Random things that I like @calisomnia - Tumblr Blog

The Rule of 3

There are 3 things your character needs to survive, no matter what the situation is: food, water and shelter. Well, and air, of course.

The Rule of 3 means that a human can only survive.

3 minutes without air. If your character can’t breathe, if they’re drowning for example, they can’t draw in the oxygen their blood needs, but most importantly, they can’t expel the carbon dioxide that is slowly poisoning them.

EDIT: Thanks to a reader @forcesunleashed, I learned that my information was incorrect, and for that, followers, I am so sorry. If a person is drowning, chances are they will be unconscious within a minute or less, which is not enough time for them to be poisoned by carbon dioxide. Death occurs from oxygen deprivation to the brain.

(if there are any other eagle eyed readers that spot something incorrect in my posts, please do not hesitate to call me out!)

3 hours without shelter. I know this may seem trivial compared to food and water, but in extreme conditions, like freezing in the Arctic or baking in the desert, it wouldn’t take much for the environment to kill your character. Finding shelter protects your character from the elements. I would even go as far as to include fire and clothing in this section. Anything your character can use to protect themselves from the brutality of nature is going to increase their chances of survival.

3 days without water. Dehydration is a nasty, painful way to die. Without water, their body slowly starts using what fluid they have in their urine, their blood, and their sweat to keep their motor running. Eventually, that fluid runs out, their organs fail and they die.

3 weeks without food. Everybody knows we need food to live. It provides your character with the energy they need to secure everything else on this list. Without food, your characters body will essentially start to cannibalize itself. It digests the nutrients from parts of their body to fuel the other parts. Your character can go longer without food than water, but without the energy to find water, your character is doomed either way.

In the following weeks I will be making master posts highlighting all of these things with example scenarios and suggestions for getting your character out alive.

whyenn-reader

part of being an adult is figuring out what eveyone else's definition of "going crazy" is. to you it is not sleeping for 60 hours, writing 80k words in one sitting and expiriencing enough anxiety to kill a horse. to beth from accounting its buying a ticket to Columbus, Ohio. and to your friend its consuming so much ketamine you lose all of your posessions and wake up with five broken bones in a ditch somewhere and then proceeding to do it again the next day. to your other friend its writing a letter to their favourite actress about how much they appreciate her work. to your neighbour its laughing loudly in a grocery store whilst in pajamas. maya from uni hears the voice of her dead father making jokes with no punchlines and she considers that to be quite normal - to her going crazy would be hearing her husband instead. your downstairs neighbour will take night walks naked sometimes and claim there is nothing weird about him. there are literally no rules to life and all meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

dazeylily

it's sorta funny (ignoring the horrors) that cis people can't be trusted with a deadname. any time someone tells me theirs I've forgotten it five minutes later, if you had names for your toes that would be far more interesting to me, but cis people get real "if you give a mouse a cookie" about it it

orrangeslices

I'm terrified of people even knowing it, because I know that some people will instantly lock that into their heads as my "real name" and eventually slip and say it instead

Something something that charlottan post about how even if people have only ever known you as the gender you transitioned to, they're still gonna think "oh they're just a boy that I need to remember to call a girl"

dazeylily

Most people won't slip up like that, the average cis person walks on eggshells so they don't accidentally reveal they're just humoring us out of a sense of obligation, they'll think about it and get even more anxious while doing that. This reinforces the wall between them and any insight into the situation.

dazeylily

a wild strawman appears

estrogenesis-eeveeangelion

does someone stand behind these people with a gun forcing them to type this shit where everyone can see it. what in the fuck is even going on

estrogenesis-eeveeangelion

like IMAGINE just admitting this, under no duress

infinite-planes

Yeah a comment like that goes in the tags, which are considered private. Fortunately that’s where it was

dazeylily

I get a notification for every note, including this one. They are very much not considered private, if anything you are sending them directly to me.

dazeylily

private area do not read

estrogenesis-eeveeangelion

"the tags, which are considered private"

phallicide

during my 2,000 years in military service upon the wartorn world of Bantok, we had a member of our unit named Private Tags who was so covered in skin tags you couldnt see his real face. Saying the tag arent private dishonors his memory in incomprhensibly vile ways, youre all going ot mega hell

estrogenesis-eeveeangelion

ah PFC Tags. we miss him every day. war is hell

doyoulovethewayzeylily

great post! funny how all the trans women are deleted

rosecrystal

This amount of individualism is exactly whats gonna kill us all btw

ashintheairlikesnow

"Going a couple hours without eating a single kind of food? No thanks, I would rather kill a child" is such a wildly horrifying take to see MULTIPLE people proudly stating.

todaysbird

had….had someone been punishing them for this?

(source)

segamascott

i have #sickfreaks i feed my birds kellogg's

riseofthecommonwoodpile

you make one fucking post where the point is “women are encouraged to develop disordered eating from a very young age and that impacts how we view the ‘natural’ size and shape of women” and too many reblogs later i am being accused of saying short people wouldn’t exist if they ate better growing up. i’m sorry but if you genuinely think i was saying that you are just a buffoon. i cannot and will not sanction your buffoonery.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Sam Handwich.

sufficientlylargen

If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.

zooperdoopers

I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)‌

sufficientlylargen

Oh, wary dell vone

zooperdoopers

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.

Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))

thinkedem

Where can one support the Pikiwedia, to further ruin the banes of actual information (also known as genai chatbots)?

zooperdoopers

if anyone wishes to support pikiwedia i would instead donate to the wikimedia foundation !! they are doing far more to fight for a free and unslopped internet.

also, i directly use their free (!!!!) api. pikiwedia relies directly on the wisdom and hard work of millions of wikipedia authors. protect this amazing source of collaborative open source knowledge for the many, many obvious reasons, but also so that pikiwedia can continue to scrongle it.

spontaneousmusicalnumber

A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore

spontaneousmusicalnumber

The vegan “any animal death ever is morally wrong” mindset doesn’t hold up when:

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

I don’t know how to end this except. Sometimes things just gotta die and acting otherwise just isn’t a realistic expectation.

spontaneousmusicalnumber

Highlights from the notes over the past 6 months include a lot of angry vegans saying “you’re blowing things out of proportion, no vegans actually think like this!” and a lot of people who work in conservation and education saying “Every day. I have to fight people who think like this.”

As a bonus this post was originally inspired by the vegan who called me racist for saying we should kill invasive species

deactivated-this-account-deacti

I ended up having a really interesting conversation with some people at the bus stop today. They were getting out of some sort of ‘clean and sober’ meeting and had starting saying how they were so bored because they didn’t have anything to do, and had to stay at home because all their old friends would pull them back. So I said something like, ‘So this is the time to do all the stuff your parents told you they didn’t have money/time for!’ “Whatcha mean?” “You know, like when you were five and you REALLY wanted to have that toy or do that thing and you were like, ‘Please mom please I gotta have this I gotta go do this’ and they went ‘Hell no you think I’m paying for that do you want to goddamn EAT?’ “ And this light went on in their eyes. The lady is going to go check thrift stores for an Easybake Oven and I told her about Wilton cake decorating classes. The dude is going to Griffith Park and ride horses, because, ‘I always wanted to be a cowboy, and you can’t drink when you’re on a horse ‘cause you’ll fucking die!’ Fuck it. This is what being an adult is. Sure it’s bills and work and relationships, but damn it, it’s also time to do the things you LIKE. I signed up for a free class/lecture on Water Gardens. I’m going. It’s time.

ruthfully

Jill. Jill you are wonderful.

lostwolfling

no joke, this is such an important aspect of overcoming trauma. I mean the trauma of abusive parents, the trauma of broke ass parents who got toxic because of it, the trauma of capitalism. Like fuck it. Go to Wrestlemania. Build a shit ton of terrariums.

creature-wizard

So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?

I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.

penrosesun

OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.

In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”

livebloggingmydescentintomadness

this is a pdf detailing the BITE model of authoritarian control, a method for determining whether or not you're in a cult.

even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.

penrosesun

Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.

Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.

This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.

People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.

Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.

Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!

It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.

One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…

This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.

If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.

“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.

redstonedust

some people like to get mad at disability benefits because they think its unfair people who dont work get a payout from the government while they have to work 50 hours at the human suffering factory every week. but if you tell them "yeah that sucks i think you should also get a universal allowance and not have to work 50 hours at the human suffering factory every week" thats apparently the wrong answer.