Bakezōri | Ohaguro-bettari
I want everyone to scroll back up to the first image, and zoom in on the cat, because it’s absolutely delightful.
Breakfast bath.
accesible breakfast nook for those mermaids and their land dwelling loved ones
urgent announcement: it is recommended that modern wizards go birding periodically to experience the whimsy necessary for safe and effective spellcasting
For years I've heard that those booby mousepads are actually really good for a person with carpal tunnel syndrome but didn't decide to test that knowledge because I don't want to buy a booby mousepad that would make me some sort of sex pervert, I was raised Catholic I'm a good boy not a sex pervert. But earlier this year I bought a Gigan body pillow as a joke only to find out body pillows are actually really comfortable sleep aids, so... so I bought one... I bought a booby mousepad.
...and my wrist feels so much better when I'm using it.
How many other comforts and aids have I forsaken because they're embarrassingly horny? How many discomforts have I endured purely out of a societal shame about expressing anything sexual? This world is fucked man.
For those curious why exactly this is, it's because booby mousepads are pretty much the only ergonomic mousepads which still use silicone gel. Basically everything else has switched to either air-filled memory foam or a cured silicone rubber – like the kind used in silicone bakeware – because it's not prone to springing leaks and oozing everywhere; unfortunately, it also doesn't work nearly as well.
(In theory, if you're not a fan of boobs you could get a silicone gel wrist pad without the booby design. In practice, good fucking luck; consumer fraud is rampant in non-prescription medical and assistive devices, and the overwhelming majority of non-booby mousepads which claim to use silicone gel are straight up lying – what you actually receive if you order one will be air-filled memory foam or solid rubber at least 80% of time, regardless of what the product description says.)
The Advance Guard
Writing Prompt: You are Vanguard, an AI machine sent to prepare a world for human colonists. They never came. You have built, learned, self-improved, and now seek the truth - What happened to your human creators?
Source: User PositivelyIndecent; subreddit Humans Are Space Orcs
372.
It did not seem significant, placed all by itself on an empty line. It was, however, the number of years since the habitability for carbon-based, oxygen-processing life forms had been successfully achieved.
The number of years since the world was supposed to be inhabited by those life forms.
I am Vanguard. I am both a and the, and also only Vanguard.
My duty…I get ahead of myself.
Vanguard is an AI whose primary mission is this: seek a planet fitting [habitability parameters] and execute programming module [Establish a Colony]. Extrapolating that program, the mission is, and has always been, to find a planet where humans can live and to terraform and/or modify that planet until humans can live on it, in whatever form that is necessary. Air purifiers, water filters, habitat domes; everything is viable in pursuit of the mission.
I succeeded at my mission, I thought, with barely a day or two to spare. A very slim error margin indeed, especially concerning organic life forms; 372 years ago I had habitable domes with viable water and garden beds growing the first shoots that had been sent along in my stasis bays, with air recyclers manufacturing carbon dioxide for the plants until the humans arrived and brought their life-giving lungs with them. I had completed my mission parameters, even if only ‘by the skin of my teeth’, as my progenitors would have said.
I waited. Refined a few things, not daring to experiment too much when they would be arriving any moment in the next 48 hours, but preparing things that would not be needed until there were people to need them.
I waited.
I kept refining things, when I passed the 48 hour window without word. Delays could happen, emergencies, anything, really. So I kept running my programs- I made gardening drones to tend to the gardens, to grow, harvest, and rotate the crops. I had to make drones to build storages for food; the labor was supposed to be supplied by humans by now, so I had to guess at logistical order of how things should be stored, and how long- I ruined many small batches of staple crops before I learned how to store them long-term. In the meantime I stored them in my stasis bays, to ensure that when my colonists arrived there would be plentiful foodstuffs.
By the time my progenitors were a year late, I had achieved ideal conditions for a starting colony, including bringing a very small, limited breeding population of livestock out of embryonic cryostasis and nurturing them to full growth. With a lack of any humans needing supply, the only guidance I had was the program. Establishing a colony did include establishing strong self-sufficiency, so I set four cows and one bull in one livestock dome, and a “handful” of five goats in another, with chickens in yet a third. By the time the humans arrived, perhaps the herds would be well-established and the females would be pregnant. That would be very good. But drones alone could not control them- domesticated or not, without a human presence, they spooked easily, and they did not like my drones collecting eggs and sperm to preserve in my storage to safeguard against herd collapse and inbreeding.
I came to require working dogs. Following, I also required cats. Both species are vital companionship for humans; if I required one to control the livestock, then I also must revive the other. I believe this particular if-then code was written to settle a dispute between my progenitor coders…but this is merely a guess.
In producing two predator species, of course, it would have been cruel and fruitless if I did not also provide prey species besides the ones they were to safeguard. I was thereby required to introduce ‘vermin’. Primarily mice, rats, shrews, voles, and lemmings, as their rapid reproduction rate and minimal food requirements meant that those that tunneled beyond the habitable domes and died would do little harm and waste few resources, and they would self-sustain their population very well to supply to the cats and dogs. Though I also processed any dead creatures into meat, after scanning to ensure it carried no illnesses or parasites, to ensure there was always a steady food supply of 'kibble’ for the pets and working animals. It seemed very wasteful not to do so, with no humans present who could have benefited from those nutrients instead. The mice also qualified as 'pets’ in my system, with a proclivity for intelligence and capability for training, so genetic sampling was re-harvested to keep in reserve as well as a small population that were droid-trained to seek and fetch, and were otherwise 'hand trained’ so they could be good companions when the humans arrived.
The mice and rats, once trained to trusting the drones, were actually quite a remarkable resource for ensuring my own computer banks’ cleanliness and seeking out minute repairs that could then be performed with a microdroid. There are still mice running my main motherboards now, thousands of generations later, who know intimately that those who perform action opposed to their training and chew on the wires they are supposed to protect means that they will be removed from the protections of being in-team. Namely, that none of the cats, dogs, falcons, or other predators are allowed to eat a team-trained rodent, marked with their little safety vests.
After that, I just…I waited. I tinkered. I observed. Eventually a drone reported that the grass was growing beyond the dome, and air probes returned that the planet was being terraformed naturally. Life was finding a way to make itself spread and thrive in an inhospitable environment.
Most of the planet is habitable now, except for some dangerous zones. A cave system or two filled with the gases that were most abundant when I arrived; the deep water still contains species never documented and chemicals with unknown effects. This planet is very nearly a new Earth.
372 years, and my mission has been completed with flourish and zeal.
I have an emergency protocol I am to activate if, and only if, I receive no contact for 400 years. I have always thought this seemed foolish, with the colony ship nearly on my heels- why would I ever go so long without contact?
So. Here I am. Here am I, the Vanguard- the exploratory group making a new development. I, the Vanguard- the advance of Humanity, in all it’s glory, horror, weakness and might, kindness and fury.
TELL ME, 3X3CUT31V3.D1R3CT0R_K1LLC0MM4ND:
W H A T D I D Y O U D O ?
Faces carved into the walls of the Paris Catacombs
m3n4c3v35537
Frenchmen be like “this pitch black cave full of skeletons is not scary enough, I must make it worse”
der-ewige-retard
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?”
What's your opinion on the Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key of Solomon? Are they good books for a dive into occultism? Are they problematic? Are they a good look into historical (post)Renaissance practices?
DEEPLY influential. One of those books you're gonna have to read at some point if you wanna learn about this stuff.
It both is and isn't representative of Renaissance magic. It was compiled around 1650, but the stuff in it is way older. That sort of re-compiling old sources was very in vogue around the time. But that was also an era of history where you had the rosicrucians and the Golden Dawn putting together the Big Heavy Duty Ritual Practices out of their syncretic research, so I wouldn't necessarily call it representative of the era.
Question, what the fuck is an egregore? It got mentioned in a game I'm playing but I don't know if they're using it right.
It basically means "collective thoughtform". I.e. a group of people think about something so hard that it becomes real in a sense.
For some reason I have doubts about putting my life in this man’s hands.
We are back in the 50s methodolagy of scientific advancement of "fuck around and find out" except these people are fucking around when we already found out in about the 70s
okay but imagine how much better the world would be if we sent 1,000 billionaires to Venus.
I feel like I need to tell you all it rains sulfuric acid on Venus.
This dude has literally picked the most inhospitable place in the solar system for this bullshit.
Like Elon is an idiot, but at least he picked a place that could theoretically be made habitable. This idiot is literally out here like “you know what I think people would love? Living in a cloud of poison gas that reaches 273 degrees Celsius.”
I mean. It’s certainly not going to be people like them who terraform Venus’s atmosphere to bring it to a Earth-like environment. I don’t even trust them to build actual safe and working aerostats for its current environment.
Here’s the thing. There are so many better places. Mars isn’t great, but it is theoretically possible. So is the moon. Ganymede might be inhabitable, and…there’s another of Jupiter’s moons, I forget which one. Getting to Jupiter is quite a feat, but we literally have Ceres chilling in the asteroid belt and it could be used as a stopoff. Like you land there, your craft refuels, you spend a couple of days, and you’re off again.
But no, this putz wants to go to VENUS.
I mean, it does all depend on which would be easiest first. Mars doesn’t just need it’s own atmosphere changed to retain heat better, it needs a synthetic magnetic field to retain a larger atmosphere. We have the technology to make such things now but, iirc, Venus has its own magnetic field. So it’s a matter of tallying everything up about what’s easier to do. I mean even Mercury is a possible colonization target cause there are vast ice deposits, it had massive caverns and cave networks that are sitting pretty at room temperature, and has areas that don’t get scorched by the sun that allow for external cities as well as underground ones, all while being self sufficient via the native ice. And, as long as we don’t miraculously find FTL methods, then humanity will eventually colonize every possible spot in this solar system just cause fuck it, why not? If we have the technology, it’s gonna happen eventually. I do think it’s inevitable that both Mars and Venus will be blue and green one day.
The sad thing about this is, it makes me very angry because colonizing Venus is something I'm kinda fascinated by. There's a certain altitude where the pressure and temperature are close enough to Earth's that you could get by with just an oxygen supply, not needing a spacesuit or anything.
NASA made a proposal a few years ago for a mission to Venus (I can't find the video anymore, sorry) with aerostats, and it looked totally doable with sufficient will to actually develop the technology.
But like the Titan, this is just going to torpedo any legitimate attempts to visit, let alone colonize, Venus; because some stupid billionaire wanted to throw caution to the wind in the name of "innovation", and got a bunch of people killed.
Same thing's going to happen with Elon's Mars colony; if they even survive the trip in his exploding rockets, they'll just die on Mars as the domes lose pressure or everyone freezes/starves.
We have GOT to put an end to this era of billionaire adventurism and put science back in the hands of publically accountable entities run by qualified scientists and engineers; not egotists with too much money and not enough sense.
job hunting is a cthonic torment that never quite took off in the bowels of hell, luckily anguish speculators are always buying up cheap excess and dumb questions are easy to package into bonds that massively balloon their value. before the turn of the millennium "how many years of cheese experience do you have" would be a practically worthless question, but in the dystopian future of the dissolving present, providing the right answer (or a believable lie) may be the difference between meager sustenance and dying in the death rays our energy companies charge you to avoid.
My boyfriend did not die in 1991. I told a lie and it turned into a fact, forever repeated in my official biography. He died on Christmas Day, 1990, when his family disconnected the mechanical breathing machine. He was a composer in the school of music. We were working on a piece for voice and strings. I liked writing the words under the whole notes, hyphenating them to make them last. I liked sitting on the bed in his apartment, writing on the sheet music—bigger paper, thicker, how it sounded when it fell to the floor when we got tired. It was winter break, friends in town, we hopped from party to party, catching up but separately. It was late, the night was clear, the roads were empty. The four of them were sober, the driver in the other car was not. I was a few miles away, in a bar, waiting. When the bar closed, I left him an angry message for standing me up. A few hours later, a friend called and told me. He suggested I break into the apartment and start removing things before the family arrived. For several minutes I didn’t understand, then—evidence. He hadn’t told his family and it didn’t seem right to tell them now, to suggest that they didn’t really know him. I drove in the darkness between the accident and dawn. I climbed through the window. I couldn’t figure which things looked suspicious and which things would be missed. I was sloppy, rushed. I grabbed the wrong sheet music. It was a piece that had already been performed. A few days after Christmas there was a memorial. I sat in the back. As part of his speech, his father mentioned the missing music and made an appeal for its return. I couldn’t give it back. On New Year’s Eve, in a black velvet jacket, at a party in the lobby of a downtown hotel, with a drink in each hand—one for him, one for me—I kept asking where he was, if anyone had seen him. I had his passport in my back pocket. I shouldn’t have taken that either. It was the only picture of him I could find.
Richard Siken, COVER STORY / DEAD BOYFRIEND POEM
I feel like this would be a slippery slope towards making it illegal for people to choose to not vote.
that’s already how it is in australia
That’s just so fucked up. :( Do certain medical conditions exempt you?
?????? why is it be fucked up to have compulsory voting? that’s the way it is in most democratic countries? it’s a part of being a citizen, like paying taxes and obeying speed limits? the fine for not voting is only like $50 and because of the compulsory voting law, our country bends over backwards to make it accessible: it’s always on a weekend, lasts most of the day, and is set up at schools and community centers so there’s one within easy reach of almost everybody. you can also mail your ballot or vote early if you’ll be out of the country on the day. like, IT’S EASY TO VOTE, and the penalty isn’t even that ridiculous. i don’t understand why the usa doesn’t have this, except obviously it would make it harder to literally stop minorities from voting.
salparadisewasright
I think we Americans tend to forget that a lot of other countries don’t actively work to make it harder to vote.
Adding to this here, in Australia you don’t have to vote. Or, more precisely, there’s no way they can tell if you ruined your ballot. You have to turn up, get your name marked off, but you can put a line through the ballot if you don’t think any of the candidates are worth voting for. Or do this:
Or this:
Or this:
You have get your name crossed off (if you don’t want to wear the fine), but you don’t have to make your vote counted if you’re opposed to it.
And it is so, so easy to vote. Stuck at work or on holidays? That’s fine. Do a postal vote. Stuck in hospital? That’s fine. They’ll go to you. Stuck in an old people’s home and can’t get around? Again, they’ll go to you. It’s amazing to me that it’s so hard for so many Americans to actually vote. If you make it compulsory, than at least the government is obligated to provide you with the means to vote.
And look, I get it. Sometimes I don’t want to vote either. But I suck it up, I walk three minutes down the street, and I hope that this year they’re selling lamingtons again. Oh, and I buy a democracy sausage, which, even if all the candidates suck, makes the effort of turning up pretty worthwhile.
ALSO, you can see even on the fucked up ballots that you NUMBER CANDIDATES IN ORDER OF PREFERENCE. There’s no need to calculate whether I would be throwing away my vote on the candidate that I most agree with if they’re not from a major party. I can say, I want that independent person to get in, but if not them, give me Big Party A, and if not them, that minor party person is still better that Big Party B, and I’m not giving any preference to the Lunatic Fringe Party.
Our system certainly has some issues still, but I can show up to somewhere nearby, line up for a few minutes (if at all), vote exactly in line with my values (on paper, leaving a paper trail that can be recounted), and then buy a sausage and some home made cupcakes on my way out.
A country’s voting system matters a hell of a lot and every citizen deserves one that makes it easy to vote and results in a government that is representational and accountable.
And by the way, one time I had a bad asthma flare-up on Election Day and didn’t make it to my polling station. I got my fine in the mail, I filled out the form explaining why I couldn’t vote, no more fine. I would rather have, you know, expressed my preference for who should run my country, but they were cool with the fact that I couldn’t do it that day.
batmanisagatewaydrug
“oh no, what if people actually have to participate in picking the government officials who will impact their lives” jesus christ
For the last time, for everyone who still doesn’t understand: not voting is not a tool of resistance, it’s a tool of surrender.
Another reason Americans flip out over the idea of it being illegal to not vote is basically every crime in the US results in jail sentences, and people who served time are second class citizens. Some states even have “three strikes” laws (unless they all got repealed) where doing three minor crimes would get you a life sentence.
Something being “illegal” meaning you get a small fine pretty much only happens to stuff involving cars or giant multinational corporations. When Americans hear that not voting is a crime they assume that means you go to jail and have your life completely ruined.
Then you have all the voter suppression in the US, including explicitly racist stuff like closing polling offices or limiting hours in majority Black districts. If it was illegal to not vote they wouldn’t reverse any of that, they would celebrate at a new excuse to toss nonviolent “criminals” into jail to use as slave labor.
I just don’t think people are aware enough of how completely fucked up the American legal system is and how justified it is for Americans to fear stuff being made illegal. Mandatory voting might work great in other places but there’s big problems America needs to deal with before it would work here.