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"It depends."
Because I never remember how to type that English short "i" sound.
Notwithstanding the quick reference placement, it's definitely best to read and internalize this one bit at a time.
For those seeking a cure for their AGAB who might be stuck under a repressive authoritarian regime.
1 Did somebody say “anti-American”?
- isolating your target as an outsider to the community.
2 Have you heard the one about deadly venomous snakes?
- disinformation, poisoning the well.
3 You cannot communicate with someone who says you should be dead
- the "groomer" canard.
A collection of different relaxing ambient sounds to play while you study or shitpost. Be inspired by the brave knights battling the giant bees for control of the alien train station...
A beautiful takedown of the neuromyth that our brains are fundamentally structured around Low, Middle and High parts that correspond to the lower and higher forms of some progressive evolution culminating in man.
Our “old friends” parasitic worms and beneficial microbes are associated with a reduced risk of allergies and autoimmune diseases. No such relationship exists for crowd diseases [colds, measles, flu, etc.]. In fact, the opposite is true.
...the numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favor human cells over bacteria.
More citations are listed on Wikipedia.
Not just ovaries, testes, labia, scrotum, clitoris and penis. Scroll down to Fig. 1 in the Mollaioli et al. paper for an important summary of where we need to go with this.
I love the way she picks apart all the stuff that's behind the deranged, toxic way our society holds its penis-related taboos. I think there's a new insight in this piece for everyone - or at least a long-forgotten one, or even an unconscious and unexamined one that needs to be considered and validated and known.
"Vulture bees still produce honey (the normal, golden type we can find in our supermarkets) by collecting nectar. They simply eat the meat and store the rotting flesh in their hives." An in-depth look on both what the actual fact of the matter is, and what sorts of signs to look for in the social media misinformation.
Of course the predecessor evils, the Know-Nothings, the Klan, the Birchers all go further back; this is strictly about the anti-abortion "pro-life" angle - or, rather, grift. The Evangelicals had basically no theology of fetal personhood until it became politically convenient.
Far from being a bloodless liberal gotcha, I’m reading these examples as a demonstration of how necessary abortion is. Everyone getting an abortion here is blameless for that - the only issue is their refusal to acknowledge it.
A cursory glance at Palestine’s geography would reveal that most of it is part of what is known as the Fertile Crescent ... The region has historically been known for its crops and agriculture. As a matter of fact, if we are to look at the average annual rainfall in the area over the last 100 years, then Ramallah has a higher average annual rainfall than Paris, and Jerusalem has a higher average annual rainfall than Berlin. ... The severe drop in the amount of cultivated land in the Naqab after 1948 attests to this fact.
A brief survey of the historical context of much of the Old Testament to show that much of the Zionisto-Christian narrative we see used to justify any number of genocides of the centuries is not that, but rather actually a collection of polemics to unify a particular political bloc of Canaanites againt various Canaanite and foreign enemies. (Warning: if you're anything like me, perhaps a preceding misconception to get over before reading this is the deeply-trained instinctual recoil at the thought that we're basically reading the literal text of the Bible like we're supposed to read Humbert's literal account in Lolita.)
I was honestly surprised to read that the Olympics weren't always this bad, and there really was a genuine element of celebrating individual people wanting to do their best before Nazi politics made everything turn in that direction.
This had been a foundational piece for me back when I was still a young quasi-Randroid edgelord. Gentle, firm and relentless.
Sparta was a horrific mess of abuse, genocide and oppression that had a perfectly mediocre performance in combat. None of its austerity and brutality made it any better at the things it was purported to improve. A warning against the worst impulses of our society today.
The "Hero's Journey" is a distortion and an arbitrary limitation, a prescriptive theory invented and popularized by men with some fairly specific agendas that have little relationship with any truth about the human condition.
Related to the Sparta series, a thorough (and admittedly prolix) recount of how the myth of the "trashy gross sexist dude who needs to be like that to do the right thing and actually help the movement" never bears out in reality - or, at least, any beneficial effect is drowned out by the direct harm and risk and opportunity cost of not ejecting such a parasite. A zine-formatted version is also available.
When I first read Why Does He Do That? I was troubled because while the advice seemed important something deep down really did not sit right. Reading this - and also this thread on Reddit highlighting some extremely transphobic remarks - helped put that essentialist blanket moral condemnation in context and helped me let go of years of internalized misandry I barely even realized I had.
I get the desire for revenge, the overwhelming urge to unleash righteous destruction in our frustration at the system. But if we ever get to that point, and these horrible people are no longer a threat or obstacle, there will be better things to do.
The only "I'll trade you one cow for 10 bushels of wheat grain" sort of explicit negotiation was only ever attested among people who typically used money but were stuck in a situation where they could not. While a modern urbanized society may never return to a gift economy at scale, it's important to remember that what we see as the default is far from natural or primordial or ontologically necessary in any way - except, as Doctorow points out, at the wrong end of the barrel of a gun.
A thing to attack the libertarian economic ideology in a way that's framed even at the thought experiment level. Not a single word in the comic or the lengthy commentary about capitalism or how private land ownership works in the real world every single time - a truly astounding dedication to kayfabe.
Gender relations emerge internal to cultural dynamics whereas racialization is imposed onto one culture by a dominant culture as part of class/colonial oppression. The latter historical process means forcing the dominant gender relations onto the gender relations of the exploited
- i.e., gender and race are two fundamentally different ways of classifying people and redistributing power, one imposed between communities and the other arising within communities. (I'm reminded of this one exchange on Jay Leno's show when Ellen Degeneres said being gay was like being black, whereupon Jay turned to Kevin Eubanks and asked him about his experience coming out to his parents.)
Every Pascha some bad memes about the origins of the English word for it come up. They are wrong.
We don't give the ancients enough credit. We never do. And apparently not even Latin speakers were as rigid about Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter as we tend to be taught.
As linked on the Wikipedia page on "white people". A solid overview of how these ideas evolved - or rather were made up and imposed - over the past 400 years.
The essay from Gravity and Grace from which we get that famous line about imaginary versus real evil - and good.
An attempt to codify our aesthetics. Mostly descriptive, mostly relatable.
This changed the entire way I approached driving - and other things. I recommend watching the video first, to keep things fairly concrete and easy to visualize.
Just as different definitions of metal serve different communities, we, as planetary scientists, find it useful to define a planet as a substellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and has enough gravitation to be round due to hydrostatic equilibrium, regardless of its orbital parameters.
Pluto is a planet. Who are you going to trust, your desire for secret counterintuitive pedantry or your own eyes? It just depends on what you're doing with the classification.
A common belief about training is that the best way to go at it is to regularly keep going until you can't anymore and then if you do that enough the "until you can't" gets further and further as you improve. This misses out on the fact that you're simultaneously training yourself to associate the activity with stress and exhaustion and instilling adverse instinctual responses that can easily outstrip or undo any progress. There are better ways to do things. Stop when your body and mind are still enjoying the play. Stop before it becomes work.
A look at the Aztec human sacrifices and their commonalities with Christian soteriology, from an Eastern Orthodox Christian point of view. Reading this as a prospective convert in early 2014 was one of the things that finally breached an old cognitive barrier I didn't realize I had about "savage" and "enlightened" religious belief systems.
Not only does G-d never speak to Abraham again, Torah tells us he came down from the mountain ALONE. The price of him not questioning was the loss of his son in a totally different way. The bond was broken. He completely and utterly failed on all counts.
Consider the possibility that, generally speaking, Jesus held by the school of Hillel, and that when he is depicted as hollering at “the Pharisees,” he may, in fact, have been debating with the school of Shammai. And that, after the Great Jewish Revolt, and the destruction of the Temple—and possibly Bar Kochba, or at least some of the fissures leading up to that time—some of the stories about Jesus vs. Beit Shammai became written down in the Gospels as Jesus vs. "The Pharisees" as the new Christian movement began to distance themselves from Jesus' former peeps.
This excerpt from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy resolved a bunch of conflicts I had about why institutions get hijacked and what has to be done about it. Any and all institutions may be questioned and considered for rejection, even if the fundamental values justifying their existence remain the same.
The forest gardens were filled with plants that benefited humans, but they also continue to provide food for birds, bears, and insect pollinators, even after 150 years of neglect. It's evidence that human impact on the environment can have long-lasting positive effects. 'A lot of functional diversity studies have a "humans are bad for the environment" approach,' Armstrong says. 'This shows humans have the ability to not just allow biodiversity to flourish, but to be a part of it.'
'I loathe that word "pristine." There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years,' says Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. 'Humans and nature can co-exist, and both can thrive.'
Adams assiduously avoided photographing any of the local Miwok who were rarely out of his sight as he worked Yosemite Valley. He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had tended for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been forcibly evicted from Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from national parks yet to be created, all in the putative interest of protecting nature from human disturbance.
We've all seen how transphobes and nazis seem to mingle with each other a lot. It seems natural since they're both jerks and bigots, but I believe it's also important to take a deeper look into just how deeply intertwined their respective (if we can even say "respective") ideological fixations they are - and how queer and anti-racist struggle, along with all struggles in the cause of individual human bodily and cognitive autonomy and freedom from authoritarian oppression must be united against this common enemy, this mythic temptation in our thoughts.
The body is but a temporary knot in matter, a knot which will be untied again.
The first time I'd ever read about Jainism was in a brief entry in the physical encyclopedia we had when I was a child. I thought it was stupid and hadn't thought about it until I read this around my late teens. I was not expecting to see it again in my early forties and for it to hit no less hard than it did then.
Sapphic romance of a woman and her unstoppable immortal star-machine. A beautiful totally-not-a-prequel to This Is How I Love You by the same authors.
A thought experiment on the underlying causes of the so-called Great Filter, but also a game of chance possibly skill that you can win.
I've read many attempts to retell and reinterpret the story of the fruit and the exile from the primordial Garden. Almost all of them get lost in the politics and power dynamics in a way that withers their own mythic power. Not this one - it's all there. That small, still quiet of loss and pining for something that both always was and never could be, that vibe of a children's storybook that contains layers adults can barely comprehend. This is mythic storytelling at its best.
Many have sought the contents and essence of the Eleusinian mysteries, but none have succeeded. Yet I feel the glory of the mysteries continues to grow among us in every light, every leaf, and every season.—I offer these verdant verses to the three goddesses and anyone who seeks greenness.
Someone's compiled a list of a bunch of the longer stories and novellas that have been posted to Tumblr over the years. (Link is to my own reblog for stability but if it's been a while you might want to check the post itself.)
An application of modern technological understanding to the dream of being uploaded and transcending the physical form.
There is so much more. So much more.
On representation, reading between the lines, and supporting troubled people you care about.
The ending we should have had, at least in retrospect. Featuring a cut that does "Spanish Sahara" the same justice as the canon ending does for "Obstacles".
Twenty years after I read the books for the first time, I'm faced with this article - and everything that I had noticed and so hastily repressed all those years ago suddenly poured back in in a whole new light.
The Red Lotus aren’t allowed space to exist as rational actors or to present serious arguments, their only purpose is to serve as a marker–a kind of “here be dragons” warning sign–to fence in the map of the possible. Individually somewhat sympathetic perhaps, but in a pitiable way. Insane. Which is sad because as they’re written–however inadvertently–I think there’s a strong case that the Red Lotus are the best damn heroes in the entire history of the Avatar universe.
This video is like a monument to everything I wish I could have told my past teenage self. It is a criticism not meant by any means to condemn, but to find a better way forward.
A long Tumblr thread going through the historical context of Romeo and Juliet and debunking some things about Romeo. tl;dr contemporary audiences would have considered them both kids trying to do the right thing. And Paris the worst of creeps.
A thorough dissection of how, far from being an originally good work whose author turned bad later on, J.K. Rowling's creation has always betrayed her authoritarian bigotry. If you don't want to watch an entire lengthy video, though, Brianna Wu covers similar points here and compares them unfavorably to how analogous themes are much better handled in another highly popular normie-geek-core franchise.
The problem with the series is not that it endorses totalitarianism, which it does not. The problem lies in the totalising, reductive, and potentially dangerous dualism of humanity/morality/democracy/destruction versus animality/reason/autocracy/survival on which the plot and character development rest. Liu constructs an ultimate, definitive existential threat to human civilisation—a threat rooted in the assumed dark forest nature of the universe—and builds his characters around these polarities: humaneness leads to self-destruction and survival depends on ruthlessness.
Try to recognize the psyop in all three easy steps here. (For a brain-cleanser try Epitaph by Max Kreminski and this Tumblr blog dedicated to demos of the real three-body problem.)
A Flash-containing browser and assets to let you read a story that defined a generation.
A transcript of all of Happy Noodle Boy's dialogue in the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac graphic novel. For educational purposes only.
A huge wealth of info about feminizing HRT.
In mental health circles, it’s often noted that seeking help for a symptom is often correlated with increased symptom severity.
This article does such a great job of making sense of something I'd noticed out of two gender-questioning people independently at the same time, in such a similar pattern despite wildly differing gender experiences otherwise.
A huge blocklist of sites (~950) that contain AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines (Google Search, DuckDuckGo, and Bing) with uBlock Origin or uBlacklist. A hosts file for pihole/adguard is available as well.
If you frequently visit a website that does something annoying unless you manually change something in the URL (e.g., converting Youtube Shorts to regular videos), or if you're on a forum and one specific person has a particularly obnoxious profile picture, or you just want to replace some specific thing on a website you don't control, this add-on is a godsend.
An illustrated guide to the increasingly nasty and offputting article ads that litter so much of the Web. No exposed genitalia or scat but definitely not good to look at too long.
If you've ever had trouble hitting the tiny keys on a phone virtual keyboard, this is for you. A successor to the old closed-source unmaintained MessagEase, this keyboard has a grid of much larger multi-function keys: to type, hit each square at any point inside it and then swipe in one of 8 directions or use one of the more advanced gestures (if you have that enabled).
I loved Buuf-Deuce back in the day, until eventually an issue with certain buttons made it unusable. This version of the Buuf icons for Linux fixes those.
Comic Sans - in monospace. I've honestly, seriously found this easier on the eyes and brain while doing a lot of plaintext stuff.
A bunch of websites that load at under one megabyte. I haven't submitted this site (or the one-page LibTech1) because of the numerous download links and my goal is to make sure that's the only reason.
A handy source of reminders and guides for adding a few curb cuts to your game - it probably needs a few more than you, the person who's been working at this thing day and night for weeks or years, might assume.
It's like The Joy Of Cooking for PCs!
A collection of fun, beautifully elegant, fully self-contained Javascript games. It's like the fulfilment of everything I had wanted to do back when DHTML was new. They even work on mobile!
A gorgeous fishbowl simulator. Try not to run out of oxygen.
A first-person game where the speed of light slows down until you are moving at relativistic speeds, and all the visual quirks that result.
A Game of Life-like that lets you fully customize the birth and survival criteria. Flashing warning on some of the possible rules - try to avoid "birth 0" until you know what you're doing.
Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.
One of the most skilled and knowledgeable insect photographers I've seen. Definitely worth a visit if you like pictures of animals.
Includes a huge, meticulously curated database of North America's various salads of the night. If you are not already a professional or hobbyist in this field, it's probably more than whatever you might think it is.
Some amazing shots in here.
I can't be the only person who was misled into thinking it was some kind of sponge-like structure that had no apparent homologue to any other insect's mouthparts. (It actually appears to have a mouth hole!)
A wonderful Web 1.0 collection of stuff that was also my first real exposure to Middle-Earth commentary and fanfic.
Suicide Food actively participates in or celebrates its own demise. Suicide Food identifies with the oppressor. Suicide Food is a bellwether of our decadent society. Suicide Food says, “Hey! Come on! Eating meat is without any ethical ramifications! See, Mr. Greenjeans? The animals aren’t complaining! So what's your problem?” Suicide Food is not funny.