May All Evil Stumble As It Flies In The World @laz-phenomenon - Tumblr Blog

Y'all - the Catholic Church is not only a conservative institution, it is a strong contender for the most conservative institution in the world. I don't say that (here) in a disparaging way, I mean it in a neutral, literal sense. The Church's entire modus operandi is that it seeks to conserve what it believes to be apostolic teaching - disciplines, practices, and prudential judgements vary across place and time, but the teachings themselves never ever change. Hailing the Pope or a bishop as some kind of progressive icon is nonsensical, and is hard for me to see as anything other than a very worrying sign of the reactionary period we're living in.

curseofmeatthawsmoth

The President of the United States is to the right of the head of the most conservative institution in the world (the Pope) and instead of viewing that as an extremely worrying sign of the reactionary period we're in, people have decided the Pope and the Church are progressive

laz-phenomenon

Can't say I'm any type of pontifical expert but I do think it's important who the pope is and I don't think the church is somehow separate from society. The guy who did the Rerum Novarum encyclical in the context of the fear of labour activism is why we [Irish] have 18% of our Senate being nominated by trade unions even though a rabidly anticommunist later pope more or less co-wrote our second constitution. The rights to private property in there that both popes were in favour of are still being relied on by our successive governments as excuses not to implement pro-tenant legislation.

I think what people are responding to is the church finally shutting the fuck up about social issues they've lost ground on and starting to speak about literally anything else. As someone in a country which has so far managed to dodge the anti-trans brainworms sweeping the anglosphere but still has an older catholic population who would still be papally influenced, I am happy about that.

I still seethe any time I think about this for more than 5 seconds because of how much stuff they own and how they have and are stalling for time so more of their institutional abuse victims die before they make proper redress payments, but I think it is a good thing that they think they're losing on culture stuff. I'd rather have 2 latin american influenced popes in a row than usa or european ones if we're comparing the ones in my lifetime.

just-shower-thoughts

2040 is as close as 1996

lemon-badgeress

first of all how dare you

#aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

today-in-homestuck

calendarstuck

today-in-homestuck

It’s been exactly ten years since…

The Beginning of Problem Sleuth [03/10/08]

And exactly nine years since…

The End of Problem Sleuth [03/10/09]

Happy decade of Problem Sleuth!

fuckthisbloganditscurses

Happiness Will Come To You.

12goblins

when tho

fuckthisbloganditscurses

When You Least Expect It. Probably Late March

wizardshark

reblog for happiness to come for you in late march!

karmanistic

theexpanseseries

damespock

i’m so glad earth only has one moon, if there were more i’d have to pick a favorite and that sounds too emotionally taxing to even fathom

plasmalogical

self care is actually getting in fights with randoms in dark alleys

No self care is stuff like taking a bubble bath or putting on a lot of makeup if you like it or taking a nice warm nap and stuff like that basically.

plasmalogical

self care is the burning heat when rage washes over you. self care is when you feel the bones crack under your powerful fists. self care is the fear in your enemies eyes

condensedchaos333

Lmao self care is taking your birthday cake just so I can eat the frosting

plasmalogical

if you touch my birthday cake ill make you eat your hands

antoine-roquentin

I am a lord and have three daughters. I want to ensure that my eldest daughter inherits my title and the family home. I find it highly frustrating that as the law of primogeniture stands my title will pass to my younger brother. Is there any sign of this outdated law being changed and is there any way I can at least give the family home to my daughters?

donjuan-auxenfers

Crusader Kings 2 can be overwhelming for new players, glad to see Financial Times helping people out. They left out the easiest way to take care of this though: engineer a plot to assassinate your brother.

collapsedsquid

We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

ms-demeanor

I can’t read this right now but I’m Reblogging it to read it later because this is so up my alley you don’t even know and god, I hope they bring up the eroding ability to recognize reality and if they don’t BOY do I have some fun shit to talk about.

ms-demeanor

Mmmmmmmmm that’s the good shit.

I was going to write my thesis on the unique symbolism present in the writing of Philip K. Dick. In his best works he takes symbols that have standard meaning - bowls, cups, animals, deserts, giant faces staring from the sky - and subtly twists them, which gives his writing an aura of unreality and a feeling of confusion that makes a real impact on the reader.

Not only is he writing about his characters having trouble identifying or understanding reality, he was making it difficult for his readers to do the same. Was he having fun running madcap through his stories and fictionalizing himself or was he writing himself as he believed himself to be when he introduced us to Horselover Fat (a self-insert character)?

The visions in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are modeled on a vision Dick had that compelled him to write the book.

I have a more difficult time reading Dick than I do other authors. I can throw down twenty Steven King tomes in a row, work through the entire published works of Gibson in a month, spend uncomfortable weeks with Octavia Butler’s nightmares. But my limit for reading Dick is two. I can get two books deep before I start to feel queasy when looking at the sunlight. Read enough Dick and you start feeling like someone has moved everything in your house one inch to the east. Something isn’t right but you can’t find out what and you can’t see what but you know it’s off and tell yourself to ignore that feeling because you’re just being crazy and paranoid. And yet you’re still sure something is wrong.

His use of language and symbolism to accomplish this is stunningly brilliant, and something I don’t think I’ve ever seen get the recognition that it deserves.

But it’s more than that and it’s worse than that.

Dick knew people. He knew their meanness and their smallness and their quiet little internal fears that could blow up into yawning maws devouring everything that opposed them. And he wrote about it.

And that’s terrifying.

We’ve been watching the viral growth of these kinds of petty fears and we’re stuck on shifting sand, trying to figure out if there’s a safe place to step next. We keep making jokes about “the bad timeline” and “what is this year” and we’re getting confused. Our heads are filled with cotton, we don’t know what to do next that won’t set off a worse explosion somewhere down the line.

I walked past a Chipotle the other day. There was a window cling on the front door that said “No Fake News! Queso at Chipotle!” and I had to sit down for a second.

A massive corporation that recently started a food borne illness outbreak because its minimum wage employees can’t afford to take a sick day is using a slogan that the president of the united states says when attempting to undermine the free press to sell melty cheese to millennials. This is so banal that you don’t want to do the “this isn’t normal” thing about a tiny window cling at a burrito restaurant but holy shit.

Is this even real? What? What?! Is the shitty president’s anti-news slogan REALLY something that got past a review board and made people want to buy bland food? How did we get here? What is this?

Did a guy whose primary fanbase is children get in a minuscule amount of trouble for profiting off a suicide victim last week? Did that guy’s brother try to take some of the heat off him by posting a clickbait video about losing his virginity for children to watch?

Did the president actually talk about nukes as dicks and claim his was better? DID HAWAII JUST GET A NUCLEAR ATTACK WARNING? Yeah, but that’s okay, it was fake (I mean it was real but it was a mistake). But the president’s dicknuke thing, yeah, that happened.

The website that harvests everyone’s data also promotes misinformation. The website where people are beset by verified neonazis is at least 10% robots. The website where everyone buys their groceries and sex toys and furniture and clothing is owned by a guy spending large parts of his fortune (made by underpaid employees and barely skirting antitrust laws) on immortality research.

What?

A New Hampshire State Rep was responsible for r/redpill, a forum full of advice on avoiding rape charges and suggestions for gaslighting your girlfriend.

What?

People are voluntarily purchasing always-on devices for their homes and police are trying to make sure they always have the right to subpoena those recordings.

What?

Every computer made in the last ten years is potentially at risk of attack because it seems like we just may not really understand computers. (I 100% wholeheartedly, as a person who works with computers, believe we don’t understand computers.)

What?

Is this even real? How?

What?

Anyway, for the love of god, please hold onto the rocks underneath the shifting sand. Value history, value science, value truth and the seeking of truth. Our world has shifted one inch in the wrong direction. Everything is the same as it ever was, just in a wronger way, and we’ve got to hold on to the fact that things don’t HAVE to be this way, that we’re not being paranoid, that something is deeply wrong and it’s time to look for a way to set it right.

Anyway long story short I love PKD and this article is spot on, thanks for sharing.

sixfromerie-deactivated20240121

It’s all clear to me now…

averagefairy

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

runawaymarbles

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

feynites

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

chromolume

so imagine you’re making ratatouille and you don’t like tomatoes. you don’t like the taste, the texture, the putting them in the water and the peeling them - eugh! so you say to yourself “lookit, this whole dish is nothing but vegetables, so what does it matter if i leave the tomatoes out?” a seemingly innocuous decision on the surface, but 2 hours or whatever later when you’re done cooking, you open the oven to find a complete mess! just a pot full of baked vegetables, none of them congealed or somehow unified. what happened to your beloved ratatouille? so you take to google and find that actually the tomatoes are an essential ingredient of ratatouille, as they form a “sauce” of a certain kind that makes the whole thing work. and so a seemingly innocent decision has destroyed the very foundation of the established order with disturbing ramifications towards the whole. in this essay i will examine how martin luther’s 95 theses lead to protestants being more boring than catholics