My roommate releases patch notes when he fixes things around the apartment.
was originally gonna go with "dog" but decided to go for a longer word with more "reasonable" mispronunciations instead, but that ended up backfiring and now like half the people on this post think i actually pronounce it like this. guess you could say it was a bit of a. a b. it was a
it was a bit of a self-own
READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
- why might op have said that she wanted to choose a word with "more 'reasonable' mispronounciations"? what could the quotes around "reasonable" indicate? why did she say mispronunciations instead of pronounciations?
- op writes that the post "backfired" and now "half the people on this post think i actually pronounce it like this." what might the word "backfired" mean in this context?
- what words could "self-own" sound similar to, and how could that relate to the rest of the post?
The overlapping ideas of Science So Powerful It Resists Magical Corruption and AI So Advanced It Can Be Corrupted Like A Human have a chokehold on my brain
My elderly father started talking about how frustrating he finds “the pronouns thing” and I was like. Oh no. He had such a good stand on this, he’s been they/them-ing his cishet siblings for god’s sake! Is he regressing?? And he was talking about how difficult it is to remember, and how onerous it feels to expect strangers to keep track of it, and I’m like oh no oh no.
Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”
“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”
“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”
So we can relax. It’s just a continuation of his crusade to they/them the world. He doesn’t want to remember anyone’s gender. He’s abolishing the genders.
It is almost five centuries ago, and the girl who will one day be a swordswoman is lying in the red-tinged mud. She can't get up—broken bone? severed tendon? She can't tell. She's yet to cultivate her palate for pain. Her enemy towers over her, a cataphract mailed in screaming steel and poisoned light. His warhammer falls, and it is death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable.
"No," says a part of her. She is not even seventeen years old. Her body is mangled and broken, wound piled upon wound piled upon wound. A dull kitchen knife is her only weapon, though she lost that in the mud the second her grip faltered. Her enemy is no thing of this earth. And yet—
"No. It is not death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable. It is only a hammer, falling. It is only 'an attack.'"
And the girl understood.
~~~
It is the better part of three centuries ago, as best the swordswoman can reckon, and she is beset on all sides by foes. They are not monsters—just mountain bandits, or highland rebels, as one cares to see it. But they outnumber her by dozens, and even an exceptional swordswoman might struggle against but two opponents of lesser skill.
From in front of her, beside her, behind her they advance, striking from every angle with spears and blades and axes. Others fill the air with arrows, sling stones, firepots. It would be effortless, to parry any single blow. It would be impossible, physically impossible, to defend against them all.
"No," says a part of her.
"You are not outnumbered. You do not face 'multiple' foes. It would be impossible to defend against every attack — but there is no 'every' attack. Only one."
"Oh," the swordswoman said. And it was, in fact, effortless.
~~~
It is eighty years ago, or thereabouts. A coiling spire of stony flesh and verdigrised copper throbs like a tumor on the horizon, coaxed from the earth by spell and sacrifice. It is the tower of a sorcerer-prince, and a birthing place of abominations.
Seven locks of rune-etched metal are opened with her single key. Wretched shapelings beasts, grown by sorcery in vitreous nodules, flee wailing from her, absconding before she even draws her blade. Demons sworn to thousand-year pacts of service find the binding provisions of their agreements unexpectedly severed.
These things dissatisfy the sorcerer-prince. He waxes wroth. He makes signs of power and chants incantations. With a flask of godling's blood, he draws the binding sigil inscribed upon the moon's dark face. With cold fire burning in his eyes, he speaks the secret name of Death. It is a king among curses, all-corrupting, all-consuming, and it falls from his lips upon the swordswoman.
"No," she says, and she turns it aside with her blade.
The sorcerer-prince's brow furrows. How did she even do that?
"Parried it."
But—
"With my sword."
No—
"See, like this."
Stop—
"Well," the swordswoman finally says, "I figured that if I just...looked at it right, and thought about it, and construed your curse as a kind of attack...then I could block it."
That's not how it works at all!
"If you insist," says the swordswoman, shrugging, and decapitates him.
~~~
It is now. It is the end. Death couldn't take the swordswoman, not when she'd spent all her life cutting it up. At times, Death might sidle up to one of her friends, or peer down into a grandchild's crib, and she'd just give it a look. That's all it took, by then.
Heartache couldn't take her, either. Bad things happened to her, and they hurt, and she lived in that hurt, but if it was ever more than she could take...she'd just, move her sword in a way that's difficult to describe. And she'd keep going.
Kingdoms fell, and she kept going. Continents crumbled and sank into the sea. Her planet's star faded and froze. She started carrying a lantern. Universes were torn apart and scattered, until all that had been matter was redistributed in thermodynamic equilibrium. With one exception.
But now it is the end. There is no time left; time is already dead. The swordswoman has outlived reality, but there is simply no further she can go. This is not a thing that can be blocked. This is the absence of anything further to block.
"No," says the girl who will one day be a swordswoman. "This isn't the ending. And even if it was, it's not the ending that matters."
The swordswoman looks back at who she was, at the countless selves she's been between them. She looks forward, at the rapidly contracting point that remains of the future. She grasps the all of linear time in her mind, and sees that it is shaped like a spear.
You know we only ever really "learn" how to bathe in our youth as it is taught to us by our parents and from then on most people kinda just bathe the same way right. And like barring actively deciding to do it the only way most people change their bathing habits is if they bathe with a loved one and get convinced to do somethi g different in the bath bc its cleaner/faster/whatever bc of them. Ok heres the thesis statement. The lack of communal bathing in society is holding us back from discovering The Ultimate Bathing
"I could fix him," and I could make him beg like a whore. What's your point?
hashtag real
You may be aware of the concept of “a rental car.” It’s where you go to a store that lives inside the airport, promise to give them some money, and they hand you the keys to a car. When you’re done with that car, you just give it back and you never have to see it again. No oil changes. No windshield washer fluid repair. No welding new body panels into it after driving on a particularly pointy gravel road.
The thing is, this is an incredibly expensive procedure. Before the world broke, even the cheapest rental agencies were gonna charge you more than just flying in, taking a taxi to the junkiest piece of shit on Craigslist, and then signing a fake name onto the title. Cops give you like a week’s leeway on getting it actually registered – even more if you are there for a “business trip” and are wearing Value Village’s finest two-piece Italian-cut dead salesman’s suit. You get to drive a new kind of car, it doesn’t cost you that much, and when you’re done you can just drive it back to the seller’s house in the middle of the night and take a taxi back to the airport.
So, being forced to rent a car during my recent trip to Philadelphia in order to give the keynote speech at the Bad Cars Monthly conference, I decided I would get the maximum amount of value out of my rental. I neutral-dropped the fucker at every light, started a small side business delivering heavy goods for cheap, and did my best impression of Petter Solberg on every even vaguely curvy road I could find. At one point, I took it to a drag strip and put down a weak fifteen-second pass, the transmission warning light shrieking the entire time as I force-fed it a couple gallons of nitrous oxide that I picked up at a shop near the hotel. Never before had a 2023 Hyundai Sonata been thrashed so thoroughly and without mercy, and I can assure you that the lot boys (and ladies) were impressed when I rolled the filthy, used-up chunk of Korean iron into the lot, parked it across four stalls, and threw the keys into a nearby storm drain after yelling “Catch!”
Friends, I cannot recommend that you purchase a new 2023 Hyundai Sonata. I can, however, assure you that I have depreciated this particular unit enough that it should be really cheap at auction.
licherally cannot explain to adults these days that im actually so cool with the idea of being “just an employee” somewhere as long as i am paid enough to live comfortably and i also like the job. “but dont you want to be rich?? dont you want to always be striving for more???” like that sounds EXHAUSTING and i like having friends so
I am an overnight custodian at my local university.
I clean chalk boards, sweep classrooms, dust mop halls, vacuum entry rugs, mop as needed, vacuum carpeted rooms as needed, and collect any wayward trash left behind after the previous shift leaves.
It’s not a glorious job, but I like it. The simple repetitive tasks are almost meditative; the consistent checklist of responsibilities means I’m not worrying about ADHD making me overlook or forget something; and I like knowing that what I do helps maintain a clean and pleasant environment for other people.
I come in, I run through my checklist, and once I’m done I basically just have to be in the building, on call, in case anything decides to go wrong.
It’s not glorious, but it is important and I like it. It’s not enriching or fulfilling, but I don’t really think my job has to be the most fulfilling or enriching part of my life. If being a custodian paid a livable wage, I think I could see myself doing it for a very long time and being content. Writing in my down time, baking bread and playing video games on the weekends.
I think a lot of people buy in to the grind because culturally we expect “careers” to be the biggest part of our lives. Jobs are more and more demanding, more and more taxing, leaving less and less room to live outside of them. So people are forced to finding their living in their work. Cause otherwise they won’t have time or energy to seek it elsewhere.
I think that’s wrong.
I think work can and sometimes should be a thing you do to fulfill basic needs and nothing more. Doing the work that needs to be done purely to sustain yourself and nothing more is okay.
If you do have a job you love and find fulfilling, great! But I think we should also embrace the fact that not every job can be that job.
Cause no matter how many doctors and lawyers and teachers and firefighters and authors and artists and engineers.
No matter how many people we have in glorious, enriching, fulfilling careers.
Someone still needs to come by at night to clean the boards, sweep the floors, and collect the trash.
So, a funny thing happened on trigun twitter
(amazon link where its 50% off as of May 8th: https://www.amazon.com/This-How-You-Lose-Time/dp/1534430997/)
Update, “this is how you lose the time war” is now #21 on Amazon’s bestseller’s list
(semi-related note but I too have now ordered the book)
another update: Amal El -Mohtar wrote a small article on her blog (https://amalelmohtar.com/i-tried-to-title-this-post-for-twenty-minutes-and-failed/), one which contains the words “[…] and the upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas.”
Further update!
Time war has reached #7 on the amazon bestseller’s list and is still discounted!
(thread found here: https://twitter.com/tithenai/status/1655613629604016151?s=20)
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