Sleeping Mara

Oh my god. I need to share another story of my new friend making today. So my friends husband says, very casually, as we’re about to leave for the ren faire, “Yeah, it’s like my story about fucking a chicken.”

And of the four people present I was the only one who was shocked. The others all nodded as if to say, yes yes, we know, the chicken fucking.

So he explained, when a progressive person is analyzing a behavior they will typically use the metric, Harm/No Harm. They may not like things in the No Harm category but they wouldn’t object.

Conversely, a more conservative mindset used something like eight metrics. Authority/No Authority Moral/Not Moral, things like that.

So, he posited if you want to sound out someone’s mindset (and you’re willing to live with the repercussions) you can ask: if a man buys a dead chicken from the store, cleans it thoroughly, then fucks it, and then eats it himself…?

I listened in dawning horror, both rapt and disgusted. But into the growing pause I whispered, “No harm…” because it really has no effect on me or anyone else if a man fucks a dead chicken. I don’t like it, I think he’s a weird dude, but like. That’s his dick. But a more conservative person will hear that and object on moral grounds despite not being harmed.

It’s been haunting me all day, so please enjoy.

This is also a handy probability scale for who's gonna be wearing your skin in a week.

I know you’re joking but this joke is absolutely the point. You’ve assigned a moral judgement to the act, rather than acknowledging it as not harmful.

In the current climate sex has so many moral judgements applied, and I can tell you that perfectly bland every day people do some Crazy Sex Stuff. When I worked at a sex shop they’d tell me all about it. It didn’t preclude them to murder or being serial killers. If someone wants to fuck a warm cantaloupe or a dead chicken it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t harm me or anyone else.

Your morals should not be applied to anyone else’s sex life unless there’s actual harm, and a time where public indecency laws are rearing their heads again creeping toward the immoral queers, it’s something to actively push against.

look. the nature of the artist (any kind) is to become inexplicably obsessed with certain themes and motifs for a few years and just milk that subject matter to death. when respected artists do this, art critics refer to it as a “period.” the only thing separating you from them is fame and accolades. to your haters you will be “that freak who’s fixated on drawing weird trains,” while to your admirers, you are simply in your “tiny trains made out of household appliances” period

cannot recommend more putting secrets and hints in your creative work that you dont expect anyone to figure out

act like youve got a ravenous fanbase of a million people poring over every detail, cuz then if nobody figures it out you feel cool n smug knowing something nobody else does, and if someone does figure it out then its like theyve joined a secret society

im laughing so hard because no matter what song you listen to 

spiderman dances to the beat

no matter what song ive been testing it and lauing my ass off for an hour

hey guys do you want to circulate the heirloom dancing spiderman again i feel like we could stand to do that

none pizza with left beef

It should be a rule of Tumblr to always reblog none pizza with left beef

ive missed you

Posted Oct 9, 2012

I mean.....

And then the search function doesn't work

AND THEN THE SEACH FUNCTION DOESN’T WORK

"I am the library of Alexandria that never burns" screams @theshitpostcalligrapher

lmao on it

Gave prince Adam from Beauty and The Beast a well deserved remake, beard and all. Its an outrage hes baby faced honestly....

Thoughts?

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!

I have been saying this about motorcycles for years: Ie, what does it mean to “be” a “man” or a “woman” when by mass three quarters of my body as I experience it (and as it would be seen by a passer-by) is made by Kawasaki and I am getting more useful sensory information from my front tyre (hot, slipping, near the limit of my grip) and my engine (struggling to breathe, pounding too fast) than from my arse or feet (numb)?

"Indeed, when he applied to become an astronaut, he failed on the first attempt. Part of the test featured the famous Rorschach ink-blots psychiatric exam. “I leafed through a whole series of them, and then the last one was a blank sheet of paper, pure white, eight by 10,” he once recalled. “I was asked what I could see. And I said, ‘Well, of course, that’s 11 polar bears fornicating in a snow bank.’ And I could see the examiner’s eyes kind of tighten. He didn’t think that was funny.”"

Brother Gregor never spoke and often spooked the neophytes with his appearance, but he was a gentle soul and a phenomenal cook and knew more ways to prepare a fish than the abbot knew hymns

a collection

I got rid of the dog because dogs fucking suck

I put it back :)

I replaced it with a ferret

ooh I love ferrets!

they're friends

Not anymore

What a beautiful wedding

Uh oh

Thank goodness! Hopefully it works

It didn’t 

...did they steal that helicopter

But it was too late

Ghost horse ghost horse

Horse is ressuracted by pumpkin man

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

what does it say about us as a culture that most of our microwaves have a dedicated popcorn button

i dont know but whatever it says, its magnified by literally every bag of popcorn saying “don’t use the popcorn button”

Funnily enough, there’s an answer for that.

In brief, the “popcorn” button was initially introduced by fancy high-end microwaves that used an integrated humidity sensor to tell when your popcorn was done; microwaveable popcorn vents steam as it cooks, so by monitoring the amount of steam in the cooking chamber, you can get pretty close to perfectly popped popcorn every time (though it’s generally only pretty close, since different brands of microwaveable popcorn have different moisture content).

As the feature became popular, manufacturers of cheap microwaves started adding a button labelled “popcorn” as well, in order to imply that they offer this feature. These “popcorn” buttons simply run the microwave for a fixed amount of time that the manufacturer figures is close enough to the printed cooking time of most commercial brands.

In practice, of course, the fixed-time “popcorn” button usually just sets your popcorn on fire. To make matters worse, owing to America’s permissive advertising laws, microwave manufacturers are allowed to make all sorts of misleading-but-technically-true statements in their packaging and instruction manuals, rendering it nearly impossible to tell whether a given model of microwave has a real humidity-sensing “popcorn” button or a fake fixed-time “popcorn” button before buying it.

In summary: the “popcorn” button that your microwave popcorn instructs you not to use exists because American microwave manufacturers are using a misleadingly labelled button in order to imply that their product has a feature that it does not in fact have, in a way that can potentially trick people into burning their houses down, for advertising purposes. This is perfectly legal.

So: what does that say about our culture?

Information that helps give context to our college roommate blowing up the dorm microwave twice via the popcorn button.