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perhaps this is naive of me, but sometimes when i read florid descriptions of the coming demographic collapse all i can think is that as a species, we finally did it--somewhere between the onset of the industrial revolution and the invention of the pill, we finally broke the iron yoke of agrarian civilization that linked our ability to feed ourselves to the size of our population, the yoke that tied the pleasures of sex to the burdens of reproduction, the yoke that meant most people would have to suffer the burden of seeing roughly half their children die before age five. and yes, if this all keeps up, the world will change as a result, change in ways both already kind of sad (a lot of small towns vanishing off the map, as the remaining population continues to concentrate in big cities) and in we can barely begin to understand now (what does the world look like after 200 years of population shrinkage? i can't even imagine). and there will be new problems. i do worry (for example) about how we will care adequately for the aged. there will be significant problems we have to confront. but god almighty i am glad we broke that yoke.

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Congratulations on "husband"!

Romantic love is such a strange beast, you know?

On the one hand, I was prepped very carefully to be as practical about it as I could manage, on the assumption that romantic infatuation would drive me moderately insane and would need a big counterweight. Parents, authority figures, moral leaders, trusted mentors of one sort or another, all of them worked so hard to make sure that the thrill of romance would stabilize (eventually) into a productive and amicable partnership. And I’m glad they did, even if a lot of it was presuming a more obligate-heterosexual framework for these things. They prepared me well, and I think my husband and I are doing good job at treating our grand romance as a shared project and a result of hard work.

But on the other hand-

Like, I *did* know, almost immediately. The very first conversation we ever had, there was already an undercurrent of, “wait, is this…?”, and we have spoken every single day since that first conversation, without fail or pause. Our streak is currently at 2,739 days. Within a few weeks, I was sure about what it was. And those lessons in practicality did stick- we didn’t “start dating” (whatever that means for a Discord romance) until about a month in to things, and the relationship proper wasn’t official until two or three months after. But I was in love by the twentieth day at least, and more than in love. I *knew*, is what I mean.

Which is a grossly irresponsible thing to say, and anyway it’s very hard to talk about True Love as a physical scientist without feeling vaguely silly. The laws of thermodynamics certainly make no provision for such things! And so I’m sort of at a loss. I’ll say, at least, that he found the secret heart of me almost immediately, that I could be naked in front of him down to my soul without any shame. That there is a kind of loneliness I’ll never feel ever again.

And seven years is much too long to be called the honeymoon period, though “romantic infatuation” is still a valid descriptor I suppose. This is a different kind of crazy. I don’t think I get another one of these- I’m not sure I could have reasonably hoped to get even one of them. I certainly didn’t *expect* it.

It takes a little bit of recklessness, I think? Like Sauron, binding the biggest part of himself in to some tiny golden ring, pulling his heart out of his own body and sending it out in to a huge, transient world, knowing that nothing in that world can last forever. But he did it anyway, and so did I, and every fall of the hammer made us just a little bit more mortal.

There’s a ring on my finger now, too, no less powerful than his. And no less fragile, either. But that’s the grand mystery, you know? Mortality. There’s not one of us that can experience the world, except with some particular, contingent point of view- we see through one tiny set of eyes, reach out with one tiny set of hands, we exist with one mind and one set of memories, and eventually, those things break and fall away from us. In this way, I think, falling in love is much like being born- except that none of us got to choose to be born. I’m glad to have the chance to choose, and to give myself again to this strange world, with all its hurts and all its joys.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

—Unintentional defamation disclaimer

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#cw: sexual assault mention #cw: abuse #cw: violence

—trigger warning, tumblr tags

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that the following program may contain images and voices of deceased persons.

—Australian Broadcasting Corporation Indigenous cultural protocol warning

As for all men who shall enter this my tomb… impure… there will be judgment… an end shall be made for him… I shall seize his neck like a bird… I shall cast the fear of myself into him

—tomb curse of Khentika Ikhekhi, 6th dynasty Egyptian official

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I lobe non-gender (non) rules since more years ago I can remember but discarding you're not gender affected in your speech as if misogyny didn't still rule the world you live in is so short sighted

I don't think at all you're specially favored by misogyny, I think personally you're a nice guy, bothering to explain, I just think assuming we,ve reach a level of gender equality where your speech isn't affected is not equal

Never save the world, friend. It’s a mug’s game.

Just look around you- at whatever’s in arm’s reach, at whatever’s unsatisfactory. Solve problems, one at a time, at a sustainable pace. If misogyny is your beat, then embrace that. Build a space where it holds less sway, invite people in to that space one at a time, until a space becomes a standard and a standard becomes a culture. Learn your limits, learn what you have to give, learn who you work well with, learn how to make a plan and how to execute a plan in a chaotic universe.

It snowballs, is the thing. What begins very small will end very large. And along the way, you’ll tally real and meaningful victories. Setbacks too of course, always defeat will chase you, but if you only know how to save the world you’ll never get the taste of victory at all, just endless defeat and endless powerlessness. So grab the small thing instead.

Learn how to look at the world within your reach and see the victories in it, and the beauty in those victories. Learn how to celebrate those things with others, in spite of the darkness all around, and build community around shared triumphs, and an ethos of power and progress.

Be more than a commentator, more than just a literary critic for reality. Get calluses on your hands, bruises on your body. I am not being metaphorical. Fuck up, and figure out why you fucked up, and fuck up less the next time around. Just, whatever you do, don’t save the world.

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really tickles me that a number of the first few posts i saw on your blog were about the gender ambiguity in the 25k husbandpost bc i did actually come to your blog to check what pronouns you use (i was talking about your post with my partner and realised i didn't actually know how to refer to the author) i hadn't even consciously noticed the ambiguity until then!

I’m sort of enjoying the present era of gender norms, at least as seen on Tumblr Dot Com.

I mean, gender discourse is never going to be what you’d call *good*, exactly. But we’re at least temporarily in a place that works for me pretty well. We’re mostly past the point where there’s a lot of energy in the fight about whether pronoun disclosure should be mandatory or not, and we’re definitely past the point where male-by-default feels like a neutral choice. As a result, I find myself treating gender markers as a significant stylistic choice, appropriate for some types of writing and not for others, but nonetheless an *open* choice that I can decide according to the needs of the moment. The zeitgeist is rather permissive, and that invites a certain amount of fun and play.

Preceding waves of this discourse refined my sensibilities and style a bit, such that it’s not particularly difficult for me to write in an unmarked mode- just like you, I genuinely didn’t realize I’d been husbandposting without bringing up my own gender! At least not until I saw the comments and noticed the pattern. But it goes to show- when I *do* use gender, it tends usually to be on purpose, and I can be relatively confident that my audience will read it that way too.

I’m really fond of men and masculinity, in the artistic as much as in the affectionate or prurient sense. Masculinity becoming a marked, deliberate choice is very good for that! It primes readers to actively think about the role of gender in events or narrative; what distinguishes it from the neutral choice? How does it influence how we interpret this scene? What particular kinds of beauty are here that wouldn’t be otherwise? And so on. If everybody were male-by-default, it would be much harder for me to bring readers along for the ride and forefront masculinity as an aesthetic subject

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Tech tips with 81k

If you're a Mac user and you use external monitors, try not to notice how much nicer text looks on monitors with >200 dpi. It's easy go through life not seeing it, but once you do you can't unsee it and it's very expensive to resolve.

Also, try not to notice how much nicer you look in clothes for the opposite gender. This also is impossible to unsee and gets very expensive to resolve.

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Layered Material in Juventae Chasma

This image shows light-toned layered rock (sedimentary?) outcrops with spectacular erosional expressions that might (or not) give good clues on depositional setting. Were these sediments deposited here *after* Juventae Chasma opened up, or are they exhumed features, exposed by the opening and subsequent modification of the chasm? Can we tell?

ID: ESP_076172_1775 date: 26 October 2022 altitude: 264 km

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

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oh come on, we all you're a man. ritter doesn't regularly post lewds of women

I hope you’ll all join me in shaming @ritterum for being problematic bisexual representation. Along any number of axes, really. Mostly the terrible puns.

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As someone who's been married for three years now and is still discovering things like this about her husband, I absolutely beam at the posts like yours on dreams. There's something to be said about the subconscious world we seem to share simply by existing in the conscious one.

Thanks, that’s very kind of you to say! And it’s true- identity and selfhood are getting more tangled and complex within my marriage than I ever expected, and it’s been fascinating to explore all the ways that our brains are in sync.

One of my favorite things I’ve figured out so far is that watching him eat desserts or candy makes the reward centers of my brain fire off in almost the same way that it does when I taste the sweetness directly. So sometimes if I want to avoid the calories I’ll just hand him a cookie instead of eating it myself, which is some kind of bizarre hack in the universe that really shouldn’t work but here we are.

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oh come on, we all you're a man. Your kind of pedantry is gendered

Oh, stick around a while, or go digging through the archive- I’ll identify as a man explicitly before too long. My gender isn’t secret! It’s just not usually salient, either.

The pedantry is authentically gender-neutral, however. I picked it up in academia, where I spent a great deal of time. My specialty was geology. The geosciences, as it happens, are one of the more gender-balanced academic disciplines out there, a split reflected in my own professional experience. My bosses and mentors have been just about evenly split between men and women. The authorial voice and general patter you’ll find on this blog may be my own, but they were honed and improved with the guidance of some genuinely impressive and implacably nerdy women. It remains indebted to them. The mistakes, of course, are entirely mine.

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I have the tantalizing sense that there's a common thread between LLM outputs and like, commodity abundance in the american-grocery-store sense. That they're both the same 'kind of thing', somehow- a system of satisfied impulses in great multiplicity, struggling to recognize or structure itself around larger abstractions, long timescales, or the deeper meaning of things.

But I can't quite grab it. I don't understand either one quite well enough, I think.

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Man and Superman

So my Tumblr notes are currently dominated by this thing, which is, you know, very cute and everyone's being very nice and the usual amount of weird about it. Everyone keeps wanting to steal it for their fanfics (yes, you can, feel free and do not be ashamed), a truly alarming number of people have cried at the club (none of you people are at the club, you're all liars), eighteen separate people have warned me to get him a mouthguard (working on it).

It's a small thing, but- a little while ago, I noticed offhandedly that I hadn't mentioned my gender in it. Ritter's gender is explicit, but I speak only in the first person. "Toggle" isn't a traditionally gendered sort of name either, unless you count the freudian implications. The icon's technically a male portrait, but only if you're real good at squinting and even then those aren't terribly diagnostic. So anyway, the post hit escape velocity without my gender being particularly along for the ride, and people had to interpret it accordingly.

As of this writing, the husbandposting has gotten a bit north of 25K notes. I know with confidence that its path has taken it through trad tumblr, catholic tumblr, it's at least skirted the edge of radfem trumblr, and any number of other places. And not once has anybody made any particular assumptions about what my gender is. They don't wonder out loud, either. Nobody has assumed that I must be a woman because I am in bed next to a man, or that I am a man for that matter; nobody treats my gender as a puzzle that they have to solve before they know how to feel about the post, at least not where I can see in the notes.

People (the younger ones, anyway) have this superpower nowadays: the power to appreciate a romantic situation without filtering it through sexed lenses in any particular way. They don't know it's a superpower, because it's so obvious to them, but it very much is- back in the 90s and early 00s, almost none of us had it. I know I didn't, though I've since discovered the capacity. If this kind of thing was printed in the newspaper back then, I guarantee you that the median reader would absolutely, 100%, be assuming I was a woman, and feel wrong-footed and disoriented if they found out otherwise.

There's something instructive in that. We don't get to choose our children's ideology; even the thousand-year reign of the Morally Correct Imperium must eventually confront year one thousand and one. Those descendants may well despise us, may have values we find abhorrent or pathetic, and may well see us the same way. If that's true, then, whence progress? It's tempting to think of social progress as the march of a particular ideology, but no mere moral imperative will ever march into the future unaltered.

But sometimes, something real does change. Sometimes, people get superpowers. Which is to say, tools, useful and unilaterally better ways of seeing the world. 25,000 people correctly navigated the ambiguity of my husbandposting without making strong assumptions about its author; they were better at reading than their parents would have been, a strict improvement regardless of the moral values involved.

At its best and most real, social progress rhymes with technological progress- breaking free of the aimless cyclicity of history not by imposing a particular way of thinking, but by expanding the space of what can be conceived. Sure, there are predictable consequences to the existence of a superpower- once it's easy to appreciate romantic joy without anchoring it in a baseless assumption of heterosexuality, there are certain moral values and ethical policies that follow- but this is merely a knock-on effect.

The core of it, the thing that makes it persist through time without effort by some authority, is simply that it is more deeply entangled with reality than the alternative. It catches a little bit more of the Dao's subtlety, makes each of us a little bit more free- more capable of understanding our own corner of the world and expressing our own values, whatever those may be.

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How many living beings have there been on Earth -- ever?

It's a safe bet that the vast majority of them have been bacteria, to the point that counting bacteria alone should be enough; anything else vanishes into their rounding error.

Multiple sources suggest 10^30 individual bacteria are alive on Earth right now (that's a thousand billion billion billions, fwiw).

Biogeochemical evidence (Pearce &al 2018) place the origin of life around 3.8 billion years (Ga) ago, and bacteria or bacteria-like organisms must have been around since then. The earliest putative fossils don't look very different from modern bacteria in shape and size.

The life cycle of bacteria is quite variable, but a few hours seems typical for simple free-living bacteria (Lynch & Marinov 2017), and 10 hours seems the most common value outside a laboratory (Gibson &al 2018). Taking 10 h (1/877 of a year) as average, bacteria have been around for about 3.3*10^12 generations. Assuming a constant population, that implies 3.3*10^12*10^30 = 3*10^42 cells -- but not so fast.

Biomass on Earth has increased over time, with large jumps corresponding to major evolutionary advancements. Crockford &al 2023 helpfully estimate a 20-fold increase in global productivity correspoding to the appearance of photosynthesis around 3.5 Ga, a 10-fold increase with the appearence of oxygenic photosynthesis some 2.4 Ga (with a hypothetical overshoot and collapse that I'm going to ignore), and a 10-to-50-fold increase with the ascendance of multicellular life. This implies that the vast majority of life has lived just in the last half a billion years!

To simplify Fig. 1 in the cited paper, I'm making a model where global productivity compared to present is 0.0001 from 3.8 to 3.5 Ga, 0.002 from 3.5 to 2.4 Ga, 0.02 from 2.4 to 0.6 Ga, and then increasingly exponentially from 0.2 to 1 in the present time. From there I get 89% of all productivity ever in the last 0.6 Ga, and 99% in the last 2.4 Ga; since the margins of error are already very high, I can safely discount everything before 600 million years ago.

I'll be assuming that the number of bacteria on Earth is directly proportional to total global productivity in the last 600 million years, i.e. growing exponentially from 20% to 100% of the present number. In bins of 0.1 Ga, I get 0.6 Ga: 20%, 0.5 Ga: 26%, 0.4 Ga: 34%, 0.3 Ga: 45%, 0.2 Ga: 58%, 0.1 Ga: 76%, 0.0 Ga: 100%. From there, I get 311*10^6 bacteria-years relative to the current biosphere.

Combined with the 10^30 estimate for today, that is 3.11*10^38 absolute bacteria-years. Since I already calculated a line of bacteria experiences 877 generations per year on average, I get 2.7*10^41 bacteria overall -- one order of magnitude less than the naive(r) estimate I got in point 3!

Since the errors on this number completely swamp the amount of multicellular organisms and -- most likely -- Precambrian bacteria, I estimate about 3*10^41 (300,000 billion billion billion billions) individual organisms have existed on Earth since the origin of Life.

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I think I solved this in a pretty interesting way in my homebrew campaign world. One of the 'setpiece' conflicts in the setting is an ideological conflict about whether or not time should exist.

The vast majority of gods existed in a sort of extra-temporal perfect platonic heaven according to their own natures; varies by domain, but I try to make them all compelling when they're discussed explicitly. But one such god had the domain of 'time', and so transience started radiating outwards through said platonic heaven. The gods in the blast radius had no real way of understanding what was going on at first, but as soon as they figured it out they were conscious of themselves as having been violated, with lots of minor/subordinate souls in their heavens as having fallen from grace and been corrupted, etc.

The detritus of broken heavens was collected at the epicenter of time and became the standard 'prime material plane' where you have elves and adventures and whatnot. The fallen souls in question entered a reincarnation cycle and started being reborn there; the immortality of souls is never in question, and I have a small ruleset for past-life flashbacks and such.

A small faction of pro-time divine powers is trying to protect time from the various gods of the formerly-perfect platonic realm, which are mounting various attacks on it and trying to convert souls back to the worship the 'outer gods' so that they leave the cycle of reincarnation after death and return to their former angelic status. (And ultimately weakening the plane enough to destroy time and reclaim what's left of their former perfection.)

It makes for a really interesting setting, and it has the advantage that every god has a basically intuitive and broadly sympathetic goal. Lots of occasions for good vs. good conflict as well, without feeling too strained. I've enjoyed seeing my players explore various characters' stances towards this kind of dilemma, and it has the upside that there's no obvious 'crapsack' outcome for mortals' souls by default, notwithstanding the more demonic divine realms.

hot take: the notable thing isn't having evil gods, those are normal. the notable thing is actually having good gods, which these settings manage … occasionally.

forgotten realms gods are all at least kinda evil because of how they all accept the whole Wall of the Faithless system instead of trying to put together something better. i'm also not impressed with how apparently the 'good' planes had a big stupid fight over avernus instead of negotiating an agreement, but maybe they've learned better these days.

torag in pathfinder has a paladin code including "Against my people’s enemies, I will show no mercy. I will not allow their surrender, except when strategy warrants. I will defeat them, yet even in the direst struggle, I will act in a way that brings honor to Torag." and in 2e it sounds like they're having him do more sketchy stuff. iomedae in the WotR adventure path had a trumpet issue.

i have complained before about the dungeonomicon having celestials use 'unimportant' souls as building materials

but sometimes writers actually pull it off, and one gets to briefly imagine a cool world with worthwhile gods

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A gentle reminder:

Messaging me out of the blue if we’ve never talked before is great! I welcome the experience, and you should feel comfortable doing that. But you’ll need to provide a little context or goal for the conversation- something as simple as “I really liked your post about <X>” or “I wanted to talk about <Y>” is fine.

We live in a very scammer- and bot-rich environment, unfortunately. Responding to a bare “hi” or “what’s up” carries enough risks that I can’t afford to do it as a habit. But scammers and bots have to work en masse on thousands of people at once- so the simplest solution is just to show that you’ve given that conversation more attention or time investment than a scammer could afford. Personalized messages, indications that you’ve read my writing, anything that couldn’t be usefully copy+pasted. Cheers!

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This commenter definitely did the smart thing by memorizing! Poems often get better when you do that; highly recommended to anyone that hasn't played the 'memorizing poetry' game yet.

Anyway, I thought I'd clarify my motives a little bit. They're basically correct here that I'm waggling my eyebrows at Current Events- I try to avoid being overly topical or reflexive about the day's news, but I do wear my liberalism on my sleeve around here, and my instinctive reaction to this stuff shouldn't be too hard to imagine.

The New Colossus may be mounted on a plaque at Lady Liberty's feet, but it's not original to the statue. Nor, I suppose, was the sentiment. Lazarus' work was written in the closing decades of the 19th century, and really helped codify the statue as a symbol of immigration and exile. Before that it was 'liberty' in the sense of, hmm, being a republic and not a monarchy? Liberty as representative government, liberty as a state that represented the vox populi. The New Colossus was a reinvention, albeit not an inappropriate one.

And that reinvention took place in the last part of the 19th century, of course, because that was when immigration started to become contested. In modern terms, the overton window had shifted; the Chinese Exclusion Act was written in 1883, the same year as this poem, and Emma Lazarus herself would see a period of steadily increasing restrictions on immigration culminating in the Immigration Act proper in 1924. That's the law that instituted (near-)global rate limits on a per-country basis. Donald Trump's second term marked the centennial of this strange experiment of turning away those who would otherwise call themselves American, though those of us born in to that experiment have a funny way of assuming this is the natural or inevitable order of the world.

We don't get this stirring, immortal poem because the 1880s were some golden age of open movement and welcoming attitudes towards refugees- more the opposite, really. Clenching fists, rising xenophobia, hardening hearts. There's grief in this poem, for those with eyes to see, and a desperation to find the right words to express those moral truths that were once too obvious to be said. This soaring rhetoric is an old maneuver in a battle we've been fighting for a long, long time, passing on the baton from one generation to the next as we go.

Art and culture can be funny that way. The most precious parts of life are always at their most visible- and their most artistically salient- when they're coming, or going. Our minds work by telling stories, and stories are most compelling when they're about beginnings and endings. We get totally scrambled by this, with a topsy-turvy view of the world.

For Emma Lazarus, the world was getting darker, and so she wrote about a beautiful golden torch. She captured a few of those precious glimmers in bronze, so that we wouldn't forget them when the night fell.

But I have a graph for you.

Look, damn you!

The closing of the American identity, the myopic vision of the United States as a treasure in some vault to be passed covetously from parents to children- this thing was not so permanent after all. That century-long experiment in isolationism has ended.

We are, just about, at the same fraction of immigrants in 2025 that we were in 1883.

Yes, there are heavy and terrible laws. Yes, there are rising tides of xenophobia and authoritarianism. Yes, they are building camps. They are doing those things in 2025 for the same reason that Emma Lazarus wrote a poem in 1883. Because we understand the world through stories, and stories are at their most powerful when they're about endings.

You have to understand this, or you won't understand anything at all: the fury of the present moment exists because the experiment is over. Because for more than a hundred years, no matter how many laws they passed, and no matter how many walls they built, and no matter how many people got black-bagged and dragged away by thugs with badges, Liberty's torch was still held high over all of it, untarnished and indomitable.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" --Emma Lazarus

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The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" --Emma Lazarus