Shouting into the Void

Escape Artist Featuring Quiver and Robber Guy

The only good thing about long COVID is that it made the medical community admit myalgic encephalomyelitis is likely caused my viral exposure. We were like “Hey, I had a virus and just never got better.” and doctors were like “That’s silly. And stupid. Chronic fatigue syndrome is just a random vague constellation of symptoms. Or just depression. It’s all in your head.” and now doctors are experiencing it.

I hoped COVID would have helped people understand that a viral illness isn’t “just a virus”, it can irreversibly wreck your health and ruin your quality of life, cause permanent damage to your body, make you more likely to develop cancer and yes, cause chronic fatigue syndrome. But no. The public is still downplaying it. If you’re not dead, you’re fine.

Or its "Why have so few people returned to the workforce, where did they go? Huh. A mystery."

They're too ill to work anymore or they're caring for loved ones who are to ill to work anymore. And that's not even counting how many people have died.

once again stating that "dude" being gender-neutral is a North American English regional dialect variation (like people calling carbonated beverages "soda," "pop," "cola," or "coke" depends on where in the US or Canada you are). Specifically, Dude is strictly gender-neutral in Southern & Central California, and I *think* Hawai'i, as an outgrowth of surf culture (think Bill & Ted's very exaggerated 80s LA stoner/surfer dialect)

Dude is MASCULINE in much of the Southwest, Plains, & Midwest when you get into and over the Rocky Mountains, because *there* it's from cowboy culture/slang.

East Coast is weird because we got it from surf culture migrating to Florida & the Carolinas, but it kinda leans masculine, but it also kinda doesn't & depends on where you are.

Which is a long-winded way of saying -- Southern Californians especially are genuine when they're flummoxed by being told that "dude" is masculine, because in their dialect it genuinely isn't. It's also hard for them to stop because they say it almost on reflex, like a filler word.

HOWEVER, if 'dude' makes someone uncomfortable because in THEIR dialect it has other connotations, stop using it! That is polite! Or at least make a strong effort. I know it is very hard not to just spout out "aw bummer dude"

(Similarly, "Hon" in Baltimore and iirc Philly dialect is also completely gender neutral, but I get when people get uncomfy / feel misgendered when I say "aw hon I'm sorry")

Yeah, hon is gender-neutral in Philly. But you still don't use it if people don't like it.

Raised along the mountain region and dude being cowboy slang, while true, is not today's standard, hasn't been that way for a long time due to cultural influence from, you guessed it, southern California. Both in terms of pop culture and the biggest offender being they keep leaving socal to gawk at my mountains.

I'm just as flummoxed over the dude thing not being gender neutral, that's how I was raised, dude was for everyone and dudette got you made fun of for trying to use it (thank the OG TMNT movie for that one).

It's more that a lot of transfemme people feel actively misgendered by it, and if they do, they'd generally just like people to choose a different word rather than use dudette. It can get really upsetting that people (and I'm not saying this is you) feel like they should argue this to death rather than just say, "Oh yeah, totally, sorry about that!" & choosing another word.

is he acting out of character or did you get too attached to a headcanon

#also is he acting out of character or is it a case of extreme emotion/growth over time/natural human contradictory behaviour

sometimes when I'm bored, I go through the list of recent bad faith Wikipedia edits that have since been reverted. a lot of them are politically contentious/offensive topics that attract crazies and trolls in general, but sometimes there are completely innocent inoffensive articles that people attack for no reason. some guy yesterday vandalized the article on the chemical element francium

Francium IS a stupid element. It has a half life of 22 minutes and barely exists at all, only naturally occurring as a product of the extremely rare alpha decay series ²³⁵U ➝ ²³¹Th ➝ ²³¹Pa (𝜷 decay) ➝ ²²⁷Ac ➝ ²²³Fr (1.38% chance). There’s less than a gram of it on earth at any given moment. It has no uses to anybody and it isn’t even the most reactive group 1A element due to relativistic effects fucking up its electron binding energies. Stupid substance.

If you somehow asked a genie to get you a gram of Francium in a sealed vial so you could do an experiment with it, the genie would just give it to you because the enormous amount of radioactivity it produces would instantly vaporize the sample and cook you alive. Absolute dogshit isotope and its synthetic siblings are just the same but worse

found the guy

TIL that there's an '80s movie where they portrayed Smilodon by sticking actual fake teeth onto actual live lions.

So I learnt about this as part of a paleontology lecture talking about how it became accepted that saber teeth don't hinder the animals ability to eat

Citation - those people who stuck some on real lions which were able to eat without problems once they got used to them

Impractical effects

(me, my parents, my sister, and the baby are sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch)

baby, pointing at the light fixture over the table and signing "on": o.*

my sister: we actually can't turn that light on right now, because the lightbulb inside is burnt out! it needs a new one.

baby: ighbu.

sister: yes, lightbulb! granddaddy said after we eat he's going to climb up there on a ladder and change it, and then the light will come on!

baby: gadada! adda, uuu! ighbu o!

sister: exactly!

baby, signing "on" and pointing at the light and then my dad, with increasing urgency: GADADA ADDA UUUU. O.

my sister: we're going to finish eating first though, ok?

baby: nonono. O. gadada adda uuu.

[a split second goes by]

baby, pointing to himself: ba. adda uuu. ighbu.

me: you're going to climb the ladder and change the lightbulb yourself?

baby: dzyeah. *pointing to the buckle where he is buckled into the high chair* ububu.

me: unbuckle you? so you can change the lightbulb?

baby, highly businesslike: dzyeah.

*pronounced like "on" without the n

this comment passes peer review

Here is what my mother told me when I was young: the world is harsh. It is unforgiving and it has teeth. Take no shit.

Here is what I have learned from the world: it is wounded and the humans scattered throughout it are rarely the rats of Rat Park, they are the tired, trembling experiments in need of more kindness, not less. Do no harm.

Here's what I have learned from the world: humans are good. They are soft, and gentle, and they are wounded, all of them. When humans were young and wild, they looked at the snarling beasts that came to their fires, the ones with sharp teeth in their long muzzles, and they saw soft fur and the welcome-home wag of a tail.

Here is what I have seen: Given an opportunity, humans will choose creation and love. They will create art, and music, and community. They will tell each other stories, sing each other songs, help each other heal. Even without safety, even when it wounds them, they will love. They will love each other - their family, their friends, their mates - and they will love the world.

Here is what I have seen: there is hope. Sometimes it is ugly and twisted and burns, but humans will hold onto it with both hands and their entire heart. They will share it with one another. They will use it to tame beasts with fur and teeth as well as the ones that live inside of themselves. They will create because of it; they will say I hope this makes someone smile, I hope this makes someone cry. I hope this saves someone. And it will.

Here is what I know to be true: evidence of a healed broken bone from thousands of years ago reminds us that what makes us human isn't our wounds, but how we care for one another through them.

Here is what my mother told me: the world will gnash its sharp teeth at me. It will try to wound me.

Here is what I know to be true: I am human, and humans heal one another and can turn sharp teeth into wagging tails.

a story with that cyberpunk theme of “are you really human if you modify your body to gain power“, except the body modification is just strength training.

parallel storyline with “these cognitive enhancements are making you INHUMAN and OUT OF TOUCH” but it’s just an education in statistics

humans stop being “truly human” and become “cyborgs abominations never intended by god or nature” the moment we pick up a fork or pencil.

… are you some medieval pope?

I actually am a pope but not a medieval one.

But my point is that humans have an ability to modify our internal body map when we pick up a tool. Try to think about how you make movements with a pencil or fork, or how you drive a car. You don’t think “I need to move my fingers this way so it’ll lever the fork that way to pick up the noodles”, you instead just move your fork, just how when you pick up something with your hand you don’t have to think about how you’re using muscles in your arm and shoulder, you just do it.

When you’re holding a tool or operating a device, at a certain point it stops being about manipulating the tool/device, because you’ve internalized how it moves. Your body map now contains that tool as part of you, and you move it just as automatically and fluently as you do your biological body parts.

It takes a while to get to that point the first time, sure, but it takes humans a long time to just get the hang of walking, too. But once you do, it becomes second nature.

So my point is that we’re basically set up to be cyborgs, to be more that human. We’re a tool using species, and one way that manifests is that we’re really good at using tools, because we treat them as part of our body, so we don’t have to think about how we manipulate them. We instead think about how we use them to manipulate external things.

So because we can have pencils in our body map, we can write, because we think about making marks on the paper, not about moving fingers.

Because we can have knives and chisels and hammers and saws in our body map, we can build and cut and manipulate resources by thinking about the changes we’re making, not about the way we handle the tools.

The base of my argument is that “unmodified humanity” doesn’t exist (except maybe the tiniest of newborn babies) because we change ourselves to be better at what we’re doing. That’s how humanity works. There is no “pure natural state” to get back to, we’re built to change and adapt and people worried about “losing humanity” because of implants and prothesises and drugs and gene therapy are missing the point: of course they’ll change who we are as humans… Changing our form IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

Like, I’ve talked about this before, but you can spot a London cab driver on a brain scan easier than you can tell male brains vs female brains, because learning how to do that changes the form and function of your brain to such a degree that you can detect it just by doing an MRI. You can tell if someone was an archer or a ballet dancer by the shape of their bones. You can tell what language a newborn’s parents speak because they babble in the same cadence and pitches as their soon-to-be-first-language, just from hearing it in the womb.

If you’re ever worried that something you do or become means you’re “less human”, don’t be. Becoming less “human” is the most human thing you can do.

I’ve been trying so hard to explain this to people ever since I got promoted to forklift driver. How quickly my body map integrated this five ton machine into a natural extension of my being. I’m actually better at guessing the battery charge on my truck by the minute sluggishness in my lift actuators than I am at assessing my own hunger. I can clear turns around shelving units within an inch of my sideboards easier than I can avoid tripping over my own feet out of truck.

It doesn’t just make me stronger, faster, able to reach higher, it also makes me more graceful, more agile, more aware of my self and my surroundings.

Perhaps even more human.

Exactly! Getting forklift certified makes you the next state of human evolution!

NASA advertising "do you want to be an astronaut" to tumblr users surely means something. What have you found out there, NASA? What have you found that you believe tumblr users, specifically, are best equipped to handle?

they want us to fuck the aliens

lol

the main thing I remember about Rincewind and women is that a bunch of scantily clad women on a tropical island offered him delights beyond his wildest dreams, and assumed they meant potatoes. He was so utterly convinced that they meant potatoes that the strength of his desire transported him back to Ankh-Morepork, where he got some potatoes and ate TWO of CMOT Dibbler's sausage-inna-buns. and lived.

My coworker completely misreads our maintenance guy’s vibes… he sees a big fuzzy bearded dude who works outside and thinks he must be super macho, completely missing all the bisexual tabletop gamer coding in his mannerisms. So when maintenance guy and I greet each other like high camp theatre nerds with a series of bows and flourishes and made-up titles, coworker is SO visibly confused and thinks I must have trained him to do this.

yeah he is my thrall now. I clicker-trained him with football hamburger gun and now he rolls for initiative at my command.

The Bear Tamer

libsoftiktok going after a beloved inventor furry for some reason

if you're wearing a fitbit, you're using spottacus's technology. be grateful.

oh boy

for further context, spottacus is not a professor at berkeley. Furries at Berkeley (a university-recognized RSO) asked him to give the first talk in their masterclass series, which you can find here!

he talks about his own experience with neurodivergence, his STEM career, the furry fandom, and how all three overlap. a really really interesting (and important!) video

hes also specifically a sabertooth lion in this video (and WOW what a gorgeous fursuit it is)