when I see english text, I read it. there's no decision or effort or anything, the part of my brain that parses normal text is automatic enough that I read a short phrase the same way I notice a car is blue

this is true also for non-english text in a latin script that is short enough. it is not true for japanese - even if a sentence in japanese is composed entirely of characters I could read if I tried, it doesn't happen automatically. I have to try

and now I'm wondering if this is closer to how many people relate to text in their native language. I am constantly baffled by people having not read some obvious sign or some such. but if they had to try to read it, even a little, that would explain it

thoughts and remarks in the same vein, weirdly most about english/japanese:

a friend of mine rotates every bottle and jar in her kitchen so that they can't see the text on it, because it's too distracting for them. this culminated in importing a toaster oven from japan because it had The Least Text on it and then having to get a fucking power converting macguffin because it was specifically a 110v toaster oven instead of 120v? i don't know. it worked mostly fine except it would turn off after 8 minutes. i mean they still have it. now it doesn't turn off after 8 minutes. i think it's the macguffin that fixed it.

went to japan a few times, on one trip with a group of friends who spoke and read varying amounts of japanese. while in tokyo, the people most literate in japanese struggled the most in navigating: the literate crowd had to consciously read the japanese text on signs, but the illiterate crowd instantly saw all the omnipresent roman text.

downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because

followed by

is such a funny sequence

i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE

I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd

No, y'all don't even understand.

There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.

That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop

Yall don't know how much I adore all of this

Don't leave this in the tags

You can get lost in a city! Have your protagonists get “lost in the desert near the pyramids” and then cut to them at Pizza Hut arguing about where to find their hotel.

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

I don't think it really "means" anything, but I think it's kind of interesting that a lot of human societies have been quite squeamish about sex—in particular viewing it as a worldly pleasure which is gross, sinful, or unvirtuous to engage in—while generally not feeling squeamish about eating in the same way.

I think this is interesting because, conceptually, sex is actually pretty tame. It is (or at least should be) pleasurable for both parties, it's connected with both romantic love and the creation of new life (things which people generally valorize), etc. Obviously I understand the practical reasons why cultures might frown on unrestrained expression of sexuality in a world without birth control, but on a purely conceptual level sex seems pretty wholesome all around.

On the other hand, eating is rather disturbing as an idea, isn't it? Eating necessarily involves killing—even eating plants. As heterotrophs we literally cannot eat anything without ending life in order to do it. And of course most people now and throughout history have eaten meat, which means that eating involves slaughter. It's a gruesome thing; the pleasure we take from food is intimately and inherently tied to death. Eating is an act of destruction which is necessary to nourish the physical body. Surely this should be regarded, by the sorts of people inclined to the idea, as the greatest symbol of the fallen nature of the material world as compared to the spiritual. Surely it is hunger and not lust that should be the archetype of sinful material desire.

While ascetics of various backgrounds do seem to have mentioned gluttony (it is after all one of the seven deadly sins), my impression is that usually lust is a much greater concern for them. Why? Because lust is more tempting, a greater threat? I don't think so. I think it's because food is more tempting. Because you can go a lifetime without sex if you actually decide to, but a few days without food and your brain will basically shut down your capacity for higher reasoning and make you eat. Even when desire for food is railed against, it is generally merely excessive desire (gluttony), and not, as with lust, desire-at-all (hunger). I think only the most hardcore Buddhist monks take umbrage with hunger. Because lust is small potatoes; hunger has us all in its thrall. No matter how pacifistic we think ourselves to be, hunger drives us to kill and kill and kill. Isn't there a little more inherent horror in that than in, uh, people having sex?

At least the Jains seem to have taken the inherent-horror-in-eating stuff seriously.

@hedoughnism, @aksemmi.

If you liked this post you should probably read this fic:

Also, according to someone's summary of Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, there were historically Christian stories about saints sustained only by the eucharist and such.

I understand why alchemists invented, and modern fiction writers use, systems with a few understandable Elements like Earth / Fire / Air / Water / Light / Dark.

I understand why even most nerds don't bother to study the Elements in real life. There's too many of them, and they don't neatly correspond to meaningful aspects of macro-level existence.

But just once I'd like to read a worked magical system where the author has looked up the properties of the real Elements, has put in all the work to build up a system of plausible-sounding correspondences, and the protagonist is a rare dual-element Tellurium-Iodine wizard.

I think the logical counterpart to the classical elements is not the chemical elements but rather subatomic particles. There's fewer of them and they're more fundamental as building blocks.

Which is to say, if my character from a setting with elemental planes and atoms of earth and such heard about Golarion, ey wouldn't expect there to be a plane of carbon in a world where people were made of things like carbon, ey'd expect there to be a plane of electrons.

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.

Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.

wow. really hope this isn't actually a norm taking hold with new users! this isn't facebook, you don't need to know people before following them

love it when you click "cancel the thing" and it pops up:

Cancel the thing?

[ Ok ] [ Cancel ]

uh,

There's a tool I use at work where after you hit cancel, both buttons in the confirmation dialog say Cancel. one goes through with the cancellation whereas the other cancels it.

should just be one button and it forks the universe into a branch where you cancelled and another branch where you cancel cancelled

I am so perplexed at why all the books I had growing up characterized the Southeastern USA as a "temperate" climate when the standard classification lists even Kentucky as humid subtropical. It seems like sources that assume a USA perspective are more likely to describe the climate as temperate.

I have endless frustration with how our environment has been shoved into boxes it doesn't really fit into. Parts of the ecosystem that don't fit the familiar categorization have been forgotten.

Large areas of the USA were oak savannas, but everyone thinks savannas are exotic environments somewhere else. The Southeastern USA had BAMBOO FORESTS and almost no one knows they existed.

Webpages sometimes describe Arundinaria gigantea as a "bamboo-like plant." But it is a true bamboo! The Southeast has bamboo, passion fruits, pawpaws, and lots of broad-leaved evergreens. Just from wandering around on Google Earth and seeing comparisons, Savannah, Georgia LOOKS way more similar to tropical nations than it does to like. Vermont. Or anywhere in Europe.

I'm not imagining this, am I? And I feel so sure it has to do with colonialism. I don't have any hard evidence but when I read texts about post-colonial thought as well as primary sources from the colonial era, I definitely see that there is a way Europeans thought of tropical biomes as savage and barbaric, and temperate biomes as good and Normal, and there was definitely an attempt to force the land to conform to European expectations and agricultural practices, like they very much did try to make this continent into another Europe in terms of plant and animal life.

I just know that I was so boggled to learn that the whole southeast is technically humid subtropical because i distinctly remember books telling that the subtropical area was like. half of Florida. And then I was like "wait. of course it is. Even up here in Kentucky winter daytime temperatures are mostly above freezing. Alabama is in the same latitude as Iran."

It's like, something about making the climate and ecosystem seem Normal in comparison to something else

this is apparently a problem doctors have when taking histories in US; half the time if you ask someone if they've travelled anywhere tropical they'll say no even if they spent the last month in Florida

yeah naturally. yeah this sort of competition always needs a conniving guy (gender neutral) who's in the background outsmarting the outsmart-competition. who's here for unspoken personal reasons that don't actually align with the prize of winning the competition. yeah you can crack the secret wide open 1/4 of the way through the novel but you keep it to yourself until it's revealed at the end that you always knew but never used it to win, for esoteric reasons no one else quite understands. yeah we can hang with me in my cat form. can you dangle my string toy?

'Course I can dangle your string toy here kitty kitty (when nobody else is watching I talk to your cat form like you're a person and one time a POV character catches me doing that and until they figure it out everyone just thinks it's a weird habit I'm embarrassed about but for the discerning reader it's some early foreshadowing)

are the tasks going to be easier or harder than stringing this stupid bow and shooting an arrow through 12 axe heads. asking for a friend, they're dealing with a really frustrating situation rn. also they want to know if the competition has snacks in between events.

perfect bot interaction on twitter

i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something

Australia

English

Fries, chips, scones, biscuits, soft drink, lollies, cigarettes, beanie, fairy floss.

England

Chips, crisps, ???, biscuits, fizzy drinks, sweets, cigarettes, beanie, candy floss.

United States, currently midwest but grew up on the west coast

French fries, potato chips (contrasted with tortilla chips), biscuits

Cookies, soda, candy

Cigarettes, beanie, cotton candy

People who are all like "I don't understand how evil cultists in fantasy stories recruit people to worship an evil god that hates them" have *obviously* never been to Bible camp

Want to run a d&d campaign where the Drow high priestess of Lolth's holy symbol is a "WWLD?" bead bracelet

*pulls out an acoustic guitar* "Now anybody who feels Yog-Sanoth the All-Seer in their heart tonight can come up here to the fire and make a profession"

I know the Eater-Of-Hearts wants to eat all our hearts but his high priest is hosting a pot luck and I don’t have the energy to cook so...

Yeah, I have to listen to a sermon about Shar and how great she is, but I also get to play games with a bunch of other teens, and then they give us pizza while they talk.

*sits backward on chair* do you know who else didn't get along with her sister?

New short story. Fantasy, < 7,800 words.

New short story. Fantasy, < 7,800 words.

i already mentioned in the past that a friend of mine trained an AI on my drawings so that it could replicate my artstyle, a fun thing is that it fed it a bunch of drawings i made of myself so most of the things it creates look like self portraits i could have done

other just look like random cool guys i could have come up with

(i fucking love the guy with short hair and lipstick, he looks fucking sick, i am 100% using that design)

first of all, i cannot begin to descrive how mindfucky and trippy is to see drawing that *could have been done by me* but werent. every time i see them i have to catch my self for a few seconds wondering "wait, did i do these and forgot????"

second, because i didnt do these they are not worn on my eyes like a drawing i would have made, these are fresh images to my brain. i dont have a memory of having done every line and curve and having observed it a million times as i was doing them, thus the illusion of life is a lot more stronger for me.

so with all this is mind, this little excercise is allowing me to do something i always craved for but that i could never get. to see my own art from an outsider's perspective. to be able to appreciate my work from the point of view of someone else. how does my drawings look to others. i can do that now with these.

and let me tell you, not to sound too conceited but, damn, i really like what i see. i can now see what everyone else sees in my artstyle, its fun! its dinamic! its really expressive in a way i never noticed! and yes, the noses! oh my god the noses! and the way the lips curl and tighten.

on top of that, as i said, a lot of the overfitting in the model is directed towards self portraits that i made of myself, so the AI will tend to use many of the faces and features i use to depict myself. now you have to understand i identify quite strongly with my own drawings. i said often that i see more of my self in my drawings than i do in a mirror.

with this in mind its also super trippy that my friend basically has a fip generator.

every time i see things like this i cant help but go "OMG, THATS ME! THAT IS ME!"

(this final piece was actually done by me, lol)

so yeah, this has been all very illuminating

openai outsources some kind of training to africans -> chatgpt uses words like "delve" a lot more often than americans do -> an anti-meteoric rise of the word's usage in papers suggests academics are using it to write a ton -> some people who don't want to read ai-generated text filter out text with the word -> nigerians discriminated against

example usage of "delve":

A pair of new deities

Well, sort of new. One of them is entirely original, but the first one is actually based on a comedic aside found in Agents of Edgewatch: Assault on Hunting Lodge Seven, where he's listed among a few of the notable names to try and miserably fail to take on the Test of the Starstone. In both cases, however, these deities are involved with the Starstone, a bit of lore I've not really touched before due to my preference for cosmic horror.

In reality, both of these could be full articles on their own, but I feel like they're not 'big' enough to get two individual pages. Maybe one day I'll change my mind. For now, though, here's a look at Veelich, the God of Failure, and Wittiby, the God of Familiars.