aorish-deactivated20251222:

degenerate-perturbation:

philipkindreddickhead:

If you had to pick one major US city to live in

New York City

Los Angeles

Las Vegas

Boston

Atlanta

Miami

Portland/Seattle

Chicago

Dallas

Denver

See Results

How tf Philly not on here, it’s the 6th most populous city in America!! Fucking Vegas is on here but not Philly? Brother I’m coming to your house

I think the person who made this must be from Dallas because i can’t imagine anyone else wants to live there.

Los Angeles is the only other city I’ve seen where the culture has a sense of Vegas as like, a real city where people live.

caesarsaladinn:

quasi-normalcy:

well you’re recognizing the importance of clean air now, aren’t ya?

I tolerate a pretty dirty kitchen floor while Karafuto l’s still in a not-final state but even then I really need to go at it again soon, but it just highlights how much further along in general I am than last time, whole areas once full of waiting tasks now clear, shelves rearranged and shit parked on counters moved in, even got a USB-powered scrubber staff so I can get a good deep clean this time.

Okay I think whatever “post-exertional malaise” from pitching the mulch last night has worn off, my shoulder’s just sore, because acting as a farmhand is serious work and I’m not used to that motion yet, like it took me a while to get used to swinging the maul.

apricops:

if holodecks existed each one would have like a lagoon of cum

memecucker:

I like how King Arthur is like, really stupid

I like how much of English mythology is The Great National Hero Gets Cucked

memecucker:

Los Angeles uses its influence in media to make people into thinking it’s a city where everyone is a fit and attractive upper middle class person that’s super hot while New York uses its influence on media to make sure everyone hates New Jersey as much as they do

Tumblr ad regarding a frequent bus line between downtown and specifically my neighborhood starting up, that’s nice targeting.

Also further confirmation that this neighborhood is going to be like, the neighborhood for the next two decades and Karafuto is in specifically the best 3-block radius for transit access.

Like, the way it turns out I correctly predicted and positioned for everything in the 2010s would leave me well-placed going forward but be a little eerie weird even if not for the whole bizarre miraculous total transformation that at some level I kind of understand as my reward for the otherwise “wait what do I get out of this?” task of reading the zeitgeist right all the way.

togglesbloggle:

It’s interesting to me how much people struggle to intuit differences of scale. Like, years of geology training thinking about very large subjects, and I’m only barely managing it around the edges.

The classic one is, of course, the mantle- everybody has this image of the mantle as a sort of molten magma lake that the Earth’s crust is floating on. Which is a pedagogically useful thing! Because the intuitions about how liquids work- forming internal currents, hot sections rising, cool sections sinking, all that- are all dynamics native to the Earth’s mantle. We mostly talk about the mantle in the context of those currents, and how they drive things like continental drift, and so we tend to have this metaphor in mind of the mantle as a big magma lake.

The catch, of course, is that the mantle is a solid, not magma. It’s just that at very large scales, the distinction between solids and liquids is… squirrely.

When cornered on this, a geologist will tell you that the mantle is ‘ductile’. But that’s a lie of omission. Because it’s not that the mantle is a metal like gold or iron, what we usually think of when we talk about ductility. You couldn’t hammer mantle-matter in to horseshoes or nails on an anvil. It’s just a rock, really. Peridotite. Chemically it’s got a lot of metal atoms in it, which helps, but if you whack a chunk of it with a hammer you can expect about the same thing to happen as if you whacked a chunk of concrete. Really, it’s just that any and every rock is made of tons and tons of microcrystal structures all bound together, and the boundaries between these microcrystals can shift under enormous pressure on very slow timescales; when the scope of your question gets big enough, those bonds become weak in a relative sense, and a rock starts to become more like a pile of gravel where the pebbles can shift and flow around one another.

The blunt fact is, on very large scales of space and of time, almost everything other than perfect crystals start to act kind of like a liquid- and a lot of those do as well. When I made a study of very old Martian craters, I got used to 'eyeballing’ the age based on how much the crater had subsided, almost exactly like the ways that ripples in the surface of water gradually subside over time when you throw a rock in to a lake. Just, you know. Slower.

But at the same time, these things are more fragile than you’d believe, and can shatter like glass. The surface of the Earth is like this, too. Absent the kind of overpressures that make the mantle flow like it does, Earth’s crust is still tremendously weak relative to many of the planet-scale forces to which it is subject- I was surprised, once, when a professor offhandedly described the crust as having a tensile strength of 'basically zero;’ they really thought of the surface as a delicate filigreed bubble of glass that formed like a thin shell, almost too thin to mention, on the outside of a water droplet. On human scales, liquid is the thing that flows, and solid is the thing that breaks. But once stuff gets big or slow or both, the distinction between a solid and a liquid is more that a liquid is the thing that doesn’t shatter when it flows. And it all gets really, really vague, which I suppose you’d expect when you get this far outside the contexts in which our languages were crafted.

werewolbachia:

aaays-and-bees:

werewolbachia:

‘horseplay’ and 'monkey business’ being treated as synonyms means something. don’t know what though

Monkeys are so silly that what they consider business, horses consider play.

ALT

squeakitties:

“extremely marketable and only slightly scary horror game meant for ipad children to watch letsplays of” is a very unfortunate genre to watch the development of

Oh I remember when these were like physical rides at carnivals

artbyblastweave:

Re: that last post about 90s aesthetics, and also Re: that post about 90s aesthetics in Fallout- I do have a suspicion that pretty soon the 1990s analogue for steampunk is gonna firm up, in the same way that “Cassette Futurism” has somewhat firmed up for the 70s/80s. Looking forward to that

:

theanishimori:

clevermanka:

Original tweet

memecucker:

memecucker:

Key part in the post is the “Americanized remake” part but when I watched Murder Among the Mormons I was struck at how Mormons have a culture about relics and finding obscure paraphernalia relating to important figures so they can bring it to the church and this kind of veneration of relics is something you hardly ever see in other post-Reformation sects of Christianity

Plus the whole structured centralized hierarchy with the Americanized part being adding some nods towards republicanism. Like the spiritual head is picked in an election amongst senior clergyman who always elect one of their own and this spiritual head has the ability to say things and claim they came directly from God (granted papal infallibility hasn’t yet been used for a sudden 180 in teachings but it potentially can be used that way). Mormons call their guy “president” rather than using titles which come from the Roman Empire but this reflects the wider political context of the state they emerged in.

Also there’s an old stereotype of Catholics always having large families that is kinda outdated now in the US but that’s def an overlap

Oh yeah also Mormons like statues of religious figures. The marble statue Christus is the most popular artistic depiction of Jesus in Mormonism from what I gather and it should be noted that the original creator was the 19th century Danish Lutheran Bertel Thorvaldsen.

Thorvaldsen is notable however for his neoclassical style that he mastered while studying in Rome and religious sculptures which might seem quite Romanesque to some (to the point where he actually designed the tomb for Pope Pius VII and thus is the sole non-Catholic artist to have a work on display in St Peter’s Basilica) though it should be noted that Continental Lutheranism would probably strike some other Protestants as surprisingly Catholic with certain things (like the original Christus state is displayed in a church called “Church of Our Lady” which would reek of Catholicism to most American Protestants).

This is a bit of a more circuitous connection but Mormons seem to have really loved the work of a guy who was notable because he was a Protestant that incorporated Catholic-ish aesthetics into his works so there’s that

>tell a queer guy about how I’m bi now

>get flirted with

>take it as bisexuality-themed joshing

>days later realize I was just being flirted with

kontextmaschine:

So when Hajj time comes around, do year-round residents of Mecca in unrelated lines of work take a vacation and rent their places out to pilgrims?

…that is to say, is it like the Indio Valley with Coachella?

…wait, there’s a fucking “Mecca” in the Indio Valley?

Oh shit, I need to remember to slap my stomach more while I still have it, already it’s taughter and higher-pitched

jadagul:

necarion:

The drafters of the Constitution were fluent in Greek and Latin. George Washington’s speeches read like they’re in fucking Latin, translated into English.

But you know what else feels like a Latin construction?

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I wonder if this was entirely unambiguous to Madison because of how his brain parsed Latin grammar?

This had never occurred to me, but now that you mention it I can’t unsee it.  The grammar looks so incredibly Latin.

The first half is an ablative absolute.  The second half is a fucking gerundive.  The sentence looks like it was translated from Latin, but as an exercise where you’re trying to prove you can read the Latin and so you’re not even trying to render it into idiomatic English.  No wonder it’s confusing!

(This article makes the same observation, and argues that this implies the second amendment is only protecting militias; I don’t think the piece is quite right, though.  It says the ablative absolute gives the “reason” for the following clause, but I think the Dickinson College link I gave, which is not trying to discuss politics, gives a better account: it’s the cause or circumstances of the following clause, which is much less specific.  You can see this article arguing for the opposite conclusion and also name-checking the ablative absolute, but I think it’s a less persuasive case—even though I’m not really persuaded by the first one either.)

But yeah, no wonder the amendment seems weird.  It is!  It’s not really written in English.

—

But then I look at the rest of the Bill of Rights and I get basically the same vibes from all of it.  It’s all super weird.

One thing I notice is how much of it is in the passive voice.  The First Amendment is active (and not coincidentally probably the easiest to read and parse); the Sixth is formally active but has a lot of passive voice in it; and all the others are straight up passive voice.  “No soldier shall…be quartered in any house”; “The right of the people to be secure in their persons…shall not be violated”; “Excessive bail shall not be required”; etc.  You also get the sort of baroque nested clauses and running series of conjunctions that comes up a lot in Latin.  

And something like the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

reads like a passage from Cicero, where he stacks up ten clauses in one sentence and you don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about until you get to the end.