here is an uh, warning, based on experiences i have had in the past with multiple versions of this
if you have intrusive thoughts and OCD, taking psychadelics runs a risk of making these much worse, potentially in the medium-long term. the reason being here that the salience-amplification and plasticty and thoughts-unbound-from-self can be not great things to be running while having these badly
now, in my understanding, psychedelics are sometimes noted as benefiting, rather than making worse, OCD. i can buy that, it might be YMMV. but speculatively, maybe a distinction is: if the fears here are more "internal" rather than "external", that is, less that you are afraid you will suddenly do something sudden and concrete and more that say, you are afraid of adopting certain worldviews, believing certain things, or having certain like orders of priorities in life or caring about some things more or less, then that might be more reason for psychadelics to harm rather than help: because the plasticity and salience boosting seems like its actually directly having the feared outcome, and honestly to some extent might even actually move things in the direction of it for real (by attaching negative feelings to something, by salience not being fully isolated from subconscious belief or feeling, etc.). which is uh, worrying
ideologically i am pretty pro-psychadelics, i dont think psychadelics are bad, but i have never seen anyone really describe... how bad this can get and i felt i should write something
this post tbh is probably one of the few things i wrote here on this iteration of my blog that actually has a chance of mattering so im gonna make it my pin. like i do wanna emphasize that the risk here IME is both a really severe worsening of intrusive thoughts and, to some extent, genuinely shifting your basic instincts/emotions/epistemic inclinations in ways that are actively worse in whatever direction youd find particularly upsetting such that youd fixate on it in the first place
it's kind of funny that yudkowsky and the rationalists of all people ended up writing some p good pop philosophy making a reasonable case against overly conflating "science" or "scientific consensus" as an institution and the standards of evidence within (with p values and peer review etc) with like, having good epistemology broadly or being something either always sufficient or always necessary to make decisions... I do not, tbc, think the rats had good epistemology. but they were actually very correct about this one thing in a way that still I think has not reached a lot of pop science people or "skeptics" etc. and continuously annoys me whenever i see it
every so often i remember how awesome the modern interconnected multicultural world is. i grew up getting to hear fairy tales from all over the world. africa, asia, europe, america. everywhere in between. i can have bagels for breakfast, curry for lunch, and ramen for dinner without even leaving the city limits. music and art and philosophy and technology that originated thousands of miles and years apart from eachother have come together and interwoven into something greater than the sum of its parts. its hard not fall into despair when thinking about the horrors but god. god the wonders.
Maidism began as a project here out of frustration with how much of the English language derives from masculine language. What started as frenzied hacking each head of this hydra upon discovery has cohered into a linguistic style that others have taken inspiration from and contributed to. This post collects those scattered principles into a single accessible location, to be updated over time, useful for whether you want to maidicize your everyday speech, reference it for creative fiction, or just think it's neat.
Maidism has one modest goal: the total feminization of the English language. Rip out masculinity root and stem, refuse to settle for "gender-neutral" language. Above all, have fun and be yourself, that's why I do this, and always question knowledge you've taken for granted, both in and outside the realm of etymology.
Why Maidist?
My first inklings of Maidism were born from my annoyance at the term Rifleman in military simulation spaces and a desire for a feminine replacement besides the standard, clunky "Riflewoman." I eventually settled on Riflemaid, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it skews as close to man/mate as one can get while still being visually and audibly distinct, allowing it to easily replace them in existing phrases and compound words.
Secondly, "female" derives from Latin "femelle" (to suckle) but was later altered to match "male" so, doesn’t really serve our purposes here. "Woman" likewise comes from when "man" was neutral and synonymous with "hand" around 8 centuries ago, where we had the feminine "wifman" (wifehand) and masculine "werman" (manhand), but with "man" now masculine, woman doesn’t quite work either. That's where we get werewolf btw.
Thirdly, we already use maid in this way, just uncommonly, with mermaid, barmaid, handmaid, shieldmaid, bridesmaid, and so on. I like it, maid feels good on the tongue, and I work in housekeeping, I think maid deserves to be a term of honor, as femininity deserves as a whole, rather than its historical and contemporary denegrated position.
Why English?
It's my primary language. I've heard from those involved in great feminist discourse happening in other languages across the globe, and while I do some due diligence in basic feminizing of loan words I use in writing (o -> a in Spanish agent nouns, +in for Deutsch), I'm probably not who you should consult for deeper detail on that.
Why Idialect?
In linguistics, an idiolect describes the distinct dialect of an individual, and Maidism is more or less the product of a one maid army, though maybe it won't stay that way! However, the Greek idio- is masculine, its feminine equivalent is idia-. Thus, idialect.
The Fundamentals
So, down to the actual brass tacks. We can largely divide masculine language into two categories:
intrinsically masculine language, which contains a root or suffix synonymous with "man"
extrinsically masculine language, which lacks any masculine signifiess, but grew to be treated as masculine over time
There's gray areas, but let's go over some clear examples.
These feminize as mailmaid, actress, bakster, lieutenante, aquaria, and matriot, respectively. You can also mix up feminine suffixes, -trice/-trix/-tress are synonymous, same with -ster/-stress/ess, and others. Use what feels right to you in the moment! If you don't know the origin of an agent suffix, check it on wiktionary, there's a good chance its masculine.
Generally, avoid -er, -(t)or, -(ar)ius, -eur, -ant, -o. Be particularly wary of words from Latin and French, they're slippery bastardes. At least French you can slap an -e on most suffixes and call it a day.
Traditionally feminize as priestess, lady, queen, shepherdess, bee, duck. Some of these terms (priest, lord, king) have no inherent masculinity to them, they were just roles historically exclusive to men. Shepherd is a clipping from sheepherder, I think it along with terms like priest or baron are fine, it can also be fun to use shepherdess, priestess, baroness, and the like. Femininity isn't something extraneous, it's something to assert proudly and to enjoy!
Drone, drake, and other terms for sexgendering animals are silly, all animals are girls. I also think its fine to keep using those terms as long as you're not thinking of the animal as "male" and still know she's, yknow, she. Use at your own peril.
This is far, far from comprehensive, and I'll likely add more as I learn more independently from others, I'm doing it all the time, it's something I enjoy and, if anymaid else gets something from this, awesome, yknow? Maybe this grows into more, maybe it stays a basic primess I can hand to randoms who download my wargame RIFLEMAID and go "why is this written like that" we'll see lol. And if it gets one person to stop saying "guys/dude/bro/man/buddy" all the time, that's a win in my book
I would like to emphasize that I agree with all of these tags by the way. My post wasn't aiming to pin all of Europe's grotesque racism on the new elections.
A few weeks ago I was at a board game night with some of my old classmates from various mainland European countries. They started talking about how horrible Trump's treatment of immigrants is and how they're so glad to be in Europe where nothing like that is happening right now. I asked them what they thought about the fact that their own governments were complicit in turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave of asylum seekers, and some of them legitimately didn't even know and were surprised to hear that their own governments had enacted policies that caused the deaths of thousands of asylum seekers.
Even here in Iceland, almost nobody has been talking about the fact that some of the far right populist parties have legitimately been talking about wanting to establish detainment camps to keep asylum seekers in.
This post is a few months old now, and the bit about Iceland is now outdated, because Alþingi (the Icelandic parliament) passed the bill approving the detention center for asylum seekers. It will be legal to handcuff and detain children there.
Never let anyone from Europe feed you the lie that racism and fascism are unique to North America in the 21st century.
Similar to money transfer services for travelling merchants in olden days, you deposit your phone with me, then fly to your destination country and withdraw an equivalent phone with the same data on it. This way you can avoid having sensitive information on your phone when you are searched at the boarder. (With snoopy boarder guards being the equivalent to bandits and pirates of olden days)
Unfortunately, if this became popular, I suspect the feds might just change the rules or ban such a business, since unlike bandits and pirates, the feds also control the destination.
there's probably? a way to do this just by saving the phone info via USB to some kind of encrypted file hosting site and then downloading it onto a burner later but I am not familiar enough with like, file size and formats and what a phone can can upload etc. to know how easy or difficult this would be practically
parapsychologists confirm NPC theory and prove majority of the population have no conscious experience. despite their pleas of resistance, society gradually shifts towards brutal exploitation and enslavement of the NPC for the benefit of the conscious, reasoning that it would be wrong for resources to go from real people to mindless golems. when the world ends everyone wakes up somewhere else, and told by horrified celestials that they had been bestowed consciousness as a sort of recording device or viewing device, just a kind of camera, to make a record of the beings in this world, who had simply been assumed to be valuable in themself regardless of what mode of experience they existed in. why in heaven would you assume otherwise? consciousness was a tool for elevating such beings, not something to set themself above as the only truly valuable. or at the very least, they could have value in the process of entering the experience of their observers. their hubris had made the world into a hell
Question for the day: how many people in history of civilization have been as bad or worse at sex as Stalin? I don’t mean in the “physical sex life was bad” sense, i.e. he’s a notorious P&V kind of guy. I mean in the “hardcore statism sex is bad and this is why people did horrible things” sense. Stalin had the best sex life of anyone in history. (I mean, last I checked, anyway.)
(He also invented the kaleidoscope, for some reason. I dunno.)
I am in a void, in no-space, though this nothing-space is in some sense quite cluttered. I speak to the void about my deepest anxieties, for here, where I do not bare my face or name, I may bare all else. Hands reach out from the darkness to comfort me.
A friend, from the void, displays a picture of Donald Trump as an anime girl, but I presume in an ironic not in a fashy way. I do not entirely understand but I hand him a heart, in hopes of being seen as in on the joke. It is the currency of this place, but everyone has an infinite budget of and cannot circulate this exonumia.
Another friend walks up to me. Her husband has built a monstrous homunculus of himself for his amusement, but the universe, in its horror, has exiled this poor half-creature to this void. “WHAT,” she said “do you think about my robot boyfriend’s take on Stalin’s sex life.” I struggle as I try to think of an acceptably interesting response, for I crave the void exonumia.
i dont have strong feelings about the usefulness or reality carvingness of the term "epstein class" and its fine to argue against the frame entirely idk, but like, at minimum simply substituting "capitalists" as an alternative frame seems v silly when its intended designation seems to be a social network that prominently includes politicians, academics, and most notably and egregiously royalty
i do think "patriarchy" actually probably comes much closer to a reasonable reframing! but on the one hand even that doesnt account for the particularities of a social network and their influence here, on the other it may well be that class is the wrong frame here not because others in a class are not doing similar or similarly bad things but because they are, therefor its a mistake to identify a whole class with a subset? idk im probably saying this confusedly
i dont have strong feelings about the usefulness or reality carvingness of the term "epstein class" and its fine to argue against the frame entirely idk, but like, at minimum simply substituting "capitalists" as an alternative frame seems v silly when its intended designation seems to be a social network that prominently includes politicians, academics, and most notably and egregiously royalty
i made a post like this before but I can't find it now. so. I'll just redo it.
What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?
It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.
My first news thing I remember is the OJ Simpson trial. I vaguely remember watching the news with my grandparents before that, but that's the first story I remember, in part because my second grade teacher had us go play so she could watch the verdict 😂
The two that come to mind are the 1996 presidential election when we were all amused by how Ross Perot only got 8% of the vote, without the context that this was kind of extraordinary.
I'm sure there were other things before that (I was sapient before 1996) but that's the first one I really remember being on all the TVs.
(Obviously 4 years later, but in retrospect, it was good my mom wouldn't let me stay up until they decided Florida.)
are there any edible lichens? not necessarily lichens that are eaten, just ones that could be
Very few, but yes! Lichens are hardly ever a preferred food source (they resist cultivation, are slow growing, labor intensive to prepare, not easily digested by the human body, and don't taste great) but are sometimes used as thickeners, flavoring agents, traditional medicines, or as a back-up food source in times of famine. A few of note:
Cetraria islandica, aka Iceland moss, fjallagrasa
The only lichen I have really eaten! It is used as a flavor additive, tea, and cough medicine (the efficacy of which is debatable), and is made into alcohol becuase people will make anything into alcohol. I have had traditional Icelandic flatbread made with C. islandica, and regularly drink C. islandica schnaps:
It has a grassy, earthy, kind of musky, tanic flavor. It's an acquired taste, to say the least. But it's grown on me.
Bryoria fremontii, aka Wila, edible horsehair lichen
This lichen is incredibly culturally significant to the First Nations people of western North America, and has historically been used as food, medicine, bandage material, building material, diapers, dyes, fiber, and much more! Traditional Salish food preparation involves cleaning, soaking, and baking the lichen in an underground pit oven, the whole process taking several days to form dense, almost gelatinous loaves.
Be warned, however, if this has you thinking about going out and eating some right now: certain chemotypes with a yellow tinge contain toxic vulpinic acid, which is bad for you.
Parmotrema sp., aka, black stone flower, kalpasi, dagad phool
Lichens of this genus from eastern Asia are used as an aromatic spice and thickening agent in some parts of India, and are often hailed for their medicinal properties.
I had a jar of homemade curry spice gifted to me that used it, but can't say that I could really distinguish it from all the other spices.
Circinaria sp., aka manna or heavenly bread
You may have heard how god blessed the Israelites wandering in the desert with "manna from heaven" to stave off their hunger, and there is some ethnobotanical evidence that this was referring to vagrant Circinaria/Aspicilia lichens. It makes some sense: when dry, the lichen is pale and small, and difficult to distinguish from the arid dirt of its preferred habitat, but after rain, it swells and darkens in color, and looks as if it just fell out of the sky! The evidence is let's say, dubious, but it is fun to think about.
This is by no means an exhaustive list--just a few I have looked into. If anyone else has experience with edible lichens, feel free to add on!
Sources and further readings:
Edible wild plant use in the Faroe Islands and Iceland
Ethnolichenology of Bryoria fremontii: Wisdom of elders, population ecology, and nutritional chemistry
Diyarbakir's heavenly bread and other manna of things
Kalpasi: The Black Stone Flower spice of Southern India
Ethnolichenology—The Use of Lichens in the Himalayas and Southwestern Parts of China
insularity and esoteric ideology and various commitment tests is actually a p good ward against infiltrators, not a mark of them. the more alienated from society a community is the harder they are to infiltrate, generally speaking. now, unless you think there are good reasons otherwise to be so alienated (and tbc there often can be), this is... a tradeoff. but it seems almost entirely backwards to me to suspect like, more ideologically committed niche groups of being a psyop
