Important Things for Trivial People

I want to go everywhere and eat everything

[threedollarsdotcom]

theyre taking me out back behind the shed presumably to give me a medal for my valor and heroism

[romansleftshoulderpad]

I love sex positive aces. I love asexuals who feel sexual attraction and I love those who don’t but engage in sex anyway! However, I’m so fucking sick and tired of having to bring them up just to prove that asexuals belong in the same spaces and conversations as everyone else. 

[teathattast]

[tunashei]

I love desire paths. There's something so wonderous about seeing an echo of humanity. Depending on it's location, a desire path can mean so many different things.

In a city, like the pic above, they represent rebellion, and efficiency. The messiness of humanity. We like to imagine we're oh so logical and neat so we design our cities to be logical and neat an then real humans literally trample on that idea. The ego required to think you can design something perfect that checks every box. Life is all about compromise and patching stuff when some new problem arises. Though people have certainly tried! Ohio state univeristy let students carve their desire paths, and then paved them over. It looks pretty artsy.

Some people will try to discourage desire paths, but this is almost always going to fail.

Eventually, people just have to accept them. Humans are too dang stubborn.

Certain desire paths are just adorable. A 0.5 second time saver. You just can't design for maximum efficiency, humans will always find shortcuts!

Though on occasion a desire path can actually be the least efficient way...especially if you're superstitious.

In a wilder area, such as below, they show us the curiosity of humans. A desire path somewhere natural often tells you there's something interesting just ahead. (Though remember some ecosystems are fragile and will suffer if trampled! Stick to paths in these sorts of areas)

And how about desire stairs? I always think these look so cool. We get see humans determination to climb, to traverse every kind of terrain.

And for something really crazy...a desire path used for centuries will create a 'holloway'

All of these pics are off the Desirepath subreddit, check them out for more examples! And many thanks to the users who submitted these photos.

[dog-of-ulthar]

Wait but tell me more, what kind of math does our godforsaken measuring system make sense for? I'm horribly curious!

oh dear oh boy okay, I've tried to explain this to people and had them just get more annoyed, so I'll give it a shot, but no promises that it will make any sense. Disclaimer also that I don't really know what I'm talking about, I've just done a lot of baking, and ages ago I read something by Plato explaining why the musical scale is how it is, and I'm extrapolating from the two

(wow this turned out way longer than I meant it to because IT'S MIDNIGHT)

the metric system is a base 10 system, like most modern human math, so it is easy to use in the way people tend to do math these days - ie, by sitting down with either a piece of paper or a calculator and doing sums. It's a good system for a lot of things, especially scientific applications where you need to be VERY precise and don't want to waste time converting units, and need to do shit like calculus. It's a highly rational way of doing it...if you are literate.

if you aren't literate, or are less literate, it's not a sensible way to construct a measuring system at all. If you measure something and come up with 367.45 cm, that's nothing. You're going to forget it, and you can't easily divide it by anything, there's no way to go from here

But consider the English Foot. We've all been working with a base 12 system without realizing it, and without really utilizing it for what it's best for, which is easy mental division. This is where people get mad at me, they say math all gets terrible and ugly when you do it in feet, you end up trying to figure out how many sixteenths of an inch 0.135 is, or you end up with repeating decimals, and it all sucks super bad. To this I say yes, it does, because you're thinking like a modern algebra student, and not like a medieval bricklayer.

The base 12 system of the traditional English foot is fantastic for mental math, because 12 is a highly divisible number. It's easily divisible into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths by most people in their heads. The inch is then typically divided into 1/16ths, which *super* suck to deal with on a calculator, but are really quite friendly if you just keep them as fractions like God and the Magna Carta intended. This is the kind of math most artisans need to do. You want supports placed evenly along a wall, to divide a piece of fabric in half, or to double a recipe. Nobody 1.7x's a recipe. Metric would be great for that, but why would you do that? It wouldn't be worth the math involved.

And listen, I also use a lot of metric baking recipes. Everything is in grams, you can measure everything the same way, and it's super accurate. They're great if you have a digital scale, but before the age of digital scales? Unfathomable. You (a medieval peasant) have a cup you've decided is The Cup, and sometimes you put in a half or a third or a quarter of that cup. THAT makes sense. Also, it's a lot easier to double something that calls for 1 cup of flour than it is when it calls for 136 grams of flour, and this is for me, a person who learned math in the typical modern way and always has a calculator in their pocket. I would have the sourdough recipe I make every week memorized if it wasn't in fucking grams. I DO have my pie crust recipe memorized. For every cup of flour you put in a third of a cup shortening, one tablespoon of butter, and start with 3 tablespoons of water (and a dash of salt). A double crust pie takes about 3 cups of flour, so that's one cup shortening. Easy! A third of a cup of shortening in grams is 68.3333333. That's nothing! That's garbage!

"Wouldn't it be more accurate to measure 68.3333333 grams, though?" Sure, but the amount of wet indigence you need to put in any baked thing changes with the fucking weather! That's why this recipe says "start with 3 tbs water." There's no need to be more accurate, and in fact it would make things more difficult.

Okay that turned into a tangent about how to make pie crust, a thing I think everyone should learn because pie crust is delicious, but i hope you get the idea. TLDR sometimes you just want to divide things in thirds and have it not suck ass. The eldritch sigil of measurement conversions is a little less threatening if you realize every step up or down is a factor of thirds or fourths

fuck oh no another half remembered piece of pop science coming at you - the largest number a typical human can hold in their head *without language* is 3. You don't need numbers to count to three, you don't need to count to be aware of three, you can just see three things and say "that's three." Don't believe me? That's the whole basis of Roman numerals. The numbers 1-3 are representational, after that they get more symbolic, and you never end up with more than three of the same symbol in a row. After III comes IV, not IIII, and it's just that III is much easier on the brain. For the same reason, a lot of English conversions are in factors of 4. There are 4 cups in a quart, and 4 quarts in a gallon, so you're only dealing with measurements that are easy to hold in your head without counting. You never have to count out 4 cups if you convert. You either need 3 cups or 1 quart. Does that make sense? Anyone who has done Big Cooking should know that if you have to count cups beyond 3 or 4 it becomes very easy to lose track.

Now i'm not saying it's all logical. It would be great if every step was a factor of 4, but they had to get fancy and throw pints in there. Pints aren't too bad, that's a factor of two, but I'll be the first to admit that it makes no sense for one tablespoon to equal three teaspoons instead of four. But because this is a system that evolved over time instead of being constructed intentionally, you have to cut it some slack. I'm sorry to anyone who decided to read this, I should be in bed, but I actually care a lot about this and I swear it's not just stockholm syndrome from Being American

[with-a-key]

This is important to me as someone who is “Bad at Math,” which I realized a few years ago just means Unskilled at Arithmetic.

I figured this out when I roomed with two Math majors my senor year of college. They would do their homework together on the couch, and it was all logic puzzles for the most part, which I could do fairly well even without training, because my brain speaks exclusively in English and can grasp anything that can be translated into English. I wasn’t bad at math - I was bad at ARITHMETIC, which sucked because all the various flavors of math I’d been exposed to, geometry and algebra etc., was really just different flavors of arithmetic, at least the way I was taught them. The reason I was better at statistics than anything else was because you can translate statistics into a kind of pidgin English without even knowing you’re doing it. But because I was so bad at arithmetic, my mathematics education stopped at algebra, and it’s sad because you really, really never have to do much arithmetic in your head, but understanding statistics and probability, being able to analyze information, logic… these are all things that are only getting more important in daily life.

Anyway, in a certain sense, my brain is SO heavily language-dependent that in a way it’s a bit like being a medieval peasant. For example, I have the metric conversions of my own height, weight, and body measurements saved as a document, because I buy a lot of clothes from overseas and those are the measurements they use. But I’ll NEVER remember that I’m 178 cm tall. I’ll never be able to picture the difference in height between myself, 1.78m tall, and a person who’s 1.63 meters tall. I know I won’t because I haven’t, we’re dealing with measures that are too small and numbers that are too large. But I can always remember that I’m 6 feet tall (roughly), so if there’s 12 inches in a foot that makes me 70 inches tall. My best friend is 5′3, and it’s easy to work out in my head that that’s 63 inches. And even I can mentally do the math to figure out the difference between those two - even if I couldn’t make the leap to change 70-63 turn into the easer 10-3 maths, I could count it out on my fingers. It’s building big scary numbers up through the use of smaller, manageable numbers, which is great for a brain like mine that finds numbers slippery and difficult to hold on to or visualize.

[yesterdaysprint]

Reading Times, Pennsylvania, March 26, 1928

[being-rachelmarie]

[caption-action]

And then you ask me whether I approve of violence. I mean that just doesn’t make any sense at all to whether I approve of guns. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, some very, very good friends of mine were killed by bombs, bombs that were planted by racists. I remember from the time I was very small, I remember the sound of bombs exploding across the street, our house shaking. I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times because of the fact that at any moment someone we might expect to be attacked. The man who was at the time in complete control of the city government, his name was Bull Conner, would often get on the radio and make statements like “n**gas have moved into white neighborhoods, we better expect some bloodshed tonight.” and sure enough there would be bloodshed. After the four young girls who lived next door to me, I was very good friends with the sister of another but my sister was very good friends with all three of them. My mother taught one in her class, my mother in fact when the bombing occurred one of the mothers of one of the young girls called my mother and said “Can you take me down to the church to pick up Carol? You know we heard about the bombing and I don’t have my car.” and they went down and what they find is limbs and heads strewn all over the place and then after that all of the men in my neighborhood organized themselves into an armed patrol. They had to take their guns and patrol our community every night because they did not want that to happen again. I mean that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible because what it means is this person asking the question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time of the first (volume cuts out)

[koth-harvest-final]

[ms-demeanor]

Trick question, the only "safe" way to respond to a cop is "I want a lawyer."

[lesbianshepard]

if I was rich i would absolutely go all out weird. commission books handwritten in a made up language. erect strange black spires in the wood. buy a boat, make it look like a perfect copy of one that was used in an 18th century antarctic expedition, and then let it drift to shore miles away. i want every interaction with me to leave people with a sense of impending cosmic horror.

[with-a-key]

First thing I do is a millionaire is get a full-body scan, and then commission a life-size 3-D printed model of my own skeleton.

[softcannoli]

I feel like I almost never see people talking about this line, which I’ve never understood bc every fucking time I watch this scene I have this visceral memory of watching a documentary like a decade ago that mentioned how in starvation situations, your brain will actually start to rewire itself to suppress your natural disgust responses. You literally lose the ability to feel disgust.

I think I’ve seen exactly one (1) post talk about the actual logistics of how Wei Wuxian survived in the burial mounds for 3 months, and while I don’t remember the details, the post speculated about him using his newfound demonic cultivation to get the corpses to bring him like, rats and birds to eat? And that headcanon honestly took me by surprise, because there was never for a moment a single doubt in my mind that Wei Wuxian, starving and desperate, had eaten half-rotten human corpses, digging them out of the dirt with his bare hands, physically incapable at that point of feeling any disgust or horror about doing so.

I think about how in the book, part of his revenge on Wen Chao after escaping the burial mounds was to force Wen Chao to strip the flesh from his own legs and eat it, until the very idea of eating meat disgusted and terrified him. Like, where would that idea even come from? Why do that, unless you consider that this is karmic punishment, that his goal is to force Wen Chao to live through every horror and humiliation he put Wei Wuxian through?

And then I think about this exchange. Jiang Cheng seems horrified by the idea that Wei Wuxian would even consider growing vegetables in corpse dirt, questioning the idea that anything grown here could be edible. And Wei Wuxian seems almost a little amused by his reaction. Like in his mind, he’s thinking about how naive but also reassuring it is that Jiang Cheng still has the capacity to be disgusted by something as… minor as this.

[gahdamnpunk]

Yoooo lemme bless your dashboard

(Feel free to add your pics too 😏😏)

[mareep-is-transfem]

the good energy in this post,,,

[curiousmango]

🥺I love this

[callmebruja]

GASP

[with-a-key]

You couldn’t be this lovely and NOT smile!

[birdonahotdog]

me, opening a conversation and foregoing a greeting: you know who i hate

[with-a-key]

@psycholinguistic

[lesbvan]

spring cleaning xx

[yesterdaysprint]

Reading Times, Pennsylvania, March 26, 1928

[la-laborista-republiko]

Some of y'all would’ve looked at drag queens and butches fighting the cops outside of the Stonewall Inn back in the 60s and been like “why are they destroying property”

[millennial-review-deactivated20]

[softwaring]

never knew i had so much in common w snails tbh

[with-a-key]

2 brain cells is just showing off frankly, in this house we white-knuckle it with 1 brain cell and a hammer like men.

[outcrying]

concept: you taking me to an aquarium and watching lovingly as i completely ignore you to look at the jellyfish

[with-a-key]

additional concept: we go to the museum and you spend 3 hours looking at multiple exhibits and then wait an additional 4 hours for me to finish reading every piece of text and examining every artifact to “finish” the first one I walked into.