toroidal-spider

[toroidal-spider]

Are you trapped on tumblr right now?

Is there something you planned to do before you got trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Are you yelling at yourself to get up and do the thing, but you can’t, because you’re trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Consider this your save point.

Put tumblr down, stand up, stretch, and go do the thing you planned to do. Future you will be incredibly grateful.

[toroidal-spider]

[toroidal-spider]

you should post your millipede

HOW DID YUO FIND OUT ABOUT MY MILLIPEDE

anyways here it is

[toroidal-spider]

On my first day in Germany I got to my hotel and I couldn't get the lights to turn on. And I was like "Eh, fuck it, I'll just take a shower in the dark." And then the shower wouldn't get hot. I waited and waited and it stayed ice cold.

So I go down to the front desk and I'm like "My lights won't turn on and my shower won't get hot" so they send this guy up with me. We get into the room and I flick the switch and nothing happens so I'm like "See?"

And he goes "You must put your card in the slot."

"I... what? I have to put my room card in the light switch?"

"Of course!"

Now I have been in many hotels in the US and never encountered this concept, but apparently it was something most of their guests already knew. So I'm looking like a fool at this point. I feel like an idiot. The dude is fully grinning at me. I put the card in the slot and voila, the light turns on.

Then he's like "Ok, let's see if the shower works. You know you must wait for the hot water?" and I just know he's thinking I'm an idiot who also can't use a shower. This stupid American can't wait for the hot water! She can't even use a light switch or a shower!

And I guess he was distracted by these thoughts of my stupidity, because this dude fully stepped into the shower. In his nice dress shirt and slacks. He just. Gets into the shower.

And turns it on.

Have you ever seen a playing field get leveled instantaneously

[toroidal-spider]

Drafts from the past. Some turned into something else, others left unfinished. 🍊

[toroidal-spider]

[toroidal-spider]

Fun fact: by just using imaginary numbers, some Evil Math, and 101 rotating vectors You Can Create a shitty approximation of a fish.

[toroidal-spider]

The Conspiratorial Mindset

So, I've always had a bit of an interest in scams and hokum, and what people call "Cults".

One of the common refrains when you talk about religious Cults is, "If you think about it all religions have beliefs that seem odd to outsiders" and this is true, but as I read more about cults I started to think,

"Wait, a lot of these groups aren't united just by having unusual religious or supernatural views; a lot of them also seem to have matching patterns of behaviors that have nothing to do with belief in psychic space aliens"

I'm talking about things like,

Having a leadership structure which is absolute, where the top leaders cannot be disciplined or even openly criticized by lower members;

Exerting tremendous control over the dress and behavior of adherents;

Telling adherents that outsiders are untrustworthy and that contact with outsiders should be strictly limited and heavily monitored by organizational leadership;

The extensive and common use of shunning and reprogramming in response to violation of any of the above rules.

In some groups, failing to adhere to the dress code and spending a lot of time with outsiders is, at worst, the subject of a few little jabs at family gatherings. In other groups, those same behaviors are treated as Defcon one crises and become the central issue of the adherent's relationship with everybody else in the organization until they can be bullied back into doing the organization's bidding.

It was gratifying to learn that other people have noticed these patterns (Some people prefer the term "High Control Group" to "Cult" because it highlights what the actual problem is)

I am starting to notice similar dynamics in what are commonly called "Conspiracy theories".

The thing about conspiracy theories is... Well, conspiracies exist, and sometimes groups of powerful people get together to do something in secret which would get them in big trouble if they were to do it openly.

But I am starting to notice a particular, I don't know, a particular way of conceptualizing the organization and purpose of conspiracies which is unique to some people and which characterizes the kind of conspiracy theorist who takes Alex Jones seriously.

I kind of think of it as a "Witch-Hunting mentality".

For certain people in more primitive times and places, if they, say, slipped off a ladder and hurt themselves, their first thought would be, "That must have happened because a witch cursed me. We need to find and punish the witch who cursed me."

And this isn't just the attribution of malice that characterizes this idea:

One malicious conspiracy that might make you fall off a ladder is a manufacturer who doesn't care about safety ratings. Imagine that the manufacturer is really deliberately malicious here. A subordinate comes to him and says, "Our ladders can't reliably hold the weight of a person and a lot of them will probably break and cause people to fall and hurt themselves." and he says, "I know that but who cares, by the time people figure it out it'll be too late to get their money back."

That's a malicious conspiracy, but, importantly, if Bob buys a faulty ladder and falls off, the conspiracy wasn't trying to hurt Bob; it merely didn't care whether Bob got hurt.

Now, this distinction doesn't take away the malice and hostility towards Bob, but if you go to the ladder manufacturer and say, "Hey boss, Bob bought one of our faulty ladders, but he's really skinny so the ladder didn't break" the manufacturer will go, "Who the fuck is Bob? And good, that's one less angry person."

Whereas imagine Bob's ladder has been cursed to break by a witch. The witch did it because she hates Bob, and wants him to fall, and if she finds out he didn't fall, she'll go, "Curses, I'll have to find some other way to hurt Bob."

Conspiracy theorists, it seems to me, are far more inclined to conceptualize conspiracies as acts of deliberate malice aimed at them rather than acts of negligent malice.

@loving-n0t-heyting posted this article from the New York Post which contains a good example of what I mean:

“I thought I was on the cutting edge of promoting rights for gay people,” Yang said. “But then I started looking deeper into where this was coming from and who was paying for it, and I started to get very disillusioned...

I assume the people paying for it are LGBT advocacy groups? Did you, uh, not know that the people you were working for were paying you to work for them?

“When you really dig down you can see how much of this comes from documents and plans at the United Nations,” Yang said, referring in part to the UN’s “Gender Equality” initiative. “It’s part of a global agenda to restructure society, re-structure our social norms and the economy,” Yang claimed. “They are undermining the sexually dimorphic nature of reality and breaking down the differences between the sexes to break down our identity. They are constructing identities for us and they want us to adopt them.”

Oh, I see.

This is exactly what I mean. LGBT rights efforts make Yang and others feel disoriented, like society is being restructured and that they are being left behind, like they aren't quite in control of social norms and that stable identity categories can't be relied on anymore.

Now, one kind of conservative might look at that and say, "These are bad second order effects of LGBT people trying to assert their lifestyle in public and that's why we should oppose them."

But another kind says, "These changes make me feel unstable. Therefore, the main purpose of the changes is to make me feel unstable. In order to understand these changes, I need to figure out who wants me to feel unstable and what they would gain from making me feel unstable."

The idea that Yang's feeling of instability is simply a side effect of a series of efforts mainly focused on LGBT rights is incomprehensible. Instead, she believes that there is a series of efforts focused mainly on making her feel unstable, with LGBT rights as a kind of side effect to the main goal of making her feel unstable.

This kind of thing is, to me, a big red flag that indicates that we are starting to float away from reasonable conspiracy thinking into crazy town.

I am particularly curious if folks can recommend any writers or researchers who have noticed this dynamic.

[toroidal-spider]

How to be a househusband and housewife together

There are many women out there who want to be a housewife. I, however, want to be a househusband. So, how is that going to work? You can't be a housewife and househusband together, right?

Wrong.

Here is my guide on how that is in fact possible and how to achieve it. Women, please listen up, because this is important to you when you marry me which I know you want to do.

Step 1) I become your househusband.

Step 2) You become my housewife.

Step 3) The bank takes the house.

Step 4) Can't be a househusband and a housewife without a house, right?

Step 5) Wrong. We pretend to move out, but actually we are just moving all of our stuff into the walls of the house, where we will live. Much like house gnomes.

Step 6) This can go on for years if we play it right, but eventually the family living there finds us.

Step 7) We get arrested on some trumped up charges like trespassing. We both know they are actually arresting us for daring to love.

Step 8) We go to prison.

Step 9) But what else is prison called?

Step 10) The jailHOUSE.

Step 11) We just can't stop winning.

Step 12) We get out of prison but have to reintegrate back into society.

Step 13) Where do we do that?

Step 14) The halfway HOUSE.

Step 15) We just can't stop winning.

Step 16) After we leave we have trouble finding stable employment due to our criminal record..

Step 17) So we become freelance DJs who play at clubs, restaurants, and parties.

Step 18) And what kind of music do we play?

Step 19) We just can't stop winning.

[toroidal-spider]

bingewatching will never come close to bingereading. there is nothing like blocking out the entire Earth for ten hours to read a book in one sitting no food no water no shower no bra and emerging at the end with no idea what time it is or where you are, a dried-up prune that's sensitive to light and loud noises because you've been in your room in the dark reading by the glow of a single LED. it's like coming back after a three-month vacation in another dimension and now you have to go downstairs and make dinner. absolutely transcendental

[toroidal-spider]

i cant quite express what i mean, but any conception about what's important in all human lives will find many many, possibly the majority, perfectly normal (i.e. not particular miserable for their time and place) lives that do almost nothing to touch on those themes. life cant be about love (in anything in the modern sense), life can't be about friendship (in again, the modern sense), life can't be about family, life can't be about pleasure, or about great achievement, or art, it can't even be about god. i think any conception of what makes human lives valuable has to have a vast number of independent senses of the good, if it wants to see the way all these normal lives are valuable, if it doesnt want to see the human life lying behind us as "mostly a waste"

and importantly....i think such a conception is correct! that when we look on these lives, it is only by contorting our minds that we can dismiss these lives. human lifespan is limited, the ways human life can have value are unlimited, so every life (well, not every life. lots of lives) is virtuous in ways that other lives have not been as virtuous. and this isnt against striving towards virtue, its very in favor of striving to virtue! but the point is that striving toward virtue isnt like there's some score (or small set of scores) that everybody gets, and youre always going to be lower (and higher!) on the virtue score than someone else, and your position on the virtue score matters. its more like....math research! that there are a million ways to be virtuous, vita brevis, ars longa, even if everybody set their heart on being virtuous as hard as possible, we could never come close to "completing" or "perfecting" virtue

i think "moral saints" really got to me. but i mean, you can see the vision im pointing at right? you can still be BAD at math research. but also, comparing at math research is silly. there's only so many math geniuses, and math is infinite! if math is going to get better, it needs all hands on deck. comparative advantage. its *comparative advantage* at virtue!

[toroidal-spider]

From 3DBearnadette on tweeter...

[toroidal-spider]

[toroidal-spider]

this is a real scene in the movie. i-i think.

[toroidal-spider]

yoooo guys these wings my dad made look INSANE i can’t wait to try them tomorrow

[toroidal-spider]

JAJAKDJFXJKWKAK&&3&;992lekda+{}{+\=\==2858/9/9/&38;9/&:;&:&/&:.