Words and Dreams of Tomorrow

@thehugmonster

Samsara; in my 20s; honestly idk

22.9K posts

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BITING

I'm thinking that maybe part of my ridiculously high stress is that I don't really stim anymore

I've found biting things to be one of the most (only) effective things for defusing anxiety, but I haven't used it much due to the lack of suitable items. i just remembered that i successfully pulled myself out of a panic attack by biting a plastic pen and shattering it into pieces. but it's not good to have a mouthful of plastic shards. Cardboard and paper are not good alternatives because the texture on my teeth is torture.

I have a problem with grinding my teeth, and I observe that I feel stress and unsafety in my teeth and jaws. I think this feeling is my body wanting to defend itself, and I think biting might allow my body to fulfill that urge and release the fight/flight response.

I was thinking of getting one of those teething toys they have for babies that have water inside and you can freeze them, however. I can bite a lot harder than a baby and whatever I use has to handle getting bit REALLY Hard.

So maybe what I need is one of those super heavy duty dog toys that are supposedly indestructible.

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biting is also one of the things i visualized myself doing to break out of episodes I had where I would just get drenched in the feeling of being powerless

When I was trying to process all the stuff that had affected me, I started to connect really strongly with the idea of a werewolf. For years before I had conceptualized my fear as a "monster" that had intruded into my head, but it started affecting and harming my body more and more to the point where I was so tense I was in pain much of the time

it felt like something was inside me gnawing on my ribs and guts and that's probably where the wolf picture came from

I realized, that the "monster" was ME. She loved me, and she was protecting me. I was struck with this awe and gratitude that my fear had always been so ferocious, unreasonable, and indomitable. Fear was my body wanting to live! And not just survive. My fear insisted that I needed to be respected, that I needed agency over my body, that I needed to be listened to. I visualized my fear as my wolf part. She was curled protectively around me, snarling and biting at anything that came near.

This image helped me feel empowered. It even helped me feel comfortable getting vaccines at the pharmacy (even a simple vaccination used to destroy my energy for DAYS afterward because of the adrenaline crash, and going to a 'non-medical' setting was my strategy for helping). I visualized surrendering to the wolf. I put the wolf-part in control, basically doing the exact opposite of what I had been taught to do, and my fear became like...this powerful thing, standing guard over me. And eventually I got my flu shot, and all the other vaccines I needed to catch up on, and by the end of it, it was very calm and almost stress-free.

this is to say, I think I've fallen back into those old, well-worn grooves of treating myself like my socially unacceptable needs are something to be crushed as flat as possible and ignored.

biting is something that viscerally feels powerful, and it's part of that visualization of my fear as my wolf part. A part of me that exists outside of social convention and the "domesticated" world and only cares about my need to be safe

Obviously, biting is the nuclear option in interpersonal relations, but visualizing a scenario where I WOULD bite someone helped me feel empowered to take boundary-setting actions: saying "no," communicating my needs, setting the terms for interactions with medical professionals

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I have so much sympathy for you, OP

The testimony of your body is true.

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one of these days i will write a very in-depth post about why the concept of "going back in time and being able to invent modern technology and amaze everyone with modern scientific knowledge" is stupid

Ryan North has a (mostly) nonfiction book called "How To Invent Everything" about the basics of all sorts of important technologies. The framing device / gimmick is that it's written as a manual for stranded time travelers who may end up having to do exactly what you're describing. I'm sure there are lots of gaps that would prevent it from actually being usable as such, but as a layperson it was a great read.

I do think there are a small number of scientific insights that are known to most modern people, simple enough to communicate, and actually useful: germ theory would be a big one. But this would only make a difference if you could make people believe you, which is a big ask, since I don't think there's a quick way to prove germs are real without a microscope.

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See, this is an easy demonstration of the problem: germ theory (the idea that there are extremely tiny particles or organisms that transmit illness) existed as an idea for a thousand years, (Ibn Sina, from the 11th century, thought of a similar idea) but it was unproven, and there was no way to prove it.

People knew from ancient times that certain things, like contact with sick people, bodily fluids, dead bodies, or "dirty" things/things that smell bad, can make you sick, even if they didn't know precisely how. And they couldn't know. In order to prove that a microscopic organism was the cause of a disease, you wouldn't just have to be able to observe microorganisms. You'd have to identify that there are specific microorganisms that are found in people who get a specific disease, and that they are not found in healthy people, and that exposure to infectious material that contains those microorganisms can cause a healthy person to become sick.

We think of germ theory as being "so simple!" because the rituals of protecting from harmful microorganisms are culturally ingrained in us, and we have access to the technologies to perform them. But if you were sent back to medieval times, would you be able to come up with a way to purify dirty water on a scale that would work for everybody? Could you come up with a treatment that kills the fleas that cause bubonic plague? Would you even know how to clean the clothing or tools that people used daily without damaging the item? How do you sterilize a cup made of wood or pewter? How do you make sure the water you're washing your hands with is clean? Can you make enough soap to fulfill the needs of handwashing? How do you safely examine a patient if you don't have gloves? How do you make the cloth you're using to bind a wound sterile?

Meanwhile, you probably don't even know how to safely preserve food without refrigeration, how to dispose of human waste without toilets or running water, where to dig a well, how to recognize different parasites and diseases in farm animals, how to recognize spoilage in stored grain, or how to use medicinal herbs. That's a lot of medical knowledge medieval people would have had that you don't know because you don't need to know.

"Wash your hands with soap and water" we would tell everyone! But we ourselves don't even know how to make soap!

Humans have been cooking, digging latrines, disposing of dead bodies, setting rules and norms about which foods are good to eat, and using medicines since before the beginning of civilization. Those things are all health knowledge, but it is easy to take it for granted when you have access to soap and sewers that keep your poop separate from your drinking water and Lysol and borosilicate glass and little boxes inside your house that automatically make objects the appropriate amount hot or cold to get rid of microorganisms.

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made a horrible stir fry out of rice noodles and a bunch of random plants I know are edible. Now stomach feels weird and honestly it probably has something to do with eating a bunch of random plants

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im always exercising that damn free will (eating leafs off the Ground)

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i had this horrifying dream that my friend used my left-over stir fry to make a stir fry but there was mayonnaise in it (???) and it was so disgusting that I spent a good bit of the dream trying to wash it out of my mouth, like in the dream I had a water hose and was fiddling with the settings trying to clean out my mouth with the water hose, but no matter how much I rinsed the water running down onto the sidewalk was still gross mayonnaise water. "Out, damn spot!" kind of situation. I woke up feeling intensely nauseated and I still feel sick thinking about it.

My brain: Don't do that again. Point taken.

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One of the books I recommend everybody to read is Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. It rewired my brain and I mean that in a really physical, tactile way.

One of the main topics of the book is Indigenous Australian information technologies. Indigenous Australians don't use written language. They have different information technologies. Not inferior. Different. Yunkaporta demonstrates the very basics of how these technologies work, and you immediately feel your brain do something you had no idea it could do.

It feels like he's walking inside your house, gesturing to a wall that was always there, and then walking right through it, demonstrating that the wall was never there in the first place.

In a written-language-based society, children grow up learning to communicate by written language, and it shapes the way their thoughts and memories work. But there are other information technologies that work very, very differently than how written language works. The very idea of ideas is fundamentally different.

The author re-iterates that writing these things down into a book mutilates the idea because writing makes you think and understand a certain way.

I think everyone should read this book because basically everyone is brainwashed nowadays to believe that human cultures follow a linear progression from being dirty cave men in the woods, to settled agriculture, cities and written language, to smelting iron and writing on paper...and it's totally wrong.

Some cultures used writing, others didn't. Writing is not a "later stage" of "advancement," it is just a different technology, and it has advantages and disadvantages.

Same with agriculture. Yunkaporta explains that there were indigenous Australian people that tried settled agriculture in the distant past, but that culture collapsed. The ecosystem just isn't good for settled agriculture.

Same with metal working. Something that pisses me off is people calling indigenous North American cultures "stone age." First of all, they made plenty of things out of copper. Second of all, they didn't NEED bronze or iron. Mining is back breaking, dangerous work, and smelting involves so many unhealthy fumes. Maybe the labor and impact upon society and the environment just wasn't worth it for them.

Colonization has made a monoculture of thought. Monoculture is in the essence of colonialism. Not only does colonialism literally replace diverse agricultural ecosystems with sameness, it also replaces human diversity with sameness.

And replacing human diversity with sameness, enforces sameness upon the ecosystem, because everyone is forced into using the same machines, consuming the same resources, valuing the same aesthetics, eating the same foods, playing the same sports, raising the same animals, wearing the same clothes, living in the same houses.

Just think about it. If two cultures live next to each other and have different cultural foods and clothes, for example one eats fish and berries and wears wool and the other eats chickens and roots and wears linen, their foraging and agricultural practices are different, so more biodiversity can exist, and they aren't using the same resources, so the resources are more sustainable. If EVERY culture eats the same food and wears the same clothes, they are all putting strain on the same resources, and every area will have the same agro-ecosystem, eliminating biodiversity.

pangur-and-grim

it might just be anthropomorphism, but I think Pangur and Belphie can tell that I’m sick? they’ve been on me like glue all day, just sitting on my left and right and not getting into any mischief. it actually made me cry a little. I guess having a fever and infection changes your smell?

(Grim’s contribution was to step on my eye socket at 7am and then hiss when I said OW too loud, but I appreciate that too. we all have different love languages.)

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There's animals that are trained to detect when someones blood sugar is getting too low or if they're having some kind of medical episode, or that can detect heart conditions etc. so animals absolutely can tell when humans are ill

Mentally combining the "bees are unionized and will leave if they don't like their working conditions" post with the various "humans stow away on alien spaceships and do the jobs that are too dangerous for more fragile species" posts

Interstellar guidelines state that while approaching humans carelessly or aggressively can result in serious injury, and while you absolutely should not try to trap a swarm of humans on your ship, if you build a human-friendly habitat with enough food within grazing distance and safe places to sleep, you just might entice a colony to move in

Trapping a swarm of humans on your ship:

unauthorized tunnels keep popping up in restricted zones

theft of various items they consider cozy, delicious, cute, or extremely hazardous

equipment sabotaged in supposedly impossible ways, and/or supposedly explosion-proofed material exploding

received communications vary from heartfelt pleas for freedom to vengeful declarations of war to treatises on the sacred rights of spaceship-occupants to disturbingly specific threats to incomprehensible slam poetry

Encouraging a volunteer human colony to thrive:

leaving items they like + building materials in areas they can access, then coming back later to find those areas transformed into fully organized warehouses/gardens/workshops

items left lying around spontaneously being made cuter, cozier, tastier, and/or more hazardous

new workarounds, temp fixes, or repurposes being tried out on any equipment that's on the fritz (and some that's not)

disturbingly creative and fervent allies against outside forces

sound of happy poetry coming from the vents

thesaltofcarthage

this post combines two of my favorite things and I am ASCENDING

this post combines two

of my favorite things and

I am ASCENDING

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Warning that humans are a symbiotic species, strongly prone to all three types of symbiosis: mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. To encourage a mutualistic symbiosis, follow recommended guidelines for available space, accessible materials, and living conditions.

Humans will not restrict their symbiotic relationships to the dominant sentient species on a starship. It is highly recommended that, if you have discovered a nesting colony of humans on your ship or starbase, you provide them with the recommended resources. Otherwise, they may wind up in a symbiotic relationship with various predator species. Or your AI bots. Or carnivorous fungi.

Don't ask. Just make sure they've got the kind of supplies that will let them be comfortable.

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HUMANS ARE SPACE BEES

#humans are space bees #humans are weird

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Overheard a girl walking past me: "I want to skip her class and practice the electric guitar."

There’s a dude at the bus stop who is having a fight with someone over the phone, and I wish so hard I could hear both sides of the fight, because he just yelled

YOU need to adjust your PUNK ASS chakra!

I don’t know what this means either objectively or in his personal lived experience but he has some strong feelings about some punk ass chakras.

Found this one in the archives, felt like it needed a renaissance. So many people need to adjust their punk ass chakras.

It’s just….it’s so beautiful….

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Overheard conversation today:

"-and we were sleeping in the room with the taxidermy, and there was a bear—and we had to put shirts over their heads so we could sleep!—"

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anyways. I’m bored.

Tell me a thing and I’ll try to draw it from memory

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He’s unhappy with this development

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y'all might have heard of this but there's a youtuber called KVN AUST who has a series of videos about "youtube's recycle bin", basically videos that have zero or very few views because they were uploaded without titles and instead have the file name given by the devices they were shot on.

I HIGHLY recommend the whole series but also you can use his library of "leads" to explore the Youtube Recycle Bin yourself and I've done that a lot and it's SO fun

The internet is so vast, much more expansive than algorithms will ever show you. This really reminds me of wandering around randomly on Google Earth. It's possible to experience so much of the world it's kind of mind boggling.

I've been keeping a collection of my favorite youtube recycle bin finds.

I think this is my favorite thing I've found on there.

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theres apparently more kinds of music than you can possibly imagine. its like. completely randomized sample of human artistic expression.

also there's at least more kinds of sports than I thought existed.

and also everywhere people are dancing. and they're usually not very good at it but that's okay

at the club in some eastern european country judging by the cyrillic text

guy in some kind of cosplay with a gas mask dancing

dance show, looks like students, cyrillic text again. pink panther theme? then party rockers in the house tonight?

guy plays drums on buckets and trashcans (interesting)

guy rapping but you cant hardly hear him because of wind blowing over the microphone. im amazed by the video quality being so good and the audio quality being so bad

brief ambience in a bar

dancing (pretty good)

on stage monologue in language i don't understand

more dancing

no idea what this is

furries dancing on the roof of a building to a furry related song

unfamiliar kind of music. I've never seen instruments like these before. there are poles you beat against the ground and pipes that you slap with a flat implement. it sounds really cool though.

disco music with a guy with a really bad wig

low quality video at a rave or something

driving terrifyingly thru snow somewhere in eastern europe i think

riding in a boat along a canal with dilapidated buildings with graffiti right up to the waters edge very interesting

truck sports somewhere in like, saudi arabia or nearby

Fish market. they are VERY fresh you can tell by the fact they're still flopping

riding a four wheeler in some kind of savanna like environment in the darkness

boat on a lush waterway nice ambience

Some kind of technology being demonstrated. would be really interested to learn what is being shown here

guys inside of a mine?

view out the window of a train near a gigantic city

unfamiliar sport where you hit eachother with sticks balancing on a beam

Guy walks under a bridge appears to be singing to himself the word "homeless"

early morning city ambience really vibey

another peaceful city ambience out a window

night time video out of the window in a city

oceanside city ambience

people in knight armor hitting each other with sticks

anyways that is most of my curated list

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BTW also when I was reading about autism genes i somehow got onto this database of genetic conditions which is how I found out that there is a condition where you are born without fingerprints

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there is also a condition where you are allergic to cold temperatures

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yall the range of human variation is absolutely wild, a lot of these genetic conditions are harmful or fatal (which is why we know about them) but there have to be like a billion random genetic variations that are largely innocuous that we Don't have diagnostic criteria for, I guess that would just be the full range of all human genetic possibilities, we are all just mutations ultimately.

But also like. Everybody is experiencing a completely novel iteration of being human. We act like it's the same and bodies are the same and there's a Standard way to be a human but there's Not we are all just awkwardly duct taped together basically.

So just think, there's this poor woman somewhere who's like "My feet go numb whenever I engage in vigorous exercise, what's up with that?" and she probably has an asshole doctor who is like No They Don't.

But actually she just has Feet Go Numb When You Exercise Condition. Which no one knows about yet. Because she's the only person that has it.

So like when we bought the new house, right after closing my attorney gave me this checklist of things to do right away, like rekey the locks, check the carbon monoxide and fire alarms, and replace all the toilet seats.

This last one struck us as very funny because, while the toilet seat one is a reasonable reminder for those richie riches out there with new toilet seat money and a fear of lingering butt germs, we do not have that option, because our 125 year old house came equipped with a toilet so technologically advanced that we have a separate toilet adjacent wall panel to control all the options.

This toilet has features I have never even seen before, much less experienced. When you sit down on it, it makes a comforting little beep, as if to say “hello friend, i’ve missed you!” It then begins to run just the tiniest bit of water to ensure that the built in bidet with full independent control over direction, intensity, and temperature will be prepared whether you opt for cold, lukewarm, or hot. Then, there is the air dry button, with its own temperature and intensity controls. It will literally both wash and dry your butt, and you will be in the utmost comfort while doing so. There is an anti-odor button, and I cannot fathom what technology THAT one deploys. There is still more.

We never would have bought this on our own, but we have quickly come to trust and love the Poopstation-9000.

I’ll note that when we moved in we immediately discovered that the prior owner had left us toilet paper, moisturizing “flushable” wet wipes, and a toilet brush next to his recently abdicated throne. It was both extremely nice of him and an objectively wild thing for him to concern himself with.

Like, it’s very kind to leave a roll of toilet paper behind. He left six, neatly arranged so we couldn’t miss them. He had it alllllll set up for us. This dude had a PASSION, and he wanted to recruit us to the cause.

I want you all to know that I have never pressed “Auto” because I am scared that it will be his personalized, meticulously calibrated setting and it will blast my butthole directly into the stratosphere.

Oh my god. I just looked it up. I had a sense that it was expensive but I had to know. I’m going to throw up.

This is an $899 toilet seat.

This toilet seat cost more than our brand new washing machine.

This toilet seat costs more than many weeklong cruises.

This house has no AC, a furnace that can charitably be described as an antique with four thermostats inexplicably installed to control it given that there’s only one zone, baseboard heating, a crack between the foundation blocks that you can very literally see the backyard through, 1970s wood paneling on the entire second floor with the ugliest (very stained) bright red polyester carpet you’ve ever seen, 1000 outlets so loose that you can’t plug anything into them, 14 spiders per room, and an $899 toilet seat.

I need to sit down.

…Thankfully, I have a spot.

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Someone had his priorities straight.

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Art...humans making art. I'm full of thoughts about art y'all. It is so human to make art.

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look at ancient and pre-historic art all around the globe, marvel at the attentive details, carefully rendered and alive. Fragments of decoration, carvings, table legs, columns, figurines, frescoes.

You might go to the beginning of history in a book. "Here is the beginning of civilization!" textbooks say about Sumer, and go on to talk about Egypt and Greece. Here is the beginning of history, where people were primitive and didn't write and only knew how to farm with sticks and be in the woods.

Don't read the textbook. Not yet. Look at the bodies and animals etched into ivory at the beginning of history. Look at the fragmentary Greek statues, beautiful humans and beasts carefully created from bronze and marble. Look at the beautiful patterns on the shards of pottery. Look at the Lamassu statues; someone crafted every feather. Look at the portraits, their smiling eyes; look at the little fragments of pottery painted with birds. Look at this little piece of ceiling with dozens of pigeons, each unique, each drawn by a human's hands.

An artist's mind held every face they had ever seen as they chiseled away marble, somehow knowing that it could be human. Imagine the patience. Imagine how heavy the slab of marble is, how difficult to move, how little it resembles you. Imagine the culmination of craft and memory it takes to make a living creature from bronze. You have to notice the nuggets and seams of metal in the rocks around you. You have to learn to make fire and learn that metals can be molten.

Imagine someone learning to extract yellow ochre and lapis lazuli, finding the source of minerals that—strangely—stain your fingers a bright color with their dust. Someone finds this important enough to tell everyone else, and those people find it important enough to tell their children.

Imagine a person making a pot to carry water, imagining a tall bird they saw near the river, using pigments to paint the tall bird on the side of the pot.

To bite into rock and shape it, you need tools; to make something large, you need people to quarry the stone and deliver it to you; to paint, you need brushes and tools, which someone must craft; you need pigments that each have a different origin and must be prepared and mixed in a medium; you need a surface to paint on, clay that must be fired, plaster that must be mixed and applied. It is a wide web of interdependence.

Imagine how long it takes to learn. Imagine the first time you try to carve a face from stone or ivory, and the second, and the third, and the fourth; imagine how many times you have to start over.

Think of learning to hold a stick of charcoal so you can control the mark it makes, now think of rendering something you can only see in your mind onto a surface, turning shadows and shapes on a real, three-dimensional object into markings that imitate it. Imagine how much time you have to spend immersed in observing the world around you.

Look at the statues and carvings, the animals and birds and people, the plants and imaginary creatures, and try to imagine each hour spent observing the living world represented by them. Imagine the cumulative weight of every look at every human face that had to be stored in the artist's mind, to be transformed into the image of a goddess.

Try to see the accumulated knowledge. The connections maintained across time and place. The technological sophistication and technique. The persistence. The patience. The wisdom, precision, and willingness to spend hours, perhaps hundreds or thousands of hours, out of a life that might not be long, doing work with no immediate contribution to your survival in a cruel world.

What could be so important?

This was not easy. It is all technologically marvelous. It represents incredible skill and effort and time, passed down and consciously shared and perpetuated. Generation upon generation of accumulated knowledge, that countless individuals decided was worthwhile and indispensable.

This was important, and it still is.

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Compilation of people in YouTube comments trying to describe how music makes them feel

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Continuation

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