An Earth Dug Into Hyperbolic Terrain

Loud gekkering in the middle distance. If you listen carefully, you can make out some dubiously insightful remarks on math, AI alignment, philosophy, and world events. V. vulpes var mathematica is a possible subspecies of the red fox marked by sapience, use of tools and language, and extreme capacity for use of abstractions, especially mathematics. This exemplar specimen is about 30 years old, and is clearly a person, as evidenced by their very fancy hat.

[notaaronsroommate]

people routinely try to invert orientalist fiction to try and prove how bad it would be like "oh, you think white guy learns karate and becomes the spiritual karate badass in asia is ok? well what if a billionaire from a tier one chinese city crash landed in north dakota and became chosen as spirit cowboy by jesus christ?" and like, what if we did reverse Lawrence of Arabia, and the thing is man it always slaps. Ok, what if we had an arab muslim become the king of being a 1950s greaser? yeah it would kick ass so severely.

if you made a movie where Hou Ming Hao was granted the blood of christ to become the greatest rodeo gun slinger texas had ever seen every single white maoist would fucking kill themselves because that movie would become the highest grossing film of all time after like a third of Chinas population pays to see the movie three times. CPC party members are posting up photo shoots of them in rhinestone chinese civil war era cavalry officer uniforms with cross draw guns akimbo mauser broomhandles with mother of pearl grips, drinking tsingtao out of red solo cups, they're smoking ribs in Szechuan. White american communists would cope and seethe so hard they would all have a brain aneurysm and die.

because this type of "ok, let me invent the coolest fucking shit ever, wouldn't that suck" isn't actually demonstrating what is wrong with orientalist fantasies of mr honky becomes the kung fu master. the problem is that those stories suck and aren't actually that interested in the meat and potatoes of those cultures. T.E. Lawrence may have been a weird freak pervert, but the thing is he was able to hang out in the tea shop and after everyone got over his terrifying blue eyes and him being insanely faggot coded, they were like oh shit this whiteboy can hang.

All these orientalist isekai fantasies are so boring because it's people that want to be the Lawrence of Arabia whiteboy orders shwarma in perfect vernacular Arabic, whole country rebels against the Ottoman Empire, but they never put in the sheer autistic homo effort to truly become arabic the way a T.E. Lawrence, they lack the humility and sense of wonder. They do not have the love.

[percysfoxblog]

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

hi John, I clicked your profile and it said "ask my anything" and you've always been someone I look up to a lot. I'm feeling very disheartened by the state of the world, do you have any advice for me about keeping hope?

This is hard for me to remember on a minute-by-minute basis, but when I visit insta/threads/twitter/tiktok/googlenews/etc, I am seeing a feed of information that does not reflect a complicated and multivalent reality but instead was created by an algorithm designed to maximize the amount of time that I spend on social media sites.

These algorithms do not give a shit what is true or useful or humane; they want me in bed spending as much time on those feeds as they can possibly get me to spend.

For example, if your information feed fails to remind you that global literacy rates have never been higher, that fewer children are stunted due to malnutrition, and that the rate of child mortality is the lowest it has been in human history ... there is something inadequate about your information feed.

But of course the fact that the world used to suck more doesn't negate the fact that the world still sucks (and in important ways sucks more than it did ten or thirty years ago). Injustice permeates every facet of human-built systems and social orders. This should dishearten us. It should anger us. But the proper response to this anger, imo, is not idle despair but engagement.

Progress happens (and it does happen) when hundreds of millions or billions of people work together to make it happen. We reduced the likelihood of a child dying by 65% over the last 30 years not because it was inevitable or ordinary but because hundreds of millions of people refused to accept so much needless suffering and built more inclusive systems to expand access to healthcare, clean water, and adequate nutrition.

Lastly, hope is not easy! There is nothing simple about the kind of hope that can withstand our current shitstorm. And yet, I believe that humanity is worth the effort to find that hope. I believe that we are worth fighting for. Inevitably, right now feels like the end of the story. My life is a story that begins at birth and ends today, the most recent day I've lived through. But today is not the end of the story. Together, we will change the story, and I believe we can change it for the better. That's why I believe that while hope is not always rewarded, it is always justified.

[fog-world]

[transgenderer]

i recently had the thought "humans are a machine for living in villages" and it feels like it clicked something together. so much of our social instincts make so much more sense in a village context. we instinctively create village-like environments. its cool that we can live in cities but humans make villages like ants make hives, and a city is like...an ant-hive that got crossed with a circuit-board, and somehow still functioned.

[raginrayguns]

recognizing someone in a crowd... like there's one person there, plus all these physically present but socially nonexistent people

[percysfoxblog]

[violet-phoenix-nebula]

This is easily the most interesting take I've ever seen discussing why the older generations seem to struggle so much with the discussions and changes with gender identity, and I think it's absolutely worth reading.

Obviously it doesn't cover 100% of intolerant people, but I think it explains a decent chunk tbh.

[flower-of-the-thistle]

this is an interesting theory, but I don't think it holds up. first, I have met many younger people who have the same tendencies. second, I don't believe anyone has gender-neutral programming. the 'corporate workplace' of today's interactions are still extremely gendered--i strongly doubt that anyone can say that men and women talk to each other in the same way they talk to their same-gender friends.

third, gender essentialism has not gone away; it is not a relic of a bygone era. gender still drips off everything, from toys to clothes to stock photos to choice of beverage. and this is reflected in queer communities as well. there are still norms dependent on gender, they are just more subtle and slightly different. it can be easy to miss or easy to rationalize away, but it's still there.

like, we all hear what's behind the phrase "women and femmes" right? (sidenote: even thinking about that phrase gives me dysphoria!) and how some transmasculine people are sort of herded to the 'femme' side of the table. oh god, I also went to a place that had two bathrooms: women and trans, and then men's. so many examples of me knowing that I'm being inserted into a box, a lot of them from queer communities. and don't even get me started on therapists (younger ones)!

so I guess this theory is just an elaboration on "boomers just don't get that society progresses into gender neutrality". which is not true, as I said. perhaps it's more of a case of "boomers get confused by youth fashion trends, and that confusion easily leads to fear" which is really how they see nonbinary people anyway.

it's easy to believe that we're separate and much more enlightened. but that can cause us to miss the flaws that we point out in others.

[transgenderer]

The world is like a cupboard with two shelves, which separate the Middle World from the Lower and Upper Worlds. In certain places there are cracks in the shelves, and these are the pathways between the worlds. Each shelf contains a large number of drawers of various sizes, which are the lands of different creatures. In the Middle World one such drawer is the land of the living human beings, others are the lands of the various animal species, and others again are the lands of the animals’ master-spirits. . . . In the highest part of the Upper World lives Jesus with his father, God, who rules the sky. Below them live the People of the Light [Rus. Lyudi Sveta], who are creatures from outer space that fly around in UFOs [Rus. letaushchaya tarelka].

Little is known about them except that they are extremely bright, like Lenin, and that they sometimes capture humans in the Middle World in order to subject them to various experiments. This is why it occasionally happens that a hunter returns from the forest with no memory of where he has been and what he has been doing. . . . At the bottom of the cupboard, in the lowest part of the Lower World, is a small drawer, which is the dwelling place of the Grandfather with the Pointed Head [Yiodeiis’ien’ulben], who is the head of the evil spirits [abasylar]. Above him is another and much bigger drawer, which is the Land of Shadows [Ayibii-lebie]. This is the dwelling place for everything that has died. When one kills an elk or another animal, its ayibii [soul] will go to this place. The same with a cup that breaks or a house that burns down; their ayibii will go to the Land of Shadows, where they will regain their shapes and stay until they are reborn in a new cup and a new house in the Middle World. Likewise, when a human person dies, his or her ayibii leaves the body in which it has resided, to take up its abode in the body of a raven or some other bird and travel to the Land of Shadows. . . .

This land is similar to that of the living, but upside-down. People live in houses and tents with their families, eat, and hunt, as they would normally do, but many basic things, such as day and night, winter and summer, are reversed. Moreover, people who died young become old, and everyone eats decayed meat. . . . A person’s ayibii will dwell in the Lower World until the moment a woman among its living family members becomes pregnant. Then it will strive to return to reincarnate itself. However, its journey back is difficult, full of obstacles and dangers. It does occasionally happen that an ayibii is eaten by abasy [the Sakha word for evil spirit], in which case the ayibii itself will become abasy and hunt for other ayibii. It can also be trapped in the crack of a shelf. But if the ayibii succeeds in reaching the world of the living, it will penetrate the pregnant woman through her vagina and possess the child. The two then become one and the same person, and the child will share with the deceased a common personality. . . . The child should be given the deceased person’s name, or at least his or her nickname.

I really like this description of his worldview, a quote from Nikolai Likhachev from Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs by Willerslev, from the 90s. theyre hunter gatherers who worked on collective farms for a while and then went back to hunting and gathering when the soviet system collapsed

[shiftythrifting]

[percysfoxblog]

[luciebryon]

New Horizon, an Animal Crossing fancomic 

2020

[percysfoxblog]

[bpdohwhatajoy]

[dateamonster]

revealing your scaring the hoes type interests early on in a relationship is a good way to secure only hoes of bravery and fortitude that will craft horrible dreams and beautiful nightmares with you

[porterdavis]

[macsarcule1]

All this stuff is probably true, but it makes it sound like the workers are contaminating lettuce.

Wide-spread produce contamination happens through dirty irrigation water that sewage has leaked into.

Even if workers were taking shits in the field, it wouldn’t be enough to make these events and someone with intestinal diseases wouldn’t last long out doing manual labor in the hot sun (ask me how I know).

Food borne illnesses are almost always from shortcuts companies do to save a few bucks (don’t test the water, don’t test the produce, etc.)

[seekingstars]

HOW’S THAT HOUSE THAT RAISED YOU? - Lev St. Valentine

[bladehorror]

The bestiary, where you keep all your besties