spock in a beanie

for processing out loud. i talk a lot about ayurveda from a personal experience angle.

[artmialma]

Sergey Galanter (brn 1971)

Pottery Class

[artmialma]

André Juillard (1948-2024)  

[dashaibo]

Have I ever shown you guys these weird late 80s Soviet Lord Of The Rings illustrations?

They were made by Sergei Iukhimov, who’s virtually unknown otherwise.

More from where that came from

[ask-disneyka]

Holy fuck this is absolutely perfect

I hated them as a kid, but I can appreciate them now.

[femmenietzsche]

Some more reasonably sized ones here:

LOTR art that actually looks like medieval illuminations? holy shit

[morgenlich]

although i’m not able to find specifically when these illustrations were made, they were in a 1993 russian translation of LotR. it should be noted that there were no official translations in russian until after the collapse of the ussr, but samizdat translations were very common (and as i understand still are)

iukhimov was ukrainian by the way, possibly from odesa though there’s very little info on him i can find in english. his now-dead website exists on the internet archive but text only sadly. someone on the tolkien collector site i’ll link below at one point compiled a bunch of his illustrations on weibo though that link seems to be defunct now unfortunately

Sergey Yukhimov

Thank you Zionius. Some astonishing ones there that i havent seen. If you want me to send you pictures of the silmarillion and hobbit illust

Добро пожаловать на сайт одесского художника Юхимова Сергея Борисовича

Project MUSE - When Philology Becomes Ideology: The Russian Perspective of J.R.R. Tolkien

Project MUSE - When Philology Becomes Ideology: The Russian Perspective of J.R.R. Tolkien

[astronicht]

These look weird because they are repeatedly and actively playing with exactly the early medieval images Tolkien was playing with. A few are more modern storybook, but at least one is FANTASTIC riff on the Bayeux tapestry. Another two are lifted directly from early medieval paleography (handwriting) right out of a textbook on Insular incipits (how an opening phrase or title of a manuscript was written). Another im pretty sure borrows from the Book of Kells; that’s definitely a specific image, I know that image. And Tolkien knew it too.

The figures look like, say, the illustrations in Old English Genesis A. There might be a little Eastern Orthodox icon style creeping in, or it might just be that that style has a lot in common with early medieval British and Irish manuscript illustration (ca. 600-1100 AD). These are great, and an extremely clever nod to the texts Tolkien was drawing from, and even the literal manuscripts in which he was imagining his work (or at minimum Bilbo’s work, in-universe) to be written:

As Tolkien says, “Further information will also be found in the selection from the Red Book of Westmarch that has already been published, under the title of The Hobbit.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, “Prologue: Concerning Hobbits”). Or, perhaps, in the Red Book of Hergest (Welsh, Llyfr Coch Hergest) — another Red Book of the West (or Wales, that is). Obviously The Hobbit does not actually show up in one of the most important medieval Welsh manuscripts (currently housed at Oxford), but from the very first page of lotr, Tolkien was playing with an incredibly specific manuscript history!

And this guy, Sergei Iukhimov, apparently clocked that shit on day one. And got a lil weird with it. Respect.

[argumate]

Yet there are compelling reasons to think that many of Africa’s problems stem from chronic underpopulation. In How Africa Works, a recent book, Joe Studwell, a development economist, concludes that the most important reason for the continent’s relative poverty has been low population density. That, he says, is being righted thanks to several decades of fast growth. By 2030, its population density will finally be where Asia’s was circa 1960. What many see as an alarming population explosion, Studwell regards as “an extremely belated process of demographic normalisation”. The argument deserves a serious hearing. First, just how sparsely populated is Africa? Even today, after decades of growth, its population, at 1.5bn, is roughly the same as India’s despite Africa having nine times the landmass.

I do think most of the prehistory of humanity was spent patiently waiting for population density to increase to the point that we could finally jump start civilisation.

[argumate]

Historically it was worse. The population was kept low by poor soil and diseases like malaria. Sleeping sickness killed domestic animals, suppressing crop yields by depriving farmers of labour and manure. The slave trade stripped Africa of more than 15mn of its youngest and fittest people. At the start of the 20th century, the continent’s population was less dense than that of England in 1066. Infectious diseases and low food production also discouraged the formation of cities, the engines of economic growth. In 1900, Mombasa, with 30,000 people, was a huge African city. Africa, wrote Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the late Burkinabé historian, was “prevented from reaching the threshold of demographic concentration which has almost always been one of the preconditions of major qualitative changes in the social, political and economic spheres”. The population only began to normalise in the 20th century when advances in medicine sharply cut mortality rates. As a result, population growth rose from roughly 0.8 per cent in the 1930s to a peak of 2.9 per cent in the 1980s.

Africa’s historically sparse population, Studwell argues, deprived it of the concentrated markets and labour pools needed for development. Without “agglomeration economies” — the benefits that come from population density — it has been too expensive to provide the roads, electricity grids, schools and hospitals that any successful state needs. As population density normalises, there are signs that some countries are starting to overcome this legacy. From a low base, there are widespread improvements in areas from higher crop yields and access to schools to availability of electricity. Populations are becoming concentrated enough to achieve the economic growth that occurs most readily in towns and cities. For all the continent’s manifest problems, growth has picked up since the turn of the century. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to expand at 4.3 per cent this year, neck and neck with a slowing Asia. Some economies, like Ethiopia and Ivory Coast, have racked up 15 years of 7 per cent growth. Another generation of that and their fortunes could be transformed.

[fleursmal]

from The Erotics of Trent Reznor by Jude Doyle

[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

[o-craven-canto]

amphibious -> ambivivent automobile -> ipsokinete autopsy -> ipsovision circumcision -> cyclotomy conspiracy -> synpnoea epilogue -> supraverb homosexual -> idemphilic [thanks to @dative-ciceroni-pizza2h] menstruation -> selenosis [looser] Mesopotamia -> Medioflumina pornography -> lupascript scissor -> schizotron [?] troglodyte -> cavernicole tyrannosaur -> dictatoreptile

(honorable mention: carnivore <-> sarcophage)

[phantom-threaded]

Brokeback Mountain 2005, dir. Ang Lee

[mizu-monos]

Come on now, you're sleepin' on your feet like a horse. Brokeback Mountain (2005) dir. Ang Lee

[farewell-to-lorien]

Talking to Ghosts, by Sienna Gonzales.

[str-ngeloop]

the trouble is with intellectual self-minimization is that there's an incentive for it -- never make any claims that anyone could take issue with and you'll never need to defend them and you'll never need to face-off against power-knowledge. Then again, I am seeing now how self-minimization could also be a more selfish way to protect beliefs that you worry deep down could be refuted by others in a way that you may find convincing. If you're attached to these positions and you're also attached to the identity of being someone with epistemic rigor, then you might avoid bringing these beliefs up in front of other people you trust and who you see as a justified epistemic authority for fear of having them confronted. For fear of either -- being forced to defend them -- even if you have a defense ready there's a social cost there, there's an emotional cost there -- but there's also an epistemic risk of being convinced that certain beliefs aren't justified. and being forced to abandon a position you're attached to, or forced to feel the ego-dystonic awareness that you're not as rigorous and ironclad as you saw yourself to be. and that others can see it too. I think, partly, I hold on to the notion of being a person who cares deeply about epistemic rigor because I hold positions that if seen at low resolution in bad faith could mark me as being part of a camp I don't actually want to associate with.

I also think that chains of logic built to defend positions from attacks (which are themselves motivated in various ways) are markedly different than the chains of logic one actually takes to arrive at a position, which is different again than the chains of logic you might present to teach people in an intelligent way. the pedagogic justification is different from the defensive justification is different than the immanent justification.

[phaeton-flier]

I think you should, as a basic matter of self-respect, not treat anyone else as above you in any inherent fashion.

They might be more skilled at something, in a way you should respect to accomplish things. They may have power over you, such that you need to listen to them to avoid pain. They may be someone you look up to, because they're accomplished in some way.

But fundamentally everyone you could ever meet, from presidents to scientists to writers to elders, should be treated no better than, say, your buddy Kev. They don't need deference Just Because, they aren't inherently smarter on axes you haven't seen evidence for, and they do not deserve or require Respect in some amorphous fashion.

You are a Human Being, stand up for yourself

[httpshayley]

quick study

[whirligig-girl]

I had noticed these strange little occurrences all my life. A bird would fly past my window and it'd sorta look like it was half there, half not. I'd glance up at a clock and for a moment, the second hand would be in two places at once. Never really thought much about it. I thought it was just normal. Someone told me once about the clock hand illusion where you flick your eyes and it looks like time stops for a half second or so, I figured it was something weird like that.

But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.

And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.

It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."

And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.

That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.

I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.

One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.

I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.

It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.

Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.

I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)

She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.

I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.

In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.

I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.

It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.

It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.

When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.

But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.

Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.

I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.

But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.

I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.

My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.

I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.

After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?

And I was just like :| yep.

Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!

And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.

The kinda scary thing is, every once in a while I'll see some of those artifacts that I used to see, like, little tiny desynchs within each timeline. I only recently got used to being in two timelines at the same time, I don't think I can handle being in three or four. My brain's already better at handling the desynch, like, one time I managed to move my finger in two directions at once all in the pizza timeline. But I'm really scared of the desynch multiplying over time. Maybe it's inevitable, but my main strategy is just to not flip any coins for the rest of my life.

[headspace-hotel]

I have been browsing your autism tag and thinking about the differences between being an HSP vs being autistic. I found some definitions online that presented being an HSP as an increased awareness of certain stimuli while in the same blog post autism was defined via behaviour. I think this is very obviously flawed. My own tendency towards anti-psychiatry makes me really question all this. Your posts about the interiority of suffering are fascinating and made me realize how little discernment exists in neurotypical culture...

Anyway, if you have any thoughts on autism vs high sensitivity, I would love to hear them! Also caught up to chapter 30 in your buckyfic... poor Steve! Hope you're having a good day :)

I have an impulse to say that a lot of people that consider themselves "highly sensitive person" are probably neurodivergent in some way, but it's not like "official" medical labels are necessarily more correct in this case.

I think that culture is really negative about sensitivity (definitely felt this growing up, I had a lot of self hatred about it)

i have an autism diagnosis (since I was 14) but my experience of autism is that I experience everything with extreme intensity.

I've had really intense, basically trauma responses (???) to experiences that a lot of people seem to survive unaffected. when i was 10 years old I got some kind of stomach flu/norovirus while staying overnight at my Mamaw's house and subsequently started having extreme panic attacks and terror towards the notion of getting sick ever again, which were so consuming for the next 2 years of my life that I felt like I had been changed into a fundamentally different person.

similar thing with my early childhood medical experiences, which, the ones my mom recalls as the most negative I can't even remember. But they were not very far outside of average experiences, and yet, I've had a level of absolute terror of medical procedures throughout my entire life that defies description. I invested a lot of energy in my teenage years on Not Thinking About It and then covid happened and I couldn't avoid my triggers anymore and for about 2 years there it felt like I was going completely insane because my body and mind were doing things I had never heard of happening to anyone.

I couldn't think of a way to justify it being Trauma and yet it was completely different than a "phobia" (for one thing, it felt completely rational and having it labeled irrational made me feel violent) so I was just like yeah i'm fucked up and filled with terror and rage and nightmares and intrusive sensations and thoughts for no reason because there is something wrong with me that has never been wrong with anyone in the history of the world and I should probably be burned alive for being weak

I'm very chill now, but I have circumnavigated the globe a thousand times in terms of the distance I have traveled in personal self-understanding.

Anyways there are a lot of ways to have a body and experience having a body and experience existence, and this world is cruel about them for no reason, and if you are Affected by something other than the clearly labeled Bad Things That Are Not Normal, you might as well be some kind of species of wild animal that has never been discovered and never will be.

I think "highly sensitive person" exists as a label because it legitimately is traumatizing and life-limiting and EXTREMELY stigmatized to be "sensitive:" to be affected emotionally or psychologically or spiritually by things to a greater degree than others, even a little bit.

like everyone in this world is on a race to the bottom in terms of who can be the most callous and unaffected by everything that happens. if you are hurt or upset by something more than average, there is A Something in culture/society that thinks you should be punished violently and painfully. And I know this because I thought I should be punished violently and painfully.

Like, the most vicious and hateful part of me is that part that has been directed at my own "sensitivity," and I've had that part since I was a young child and it is so fucking violent and cruel, and I think sometimes people don't understand fascists and their need to punish and make other people suffer and their visceral gratification at the Rightness of this suffering, but like. that part of fascism is something I viscerally empathize with because I've felt it. Towards myself. And I can imagine how it must feel to direct that towards other people. And I wonder if fascists start out by directing it towards themselves.

sorry this went really off topic but it's all connected ya know

[sugar-petals]

hot take in a roundabout way i think that's also why so many of us opt out of becoming parents ourselves

[aroace-ryland-grace]

the sewing machine is like if a horse and an inkjet printer had a child

[subtextsays]

This only applies to the modern show breeds of sewing machines. Heritage breeds like the Singer 27, 15, 66, and 201 are docile and extremely hardy. They're easy keepers, requiring oil and the occasional light bulb to maintain working condition. Treadle and crank varieties thrive on an electricity-free diet. Injuries, while rare, are quickly resolved thanks to a thriving aftermarket parts trade. In cases of severe neglect, percussive maintenance via sledgehammer can restore motion.

[maureen2musings]

Spangle-cheeked Tanager

javier.chaves.photography