I'm so mentally stable you can park a horse in my brain
piplup grain entrapment
piplup cares a lot about his work
piplup reports on the company's finances. layoffs are inevitable.
piplup takes a sick day
piplup considers some jorts
piplup forgives his father.
piplup goes grocery shopping
piplup jumps your battery
piplup lights the menorah
piplup sees the pale blue dot
piplup catsits
piplup hides a zombie bite from you
Can I speak my truth. I don’t think Brienne is even a little gay. I think she’s a kinsey zero who false positives on everyone’s radar. I think if you dropped brienne into new age 2024 she would get treated as a lesbian in her day to day life but whenever a woman liked her she’d be like. Ummmmmmm I’m really sorry but I don’t. Feel like that. I think she’d give lesbianism the good old college try bc of the direness of her male love life and come down firmly on the side of not attracted to women. I think she is quintessential pnw woman who you think is a slam dunk homerun lesbian based on everything about her who drops the word husband on you. I think she gets clocked on sight and mentions a partner named Jaime which makes people go. Okay. Partner i know that game. Jamie easily the name of a lesbian. Easily. And then she drops the he pronouns and you go. Well. Could still be a weird lesbian. And then Jaime is a business major in a frat with generational wealth. And HE is the kinsey five in the relationship.
some award winning thoughts from the tags
and what if I told you nine was less afraid of love than ten. what then.
for a moment i lived in a beautiful world where doctor who didn’t exist and this was simply a seven-ate-nine joke too layered for me to understand
This is actually something I was thinking about is that rent can not exceed 1/3 of monthly minimum wage income.
So let's say state is on federal Minimum wage which is about 1100 a month so in that state no matter what rent on any place could not exceed 370 dollars.
Even if minimum wage was 15 dollars (about 2400 a month) max rent could be 800
So if landlord want more money they would have to fight bosses and state legislature to get it.
Like average Pennsylvania rent is 1400 and in this world if landlord wanted to charge that the would have to get minimum wage raised to 26 dollars an hour.
To bosses and landlords:
My brain: You have so many tight deadlines. So many things on your weekly schedule. So many important jobs. You have to get important work done!!!
My hands:
i can't explain it but i'm obsessed with this entire conversation somehow
The tailors at Colonial Williamsburg made a suit for their cat
The best part is that they were inspired by a diary entry from 1775, written by a 12 year old tailor’s apprentice who had been left unsupervised all day and decided to make a suit for a cat. Here’s a link to the blog post about it, but I’ll just paste the whole diary entry here:
“I had been at work about two months when Christmas came on – and here I must relate a little anecdote. The principal [the tailor] and his lady were invited to a party among their friends…while it devolved on me to stay at home and keep house. There was nothing left me in charge to do, only to take care of the house. There was a large cat that generally lay about the fire. In order to try my mechanical powers, I concluded to make a suit of clothing for puss, and for my purpose gathered some scraps of cloth that lay about the shop-board, and went to work as hard as I could. Late in the evening I got my suit of clothes finished; I caught the cat, put on the whole suit – coat, vest, and small-clothes [breeches] – buttoned all on tight, and set down my cat to inspect the fit.
“Unfortunately for me there was a hole through the floor close to the fireplace, just large enough for the cat to pass down; after making some efforts to get rid of the clothes, and failing, pussy descended through the hole and disappeared; the floor was tight and the house underpinned with brick, so there was no chance of pursuit. I consoled myself with a hope that the cat would extricate itself from its incumbrance, but not so; night came and I had made on a good fire and seated myself for some two or three hours after dark, when who should make their appearance but my master and mistress and two young men, all in good humor, with two or three bottles of rum. After all were seated around the fire, who should appear amongst us but the cat in his uniform. I was struck speechless, the secret was out and had no chance of concealing; the cat was caught, the whole work inspected and the question asked, is this your day’s work? I was obliged to answer in the affirmative; I would then have been willing to take a good whipping, and let it stop there, but no, to complete my mortification the clothes were carefully taken off the cat and hung up in the shop for the inspection of all customers that came in.”
“I was hoping they’d beat me and forget about it but to my horror they stuck my work up on the fridge”
What a dapper little gent!
The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.
So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.
But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.
But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.
Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.
I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.
on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.
The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.
I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.
at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”
The Library of Babel is one of my favorite science fiction concepts of all time! Especially because now that the digital version of the Library exists, we may be on the verge of resolving the Perplexing Nexus.
So in the book, the library of Babel consists of a bunch of hexagonical rooms, arranged more or less like a beehive. Two walls are doors connecting them to adjoining hexagons. One wall contains the supplies necessary for human life. the other three walls contain these 410-page books (it’s 410 pages because that’s how long Borges’ copy of Don Quixote was), most of which are gibberish.
The story is mostly focused on what life is like for the humans inside the Library- their only source of stimulation is the books, they have no idea why they’re here, and they can’t get out. It’s generally agreed that the answer to why they’re here and how to get out is somewhere in the library, but there are literally TRILLIONS of books, and as stated above, even if you find one that makes sense, there’s no way to know if it’s true. some people have devoted themselves to searching for the way out, some just collect anything that makes sense, and some are wholesale burning every book they find to try to break the library.
Borges wrote his story in the 1930’s well before the advent of databases, and the mechanics of the library weren’t the main focus- the effect on people when confronted with the dubiousness of The Truth was. We now live in an era where the Library is Real- or at least, a digital version of it is, and we may be able to do something none of Borges’ characters could:
Actually sort the damn thing.
Text AI is unfortunately being used for stupid purposes, but we’re getting close to machines that can read text and reasonably judge if the text is gibberish or Real Words, and do so at speed. There are Trillions of Books, but we crunch bigger datasets than that.
Imagine a sorting algorithm that moves through the library, room by room, reading every book in the room in a flash, and flagging it as “total gibberish” or “some comprehensible text”, highlighting any comprehensible text, and perhaps even searching for cryptographic clues in the nonsense. It’s going through the library much, much faster than any human can, and methodically, room-by-room, never returning to a room it’s already processed, a but like the old phone game of Snake.
Acutally, kind of literally. I imagine it would manifest in the database as a sort of enormous serpent, twisting through the labyrinthine library, devouring books whole. The Comprehensible ones are left standing on the shelves in its wake, survivors not of a force of nature, but a cataclysm of technology.
…But can you trust it?
Who created this monster? What parameters did they use? Why the hell did they make this thing? Can you trust the creator’s motives? and what about the serpent itself? Is it a mindless thing, following it’s creator’s orders, or is there a spark of self with in it? Has the consumption of this data changed it? Or are we talking to
So how about a sequel: The Serpent of Babel.
been thinking about fantasy/scifi rule systems and free will
Incorrect sayings that I use so often I’ve almost forgotten that they’re not the originals:
- I have bigger fish to fight
- We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it
- You can lead a horse to water, but if you drown it you have to walk home
- Opening a can of whales
- You made your bed, now shit in it
- Combining the latter two into the phrase “you opened this can of whales, now lie in it”
i see posts here about how people are so mortified when they are acknowledged as being a regular customer somewhere that they never return. cowards. the employees at taco bell treat me like a celebrity. like royalty. i am their strange little pet customer who gets traded along as staff comes and goes. they know my car before i even speak in the drive-thru speaker. today i was 2 hours late and she ran over and squealed that she "thought i'd left them!" and that she "made my order with extra love!" and you what, she did
it's funny that this is getting notes again, because last night i went to the thai place in my neighborhood. it's run by a family and during covid times i ate there literally almost every day. later i cut back on eating out so much and hadn't been there in two years but last night we went and ate inside for the first time ever and the owner ran over to say hello and ask how i was, and repeated our old regular order. it was sweet. it's so easy to feel like you are an island, but stuff like this reminds you that you are part of a community.
this emerged in my head when I was trying to drive
May I propose the fill ins?
I do genuinely believe that the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and arguably the Zelda franchise as a whole, though i myself have played literally none of these games) is closer to fitting the description of ‘Tolkien-esque Fantasy’ than most other movies/shows/games/books etc that claim that label
Like, compare this post by tumblr user wufflesvetinari, which makes an important point about Tolkien’s worldbuilding, and also lives in my head rent free:
and then these quotes from Jacob Geller’s “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”
and his conclusions about the messages in Zelda games are thematically very similar to the through-lines about friendship and love in LOTR, and what a lot of authors miss about what makes a fantasy story personal and memorable:
“A world without joy and humor isn’t a compelling world to fight for” is exactly why there are so many pieces of fantasy media out there that just feel like carbon copies of each other (i’ve seen many posts that explain this better than I can though I can’t find any specific ones at the moment, just know that I didn’t invent this thesis). You’ve got the cool swords, you’ve got the wizards and the spells and the battles, but first and foremost you need the LOVE.
"our son made it through the war to come of age, let's fucken party! rsvp only if you're a little bitch who's NOT coming. all y'all not dead of alcohol poisoning by morning (lmao losers) get dunkt on"
Note that "carriages at (time)" would by then have been a rather old-fashioned way of indicating at about what time guests should expect a social event to end. The impression here is that things are expected to be fairly sedate until midnight, when the adults (relatives, friends-of-the-family, parents of the youth's friends, etc.) clear out, and the young people are free to get their rager on.