Starborn

Among the crows

[josephbrassey]

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

[gudamor]

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

[thoodleoo]

book 11 of the greek anthology is truly the gift that keeps on giving

[mumblesplash]

it’s so magical and beautiful that there are sprawling interconnected cave systems carved deep into the earth by various geological forces and you don’t have to go in them. there are miles and miles of stone passageways in total darkness that require you to exhale all the air out of your lungs to squeeze through parts of them and you don’t have to be there. some of these squeezes are underwater and require cave divers to take off their oxygen tanks and push them through ahead of them and me i am above ground looking at the sky as we speak. there are untold subterranean wonders no human has ever seen and i will not be the one to discover them #grateful #blessed

[mumblesplash]

cave divers when they are happily married with kids and beloved by their community but theres a crack in the bottom of a lake called The Devil’s Rotting Esophagus where 57 people have died

[homunculonimbus]

"Wow, you're really good at this, you should do this professionally" okay but have you considered that I don't want to because that would suck all the fun out of this thing that I do for fun and entertainment and it's actually a conscious choice to not do this professionally because that would destroy the very reason I do this to begin with

[homunculonimbus]

"You should monetize this hobby" You should go outside and leave me alone

[jaypilled]

are those my only options

[lindleland]

disco elysium dialogue tree

[cryptotheism]

Middle Earth doesn't even have plate tectonics. All the mountains were placed there by the Ainur or some shit. The shape of Mordor isn't "unrealistic" the world was intelligently designed by Catholic elf gods.

[cryptotheism]

Also here is what the actual Carpathian mountains look like.

[myspace]

Six flags commercial from 2004 you most likely forgot about.

[nonenosome2]

Nobody who has seen this has ever forgotten about it.

[c3rvida3]

kitten if you don't get daddy his 3D printed sensory slug in the next five seconds you can kiss your grandma's drywall goodbye

[c3rvida3]

This was supposed to be unrebloggable, but I was flying into a gamer rage at the antique store because someone was wearing too much Victoria's Secret Love Spell body spray and it gave me a migraine.

[prokopetz]

Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century

A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.

For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.

It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.

(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)

[great-and-small]

Don’t mind me just thinking about the hole in the middle of the United States where Chipping sparrows refuse to fuck

[great-and-small]

[starborn0]

Anytime I really get caught on whether or not I’ll ever produce a writing of significance, I have to remind myself that enjoying the fruits of humankind’s labors in peace is in itself a sort of victory.

[cryptotheism]

Curious to hear more thoughts about brothers Karamazov. And what your favourite individual scenes are and what you think about the inquisitor scene. If you want. Alyosha absolutely would say bweh btw

Part of what makes Dostoyevsky so fascinating as an author is his genius-level skill with character productively clashing with his personal Christian aristocratic moralism. I was interested in the trial, because I find it very interesting when an author has to represent The Law.

Take detective Porfiry from Crime and Punishment. Incredible character. A proto-Columbo. As a representation of the law, he is dogged, unassuming, disheveled, and sharp-witted. His approach to Raskolnikov's murder is methodical, almost non-judgemental. He does a excellent job of representing a legal institution slowly pursuing Truth. He is also morally justified. It is good that Raskolnikov goes to jail. He deserves to be in jail, and it is good when detective Porfiry puts him there.

Compare this to Kafka depicting police and lawyers, as bizarre, childlike, sadistic, freaks who talk like spirits from Twin Peaks. They are representatives of a system with arcane rules that has both total power and little regard for its subjects.

I was really interested to see how Dostoyevsky represented the trial of Dimitri. I got farce. Yk like the jury are presented as idiots and romantics easily swayed by the lawyers. Dostoyevsky is clearly far more interested in the social aspects of the legal system. I might do another closer read of the trial chapters to see what I can glean. I do like how the prosecutor was described, as being this strange and birdlike man. I feel there's probably some allusion I'm missing.

As for my favorite scenes I really liked how the chapters from father Zosimas perspective changed style. I listened as an audiobook and the reader changed his delivery for those bits. It had an interesting affect I can't quite put into words. I especially liked that father Zosima rotted incredibly quickly and his followers started questioning their faith in him, rather than the actual value of his teachings. It was a witty and effective commentary on religion that --imo-- feels somewhat undermined by the thematic adherence to Christian morality as a meaningful social technology.

As for the Grand Inquisitor chapter. Yeah incredible. Alyosha being the Christlike little bro is effective and engaging. Excellent type of man to sexually torture. I will say though, I recently read The Apache Wars by Paul Andrew Hutton and it is personally difficult for me to square the beauty of the argument presented by the Grand Inquisitor with the actual historical events of the conquest of Apecheria and the Americas more broadly. Great book. I enjoyed Crime and Punishment more.

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[sashayed]

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

[boomstab-papa]

[your-cosmic-creature]

“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

[overflowchute]

THE CRICKET THAT LIVES EXCLUSIVELY ON NEW LAVA FIELDS AND IMMEDIATELY LEAVES THE MOMENT ANY PLANTS SHOW UP. NO ONE HAS EVER SCAVENGED THIS HARD BEFORE. IT'S A LIFESTYLE

[bunjywunjy]

THE VOLCANIC VENT CRICKET LOVES CHEESE

[godblessthesickos]

World historical loser

[drwiltz-official]