Yahweh nerfed mƩ, coz if Ah weren't, Ah would learn ALL the languages old, new, & forgotten, and then reconstruct the tower of Babel to personally kick his arse.
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Peter Solarz

Kaledo Art

if i look back, i am lost
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dirt enthusiast
noise dept.
Misplaced Lens Cap
Today's Document
I'd rather be in outer space šø

shark vs the universe
Three Goblin Art
Aqua Utopiaļ½ęµ·ć®åŗć§čØę¶ćē“”ć
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ē„ę„ / Permanent Vacation

JVL

izzy's playlists!
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oozey mess
RMH
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@goblinindenial
Yahweh nerfed mƩ, coz if Ah weren't, Ah would learn ALL the languages old, new, & forgotten, and then reconstruct the tower of Babel to personally kick his arse.
So we all know how touch-starved Grace must have gotten during the trip back to Erid, and the inevitability of never coming into contact with another human for the rest of his life.
But have we considered how touch starved Rocky must be during their journey back, too? It's different for Eridians, yes, he doesn't know what hugs are, sure, but after 46 human years completely isolated from his kind? After watching his crewmates die slow, painful deaths? In what essentially amounts to a total void? Where sound cannot travel and in order to interpret the universe around him he must rely on the equipment he shares with his dead friends?? And even when he meets Grace, the very first time he touches another living being it was to the tune of agony as his body literally burned?????? Not only hurting himself, but also leaving a permanent scar on the only other intelligent life within light-years????!!?!!? Scarring his friend????!!????
Meaning the very first time he touches someone after years of isolation, they both nearly die and will forever have the scars to show for it.
What if when they returned to Erid, Rocky struggled with touching/nuzzling/tapping Adrian, his friends, his family, his own kind like he did before he left for Tau Ceti? Because after everything he went through, he learned to associate touch with nothing but pain.
Curious pebble (3/?)
Part 1 / Part 2
A massive shoutout to @thereal-sillyguy for making everyone's favorite pebble into a gif! I very literally couldn't have done it without them!
Imagine Grace defined his name as the elegance definition of grace and Rocky spends years thinking how fucking ironic this clumsy leaky space blobs name is.
Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.
And Rocky has to suddenly reconcile that the clumsy leaky blob that saved his life twice, that almost certainly doomed himself to come back for him, name is Mercy.
k but imagine Rocky wanting to learn about how humans became the apex predators of their planet so he has Grace āhuntā him in the biodome as an experiment and during it he thinks Grace isnāt trying or taking it seriously which is bad bad bad because this is for research purposes
only for Rocky to get more and more tired as the experiment goes on just to realize that Grace isnāt which makes him panic so he puts as much distance as he can between them and finds a (hopefully) safe spot to sleep and when he wakes up the human is crouching over him like āgot youuuā and Rocky has never shrieked so damn loud before in his life
i'm genuinely having so much fun writing a jock protagonist. can't believe i never tried this before. all these years i've been limiting myself needlessly
i've created an extremely elaborate magic system based on linear algebra and not once does the narrator ever explain how it works. he doesn't know. he doesn't care. that's nerd shit. he is going on a lad's night out and if you try to tell him anything about equations he'll put his fingers in his ears and go "lalalala"
i feel it's important to add that my other protagonist is an academic and does know how the magic system works, but he doesn't get a POV chapter until halfway through the story. which means that over the course of 40,000 words we gradually build up a solid working idea of this world and its laws, as understood by Jock Protagonist - and then it switches to Nerd Protagonist, who's like, "just so we're clear, he was wrong about basically all of that."
This is genius
[ID: a tag reading, āand then he ALSO doesn't explain it. because like all academics he assumes you already know.ā /end ID]
meta question; are there any worldbuilding or genre tropes you can't stand to see, or are intentionally avoiding with the white calf setting?
I'm going to talk about things relevant to settings more or less like my own (non-industrial, no true nation-states, no history of global colonialism, no global culture/mass-media, material conditions are not analogous to anything in the modern era etc) so keep that in mind. SOME things I say 'will never work' here could work in other kinds of settings.
---
-'common tongue'. A setting where there's a single language that is an invariable lingua franca that everyone knows how to speak across a vast geographical distance. Something like that Will Not develop without being imposed by something like an imperialist entity, and even then you will see variable dialects and linguistic drift across space and time and people who just Do Not Know It Anyway.
I don't think a 'common tongue' is an appropriate conceit on anything beyond very localized/regional scales, or in larger-scale contexts outside of an occupier enforcing the use of its language on its subjects. And even then you should take into account that regional dialects will always exist, the developments of pidgins and creoles are likely, and that the occupier language will not always be the First languages of colonized people or spoken fluently by every individual.
Also just in general an entire continent should have hundreds if not thousands of native languages (depends on size and geography, isolating features like lots of mountain ranges/rivers/islands = more languages). I'd never expect anyone to have them all Established but you should be writing with the presumption this diversity is There.
-DND type rpg stuff bleeding into the worldbuilding. Like 'adventurer' being like, a career? In a setting with any degree of realism the behaviors ascribed to 'adventurers' would be better described as 'mercenary' 'bandit' 'grave robber' etc. Same goes for 'thief' or 'assassin' being its own job + 'thieves guilds' and 'assassins guilds' like, existing. Pre-modern era organized crime looks very different from a guild where you are put to work doing theft and murder for random clients. Don't have thieves guilds. Probably don't have 'assassins' as in 'person whose job is to do contract killings for whoever can pay the price', that's never Really existed.
-Having a sophont species that ubiquitously shares cultural traits like values, morality, modes of subsistence, practices, religion, etc. Not just talking about flagrantly terrible 'good race/evil race' type shit but stuff like: 'they Respect Nature and never cut down trees' 'their food mostly comes from hunting and foraging for mushrooms' 'they value strength in battle' 'they worship the sun' 'they have this specific kinship system' 'they never go around naked and always cover their genitals' etc. Any broad strokes you make about an entire species should be rooted in their biology (especially sensory perception/reproductive cyles, and underlying behavioral drives and ancestral social structures if you're VERY careful about it and don't treat complex social behaviors as unshakeable biological imperatives), and the same biological roots should be expressed differently as a matter of cultural variation.
"They are seasonally fertile for a very short window of time" is hard biology, "the period of seasonal fertility is celebrated as a holiday" is cultural and should not be universal. "Their pre-sapient ancestors formed serially monogamous pair bonds" is a manifestation of behavioral drives, "they only spend a year with any given sexual partner and then choose a new one the following year, and they don't have any form of longterm reproductive contracts in their societies" is cultural and should not be universal.
-I have so many fucking annoyances about how people approach worldbuilding religion that it could be its own post longer than this one. I can't give it in summary form it's too much.
-I don't tend to like settings wherein creator deities exist as self-evident parts of material reality. I don't think that conceit is inherently going to be a bad thing (there's a LOT of interesting ways you could handle it) but most of the time it's not done thoughtfully and just results in a world that feels flat and unpeopled. Everybody believes in the same things in more or less the same ways. Maybe you'll see certain societies Favoring certain gods or interpreting them a little differently, but there's no truly profound differences in worldview. Religion can't serve some of its core purposes of teaching a culture's values and morals and practices and history (or if it does, it's on a dead-literal historical level like 'the fire god favored the xyz people because she likes war and they like war and they were loyal to her and so she gave them fire magic' or fucking something). it becomes decoupled from culture and subjectivity and is more like a form of science measuring empirical reality (it's just that this empirical reality has deities and magic or whatever).
-exact approximations of 21st century LGBT identities existing as identity labels. OF COURSE there are going to be people who are experiencing the same Things we describe as being gay, a lesbian, bi, trans, nonbinary, but it's Very unlikely that you'll have a culture that has these concepts in a 1:1 capacity. Or the concept of "heterosexuality" for that matter. Or the notion of sexuality as an identity, something that's Who You Are and not What You Do.
Also there won't always be a distinction between sexuality and gender in general, gender norms may have expected sexuality Strongly baked in. Some 3rd (or etc) gender spaces may be defined heavily around one's sexuality. As in, a society might find it socially acceptable for someone who has been AMAB to have sex with men, but conceptualizes that as a facet of not Being male and instead part of a separate gender role. Or one that finds this socially Unacceptable considers it to remove one from the category of 'male' in a capacity that is a personal failing. Etc.
-that thing where people go 'look, my fantasy culture has the genders of Man Woman and Nonbinary so there's a place for everyone and there's no transphobia :)'. If sex and gender is being assigned to begin with, that means there are gender norms and thus people who exist outside of these gender norms.
-Depictions of a Proud Warrior Culture in which it's socially acceptable to kill anyone for any reason because 'might makes right' or 'we have to weed out the weak' or whatever. This is VERY often just done to show how ~exotic~ or ~barbaric~ a fantasy culture is, and even when it's not racist it's dumb as fuck. Having some concept of 'murder is bad' is pretty much culturally ubiquitous because a social species cannot Survive without ways to regulate intragroup conflict (it's just that what exactly defines 'murder' can vary). A society is not going to have 'you can just straight up kill another member of the in-group for whatever' as a trait. You might see regulated and ritualized forms interpersonal violence like duels, or specific insults or non-violent offenses that are considered grave enough to warrant death, or ways to Other a person that socially justifies/excuses retributive violence, or socially protected authority figures that can get away with murder, but these aren't the same as 'we think its normal for people to just immediately escalate to murdering each other when they have a disagreement because we are Proud Warriors and Strength and etc etc' (and the examples I gave will probably still be treated with a degree of gravity).
-Depicting patriarchy as conditions in which Women Are Constantly Being Sexually Assaulted At All Times and there are no social protections against sexual violence (except MAYBE for like the most elite women). Like, the most hardline patriarchies in which women have zero legal autonomy and are functionally property still tend to posit rape as a crime (with marital rape being a BIG exception), even if only legally framed as destruction of another man's 'property'. The nature of sexual violence/rape culture within patriarchies is a lot more insidious and complex than just 'it's a free for all'. You are not going to see conditions in which it is socially normalized for any man to assault any (IN-GROUP) woman.
-Depictions of what is ostensibly a true matriarchy and yet it is Not an oppressive system of gender hegemony that denies autonomy/exploits labor of its underclasses but is instead framed like, a utopia where everyone lives peacefully under the guidance of the wise female leadership and the Earth Goddess, and they don't fight wars and they live in perfect harmony with nature due to all the innate female emotional intuition and earth connection and goddess energy menstrual blood moon magick whateevvrvrrrrrrrrrr.
Ok this one isn't That common in speculative fiction but I've read a few novels that were inspired by the bunk pop feminist theories from (iirc) the 60s-70s about how human societies everywhere (read: in Europe) were all harmonious earth goddess-worshipping matriarchies through the paleolithic/parts of the neolithic, until the Evil Warlike Proto Indo-Europeans conquered and introduced patriarchy and horses (masc). And boy did these books suck.
More story/character-driven nitpicks:
-presumptions that gay men in patriarchal societies are just going to de-facto Respect Women by virtue of not being sexually attracted to them?
-writing women in heavily patriarchal societies as all holding like 21st century feminist viewpoints (unless they are the Bad Women like evil mothers or evil bitch-whores who are obstacles for the protagonists, in which case they are allowed to have internalized misogyny). Like ABSOLUTELY there can and should be women who question their social conditions, can articulate pain and humiliation at being treated like property, will reject social norms and push for better conditions and autonomy, etc. But there's a difference between writing your women as people who have been steeped in their culture's norms for their entire life and question these norms on their own terms, and writing them as if they just teleported in from a women's studies class.
-Systemic oppression in which only the Mean People exhibit bigotry and the Nice People are enlightened social progressives. How interpersonally friendly you are has nothing to do with whether or not you've unlearned bigoted norms ingrained in you from childhood. I think this sort of thing absolutely neuters any attempts to depict systemic oppression by framing it as just a struggle between 'bad people' and 'good people' (and in a lot of cases turns into stories where the oppression isn't even slightly Convincing because your big cast of Lovable Protagonists are all like "Love is love! I think women should VOTE!" and then there's one antagonist in a Bad People faction who is like "BURN THE GAY WITCH", so it feels like it's just a struggle against a small group of meanies and not against cultural hegemony). You should have kind, friendly people who exhibit bigoted social norms.
-a society where arranged marriages are the default but your protagonist is like, SHOCKED that they won't be marrying for love or that they don't have any choice in the matter (because they have been teleported in from a women's studies class). The concept of marriage as a fulfillment of a romantic bond rather than a reproductive contract between families is Pretty damn modern. Like you might have societies where romantic love is an aspiration for marriages, or where it's idealized as something that develops in the process of courting or etc. And there's a good chance that compatibility will be taken into account to SOME extent. But having your character be like "but Puh-PAH I don't WANT to marry Sir Chunt for I do not LOVE HIM" upon the announcement of the arrangement can strain plausibility.
Not saying that someone desiring to marry a person they have actual romantic feelings for or resenting their lack of choice is implausible by any means. It just shouldn't feel like this is a surprise to them. And many people might not be able to articulate it perfectly as "I wish I had autonomy to do what I want with my body and my relationships" rather than stuff like "I don't even like this person, I wish they were xyz instead, god my fiance is ugly this sucks, I don't know if I'm ever going to like them, I would've chosen much better," etc.
Also yeah some people Are going to just be fine with it because they know what they're getting into, they've known it for all their lives and are surrounded with people who've been through the same thing. And there's probably additional cultural/legal facets to marriage that they may look forward to regardless of how they feel about their spouse (security for themself and their family, entering into adult status and social spaces, legal and social privileges, etc).
You are 60% water and every lake, river, pond, swamp, creek, and ocean you encounter wants to reclaim it desperately. Be careful out there.
Good, I hope it haunts everyone about to enter a body of water so bad that they wear a life jacket. š
Every single person I knew (past tense) who has drowned was "a strong swimmer." Water in the wild does not care how good you are at swimming.
I mean this with all due respect:
You are not going to pass a skillcheck against a rip current once it has you.
Waves will not bow to your physical prowess no matter how impressive.
Shock does not care that you used to be on your school swim team.
If you hit your head, being good at swimming isn't going to turn you face-up while you're unconscious.
You may be unable to return to shore. Rescue may be unable to find you quickly.
9pin D-sub collar and ribbon cable leash
the change from AD to CE feels really emblematic of how surface-level and meaningless the supposed secularization of the western world is
Common Era is definitely preferable over Anno Domini, if only because christ is no lord of mine, but itās only less christianocentric in that it doesnāt overtly make reference to christ in its title. the benchmark is still the same. youāre still measuring when the common era began using the (supposed) birth of christ, separating history into āthe period before jesusā and āthe period after jesusā. this conception of history is no less defined by christianity than it was before, except that now itās easier to ignore because youāve draped it in a āsecularā, āmodernā veneer and done nothing to actually unpack the ways in which western society intrinsically centers christianity.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
[runs hands down face]
Okay this is the problem with sharing pop science stuff online and content aggregation accounts
The study is real, it's very easy to find by searching up the author's name + study. Give it a read yourself. It's written in a pretty accessible way imo.
Note that it does not put forward any explanations for why this effect happens, only that it does. In the conclusion it posits many possible reasons for why, and that it's most likely nothing to do with the specific action of walking, merely any semi automatic repetitive activity. They also acknowledge the study did not account for the social company the walkers were in, which is a pretty massive factor imo. Considering the conclusion brings up MANY alternative explanations and future experiment possibilities, it's decidedly not "killed every alternative explanation" like the tweet says. The actual paper ends like most scientific papers, listing alternative possible explanations, these are preliminary results, more research is needed, wider demographics of people need to be included, etc.
Another thing is the phrasing of these tweets are like red flags flapping in the wind to me. Any short form social media content that's 1. Pop science 2. Conveys absolute certainty 3. Ends with self improvement biohacking adjacent advice, should set off alarm bells.
Look at the implications that if the tweets were true, it would mean wheelchair users and people with mobility issues would be inherently worse at creative tasks.
So who is this person that's tweeting this, rephrasing this paper in a "helpful" way that is sure to get shares from people who really value being creative and are looking for any way to become more creative in their -
OFC ITS AN AI BRO
You wanna see what his recent articles look like?
CAN WE STOP GETTING BAITED INTO PLATFORMING GRIFTERS
Thank you! There were so many red flags in the first post's language. The original paper straight up says that the mechanisms weren't isolated! Also there is no single part of the brain responsible for creative idea generation, it involves communication between multiple brain networks.
Glad I wasn't the only person who looked at this and thought that it was weird to say this study is SO perfect when the way it's framed here directly implies that people who can't walk are inherently less capable of being creative than people who can.
I can't leave a reply but to the disabled people in the notes who now genuinely seem to believe their mobility issues have robbed them of their ability to be creative pls don't think that! That's not what this study said! You're dealing with ableist misinformation from an AI bro, the study did not make these claims. I encourage everyone who's shared the version without the corrections to take them down, this misinfo is hurting already clearly hurting disabled people and should not be spread.
ābits to use in everyday conversationsā
How people get nicknames:
Recipient of a third-degree burn in front of witnesses. IE, "I won't take that shit from a man dressed like a ghostbuster"= "Gostbuster" or "Buster"
A distinctive personal feature or quirk. IE, "Have you noticed how that new guy is always eating bell peppers?" = "Peppers", or "That chick has a massive forehead" = "Forehead".
An embarrassing thing you said or did. IE, "Did you seriously call Dale "Dad"?" = "Junior", "Baby boy", "Sport"
A game of name-mutation telephone. IE, "Donny Clyde" = "Bonnie 'n' Clyde" = "Bonnie" = "Bon-bon".
Irony. IE, calling a tall person "short stack" or a particularly dour person "sunshine".
A 'wrong place wrong time' one-off incident. IE, "He spilled oil on his pants and had to borrow a pair that were way too big and Jim saw him with the waistband pulled up to his nipples and called him 'Parachute'"
A batman-style origin story but not in a cool way: "One time she hit a deer with the company car and when she called the boss to tell her she was crying so hard we thought she was dying" = "Bambi"
The incredibly rare 'admiration' nickname, bourne only once a millennia under the light of the blood moon: "We saw him lift a truck once so now we call him 'iron man'"
+ How Nicknames Stick:
Your fate is determined by The Counsel
You hate it
It's accurate
This reminds me of an article about how callsigns in movies are inaccurate because they're too cool. Generally your callsign in the military is like "Bepis" because you once pronounced "Pepsi" wrong.
^^^
Do Eridians know they are different colours. I bet Grace's alien kids love finding out what colour they are. It means absolutely nothing to them but they're like :O :O
Some of them think he's making this whole 'colour' thing up to mess with them and try to catch him out by asking again on a different day to prove he's just saying random noises but he's like you are still blue buddy and they're like :O :O
Like if we met an alien species who had extra senses & they said that some humans felt spingly and some humans felt spoingly I bet we'd all want to know if we were spingly or spoingly humans
āEridians dislike earth because they abandoned Grace.ā *Incorrect Buzzer Sound* ya missed the point of the story buddy! Itās not about someone being ābadā itās about the incredible power of love and that love being worth dying for!
Gimmie Eridians who are absolutely heartbroken to hear that humans where so desperate and so scared that they where willing to part with not just one Grace, there were three of them! Gimmie Eridians touched to find that the humans planned a way for their sacrifices to be as comfortable as possible. Gimmie Eridians who send earth a message saying āWe know it must have hurt to send your heroes to die, but one made it and heās safe here. We lost 22 good Eridians on the journey we would have lost 23 if not for your Grace.ā
Give me humans sitting on Earth slowly coming to the conclusion that when we look up not only are we not alone, someone out there is alive because of one of us. That no matter what we think of ourselves a whole species thinks highly of us because we helped save the galaxy. Give me humans who figure out how to send a probe to Erid filled to the brim with messages for Grace and footage of a monument being raised that reads his name, his crews names, and then āin memory of the 22 Eridians who lost their lives on the journey to save the stars.ā
You send people to space to save the literal entire world and you still don't trust them to dispense their own drugs
yeah u freaks up north look and sound exactly like this when u pretend that us southern queers are perfectly complicit in our own eradication - for the heinous crime of not living in a liberal population center.
I keep this image on hand for whenever I see similar sentiments.