comparison, are also rocky and lack the feathers:
This makes sense that the branch of dragons Godrick is apparently related to is that of Greyoll's! We never see him use anything bolt-like, however, he does use wind-based attacks, like the rest of the Stormveil. His children do so too!
^ Worth to mention that Dragon Communion has connection with Godfrey (lion face is his mark), but the dragons laying in these churches are the Ancient types! These might be remnants of war with Gransax and others, since they did try to "defeat dragons by becoming them" as set of Dragonic Sentinels suggests! @fantomette22 offered another idea that maybe these Ancient Dragons instead were 'keepers' of these churches, and somehow had conflict with Greyoll's line of dragons. So, these churches came after Godwyn made peace between Ancient Dragons and Golden Order, and people were supposed to specifically consume hearts of Greyoll's dragons, not Ancient!
I don't know which idea I am leaning towards more, but I wanted to bring the Dragon Communion up just in case! Still, Godrick calls the dragon a relative and shows frail health, whereas act of eating dragon hearts gives you serpentine's eyes and makes you into a wyrm (most likely gradually lol). None is seen on him or his children, so I assume relation refers to mixing blood, not to the act of him or his ancestors consuming the hearts! In other words, if Ancient Dragons could turn into humanoids and have children (+descendants like Draconic Tarnished), maybe Greyoll's type could do this as well? 🤔
@val-of-the-north on the other hand, suggested an idea that rather than Greyoll's type of dragons being directly involved, it is all the same kind of genes of Ancient Dragons but having "evolved" into being like Greyoll's type! So, like her kind of dragons are more 'earthly' type, that evolved from Ancient Dragons straying further from perfection and divinity but instead adapting to whatever effects them (looking at you, Dark Souls!), similarly Ancient Dragon genes IN Golden Lineage changed too. And in roughly the same from-stone-to-feather manner, to mirror evolution (or corruption?) of the dragons themselves! I think this idea is very good in terms of how Fromsoft can't have enough of reusing the concepts!
^ Grafted Scions are also showing grey hair, despite being very young! It is not all grey yet and original color is likely black; same as hair of wandering nobles, which would make sense for whatever women Godrick slept with apparently to be noble too. Early grey hair could be manifestation of this poor health and shortened lifespan! Maybe humans with dragon blood in mix die early because they age early, but for Demigods it is just early aging.
(Video by Zullie the Witch ( x )) ^ At this rate I wonder whether these wings and feathers were actually grafted though, of they are sort of a side-effect of this "heritage" xd Like, sure, Stormveil is very much associated with the hawks, but modern Dragons ALSO having feathers makes me wonder! Especially since Godrick himself doesn't have any wings and feathers grafted on him, but the Noble Scions do.. Imagine feathers just showing on them because they are young, and maybe Godrick also used to grow feathers but they fell out by now due to simply his age!
______________
Conclusion: don't have children with the dragons while Godfrey isn't looking or something they will turn out kinda sick and frail idk
#elden ring#godrick the grafted#grafted scion#lichdragon fortissax#elden ring theory#elden ring headcanons#not art#text post#elden ring reference#screenshots#tbh Val's idea IS very good because that was kinda what happened with dragons in DS!#like notice how ancient dragons are fine but Greyoll's type adapts to every other environment element#like scarlet rot or glintstone or ice!#@dlc I am waiting for my Sleep dragon xd
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TEAM FORTRESS 2 CONCEPT ART -> Badlands (cp_badlands)
Badlands is a remake of the Classic CTF Badlands from Team Fortress Classic, and was released in the February 14, 2008 Patch. Much of the map has been changed and the map type has been changed from Capture the Flag to Control Point. The map consists of a base for each team, an open second point for each team located on the top of a hill, and a center point on the bridge. — Official TF2 Wiki
#type: environment#type: concept art#team fortress#tf2#team fortress 2#valve#concept art#videogame concept art#tf2 concept art#videogames#gaming#our post
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The real AI fight
Tonight (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."
Last week's spectacular OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between "Effective Altruism" (doomers) and "Effective Accelerationism" (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama.
Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.
Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine."
Once-and-future OpenAI CEO Altman is said to be an accelerationists who was forced out of the company by the Altruists, who were subsequently bested, ousted, and replaced by Larry fucking Summers. This, we're told, is the ideological battle over AI: should cautiously progress our LLMs into superintelligences with safety in mind, or go full speed ahead and trust to market forces to tame and harness the superintelligences to come?
This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive:
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
As Molly White writes, this isn't much of a debate. The "two sides" of this debate are as similar as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Yes, they're arrayed against each other in battle, so furious with each other that they're tearing their hair out. But for people who don't take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they've split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse:
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation
White points out that there's another, much more distinct side in this AI debate – as different and distant from Dee and Dum as a Beamish Boy and a Jabberwork. This is the side of AI Ethics – the side that worries about "today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others." As White says, shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence "is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI."
After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic "decision support" systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor – like the claims-evaluation engine that Cigna uses to deny insurance claims:
https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims
On a graph that plots the various positions on AI, the two groups of weirdos who disagree about how to create the inevitable superintelligence are effectively standing on the same spot, and the people who worry about the actual way that AI harms actual people right now are about a million miles away from that spot.
There's that old programmer joke, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't." But of course, that joke could just as well be, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't understand either":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/11/the-ten-types-of-people/
What's more, the joke could be, "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand hexadecenary, those who understand pentadecenary, those who understand tetradecenary [und so weiter] those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't." That is to say, a "polarized" debate often has people who hold positions so far from the ones everyone is talking about that those belligerents' concerns are basically indistinguishable from one another.
The act of identifying these distant positions is a radical opening up of possibilities. Take the indigenous philosopher chief Red Jacket's response to the Christian missionaries who sought permission to proselytize to Red Jacket's people:
https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5790/
Red Jacket's whole rebuttal is a superb dunk, but it gets especially interesting where he points to the sectarian differences among Christians as evidence against the missionary's claim to having a single true faith, and in favor of the idea that his own people's traditional faith could be co-equal among Christian doctrines.
The split that White identifies isn't a split about whether AI tools can be useful. Plenty of us AI skeptics are happy to stipulate that there are good uses for AI. For example, I'm 100% in favor of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group using an LLM to classify and extract information from the Innocence Project New Orleans' wrongful conviction case files:
https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html
Automating "extracting officer information from documents – specifically, the officer's name and the role the officer played in the wrongful conviction" was a key step to freeing innocent people from prison, and an LLM allowed HRDAG – a tiny, cash-strapped, excellent nonprofit – to make a giant leap forward in a vital project. I'm a donor to HRDAG and you should donate to them too:
https://hrdag.networkforgood.com/
Good data-analysis is key to addressing many of our thorniest, most pressing problems. As Ben Goldacre recounts in his inaugural Oxford lecture, it is both possible and desirable to build ethical, privacy-preserving systems for analyzing the most sensitive personal data (NHS patient records) that yield scores of solid, ground-breaking medical and scientific insights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eaV8SWdjQ
The difference between this kind of work – HRDAG's exoneration work and Goldacre's medical research – and the approach that OpenAI and its competitors take boils down to how they treat humans. The former treats all humans as worthy of respect and consideration. The latter treats humans as instruments – for profit in the short term, and for creating a hypothetical superintelligence in the (very) long term.
As Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax reminds us, this is the root of all sin: "sin is when you treat people like things":
https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html
So much of the criticism of AI misses this distinction – instead, this criticism starts by accepting the self-serving marketing claim of the "AI safety" crowd – that their software is on the verge of becoming self-aware, and is thus valuable, a good investment, and a good product to purchase. This is Lee Vinsel's "Criti-Hype": "taking press releases from startups and covering them with hellscapes":
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
Criti-hype and AI were made for each other. Emily M Bender is a tireless cataloger of criti-hypeists, like the newspaper reporters who breathlessly repeat " completely unsubstantiated claims (marketing)…sourced to Altman":
https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464030855880383
Bender, like White, is at pains to point out that the real debate isn't doomers vs accelerationists. That's just "billionaires throwing money at the hope of bringing about the speculative fiction stories they grew up reading – and philosophers and others feeling important by dressing these same silly ideas up in fancy words":
https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464024432217299
All of this is just a distraction from real and important scientific questions about how (and whether) to make automation tools that steer clear of Granny Weatherwax's sin of "treating people like things." Bender – a computational linguist – isn't a reactionary who hates automation for its own sake. On Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 – the excellent podcast she co-hosts with Alex Hanna – there is a machine-generated transcript:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417
There is a serious, meaty debate to be had about the costs and possibilities of different forms of automation. But the superintelligence true-believers and their criti-hyping critics keep dragging us away from these important questions and into fanciful and pointless discussions of whether and how to appease the godlike computers we will create when we disassemble the solar system and turn it into computronium.
The question of machine intelligence isn't intrinsically unserious. As a materialist, I believe that whatever makes me "me" is the result of the physics and chemistry of processes inside and around my body. My disbelief in the existence of a soul means that I'm prepared to think that it might be possible for something made by humans to replicate something like whatever process makes me "me."
Ironically, the AI doomers and accelerationists claim that they, too, are materialists – and that's why they're so consumed with the idea of machine superintelligence. But it's precisely because I'm a materialist that I understand these hypotheticals about self-aware software are less important and less urgent than the material lives of people today.
It's because I'm a materialist that my primary concerns about AI are things like the climate impact of AI data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems – not science fiction-inspired, self-induced panics over the human race being enslaved by our robot overlords.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space
Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#criti-hype#ai doomers#doomers#eacc#effective acceleration#effective altruism#materialism#ai#10 types of people#data science#llms#large language models#patrick ball#ben goldacre#trusted research environments#science#hrdag#human rights data analysis group#red jacket#religion#emily bender#emily m bender#molly white
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Every time I draw comics or think of ideas about Ghost and Hornet, I always find that they have somewhat similar behavior and personalities
So I decided to check out their personalities and well...
Both are istp=))
#They are actually quite similar#I mean...#they all think logically#are good at adapting quickly in new environments#both prefer actions over words#not the type to smile often#and they don't care too much about other's feelings#even their own#It might not be very believable#but I think it's pretty cute that these two siblings have something in common#Even though they think logically#they are still receptive to understanding others#hk#hollow knight
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#I hate the only way to make friends in fandom nowadays is to join a fucking discord server#Im just not built for that type of environment *at all*#way way too many people#to much juggling convos#and the vibes are usually atrocious#(its always like 1-2 guys that make it that way tho honestly)#Its already hard enough for me to talk to people#being made to join a server is like being thrown into the deep end
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Do psychotropic drugs and/or ritual play a role in any of the blightseed cultures? A pretty broad question, lol
Yeah that’s a very broad question, the answer is about as much as it tends to play roles in real history. Alcohol is pretty ubiquitous (outside of cultures that abstain from intoxicants) and used for a variety of purposes, opioids are commonly used in some parts for pain relief or recreational purposes, stimulants (usually in mild, natural forms) are used to provide extra energy, and hallucinogens are most commonly used as part of a larger religious framework (rather than for recreational purposes). Any more elaborate answer kinda has to be case by case in a certain culture or part of the setting.
I'll just take this as an opportunity to talk about the one established sect that pretty much REVOLVES around psychoactive use. This is the Scholarly Order of the Root, which is a sort of mystery religion + elite community of scholars who currently occupy the Ur-Tree and its forest in the far southern Lowlands (southeast of Imperial Wardin, on the same land mass).
The Ur-Tree is the obligatory Huge Fucking Fantasy Tree (and its surrounding forest). It’s a mass of vegetation about a mile tall and almost as old as Plant Life Itself, its upper branches are primeval plants, which become more modern the nearer they get to the ground (and each 'level' holds tiny ecosystems, some containing descendants of LONG-extinct arthropods/other small animals). Its lowest branches and the surrounding forest are contemporary plant life, and all is connected and protected by an incomparably MASSIVE fungal mycelium network (which is itself a living god).
A lot of the Scholars' more secretive practices revolve around experimentation with substance use with the goal of expanding the Mind and transcending the body to fully connect to the Dreamlands, and they have a supply chain of traders and mercenaries called Rootrunners who traffic substances into the Lowlands. Most of their psychoactive use is in a very intentional capacity and not just like, for fun, but a LOT of them are just straight up addicted to cocaine (in the form of alchemically refined bruljenum, which is used for practical purposes of its stimulant effect during long hours of work).
All known psychoactives are desirable for experimentation (particularly hallucinogens), with each having properties that either allow expansion of the Mind, transcendence of the body, or outright divine communion. Their effects are logged in great detail and interpreted to form the basis of the Scholars' understanding of the natural world and reality itself.
The most important substance is Ur-Root, which is root matter from subterranean levels of the Ur-Tree that have both their own intrinsic psychoactive substances and a very, very high concentration of living god mycelium. The tree root contains DMT and the mycelium has its own wholly unique effects (being an actual living god). They alchemically refine it into a purer, more potent form, and use it to expand beyond the body and directly commune with the Giants, a group of entities they have identified as the only true gods.
An Ur-Root trip starts off with minor visual distortion, which turns into shifting fractals that slowly obscure the vision. Eventually the senses are entirely taken over by a 'tunnel' of rapidly shifting fractals and geometries. In a complete trip, the experiencer gets a sense that they have been pushed through a membrane and entered another realm, finding themselves in a distinct experiential Space.
At this point they may encounter entities which communicate to them in a language impossible to describe but wholly understood. These beings are understood to be the Giants, or at least aspects of the Giants that mortals are capable of comprehending (they often take familiar tutelary forms of the Mantis or the Snake, or appear resembling the same type of sophont that the experiencer is, all composed of ever-shifting geometries). The experiencer often feels a sense of unconditional and endless love from these beings, though the Giants may be more hostile and may appear in the form of the Trickster (usually a cultural figure regarded as malicious, be it an animal or otherwise) in a bad trip.
(^Up until this point, this has mostly just been a DMT 'breakthrough' experience ft. 'machine elves' and the like).
They are then removed from this space and returned to something that feels like the real world, but is nearly unrecognizable. They have a sense of rapidly moving through time, and will usually see 'the spires' towards the beginning, which just so happen to look like this:
(source + some context via Implication- the spires are exactly what this art is depicting)
The experiencer continues to move across an unfathomable amount of time, occasionally 'seeing' other such flashes of unfamiliar landscapes and creatures, and yet also being devoid of all their senses, the 'seeing' is pure, unfiltered experience. There is a sense of interconnectedness with all life, and that one has become the forest (or even Life) itself. The sense of time is wildly distorted, the trip lasts only about 5 minutes but feels like an eternity and is understood as literal hundreds of millions of years.
The experiencer has usually lost any remaining sense of Self and individual consciousness during this phase (in which case this time distortion is usually a neutral or even peaceful experience), but some retain a fraction of their identity, and find themselves trapped and conscious while experiencing what feels like eternity (which can be LIFE-CHANGINGLY distressing, even after the fact).
(^This latter part of the trip is the effects of the Ur-Tree fungus).
The trip ends with a sense of rushing through the ground and back up into one's body, at which point they will abruptly return to their senses and consciousness. The details are then immediately retrieved via interview and recorded in immense detail. The whole experience is understood as having been full comprehension of the Dreamlands, communion with the Giants, and then a tour through the act of creation.
This is done as part of the initiatory practice into the inner mystery-religion of the scholars, and as needed for study by high scholar-priests. It is not taken lightly, both as it is absolute communion with the gods and reality, and in that it can be a very, very difficult experience. People who have gone through this often walk away with a permanently shifted perspective, often in a positive and/or comforting way- a sense of interconnectedness with all life, a peace with the concept of death, seeing less of a point in individual ego and the concept of Self, and comfort in the sense of divine love they (may have) experienced. This heavily influences the philosophy of the Scholars and has had effects by proxy in the religious worldviews of the region.
Details of this experience are closely guarded, and initiates are given absolutely no prior knowledge and expectations for their trip. This is seen as a necessity- their naivety will allow for a true, unfiltered experience, and can be used to gauge whether they should or should not be accepted. Those that have a distinctly bad trip upon initiation may be assumed to have been 'rejected' by the giants and thus denied full priesthood, though this largely depends on How they interpret their distressing trip- those who identify this as a test and harsh lesson in a journey to enlightenment may be accepted (as this is how fully initiated scholar-priests interpret and handle their bad trips).
This inner priesthood is only a small fraction of the Scholarly Order, and its greater function is as a hub of education and repository of knowledge, and Scholar-trained doctors can provide some of the best medical care available in the setting ('best medical care in this setting' only means so much but it's pretty solid, relatively speaking). Only a chosen few Scholars ever get to commune with the Ur-Root, and most of the divine secrets revealed in the process are kept hidden (though they indirectly influence the politics and worldview of the entire order).
#I'm kind of fascinated by the quasi-religious beliefs that have developed around recreational hallucinogen use (ESPECIALLY DMT)#In contrast to like. Uses of DMT-containing substances like ayahuasca for long-established religious purposes#So this concept is basically 'what if a religion was FORMED from pretty much the ground up out of DMT usage'#Like the common 'entities' people encounter in recreational use being identified as the Real Gods and producing a religious worldview#that is mostly rooted in this experience (while still influenced by other cultural factors)#Also the like. Meta going on here is that the fungus is a 'living god' and the oldest one on the planet#It is a VERY rare type of living god that is 'created' by non-sophont (non-sentient even) beings and exists as a mycelial network#that perfectly supports and protects an entire forest. Basically a god for plants. It is so deeply interconnected with its forest that the#usual power sophont belief would have over it has basically zero influence. This is absolutely the closest thing to A God in canon.#(While still not being a Creator/sapient/or even supernatural within the framework of this reality. Just VERY unique.)#The Ur-Tree has always been above water and grows very very slowly over the course of millenia by kind of 'pulling up' plant life from#the ground (so you see ancient long extinct plants in its higher branches and contemporary plants close to/on the ground)#The mycelium helps shield and feed extinct plant life that could not otherwise survive in the contemporary environment#And the forest is big enough to produce its own weather (it is a rainforest and has been ever since the capacity for rainforests Existed)#It's not really a tree at all in any normal sense but an amalgam of thousands of types of plants-#Some growing on top of others and some interwoven beyond any distinction. It does form a superficially treelike structure#(mostly in order to physically support its own mass) with a very wide 'trunk' and massive 'roots' (which end in actual roots).#It feeds on its own perpetually shedding and decaying 'body' and any animal life that dies in the forest is VERY rapidly#decayed and absorbed by the mycelial network (to the point that many large scavengers cannot survive in this forest)#(If you kill a cow and leave it on the ground for just 1/2 hour you'll see little strands of mycelium already growing up around it)#The fungus fruits and spores on a very infrequent basis (scale of ten-thousands of years) which causes the forest to very slowly spread#Fortunately this isn't really an existential threat because the spread is VERY slow (even on a geological scale) and the fungus#itself is rather mundane in nature and cannot usually compete against established fungal networks in other places.#Though there are little Ur-Tree mycelium groves and woodlands in other parts of the world that may (over untold millennia)#generate their own Ur-Trees (there's already a few but they are all MUCH smaller and not readily recognized as the same thing)#WRT THE TRIP:#Most of what I'm describing is a DMT trip but consumption of high doses of Ur-Tree mycelium has both mundane psychoactive effects#and IS kind of the person experiencing the fungus' entire lifetime and seeing flashes of the world's actual evolutionary history.#The amount of material knowledge that can be accurately gleaned from this this is VERY limited though.
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I know I've been on about this for a while now and I'm being a hater but you're telling me SydCarmy was "always meant to be platonic" even though there are two seasons of writing making use of tried-and-true explicitly romantic tropes, themes and writing signals, and SydLuca is going to be romantic because...he was nice to her on screen for a few minutes?
I don't even care if people ship SydLuca, or if they just prefer it, but you can't honestly tell me that you believe Carmy was always meant to be a friend but Luca is an obvious love interest.
Just because Syd and Carmy haven't kissed or confessed their love to each other doesn't mean that isn't very obviously the direction this show is going. The Bear has already shown you who is endgame. It has shown you every episode of the show so far.
Honestly I really don't think The Bear fanbase understands this show or cares about these characters or the story being told here, which is unfortunate because this show is shockingly well-written in comparison to most shows right now, and we should be so grateful for it but all we're doing is complaining that the writers led us on by not making a ship canon fast enough. It's just. Sad.
#The Bear#SydCarmy#I was like a casual fan of this show two days ago#and now seeing how little respect this show gets from it's fanbase I'm losing my mind#I mean I shipped SydCarmy before anyway but now it means so much to me#it means so much to see such a realistic and purposefully well paced romance take place#so many shows portray romantic relationships and their beginnings in ways that just don't really happen in real life#and this show very purposefully said no. These are characters who are strangers. who are working together. Who are in a tense environment#and each of them has problems - one of them the type of problems that makes developing new relationships pretty difficult#these two would not get together right away. It would take a long time. And there would be ups and downs.#And even when that's the case. Even if when it takes a long time and doesn't go smoothly and is hard -#it can still be beautiful. It can still be romantic. It can still happen and here's how#and I'm just so inspired genuinely. It is so difficult to write romance without being cliche and so difficult to write it in a way that#could actually happen in real life and I really do hope I can write something half as good some day#and then to know so many people have no appreciation for it at all#because they prefer the shows that have characters make eye contact a few times and then confess their love for each other like#it's just fucking sad. So sad that so few people have any appreciation for good writing especially the difficult of romance writing#like I really just don't even know what to tell you. In real life these two would not have confessed to each other yet. They would not have#kissed yet. They would not have even realized they have feelings for each other yet because those feelings would still be developing#and I also want to point out that given the disparity in power between Syd and Carmy in season 1 it wouldn't have been healthy for them to#get together much sooner. He was her boss. He was also her idol. Before they can even get together that needs to be balanced out.#And then on top of that don't you see the value in Carmy realizing the dream girl he's romanticized in his head - Claire - isn't actually#what he wants? Don't you see the beauty in him being disillusioned from that? And realizing that Syd is what he wants?#Don't you see the beauty in Syd having an idealized vision of what Carmy The Great Chef is like realizing she was wrong and that he's human#and flawed and then realizing - she loves him anyway? She loves him more for not being on a pedestal and for having his flaws?#Are you telling me that even thinking about this doesn't move you? Doesn't make your heart ache a little?#And again - ship and let ship - but what is Luca? What is Luca if not just what she was hoping Carmy would be when she wen to The Beef?#What is he if not just another man who she has not seen under pressure yet? Not seen reliving trauma yet? Not been her boss yet?#It's easy to look at him and think he's better than Carmy - and that's the point. That's the point The Bear is making.#It is easy to want someone you don't know. It's hard to want to someone you do know. But that's what love requires and that's the point
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