Isn't life so fucking inconsistent?

romanticize your life. i cannot stress this enough. use scented shower gel and shampoo, so you look forward to showers. go on walks and see how pretty the sky looks. notice the wildflowers on the roadside as you drive. light a candle when you get home to make your room smell good. notice & appreciate the little things in life. it won't cure your mental illness, but it'll make it easier to exist in this world.

"it won't cure your mental illness, but it'll make it easier to exist in this world." i needed this. thank you.

capitalism breeds innovation

not to be all “think of the children” but the fact that companies can openly admit to using methods to intentionally form addictions in children and we’re not killing their ceos in the streets yet is astounding

when I say “kids now don’t know how to disconnect” or “kids don’t know how to be bored anymore” i don’t mean “kids should sit in a white room in a solitary chair eating saltines and never touch technology” i mean “kids are losing the essential ability to imagine and create their own play because they have a constant 24/7 stream of more overstimulating material than they could ever watch at their fingertips, and when this stimulation is removed they literally don’t know what to do with themselves”

when I say “kids are addicted to video games” I don’t mean “ah these darn kids and their dag-blasted Ataris” I mean “video games are being purposefully designed to squeeze as much money/ad engagement out of the individual consumer as possible and mechanisms like lootboxes and season passes are intentionally engineered to create addiction”

i know it’s purely anecdotal but every time i think about that toddler who told his dad “don’t forget to like and subscribe” at bedtime because he thought it was how you said goodbye to people i feel sick

Not to sound like a boomer but playing in mud, using sticks for swords and guns, and gathering plants for potions are all vital to childhood

this is modern art

all homeless people deserve housing

yes even the ones that don’t work and are mentally ill and take lots of drugs

bro. what…?

what part of this is confusing for you

I'm guessing the part about giving a shit about other human beings

I don’t WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet

I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer

i will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death

shit man this got me emotional

dont play defense

x

Oh fuck it’s… wait… NOT chocolate guy again?

Russian Chocolate Family, apparently

bungus

welcome to ‘no note bungus’. reblog and you will feel a sense of accomplishment and goodwill wash over you

Traces of coca and nicotine found in Egyptian mummies - WTF fun facts

well DUH. a lot of historians are still trying to process the fact that ancient egyptians knew how to build boats, which is ridiculous. why would they not be seafarers and explorers?

this is not new or surprising information at all. it pretty much day one of any african-american studies course.

the egyptians knew that if they put their boats in front of the summer storm winds it’d blow them right across the sea to the Americas and they shared that with the greeks.

It’s really hard for people to understand that everyone had boats, exploration, and trade interactions without the same level of murder, colonization, and violence that the Europeans did. It’s really hard for people to get that.

Well, no people find hard to understand that one of the earliest civilizations could build a boat sturdy enough and reliable enough to cross a 8,766 mile stretch that gave people thousands of years of technological progress later great difficulty.

The notion that technology is a steady upward climb of “progress” is, itself, part of a Eurocentric historical narrative revolving around the tacit teleological assertion that Western European civilisation represents the culmination and endpoint of history.

In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.

I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.

So no, it’s not particularly incredible that the ancient Egyptians had boats far more advanced than they “should” have given their overall level of technology. That stuff happens all the time.

People invent the technology they need. They can even invent a technology, then not use it.

The Inca are often accused of “not knowing about wheels.”

Except, they did have wheels. They just didn’t use wheels for long distance transportation. They had a huge road system. On which everything was moved by pack animals and people. The Inca road is an incredible feat of engineering.

So, why didn’t they use wheels?

Because their land was so freaking mountainous that the road would repeatedly turn into this:

Tell me what earthly use a wheel is when your road keeps having to have steps and narrow bridges because you live on top of a mountain.

But that image shows us what they did have.

That’s a suspension bridge. Europeans didn’t invent those until centuries after the Inca did.

Because when the most efficient route through your home hits chasms, guess what?

You get real good at making bridges!

And when the best way to move goods through your desert homeland is a big river?

You get real good at making boats.

The technology a culture develops and uses is the technology they need. In Europe that was one suite of technology, and because white folk are so dang arrogant, we think that’s the superior means of development. It’s not, it’s just how technology develops in Europe.

The Minoan civilisation in Greece, around 2,500 BCE, developed huge technological advancements, including fully operational water and sewage systems, complete with flushing toilets. This would be around 3,000 years before one was invented in England.

Minoan Greece was also a sea power. They had huge fleets of ships, which meant they did a lot of exploration. They also built one of the biggest trade networks in the world, reaching as far as Egypt, Cyprus, Canaan, Syria,  the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), the Levantine coast, Anatolia and Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey, Israel and Iraq).

A volcano eruption on a nearby island, which caused a tsunami, possibly destroyed their sea power and left them vulnerable, which is why most of their technology was lost.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse a few centuries later led to the simultaneous destruction of advanced civilisations in Greece, Egypt, the Near East, Asia Minor, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This caused a dark age across two continents which created isolated village cultures, and is the reason most of their advancements were lost.

The notion that technology can only advance is some white nonsense.

That too.

(Minoan Crete may have been part of the inspiration for Atlantis).

This is also why Egyptians didn’t bother with the wheel* for like three thousand years. What fucking good are wheels when EVERYTHING IS SAND?

But on the flip side…they came up with a way to use water to basically hydroplane those giant stone blocks in their buildings across the desert. Which is a hell of a lot more useful in an unpaved sandy region.

Likewise let’s not forget the Aztecs, who came up with a farming system so efficient (chinampas) that parts of it are still used today and really ought to be revived on a wider scale as part of sustainable farming. And also Native Americans, and I’m using that term BECAUSE it’s so broad: look at tribes across the country and you’ll see something interesting. Iroquois, living in a cold, well-forested, and often icy land, built immovable longhouses—which would survive the bitter northeastern winters. Plains tribes developed the tipi/teepee—while they also faced long, even dangerous winters, they also lived in a place where travel was far easier and the worst of winter could be weathered by heading south. Or down where I live, the Sinagua (later assimilated into the Hopi) built their homes IN CLIFFS. And by that I mean “off the ground, built into the cliff face with adobe.” Aka, some of the best pre-refrigeration insulation against the heat that you could possibly hope for. We still don’t know how they did it, incidentally. “With ladders, dumbass” is an obvious answer in some of their dwellings, but in others it’s not clear how they just….hung over a sinkhole, a quarter of a mile or so above the water, and chipped out the front doors so they had a place to sit while they made the rest. Scaffolds? Very well-balanced rope ladders? Smaller cliffs they chipped off afterward to prevent enemy incursion? We don’t know, but we do know they found a way to make the extreme heat survivable and even sort of a nonissue. They never bothered with stuff like modern central AC because they found a way to let the stone and clay do the job for them.

Technology isn’t always a race. Sometimes it’s just an evolution.

*nominally. We have extant toys from this period that have wheels to make them move.

I just planted this new baby pinyon pine tree. It's the most adorable thing ever and I am very excited for it to grow up.

I’m convinced it was an interdimensional portal

Oooh, I know this one! The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration - they make the rules for flying here in the US) has designated “roads” in the sky to keep all the commercial jets from running into each other. When you’re headed the same direction at the same speed, you don’t get in each other’s way. If you’re heading east you fly at one elevation, and west-bound planes fly at a different height. There are lots of rules to keep mid-air crashes to a minimum.

However, if you’re running late, or weather in one spot is bad, you can call up Air Traffic Control and ask for a new route! And they will look at their little radar screens and maps of all the airplanes in the area, and tell you what shortcut you can take.

I am a little bit overcome by this. We made actual imaginary tunnels in the sky so our giant metal birds can fly through the open air in the most organized, polite way possible. We check in over our designated long distance thought projection machine channel that anyone can listen in on but we all promise not to interrupt to get permission to swap imaginary sky tunnels. We come up with the weirdest impossible shit and immediately give it boundaries! Humans are ridiculous. I mean yes these are good rules and many many people would die if we didnt have them, a+ on these rules, but if you take a step back wanting to sunder every natural limitation we can find and then going ahead and building our own so nothing gets too messy is a fucking hilarious art for a species to compulsively pursue.

had an idea

Clearly you haven't read Dr. Sugenon's new paper on comparative Germanic morphosyntax

Who’s Dr Sugenon?

Joe Mama

Wait, you mean Dr. Joe Mama, from the world renowned Mama & Ligma Institute of Psychometric Chiromancy?

I believe they co-authored that study that had them nominated for the Nobel *and* the Bofa.