Semper non Sequitur!

One of God's own prototypes -- some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

The opening title card of the movie “HOLES” is misspelled in DVD and Blu-Ray copies of the film.

Often when a movie is transferred to DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K formats, the titles have to be redone to read more legibly. When Disney released “HOLES” in 2003, the title card itself was written in small text in the corner of the screen. If transferred to home video normally, this title would have been only five pixels tall and too faint to make out.

But in early 2004, when the time came to alter the title for home video, the digital technician responsible typed the name wrong and quality control never caught it, all the way through the film’s blu-ray release in 2018. No fans wrote in noticing the flaw, nobody in quality for the disc releases, nobody at all noticed, and so the flaw remains to this day.

When we at FIJMU brought the error to Disney’s attention, a kind intern in an old fashioned hat simply took the initiative and explained, “I can fix that.”

[lafortis]

where my hloes at

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Why, they’re all hanging out at:

[pangur-and-grim]

dogs that I've been tempted by this week

[pangur-and-grim]

also adoption links, if someone else is also tempted:

Ferka

Fredy

Snowball

Pedro

[snufflingfortruffles]

oh no why did i click on pedro

[pangur-and-grim]

right?? unfortunately I have red-tailed hawks in my neighborhood, and he would be carried off

[villainessbian]

*he queeres* place on *he in*erne*

[twistcmyk]

no, i do not have cameras in your home (yet)

[patricia-taxxon]

the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese

[patricia-taxxon]

oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake

[patricia-taxxon]

im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.

"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.

You and a remorseful abuser would both think I'm giving the easy, coddling path. It's actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.

[ship-of-fools]

[tall]

[prokopetz]

The secret to always having things go according to plan is to have multiple mutually exclusive plans which between them encompass the entire space of possible outcomes. That way, no matter what happens, it will be according to a plan.

[rednines]

Baudrillard would have loved gooning

[rednines]

Look tumblr is a great place to find poststructuralist gooners but you’re a bit optimistic about the number of them

[wasturbatress]

[raptorific]

If I didn’t remember actually reading this in an actual Calvin and Hobbes book as a child I’d think it was ironically photoshopped like those comics where Mickey Mouse and Goofy talk about how reality is an illusion but this comic strip was actually just……. already………… like that……………

[memewolves]

I mean the title characters were named after philosophers so

[prokopetz]

That actually made me feel really dense when I finally figured it out. I mean, I picked up almost immediately that Hobbes is named after the philosopher, but took me years to twig to the fact that Calvin is named after the theologian.

[prokopetz]

Skeletons are theologically controversial. Some clergy say that the skeleton represents the enduring part of humanity, which will be brought back to life on the day of judgment. After all, many relics are pieces of bone. But other theologians claim that the skeleton, as the innermost part of the body, hidden from all sight until death, represents original sin itself.

 - excerpt from Miserable Secrets, the upcoming bestiary supplement to Rose Bailey’s Castlevania-punk tabletop RPG The Shadow of Golgotha

(If you aren’t following Rose Bailey’s Pateron, you should be.)

[graffiti-looker-deactivated2020]

Thought it was Catholicism reading the quote

[prokopetz]

Well, it’s not not Catholicism. The setting of Shadow of Golgotha proposes a future history in which the institutions of organised religion in Western Europe have been subverted by a vampire aristocracy, and all of the traditional vampiric weaknesses have been re-interpreted as signs of their holiness; for example, they’re repelled by the Cross because it symbolises the murder of Christ, poisoned by silver because it represents Judas’ betrayal, and so forth.

(The really fun part is that theological arguments like the one cited in the original post are reflected in the mechanics, in this case by the fact that whether skeletons are vulnerable to Holy damage depends on which side of the debate about the nature of skeletons the wielder falls on.)

[comatosecartesian]

Wait so faith only deals the damage you expect it to?

[prokopetz]

I’m not the game’s author, so I can’t speak to authorial intent, but if I was the one running it, I’d probably handle it like this:

In many denominations of Christianity - and particularly in Catholicism - there’s a theological notion called “honest intent”. A full discussion of what this concept entails is beyond the scope of this post, but in a nutshell, the idea is that a sacrament performed incorrectly, or by someone who doesn’t actually have the spiritual authority to administer it, may nonetheless be valid under certain circumstances, provided that the administering party honestly believes that they’re performing a valid sacrament and has no ill or self-serving intent in performing it. Similarly, a sacrament can be performed by a knowingly unqualified or duplicitous party and still be valid under certain circumstances, if the recipient honestly believes they’re receiving a valid sacrament and has no ill or self-serving intent in receiving it.

So in the case of our theological dubious skeleton, someone who believes that skeletons are holy - or at least, not unholy - creatures would be unable to invoke the wrath of God upon it, even if that belief is incorrect, because it prevents them from formulating the requisite honest intent.

(The concomitant question of whether one could successfully invoke the wrath of God upon a non-unholy creature in the honest-but-mistaken belief that it’s unholy is, of course, theologically fascinating - and, incidentally, heretical. Seriously, don’t wonder aloud about that sort of thing within earshot of a deacon; that’s a good way to get Inquisitioned.)

[apopheniaandeisegesis]

And, of course, if you count the skeleton as the recipient of the sacrament, you can wind up with all sorts of questions about what the skeleton believes.

[prokopetz]

Not to mention questions about whether getting blown up by divine wrath counts as receiving a sacrament!

[cryptotheism]

is the holy trinity a really complex thing? it sounds kinda easy to understand but some people seem to be really confused by it. is it like water?

Like many things in Christian theology, it is fairly simple on the surface, but becomes exponentially complex the more you dig in.

I think calling the Trinity "like water" would technically be nestorianist heresy because it implies the three elements are indistinct and of similar nature.

[prokopetz]

[squeakitties]

cloth gown gridlock

[creepymutelilbugger]

[starrmarr-deactivated20260106]

[blogofex]

@vriskakinnieaynrand

[tanadrin]

I’ve noticed the latest Claude does this thing where it will verbally start a line of thought, often a hedge or raising a complication to an idea, then backtrack and go wait, no, this was right the first time, nevermind. And my sense is that this is a product of the RL trying to make the model better at nuance or whatever, but it’s kind of annoying as a verbal tic.

As a signature of what makes LLM output and reasoning different from humans though it’s very interesting. I’m just spitballing here but I do wonder if it’s a combination of a couple of things—one, LLMs process the whole text in one go to produce the next token and there isn’t by default inherent continuity from one such pass to the next except what’s in the text, so while a human will think about something and go “nevermind” and discard it, and this is an invisible process, for an LLM that kind of mental digression has to be in the output *somewhere.* Using more sophisticated interfaces or harnesses or whatever that put that stuff in a scratchpad just hides it (and if you’re using a simpler, faster model like Sonnet it’s not using those features by default).

But I also get the sense that this is a product of the fact LLMs are pretty smart in some ways but not conscious—that even in more sophisticated setups where you have multiple task-specialized models working together behind the scenes to produce more sophisticated output, they’re all chugging along in a pretty reflexive way. If you let your own lower-level running-on-automatic cognitive systems handle a task, 99% of the time this works great—people navigate from point A to B over considerable distances all the time while their mind wanders, negotiating foot or car traffic all the while, and while your attention can step in if something genuinely unexpected happens often it just doesn’t need to. There are cognitive systems like music that work fine even in people who are suffering massive cognitive impairment.

It’s not a perfect analogy bc I don’t think LLMs resemble human brains very much, and humans can’t do complex tasks like “prove this Erdős problem” by reflex. That’s the sort of thing that requires all our attention usually. And we don’t have to synthesize our reasoning all the way down to the fully structured linguistic form to review it and go “no, that doesn’t sound right.” And having different modules work together to sharpen and improve the final output helps, but I suspect (and I really am way out on a limb here!) that completely discrete modules are a less efficient use of overall processing power than the sort-of-modular-sort-of-not design of the human brain, where different cognitive systems aren’t entirely discrete, specialization is only partial, and the brain itself is fairly plastic. The “modules” here are much more tightly integrated into one another, and because evolution can optimize ruthlessly for efficiency (has to, given it has stark resource constraints), it doesn’t and doesn’t need to care about like elegance of design. Which is a pattern you see in biology all the time.

[thecolorofthegame]

I know this trophy is supposed to represent a triathlon, but it looks like a cyclist award for attacking pedestrians

[zoesupreme]

broooo can you imagine

[zoesupreme]

mid 70s. in the backseat with 2 honeys with huge bushes. you turn the knob on that radio and Al Green comes on. one of them asks you if you want a quaalude.

[medievaljournalist]

When asked "what do you want to be when you grow up?" 89% of children ages 6-18 responded 'warrior-poet'. The remaining 11% was some other boring shit