okay but what did the rats do?
An obvious conclusion from this (which I would have said in so many words in “Lying for Money”, but I didn’t necessarily have the right language then because I hadn’t got so far into cybernetics) is that an adversarial decision-making process should never be industrialised. Sparrow actually prints a very good case study of one of the few Medicare insurers to have non-insane fraud rates, and they achieved it by not trying to cut costs in loss adjustment. They reasoned that paying the right claims was more important than reducing the average cost and of course they were right – a single fraudulent claim, at US healthcare prices, could outweigh a year of cost savings from process optimisation.
Less obviously, there are lots of non-adversarial decision processes where it’s also dangerous or destructive to standardise the inputs. At the very least, any industrialised decision making process needs to be monitored, to be sure that the world hasn’t changed too much. And it needs to be entered into in the understanding that unlike a manufacturing process, an industrialised decision process is here for a good time rather than a long time; the cost savings are temporary because the world will change and the process will need to be rebuilt. Understanding which decision processes can be industrialised anyway, and which ones are best kept open and artisanal might be the essence of management in the 21st century.
What can be replaced with chatGPT?
SURVEY QUESTION: what is your personal favorite cold sandwich to make at home. alternatively, what is the fanciest sandwich you make
on the topic of sandwiches i like a lot of things but i think if you want sandwich info you can't get better than sandwichtribunal.com. a theoretically infinite list of exant sandwiches and detailed descriptions and explorations and new research of their history, development, preperation method, and flavor. really delightful passion project by mostly one guy who just really, really likes sandwiches, with a couple of guest pieces by fellow sandwich enthusiasts
a great place to start is this article on the history of the club sandwich, an article that took the author months of independent research through tons of old cookbooks and magazines and newspapers. he ends up making basically every example he can find, moving through time on a sandwich train. it's a really fun read!!!!
tumblr user grubloved i respect you so much
learning that fellini made a sexy giantess anthology film entry
realizing that, since it happened in 1962 that the sexy giantess anthology entry is actually a critically important watershed moment in his entire filmography stylistically since it comes between La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 and represents the ultimate final break from his origins in neorealism towards his more overtly freudian and fantastical style
and while we’re on the subject, playing Hogwarts Legacy is obviously less harmful than say going to church and only attracts more criticism because a shitty game you had no interest in playing is an easier target.
obviously less harmful than say going to church
Look, scrupulosity isn't a contest. If others are finding extremely tenuous "harms" in a mundane, common activity, you don't have to take that as a challenge to find even more dubious harms in an even more mundane one.
I mean, to be clear, lots of harmful stuff happens in churches! But "going to church" in full generality does not lay all of those harms at your door. That's just more magical thinking.
right, I have been inside a church myself (purely to admire the architecture!) and I trust it did not directly contribute to the torture of children, even if the church in question does regularly engage in that.
but the fact remains that the pope, to pick one example, is harming the world and society in a direct and unambiguous manner to a far greater extent than Joanna Rowling ever could, and that anyone with a genuine aversion to transphobia or homophobia or sexism or antisemitism has far more reason to be enraged at the many churches that contribute to these than at Harry Potter books.
Not to be rude, but this feels like a Black Lives Matter v. Blue Lives Matter argument. Church, a lot of people dont have a choice in, and when they do, a lot of people leave it. Or go to preserve some sort of family value, or because of strong societal and cultural influences. We all chose to read Harry Potter. People are CHOOSING to play Hogwarts Legacy.
And honestly? It could even be argued that jkr could be doing more harm than the church because she's actively funding anti-trans groups and pushing antisemitic sentiments in her work. The church has opinions and 'official stances' but the pope can't control every person in the holy sea and what they do. You can control where your money goes, based on how you know it supports specific people with specific agendas. Especially for a luxury item like a video game.
that's absurd, to suggest on the one hand that people are compelled to go to church and yet that the church has less grip on people than Harry Potter does, simply absurd.
the Catholic Church practically invented antisemitism and American evangelical churches are doing their absolute damnedest to rollback abortion rights and gay marriage, Rowling simply cannot compare with the political power they have and that power comes from the people who choose to support them.
“the catholic church practically invented antisemitism” are you shitting me? does the pope have a fucking time machine?
was the pope sending Terminators back in time to put out hits on the Maccabees?
did Haman have a fucking oracle to see the future and convert to Catholicism 800 years before it existed?
come on man if you look at the development of modern antisemitism it's intertwined with Catholicism to the point that Hitler can claim it's one thing they have in common, if you have to go back to the Maccabees then that really has zero to do with antisemitism as we understand it today.
do you think that the historical persecution of Jews and modern antisemitism are just unrelated coincidence? when the same goddamn thing has been going on for four thousand years your timeline that starts in the 1800s is not gonna convince me some new guy is responsible.
that's really silly! "the same thing" hasn't been going on for four thousand years, unless you think the Roman conquest of Judea was driven by antisemitism (!) while the Roman conquest of Britain (and everywhere else) was driven by something entirely unrelated, despite being carried out the same way.
I think it's a colossal reach to assume that the Christian obsession with finding excuses to persecute Jewish communities was something they inherited from the Babylonians (!) and not something that derives from the origin of Christianity as a former Jewish sect and its need to differentiate itself from Judaism as a result, with the ongoing existence of thriving Jewish communities an ever present implicit rebuke to claims of Christianity supremacy.
I usually take the approach that it’s worth examining motivations in order to classify behavior. Axial age warfare was pretty brutal; I think it’s Bret Devereaux who points out that its brutality actually isn’t matched (at least in Europe) until the beginning of the Early Modern period, and maybe not even until the Thirty Years’ War. Deportations, the destruction of cities, and the enslavement of whole populations are pretty common tactics throughout the Mediterranean basin across the whole period, and the Romans (and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and even occasionally the Judaeans) all made use of those methods of warfare.
In that context, the Roman conquest of Judaea, the Babylonian Exile, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt and its consequences all don’t seem to position the ancient Jews uniquely compared to the way other smaller nations were positioned to the surrounding powers. To be sure, atrocities were committed against them--unfortunately, those atrocities seem to have been part of the normal methods of warfare of empires in that period. (These methods of empire-building sometimes also included religious persecution--John Hyrcanus, for instance, is reported to have forcibly converted the Edomites to Judaism during the expansion of the Hasmonean kingdom.)
Christianity changed the social situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, and in particularly created the awkward scenario of a novel religious tradition whose predecessor was still around, and in fact still going strong. Different schools of thought in early Christianity reacted to this differently. Some were “Judaizing,” i.e., saw their movement as a Jewish one, and sought to preserve it as such; others (like Paul of Tarsus) sought to integrate gentiles into the movement. In Jewish-Christian Relations: The First Centuries, Abel Bibliowicz writes about the complex relationship of early Christianity to Judaism; his thesis as I remember it (it’s been a while since I read the book) is essentially that a specifically anti-Jewish strain arose in early Christianity as a reaction pushing back against the “Judaizing” (really, the core of the original “Jesus movement,” based in Jerusalem) faction, and this strain subsequently informed a great deal of later Christian thought on Judaism, though it was never omnipresent, if only because Christianity was never a monolith.
But it was frequently very influential; it was (again, this is me paraphrasing Bibliowicz as I remember him) a major compontent of Gnosticism, which sought to explicitly differentiate the Jewish and Christian notions of God, relegating the former to the status of Demiurge, as drawn from Hellenistic philosophy. It was even more influential in the Middle Ages, of course, with the development of high medieval antisemitism, and concepts like the blood libel, and the long history of not just violence against Jews as part of the project of brutal Axial age imperial expansion (which created a massive amount of violence against everybody), but as part of a program of ideologically motivated religious discrimination, forced conversion, and occasional slaughter. That was different; and Moritz Steinschneider coined the term “antisemitism” in 1860 or thereabouts in reference, as far as I know, to that specific phenomenon of European prejudice against Jews--initially, in his writing criticizing Ernst Renan, the first proponent of the so-called “Khazar hypothesis,” which was related to contemporary race science.
Given that the tropes of what we might call “classic” antisemitism, or central examples of antisemitism, draw heavily from specifically medieval and later stereotypes and myths about Jews, while we might stretch that definition to cover, e.g., religious persecution in previous eras (like that of Haman in the Book of Esther), that certainly seems to be stretching the word beyond its usual understood meaning. But applying it retroactively, and applying it to cases where the Jews were suffering the same treatment as any other conquered people in the Axial Age seems to me to stretch the word to its breaking point.
FWIW, I also think argumate is wrong here: the Catholics didn’t invent anti-semitism. It was present from some of the earliest parts of Christianity, long before anything approaching “Catholicism” as a distinct practice existed. There were bishops in Rome at that time, according to the traditional papal lists anyway, but the Roman Catholic church as a distinct organization and set of beliefs seems to emerge only gradually in Late Antiquity and the very early Middle Ages, slowly diverging from the eastern church and not formally being separated until the 11th century. Christians were working on institutionalizing persecution of Jews long before that--the first big Christian expulsions of the Jews were in the 5th century.
jfk famously changed the course of fashion by making many appearances at state functions without a hat, which was previously considered mandatory for well-dressed men. at his inaugural address, he even bragged about "[his] big juicy melon, naked as a jay bird for all the world to see". unfortunately we can all see how that turned out for him in the tragic events of the zapruder footage
the real tragedy about JFK is that with his horrible secret health condition managed mostly by uppers and steroids by incompetent 1960s doctors, he was apparently healthy, yet his system was essentially defenseless against the deadliest medical problem known to man: being shot directly in the brain
you know who could have used a warning about something being spoiled? JFK, about his lovely visit to Dallas, Texas
I don't remember why I spent last night JFKposting. I don't know exactly was going through my head here. On the other hand, what went through JFK's head was pretty thoroughly established by the Warren Commission
the war on Saturnalia
Today at the taberna I said “Io Saturnalia!” to the cashier. She said “Merry Christmas, sir” back to me. I smiled and said “You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Emperor Julian has given us Saturnalia back.” She started crying tears of joy and said “Io Saturnalia” and then everyone in the taberna clapped.
Butterfly House - Surrey, UK - Laurie Chetwood (2000-2003)
“Butterfly House, a remodelled 1930s timber-clad family home, is an architectural study in zoomorphic design, a sculpture inspired by the life cycle of a butterfly to demonstrate experimental environmental design on a liveable scale.”
The composition seems similar to the Metalheart & Vectorheart styles
Scanned from ‘Architecture in the United Kingdom’ (2006)
What with bucket hats, bare midriffs, and flared jeans having been resurrected by some irresponsible necromancer with frosted tips, I figure there’s no better time to resurrect some of my favorite Y2K fonts. I typically only see the same three or four pop up in discussions on the subject, so maybe this will be helpful to nostalgic designers. Click though for links.
Golly! That post sure was popular. I’m happy to share some more.
Astro (2004, T26, Commercial) Crystopia (2000, BrainReactor, Commercial) Crystopian (1998, About Type Foundry, Commercial) LVDC Fool 22 (2003, Lovedesign Co., Freeware) Frigate (2001, Apostrophic Lab, Freeware) Neutronica (2000, BrainReactor, Commercial) Pornomania (2000, BrainReactor, Commercial) Proton (1995, T26, Commercial) Rephlex (1998, Lineto, Commercial) Solar2000 (1998, Cyclone Graphix, Unknown)
How does this have so many notes?
LVDC Cobra 4 (2000, Lovedesign Co., Freeware) Contour (1992, Device, Commercial) FUTU (2002, Fenotype, Freeware) Intergalactic (2000, BrainReactor, Commercial) Omicron (1997, Beyond Design, Freeware) Photonica (2002, Liew Keng Huat, Freeware) SF Quartzite (1999, ShyFoundry, Freeware) Republika (2000, Apostrophic Lab, Freeware) Unite (1997, Image Club, Commercial) Warzone (1999, Glitch, Freeware) Yagiza (2001, B-Rain, Freeware)
Honorable mention to Yeoman Jack, an excellent free modern face by Iconian that looks more like it’s from the early 2000s than many of their actually 20 year old fonts. I tried to stick to fonts that I was pretty sure were not based on an existing typeface. I only left out Typodermic because Ray Larabie’s work is already so popular and well known, but Neuropol is obviously a classic. Check out his stuff if you’re nor familiar.
Would love to hear more about the functions of fantastical elements in magical realism vs. SFF!
so modern fantasy tends to be quite systematizing in how it treats magic, one of many different things i was gesturing at in this post. in magical realism, fantastical elements are rarely systematizable. they exist much as they might in epic, as a manifestation of heightened emotional consequences. a great example from One Hundred Years of Solitude is a section involving striking plantation workers at the operation of a thinly-veiled United Fruit Company. the army is called in as strikebreakers and the workers are massacred; all traces of the massacre are covered up, and one of the protagonists, escaping the massacre, only knows it really happened because he stumbles upon a freight train whose cars are filled with corpses. as he is escaping, it starts to rain.
the opening sentence of the next chapter is "It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days." this isn't pure metaphor, crucially. it really is raining, and a consequence of this rain is something you might expect: the town of macondo is overwhelmed with mold and damp, and begins to slowly disintegrate, in a way you might expect from a multi-year-long rainstorm. but it is also metaphor, because this is a manifestation of José Arcadio Segundo's grief and confusion, and for the dashed hopes of prosperity of Macondo itself, and it marks the beginning of the final act of the novel, where because of the tragic patterns of inescapable history, for which the story of macondo itself and the buendia family in particular is a microcosm, the world of the novel ultimately collapses in upon itself.
but this isn't a "magic system." there's no epistemologically tractable basis for the fantastical elements here: there are no ancient elven gods in the hills, or carefully worked out classifications of weather-magic. there are no wizards, and no dark lords. because our world does not have those things, and a key component of magical realism is that second part, "realism."
i don't wanna retype the whole thesis of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding here, but I will try to summarize effectively: everything we take for granted as the basic conventions of "realistic" fiction (fly-on-the-wall style narration, even when not in the first person, psychological interiority, prose, etc.) is part of a set of genre conventions as artificial as any other, which can be termed "realism," bc it is associated with stories about either the real world, or worlds meant to resemble it in most respects. all genre is porous at its frontiers, and there are precedents for the modern realist style stretching back to the Icelandic sagas and the classical Chinese novel (nonetheless with crucial differences), but realist fiction as we now utilize it starts basically with Don Quixote, and in English with, well, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.
modern fantasy fiction obviously uses these conventions, too; but fantasy fiction explicitly negotiates with the reader that it is taking place either in a world different from ours (albeit one assumed to be similar in most respects), or in our own world with explicit deviations. magical realism does not do this, at least not nearly as explicitly; rather, one hallmark of the magical realist style tends to be (there are exceptions, particularly in Borges; but Borges is sort of a non-central example in other ways, too) that the "magical" elements are treated as indistinguishable from the "realist" elements. so while a non-wizard in a Harry Dresden book will be shocked or surprised to learn magic exists in his version of "our" Chicago, in a magical realist text heightened or supernatural elements will intrude on the "real" world without comment most of the time.
really the term is a bit backwards; you could call it "realist magicalism" insofar as magical elements are frequently emotionally and narratively unexceptional.
and we can contrast this again, for further illumination of the issue, with merely literary fantasy and science fiction. so a literary SF novel like "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro still explicitly negotiates with the reader the differences between its world and ours, despite taking place nominally in a version of ours; contrast the very magical realist (or even surrealist) "The Unconsoled," by the same author; or, for another example, a much more SF-like (though still pretty weird, it's Haruki Murakami) "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" vs the much more magical realist "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" or "1Q84."
(Fantasy described as "literary" is a bit harder to find, I think because of cultural prejudice on the issue; but "literary fantasy" might include, for profitable contrast with magical realism, Watership Down, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Gormenghast books, or Dhalgren, though the last two are definitely atypical examples of whatever genre you try to put them in. A lot of early horror, like The Turn of the Screw, or pre-Tolkien high fantasy, like Lord Dunsany's works, might qualify for various definitions of the term. They certainly have literary ambitions.)
Because no genre is an island, there are obviously going to be texts that straddle the margins. "House of Leaves" has strong elements of both horror and fantasy, but both are very difficult to systematize, and I think you could make a very good argument that it is also magical realist. Outright surrealist texts like "The Unconsoled" and "Finnegans Wake" are definitely going to tread this line as well, since the heightened, emotional narrative logic of magical realism is also a good fit for dream-logic as well. But suffice it to say, I think you have to be deeply underinformed, or just plain dumb as hell, to look at the most notable examples of what are called magical realism and its closest matches in the fantasy genre (which might be, what, urban fantasy?) and go, "oh, yeah, these are clearly doing the same thing on the level of narrative structure."
I think part of what causes the confusion between the two is that there isn’t really a good umbrella term for the kind of pre-novelistic arealism that still survives in comedies and cartoons, where witches, genies and talking mice are just another fictional element in need of neither in-universe explanation nor symbolic/emotional justification.
So relatively well-regarded, relatively serious examples like Love and Rockets or the Fargo tv show get lumped in with Magic Realism, while at the other end of the spectrum people will nitpick the implications of details in Harry Potter or Batman in a way they would not bother with for The Mikado or The Tempest or for that matter Family Matters, just because they associate that kind of storytelling with novelistic realism and hence “worldbuilding” even when the authors clearly don’t.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
You may be interested in ongoing Jewish discourse about animal sacrifice: it only ended because the temple was destroyed by romans, and the temple was believed to be the only licit place for that ritual. The daily prayer services are (still!) temporary replacements for sacrifices: some jews want to see the temple rebuilt in israel and some dont - the anti-rebuilding trend typically does major rewrites to the prayer services but that is by no means the majority view and it is by no means a settled issue. It was definitely not a mass cultural rejection of the concept. Also other groups that trace their lineage to Abraham that get habitually forgotten by christians, and never restricted themselves to temple-only rituals, still practice sacrifices v similarly to Muslims on Eid.
Not saying they are numerically huge but jewish choices (whether real or rhetorically invented) have always loomed large in christian discourse.
For the african diaspora religions practicing sacrifice in the US check out the supreme court case Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye vs Hialeah FL. It has my favorite supreme court decision language of all time: "religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection." In 1993!
I'd be interested in hearing about other Abrahamic groups that still practice animal sacrifice besides Muslims, if you have more information to share. That sounds fascinating.
AFAIK part of the reason Kosher and Halal meat are forbidden under Sikhism is because they consider the pre-slaughter blessings to qualify them as a form of animal sacrifice. On the other end of the spectrum there are Mormon fundamentalist sects that still practice blood atonement, which is technically a form of human sacrifice. Although since they don’t have a theocratic government to enforce it, in practice it’s probably more like a cross between a mob hit and the sanctified assasins from The Amber Spyglass.
They Used to Paint on Bass Drum Heads in the 20s and 30s
if I had a nickel for every time seth green played the nice boyfriend of the bookish, nerdy girl who fights supernatural beings with her group of friends (called the scooby gang) led by her pretty but badass best friend (played by sarah michelle gellar) before she eventually came out as a lesbian, I'd have two nickels.
Where I come from, we don’t worry about these fruity-tuity California style buds. Okay? I’m from Scranton. What i’m smoking is dirt. So lets get that straight jack. Pure brick. Ass. Okay? America- Americans are wanting to smoke that dirt, okay? You go up to someone and say, hey, I’m gonna give you a big bag of this heady bud, but I’m taking your stash of mids, they’re gonna say C’mon man! get out of here! *audience cheers* that’s right. that’s right. Get the hell out of here! We like stems! We like seeds! Where I come from.












