On a genetic level being tasty to humans is one of the most successful evolutionary strategies ever

Person who understands how language works

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function

yes i did level the entire city. but in my defense it was because I had to hit the launch button in order to save an ant shuffling across it. My intention was to save the ant. I merely allowed the missiles to launch. By the doctrine of double effect, everything is basically fine

Out of curiosity: classification of boiled grain-paste shapes

oh that’s actually kinda cute

texts from the airport

i wish that people were more accepting of the fact that not everyone's "core being" or whatever you want to call it will line up perfectly with a label. some people use labels that match their feelings 100% some will use labels that mostly of kind of fit. some will use a label but only to get people to stop asking about it. some use no labels. etc. labels are just tools that we use to describe our unique + indescribable experiences and feelings, and they tend to work pretty well, but it isn't 100% effective. this is what it means to not sort people into boxes

but if I don't get weird and horny about this then who will

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

okay what did i miss

(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)

I know that its not actually that hard to learn to draw. or paint. or cook. or learn to speak a new language. or code. or any of a myriad of other possible skills or hobbies. but at some point you need to pick some single digit number of those ten thousand things that anyone can do, and to everything else say "i have other priorities" because otherwise you will never do any of them.

and so i think when people say "i wish i could..." they usually don't believe that they couldn't do it if they really tried, or even that they've overestimated the difficulty of doing so. I think what they're really wishing for is that time and energy were not finite quantities and that everything that was worth doing could also be done. because it's cosmically unfair that that isn't so.