Spades Players DNI

Orthodox Jew, he/him, ace aro probably mi jan Siniseli. o toki tawa mi kepeken toki pona! Blog for numerous and miscellaneous nerdy hobbies including but not limitted to math, science, games, linguistics, swords, menswear, worldbuilding, poetry, aesthetics, and philosophy This is what my schmoozing is like outside of the study hall (my orthodox jewish blog is @snissel613)

[snissel7]

I saw someone being rabidly gaylor so I went to check out their blog out of academic curiosity and you know what I found? Gaylor. endless self-reblogs of nothing but gaylor. There are exactly two braincells in this person's mind and one is "Taylor Swift" and the other is "Is Gay" and friend they are working overtime

[janmisali]

pick whatever option the person you're following who reblogged this post didn't pick. if they didn't say in the tags what they picked or if you're seeing the original post and not a reblog, pick at random instead.

first option

second option

Remaining time: 2 days 22 hours

[problemnyatic]

the most valueable skill a white leftist can ever learn is how to take an L with grace.

[problemnyatic]

You gotta be able to take an L if your moral and ethical belief systems are to be capable of guiding you. Otherwise you just have an idealized self where you get really mad and scared when anyone points out it isn't actually you. How the fuck are you gonna walk the walk if you can't handle being told when you are not, in fact, actually walking it

[problemnyatic]

you cannot just socially transition into being a good person you are going to have to settle for being a messy human being who has to try and fail and keep trying to get better like everyone else. yeah even when it's embarassing and sucks for you a lot.

[livseses]

Ya gotta learn to earnestly and honestly say "Oh shit, my bad."

[tartrazeen]

And to then end the sentence there, not launch into a paragraph of explanation or panicked super-apology.

[tim-official]

remembering this one time my father, a devout catholic who thinks of himself as progressive and believes in evolution etc, where we were arguing about "souls" and he was saying obviously animals don't have souls but humans do. and i said well you believe evolution happened. and he said yes. and i said so at some point as hominids were evolving did they just develop souls when they got 'human-like' enough? and without skipping a beat he said, yeah, at some point god said "okay you seem enough like humans" and a non-ensouled primate gave birth to an ensouled human child. and that's why humans have souls.

[voyaging-too]

The Lord of the Rings takes place in a world that’s analogous to Medieval England, and yet there’s New World crops like potatoes and tobacco. That’s not actually a plot hole: Tolkien himself explains, in the prologue to Fellowship, that pipeweed has been brought from overseas by Numenorians, it follows that hobbits came by potatoes the same way.

But the Hobbit and the early chapters of Fellowship contain much more jarring and numerous anachronisms than post-Columbian-exchange plants. There are metaphors referring to gunpowder, guns, a train engine and express trains! There are commodities that are from the Old World, but were not widespread in Medieval Europe, such as coffee, tea and fireworks. Even silk might be a bit of a stretch. And then there are tons of things that could or technically did exist  in a medieval world, but we definitely associate them with later eras: top hats, public museums, clocks small enough to put on a mantelpiece, football, golf, mothballs, umbrellas, metal pens, water bottles instead of waterskins, Christmas crackers, and then there’s the entire question of the hobbits’ written culture. Paper appears widely available and cheap, not everyone is literate but there seems to be a large literate middle-class that owns multiple books, has long legal battles with paperwork involved, sends tons of letters, sends written party invitations, uses anachronistic pre-cut envelopes. Letters aren't carried by random servants, there's an official postal service and a post office: this all implies a level of literacy and written culture more typical of an Early Modern-ish setting. Or Regency? Or Victorian? But definitely super not Medieval.

Conclusion one: when Tolkien started writing The Hobbit he very much did not know where he would end up, which is thematically appropriate.

Conclusion two: Tolkien semi-intentionally wrote the Shire as low-tech but still very recognisably similar to modern England, so that the hobbits leaving its safety to enter an Actual Fantasy World would feel more relatable. (LOTR is a portal fantasy.)

Conclusion three: these are not the aspects of worldbuilding that actually matter, it is actually good that Tolkien is obsessed with mythology and linguistics and only sketches the rest of the worldbuilding out as far as it's necessary for the plot, no need to sweat the small stuff. You should only write about agriculture and taxation if you care about them as much as Tolkien cared about unhinged comparative linguistics.

Conclusion four: in a Watsonian sense, we can take on the conceit that Tolkien didn't write the books, only translated them from a real source, the Red Book of Westmarch. We may then proceed to blame any perceived inconsistencies on his translation.

[northstareclipse]

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

[kosherdragondev]

Some of your problems have a systemic cause, and some of your problems do not...

[xylophonetangerine]

[witemglitch]

It exists and it's called Portland, Oregon

[sanrio-stud]

[bettyrightnow]

this picture kills me he thinks this whole damn event is about him

[snissel7]

and he’s right

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Metahuman with super healing powers whose entire job is that once a week they go to a nearby hospital and are put into a medically induced coma for 24 hours while all their organs and blood are harvested, and kept there until they've healed up again.

They get paid a small stipend by the Heroes Council for this, and they live off that.

No crime fighting, no obvious heroics, and they only took a Super Identity because it's technically hero's council policy. Nobody's ever seen them in a cape.

Every so often the Heroes council will release an official report to the public, and there'll be another bunch of news articles wondering how some unknown super calling themselves 'Meat Factory' somehow consistently holds the record for most lives saved across the city.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

It is essential to my vision that they are not at all sanctimonious about this.

Like, they regularly act like they're getting away with something. They joke about how they get to earn money in their sleep. They show up to their hospital visits in deliberately ridiculous disguises, on the excuse that they need to 'protect their identity'.

Part of their employment contract is that they get served the same post-operation vanilla ice cream that they normally hand out on the childrens' ward. Also a sticker. Their overnight bag is covered in stickers.

[sergeifyodorov]

I don't read as much fic as I used to but one "tell" for non Canadians writing us, besides the etransfer, is the units you use to describe us measuring something. I hate to tell you this but The Chart is real and it's completely subconscious. Please abide

[demotu-writes]

ETA the chart (or at least a version of it):

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").

Also, the length of a dick is in inches for SURE.

[captainjonnitkessler]

So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"

Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.

[myfootyrthroat]

Reblogging again because I was thinking about how this ties in with people using "none of us are free until all of us are free" as a cudgel. Passing up small wins for not being pure enough doesn't bring the big wins any closer.

[snissel7]

just saw the based take “we need to abolish free speech after the socialist revolution because otherwise the capitalists will monopolize the press and brainwash everyone back to capitalism”

[anarchistmemedistro]

[coolishfoolishness]

Or we could just accept that lying is the right thing to do sometimes actually, instead of making weird, backwards loopholes to convince ourselves we're telling the truth

[lilith-hazel-mathematics]

[feldfrog]

If I was a zookeeper, I would give a spare key to every animal somewhere inside the cage. If they can figure it out, they deserve it

[snissel7]

Watching the Tom Scott video on William Armstrong and just got Blindsided by "The Magician of the North"

[donniehaspronouns]

let’s maybe stop acting like cishet perisex men are inherently dangerous and bad and undeserving of a space at pride. some of the best queer allies I’ve ever had have been the cishet perisex guys that come with me to local pride events and hype up my transition while I’ve had my identity questioned and attacked by fellow trans queer people. your capacity for harm is not stored in your identity, it’s in your actions.