Wait did Taylor say she wanted to live in the 1830s as like. An antebellum southern belle post? Taylor...

weirdly, from what i can tell the role of crossroads in voodoo magic is unrelated to its role in european magic. actually there might be three totally distinct origins in west africa, britain, and greece. would britain have recieved the influence re: hecate that associated magic and crossroads? i guess magic lore can travel pretty far... anyway i THINK the european stuff traces to hecate but the african stuff related to the kongo cosmogram which has the crossorads as a "meeting place" between two worlds, and so the place you go to interface with the spirits. i guess the same logic could have applied in greece. from the wikipedia page it seems like she was a goddess of boundaries/liminality first and then became a witchcraft god so this story seems at least plausible

-Voodoo, Metraux

-Voodoo, Metraux

At the ceremony for taking the dead out of the water, the head priest takes each one out one by one, they call out, ask about their relatives, etc, and each is put in a separate pitcher. theyre kept in the pitcher for 40 days, given food offerings, and then become good spirits, minor loa who look after the people of that particular voodoo temple (humfo)

midjourney understands nate is a nerdy brown haired white guy with glasses and porygon is a red and blue duck. but uh. its not close enough

the only pokemon midjourney knows are charizard and pikachu. if you ask it to depict another pokemon it makes a terrible pikacharizard

i think this scott article is the best way to understand what's going on with the concept of "war crimes". you CANT have a ban on war, just like, on a practical level, thats not a thing you can maintain unless you have godlike power, even though war is really really bad (generally). but you CAN have a ban on like, chemical weapons. people dont want to use chemical weapons nearly as much as they want to do war in general. so even though chemical weapons arent really worse than like, general killing, "war crime" can still be a useful category. like part of the reason we can sort of maintain rules against killing civilians (sort of) is that killing civilians is sometimes not strategically useful. but when it IS very strategically useful (like for example if most combatants are hidden among civilians) then on a practical level you cant maintain a ban on killing civilians. i mean that doesnt make it okay it just means like. youre not powerful enough to stop it.

bro what the fuck lmfao. funniest possible thing to say for absolutely no reason

the only pokemon midjourney knows are charizard and pikachu. if you ask it to depict another pokemon it makes a terrible pikacharizard

quote of the year

i think this scott article is the best way to understand what's going on with the concept of "war crimes". you CANT have a ban on war, just like, on a practical level, thats not a thing you can maintain unless you have godlike power, even though war is really really bad (generally). but you CAN have a ban on like, chemical weapons. people dont want to use chemical weapons nearly as much as they want to do war in general. so even though chemical weapons arent really worse than like, general killing, "war crime" can still be a useful category. like part of the reason we can sort of maintain rules against killing civilians (sort of) is that killing civilians is sometimes not strategically useful. but when it IS very strategically useful (like for example if most combatants are hidden among civilians) then on a practical level you cant maintain a ban on killing civilians. i mean that doesnt make it okay it just means like. youre not powerful enough to stop it.

obsessed with the fact that naked mole rats seem to have a whole caste of special little guy whose job it is to be really fat, horny, unhelpful, and disgusted by incest

euler was technically swiss but i think he should properly be considered a basler. basler is easily the coolest part of switzerland. first public museum. at the switzerland-germany-france triple point. famously humanist. location of bicycle day!!! home of the bernoullis in addition to euler! man. i kinda wanna go on a basel pilgrimage now...

crinkle economics mastermind

there are a lot dudes on dating apps who will ask me questions (not like. conversation starters. just practical fact questions. like "do you have a penis") that are clearly answered in my bio and it just kind of confuses me. like. its a weird relationship to have to information. if i desire information my first instinct is to seek out that information in the place i think will have it. its one click away! at the top of the chat box! its less effort than typing a question! its like they never internalized the lesson that information can be found in inert text, without a person talking to you

Secularist society that takes the cigarettes approach to religion and it's totally legal but all religious texts require a big sticker thst says "THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR GOD" or whatever. And at the start of every sermon you have to give a disclaimer thst you're making it all up. Etc. Kinda based

There's a weirdly poignant sort of... metaphysical tragedy in the fact that pain, which evolved as a helpful signal to alert us when bad things might be happening to us, grew into becoming... well, basically the Bad Thing. To the point where by universal consensus the very worst thing you can do to a being like us is torture them (i.e. trigger the warning signal as strongly as possible while perhaps deliberately avoiding causing "actual" harm). And there are tons of illnesses and injuries and disabilities that massively impact people's quality of life, ranging from annoying to depressing to driving people to suicide, basically purely because they're very physically painful, while the underlying bodily dysfunction that the pain is supposedly "warning" of is either relatively minor or literally non-existent.

The capacity to feel pain is a good and important thing, some people lack it and that's generally awful for them, only in a universe unrecognizably different from ours could we ever do without it. But isn't it awful to think how if only there was somebody up there to adjust the settings for us, they'd probably only have to tweak them the tiniest bit to keep 99.99% of the benefits while saving us from all the most extreme miseries forever?

The mechanism didn't have to be perfect for natural selection's purposes, it had to be good enough that the average individual in the average situation would be motivated to stay more or less out of trouble. Measured by the metrics nature was working towards, she could afford to be a little slapdash with the exact implementation, and she was. In doing so she opened the door to infinities of evil and suffering that wouldn't otherwise be conceivable. All this only had one chance to happen, and it happened that way. There's nobody to be mad at--I'm mad about it, though.

WHERE is that video that takes an old home video of a wedding (c. 1980s) where the bride does a dance with a chair that is so strange and slightly furious and it's remixed with modern music? and with the edit you get the feeling that this is this woman's last grasp at a sense of agency, doing this powerful odd dance at her wedding