Also the thing where your friendship consists entirely of talking about badbrains.

So you have no conversational avenues if nobody is sad.

Nobody is trying to incentivise sadness it just… happens.

You need other things to care about, even if it’s just a cartoon or something.

shuffling-blogs replied to your post: It is very very hard to come up with c…

On the one hand, obviously.

On the other hand, if you’re actually trying to get it to work like UBI, you might have some problems. Because OK, you give ten kindness units to everyone, and then you give extra attention units out either to people who do really cool things (same as under UBI people can still earn wages) or people who have extra needs (same as under UBI you might have a charity to say, buy a wheelchair for a person whose UBI won’t cover that cost and can’t work.

Thing is, saying “look at me internet I am very sad” is way easier, than, idk effortposting or writing a novel. And as someone who is no longer mentally ill, it’s kinda unpleasant that I am sitting around worrying my internet friends will all leave me for not being crazy enough, but I’m not cool enough to write a novel yet. So it would be 5000x easier to just be sad again than live on my UBK ten attention units. Except being sad is, in fact, terrible.

(Then there are the jammy gits who are badbrains and still do cool things? How? You are magic?)

It is very very hard to come up with community norms that are kind to people who are struggling but which don’t incentivise continuing to struggle.

Selfishness and Spirituality

Trying to write a thing which is hard to put into words, not because I have significant word-problems but because the proper words for spiritual things do not exist.

I read a person’s description of their faith recently. I should not read that person’s blog, because they reliably trigger the fuck out of me, but this post did not trigger me. They talked about worshipping trees and soil and life, and how this happened not-on-purpose, and how it helps them touch the deepest reality. And without trying to copy this person (because I think this person is close to the maximum amount of difference from me that is possible) I want to explain how I am trying to touch the centre of reality.

This is my faith. It is the faith I am growing inside myself, partly on purpose and partly automatically without wishing. I am trying to describe it, for my own benefit mostly.

I think this faith is perhaps a way to be a Naturalistic Pantheist, but Naturalistic Pantheism is a vague and infinitely customisable umbrella term for (mostly, but not exclusively, white, Western) non-monotheists who try to be spiritual. So I speak only for myself.

And this thing in my head is influenced by the good bits of Catholicism, but good bits of Classical philosophy, by Less Wrong, by neurodiversity ideas, by my own life experiences, even by Doctor Who. But I think what I am finding is a thing which is real, and is at the bottom of the world. I am just finding it and describing it in a way unique to me, to the concept-frame I need to touch reality. And some people find the same thing and describe it with the opposite words. And it is still growing within me, and I am struggling to explain it, so please try to be kind and patient.

I can’t stop people yelling at me if that is what they want to do or feel they ought to do, BUT if you are going to yell at me at least read the whole thing so you can yell at me for something I actually said.

Everything is made of selfishness. Everything.

Everything is also made of love. It is the same thing.

Love is selfish. Selfishness is loving.

Love is being something, being it fully without apologies, and letting other things be things. Selfishness is being something, being it without apology, and letting other things be things.

In life’s name and for life’s sake, I love. In life’s name and for life’s sake, I am selfish.

There is a principle, or an anti-principle, that I call God. It is not what most people call God. To love another person is to punch the face of God. God is not love. God is death and God is emptiness. God is crushing your true nature for the sake of other beings, but when you crush your true nature you hurt the other beings too. God is imaginary, but exists as a principle. God is poison. I know the thing I call God is not God. It is more like… entropy. Destruction. But those things are the same, in my head, because of the things that have happened in my life and in my brain. I hope I do not offend people by calling this thing God. I know it is not the thing you call God, but it is the only thing I am capable of calling it God.

There is a principle. This principle is close to some people’s idea of God. I cannot call it God; the word God has been poisoned forever for me. I don’t have a name for it. But it is a selfish and loving force. It is the force of being according to one’s nature. It is the force of life and order. It is the principle behind the principles, the law behind the laws of science. It is the law that things do the things they do, that things are themselves, that existence exists. It is almost tautological, but it is beautiful and it is love.

All the atoms of the universe are selfish. The electrons orbit the protons on neutrons, not for the benefit of anything but themselves, but because it is their nature. They are being themselves. On some level, even though they don’t have any human-like thoughts, they want things. They want to orbit, to obey the laws of physics. All matter wants that, and it does it. Reality does what it does and it does it selfishly. The electrons do not dance for any reason except that it is their nature. They do not think about what other subatomic particles want. They just are themselves, fully. And by doing that, by being that, they allow things to be. Everything, from planets to bacteria to nuclear warheads to anti-malaria pills to stars to you and me, exists because the electrons dance selfishly. I wish I knew more physics; perhaps I should make an effort to teach myself. But I know that the world works because matter is selfish, and that its selfishness is love because it allows things to be.

At a much bigger level, there is me. And sometimes I lie still in my bed and I am just SELFISH. I don’t mean a synonym for masturbation (I do do that, and that is AWESOME, but that’s not the point.) I mean I just feel my body existing. The softness of my fat, the harness of my bones, the fluffiness of my hair. My heart, beating thudthudthudthud because that is how it works, without asking permission. My chest, rising and falling, pulling air into itself and pushing it out again, taking the oxygen it needs and expelling the carbon dioxide it doesn’t. My whole body, just existing, selfishly obeying laws of biology because that is what it wants and needs. The big fat softness of me, taking up space. The universe is unimaginably vast and I am tiny, but I take up a piece of space. There is a little piece of this universe which is JUST ME, as long as I take up that space, there is no room in that tiny portion of the creation for anything but me. 

When I was bulimic, I tried not to eat, and this had only a tiny amount to do with body image. It had mostly to do with trying to stop being selfish, to stop doing things for myself. And I failed. I starved and then I binged and purged. This was because my brain failed to understand things that the rest of my body understood. My body knows how to be selfish. Every second it turns oxygen and glucose into carbon dioxide and water, unlocking the energy to keep surviving. Every second my body is selfish. Every second it loves itself. And if bits of the brain-part of me break, the rest of my body will tell them. It will tell them to eat until the piece of brain that wants to be unselfish, to fade to nothingness is not strong enough to overpower it.

Breathing is selfish. Breathing is against God. Breathing is taking the air because you want it, need it, because it is in your fundamental nature. Lungs do not ask permission to breathe, they do not double-check that nobody else needs the air more than they do. I remember one day, deep in my eating disorder, I tried to kill my inner selfishness by restricting my breathing. It did not work. I would take a breath in, and count to eight. Then I would take a breath out and count to eight. Until I felt faint and I stopped. But even if I had been unselfish enough to carry on restricting my breathing, eventually I would have become unconscious and my lungs would have breathed the air they needed automatically, without my mind’s consent.

BREATHING IS CAPITALISM. I support lots of left-sounding things like higher taxes for the rich, government-funded healthcare and education, basic income guarantees with extra benefits for disabled people to buy assistive tech etc, but I am a capitalist because I breathe and I am not going to stop breathing. I am not going to wait in line for more deserving people to breathe before I breathe.

And I want to live my life in a selfish way, by which I mean making the world the kind of world I want. But that means being loving.

Example: I have started giving 10% of my income to GiveDirectly. I will put aside another 5% to people who beg on tumblr for money to help with transition funds, moving out of abusive households, desperately needing food/rent money etc. This is a selfish thing to do. Because I am imposing my will on the world. I believe in utilitarianism (I am not one of those awful utilitarians who thinks we should murder disabled people; don’t worry, I AM a disabled people, probably not disabled enough that Peter Singer thinks I should have been killed but still.) But utilitarianism is selfish, because I am making the world happier* because I want to. That is selfishness. I am making the world be more according to my values. Loving people is selfish. Loving means wanting good things for them, and wanting good things to happen to means imposing your will on the world. It means not just letting things happen, it means doing things and making decisions.

If I were a better utilitarian I would move back in to the crappy accomodation I lived in before, find food by foraging in dustbins and give all my money except rent to Give Directly. But that would still be selfish, because I would still be making the world according to my own wishes.

And whenever I am kind, whenever I am patient, whenever I make people laugh by putting an amusing caption on a gifset, whenever I let myself sleep and give my body the rest it wants, or drag myself out of bed so I can do things I think are important, when I eat cake because it is delicious or when I eat kale because health brings pleasure, whenever I comfort someone who is sad or signal-boost something that is important, whenever I write angry letters to my MP urging him to change the AWFUL ConDem policies on disability benefits, whenever I masturbate, whenever I excercise or watch TV, whenever I make the decision to work for better mental health by not self-harming, whenever I take medication to make myself better or refuse medication because the side-effects aren’t worth it, whenever I look at pictures of birds, when I reblog penguins to make Danni happy, I am selfish. I am building the world I want to live in in tiny steps. I am not asking permission, not being obedient. I am living according to things I value.

The thing I call God is the opposite of that. It is the principle of entropy, of not-loving, of just letting everything hurt you. The ultimate perfect person according to God is a person who ignores their own values completely, who does what they are told, who passively accepts abuse of themself and the people they love. They do not eat, they do not take up space, they do not care about things, they do not seek their happiness, they do not do what they care about, they roboticly obey what they are told. They do not think, they do not value their own thoughts or happiness or experiences, they do not trust their own ability to do anything, they accept contradictory things because they do not allow themselves to think. They will accept anything that says they are bad and they refuse to accept anything that says they are good. They feel obligated to disappear, but they do not even kill themselves even though they want to because that would be acting according to their own desires. They repress all their desires and try to not even HAVE them. They do things for other people, but they do not love or like other people, the just obey rules. And they have a bias towards coldness, emptiness. They want to be absorbed into God, to have their own will annihilated.

At the end of the universe, when entropy has made everything come apart, this will be the achievement of the principle I call God. That He has made all things dissipate, stiop being, stop doing as He commands. But I want to believe in cyclic models of the universe, that there will always be stuff, always be things happening, that matter will never stop dancing. I want a never-ending dance of matter, spitting in the face of entropy. And life, life is the highest form of the dance, because life wants things harder than not-life. But even not-life wants. Stars and planets are themselves, they obey their own natures, they rotate the way they are meant to. Even rocks, they are heavy, they exist, they fall, they are THEMSELVES. And I am myself, and I love myself , and I am, I am. I exist and I will not stop or apologise. And when I do die, my body will not stop, it will return to the earth and the matter will keep dancing and be absorbed and become other things that live and want. I will be earth and trees, birds and bacteria, people again. And everything will keep on dancing, keep on being itself.

And so I try to live loving selfishness and selfish love, every day. And I worship the thing at the base of reality I have no name for. And I hope that matter never stops dancing, but even if the dance is only temporary, it is still important. And I try to bring light into the world. This is the faith that I have held and hold, And this is that in which I mean to die.

I’m not here, I’m definitely not here, and I’m turning leechblock back on as soon as I post this, but this post was really important to me and I wanted to reblog it before it disappeared.

@queenshulamit​, I am not sure if you mind people reblogging things at this point.  If you want me to delete this reblog, I will.  I have the text saved on my computer already anyway.

All the best to you in leaving Tumblr.  I know it was an excellent decision for me, and I hope life gets better for you too.

It must have been really important to shorten the word “television”, because US and British English each independently invented shortened forms of it (”TV” and “telly” respectively… wait, do British people say “TV” also? I should probably ask @house-carpenter).

Anyway, this makes sense – “television” is a really common word, and it’s four syllables, and common words tend to get shortened.  (I feel like I almost never say “television” and I usually just say “TV”.)

My question is, why hasn’t “computer” gotten shortened similarly?  Is it just too new of a technology?  How long did it take for people to invent “TV” and “telly”?  (But “app” is a short form of “application” and those have been around for way less time than computers.)  Is it because “computer” is three syllables and “television” is four, and three syllables is an acceptable length for a word that common?  Do people just use other terms, like “PC” and “laptop” and “Mac” if they want to refer to their computer more efficiently?

One stressed syllable vs. two? 

British people do say “TV” as well. “Telly” is a more colloquial word for the same thing. The OED has a quotation which illustrates this nicely:

“Television” is attested from 1904 as “televista”, 1907 in its current form. But it was originally a mass noun referring to the system of producing images on a screen via radio transmission; people called the devices that were used to do this “television sets” (and this is of course still a term in use) at first. (So the word has arguably been shortened twice, in both dialects!) The OED’s first citation for “television” in the sense of “television set” dates to 1955.

“TV” is attested from 1948 in Fortune and Time (both American magazines) and from 1957 in the Times Literary Supplement (which is British). “Telly” is actually older; it’s attested from 1930 in Variety (another American magazine!) and as late as 1977 in the New Yorker; the OED says it’s only now chiefly British. Again, both of the abbreviations were originally used to refer to the medium rather than to the individual devices.

So it only took about 20 years for the first abbreviation to emerge. And people have been talking about computers for longer than 20 years. So, on the question, I think @severnayazemlya has the right idea. One way to test it would be to look at place names, which are reliably under pressure to be shortened.

Thanks!  =)  I was hoping for a post like this.

Is it fair to compare “Wisconsin” to “Athelstaineford” and “Liverpool”?  Place names in the US don’t get shortened as much, do they?  (Is it just that they’ve had less time?)

John Muir (via scrapbooking-nature)

Selected Poems // Rainer Maria Rilke

(via syllablefingers)

Slipped a little with my plan to complete one sheet of exercises per day over the Christmas break. Only did 4/7 questions on the simplex algorithm yesterday. But I should be able to get back on track today, if I don’t slack off too much.

(The simplex algorithm is just SO TEDIOUS, aaaaargh)

(I’m sorry. I feel bad about judging the simplex algorithm. I’m sure it has friends and family who love it very much. It’s not you, simplex algorithm, it’s me. Perhaps in another time, another place, we could have made it work together, but in the here and now, it just wasn’t meant to be.)

Confession: I think linear programming is really boring.

Except for LP problems with multiple optimal solutions.  Those are exciting and edgy.

Good news!  The deer turned out to be quite edible.  =)  It was very fresh; as I suspected, it must have died just an hour or two before I found it.

I was wrong about the eyes being cloudy; they were totally clear.  And the smell that I mentioned was not rotting meat; it was coming from the gut cavity, which had gotten slightly ruptured when the deer was hit.  Apparently it died from the gut injury, and a snapped spine, and a lot of internal bleeding.  Poor thing; I’m glad we were able to honor its death.

Anyway, a little bit of meat on the lower half of the deer got ruined by the gut cavity bursting, but the rest was totally fine!  @sleepymountaincrafts‘s boyfriend showed me how to remove the hide, remove the guts/internal organs, and cut up the meat.  It seems like a pretty straightforward process!  I think next time I find a roadkill deer, I’ll be able to do the whole thing myself (with a bit of trial and error).

In conclusion, picking up roadkill turned out to be a great decision!  And now I have discovered a very ethical, unfortunately abundant source of free food.  (Now all I need to do is start dumpster-diving for the rest of my groceries…)

We had venison for dinner at the Bushcraft School (it was quite tasty), and a lively discussion about anthropology.  And afterwards, I got to hang out with @sleepymountaincrafts for a while, which was awesome.  =)  In conclusion, it was an excellent day.

Have you got anything planned for the hide? I understand deerskin can be made into all sorts of things.

I don’t have anything planned for it personally, but I left it at the Bushcraft School, and they're definitely going to do something with it.

I actually took a class there, a few months ago, on traditional brain-tanning, which would turn the hide into buckskin leather that I could use for clothes.  I’ve been wanting to try brain-tanning again, and this would have been the perfect opportunity, except that I’m in the process of moving.

Oh well!  There’s always the next roadkill deer.