Reblogged cruelfeline
people: do you like (character)?
me, a little unhinged about said character: He’s fine. He’s alright.
Reblogged
my general position on public nuisance is "you should do your best not to irritate or inconvenience other people unless there's a good reason" and then litigate the "good reason" on a case by case basis. i think that's the best anyone can do. the definition of "good reason" varies wildly depending on context, your background, culture generally, what data you have as a participant or a bystander, and local laws, and all three of these things are relevant factors
for example it really does lower my level of reactive, irritable stress with my neighbors to know their names and general schedules. i don't know why but it really does bother you less if Kyle Upstairs is having a party a little too late and you can hear Bulletproof through the ceiling, as opposed to if you're on year three of living underneath some anonymous fuckhead you want to kill. it's like oh Kyle's cousin is visiting and they're just chilling out maybe they lost track of the time. this makes all the difference. as usual the best advice is to form community with the people around you no matter what, even if you are entirely self-interested it will benefit you in the end. well that's all I got
Reblogged vampire-bat-boy
I am obsessed with this botched restoration of a 19th century statue of saint anthony
Look at how yassified he is
St Cunthony of Servington
Reblogged hatsalad
tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva
me normally: i'm not personally a huge fan of modern art
me around right wingers: I love modern art sooooo much and I think there should be litter boxes in schools also
fucking obliterated lmao
Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:
The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.
The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.
The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.
Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.
Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."
Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.
But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.
But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.
This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.
Okay this is gong to sound condescending on several levels but:
There's a kind of cliche about training a dog - that if you want it to always come when it's called, you should never scream at or punish it when it does. Even if you just spent twenty minutes getting increasingly panicked thinking it was dead in the woods! Even if it had been trampling through the neighbors garden! It is very important that it's direct association is 'stopping whatever super interesting thing I was doing to go back to human = being praised and rewarded'. If the association is instead being screamed at or punished, the dog will be less enthusiastic to stop whatever fun thing it's doing to run to that.
I feel like a great many people would noticably improve their own lives if they started applying the same logic to how they treated other humans.
they could have said, like, "we made a new wolf morph, which shows how far genetic science has advanced". they could have said, "we're calling them direwolves out of a love for the extinct species." maybe too much to ask for but would have loved it if they'd pointed out some kind of ecological niche they were theoretically intent on resolving - like, "wolves are having trouble adapting to human sprawl and we are hoping that our research into the past will help us save wolves in the present."
but alas they did not do this. and see this sucks because i want to be hype about new bigass fantasy wolves. there is a 7th grade version of me that would be ecstatic about this. she would be obsessive.
unfortunately, due to capitalism, now i gotta have beef with puppies. can you imagine.
Reblogged vaspider
why are cyberpunk tabletop things so obsessed with decency and personhood being tied to how many surgeries you haven’t had
“if you have a prosthetic it takes out a part of your soul” like thanks shadowrun
in early cyberpunk, the point was more along the lines of “if we integrate technology into our bodies we risk becoming dependent upon the people and institutions who control that technology, who would then use that to enrich themselves at our expense”
unfortunately that was too anti-corporate for American mainstream culture so as cyberpunk moved out of its niche it became “uhhh it eats your soul I guess”
tags by @rubyvroom:
#this is important context #if you weren’t around at the time it is easy to miss but #anti-corporate sentiment was pretty much the lynchpin of cyberpunk until there were movies and games making money off it #it was the 1980s you guys #the entire point was that corporations are evil and technology should be used to circumvent them and escape their control over our lives #and not be used to make ourselves into another product #now that the internet is entirely monetized and corporate it’s harder to remember that originally it was synonymous w freedom & independence
Yes, exactly. Cyberpunk is anti-corporations, not anti-body-modification.
