actually-the-sun

any pronouns "Concentrate on this phrase: 'beyond this world, I live.' Say it to yourself now. Ignore the disclaimer."

[comment-tube]

[onrtrp]

sure man. whatever

[o-craven-canto]

Alternate timeline in which all Greek and Latin roots are swapped:

catastrophe -> contraverse cephalopod -> capitoped chlorophyll -> viridofolia democracy -> populimpery homicide -> anthropoctony homosexual -> equigamic kilometer -> millimensure interregnum -> mesarchy magnanimous -> megapsychic manuscript -> chirography motorcycle -> ergatorote microscope -> parvovisor oxygen -> acidofex polyamory -> multierasty television -> remotoscope universe -> monostrophe

[cryptotheism]

Bro wants to be a fop but he's barely dapper

[cryptotheism]

Bro called himself bohemian with zero joie de vivre

[tsarina-anadyomene]

There's really this strong temptation that everyone has which basically says "to have interiority is to be like me; ordinary people are surface everywhere." And this manifests in different ways in different spaces, and becomes really pronounced when you cluster together with similar people. So tumblr users often act like straight people don't have any interiority because it helps you feel the deepening of social bonds with other gay people. This happens professionally too. I think it was Summer or Sharks who was saying that programming people think that intelligence is just being really good at writing code. Not surprising but very strange to me! I am (equally ridiculously) used to thinking that intelligence is being really good at philosophy, having command of a lot of sources that you can use creatively, etc. This reflects a kind of dynamic on tumblr and reddit. On reddit to have interiority is to be a science guy and on tumblr to have interiority is to be a humanities girl (and the dynamic is gendered in exactly this way). And I think there is something dangerous about habitually regarding other people as automatons. It's good to have people outside of your niche to remind you that other people from different walks of life are quite deep and complicated. They are full of love and fine grained attention to things you never thought to care about. And I think a lot of people go through life thinking of themselves as perpetually victimized by basically empty people rather than having genuine confrontations with full, genuine people who are committed to subtle, complex and real values, who have detailed and intricate histories, and who have a bond to you that you might never quite fully understand. But we rarely even try at understanding these things. We just decide that they're stupid and ridiculous and unreasonable.

[hamsters38]

Started watching twin peaks and you weren't kidding about agent coopers aradiaisms omg

well of course

[agentofdeterioration]

The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad is, to a modern audiences, what classicists have called “boring as hell,” but I can’t help but think that if you were watching Homer recite it it would have been more like when comedians go, “anybody here tonight from Chicago?” and the Chicagoans in the back start cheering

Homer’s like, “and there were forty black ships from… LOCRIS” and the Locrians in the crowd start going absolutely nuts

[thecactifindahome]

[il-castagno-press]

A page of forget-me-nots from my current sketchbook.

[whirligig-girl]

the thing about steampunk spaceflight is that you can investigate all these little things and solve all these little problems but inevitably everything is going to come together disastrously. The whole is worse than the sum of its parts. You can design a really cool steampunk space station--I have definitely tried at times--but it all falls apart when you try to launch it into space.

It's just. You're fundamentally limited by the mediocre materials science and chemistry available in the victorian era. Even if you solve every other problem, the ship is just going to be too heavy and the rocket engines are just going to be too inefficient. You have to cheat! You just have to cheat. You have to cheat somewhere. I always go back and forth on what and where that cheat is. We can't even have liquid hydrogen without cheating.

[random-thought-depository]

It once occurred to me that a civilization might be able to do space travel at a substantially lower level of technology if they could somehow start out in space. A lot of the difficulty of space travel is dealing with Earth's atmosphere and gravity well. If you don't have to deal with starting out under a thick atmosphere and at the bottom of a deep gravity well (and don't need to deal with atmospheric re-entry when you want to go back home) you can build relatively fragile spacecraft and use low power low thrust rockets with long burns.

This thought gave me an idea for, like, a novel set during a space war fought with basically WWII technology between descendants of post-apocalyptic survivors of the collapse of an interstellar civilization who live on O'Neill cylinder type colonies orbiting a gas giant. The colony cylinders and their life support infrastructure are still functioning legacy constructs from the collapsed more advanced civilization and the present civilization would be the product of severe technological regression followed by a couple of centuries of recovery, they have some access to Ragnarok-proofed legacy technology from the more advanced civilization but the stuff they can produce themselves is mostly basically middle twentieth century level, so you get space travel with weird retro technological assumptions (the navigators are doing their math in their heads and with look-up tables and simple mechanical calculating aides, the main weapons of the space warships are basically WWII era battleship guns modified to work in vacuum, battles tend to happen at relatively close range and low relative velocities because of the difficulty of hitting enemy ships at long ranges and high relative velocities with the technology available to these people so you can actually kinda plausibly get soft sci fi space is an ocean visually dramatic space battles, the spaceships need lots of manual labor to work and have big crews cause there's very little automation, a division between "space warships" that are kind of like sea ships and "space fighters/bombers" that are kind of like airplanes might actually kinda make sense cause these people don't really have the tech for guided missiles but could get around that by making a two stage missile with a recoverable first stage that has a pilot, etc.). I have no idea whether that set-up would hold together realistically, but it seemed like an interesting idea for fiction, and there's an obvious built-in patch for feasibility holes with the possibility of patchy survival of more advanced knowledge from the collapsed more advanced civilization and strategic application of Ragnarok-proofed legacy devices built by the collapsed more advanced civilization.

This kind of set-up might work for a relatively hard SF steampunk space setting too, IDK.

[wildgifthorses]

Formal experiments make it so tempting to irritate followers with a conceit forcing unnatural snytax and wording on sentiments lacking in substantive meat. Rather than keeping a regular meter a proper expression of well-defined views has to conform to the structure of thought and proceed at the rhythm of actual news.

[jadagul]

There's a linguist, Anne Cutler, who studied how everyday speech is affected by rhythm and rhyme. She wrote "The perception of rhythm in language". It's easy to read and it's well worth your time.

[unknought]

Higgledy piggledy, turning and turning as gyres are widening, centers unheld,

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

shambling slowly but revelatorily, slouching towards Bethlehem, there to be born.

[transgenderer]

It really feels like at least the Top 10 most like significant Shakespeare plays should be running in nyc at all times. Like, what do you mean I can't just SEE the tempest, whenever I want? And there's no city I could move to where I could? What's the point of this chud planet

[cali]

a lot of my want in making this is that i feel like a lot of my tedious detailwork is somewhat wasted in the way, that the medium im using is usually shared around in. social media is not made to zoom but in a game i get to put the camera as close as i want. its fun to walk around on my drawing, the jirachi pic wont be in the game- im just testing out high res asset stuff here

[cali]

history of speech bubbles

[sticksandsharks]

Birds of a Feather

[cparti-mkiki]

[hyperions-fate]

The nice thing about this heatwave is that you get to feel like Gilgamesh, prince of Uruk and contemplator of the deep, lost and grieving in the sun-lacerated deserts of bronze age Mesopotamia whilst you're getting the shopping from your local Aldi.