Tick Tock @what-is-yaoi - Tumblr Blog

Okay so like. Imagine somebody you love gets a brain slug. Like from movies. Like this little queen here on Philip's head:

Their entire personality is just gone. It's brain slug time now. The brain slug, through their mouth, keeps telling you that your friend put the brain slug on voluntarily, referring to your friend in the past tense, and going on about how much they loooove having a brain slug.

You're naturally suspicious, right? You're likely to point out that the brain slug is jacked right on in to the wiring of your friend, and can make them totally Gucci with whatever, including having a brain slug.

So you're like "if my friend is so happy with the brain slug, can you do me a favor? Take off the brain slug and let me hear it from HIM" and of course the brain slug is like "I don't need to, I can see his thoughts and he's cool with it. He wants me to be here."

Your friend is also a gay guy, let's say. Absolute queen of the queens. But there's a straight woman who thinks he's hot, and with the brain slug, your friend's body walks over and fucks her with a smile on his face. You're like "that's not a decision my friend would EVER make!! He would NEVER be okay with that!" and the brain slug, through his mouth, is like "oh it's fine, I opened up the settings in his brain and I made him Bisexual instead of gay, and set it so now that woman is the most attractive person in the world to him. He's totally into it!"

You object to this, obviously! You ask if there's any way to free your friend from the slug. The slug is like "why would he want to be free of me? he's having the time of his life, as long as I keep manually changing his preferences so whatever he's doing is his favorite thing in the world!" and you're like "because he's not him anymore! You killed my friend and you're puppeting around his corpse! Get off of him!" and the brain slug is like "if you want, I can try and get you a brain slug too and then you'll LOVE what's happening to your friend!" and you tell it to fuck off, obviously, you don't want to LIKE this, you want it to stop happening, and the brain slug acts all hurt like "I'm sorry but I'm getting some toxic vibes off you... why do you want me to literally DIE? You give me a hard time for turning your friend into somebody he's not, but when you think about it, aren't YOU doing the same thing to ME?"

anyway that's why I can't vibe with the people trying to sympathize with the hive mind on Pluribus or talk about how upsetting Carol's outbursts must be for it. Frankly it does not matter if there even is some Sinister Ulterior Motive. The hivemind is inherently evil even if it's hiding nothing and everything it says is 100% true.

Anyway look at this sticker my phone suggested to me while I was typing this post:

audiblysticky

I don’t read the Pluribus tags so pardon if this is a specific response to posting in there but I think you’re ignoring a lot of important context when thinking about the hivemind

The hivemind comes from a genre starting in the fear of communism and loss of identity, it’s the straw-man argument against working for the good of the many at the cost of the few, literal like “if we do this you are worse than dead, and there is nothing left of you”

I don’t think that philosophical viewpoint (needs of the many over needs of the few and strict utilitarianism) is for everyone, and it holds a lot of nuance, but I think your post ignores that Pluribus is trying to subvert of genre that historically has said “yes hiveminds are evil and you should be scared of them because communism is evil and you should be scared of it”

I take specific issue with you saying “The hivemind is inherently evil even if it's hiding nothing and everything it says is 100% true.” And still comparing the hivemind to a parasite

If we take the hivemind as genuine, not lying, ***there is no controller***, it only gave humanity the ability to completely and 100% connect

I think a more apt comparison would be, you fall into a coma, and you wake up in an age of complete and total social change towards a 100% devotion to socialism

And your buddy, who used to be, idk a politician, is doing landscaping and yard work now, it’s not because there is one controller over them all, but because he made an agreement that 1. He is able and willing to do that work and 2. That’s where he is needed at that moment for the betterment of the many

I don’t think the hivemind is the antagonist in the show, and if the show does go the route of hivemind evil, I honestly think that would be a neoliberal cop out of any emotional and critical depth that we could’ve had

The hivemind functions as a sounding board for Carol’s grief narratively, literally over Helen, but metaphorically about societal change, and being left behind

Saying that if the hivemind is 100% genuine and hiding nothing it’s still evil, is just saying the entirety of humanity is evil

If it’s telling the truth there is no active voice parasite, it’s that communication between people has been perfected, there is instant transfer of thought and there is no crossed wires or miscommunication, there is no misinterpretation because suddenly you have been able to see every living human action as if you are the perpetrator and the person it is being done to

You are the counselors at the conversion camp who have abused children, but you are also every abused child, you are the conservative politician, but you are also every immigrant field worker who left them home to work in unfair conditions for a chance of a better life

It is the complete removal of barriers

I don’t think this is a story about communism bad, hivemind bad, and I think saying that it’s 100% evil even if it’s telling the truth is misguided and you’re not understanding what the hivemind even is

(I think there is a lot to think about for the women whose bodies are now having sex with the unincorporated, but I think you can argue that like the politicians doing landscaping and home repair, they have found someone 1. Who is able and willing to do the work, because sex work is still work in a post money society and 2. They’ve agreed this is what’s best for the many (which seems to be an agreement treating the unincorporated humans to anything they wish) )

callmebliss

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

macleod

I've seen this passed around a few times, and I have one thing to say:

It's online. The book was carefully and wonderfully recreated online by hand. You can find it here. The entire book is this easy.

calculusmadeeasy.org

junk-hed

pinene

Americans love Disneyland because it’s a walkable city

mercuryfountain-deactivated2024

That's actually a really popular analogy. Howard Kunstler wrote about Disneyland as a "capital of unreality," where "the public realm is packaged for sale as a commodity."

"Through the postwar decades Americans happily allowed their towns to be destroyed. They’d flock to Disneyland at Anaheim, or later to Disney World in Florida, and walk down Main Street, and think, gee, it feels good here. Then they’d go back home and tear down half the old buildings downtown and pave them over for parking lots, throw a parade to celebrate a new K Mart opening—even when it put ten local merchants out of business—turn Elm Street into a six-lane crosstown expressway, pass zoning laws that forbade corner grocery stores in residential neighborhoods and setback rules that required every new business to locate on a one-acre lot until things became so spread out you had to drive everywhere. They’d build the new central school four miles out of town on a busy highway so that kids couldn’t walk there. They’d do every fool thing possible to destroy good existing relationships between things in their towns, and put their local economies at the mercy of distant corporations whose officers didn’t give a damn whether these towns lived or died. And then, when vacation time rolled around, they’d flock back to Disney World to feel good about America."

If anyone's interested, The Geography of Nowhere is unrivaled as a crash course on and scathing critique of American postwar urban planning.

speaking-impartially

“but EVERYTHING is chemicals!!”

that’s not what it means and you fucking know it. stop putting weird shit in food.

sal-absinthii-deactivated202311

Except it is, and believing you can tell the difference between “bad chemicals” and “good chemicals” from the label is exactly how marketers trick you into thinking something is healthier than it is just because they say “derived from natural sources” instead of the chemical name, which is not necessarily true.

Further, that “weird shit” serves a purpose. Potassium sorbate, also called E202, for instance, inhibits microbial growth in food and beauty products and stops unwanted additional fermentation in wine and cider. So unless you want sour wine, contaminated cosmetics, and things going mouldy in your cupboard in three days, it’s good for potassium sorbate to be in there. And if you were brewing your own beer/wine/cider at home, you would use it too. Various acids are used to lower pH in preserved fruits and vegetables in order to prevent botulism. Potassium metabisulphite/pyrosulphite is also used to prevent microbial growth in wine.

Some things are unhealthy, absolutely. Look at what happened with trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils, which serve no purpose except to cut costs. It’s good to know about those things. But I have also seen so many products intentionally marketing themselves to appeal to the “natural” consumer that are the same exact things as the “scary chemical” stuff they’re just called something different. Like I’ve seen a lot of soap labels where they call the ingredients “natural cold-pressed extract of Helianthus anuum” to make it sound healthier and less processed than if they’d said “triglycerides” or “sunflower oil,” which is what it is. It works the other way, too, where labels will intentionally play up scientific jargon the average consumer doesn’t know the meaning of so that their product sounds like it’s different and worth paying twice as much for, like, for instance, “micellar” soaps, which is just regular soap.

Other stuff serves an aesthetic purpose that does not have a negative health effect and is also not strictly necessary, but which if it was not there, people would think the product was worse, like the lecithin emulsifiers that keep your mayonnaise and yoghurt and peanut butter from separating unpleasantly, the sulphates added to shampoo to make it lather, or the carrageenan or alginate added to toothpaste and ice cream to make it smoother (lecithin and carrageenan both come from natural sources, actually — lecithin often comes from from soy, and carrageenan and alginate come from seaweed — but they aren’t always listed that way, so they sound like “scary chemicals” to skittish people). Alum is used in pickling to keep pickles crunchy; it’s not necessary, some people pickling at home prefer not to use it, but if you got a mushy pickle at the supermarket you’d be turned off by it. Sodium citrate is a salt of citric acid, which can be “natural” from citrus fruits or artificially-produced but which is identical in either case. It helps emulsify melting cheese to keep it from getting a gross oily layer separating out and to regulate pH in things like gelatine products, which would not hold their structure if the pH got outside of those bounds. These things are there for a reason.

As I said, not everything is benign or good for the customer, and that’s important to be aware of, but “ah this is a chemical I can’t pronounce so therefore it’s Unnatural and Bad” is NOT the same as being an informed consumer, and it actually makes you way easier to manipulate through marketing. Deciding that something is good or bad for you based on how it sounds when you don’t actually know what it is or why it’s there is not “doing your research” or whatever the granola hippies in the Facebook mommy group say.

I’ve been around long enough to expect that no one on this post will even read any of this, but in the interest of promoting actual consumer health literacy, I have to say it for those people who do.

luckyybones

The most buckwild thing to me, is seeing those types of ‘I should be able to pronounce all the ingredients’ folks get very up-in-arms on the subject of food waste. I cannot imagine how many safe preservatives they can’t pronounce, but i DO know how much more food waste there would be if said ‘chemicals’ weren’t in use.

lakevida

it's okay if you're not gay but at the least you should still be weird and hard to understand

moon-mason

fah-ren-heit

been thinkin about how my ethics professor back in undergrad was like.

look. there’s no such thing as perfect altruism. you’ll always get something out of helping or being kind to others, whether it’s a stronger relationship or returned kindness or just the feeling of having done good. there’s nothing inherently bad about getting something from doing good either, especially since it’s completely unavoidable. people being rewarded for putting love into the world doesn’t make the world a worse place. so just do as much good as you can and don’t worry about being “selfless” while doing it, because being truly selfless is in fact impossible.

and like man did that take the pressure off of Being A Good Person!! you’re allowed to enjoy helping people! you’re allowed to be kind without worrying that you’re maybe secretly just doing it for yourself!! it’s okay if you are doing it for yourself because you’re still being kind to others!!!!!

tkingfisher

Honestly, I give the most when I’m frustrated and depressed. Everything gets to be too much and I finally go “I cannot fix the world, but if I give money to the food bank or the Alongside Wildlife people or Native Seed/SEARCH or Aseel, I can maybe fix THIS one little thing.” Then I feel better and go play video games instead of staring at the wall.

And no, that is not selfless, and there are people who would say it’s giving for the wrong reasons, but that money spends just the same as money from a saint would.

mazeroamer

some game dev in circa 2003: hey can we get a song for our scrimblo bimblo french comic book licensed game lol

guy about to fucking go primal beast mode and drop the hardest breakbeat track in the universe: ok

foreveriallyzombified

im still furious about this post due to the disrespectful tone in reference to astérix and obélix.

astercrash

sosuperawesome

Earrings // As Above Creations on Etsy

carnival-phantasm

My favorite thing about the Demon Core is that, unlike nearly all other radioactive incidents, everyone manipulating it was completely aware that the game they were playing was ridiculously dangerous and extremely stupid...it was a peer reviewed "fuck around and find out" accident by people with doctorades

apas-95

The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion. Under Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used and the only thing preventing the closure was the blade of a standard flat-tipped screwdriver manipulated in Slotin's other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing the test in that manner. Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail", based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman, who compared the experiments to "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon". On the day of the accident, Slotin's screwdriver slipped outward a fraction of an inch while he was lowering the top reflector, allowing the reflector to fall into place around the core. Instantly, there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin's skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing an intense burst of neutron radiation estimated to have lasted about a half second.

carnival-phantasm

Cringe radiation sickness from my fail safety protocol

poison-ivy-on-drugs

godh8er-deactivated20220626

how could op just leave out the resolution like dat

s-n-arly

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

gay-irl

sherlock-is-ace

“It’s an easy mistake to make. He’s effeminate and therefore we think he’s weak, but that man sits in pubs and clubs and houses and hotels, telling all the world about his homosexuality out loud, all day long. It doesn’t matter who’s listening - priests or housewives or landlords or anyone. He tells the truth and he doesn’t care. No-one else does that.”

- A Very English Scandal