borgesianbox

[borgesianbox]

all science fiction is Dune, except Dune, which is Foundation

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Knuckle tattoos that say SING, MUSE

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it's insane the sheer vertical cliff face of abstraction you need to climb just to be able to think about shapes correctly

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so wuthering heights by emily bronte means nothing to you?

[borgesianbox]

More favourite numerical memes:

Implicit or implicit enumeration of uncountable things (example: taking inventory of the fucks which one gives)

Suggesting the divisibility of things which are not customarily thought of as able to be subdivided (example: "six whole people")

Using words that aren't numbers as numbers (example: "one William dollars")

Technically correct but contextually misleading estimates (example: looking at a group of several thousand things and observing that there are "at least three")

Incongruous qualifiers for apparently simple sums or tallies (example: she was twenty-seven years old, not counting 2014)

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Mathematicians will literally fit an infinite plane on a sphere with radius=1 and then look you in the eye and deny being wizards:

@awizardmostkitty what do you think of this evil sorcery?

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"wow ur so good at math" ah ha but you see. you dont ever get good at math. you stay bad, but now youre bad at harder math

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the Earth is locally flat. since flatness is a local property, it follows that the Earth is flat.

[borgesianbox]

ether as severance + “the courtship of kier and imogene” (relationship parallels)

(just so we’re clear, while the kier-imogene dynamic is clearly paralleled with helena and mark, it is also reiterated in cobel and mark, dr mauer and gemma, and even burt and irving to some extent; season 2 has also made it a point to show us that helena and cobel are both victims in their own ways while being perpetrators. it is not a black and white situation and misogyny will get you blocked.)

original threads: (x), (x)

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I do find it really interesting that Harmony's (presumably) first solution to the trauma she endured at the factory was inventing Severance. Some other types of people would have perhaps invented a self-stirring ether vat, or some type of high-tech automata that could take over the more dangerous and questionable jobs Lumon had been delegating to children. But no. Rather than trying to present an alternative to the exploitation, she dreamed up a way that people just wouldn't have to *feel* it.

I can't quite articulate it but it speaks to very deep indoctrination. Rather than saying 'here, you don't have to exploit people' she says 'here, if you're going to exploit people at least let them forget.' something something reverence to an all-powerful seeming company something something not even being able to imagine a world where people aren't being exploited so instead just trying to lessen the blow.

[borgesianbox]

need to string together my thoughts more on this but reeeeeally interesting to see the influx of media - severance, the substance, mickey 17 - centered on the idea of a double/expendable iteration of yourself.

the dehumanization of workers by the way of non-livable wages, unsafe working conditions, and identity based discrimination (and the current removal of dei initiatives), all drive a wedge between our personhood and the value we are prescribed as a member of the workforce. something something the effects of ai and deepfakes already putting people in danger, the way we live and present our lives online vs in reality, there’s a lot to unpack here. but it’s fascinating to see this trope so widely translated as a storytelling vehicle for these ideas, and that this is the story that people are interested in telling.

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“You are making breakfast in every dream that I have of you. You are in the kitchen, your soft middle pressed up against the cold marble countertops like a vision too beautiful for the magazines, sprinkling dark chocolate chips over pancakes. I think for a brief second that I am dreaming inside of my dream, that I had to make you up twice, just to get it right. You, brushing your dark hair out of your face, smearing batter across your cheeks. You have come and made my dreams smaller, narrower. Filled them with sugar and your body humming in the same room as mine. I dream, now, of a normal life with you. A life where breakfast lasts until the sun goes down, until I have finished gazing at you from across the table, flour dried to your forehead like a kiss.”

— Caitlyn Siehl, Chocolate Chip Pancakes (via alonesomes)

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Geometric topology proofs are either "we draw a commutative diagram and the result follows immediately from well-known homotopy theory [Whi78] :)" or the most ill-explained, possibly untrue diagram manipulations and terrifying handle constructions you've ever seen. And sometimes both.

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LET’S HAVE A CONCLAVE

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Mean Girls (2004) // Conclave (2024)

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20 Versions of Sherlock Holmes Ranked from Most to Least Likely to Set a Building on Fire in a Fit of Rage

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An anonymous Grandmaster (white) defeats Magnus Carlsen in the Lichess Titled Arena, September 2019.

“Mate threat, mate threat, mate threat!”

Commentated by ChessNetwork.