Title is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories". Handle means "storyteller" in Nahuatl. This'll mostly be about pop culture, linguistics, philosophy, history, and other things that interest me, but also about writing.
good art is when something looks like real life, the more real it looks the more better the art. abstracted figures give my trad children nightmares, one time they were exposed to cubism and couldn't go outside for a week
$6 billion could topple a lot of socialist regimes and hunt down a lot of militias in failed states, and thatās who causes most chronic hunger in the modern worldā¦
if you live in America: unless you are a genuine esoteric right wing extremist you have not dealt in any way with what it means to acquire an actual ābanned bookā
Engineering teams around the world have been attempting to develop new methods of seawater desalination.
Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.
The goal is now to scale the technology for use in coastal areas and islands experiencing water insecurity.
Something that annoys me is the constant whining about "more queer spaces, more queer communities" but then they're immediately like "yeah! And we need ones that don't cost money or require a purchase!"
Girl that's exactly why they close down after a year. You NEED money to keep these places open. There's no magic Gay Money Pot with endless cash to keep these places open. It requires YOU to put your money where your values are!!
You know that thing where screenwriters canāt get anything original greenlit so they use existing properties as trojan horses to do the original story they actually wanted?
It seems like the same thing happens with ideologies and religions, resulting in stuff that has basically nothing to do older forms of the ideology/religion and are in fact hostile toward the original form using a particular name.
Opinions designed to make me specifically lose all hope:
I always call people I meet at work by their first name, whether they want it or not. When they talk to me on a first name basis, that means we are friends, and that's good. I want to be friends with everybody. When people insist on being called Mr. Name instead of Jim, they don't want to be my friend, and then I don't give a shit about respecting them. Or worse, they are socially conservative.
I don't understand why people would ever be unfriendly and unfamiliar and go by last name.
Like a lot of things in this genre it kinda points out differences between ideals expressed in science fiction (or cases when something dystopian has been produced), generates negative affect from them, and smears that negative affect all over a bunch of stuff with (in my view) little rational justification.
Also MASSIVE gell-mann amnesia regarding EAs and longtermism IMO, and "what do you care if the bridge falls down? The most important thing is that it centers minority voices" mentality.
I think some of these problems are common in an essay that jumps between many different topics.
It says we shouldn't care about a supposedly theoretical, far off human extinction by evil robots and then talks about Sam Altman perceiving that the potentially evil/dangerous robots are forming right now in his own hands.
Frankly I think that the fundamental basis of this article is that the author hates the idea of lone visionaries and likes socialist or left-wing-community governance, and they would be humiliated if lone visionaries or a non-socialist future were to carry the day. The self-interestedness and immorality of the current crop of tech people and the antidemocratic attitudes, contempt for normal/currently existing humanity, etc is almost window dressing, it's not really being explored.
One: Why does the top say "stories of a better future"? That's not what science fiction is. That's not even what the article body is about. The article later says "Gibsonās vision was explicitly dystopian".
Two:
Star TrekĀ depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment.
Star Trek is wrong or incoherent on this point. "Post-scarcity" is a buzzword that collapses under scrutiny. The strict interpretation is physically impossible because Chateau Picard is scarce; there aren't enough French chateaus to go around. The loose interpretation is already accomplished. Roddenberry didn't understand why money is.
Three:
Seldonās most important act is not his prophecy: it is founding theĀ SecondĀ Foundation, a hidden network of scholars working collaboratively across centuries. The novelsā moral architecture is explicitly anti-authoritarian: every time a charismatic individual attempts to seize control of the mission, the story presents it as catastrophe. The series is, at its heart, a sustained argument for the indispensability of checks and balances.
The Second Foundation is an unchecked shadowy conspiracy of telepathic puppeteers making sure mainstream society doesn't diverge from The Great Plan. This is super authoritarian. Did Taskale ever read the books, or did she just hear "network of scholars" and think "that means ingroup, so it must be good" ?
Asimovās vision of the far future is a defence of the mundane infrastructure of civilisation: the archive, the committee, the negotiated agreement
and the shadowy conspiracy. The shadowy conspiracy is very important to that particular sci-fi vision! And it only negotiates agreement within the conspiracy, not with the rest of civilisation.
Four: "Whitey on the Moon". This strikes me as a values difference pretending to be an argument. Taskale wants a maximin society and positions himself as a stereotypical mom telling off her child: you can't go to Billy's house Mars until you've finished your homework! I want a freer society: you're not my mother, you're not Elon Musk's mother, we are not children, you can shake your fist at the sky.
Five: "Silicon Valleyās selective reading" and similar pejorative phrases. So much projection, Taskale should find work in a cinema. Taskale is selectively picking parts he likes, such as the scholarly side of the Second Foundation but not its conspiracy control, then complaining that billionaires are only picking the parts they like. Fuck off. Double fuck off because the billionaires have the better excuse here for picking only some parts to implement: different sci-fi stories are contradictory and it's impossible to implement them all at once.
Six:
J R R Tolkienās The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. [...] Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon ā it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely.
Hey Taskale, what's the third Lord of the Rings book named? Can you think about how Aragorn's arc contradicts your claim of what the allegedly "central moral" is? Do you see how there's some will to dominate involved in calling up an army and going to war?
Tolkienās fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power.
This is misinformation! When Frodo the hobbit reaches Mount Doom, he does not prevail this way. He claims the Ring for his own and puts it on with the intent to seize power.
(The other hobbits at large are not prevailing either; they're getting dunked on by Saruman.)
The essay is very, very, very bad throughout. Much of it is wrong, and more of it is not even wrong, it's buzzwords and slurs and free-association and Whig history and what Orwell described as "It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx".
Science fiction provides the aesthetic cover for this anti-democratic vision. It makes rolling back the franchise sound like bold futurism rather than Victorian regression.
Taskale has no business complaining about any sort of "anti-democratic vision" after he cheered the Second Foundation. Taskale does not have the wit to realize that rolling back the franchise can be bold futurism, either.
Take away the prejudicial framing and look at Star Trek again, then try to describe with parallell words to Taskale's complaint: "It makes rolling back money sound like bold futurism rather than Iron Age regression."
Money, like the franchise, was invented at some point. Perhaps these were good ideas and should be kept, perhaps these were bad ideas and should be abolished. Science fiction is a subcategory of speculative fiction: "What if?" stories where the author fantasizes about some change to society. It is good and right that authors can speculate about abolishing either or both of money and franchise. But Taskale does not want to let science fiction explore ideas freely; Taskale demands that science fiction should be politically correct and it's only "real" science fiction when it's exploring his favored ideas. Taskale wants disfavored ideas purged from science fiction and put in a containment box called "reactionary futurism" instead.
Stop trying to claim genres for your politics. Stop doing it. Stop. According to insufferable leftists, every genre other than "contemptible marvel movie" is actually made by leftists and only for leftists and non-leftists are actually stealing it from them by enjoying it.
This is anarcho-totalitarianism. "Everything within my politics, nothing outside my politics, nothing against my politics." Art is meant to be escape from the suffering these people inflict on others, and they hate anything that offers escape from their cruelty.
OP: "Decarbonized formaldehyde is great. Just wash daikons with decarbonized formaldehyde and they turn white."
"Decarbonized formaldehyde" (č«ē¢³ē²é) is an online phrase used to make fun of people that blindly avoid chemicals. Formaldehyde (H2CO) decarbonized is water (H2O).
and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
No, no this movie where everyone's saying how we need to turn white cultures' stories into multi-cultural ones while not applying that standard to any other cultural group is not about white supremacy, unless you're somehow saying that the culture warriors doing this are perpetuating white supremacy by demanding that white cultures have their stories be treated as generic open-source ones while not doing that for anyone else. You're going to have to learn how to criticize someone and something for being culturally insensitive without criticizing wypipo and blaming it all on the exact opposite of what's actually going on.
once again this isn't about "white cultures", this is specifically about ANCIENT GREEK (and to a similar extent roman) culture. and this isn't about some nebulous "other cultures", this is about CURRENT WESTERN CULTURE. i know you just saw the "white supremacy" as a buzzword, but i can't help if the white supremacist colonialist legacy (britain and its american colonies) has turned multicultural in the meantime. that's not my fault. the rest of the cultural relationship between The West and the ancient Mediterraneum still applies.
stop being anti-intellectual on my post and maybe read it again. the white british-american director casting hollywood a-listers isn't doing so in order to make All Cultures feel represented. there's one culture most of them have in common here.
i can't help if the white supremacist colonialist legacy (britain and its american colonies) has turned multicultural in the meantime. that's not my fault.
No, it's your delusion. You've decided that non-white people's actions can be classified as being "because of white supremacy" if you make enough arm-breaking reaches, and most people who do that do so because they cannot function in a framework where something wrong has happened in a cultural context that can't just be blamed on the evil whites. There is nothing "multi-cultural" about WHITE supremacy. Inclusive bigotry is as real as bright darkness.
the white british-american director casting hollywood a-listers isn't doing so in order to make All Cultures feel represented. there's one culture most of them have in common here.
Ah, yes, the director's race alone is what matters here. Pin everything on him and him alone, completely ignore the years of people doing this exact same thing to stories like Snow White, and then casually brush aside the same "rEpReSeNtAtIoN!!!11" cries that led to those things, and just like that it's all the fault of the evil wypipo Westoids and their non-white henchmen. And all you had to do to get there was completely rewrite everything going on.
So, let's try this again. A cultural touchstone of a white European culture has been declared to be open-source and by necessity multi-cultural, a double standard that would never be applied to the story of Susano-o or Moon Prince of Sotho. And your argument is that this is all the fault of the evil wypipo and their evil Western culture for, what, forcing all those poor innocent minorities to demand that European cultural stories be declared open-source while we both know any such attempt to have a white woman do what Lupita Nyong'o is currently doing in one of the above stores would be met with torches and pitchforks? Try harder next time, because "multi-cultural legacy of white supremacy" is way too easy to trace to "words I can say to blame white supremacy for the actions of non-white people and the suborning of ethnically white cultural aspects"
I think itās funny how Mormon God was like ālook polygamy is super important and I am telling you my followers to practice it even in the face of persecutionā and then 40 years later Congress said Utah wouldnāt be given statehood as long as the LDS practiced polygamy and Mormon God was like āOk tell everyone I changed my mindā
ok wait i just watched that new flds documentary on netflix and a genuine question i have about mormon polygamy is where are all of the men?? like, if there are a whole bunch of men who have multiple wives, wouldn't there also be a parallel number of "leftover men" who won't ever get a wife? are they still part of the community? do they get kicked out? what's their deal?
I live near the formerly FLDS community of Colorado City. Church leaders would often look for pretenses to excommunicate boys in their teens from the church- stuff like āwore short sleevesā or ālistened to the wrong musicā. Theyād just dump them on the side of the road. Thereās over a hundred that an organization I researched know of, which is a LOT of people when you consider the size of the cult. A lot of them donāt have anywhere else to go, so they end up homeless and often substance abusers. We call them Lost Boys.
iām always thinking about that news story where a three year old boy who wandered away from his house and ended up in the middle of the woods was found by this local great pyrenees farm dog who herded the kid back to his unrelated owners house. and the guy was like. whose kid is this
that dog must have been like. hmm. this isnāt a goat. some human must have left their puppy behind by accident. i have to bring this to management. surely my owner will be able to sort out whatever has occurred. that kid was like iām all alone and scared and omg a big fluffy puppy is here to help. and that fucking farmer looking at his dog like. whoās toddler did you steal???
Not quite desert- more high desert (source: I live here). The main difference is that we do have short trees. Hereās a picture of landscape much like the toddler was traveling:
Itās pretty nasty to walk through underprepared.
Oh wow. I would actually consider that even worse than just desert because there's so many different hazards that I can see for a three year old child to be lost in.
amandla
tangentwithtanner
titsay
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
baratheonpilled
