Madnesses longer than 400 characters

• I was known in my time. Lady of Butterflies, Princess of Darkness... Mistress of Typos. The funny things was, I was nothing my dreamer was not. And she never bothered to hide any of it, either. We were just... different. Different upbringings, different directions, different stories, but the same motivations. Same wills and dreams. Same final resting place, for a few years at least. But things change.
• It is an impossible sofa. A great mystery, unquantifiable, unsolvable. We all have them, little things we find that simply cannot be and yet they are nonetheless there, before us, taunting, tantalising, jarring our very perception of reality. There is no reason, no explanation, no hope of understanding. They are simply impossible. And they are sofas. And they are what make the universe worth living in.
• Would understanding really clarify, though? Or would the randomness only become bigger, more elaborate and more intricately convoluted? Perhaps one could become less vague in general, but there is something strange about comprehension - the more specific things become, the more remains unknown. The more that is seen, the more one will realise what lies out of sight, and the more utterly intangible reality becomes.
• You exist, without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that was your self. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled.
• You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theatre whom no one notices until she slips out. Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
• Analogue gave way to digital. It was large, bulky, superfluous... digital is small. Clean. Precise. Too precise. Suddenly everything is so very finite, and the superfluous from the analogue is missed... so don't define so precisely. Define the analogue in digital terms, but vaguely. Not how it is, but how to make it... and suddenly it is as if the infinite lives once more. Analogue lives once more.
• You know that little tingling sensation, that itch of foresight or sideways realisation at the back of your brain, that feeling when the hairs on the back of your neck rise and bits of your vestigial reptilian neuron-architecture start firing mad signals at the rest of your mind - the feeling when you realise something that you are so unsure if it could be possible you slide up to the idea sideways because you are afraid, if you look at the idea you have had face on, it might wriggle away? You know that feeling? Of realising something that is possibly nothing but might, might just come to be true?
• It was a good cave. Wombats, for the most part, prefer burrows to caves for actually living in, and natural caves back home are generally treated as parks. Other than shoring up the unstable bits, we don't alter them much, so it's not the sort of place you'd want to retire. But it'd be a nice spot for a picnic, if you ignored all the weird little lizards who want to skin you as politely as possible.
• Hangover? Suffering Hypervitaminosis A poisoning? Vomiting? Gods got ya? Got that just-went-to-a-party-reeking-of-warrior-herbs-then-got-shitfaced-on-mead-and-sleapt-it-off-on-the-floor smell hanging around your fur? Feel like a family of incontinent ferrets did the same thing then slept in your mouth? Convinced someone lodged your own pickaxe in your head? Trying to explain comparative ethics to a sentient shadow whilst coming down after mixing alcohol, testosterone-boosting herbs and unrefined opiates? Birds singing far too loud whist the day DARES to be anything other than overcast? Try new aspirin-flavoured Mountain Dew! For the wombat on the go!
• The arrangement has its terms, but they involve no epic and bloody battle of the wits with the dire sir Reginald, no crossing the vast expanses of the plains of Dorani littered with the shimmering shards of broken things, no open war with the dragon Zaori amidst the fire rain as Shintaiden falls from the sky, no wrestling with a mongoose, and no long drunken bouts of workaround-oriented programming after a deadline pushed back month after month for lack of an Ironholds. It doesn't make for a particularly good story.
• Moms are not supposed to be the source of your pain; they're supposed to make it go away. They're supposed to hold you and tell you everything is going to be alright. They're supposed to tell you that thunder is angels bowling, and that it's okay to be afraid of the dark, and it isn't silly to think there might be monsters in your closet, and that it's okay if you want to climb into bed with them just this once because it's scary in the room all alone... they're supposed to say it's okay to be afraid, and not be the thing you're afraid of. But most importantly, they're supposed to love you no matter what.
• SCP artifacts pose a significant threat to global security. Various agencies from around the world operate to maintain human independence from extra-terrestrial, extra-dimensional, and extra-universal threat. In the past humankind has been at the whim of these bizarre artifacts and similar phenomena, but we have now reached a point in history where we can begin to control and contain these defiances of natural law.
• This is a bar of soap. It might not look like much, but it is, in fact, a very, VERY powerful weapon. It carries healing magic more powerful than anything the gods could grant me! It kills enemies so deadly and subtle that us mere mortals cannot even perceive them, although they are always all around us, trying to do us harm. But if you rub yourself over with the magnificent soap, it will grant you an aura that even the terrible Germs will be forced to flee! So, mighty Lhoryn... take this soap. And vanquish your enemies.
• There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and its cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines, the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice.
• To someone who only knows how to dig with a spoon, the notion of digging something as large as a trench will terrify them. All they know are spoons, so as far as they're concerned, digging is simply difficult. The only way they can imagine it getting any easier is if they change – digging with a spoon until they get stronger, faster, and tougher. And the dangerous people, they'll actually try this.
• I'm sorry, I'm trying to understand what you just said. A world in which there are no libraries? How is that possible, if there's anyone left at all? Libraries aren't just buildings, books on shelves. They're ideas, stories, and stories you pass on, tell to others. You can write them down to keep them longer, to share them further, but you don't have to, because they still survive in the people themselves. So long as anyone remembers, they're still real.
• I used to be like you, a long time ago. All brand new and perfect; no mistakes, no regrets. People look at you and think of how wonderful your future will be. They want you to be something special, like a doctor or a lawyer. I hate to tell you this, but if you grow up here, you're more likely to wind up selling your bodies on the streets or shooting dope from dirty needles in a bus stop. And if you're successful, you'll make money selling junk to crackheads, and won't think twice about killing someone's wife, because you won't even know it's wrong in the first place. Maybe... you'll end up like me. A hobo with a shotgun. I hope you can do better. You are the future.
• One woman sat near the steamer and in silence she threw scoopful of water to the sauna stove. No-one said a word. The only sound was water hitting on a stove. It was not awkward nor uncomfortable. The only feeling I had was the feeling I could call calm melancholy or longing. For me it was the essence of being a Finn. Sitting in a small room, naked, with people you've never met before but yet you're completely comfortable because you know you're all in that room only for yourselves. In that room, rushful weekday separates from free time, afternoon separates from evening, it's a place between restlessness and peace. Where you literally sweat your worries, pain and rush away.
• The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
• This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible.
• What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.
• The gods were here first, and they're bigger. They always were, and always will be living it up in their father's mansion. You only crawled from the drain a few millenia ago, after inventing legs for yourself so you could stand, inventing fists in order to raise them and curse the heavens. Do the gods see us? Will the waters be rising soon? The waters will be rising soon. Find someone or something to cling to.
• We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible, and we count these moments, these moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known... we count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that, or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers and we've barely begun, and that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.
• So many of the sources historians use to piece together the past are known fakes, but the best they can do is read between the lines or have no lines at all. There's a reason why medieval historians read farm reports featuring travel descriptions and saints' lives involving demons-living-in-buckets with the same attention to detail. Every dry history text you've read in your life comes from a pile of sources like this, bits of maybe-truth cobbled together with toothpaste and narwhal horn dust.
• I understand you exactly. You could have been something once. You had all the worlds ahead of you, and you threw it away, you wasted it, you, because you didn't care, and so you slipped further and further away. The others lost you, too, because they were just like you, and they didn't care any more than you did. They were just like you, and they are still just like you were, now, and so you hate them. And yet the only one you hate more than them is yourself.
• Sometimes the most important thing you can do for someone is to accept them for who they are. Accept their faults, their failings. Accept that they may never get better, or change, or be who you want them to be. But be there for them. Support them when they stumble, help them up when they fall. They may give you nothing in return, but they may also give you everything, show you things you never would have imagined, because odds are, you need the same things they do.
• We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
• The details don't really matter, but I've spent most of the day so stressed out that my skull is rattling from the pressure of my teeth grinding together. I feel like I have finally exceeded my stress limits and am about blow a gasket. But I can't go home, because if I do, the world will end, right? I'm trying to work, but every few minutes I have to stop typing and make fists so tightly that my whole body shakes.
• It has come to our attention that you are in a dire and currently-unremediated state of having-not-been-sued, and as we, the parties inclusive hereunto referencing the party of the the first part thereunto, are well-equipped to carry out such legal maneuvers, we, the parties inclusive hereunto referencing the party of the first part thereunto, are hereby announcing our Intent to Litigate against you and yours, hereafter referenced as the parties of the second part.
• I believe in rot. I believe in bones, in withering organs, in snapped sinews. I believe in the irony of life that made our smiles a flaunting of our skeletons, an omen of the grave, and I believe in the eternal nothingness that awaits me when at last I will close my eyelids on a long-expected pain. I know the morgues and the proceedings in black and the poetic epitaphs and I know them all to be crutches for the living, so they may accept death, extinction, perdition - loved ones first, and then the self, because your turn will come just like mine. Delusions: ghosts, monsters, nightmares, dreams, words, fears. A permission to live for nothing until you're no more.
• When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as 'human rights' versus 'property rights'. No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. He who claims the 'right' to 'redistribute' the wealth produced by others is claiming the 'right' to treat human being as chattel.
• Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, no place or purpose. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd be billionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning this fact, and we're very, very pissed off.
• There is a world that is inaccessible to me because it is riddled with the corpses of miscreants and idiots who didn't know better, and any misstep on my part will either send me to that graveyard, or I will nonetheless perceive that I am in that graveyard. Prurient thoughts loom perspicuously in my mind, imperceptible to others but readily apparent to me and determined to make social interaction difficult.
• I take issue with the notion that there is anything in all the worlds that cannot be communicated. If no words are good enough, the language will evolve. If the language itself is broken, notation will be invented. Poetry, mathematics, silence, the very nature of the universe, we put everything down into meaning, and pull meaning out of everything. To those who do not understand it looks like magic, but to those who do, it is simply what it is, right there, laid out plainly against the page.
• From trying to make others happy and tick the boxes of the many multiplying standards and recommendations for our meetings, I stopped making jokes of any kind, frankly my presentations became dull to my eyes. At the moment I have no plans to make any presentations or even take part in meetings in the year ahead. The prospect of starting up again and freely sharing knowledge or experience from my volunteer and programming through planned presentations and workshops does not excite me any more. Instead it now feels like the sort of painful hard work that needs to be paid for.
• Remember always that names are conventions to express something, and this is true also for personal given names. Always in history names have been translated, because of usefulness, to keep them untranslated is only a recent practice. Surnames, if one studies their history, are even more clearly a convention, since they are an addition to the name to distinguish a person and a family from others, so they often are patronymics or names of a profession.
• This is the reality of the Internet. Nobody has a plan. Sure, we work to build things, and they may end up in the general direction where we planned them, but everything takes on a life of its own as the mass consciousness and the consensual hallucination takes hold. The founders of anything successful describe, in retrospect, how they planned things, but the reality is that nothing ever goes according to plan.
• That cathartic propaganda you enjoyed turned away the minds you want to change. The only people who read past the first paragraphs where those who already agreed with it. That's why objectivity and balance matter: you can only change minds if the reader trusts you, and actually reads what you write. Like a war correspondent attacking the enemy, partisanship erodes not only trust in your own writing, but contaminates all other journalists covering the same topic.
• The whole concept of 'Hate Speech' is abuse of the language. Speech is speech. Those whose ideas need to be artificially propped up via suppression of the opposition are always wrong. In the free market of ideas, where people are allowed to talk about them freely, bad ideas can be dispelled through logical inquiry. When someone is allowed to decide what other people are allowed to say, anything they don't like becomes 'hate speech'.
• This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.
• Icarus. The original myth had two parts. Daedalus said to his son, 'I fashioned these wings for you. Two rules. Don't fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax. But, more important, son, don't fly too low. Because if you fly too low, the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.' We've left out the second part of the myth. We don't say to people anymore, 'Don't fly too low.' All we do from the time they are 4 years old is warn them against hubris. We have created this industrially led structure that says: How dare you.
• There is something frightening about the universe when we consider that only our senses of sound and sight make it beautiful. Just think, the universe is darker than the darkest ink; colder than the coldest ice and more silent than a silent tomb with all the bodies rushing through it at terrific speeds. What an awe-inspiring picture, isn't it? Yet it is our brain that gives merely a physical impression. Sight and sound are the only avenues through which we can perceive it all. Often I have wondered if there is a third sense which we have failed to discover. I'm afraid not.
• We use aggression and strength to bend dependent others to our will - or, in the absence of strength, use sickness and weakness to harness the force of empathy, and deceive our way to dominance, underground. Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers? Assuming we had the ambition, dedication and power of organization - which is highly unlikely. Paucity of skill, however, does not constitute moral virtue.
• I got my heart broken and I survived, I failed 3 courses in university and graduated, I got rejected in the very first job I applied for and got promoted yesterday, I went through hard times with my family but then two years later, we laughed our hearts out over lunch, The closest friends disappointed me several times but I made new friends and loved them with all my heart. I did it once, I can do it again.
• Too often, people who leave behind toxic belief systems might leave behind the beliefs but not the system. A toxic religious or political ideology teaches you to think something dogmatically; when you stop believing, you think you're free, but then you commit yourself to believing something else dogmatically. You see this a lot with ex-Christian atheists: because they don't believe in God anymore, they insist that anyone who does is illogical, stupid, etc. They've changed what they believe but not how they believe it.
• And all the time - such is a tragi-comedy of our situation - we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
• Musubi is the old way of calling the local guardian god. This word has profound meaning. Tying thread is Musubi. Connecting people is Musubi. The flow of time is Musubi. These are all the god's power. So the braided cords that we make are the god's art and represent the flow of time itself. They converge and take shape. They twist, tangle, sometimes unravel, break, then connect again. Musubi - knotting. That's time.
• I realise now that to remain at one point of view is restrictive and will only provide a limited vista of the world. To jump from different perspectives of a problem, to assume different philosophies and view it through their lens in another light - that is how to live, how to work. To remain flexible, to keep an open mind, to not close yourself off because of what you believe in as absolute truth.
• I've been thinking about trauma - how it's repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I thought, 'Well if the Greek root for 'poet' is 'creator,' then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.' I thought it was so neat. Everyone's a poet, as long as they remember.
• Anyone who knows anything about history knows that it is built on conspiracy, conspiracy is the engine of history … These people have never sat in a courtroom and listened to lawyers try men and corporations on charges of conspiracy … Conspiracies are a fact of life, for anyone to say that conspiracies are absurd, and that anyone who thinks that conspiracies are real is a 'conspiracy theorist' has a real problem.
• I am pessimistic because I don't trust history. But at the same time, I am optimistic. Out of despair, one creates. What else can one do? There is no good reason to go on living, but you must go on living. There is no good reason to bring a child into this world but you must have children to give the world a new innocence, a new reason to aspire towards innocence. As Camus said, in a world of unhappiness, you must create happiness.
• In tragedy, we find the worst of humanity. We also find the best of humanity. We find strength, real strength in hope. When the happy ending is not provided, we must create one for ourselves. We aren't past it, we aren't over it, but even just going on living is an act of defiance. An act of rebellion, a middle finger to all those assholes striving so hard to take away everything you are and kill you.
• I don't understand why people hate puns, they're language taken and twisted and wielded to create a special brand of humour; they're the result of thousands of years of language evolution and combined with the finest wit, and resulting in an universal reaction of laughter and groaning. In a way it's a form of magic, if you consider magic as the power of words on the world. You could even say it's wit craft.
• MediaWiki skinning scares people, and for good reason: implementing a skin that is not very much like Vector typically breaks every extension and gadget ever. Changing Vector is also a bad idea for the same reason. Changing the skinning backend itself is like opening a portal to unspeakable horrors: the fabric of the wiki turns inside out, extensions merge into unusable chimeras, and the site navigation starts breeding with itself. It is, generally, not recommended to try.
• Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
• The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.
• You'd think horses were one of those animals that has horrible health due to humans breeding unhealthy animals to achieve a certain look, but no, they really are just naturally that fucked up. Horses' lungs bleed when they run at a certain speed. If their diet is too rich or low in selenium, their hooves fall off. If a horse's leg breaks, you kinda have no choice but to put it out of its misery. If a horse eats too much in a sitting it dies and they also don't have the ability to feel sated. Which means it will keep eating. Speaking of hooves, have y'all ever seen a newborn foal hooves? You don't want to, but, just saying.
• When any current moment is over, it immediately begins to lose all shape and color. Like a fish pulled out of water and left to die on land, its colors pale and it flops helplessly around until its life energy ebbs beyond a certain point and it dies. However, there are some moments that refuse to die. As they weaken, they stumble and lurch through the now, wreaking havoc. Colliding with lives and events, they leave their mark, aroma, their scales, on everything they touch.
• What people have to realize first is they're not just one single person who does weird, out-of-character things now and then. We're all made up of many different selves who fight and compete with one another constantly. Somehow we've got to get them to agree on a few basic things. Get them to stop fighting with one another. They all have different needs. One part of us wants safety, but another wants adventure. I want to be loved. I want to be left alone... Those aren't contradictions - they're independent selves saying 'I want this!'
• In this world, there is nothing as impartial as death. For all living creatures, death is sure to eventually come knocking. Death is an equalizer - it is an absolute truth - and it is always lingering right beside us. Nevertheless, people make the best use of their wits and courage.... struggling... floundering... they cling to life until the very end. You see, we actually like this unjust and unequal world...
• So the night is dark and full of terror? Be a light. However you can. In big ways or small. A thousand tiny gestures of kindness sustained over time will eventually make up a whole. Start somewhere. But don't you ever tell people it's pointless to hope, or to believe in a better world. Don't you dare take that from them. Do better. For your sake as well as others. You deserve better too. Hope is not the reserve of the naive, it is the foundation upon which better things are built. So stop trying to tear it down.
• Being lawful is about how much you trust and value what other people think. Forget the actual law, that's what it's really about. It's about holding yourself to the standards of other people and acknowledging that you are responsible for meeting their expectations when interacting with them. Chaotic is about valuing your own standards above all else, even if you're acting on behalf of someone else. A Lawful Good person is empathetic, a Lawful Evil one is manipulative. Both are paying attention to what other people want and expect of them.
• Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.
• It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.
• Man created society in his own image; it enables him as much as it corrupts him. Man chooses evil, for the sake of the evil. Man exults in agony, delights in pain, worships destruction and pathology. Man can torture his brother, in an ecstasy of pleasure, and dance on his grave. Man despises life, his own weak life, and the vulnerability of others, and constantly works to lay waste, to undermine, to destroy, to torment, to abuse and devour.
• Who can believe that it is the little choices we make, every day, between good and evil, that turn the world to waste and hope to despair? But it is the case. We see our immense capacity for evil, constantly realized before us, in great things and in small – but can never seem to realize our infinite capacity for good. Who can argue with a Solzhenitsyn when he states: 'One man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny.'
• In any civilised society, I don't think there is any category of death worse than that of a child while his or her parents still live. It is an experience that turns the natural order upside down, that demands more in the way of strength and emotional resources than any rational person has to give. It can bring family members together or tear them apart; it can test faith or destroy it. But it leaves non as they were; it is utterly transformative. And within this unfortunate category, there can be no death more horrible than the death of a child by murder.
• He's a guy who has seen so much, done SO MUCH... that he's calm. He's so far beyond wrath at the demons that he's entered a weird Calm and just LIVES there. Nothing shakes him of it. He doesn't grunt, he doesn't yell, he doesn't scream, he just breathes and moves on. New demon? Well, it'll bleed like the last. He doesn't revel in combat, he just moves through it like walking through air; it's a function of existence for him.
• There are those dreams that sort of stay with you, lingeringly, coming back in bits and pieces over the first few waking moments, and then only as feelings and familiarities later. As the years go by, you remember, again, in the moments where the same thing happens again, and you cannot place whether the memories are real or imagined. But you know you've lived this before. You feel like you know it implicitly.
• My grandfather's grandfather once stood in the presence of the Revan. It is hard to believe. They say we once lived on the surface and walked in the light of suns and moons. It is hard to believe. Here, the light of the Infinite Engine warms our skin and lets us look upon our faces. The Revan said to dedicate each newborn child to the machine. It is the first touch they feel when they emerge from their mother's bodies. The Revan said to give our dead to the machine. It takes back all that it gave them through the years and returns it to us as food, as medicine. Our homes are built and heated from the bodies of our dead. No one understands when I ask the question, "Would it seem strange?" What did we give up when we swore ourselves to the service of the Revan?
• Fools on both sides. All who thought the Star Forge a mere weapon, they didn't know. They never wanted to know. It is the seed of worlds. Such power, even in a fragment. A fleet, that's what I made of it. Almost laughable now. What of its smallest piece? It cannot build ships, no, what useless fragments does it generate? Air. Life. It feeds on the Force, on energy, on mass, on whatever you give it. And it creates. That is its nature. It begins where we all began. A breath of air, a drop of water, the first chains of carbon. Why bother with fleets, when one day we might build our own galaxies?
• Mountains. Heavy mountains, things that change over time. Sky, blue sky. What your eyes cannot see. Sun. A unique object. Water. something comforting. flowers, so many of the same, and so many unneeded. sky, red, red sky. The colour red. Red. I hate the colour red. Water flowing. Blood. The smell of blood. A woman who never bleeds. Man made from red soil. Man made from man and woman. City... a human creation. Eva, a human creation. What is a human? A creation of god?
• Ask a hundred writers where their stories come from and you'll get two hundred answers, and even more stories. And that's not even the big ones. The ones we build over a lifetime, the ones we dream, and weave throughout our lives, that we always come back to, working and reworking. These stories come from everywhere. They are. They build on all the other stories, all the tropes and moments and feelings, every random bit of life that takes its chance to sing to us.
• There are days I have categorically failed to comprehend a potato. It's like... what is this? What is potato?! Have you ever stopped to think about potatoes? As objects, they are squishy and firm, rough and smooth, solid but liquid. As plants, they're the entire plant packaged up for transport, or storage, safe and hidden. Every eye is a sprout in waiting. You can chop them up and each piece becomes a new potato. They sit in the ground and wait. Potate. Sprout, and infloresce, lush and green. But the green is poison. They have made themselves indispensable as food, and yet the leaves are deadly. Nothing should be comprehensible. Nothing is! It's all potatoes! All the way down!
• The entire business model and culture was based on a having a happy demeanor even though it was the kind of job where you're dealing with customers and every minute of time is constantly monitored and you could get in trouble for performing 'too well'. Despite all being about positivity, people would cry at their desks and if management thought someone seemed too down they were required to start a 'happiness journal'. If you couldn't keep up you didn't want it enough and you weren't a fit.
• It takes time to learn how to understand new forms of media. It takes experience to recognise the new scams and misrepresentations by the novel shapes and forms they come in. The child believes what he is told. The student believes what he reads. Not yet familiar with the methodologies and patterns that go into visual storytelling, the dilettante takes the presented story at face value, and takes it to heart, and so yet another generation follows the suggestions laid out before them, for why dig deeper? Each and every iteration, it takes time to even realise they can, let alone that they must.
• Fixed misspelling of 'cahce' to 'cache', which was a critical bug that was breaking homepage. Then I removed cache completely. By the way, I haven't audited this code for security. In general, I would highly recommend against running PHP code on a public facing server. It's probably fine to run this (and mediawiki) on your local intranet disconnected from the internet (e.g. put it on a separate VLAN). Because the main use case of a blog is to have it not publicly facing.
• A black hole creates a hole in your perspective by trapping light that would have otherwise contributed to the image your eyes perceive. But I will note that any object between you and the source of light can cause a similar phenomenon. A solar eclipse is not a hole in the sun. Just because black holes achieve this through a unique means doesn't make them more deserving of being defined as holes, ontologically.
• Paul wasn't squeamish about sex so much as he was, I'm fairly confident, a self-hating pompous 1st century version of the Ivy League fancy Jewish Roman citizen misogynistic homo douchebag. He basically told young Christian men that premarital sex was a sin so only get married if you can't control your dick. If you can, leave the women be, they ain't shit. Nothing from Jesus ever said women were less than men or shouldn't teach, all that women should keep silent and ask their husbands when they get home bullshit was Paul. He also talked about wrestling with the weaknesses of the flesh. Dude was gay as fuck and super wanted to not be. Some sad shit.
• One of my 4k monitors has a bug, thankfully not noticeable most of the time. Tried to get it out or at least shift it loose so it can fall down to the bottom, but to no avail. So instead I just live with it, because it's close to the left edge and unless I fullscreen an app or the app over there has a bright background, I don't see it. It's annoying but not 'toss out an otherwise perfectly good monitor that I paid hundreds of dollars for and get a new one for hundreds of more dollars' annoying.
• Why the fuck do people always remind you that Taco Bell isn't real Mexican food? Do you not think that I know that? Do you think I go to Taco Bell because I think the 16 year old white guy behind the window just made me authentic Mexican cuisine two minutes before I pulled to the second window? No, do you know why I go to taco bell? It's because it's 1:30AM and my life is terrible so I order a coke and five dorito loco tacos and shove them down my face in the parking lot.
• Princesses who can't do anything for themselves end up locked in a castle guarded by a dragon, alone. Princesses who can't make decisions won't become a good Queen. You're not raising a princess, you're raising a Queen. Queens need to do the hard work that some Kings neglect. They need to make hard decisions and make sure their kingdom runs smoothly. Princesses are pretty, but always require saving. Queens raise Queens.
• The best thing about psyche hospital is your fellow patients. You form strong bonds in there and I have lifelong friends I've met in there. It's all stripped away and you talk freely about your mental health to each other and share things you wouldn't share with your friends and family in the outside world. I've learned that people living with mental health issues are probably the kindest and most understanding people in the world. They get it, they get the human psyche... and they don't want anyone else to feel how they feel so they treat people beautifully.
• We're so lucky we're alive to see this beautiful world. Look at the sky. It's not dark and black and without character. The black is in fact deep blue. And over there! Lighter blue. And blowing through the blueness and the blackness, the winds swirling through the air. And there shining, burning, bursting through, the stars! Can you see how they roll their light? Everywhere we look, complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.
• A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail, that we will hurt those around us. But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.
• Real friends are the ones who stick by you during your darkest days, and have the guts to call you out on negative behaviors and actions, because they want the best for you. If you have people who only hang with you during your best, but not your worst, then they're not really your friends. I don't know if there was ever any moment she stuck with you during a dark time in your life, but based on this, she abandoned you when you needed a friend the most.
• It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
• I read of a man who stood to speak at a funeral of a friend. He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning... to the end. He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke of the following date with tears, but he said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years. For that dash represents all the time they spent alive on earth and now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.
• So far, not a single scientific model was even close to being 100% accurate at anything; but they worked. Our current models have things we can't explain or things that don't work - like that conservation of energy just doesn't apply to relativity, etc. We'll probably never have a complete theory of everything, but rather keep amending the models we already have with new bits to make them jive with newly collected experimental data, or just throwing stuff out and starting anew when we realize that we were completely off-track, or even, just being honest in admitting that we don't know something. And still there are people who can't get it. But every invention on history is a testament to someone showing an understanding of how things in this universe work, and applying our vast yet minuscule knowledge of stuff in general.
• Infinite Jest. The best way I can describe it is 'The big, deep book about people written by a guy who reads big, deep books about people and knows how to write a big, deep about people and every part of the book is him showing us how he's writing the big, deep book about people, but we never get any big, deep insights about people to go along with the knowledge that this book sure was written to give them to you!'
• I was looking out at the wall of a room but in my eye I was seeing infinitely, kind of like a never ending runway. Another time I thought I went too far because I had to close my eyes and these pulsing patterns were too much, and as I lay I think on my bed, in the fetal position, terrified and focusing on breathing, I had a sensation of going inside out, like a rubber glove you peel off your hand and the glove is left inside out.
• In the Balkans, the mother is sacred to a son, and unless you're ready to throw down, you don't go there. Some will just give you a punch or a pimp-slap to cool you down if you're friends, some are ready to kill you for it though. And weirdly, between brothers and the very best of friends, once you get to the level of jokingly insulting another guys mother or sister without him grabbing your throat, you know you've made a friend for life.
• He legitimatey thinks that getting a drivers license allows the 'government' to come in and rape your women (I didn't inquire as to whether that was handled by a specific US Rapist Department, but I digress). He thinks you should be able to get out of a speeding ticket by just... refusing it? I don't know, I haven't suffered enough brain damage to fully comprehend most of the things my father believes.
• why the fuck did I come here? It's super uncomfortable being there, and it's not like you can really mingle or anything. It feels like you're giving a presentation in front of an arena full of people, but about a topic you know nothing about. It is.... incredibly awkward and uncomfortable. It's like the chicken salad sandwich from 7-11. It tastes like shit. I know it tastes like shit. And yet, I keep eating them.
• Even in a complex system, there is no such thing as luck. All possibilities play out according to what occurred elsewise, bubbling outwards, interacting and converging over time and space in a series of disastrous coincidences, guided and defined by what men would call the 'laws of numbers'. These laws of numbers, these probabilities, are limited only by what functions are known, and by the very perceptions of those who know them. The paths are not linear, and may diverge. And so there are different outcomes in different stories, even with the same base numbers, the same pasts, the same events. Roll the dice. Reset the game. All is known, and the world still is not what it seems. The maths tell all, but there is not all to tell.
• The man who has seen it all has not. He has seen lies, and horror, and betrayal. He has seen what people are, and the monsters that linger beneath their masks. He has seen demons, and been held in their sway. But he cannot see angels, for they wear the same masks as the demons. He cannot see love, because it looks no different from fear. And you cannot help him. Every truth you could possibly tell him he has already heard as a lie.
• The forest is an ocean. The deeper you go, the stranger things get, the deeper the forest becomes, the darker. There are thousands of unknowns, and in the darkness, the species get bigger, scarier, more dangerous. Instead of whales there are giant elder deer. Instead of trenches there are taller trees and tangled roots and deep jagged creeks. You can walk across the ocean, but in these depths you will need to climb over the mountainous roots. You will see the need for size. Darkness clings to the monsters here, hanging. Is there another side? Or beyond the ocean is there only more ocean?
• I've been cooking by myself for a while, and I realise I've been starting to make Early Apocalypse Onset Meals. I just made a pot containing rice, frozen peas, some frozen corn I found in a corner of the freezer, and Mystery Ground Meat. It contains the concept of nutrition without actually being a meal, and only noticing the concept of Food out the corner of its eye in a crowded square and pulling its hat down, trying not to be noticed.
• I finally figured it out! See, they want you to tell them truth, but they don't want all of the truth. Like today. She asked how I'm feeling, and today I just said 'You know, I'm feeling really good!' when what I was actually thinking was 'I'm feeling really good, and also, I wonder what your face would taste like if I cut it off and ate it.' Like that. They don't actually want all of the truth.
• I'll never stop being fascinated by the double standard people hold for intoxication. Its a mind altering substance and you can't be held responsible for any decisions you make while doing so, can't consent to anything, etc. Until you hurt someone. Then, not only did you apparently know precisely what you were doing, you deserve extra punishment because you were so incredibly irresponsible. And the drunker you were, i.e. literally more impaired and less likely to know what you're actually doing, the more people condemn you. It's honestly hilarious.
• 'Vaccines cause autism' gives people a weird sense of comfort. You can direct all your anger and frustration at them, Big Pharma or doctors or whoever sell vaccines. They purposely cause autism, just for money. Because, what's the alternative? The truth? 'We don't know what causes autism, but it's definitely not vaccines. No, we can't tell you what does cause it and we can't cure it. It'll just randomly happen to some people without any reason and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.' People would rather live in a world with a clearly defined monster they can fight than a nebulous lack of information.
• You're twitchy, shaking, and scared. You have the normal fear of not knowing what's going on, but with the virus really fucking the amygdala this is amplified a hundred fold. It's around this time the hydrophobia starts. You're horribly thirsty, you just want water. But you can't drink. Every time you do, your throat clamps shut and you vomit. This has become a legitimate, active fear of water. You're thirsty, but looking at a glass of water begins to make you gag, and shy back in fear. The contradiction is hard for your hot brain to see at this point. By now, the doctors will have to put you on IVs to keep you hydrated, but even that's futile. You were dead the second you had a headache.
• You're alone, hallucinating, thirsty, confused, and absolutely, undeniably terrified. Everything scares the literal shit out of you at this point. These strange people in lab coats. These strange people standing around your bed crying, who keep trying to get you 'drink something' and crying. And it's only been about a week since that little headache that you've completely forgotten. Time means nothing to you anymore. Funny enough, you now know how the bat felt when he bit you.
• I get that your horny brain made you think that fucking a coconut was a good idea, that's not even what surprises me. But your brain is supposed to return to normal after you blow your load, so why did your normal brain tell you 'it's fine to leave an open coconut in a warm room with semen and butter in it' and most importantly how were you not disgusted at the idea of fapping by using your several days old semen as lubricant?!
• I've always had a positive outlook on things and am drawn to feel good stories of recovery, forgiveness, reunion, etc, pretty much the 'return of the prodigal son'. But I never really thought about how those stories gloss over the pain and resentment of victims who are unable to forgive unforgivable actions but are inadvertently made to feel guilty and ashamed for feeling that way. We just kind of expect them to just automatically be the bigger person, eventually come to forgive, move on, if not now, then with the passage of the years.
• Life is long and complicated. You can never truly get a fresh start. Things wear you down over time. And you just get so tired. Getting excited about things is hard, and when you're an adult and you get excited about something, there's usually another adult in line that is ready to tear you down for it. Just because they're shitty and the only thing they get excited about, these days, is shitting on others.
• The world is cruel and harsh. Human compassion is one of the few mercy's that can exist in your life. If you aren't compassionate then you're neglecting one of the highest purposes of human existence. We bring light into the world with our compassion. Don't give up on that. We need more compassionate people in the world. If everyone decides to be selfish and hostile then our future will not be one that we enjoy living in. The world is what we make it, with every little action, the butterfly effect is true. Send out positive waves and try to make positive impacts in the world around you. Nothing else truly matters in the end besides the perpetuation of compassion and goodness.
• Take that imposter syndrome shit to the return desk and exchange it for brilliant conman syndrome, it'll change your life. Do you have great things in life? Shit yeah you do! Do you deserve them? Maybe! Maybe not! Do you deserve for good things to happen to you? Who gives a fuck! Will good things happen to you regardless? Fuck yeah they will! Get drunk on questionably placed power and tell the regret fairy to suck it cuz you're here to have a rad time!
• When you have the refill you can see the pellets, they are tiny and the whole bag is light as fuck even though it is huge. A beanbag chair is a whole ass chair and it will float on water even if you sit on it, it does not take the level of foresight belonging only to animals before a volcano or a tornado to know that you need a plan to handle them. What lack of perception is even necessary to not understand that these things will act worse than feathers. It is the glitter bomb of pillow stuffings and if you touch it at all it clings to the hand like the scales of Satan. How can any person make such a miserable mistake twice? It baffles me.
• Suicide will always be an option and you can keep it in your back pocket. For me, that makes me feel safe. But since it's always going to be an option, why not put it off one more day? You can always do tomorrow. You can always do it next week, next month or next year. It's never not going to be an option. So I got a kitten as a way to postpone it for myself. Right now suicide feels inevitable, and I am almost positive it's how I will die eventually. But for now I gotta hangout with my kitten.
• The atoms are crushed into their constituent subatomic particles, electrons and protons squeezed together to form neutrons, and what you have is basically neutron soup. This is what you find at the center of neutron stars - degenerate matter, held up by neutron degeneracy pressure, which we don't understand very well. Theoretically, you could squeeze further until the neutrons are torn apart into their constituent quarks. Most of the 'matter' inside a neutron isn't really matter at all, only a few percent in the form of quarks. The rest of the 'mass' of a neutron is actually energy, mediating the interactions between those quarks. So you could have a star that's been crushed beyond neutron degeneracy pressure, and is now quark soup instead of neutron soup. Quark soup being thousands of times denser. But we're still not at the level of a black hole.
• What do quarks break down to? Nothing, so far as we know, they are fundamental particles, not made of anything else. What determines their density, what's 'holding them up' and preventing them from shrinking further? We don't know. So this is where our knowledge of the quantum world stops. We don't know what's inside a black hole. It's not atomic scale, it's not even subatomic scale, it's something past that. Our theories offer no clue of what that something looks like, but we know it exists. It curves space-time, it produces gravity.
• Okay, just so you know, having enough papers that you require a filing cabinet to contain them all... is the first step to becoming my mother. Soon you're buying more and more filing cabinets, and then you just give up on filing cabinets and start stuffing papers into paper bags. Until you have dozens of 20-pound paper bags filled with 8 1/2" x 14 sheets of copy paper, and then boxes, and you start stuffing folded papers crosswise and lengthwise into other boxes, and then plastic crates, and then rubbermaid boxes. Soon, you've got 2,000 pounds of paper, and you can't throw any of it out because it's 'evidence'.
• We have a famous stand-up comedian in Germany, Serdar Somuncu, who toured around the country for years and read out of Mein Kampf. He was obviously making fun of it by showing how badly written it actually is. So he was destroying the myth about the book and its author. His shows frequently got visited by neo nazis which were like occupying the first row to threaten him during his performances. He even made them burst out in laughter regularly, since it took them by surprise what Hitler actually wrote in that book... This guy is a legend now.
• Gelatin-based anything was a status symbol for a long, long time. It was usually the bastion of the upper classes, but once they figured out how to mass produce gelatin in a dried form, well shiiiit, suddenly everyone could get in on the action. And much like any luxury item that suddenly becomes a Walmart staple, the upper classes reject the hell out of it until it becomes a marker of someone out of touch.
• 5:30pm is when I got that overwhelming feeling of fear and felt like the whole world around me was completely silent and my brain repeated 'something bad is happening'. The feeling of the silence and the emptiness of the sea and beach and roads around me felt like I didn't exist all of a sudden or that I wasn't in this world anymore. I don't know how else to explain it and I can't explain the whole thing other than coincidence.
• I've noticed that it's easy for people to put things in categories. Like this is all bad, or this is all good. And I tend to keep weighing the complexities of this whole situation. What is manipulation and what is consent? What motivations are pure? And the reason I don't want you to know my real name or see my real face is that I don't want to be defined by those who would judge me for the choices that I made. Anyone can make the decisions that I made.
• One day I come home from work. Stop by the kitchen to grab a bite. And there he was. In all his Glory. Crazy Italian Guy, sitting by the table. He glanced at me shortly with madness in is eyes and got back to his business. I realise there's a little pile of white powder by his side. 'Ok, so the guy's doing coke. Explains a lot,' I thought, innocently. Oh no, not at all. Crazy Italian Guy was not doing coke. What he was doing was cutting up a newspaper in an obsessive manner until it turned to actual dust. A whole newspaper. In tiny piles. For hours on end.
• As you know, holometabolous metamorphosis is one of the most ghastly things in nature. The larva is driven by chemical imperatives to entomb itself alive in its own final skin. Then the absence of a protective juvenile hormone permits the activation of the imaginal discs embedded in its infant flesh. These spew forth a torrent of enzymes which tear apart most of its cells in a sort of quasi-digestive self-immolation, leaving it as basically a shiny bulging sac of goo in which the discs float, spinning new arts and organs round themselves out of the dissolved ex-caterpillar. When they've finished, the imago will explode out of its old skin like a John Carpenter special effect. Its wings at this point are still soft and soggy, with the consistency of used kitchen paper, so it'll have to hang upside down, dry off and pump hemolymph into its wing-veins before it can take off and make innocent humans coo over its beautiful colours.
• He has missed major life events because he had to mow his lawn. That's not a metaphor. He didn't attend his son's wedding because of his lawn. Family vacations were delayed or cut short because he had to cut his grass. We moved to be near them. Every weekend, without fail, we would invite them to go with us to the beach or a theme park or dinner... and he always declined. Because he had to mow his lawn.
• The early internet was about exploring, finding paths through places you weren't really supposed to be, ways to do things for free that would normally cost a lot, discovering all this hidden information, sharing weird thoughts, etc. Most everyone there was weird, choosing to figure out stuff like that and share their interests and bizarre sense of humor online instead of just watching sports like a normal person or whatever. There were no real rules.
• There were all kinds of computers on the net. And they didn't all have compatible text modes. So you often got random garbled chunks of text if the other system used a different encoding or something. For some reason, the IRC servers that I found early on were I think in China, and even though most people were chatting in english, it was often garbled with weird symbols. And the long-distance BBSes that I used were always garbled. But we figured out how to understand each other well enough and had a lot of fun anyway.
• As others have said, restaurants, traveling, family, and holiday traditions are all missed, but one thing that really gets me is spontaneity. On a day off I used to love to just leave the house, maybe for breakfast or lunch or whatever, and just see where the day took me, maybe shopping, for a walk to take pictures, an early beer at the neighborhood bar, whatever. Now, every trip away from home is for a purpose and rigidly planned.
• Take the cookies off and set the cream aside. Take each cookie wafer and put them vertically in your mouth on the inside of your teeth up against your gums like when you're at the dentist and they ask you to bite down on that little radiation shield during X-rays. Now, your mouth should be held slightly open, and you should be slobbering a bit. That's good. You'll need that. Here's where the cream comes back into play. Take the naked cream and plop it right on to your undulating tongue. Maybe your tongue isn't undulating, but mine always is. I'm not sure it matters. The cream will melt and ooze and slowly pool at the molars where the cookies are clamped down. After a minute or two, they'll soften up and your whole mouth will collapse into the cream, with the half mushy cookies leading the way. Now, I'm not really one for chewing, so I like to do a sharp swallow and down the whole thing with a chaser of milk. My brother chews, but I think you should try it without chewing.
• Sometimes people use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like a person' and sometimes they use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like an authority' and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say 'if you won't respect me I won't respect you' and they mean 'if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a person' and they think they're being fair but they aren't, and it's not okay.
• Conspiracist ideation is often associated with low self-esteem and feelings of powerlessness. The conspiracist feels empowered by these beliefs because s/he becomes part of an 'elite' who know the 'truth' (what they don't want you to know!). This also produces a confirmation bias where they seek the echo chamber of supporting evidence. Contradictory evidence is dismissed because it is viewed as a personal attack by undermining the thing that gives them power and esteem.
• So this is a fascinating example, in practice, of the japanese concept of 'Ma'- negative space, the gap, the pause. It's where you just... stop. Doing lots of busy things in your day, getting from A-to-B nonstop? Take just... five minutes. Buy an icecream. Sit in the sun. Enjoy it. Life got you stressed? Stop and pet your cat. They need more love, and don't understand why you pet your phone more than them. Take the time. Sit with the little old lady. There's little moments in life that will add contrast to the noise, and without them, it just becomes static, a blur with no distinction. You'll miss out on both if you neglect one.
• You remember places, smells, sounds, blurry faceless figures of people who were once a major part of your life but now might as well not have existed. A birthday party in a strange, colourful room. A vast, bewildering out-of-town supermarket on a rainy Saturday. A garden patio on a warm summer evening, more youthful versions of your relatives chatting amongst themselves, using words you can't understand. It's unlikely you can recall any specific events, and you probably can't place them in any sort of context, but you remember that they happened. You remember how you felt. You remember being there.
• There is this one house I will never forget. It was filled with penises. There were pictures on the wall of penises. Penis statues, carvings, paintings, flags, tapestries, lamps, table legs, drawings, etc. were all of penises. The armrests on the chairs and couches were shaped like penises. So if you put your arm on them, you would be grabbing the head. Even the couches and chairs were upholstered in penis fabrics. The two dudes that lived there were both artists and they made all of it. It was the weirdest fucking thing I think I have ever seen.
• It is a substance that cools and warms in equal measure, both sold and known as a product that brings pain relief. So when you hear that it brings soul-scouring pain if applied to one's wrinkly undercarriage, it flies in the face of known facts. Okay, so maybe it hurts. You might have even just watched your friend do it, and they sure aren't acting as if it's a good time. But surely it can't be that bad. One little dab is enough to put the myth to the test. One little dab can't do that much damage.
• Your story is a perfect example of exactly why gaslighting is abuse. If this boy did exist in your family, and I think it's obvious at this point that he did, your family have all made you doubt not just your memories of him but also your ability to perceive and trust reality. This is deeply psychologically harmful. To be lied to for whatever reason that caused you to lose confidence and security in your own perception of the world. No child should ever have those kinds of fears.
• The book is very new agey, and a little obnoxious. But then I get to the chapter on emotions. Apparently creativity is a type of 'sexual feeling', and you know that you are being really creative at work when you feel a tingling in your genitals. They also included a helpful diagram, with an arrow pointing to the stick figure's penis area, in case you weren't sure where the sexy part of your body is.
• It stuck itself to the inside of the bag with its own shit. What useless fucking... the females of these bugs don't have external genitalia, apparently. The males just march up to them with their sword-dicks and jab them in the abdomens and squirt jizz in. It's called 'traumatic insemination' or some shit, and the males are so dumb, they'll do this to other males, too. I'm gonna write a book titled Shit I Never Wanted to Learn.
• We don't love free will, we love the idea of free will, the idea that we are responsible for our choices, that our choices have meaning, that we have control. But so often, we don't have control. Our choices are nothing but one impossible option or another, one last grasp at survival. Will we save ourselves at the expense of our dignity? Will we save ourselves at the expense of another? In these choices we are forced to make, no matter the option, we give up something of ourselves to do so. It is not free at all, for the cost is our soul.
• Keep your aspirations to yourself. Telling anyone in your household or social strata about your plans to get out and do better may be met with bitterness and downright ridicule. People will call you uppity for wanting to go to school or stupid for having a career goal that isn't modest and local and vaguely dead-end. People will tell you that you have no common sense simply because you refuse to see the world in terms of pure survival.
• If there's a rule that everyone breaks, then anyone who breaks it doesn't stand out. In fact, people who try to call out other people for breaking it get called names for being holier-than-thou or a wuss or something analogous. Anyone who decides to follow the rule gets taken advantage of by people who break it, so they don't feel bad about breaking it themselves. Even if it harms other people, those other people are rule-breakers so it's still a fair situation.
• You're getting handled in a way that you've never experienced and things are happening to your body that you don't understand. You 'let' it happen because you don't know any better and it's an adult. Surely this is okay? You're told to keep it a secret otherwise you'll be in big trouble. There's clearly something wrong but being a five year old you just bottle it up and never really think about it.
• These humans were being told that they were killing the people they were charged with making healthy and whole. On top of the whole 'How dare you suggest that I, a gentleman of means, am unclean!?' combined with 'Well this other gentleman of means and several of his peers say that you are wrong,' we have the very real and sadly common human reaction of '...but I'm the helper. I can't be hurting them because I'm the one who helps.'
• Toddlers are just insane little people. Their brains are capable of complex problem solving, but they don't have enough information to deduce from, so they just make shit up that fills in the gaps. Kind of like when people in a psychotic break will just adapt new information into their delusions. It's all part of growing up and learning, but it can be funny as fuck as an adult listening to the insane ramblings of a 3 year old.
• For years I struggled to recreate my grandmother's recipes until I discovered that 'tablespoon' in her recipe book didn't actually mean 'tablespoon', but referred to this random goddamn spoon she had in her kitchen, and all the other measurements in there had similar logic. Meanwhile when my other Gran died her daughters fought for days over her recipe notebook that nobody was allowed to touch, until they finally decided to just copy the recipes down and so they opened it and found out there was only one entry and it said 'Book that I pretend has recipes'.
• An apartment complex that has a bed bug infestation will have a very specific smell. It's almost a boxy but sweet sort of smell with maybe a shoe-polish finish? Kind of like a stink bug, but less intense and almost a little fruity. If you've ever been on the L in Chicago early in the morning, excluding a holiday weekend, before people have infested it with their own grossness, that's the smell of bed bugs.
• There is a lot of crap like that that's better ignored. Invisible black holes that travel through the universe and we can only detect them when they 'eat' suns, the idea that we are unlikely to inhabit a stable universe (not impossible but unlikely) or even the idea that has something to do with string theory where the universe can just poof and collapse back into nothing at any point. Nothing to do about any of this so you can only ignore it.
• We booked a band one Saturday night who was a really big reggae star in the area. As the dude was setting up my manager and I noticed it was eerily dead for the evening as the band was just about to start so we went out to smoke. The woods behind the restaurant had a thick fog coming out of it and we were noticing how odd that was considering it was a really warm and clear night in July. Then we saw them. Groups of stoners with dreads and beanies emerging from the tree line. It wasn't fog in the woods... it was marijuana smoke. We didn't sell that many drinks that night but I remember the cooks complaining about the amount of mac n cheese they sold.
• Never underestimate what poor hiring practices and a lack of training can do. Way back, I worked at a grocery store and my coworker called me over to help him because he couldn't get an item to scan. It was a potato. Not a potato with a barcode sticker, or in a wrapper or anything like that. Just a fresh, raw, skin-on potato, and he was waving it back and forth over the scanner, completely confounded that nothing was happening.
• But that's the problem. So many of these masks, so many of my lies, they're not my own. They never were. I've always preferred the truth, but so often, people don't want to hear it. They refuse to see it, even when it's staring them right in the face, and instead they fill in the narrative with lies, they create their own masks to cover it up. And I'm no different. There are things I never wanted to know, either, things I would have believed anything to never have had to confront. Only time wears it all down again.
• I actually had to explain to a therapist that even when people, like therapists, say there is no wrong answer, they almost never mean it. They might not want any specific answer, but they usually expect the answer to fall within a certain ballpark, and when you're on the spectrum, you can have an uncanny ability to answer outside of that ballpark, and it leaves the asker anywhere from baffled to frustrated, which in turns makes open questions frustrating for you, because you gotta figure out what they want first, and they won't tell you.
• Light is neither a particle nor a wave. It's something that we don't have a word for and that doesn't exist in a way that we can sense directly. But this unnamed thing happens to act in a way similar to a wave in some situations and like a particle in others. A cylinder will roll like a sphere in one direction but not roll like a cube in the other. That doesn't make it a sphere and a cube at the same time. It makes it something different.
• That is your boundary. Feel free to have it. But also reflect on why you have that feeling. Just because it is your personal boundary does not make it exempt from bigotry. I question all the time why my gut reaction goes a certain way and when I first started doing it, I found that a lot of the things that I felt were based in some sort of bigotry. With gay men in particular, a lot of those feelings that we think are internal are actually due to a shitload of toxic masculinity in our culture.
• One thing leapt immediately to mind when you wrote, 'We need management that is not just charismatic, not just good at giving speeches, but empathetic and compassionate, who genuinely understands our experiences' - people who are charismatic, or what passes for charismatic in some environments, and good at giving speeches are very rarely also empathetic and compassionate. Our articles on superficial charm and psychopathy in the work-place may be of interest.
• It also turned out, unfortunately for Lenin's mob, that no matter how inspired the Red Guard and the days-old Red Army were by the Revolution, it turned out that the maximum effective range of revolutionary zeal proved to be somewhat shorter than that of the Gewehr 98 firing a 7.92x57. This led to two things. Firstly, the Germans gained more ground in five days than they had in three years. Secondly, it led to a stunning realisation that perhaps it would be a good idea to have people who knew what the hell they were actually doing staffing the army.
• The call went out, to comrade soldiers and former officers alike, to come back to the colours. Well, the new colours. And the idealism of the Red Army died about a month into it existence. That call also went out at the higher levels and senior tsarist officers were brought in as specialists. They weren't particularly trusted, they were given minders in the form of political commissars who held the level of Command Authority as well. However, they did vaguely know what they were doing, and the Soviets were fairly desperate. So desperate indeed, that the idea of elected positions and an absence of ranks was abolished mid-1918 and anybody who didn't like it was a counter-revolutionary, and was then shot.
• NEVER EVER, EVER, USE A CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN FROM A HOTEL OR BANQUET HALL!!! Picture this: it's an expensive ass Sunday brunch. Well little Timmy just double fisted strawberries directly into that chocolate, bit into both strawberries then triple dipped into the chocolate AGAIN! And some old rich lady just sneezed on it. And somebody else just dropped their snack into it. The best part: that chocolate gets strained and saved for the next weeks brunch. Chocolate is waaay too expensive to throw away.
• Kids have a fundamental sense of fairness and when they see a situation where they feel things are unfair, they will sacrifice their own advantage or sacrifice to punish those behaving selfishly in order to maintain fairness. I imagine that you noticed the injustice in the inequality of how your parents treated you both as a child and used your kid logic to correct that injustice to maintain fairness.
• We have no issue leaving her at home alone. She has a spot where she waits, and as soon as we start getting ready to leave, she goes there. Sometimes we come home to find some clothing in the spot with her, but she behaves herself perfectly. We didn't train her to do this. She just does. I read somewhere that, for most dogs, if you are chill about leaving, and if you've developed a relationship where they feel secure and loved, this tends to be how it goes.
• I work in maintenance. Fax-machines are the hell. Difficult to set up - because of analog phone lines, which don't exist anymore and require all kinds of shenanigans to emulate - horrible to maintain. If you ever got a call by a fax machine, you know what bleeding ears mean. I forgot to mention how freaking slow this tech is (did you know that they convert the imagine to a serial signal, then convert that to a analog phone signal, then this gets converted to a VoIP call and all the way back on the other end?). Just because some dinosaurs wont get used to emails, doesn't mean fax machines are anyway less inferior!
• Unfortunately, the term sphincter isn't reserved just for one thing. There's another two sphincters around our pupils (one each), another two around our eyes, two sphincters in our esophagus (top and bottom), another one at the end of our stomach, one between ileum and colon, another one leading into the duodenum, the anus, two more in our urethra... Not to mention countless precapillary sphincters. Countless.
• We live in the shadow of Leviathan, a beast made not by men, but by the evil that dwells within men's hearts. All mankind can hear his voice, his words echo from the abyss behind our eyes, and he shares with our spirits his visions of conquest and power. Nations are brought forth in his name, and empires rendered to ash at his command. The man who subjugates his neighbor, and the nation that steals from its people, are compelled to evil by the same force. Men hunger for power, and Leviathan promises power to all who harbor his sentiments. Resist his voice, lest his will overshadow your own.
• There aren't a ton of great autism orgs out there. The one I know of that isn't awful is the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), and they have recently had some concerns come to light involving internal racism and bad management. I can tell you to put a country mile between you and Autism Speaks (anything branded with puzzle pieces typically ties back to them). They are the PETA of autism advocacy.
• I'm begging you, as an autistic person, as a parent, as a mother of autistic kids. Your therapist is wrong. Please, please listen to your daughter. Her health and safety is so much more important than trying new things on someone else's timeline! She'll try new things when she's ready and motivated to. That sick feeling in your gut that you have when she hurts herself - listen to it. She's autistic. No amount of therapy is making her autism go away, so if she's telling you 'this is too much', listen to her!
• It's funny how such a disgustingly violent incident, a scene of utter chaos that the operators had to endure for close to a full day, and one that the parents will suffer through for the rest of their life, can be so systematically boiled down to a few default terms regurgitated over and over and over by the media, as though each and every incident can be treated with a simple copy/paste and change of the date. There is not a single word in that article that can even remotely convey the horror of that scene, nor frighten the average driver to keep two hands on the wheel and concentrate on the road.
• It is the excuse. You can put it any way you want it; don't dish it if you can't take it, don't start none won't be none, fucked around and found out. But the fact of the matter is, in this world we must be kind first, and be kind to all, but as soon as the other person foregoes kindness towards you in favor of hostilities, you destroy them. Mercilessly, utterly, as completely as you can. You let them know you are kind as a choice, not for a lack of spine. And move on.
• All the things happening to you right now are actually pretty... normal. Someone who learns magic would usually end up in the Mages Guild and be given free room and board. Someone who helps a wealthy sorceress out of a mind-control spell would usually be given a big reward. Someone looking for a package while knowing the exact room it was stored in would usually find it. None of these 'strokes of luck' are actually that lucky; they're just kind of what would happen to a normal person in your position. Assuming that the universe is actively out to fuck you over might be overestimating how much the universe actually cares about you.
• The Original Sin that sabotaged my citation graph workflow is that I used Redis as my data store, a data store that does everything in RAM. This killed scalability, disabled the service for years, and the only reason it came back is because I finally had a machine with enough RAM to run it. Currently I am working on a next-generation database in Postgres, and once I do this I may be able to rewrite Citationgraph Bot to use that instead.
• I want her to see and like the side of the internet that I do, like the people and the genuine interactions you can have. For example this post: I made it when I was half out of my mind from jellyfish toxins, finally got some sleep then woke up to find a bunch of people supporting me in my feelings. There are good sides to the internet, there are genuinely kind people here, but she's been so stuck in the fake stuff that she doesn't see the side of the internet that I do. I wish she did.
• Ironically the catastrophic recursion log write is caused by catastrophic recursion detected. It detects the recursion, writes it to log, and exits. The problem with this is that the recursion keeps happening, except now it's affecting log writes instead of other things. Yes, I'm pissed that this is how it works. In general if you're expecting anything in the code base to make sense you are wasting your time.
• I'm an insomniac, and let me tell you, disrupted circadian rhythms can do some incredibly destructive things to the body. It can trickle down in so many different and unexpected ways. Memory issues are pretty common. Mental fatigue can make it seem like a person has a different personality at times, because they're just trying to scrape by and don't have the 'energy' to be themselves. Certain parts of the brain may not be recharging and replenishing empty resources.
• Who are you trying to convince? Yourself, or everyone else? I'm a marriage counselor. And I can say that most times this behavior will only get worse. You shouldn't have to put up with that. His behavior is very disrespectful and speaks volumes on his opinion of you. I get it you're 18. You think this is your only chance at 'true love', but trust me. You have all the time in the world to find someone who cherishes you, and treats you how you deserve to be. Don't sacrifice your self respect just to put up with someone else.
• I often think people are assholes themselves for avoiding confrontation when other people are being assholes. I worked in a sexist, demoralizing, horrifically toxic work environment with someone really close to me and, while I can hold my own, there were times where I was shocked this guy didn't stick up for me and watched me getting verbally abused by my boss. Wanting not to 'make waves' can absolutely make someone the asshole.
• The discomfort of the people around the parents whose child died is a fraction of the pain of living after the death of your own child. That pain is magnified exponentially every time another person ignores that your child ever existed. Someone literally asked me once if I counted my son (when I was pregnant with my third after my son's death) since he died at 17 months old, or if I considered my current pregnancy my second child. I almost asked her if she counted her living 13 month old as her child. This whole attitude is absolutely ridiculous.
• No time to be gentle in an emergency. Just like when they are trying to do CPR, bones will likely be broken. When doctors are 'doing everything' to save a life, it's not pretty. It's not gentle. It's likely very painful and messy. They are doing whatever it takes to save a life. They don't have time to do anything else because every second matters. Unfortunately it is also very traumatic. I'm sorry you went through that, but I hope you and your son are alright now.
• Nothing is as ironic as the people who preach about Noah and the flood not even blinking when the scientifically proven metaphorical flood of climate change is on the table. It's that tragic disharmony between faith and science that just shouldn't exist - the metaphysical and personal does not require scientific proof to be subjectively real to some people, just as one cannot make claims about scientific facts merely based on them. You're not supposed to be arguing if a sword is better than a shield until you're crippled in your anguish over having to choose when you're probably supposed to be wielding both to your advantage.
• It's something many dystopian fictions get wrong: the way it just slips in, slowly and passively. Like, people live in this hell, calculate how much of debts they'll have left when they'll die of their diabetes they won't be able to pay, while others are shouting 'Murica number 1' in riot to remove the vaccines, brainwashed by politics that just play with them. I just wonder, how it would have been seen if it was explained to someone in the 70s.
• You know when they send people door to door to try to convert you? The church knows that they have no chance of converting you. That's not the point of sending these people out. The point is to train them to use the most annoying of tactics on you so you'll be visibly aggravated with them. To get doors slammed in these people's faces over and over again. The point is to teach the people going door to door that the world hates them, and that the only safe place for them is back at church, among other Jehovah's Witnesses.
• I do not despise all children, it's just that these children in particular were... unbelievable. One kid came and sat on me. He didn't acknowledge my existence or seem to particularly care about me, he just acted as if I was a chair. It was an extremely strange and very loud group of children. I tried to just pretend I could not see them because that seemed to be what they wanted me to do and when you are confronted by a large group of children you go with their flow, because they are scary and could easily switch into Lord of the Flies mode at any moment.
• Being on the sidelines is exactly what I'm talking about when I use the term 'spectator'. It's a common metaphor to describe the stages of parenting. To start, you're in the game, on the field with them. As they go into teenage years, you're the coach - helping them from the sidelines, giving them good techniques, showing them the ropes and giving them a safety net. Once they enter adulthood, you're in the stands, spectating - cheering them on and encouraging them while they play their own game unassisted. Spectating doesn't mean uninvolved - it means you're not making the decisions for them, you're supporting their decisions.
• You don't ever remind a person with dementia about the passing of their loved one. It might hurt you to know that they don't remember. Maybe you need the closure of grieving with your loved one who has dementia. But they will not remember that tomorrow. To remind them is to torture them. Think about the first time you learned a loved one died. Think of the pain in that first moment. Every moment after that is slightly less painful. Nothing is like hearing it for it the first time.
• The 1980s-1990s studies initially concluded that fish stocks in the best-known fishing areas such as the Mediterranean and Grand Banks were down 80-90% from levels in the 1950s and 60s. Further historical research concluded that the fish stocks in the 50s-60s were ALREADY 80-90% depleted from pre-Victorian levels. When Cabot 'discovered' the Grand Banks (probably already fished from Europe on the quiet), he described being able to fill a basket with cod just by dipping it in the water, and the biggest cod were as big as the ship's rowing boat.
• This car's got history. It's seen some shit. People have done straight things in this car. People have done gay things in this car. It's not going to judge you like a fucking Volkswagen would. Interesting facts: This car's exterior color is gray, but its interior color is grey. In the owner's manual, oil is listed as 'optional'. When this car was unveiled at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show, it caused all 2,000 attendees to spontaneously yawn. The resulting abrupt change in air pressure inside the building caused a partial collapse of the roof. Four people died. The event is chronicled in the documentary 'Bored to Death: The Story of the 1999 Toyota Corolla'.
• When I was younger, I always found it so strange that so many songs were about love, and so little else. Only later did I learn it was more shallow than it seemed, and so much deeper than just songs. Almost everyone has experienced or longed for the idea of love. Rarer, later, quieter, just not talked about, is the love that hurts, or the love that makes whole. We haven't the words for how to mourn the loss of someone who never even was. We have no clean way of expressing the joy of a bursting pride for someone else who defied all odds; we haven't even the expression for the sense relief when it's our own accomplishment. We call it validation, we scorn validation. And yet we long for the feeling, the arousal. We sing songs that call for love, when what we really need is to be heard in everything else, to be understood as we simply are."
• I have an orange cat. I love him to bits, and he may be the love of my life. But the simple truth is that he's dumber than a box of hammers. When I talk to anyone about him and want to put him in a good light, I usually refer to him as 'gloriously stupid'. He doesn't understand some of the most basic stuff that all other cats (that aren't orange) just instinctively know and do. It's just how he is. It's just how orange cats are.
• The term is poverty of imagination. Something is either extremely concrete, right there in front of their eyes, or they don't get it, and get annoyed with you pretty quickly if you try to make them use their imaginations to understand your point. Nothing they do or say is original. It's copied whole cloth from other people and media that they like. Other people's originality strikes them as annoying randomness. If you ask for any kind of unusual request or special consideration, this breaks their brain, and they usually jump to the conclusion you're trying to cheat them. This is both a safe conclusion to jump to if you're not very bright, and a legitimization for expressing the frustration they feel for not being able to follow what the hell you're trying to say, and your failure to just fall in line and be no trouble to them.
• The ratio is actually about 98% real movie with 2% porno spliced in. The porn parts are also not... 'fun' in the way pornhub would be. More disturbing than sexy. What's interesting about it is the novelty factor. It's essentially a big budget film with Malcolm McDowell, but it feels like a "B" movie. It does manage to capture this certain mood/tone of complete and utter insanity. It's pure hedonism and madness with this ever-present sense of dread and anxiety. It's not a good movie, but it's definitely unique.
• When I was a little kid, maybe 6, my dad worked as a welder. One day he brought me to work. He would to start his drive at 4am. I remember riding through the city on the bench seat of his 80's Mazda B2000 pickup. This is the first time I remember seeing the glow of sodium lights covering everything I could see in a soft, warm orange light. We lived in the country and I had seen singular streetlamps, but never anything like that, passing under rows of lights on the urban interstate and through the city. That was over 20 years ago and every time I drive on a road at night lit solely by sodium lights it takes me right back there to simple times with my dad, a humble welder, but still my hero. Technology changes, but I hope there is never a night when there is no sodium light remaining. Maybe I'll tell my grandchildren about the warm, calming glow of the past. But words can never convey the magic I felt.
• They say they don't buy it because we must be so fucked up to view stuff like this, literally say we must be psychotic and/or worse things. That's entirely wrong, though; this kind of content can help people so much, whether it means being more careful in your day-to-day life or not being suicidal because you either see people fail and live a horrible life afterwards, or succeed and see the family's reactions to their death.
• If you want me to hear and understand what you are trying to communicate, I can't be making eye contact. If you're trying to communicate technical information that I need to process and respond to, I can't even be looking in the same direction as you. I never understood why people say that eye contact shows people you're listening. Like all I'm going to hear when making eye contact is every fiber of my being screaming at me to look somewhere else...
• I have these déja vu's of déja vu's of déja vu's and then a déja vu of this happening with the same context; I was in the same place with the same people talking to me saying that exact thing. It just makes no sense, it can go on for like a minute of thoughts inside my head of déja vu. And sometimes it happens, and then I déja vu a thought that occurred in my head the time before, like I would déja vu thinking 'fucking hell, no way this is real' and I would think about it and déja vu.
• You really start to question what is real and what is not when you have seizures. It's a metaphysical level of fear. Eventually you grow to deal with them emotionally afterwards but before (and during if you don't lose consciousness) you become convinced that reality is becoming fluid. You can tell yourself it's just a seizure, but you're still terrified and believe things that are true aren't true, and things that aren't true are.
• To preface this, chicken and human rigor mortis is roughly the same. For a chicken if you slaughter the chicken and want to eat it, you have less than 1 hour to get the chicken in the pot before rigor mortis, else you have to wait 8hours. The normal amount of time recommended is 3-5 days in the fridge to let the body relax. For humans it's 2 hours till rigor mortis then 8 hours and most likely another 12 hours of rigor mortis.
• As someone that's battled those thoughts, the end result does not matter. Who finds our body does not matter. All that matters at that point of your life is to make the voice stop and make the pain go away. There is no glamorized scenario where we are found looking serene and beautiful and peaceful. The last thing we give a fuck about is what other people are going to think of us, and why would we? We will be dead.
• The biggest problem with it is that it's kind of a safety issue. If someone has health problems that might mean passing out or injuring themselves, like a seizure disorder or allergies, then a physical barricade like that might not be the best idea. It could also be a problem in a fire for the same reason. On the other hand, it could protect someone in the event of a break in... Basically, it's a matter of considering your individual situation and needs, then weighing the pros and cons.
• She's forcing misogynist and bigoted beliefs, which are damaging to society as a whole, onto her children. She is emotionally manipulative and refuses to engage in constructive dialogue with you. She's your mom and you love her, and that's okay. You will always love her. But you'll do well to examine her behaviors and separate your love for her from the belief that she's a good mom. Good moms want the best for their kids, and guide them and support them in becoming their best.
• I know so many people who had relationships like this and got married because 'it was time'. No love between them, really, just a weird animosity. The same people who see a relationship that's years in and healthy and go 'Enjoy it while it lasts!' and tell people that they're dumb to get married and 'will understand someday. Like yes maybe the marriage or relationship won't work out, but we didn't go into it hating each other from the jump?
• Penuel, literally translated, is 'Face of God', and is a sacred site located atop a mountain top, where you can see the sun rise over most of Jordan. It doesn't literally mean God's Face, and the tale isn't meant to be about literally wrestling with God. Mountain landscapes, particularly those with impressive sunrises, have been referred to as 'looking into the face of God' since proto-Indoeuropean times. It's a cross-cultural idiom that vastly predates the penmanship.
• Somebody had to film that scene. Somebody had to work out the blocking and framing. Somebody had to hold the microphone boom. Somebody had to stand in front of the camera multiple times with a clapper slate and say 'Thankskilling Scene 43 Take 1'. Somebody had to go in with a light meter and make sure the lighting would show up right in camera. Somebody had to make a turkey puppet with a silicone mask on it. All this, after somebody wrote this scene on a stolen macbook while snorting meth and crushed caffeine pills off a truckstop hooker's butt. I'm gonna assume the people who did all those things were the four people on camera.
• Having worked with lots of suicidal people over the years and having lost my first husband to suicide, I just want to say that some people have too much pain to live with, very often through terrible circumstances and no fault of their own, but they still are the ones that have to live with it. It's no-ones place to convince them to live with that pain longer than they want but having someone just be there, listen, and care in the end is an amazing gift to give, even if i's the last one they can receive.
• Have you heard about Quantum Immortality? Basically, from what I understand of it, in a near-death experience your active consciousness transfers over to an alternate reality where you lived. The others won't follow though and will just witness the reality where you died but you have already transferred so it doesn't concern you. It's the best I can explain it but what I can say is I definitely know that feel. There were multiple times in my past where I was in a near-death situation and I was one step away from passing on, but still I lived, or at least my consciousness is still alive despite the odds.
• There are all sorts of horrendous medieval or high-tech punishments you can mete out on characters in a game. But sometimes the best ones are the simplest, those that strike a chord with the players. Having a character drawn and quartered is kind of abstract, but having one be made to sit in the naughty chair with their nose to the wall is profoundly embarrassing and visceral. Especially if you do it to a noble in the King's court.
• If scientists got paid more and management types knew how to plan work more efficiently, we'd cure fucking everything. But we aren't paid enough and management doesn't care as long as they get paid to sit around. So bench scientists just fart around finishing projects here and there, sometimes making a mad dash at the last possible minute to get data for a deadline, but mostly just surfing the web and drinking coffee.
• As a Political Scientist, the data compels me to report that everyone is wrong about everything at all times. There is not one single topic that all who have been polled can agree on. Regardless of faith, race, class, age, and several other rapidly changing demographics, there is not one sentence that can be uttered that can not be deemed contentious or will not be argued against in our current age. This hypothesis has been confirmed at the 0.05 level. However, the remaining 4% are currently in contention and we are awaiting counterarguments.
• Sadly I think there are a lot of childish adults, but worse, adults who don't honour their children as sentient beings. I'm 56 and actually remember being your age. I believe you sound incredibly smart and well mannered. You strike me as a young woman who has a head on her shoulders and can be trusted with adult conversations and concepts. People too often dismiss lack of experience for inability to fathom and process simple/complex situations, which is so clearly wrong in your case. I am sorry you are stuck there for another year and a half.
• Medicine has gotten too good at keeping people alive. Kids would sit for months and months connected to CRRT (dialysis) and ECMO (heart/lung machine) literally wasting away before ultimately dying. And when they die they don't resemble anything like a kid. They look like puffy little aliens who sometimes have lost the perfusion to their hands and feet so now they're dead and black. It's horrific and I can't imagine putting a child through that. I also cannot imagine spending my days sitting in a hospital room watching that happen to my child.
• As bad as the situation is, it's heartening to hear that your relationship is still strong. I don't know if you do this already, but I think that you can endure if you focus your love on him intensively. It's probably hard after so many years of marriage and you fall into a groove but if you're always waiting for him to come home after work, thinking about things he might like, sending him loving text messages and just generally being the light of his life, which is one of the things you can do in spite of your chronic pain, he will never be stuck in a job he hates because he has a source of pure love to come home to.
• Humans will laugh themselves out of a horrifying situation to which there is nothing they can do. I don't think it's entirely inappropriate because appropriation is something we do as a cultural norm. In this case any emotion of discomfort and helpless watching would likely ignite laughing in the same way many people watch horror to feel relief that reality is safer. I would feel differently if they were laughing and participating in the animals fate, but they cannot so I would expect the weirdest reactions out of people.
• This is why a lot of people with lazy eyes develop monocular vision. The brain just kind of decides 'yeah, no, that's wrong' and ignores anything coming from that organ. It happens easier in children. The alternative is so wonky it'd cause severe headaches, dizziness, etc. The images are so separate and your brain trying to work with both when it's used to a single joint image is usually going to result in the brain ignoring the image you're not focusing on.
• Sure, you 'could have' shown him proof that the car was yours. You also could have put on a Spider-Man costume and run around the parking lot flapping your arms like a chicken and singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The point is that it wasn't remotely within his rights to demand either of you, since you were a complete stranger to him, the car wasn't his, and he literally didn't have a single piece of evidence to suggest that anything inappropriate - much less anything illegal - was going on.
• People misunderstand glitter. Treat it as a hazardous substance, not unlike a can of polyurethane, and generally you will have good results. Follow up by sealing it with polyurethane after for full effectiveness. It is not that it is not a child's toy, but that children miss half the experience, as they are not the ones getting glitter sealed to their skin with polyurethane for the better part of a week. They are fully capable of learning proper handling, and with this knowledge, nobody need deal with loose glitter ever again.
• Pronouncing the 't' still is considered lower class by many self-proclaimed language snobs. One basis of the snobbery may be literacy: those who are able to read are the only ones who would include a 't' sound. Of course, that bit of snobbery doesn't account for a word like fasten where no one pronounces the 't'. Which is to say, as with most bits of language snobbery, insisting that others pronounce a word according to your personal preference is most likely good evidence that the insisting person is an asshole.
• Secrets tend to fester. They might delay consequences, but they also tend to make them worse when they do come out. They also sometimes create new ones like the niece suffered through. Her whole life she saw her uncle be loving and generous to everybody but her and not know why. Was it her? Was she seen as unworthy? What has she done? Did she deserve it? I'm sure these thoughts went through her head at least a few times growing up. She suffered through all of this because her parents did something horrible, something she has probably been raised to see as bad and to never do, and she was a product of that. She suffered and was never told why, thereby increasing the suffering because her parents were and continued to be selfish until it all came out.
• I don't have a favourite colour, I just love colour. I love how green is really various amalgamations of like twenty different colours that all kind of suck, but the complexity of how they come together in nature is beautiful. I love to hate on yellow, I love how white is everything and nothing all at once, I love how black makes everything else pop. I love the mellow, clear simplicity of red, and the harsh complexity of blue, how utterly piecing the many, many variants can be. That's what makes it beautiful.
• This is like my personal 'golden rule'. If you think what you did was fine, why can't I tell people about it? Own it if it's not big deal. But if you think what you did was so fucked up it can't be spoken about publicly, then apologize and stop fucking doing it. I'll keep it between us if you acknowledge your mistake. But if you think it's cool to throw a kid's favorite blanket away, why the fuck do you care if everyone knows? Because I will make sure everyone knows.
• There may be no act of human failing that more fundamentally challenges our society's views about crime, punishment, justice, and mercy. According to statistics compiled by a national childs' safety advocacy group, in about 40 percent of cases, authorities examine the evidence, determine that the child's death was a terrible accident - a mistake of memory that delivers a lifelong sentence of guilt far greater than any a judge or jury could mete out - and file no charges. In the other 60 percent of the cases, parsing essentially identical facts and applying them to essentially identical laws, authorities decide that the negligence was so great and the injury so grievous that it must be called a felony, and it must be aggressively pursued.
• The human memory, especially when recalling events or details from childhood, is beyond 'rather unreliable' and is closer to 'mostly unreliable'. Chances are that you don't actually vividly remember anything from childhood, it's all distorted and out of sequence. It doesn't help that when you think you're remembering a childhood event, you're actually remembering the memory. And this repeats. It's like Chinese whispers.
• My mother's side of the family was Catholic, though not very good ones, and so had the usual assortment of statues, crucifixes, etc. Mom was definitely not Catholic, and when we were touring a new home for them, there was a niche in the wall in the living room. Naturally I whispered, 'What the hell is that for?' Mom answered, 'It's the Jesus hole.' Never laughed so hard in my life. At least not at a house showing.
• A marriage and the person you share children with is the most impactful relationship a person has - it impacts your health, career, finances, children's development, everything. You wouldn't let a toothache rot your whole mouth before seeing a dentist, so why wouldn't you be equally proactive in addressing problems that are within such a significant relationship before they deteriorate your bond with your partner? The fact that people think of couple's counseling as something to use as a last resort, rather than a tool to utilize when problems first begin popping up, always saddens me.
• Sorry, but Christmas trees have got to be the saddest of all the trees. Overcrowded living conditions, new growth lopped off every year, groomed to be the 'perfect' tree, cut in the prime of their youth, only to be abandoned in the cold by the side of the road. Like Texas cheerleader meets Chinese foot binding, but for trees. Their only hope is to be abandoned in the back corner of a failed u-cut tree farm because they were too ugly to be loved.
• We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.
• Perhaps they'll grow up courageous, finding joy in all of life, filled with wonder and hope despite all the pain before them. Or perhaps they'll only resent their lifetime of agony, in which they themselves had no say at all. But you can't know, now. Now, faced with your tiny bundle of miswrapped baby, you must choose for them, and you may never know if it was the right choice. But you'll have to live with that choice regardless.
• No one knows everything about medicine, and often patients turn up before their symptoms get bad enough to match the descriptions in the textbook. It's only a matter of time before you miss something bad. If it hasn't happened to you, then you haven't seen enough patients. When it does happen to you, it will burn itself into your brain forever. It will eat at you and keep you awake at night, but the only way to keep going is to find a way to persevere and learn so you never miss it again. Accept the fact that you are going to miss something again and change your practice to reflect this fact.
• If my son were to follow through with his suicidal ideation, my dark secret is I completely understand because he would be out of his pain, and although it would completely destroy both of us, he would be more at peace than he is now. This kid is my life and my light. But him being at peace is something that I don't know that medication or his parents or environment can give him and that is the worst possible feeling you can have as a parent.
• Both leave the same scar, during the development stage until adulthood we inherently believe that anything happens to us happens because of us, and we must not be good enough to be loved. This is regardless of the reasoning, and this trauma remains ingrained in our subconscious, following us throughout our life until we become aware of it and get in touch with our inner-child's needs that weren't met by our biological family.
• I just wanted to say that from the description you've given your mother sounds like a wonderful person. Loving flawed individuals can be... difficult. For many it can be hard to see past the things they get wrong. But we are all hurting in one way or another, and those that can carry that pain with kindness are my favorite type of people. The strongest creatures on this planet. And from what I've read kindness is something she had mastered. I'm sorry for your loss, but she left something special behind. Never them take that, or make you doubt it.
• Think about it this way - when you see how she is with her child, and you think of how different it is from how she raised you, imagine how much pain that must cause her. The way she acts now is the way she believes all children should be parented, and she could not give that to you. I suspect she is probably burdened by a deep, painful sense of guilt and failure over how you were raised, because she simply couldn't provide for you in all the ways she wanted to.
• He must wield the mythological Penis of Persuasion. I personally have never encountered one, but I have heard tales of a dick so golden that it causes those who fall under its spell to lose their ability to logic, reason or stand up for themselves. It has a female counterpart, the Pussy of Persuasion - a golden cavern of reputed muscular dexterity that men will throw all their time, treasure and common sense away. I too have never encountered this mythical beast as well. But apparently, they are all over the place from what Reddit tells me. I personally am glad to have never encountered either in the wild.
• I was taking someone home who had severe cancer, and had seemingly developed an acute lack of fucks. Hypofuckemia, if you will. He shit himself upon arrival to his house, but we needed extra help to carry him up the stairs to his house. It took 20 more minutes for them to arrive. We got him inside and his family had the pizza waiting for him. He was asked if he wanted to change first. He declined, and chose a pizza poop party for one.
• I gave her a choice, the same choice I was forced to make when I first came to these worlds. The same choice all reapers must make, the choice our deathdealers give their lives to make. We submit, that we may live, because it is the only option we have. But this is not free will; from the moment we give our names, our will is not our own. And yet we must, and it's not fair, it's not right, it's not just, but such is the nature of the world we live in, and the god we chose to serve.
• The truth is, we don't love as many people as we're supposed to. I don't love most of my family members. They haven't done anything overtly terrible to me that would justify a 'lack of love' in a social context that assumes we all love our family members just because they're family. So when family obligations and events roll around I'm left feeling inconvenienced and pressured, and I struggle to understand why I'm supposed to buy a bus ticket and make the 4-hour trip to stay in a cramped house with people I don't feel much for. And why I should do that three or four times over just the Christmas holidays so that I can see all sides of my family and partner's family.
• There are no means for escaping this world. It penetrates even into your sleep and is its substance. You are caught in your own dreaming, where there is no space, and are held forever where there is no time. You can do nothing you are not told to do. There is no hope for escape from this dream that was never yours. The very words you speak are only its very words, and you talk like a traitor under its incessant torture.
• All the things of this world are of but one essence, for which there are no words. This is the greater part which has no beginning or end. And the one essence of this world for which there can be no words is but all the things of this world. This is the lesser part which had a beginning and shall have an end and for which words were conceived solely to speak of, the tiny broken beings of this world, the beginnings and endings of this world, for which words were conceived solely to speak of. Now remove these words and what remains?
• My therapist says 'shame rolls downhill'. Meaning, that abuser acted without shame. He should have felt shame for how he was talking/behaving, but he didn't and you absorbed it. But it isn't your shame. It's the shame he should have had. You don't need to take on that shame any longer, you did nothing wrong. I am really really really glad your coworker reported that behavior. And I am really sorry you experienced that, that's awful and you didn't deserve that. No one does.
• I'm not sure people should be concerned how the document is produced if it is otherwise coherent and readable. Not that this applies in places where producing the document yourself is the point. If someone sent me an email and an AI had written it, if I otherwise couldn't pick up on it being AI I wouldn't care, and writing can be bad or awkward without being AI. And if it was spam, I would dislike it for being spam, not for being written by a large language model.
• In the pitch black of night, in the middle of the vast emptiness of the sea, you see the stars filling the heavens, and more shooting stars than you would expect streaking to the earth with their fiery tails. As your eye draws down to the water, you find that somehow the ocean is darker and emptier than the sky. Your eyes strain for a glimpse of anything, but ultimately you only catch glimpses of strange and mysterious creatures lithely swimming just beneath the surface occasionally peeking above or triggering flashes of bioluminescence that disappear as suddenly as they appear.
• It's one of those family recipes where something is changed or added with every generation. Like, my great-great-grandmother just made a simple, plain pumpkin soup. My great-grandmother added herbs and spices, nutmeg and rosemary, sage, thyme from her garden. My grandmother added garlic and onion. My mother roasts the pumpkin instead of boiling it and added a couple of small kumara (or sweet potato), and I use extra garlic that I also roast and I use a little parmesan cheese. I use some of the extra garlic to make a butter to spread on toast for the side. It's not like it's particularly fancy, it's just pumpkin soup, but whenever I make it, I make it with a lot of love, because it's all the memories of learning to make it with my mum. It was the first thing I learned to make. It's the warmth that it fills me with while it thunders and rains and hails outside, because it's my go-to for that kind of weather. It's the crunch of the toast. It's sharing something that I love with someone that I care about. And that's what cooking is supposed to be like. Happiness and love on a plate (or in a bowl).
• My mom can be belligerent, but she does not have racist outbursts. For this I am thankful. Because there is nothing you can do. She does not recognize me anymore. Last visit she read the same 2-sided newsletter over and over for 90 minutes. Every story was brand new to her. Frankly, I am surprised she is so pleasant. I can see, feel her grasping for a reference point to anchor herself to. They all slip away. It must be so frustrating.
• Sounds like your aunt is just jealous she lacks your problem-solving skills and personal style, and, like all resentful no-talent scrubs, confuses 'tearing down those who did something' with 'I did something', hence her campaign against you. Her jealousy is unbecoming. Wear the pretty things in good health and find it in your heart to pity the poor old termagant who may be older but has certainly not acquired any wisdom or grace.
• Evangelical pastors in some places are staring to condemn Jesus as a 'woke, weak liberal'. I wish I was joking. The very man that was used as the foundation of their religion is a 'woke, weak, liberal'. How did we get to a point where Christians hate the very man that is the foundation of their religion? Next thing you know, the Romans are going to be praised as 'having some good ideas' and that Jesus would have lived longer 'if he'd just complied' with Herod's requests. Then we'll be told there were 'good people on both sides'. But of course, the Jews will still be the bad guys because even though Jesus was a woke, weak liberal, fuck the Jews just because, right?
• I'm still haunted by whether it was the right choice, and if he'd have made a recovery, and if we were right to listen to the nurse who begged us to end his life. In the end, I have to believe that the person that likely spent more time with him than anyone (certainly more than the doctors) would have known what someone in pain looks like. Especially if they work in the ICU. I just wonder if he would have really remembered it if he would have made a recovery. It was hard seeing someone in so much pain, and even harder making that awful choice.
• Have you ever been forced to deal with bureaucratic bullshit? Any plodding, government agency that's not pulling drug money or spies, you now, the sexy stuff, they plod along like they're encased in drying cement. Their souls are dead from the relentlessly long and redundant task of 'managing' whatever their field is in, and as elected officials and nepotism's finest worthless middle sons and youngest daughters, they aren't usually terribly qualified to deal with the topic at hand. Its safe to say that 'no bobcats' means that the guy in question has never personally seen one, therefore? Not real. And they don't enjoy or really allow dissent or other options. It's wrong because tedious paperwork and 'my uncle Joe-Ray got a good job with the parks services, he gets a cool truck, but I get to watch a field for a housecat that got real fat? Or bears? Bears aren't real, don't be such a child. Teddy bears are toys, they're not real animals.' It's an exaggeration but I swear it's correct in spirit if not to the letter. Sorry, got carried away.
• No, this is normal - you feel for the innocent who cannot speak for themselves. I think most decent people also have genetically ingrained in them what I consider a sacred human/pet contract. We chose to breed dogs (and cats) over tens of thousands of years to love us, need us, and be loyal to us in exchange for really minimal things from our perspective - a meal, a shelter, some socialization. When another human treats a domesticated pet animal poorly, it is a breach of that genetic pact. Pets don't have the ability to enforce that pact - only you can speak on their behalf.
• I lost a cousin like this, was a gay teen in Texas. His mom isolated him from the rest of us to the point that, when he slipped away from us entirely, it hardly made a ripple. Nobody in the entire extended family ever talks about him. His mom turned all over demands for perfection on her younger children and acts like he never existed. I met him once, but nobody has said his name in years and now I can't remember it anymore.
• As plenipotentiary arbiter, duly invested by the Council of White Middle Class Westerners, I declare her anathema and excommunicado. She is stricken from the records and rolls. She has no claims to the ceremonies and trappings; she shall enjoy neither Pumpkin Spiced Latte nor Murder Documentaries. She is cast from the sight of Taylor Swift, and shunned by Olive Garden. Feel no pity, for she has brought this upon herself.
• When my dad was alive, they fed off and supported each other's delusions, so I knew anytime a sentence began with 'well what your father and I think is ...' that whatever followed would be bullshit. And of course they would tell all their friends, who'd fully believe it. But then, my mom's mom was a complete whackadoodle as well, and told the neighbors she didn't have children, since my mom was an adult, yet also her grandson, my brother, was an assassin.
• The protagonist, a speechless cat-thing called Kitling Ripe, performs a series of elaborate rites to rescue members of her extended family, culminating in the resurrection of her 'other grandmother', Moldywarp. When the Snake-Witch killed the horse, Kitling snatched one of its eyes. When the Dry-Witch killed the pig, Kitling stole a cup of its blood. Then she took them to the place Moldywarp lay buried, and she shook out her hair, and she began to dance...
• My dad actually did end up on an FBI list in the 60s when he was a student. He listened to shortwave radio, and he found a Chinese station and mailed them a reception report, which is basically a 'Hi, I live here and listened to your station on this date'. After this, the Chinese government started mailing him Communist materials, including an English translation of Chairman Mao's little red book. Dad wasn't a Communist and gave all the stuff to his friends at the university who were. After a few months of regular mailings from China, the FBI sent Dad a letter saying 'We know you are receiving this material in the mail. Do you wish to continue receiving it?' Dad wrote back saying 'yes', because he figured it's a free country and it's his free speech right to receive Commie propaganda if he wants to. So he wound up on a list as a Communist sympathizer.
• I'm strong and I hate that I am. I'm strong because I wouldn't have survived the abuse if I wasn't. I'm strong because I've largely been taking care of myself since I was 7 years old. I'm so strong that when someone tries to take care of me, I physically recoil and don't know how to respond. It sucks and I'm actively working with my therapist to allow weak moments back into my life. Being 'strong' is almost never a good thing.
• 'Better' is a funny word. I have a good mental health team and an excellent therapist along with coping skills to deal with the bad days so they don't spill out onto others. The ghost of what happened and the cruelty of how everybody in leadership made my life hell is still here, and plays like an unwanted soundtrack in my head. A part of me grieves for who I could have been if that trauma never would have happened, but is proud of how things are building back. 'Better' is complicated and never seems to feel like 'better'.

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