Contagious Agen

this is so sick, it's like a combo of chiptune and demo. the creator calls it 'oscilloscope music' and the music is literally what's drawing the images. the whole album fits on a floppy and yet the visualisations are so creative, and for music built around drawing cool shapes, it sounds really good

the last track is absolutely nuts. like theoretically i know how they did it, but it's so complex. it's crazy that it can be a full animation of a face spitting out a cloud of bicycles or a bunch of intersecting spheres and still sound musical

it's interesting how the more we know about the world and the more we advance in technology, the more the line of speculative fiction shifts. like that thing about how moby dick is written the way it is is because people used to believe the ocean was so dense that it was impossible to get to the bottom and shipwrecks and bodies would just be stuck neutrally buoyant halfway down. that's CRAZY. but that is the world they thought they lived in, and they wrote about it like it was the truth. because it was to them!

and while you could of course still write as if that were the truth, or write as if people still believed that to be the truth, now it's speculative fiction, it's fantasy, it's sci-fi. it's not a lived reality or how water/atmospheric pressure works. it's different when you know better. a common example from now: writing about a world where androids and floppy disks are contemporary to each other is different when you're doing it because it reflects the times you live in, vs a past you are imagining with those features, because the world you live in has long abandoned floppy disks and still does not have androids. back then, the same concept was science fiction. to do it now is retrofuture.

i suppose the things we take for granted--like that the future aesthetic is white and plastic because that is the present state of technology--might seem just as outdated in twenty years, when things change again. to quote men in black of all things, "Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat. And fifteen minutes ago you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

CANDACE AGAINST THE UNIVERSE (2020)

”#he looks so mad they won't let him commit murder XD”

I must be a scientific expert on cartoon gags because I didn't know there was a running joke with his inventions having self destruct buttons but I surmised on my own that there must be from this sequence and died laughing that even his axe has one. The lack of attention called to it, just having it visible from behind in that one shot, is comedy gold, as is the fact that this means there is nothing special the axinator even does other than being a normal axe that is easy to destroy.

I relate to Reimu because I would also rather be getting drunk and railing a tgirl witch than doing my job

dan-was-on-fire-once said:

Hey, so, I think you’re not really understanding the purpose of conversations like this one, or why people want to have them. People go to bars and go to parties and run discussion groups and moderate book clubs and volunteer at youth shelters, and they care about how to address one another in a way that lets people make their needs known while not putting them on the spot or forcing them into conversations they aren’t ready for.

And this is hard. In some cases, it’s literally impossible - some people need the exact thing which will hurt other people, and any conceivable policy is going to feel like a punch in the gut for someone. In other cases, it’s possible only with a ton of hard work, and with other tradeoffs, like having more complicated verbal discussion prompts, which can be hard on people with language processing challenges. 

But it’s still worth knowing what the tradeoffs are, and brainstorming about ways to thread the needle and offer more to people. Because we can. Because even if we can’t find anything that works for everyone, we can find something that works for more people, and that’s worth it all by itself.

If you’re interpreting social justice as ‘a bunch of people deciding which things are offensive’, then of course ‘every possible set of norms is going to harm some people’ is ridiculous - what’s the point in declaring everything offensive? 

But if you’re doing social justice because you want to give people more options and learn more about what they need and learn, from them, more about what you yourself need -

- then, well, you’d better be able to work in a complicated world where there isn’t a single perfect course of action that hurts no one, and where often you try to do something and then realize that it’s created a new problem or made an existing one worse or run up against another limitation.

I recognize that there are people who harass others in the name of social justice, and that’s meant that for a lot of people it feels really urgent to figure out what the Approved opinion is, and what course of action definitely won’t get them harassed and called a horrible person. But - 

- well, firstly, there isn’t such a course of action. Some people will be dicks to you no matter what you’re doing. Even if there were one True Social Justice that harmed no one and required no further analysis and learning, people wouldn’t agree on it, and in the real world people have access to completely different experiences and needs and of course they don’t agree.

- and secondly, if your engagement with social justice is around trying to identify opinions people won’t hate you for so you can hold those and not be a terrible person, then I think you actually should stop engaging in social justice for the time being. It’s really important to come to activism from a place of ‘I want to build a better world’ rather than ‘I want to not be evil and hated’. It’s really important to feel able to independently evaluate ideas and go “yes, this seems true” or “no, I think this is missing something”. It’s really important to be filling in more pieces of your understanding of the world rather than replacing your own understanding with the one being yelled the loudest. It’s better to take a step back than to blunder through looking for the wrong thing and learning to ignore yourself whenever you disagree with it. 

So what do you do if you just want people not to hate you?

I’m not saying this isn’t a totally reasonable thing to want, but -

it doesn’t work. People are really varied, and value really varied things, and there are a lot of them, and they’re all going through their own stuff, and some of them are deliberately awful to others and some of them are doing their best but are kind of awful anyway. There are people who will hate you for being a woman and people who will hate you for being a man and people who will hate you for being anything that isn’t a woman or a man. There are people who will hate you for thinking Israel should exist and people who will hate you for thinking it shouldn’t and people who will hate you for not having an opinion about Israel.

There is no shape you can contort yourself into so no one hates you.  So what you have to do is go - okay. I am valuable; I matter; my suffering is bad and my happiness is good.  I have access to truth - that doesn’t mean I’m always right, or always have the answers, it means the opposite of that, it means that I have the capacity to learn, and the capacity to reject things as false or identify things as true, it means that when I go out into the world and try to learn things I can do more than answer ‘who hates me’ or ‘who yells the loudest’. I have access to truth that other people don’t have - I know what it’s like to be me, and I know when I feel strengthened and empowered and able-to-truth-seek and when I feel dismissed and unwanted and obliged-to-conform. And I’m going to start building my world off of that, because I am the only one who can.

And then you block people on the internet who hate you and maybe get a pet who adores you and you seriously consider moving somewhere where you won’t be surrounded by people who hate you and you keep track of the answer to the question “is this friend/meetup/ideology/blog making me more able to uncontort myself, or just giving me new things to contort around?” and you pursue the places and the people where you don’t feel hated, and don’t feel like you have to confine yourself into someone who isn’t hateable. And people will still hate you but they won’t control you, and people hating you matters a lot less when they can’t control you anymore.

Chai tea bag + lil but of brown sugar + apple cider packet + 16 oz. mug of hot but not quite boiling water

it will not Fix You but like. maybe. maybe.

tags by @eridan-ampora

Update: this is the best post I've ever made because everyone is sharing their Warm Beverage recipes in the notes. Go check the notes for more Warm Beverages That Will Fix You.

my favorite piece of modern art is Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, over one hundred million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds made by dozens of craftsmen

My first thought was "WHY" but @json-derulo did the work so I didn't have to:

I'm about to be born. Just give me another dayish.

one day until your crashlanding

finch fry

the vet measured junta on sunday, and as we were leaving the assistant said “he wrote down the measurements for you” and passed me this

delighted that this post has lived on in people’s hearts

I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.

Oh some of you don't know about the squids. I talked about them in another thread that went kinda viral somewhere or other but one of the reasons you should not swim in the open ocean at night in many parts of the world is that the water starts teeming with these:

And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans! But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators. We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free. In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)

There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:

And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:

There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered. The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:

No for real:

Created by : ☆Rebecca☆ Respective credits to the creator ⓟⒶⓇⒶⒹⒾⓈⒺ♡ⓎⓊⓇⒾ

basically I think that if your protagonist doesn’t want to fuck someone so bad it makes them look stupid, then there probably isn’t enough energy in your story. “Fuck someone” isn’t literal btw—they can want to uncover the secrets of their parent’s death, they can want to prove their worth, they can want a donut from one particular bakery—it can be anything so long as they want it so bad that they’ll make decisions that make any sane person go “are you a moron??”, with little to no forethought, or even tons of forethought and this is still the option they chose. Because they want to fuck that thing so bad.