[antirpg]

I’m glad ppl on tiktok are doing ok

[ofide]

good lord

[lifeofcynch]

[ghostaquarius]

[normal-horoscopes]

YEAH I GOT NOTHING

[vonlipvig]

i don’t understand a single sentence in this and i’m ok with that

[xek-xek]

[cavalierprimetime]

I haven’t stopped saying “it’s called quantum jumping, babe”

[arirna]

[thebuttkingpost-deactivated2021]

I would genuinely like to know who to blame for making these children so disconnected from the concept of imagination that they think the simpler explanation for what they’re doing is that they’re projecting their consciousness into one of infinite realities where fictional characters are real.

[esoanem]

[tiktoksforlosers]

X

[jeanjauthor]

There is so much going on here, the fact she made a laptop mockup for her own cat, the fact that she put the “google images of birds” on it, the fact that the cat KNOWS it’s the cat’s “laptop,” the fact that the cat is UPSET WHEN HER LAPTOP IS MESSED WITH...

12/10 would watch again

[tianella]

So great lol

[best-friend-quads]

You TOUCH Miette’s LAPTOP?

[fikrul]

L + ratio + no tithe + no worms + military rp guy ghost + scorn in your throne world

[alleppo-fr]

fresh new nerd

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[monstyra]

reunite with your lost phoenix

a more canonical reprise

[skepsys]

thinking thoughts about a hive lightbearer who is Just Some Guy

probably gonna have to reiterate on this a few times later just bc it feels soo hard to find refs of hive, lightbearers or not, so im like… kind of making shit up as i go… but i like him :-)

[rivare]

fulgrim sir

[skrankku]

That one big official action figure has all the armour on the front. What is up with that.

[endivinity]

ghost really just woke up and chose war crimes. considering we spent, y’know, a whole season on forming an alliance with the cabal. we could’ve just asked

[humanwheatleyslefttoenail]

glados and wheatley would both do nfts but for very different reasons. wheatley thinks they're the future but has no clue how they work, needless to say he makes his nft his twitter pfp. glados is trying to grift people on purpose

[humanwheatleyslefttoenail]

chell never says a word on social media except sending glados and wheatley screenshots of her right clicking

[shrimplovercat]

tags via @tychomagneticanomaly1 // generated with 15.ai

[tahthetrickster]

i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE

[zmenit]

“THAT’S RIGHT TWAS I that set the house ablaze!!!”

[3fluffies]

Dying.

[ciatri]

Every fucking time I know what’s at the bottom and every time I still lose my shit.

[randomslasher]

I’m so happy this post is back again asdlkfjsa

[vulpetrope]

Star-crossed

If you would like it as a print you can purchase it at my store <3 

[tanadrin]

A historian or a sociologist will say something like “technology doesn’t exist on a simply hierarchy like in a video game,” and I think people whose exposure to history is primarily through pop culture will go “huh? that seems like nonsense. I mean, an automatic rifle beats a sword. 21st century America is richer than 3000 BC Mesopotamia. Our medical technology right now, today, is better than anything in the Middle Ages. Of course you can ‘rank’ technology!”

But the real answer is still no; because no technology exists apart from its context, and the question you are forgetting is–better how? Better in what situations?

The Ancient Greeks knew the principles necessary to build steam engines, and probably would perfectly understand the principle of operation of a steam locomotive; but they didn’t build trains, because they didn’t have the metals to build trains with, and they didn’t have the metals to build trains with because the economy of the ancient eastern Mediterranean didn’t support the manufacture of steel; and it didn’t support the manufacture of steel because bronze and the iron they had solved all the problems they needed metals for, a king of ancient Greece devoting his city-state’s spare productive capacity to mining iron ore and turning it into steel would have been wiped out by neighboring states who didn’t waste time and energy doing that, and spent their time making a bunch of bronze swords and beating the crap out of that king and his soldiers. Even if the Greeks could have built trains, what would they use them for? Railroads are a solution to transportation when you have industrial quantities of goods moving around to support a highly integrated economy, a rich source of high-carbon fuel easily available, and (for instance) warfare based on massive formations recruited from a mobilized, industrialized population.

None of which ancient Greece had. If you Connecticut-Yankee’d your way into 5th century BC Greece, you would find that trying to bootstrap an industrial economy from the ground up would require first speedrunning 2300 years of intervening demographic and economic developments, as well as technological ones, and even then a modern Greece surrounded by a Bronze Age world would be a very different animal, along all those dimensions, than a modern Greece surrounded by a modern world.

If you wanted to go Alexander with modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare, you could–but modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare is a solution to modern arms, and you might find it was significantly cheaper to arm your hoplites with slightly upgraded versions of the old spear-and-shield, and invest all the materials and energy you would have spent on tanks in building up the wealth of your state–because remember, everything you spend on building a better tank you’re not spending on anything else. This is why German technical skill was a miserable failure in WW2–their overengineered bullshit was expensive, and for each fancy German tank they pumped out (from a much worse position resource-wise than the Allies), the Allies made many less fancy, good enough tanks, and the Nazis got overrun. To recall the earlier metaphor: your automatic rifle is only any good if the other guy is way over there. If he sneaks up on you with his sword, you might wish you had a sword instead, though that won’t help you if you’ve only ever practiced using a rifle, because it’s “better.”

Even the process of innovation is not like most people imagine it, I would argue. The bulk of innovation comes from incremential trial-and-error improvements in processes that accumulate over decades, if not centuries or millennia. Incremential improvement is hard; unless you have a wild overabundance of resources, too much experimentation is just going to waste scarce materials; the thing that drives major innovations is having a problem that needs solving, and (again, until a resource becomes superabundant) a reliable method that produces consistent results is better than wasting time and effort testing a new way of producing something that may or may not work.

If you want an antibiotic or to send a message across the world, or figure out what the Moon is made of, yes, modern technology is better for all those things; and there are periods of cultural and societal change that open up the space for innovations: the steam locomotive was impossible in 5th century BC Greece, and inevitable in 19th century Britain. But it only became inevitable because of economic changes that only became inevitable because of demographic changes that started much earlier; those in turn were dependent on factors beyond the control of any single person or state.

Technologies can be dependent on each other, or on other factors, in the way living organisms are dependent on each other or on environmental factors in a food web; but a shark isn’t “better” than a jellyfish because it has a more complicated anatomy. It’s solving the problem of how to be a shark, while the jellyfish is solving the problem of how to be a jellyfish. Even our industrial, “scientific” technologies can struggle in environments they’re not suited for, which more “primitive” technologies do perfectly well in–because even our best technology (and our best scientists) are constrained by the environments and assumptions they are developed in.

[quasi-normalcy]

I’ve started to look at it as a sort of evolutionary process, where instead of saying that this or that technology is “better”, you need to look at as “this or that technology is better for this or that particular thing in this or that particular socioeconomic context.” Instead of having one generic variable of “goodness”, you have a multi-dimensional space of different variables for which a particular technology may be good or bad; and even “primitive” technologies can still be optimal in some specific niche.

[troublerats]

The hidden lore

[frisee]

text from my mom 🙄

[chaoskirin]

I am sorry. I’m bashing Apple here. And for good reason.

This is a plea to my followers.

Stop buying Apple products. I know you’ve used them for most of your life, and I know it’s inconvenient to move to a new brand because in most cases, you cannot take your contacts with you on various chat apps.

I know this is inconvenient. I truly do.

But Apple is not the company it was before. There is now no difference between an Apple computer and a Windows computer in terms of graphic design. I know this for a fact. I had to use both in college 20 years ago, and non-apple computers are now generally better for design work than Apple computers.

Most non-apple companies encourage self-repair of your own devices, while Apple refuses it. I also know this for a fact, as I watched Apple computers become slowly less reparable through the late 90s and early 2000s. Where I was once able to do the repairs on our office computers, we had to start sending out our Apple devices because they started gluing things down on their logic boards. Notably the glue they used was not heat-resistant and led to device damage should the heat sink system fail. But they did this because they wanted to dig more money out of their customers.

Apple software is also designed to fail. I cannot believe people are still buying new devices after the scandal where Apple was slowing their phones in order to force people to purchase new versions.

Apple hardware is designed to become obsolete. Motherboards and logic boards are designed to hold exactly what comes attached to them and will fail if upgrade attempts are made.

Apple refuses to work with software developers despite promises of cross-compatibility. One of the very first coding problems I discovered was to discover a gigantic hole in a software program that made a plotter (giant printer) compatible with iOS. This caused a memory leak, leading to necessary resets of the computer after every 2 feet of printing.

I know that it’s not possible for most of you to just throw your devices away and buy a new one. I wouldn’t be able to do that, either. But eventually there will come a time when you have to upgrade, and I encourage you to take the plunge and purchase a non-apple device. I don’t even have a recommendation for you because literally anything is better than Apple. A rock that you write on is better than an Apple phone.

Unfortunately I expect to be shadow-banned on Apple devices because of this, and I’ll try to report on decreased activity as much as I can.

It’s time to stop trying to beg Apple to change. They won’t. It’s time now to just stop supporting Apple.