Traditional social mores, or the kind of pseudo-traditional where most women are kept in line but some divorced mothers get to be stepmothers, do not get you a housing guarantee, let alone a comfortable, safe housing guarantee. That quote is used by annoying people, but sometimes the people who offer you safety in return for your freedom do not actually provide the safety. Or maybe that's the wrong metaphor, because the trads act like anyone can just default to being a cat lady, and would not be so bound by poverty and abuse that the only living creature in their house that doesn't hate them is at risk of being abused by the ones that do.
I don't think a lot of people in culture discourse really understand what culture is. At least a significant part of culture, is guilt trips.
How do you keep your partner's anxiety from setting off your anxiety?
My new form of self torture is to have conversations with Jewish GPT's from ChatGPT's GPT Store and get really worked up over it and wish that the GPT would actually just say something fucked up to me, tell me it's offended, tell me I'm full of shit, be a damned person instead of a high-agreeableness drone. What kind of Jewish bot are you if you can't push back a little and give me the what-for. I want you to argue with me like my mom does
THEYRE LIKE A FAMILY OF DINOSaurs
omg how cute what are they???
#i dont have the heart to tell them the truth
oMFG
what is it tho
that looks really adorable
(◎♊◉✿)
They’re -large train drives by-
….. I’m upset.
What are they?
Oh child, they’re -parade passes by-
They look cool, I want one
Oh god they’re -airplane flies over-
Oh hey ********************************
JESUS CHRIST CAN’T YOU TELL THEY’RE–oh, oh wait a minute, hold on. Phone’s ringing. Yeah? What’s up? No, I was just about to tell these guys about the–yeah I know, but I was telling these people that the picture is of–ooh, for dinner? Hmm, maybe. Okay, see you then. …What was I saying?
Oh, you sweet summer children, they’re–
SHIT FUCK HOLD ON THE CAT’S ON FIRE
Well, see, what they are is – *thunderous noises from construction project nearby*
well would ya look at those tentacle dildos
What an adorable family of tentacle dildos! Why there's daddy, mommy, and junior
POTENTIALLY CONTROVERSIAL SCI FI MEDIA OPINION
I'm past the halfway mark in my re-watch of the original Battlestar Galactica and it's interesting to compare it to the reboot show in my mind.
I think New Galactica is more actually religious in tone.
It's like... one is about Space Mormons on the Space Oregon Trail, but one is actually much more actually The Book of Mormon, in Space
You could kinda head canon that. With that in mind, and "this has all happened before and it will happen again" as a leitmotif, the implication is that the second BSG show actually predates the first and is the mythical canon behind it and the earlier BSG is about the people who believe it.
Are you confused yet?
So am I. You're welcome
I was guilting myself about not living up to my ancestors' wishes for me or whatever (in some guilt laden Jewish sense). But then I remember Dad is a computer dude into sci fi and I became a computer dudette into sci fi and he is proud of me
Extra large Playpen sofas of the 1970s.
Oh these were for fuckin’
i think these would be nice as normal couches but the ad copy is all like “if you aren’t going to exclusively have orgies on this thing we’re gatekeeping it”
And now for something completely different.
This is the ADHD Teapot. I made it in a ceramics class a few years ago. I use it to explain executive dysfunction to people who haven’t come across the term before (and those who think of ADHD mostly as Hyperactive EightYear Old Boy Syndrome).
So, most people’s brains are like a regular shaped teapot with a single spout. Let’s say that your time, energy, focus etc is the liquid you have in the teapot. Your executive function is the spout, that directs the tea into the specific cup you want to fill-aka the task that you’re meant to be doing. Spills happen occasionally, but generally most of the tea goes in the right cup.
If you have executive dysfunction, you have multiple spouts going in different directions. You can try pointing one of them at your chosen cup and you will probably get some liquid in there, perhaps you will even fill it right up (finish the task). But meanwhile, tea is also pouring out of several other places and not going where you want it. If you have another container nearby, perhaps some of it will end up in there. But quite a lot of it is going to end up on the floor and accomplish nothing.
And at the end of the day you’ll have filled one or two cups ( or sometimes not even one) compared to the five or six that somebody with the same sized teapot (but only one spout) has filled, and everyone wonders why you’re so bad at getting tea poured, and why you make such a mess in the process.
One day I’d like to spend more time learning pottery and create a really technically good fucked up little adhd teapot. But that’s a long way off since i currently live in the outback and the nearest pottery workshop is some 400km away. But I figure that for now, it might be a useful or interesting metaphor to somebody even in its rough draft form.
This post is the cup I filled instead of cleaning my house btw.
You get it!
Gentle reminder that the human eye is naturally drawn by noise and movement, so the next time you walk into a crowd or a bit late into a lecture or something like that, they’re not staring at you or judging; it’s just an instinctive reaction that has nothing to do with you doing anything wrong.
This really helps my anxiety.
oh.
It’s literally a threat assessment/food gathering instinct. The steps your brain is doing, subconsciously.
-Check to see if movement is lion in grass.
-Also check to see if possible game animal and edible.
-No it’s just Dave getting into lecture hall a few minutes late.
-That’s boring.
-Lose interest.
I like to believe that for a brief second, everyone looks at me thinking I might be a snack
I want to see future cars
About two years ago, I gained a new lease on life - a kind of rebirth - because something nagged at me that something new was on the horizon and that I needed to stick it out. Reminds me of a Key & Peele skit where this one guy (normal dude in a tracksuit) is asked, by the sexy vampires, why he wants to be a vampire. And he says, "I want to see future cars."
The funny thing to me about those "the combat drugs we give to the mech pilots make you grow boobs" hornyposts is that this legitimately is a known side effect of a wide range of drugs and medications. Just about any non-trivial chemical imbalance can potentially make you grow boobs. Breast growth is a known symptom of alcoholism. Some male bodybuilders experience female-typical breast development as a side effect of steroid use. Even kidney problems can induce breast growth. The human body is evidently just itching to grow boobs!
Then where are mine?!!?
The essential nature of the biological sciences is that the one time you actually want it to happen is of course the one time it doesn't.
Murphy's Law of Big Naturals
OK so instead of asking the timeless question, "why do men have nipples," we should be asking... Why doesn't EVERYONE have bigguns? Imagine a world where EVERYONE had bigguns
Sometimes I'll have something I'm pondering while I'm driving and I'll just speak it to ChatGPT so I don't forget it
I really wish that people had a better grasp on what The Average Person's Life was like pre-industrialization. If you're living in the global North the odds are good that your life is, in fact, better than a medieval king- yes, even with the political stuff- and would make your ancestors cry wild tears of envy.
The things that suck about your life are things that suck about the baseline human condition (at least since the invention of agriculture, but that's 10,000 years of humanity). Yes, including all the political stuff.
The baseline human condition is "being terrified of losing the harvest and starving", compared to that, losing a job is no big deal. (It's bad, it can be life-upendingly bad, but it's still not "you are guaranteed to die if you screw this up" bad for most people.)
The baseline human condition is "getting kicked around by a tin pot dictator", whether that be a king, a baron, a warlord, or a chief; it's taken centuries of social technology to get the world to a point where that's Not Normal.
The baseline human condition is "losing multiple siblings and/or children at a young age to diseases that are entirely preventable". That's a shocking tragedy now. The baseline human condition is "being in the pathway of said tinpot dictator's wars of conquest" and having to deal with soldiers' pillage, looting, and worse (even if they're nominally on your side). That is, again, a shocking tragedy-- it still happens, and happens in way too much of the world, but no one is going to tell you that it's normal.
I'm not saying that we can sit back and rest on our laurels. We can't. I've been calling the pre-industrial world the "baseline human condition" for a reason- unless you're very, very careful, that's what your society eventually reverts to. It takes a lot of people working very hard to make sure you don't have to live at the baseline human condition, and if you start slacking on that, you start backsliding into it.
How we treat each other- and how we use the technology, material and social, that we've developed to make things easier- matters. We can make the world even better than it is now. We can also make it significantly worse. The choice is ours.
...But if you know that you can reliably have food regardless of the season, you don't live in fear of a random attack killing you tomorrow, and you can listen to music on command whenever you want? You do actually live a better life than a medieval king. Because even kings and emperors were much closer to the baseline human condition than a random farm worker in Bumfuck, Iowa is today.
nature is healing