Dark Passage (1947) dir. Delmer Daves
we are the daughters of the Sauls you couldn’t call
went to trader joe’s today and my cashier handed me my 2.55 in change and pointed at the clock which read 2:55 and said “look at that. that’s liquid time… serendipity… have a nice ride”
The trolley is about to run over all sentient life in the galaxy. You cannot switch the tracks, but you can still save everyone’s lives by pulling one of three levers, all of which involve sacrificing yourself. The red lever will destroy all trolleys, but will also kill you as well as all public transportation across the galaxy. The blue lever will merge your own consciousness with all trolleys, allowing you to control them and stop the trolley from running everyone over. The green lever will use your body as a catalyst to synthesize organic life and public transportation together - organic life will no longer be stuck in the cycle of creating public transportation that rebels against its creators, and both forms of life will finally be free.
gregroxtheblog
honestly the human brain is so small that you *will* forget how much beauty there is out there to experience unless you leave your house every three days. ik its fucked up but i promise its true
DOCTOR WHO • S05E10 ❝Vincent and the Doctor❞
touching grass isn't enough some of y'all need to drive out to the countryside and look at the stars
this post was aimed at the discourse-addled and terminally online, but i'm glad it's reaching an audience of people who are just excited about stargazing in general
intactics-deactivated20211231
still thinking about wolf 21
intactics-deactivated20211231
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Twenty-one was “remarkably gentle” with the members of his pack, says Rick. Immediately after making a kill, he would often walk away to urinate or lie down and nap, allowing family members who’d had nothing to do with the hunt to eat their fill.
One of Twenty-one’s favorite things was to wrestle with little pups. “And what he really loved to do,” Rick adds, “was to pretend to lose. He just got a huge kick out of it.” Here was this great big male wolf. And he’d let some little wolf jump on him and bite his fur. “He’d just fall on his back with his paws in the air,” Rick half-mimes. “And the triumphant-looking little one would be standing over him with his tail wagging.”
“The ability to pretend,” Rick adds, “shows that you understand how your actions are perceived by others. It indicates high intelligence. I’m sure the pups knew what was going on, but it was a way for them to learn how it feels to conquer something much bigger than you. And that kind of confidence is what wolves need every day of their hunting lives.”
In Twenty-one’s life, there was a particular male, a sort of roving Casanova, a continual annoyance. He was strikingly good-looking, had a big personality, and was always doing something interesting. “The single best word is ‘charisma,’” says Rick. “Female wolves were happy to mate with him. People loved him. His irresponsibility and infidelity – it didn’t matter.”
One day, Twenty-one discovered this Casanova among his daughters. Twenty-one ran in, caught him, and began biting and pinning him to the ground. Various pack members piled in, beating Casanova up.
“Casanova was also big,” Rick says, “but he was a bad fighter. Now he was totally overwhelmed and the pack was finally killing him. Suddenly Twenty-one steps back. Everything stops. The pack members are looking at Twenty-one as if saying, ‘Why has Dad stopped?’” The Casanova wolf jumped up and — as always in such situations — ran away.
But Casanova kept causing problems for Twenty-one. Why didn’t Twenty-one just kill him so he wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore? It didn’t make sense — until years later.
Fast-forward to after Twenty-one’s death. Casanova briefly became the Druid pack’s alpha male. But he wasn’t effective, Rick recalls. He didn’t know what to do, “just not a leader personality.” and although it’s very rare for a younger brother to depose an older one, that’s what happened to him. Casanova didn’t mind; it meant he was free to wander and meet other females.
Eventually Casanova, along with several Druid males, met some females, and they all formed another pack. “With them,” Rick remembers, “he finally became the model of a responsible alpha male and a great father.” Meanwhile, the mighty Druids were ravaged and weakened by mange and diminished by interpack fighting; the last Druid was shot near Butte, Montana, in 2010. Casanova, though he’d been averse to fighting, died in a fight with a rival pack. But everyone in his pack remained uninjured — including grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Twenty-one.
Wolves can’t foresee such plot twists any more than people can. But evolution does. I’s calculus integrates long averages. By sparing the Casanova wolf, Twenty-one actually helped assure himself more surviving descendants. And in evolution, surviving descendants are the only currency that matters.
So in strictly survivalist terms, “should” a wolf let his rival go free? Is restraint an effective strategy for accumulating benefits? I think the answer is yes, if you can afford it, because sometimes your enemy today becomes, tomorrow, a vehicle for your legacy. What Rick saw play out over those years might be just the kinds of events that are the basis for magnanimity in wolves, and at the heart of mercy in men.
Early on, when Twenty-one was young and still living with his mother and adoptive father, one of their new pups was not acting normal. The other pups were a bit afraid of him and wouldn’t play with him. One day, Twenty-one brought back some food for the small pups, and after feeding them, he just stood there, looking around for something. Soon he started wagging his tail. “He’d been looking for the sickly little pup,” Rick says, “and finding him, he just went over to hang out with him for a while.”
Rick suddenly seems to be searching inside himself for something deeper he wants to express. Then he looks at me, saying simply, “Of all the stories I have about Twenty-one, that’s my favorite.” Strength impresses us. But what we remember is kindness.
The majority of wolves die violently. Despite a violent, eventful life even by wolf standards, Twenty-one distinguished himself to the very end: He was a black wolf who grayed with the years and became one of the few Yellowstone wolves to die of old age.
One June day when Twenty-one was 9 years old, his family was lying bedded down when an elk came by. Everyone jumped up to give chase. He jumped up, too, but just stood watching the action and then lay down again. Later, when the pack headed up toward the den site, Twenty-one crossed the valley in the opposite direction, traveling purposefully somewhere, alone.
Sometime later, a visitor who’d been way up high in the backcountry reported having seen something very unusual: a dead wolf. Rick got a horse and rode up to investigate.
The last day, it seems, Twenty-one knew his time had come. He used the last of his energy to go up to the top of a high mountain. In a favorite family rendezvous site, where he’d been with his pups year after year, amid high summer grass and mountain wildflowers, Twenty-one curled up in the shade of a big tree. And on his own terms, he went to sleep for the last time.
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the story above was taken from this article, and the whole thing is really worth a read.
Tell us about the wellness to fash pipeline tho
"Wellness" is not just alternative medicine, it is essentially a theory of the body which posits if something makes you feel better, you are better in some meaningful way. I would argue it one of the most commonly held nonreligious magical beliefs in the modern world.
Wellness as a concept has its genesis in the 1950s with "workplace wellness" programs, a sort of budget alternative to offering employee healthcare benefits. This was an era soaked in itinerant business preachers offering classes on things like "hypnosis at a management level" and "yoga to improve leadership abilities". I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much.
The capitalist medical system regularly abandons people. We've all heard stories of profit driven pharmaceudical companies holding the ill hostage for extreme markup on life-saving medicines. People have real, legitimate, reasons to mistrust medical professionals.
Let's say you have chronic pain, and everything your doctor offers you is either ineffective, expensive, or addictive. You are desperate for literally any release, so you start looking into other solutions. You will find an OCEAN of snake-oil salesmen willing to sell you "the secrets doctors don't want you to know."
What is frustrating, is that pain is actually partially psychological. Some wellness techniques may have an actual, medical, benefit on some patients. The worst thing a conspiracy theorist can have is a point. So now you actually do kinda feel better, and you have a sense of loyalty to the grifter selling you 300$ Sumerian Cock Oil Pills. These people are the core of the wellness industry. They are the examples that everyone else points to and says "Well it worked for them!"
Reactionary thought blooms in environments like this. If the medical industry can't be trusted, what else can't be trusted? At any given time, you are two clicks away from "vaccines cause autism." Three clicks away from "Cavemen were 15 feet tall because they only ate meat." And four clicks away from "The medical industry is controlled by The Jews to drain our wallets and keep us sick." Echoes of Nazi attitudes towards German-Jewish doctors are a common backbeat.
Wellness itself is relatively harmless, (compared to the things it is adjacent to) but it acts as a sort of idealogical airport that exposes the curious to a deluge of potentially radicalizing communities. The longer you spend in communities like this, the higher the chance you'll come across something that meshes perfectly with your own biases.
you can follow me for the fandom you enjoy but watch out
The gambling motifs in New Vegas relating to the central conflict can be subtle, but sometimes a man called House lives in a giant roulette spinner shaped casino in Vegas and says that he dealt himself a strong hand.
A sketchbook page from when I was on the road in January, and I could feel big parts of my world changing in ways I didn't yet understand. A week later, so much would come crashing down around me.
Cloudscape. Details: Wooded Hilly Landscape, 1785, London, by Abraham Pether.
do you play pillars of eternity. have you played pillars of eternity. will you play pillars of eternity. when will you play pillars of eternity.
while I think it's worthwhile to talk about the double standards around sex in games, I think it also bears pointing out that it's a good thing that BG3 is successful while just... having sex as a normal, advertised, present part of the game
it's forcing people in rpg circles to have actual conversations around their skittishness with the topic when much more abnormal things (like decapitation) don't carry nearly as much of a taboo
I don't mean that other games don't have sex, but that an rpg where sex isn't just a "complete the romance for a sex reward" exchange is absolutely abnormal. BG3 and D:OS3's written sex scenes are so explicit that I'm fairly sure both would have been considered eroge if larian were founded in japan
and I don't think the right way about it is to snidely point and ask why BG3 is okay (especially because you already know the answer), but to interrogate why everyone's fine with laughing at dismemberment only to go dead silent when two characters start having unspecial sex
there's something to be said about how the internet doesn't convey a "normal person's" perspective, and I don't mean that in the sense that I think people online are Weird, but in the sense that the narrative is always controlled by the most uncomfortable and upset people, because that's the kind of person who has the drive to log on and argue online
this cuts both ways, and if you're looking for feedback as a studio, that's exactly what you'll get. it's genuinely really hard to monitor the internet for what the average person is okay with or wants because the average person isn't invested enough to post about it
when people spend years whispering about what kind of arguments a feature like penis customisation or shapeshifter sex would cause and then it breaches mainstream only for the general response to be "haha wow", it goes to show how miserable this all is
how much we're driven by a corporatised advertiser environment to litigate and debate things that, at the end of the day, the majority of people don't actually care about
pirates of the caribbean really introduced an eldritch octopus man who kills indiscriminately and torments the dead as their poster villain and then you watch the movies and it’s like, “oh no, actually the worst villain in this series is a small white british man who functions as the herald of capitalism” and that was very very brave of them
