anonymouscapybara

[anonymouscapybara]

[anonymouscapybara]

Terrible Visions

A scrambled timeline is a timeline that has proceeded much like ours, except that some particular facet has been mixed up all over the place. For example, in the scrambled timeline we will consider today, our world's fictional stories have been told by different people, and in different ways.

Bryan Lee O'Malley, in this alternate timeline, is best known as the cartoonist responsible for Homestuck, a popular comic series about a group of children who become embroiled in a cosmic-scale video game known as Sburb. Although Homestuck is probably most often associated with the cult classic Edgar Wright-directed film adaptation released in 2016, the comics themselves are highly-regarded, and the film brought a new audience to them. Netflix has commissioned an animated continuation, The Homestuck Epilogues, which is due to be released soon.

Andrew Hussie, on the other hand, is a figure you're likelier to know if you're overly online. His "MS Paint Adventures" series - most notably including Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, which is kind of like Homestuck but weirder and hornier - have firmly remained a fixture of obsessive Twitter fandom culture. It doesn't help that the best-known iteration, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, is infamous for stretching thousands of pages of meandering digressions out of a simple and focused narrative starting point. Scott Pilgrim fans have developed something of a toxic reputation, which is not entirely deserved - although of course Knives discourse is interminable, and back in the fandom's heyday there were reportedly incidents of fans assaulting each other "for being evil exes".

Scott Pilgrim fandom was very big back in the day, though, and consequently it was a nexus for other creative figures who would go on to surpass Hussie. Perhaps foremost among these is indie developer Toby Fox. He was literally living in Hussie's basement when he produced ROSEQUARTZ, a universally-beloved retro Goonies-like RPG about a human hybrid boy born to a race of gem-based aliens. He's now developing an episodic spiritual successor, RAZORQUEST, with more overtly dark themes. It revolves around an inheritance dispute among a demon-summoning family.

Other foundational figures in this timeline's internet culture include Alison Bechdel, who helped get the webcomic scene started. Although she's now more seriously acclaimed for her personal memoirs, her gaming webcomic Press Start To Dyke, which premiered in 1998, was once everywhere. It had a broad appeal, and at its height, it was common to see even straight guys sharing pages from it. Time has not been especially kind to it, though, and at this point its main legacy is test.png, a meme spawned by one of the comic's most ill-advised pages.

Then there's John C. McCrae, more often known by his pseudonym Wildbow. A prolific and reclusive author of doorstopping "web serials" - long-form fiction published online - McCrae's best-known serial is still his first, Wind, a noir superhero story set in an alternate history where capes are mostly just a subculture of unpowered vigilantes. Wind landed in a culture already rife with comic book deconstructions, like Alan Moore's 2002 graphic novel Worm Turns, but it nonetheless managed to stand out from the pack with its extensive cast of characters and its themes of coordination problems and the end of the world. Later McCrae web serials include Part (the first "Otherverse" serial; an urban fantasy story about a couple who die in a car accident and find that they have become ghosts), Tear (a "biopunk" story set in a collapsing underwater city), Warn (the controversial Wind sequel), and Play (the second "Otherverse" serial, set in a small Indiana town that helps hide a psychic girl from the CIA).

Last and perhaps least, we should discuss J. K. Rowling. Far and away the most famous of any of these authors, Rowling's name is inseparable from the YA series that she debuted with, the Luz Noceda books, which remain her one successful work. Although it was heavily derivative of older fantasy novels - like Jill Murphy's Academy For Little Witches, or Philip Pullman's Methods Of Rationality trilogy - Luz Noceda was still a monumental and unprecedented success in the publishing industry, and the film adaptations were consistent blockbusters. The final book, Luz Noceda and the Watcher of Rain, contained some allusions to a romantic relationship between Luz and her recently-redeemed associate Amity. Rowling confirmed that this was her intent in subsequent interviews and indicated that she had fought her publishers for it; the film would then go on to escalate matters slightly further.

There have been many lengthy and heated online arguments as to whether the references in the book itself constitute text or mere subtext. Whatever your stance on this discourse, a new complication has been introduced recently: although she has put out no official statement on the matter as of yet, it has become quite apparent from Rowling's shrinking network of contacts and her conspicuous silences that she is certainly TERF-sympathetic, and likely an outright TERF herself. For many, this is leading to a critical reevaluation of the social values inherent in the Luz Noceda series; others, to say the least, are holding off on that kind of reappraisal.

Anyway, Scott Pilgrim just beat Luz Noceda in a Twitter poll for Most Gay Media, and people are piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed

[anonymouscapybara]

[anonymouscapybara]

But then around 30 million years ago — halfway through the Age of Mammals, give or take — something happened. The nautiloids started disappearing. Fewer species, less diversity. Bit by bit they shrank back into their current small range. What happened halfway through the Age of Mammals? Well, here’s one clue: the nautiloids’ long retreat showed a pattern. It wasn’t everywhere and all at once. They disappeared first in the northern arctic regions; then in the Antarctic; then in temperate zones; finally across most of the tropics except that one small patch. This pattern suggested a culprit: a warm-blooded predator that evolved in the Arctic and then spread around the world. But… the armored cephalopod design had been around forever. They’d been living with predators for half a billion years. Sharks. Primitive armored fish. Not-so-primitive modern fish. In the age of dinosaurs, they had to deal with ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs. Back in the Paleozoic, they were hunted by eight-foot-long giant sea scorpions. Way back in the Cambrian, they had to live with the anomalocariids. In the early Age of Mammals, there were primitive whales and sea-going crocodiles. The armored cephalopod design took them all in stride and kept going. So what happened?

[anonymouscapybara]

I have historically posted my annual mathblr roll call in late April, but I think it makes more sense to do it at the beginning of the year so it's clear which post is current. Accordingly, I now call the

🧮 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟝 𝕄𝔸𝕋ℍ𝔹𝕃ℝ ℝ𝕆𝕃𝕃 ℂ𝔸𝕃𝕃 🧮

Reblog/reply if you are a mathblr and/or mathblr adjacent. And tag the other (at least semi active) mathblrs & adjacents you know of!

"What counts as mathblr? Do I count?" If you want to! Math shitposters! Math academia aesthetic blogs! Math studyblrs! Math related gimmick blogs! Unthemed blogs owned by people who happen to be math fans! I want them all! I'm happy to see CS, stats, physics, and other math-adjacent folks too if they like hanging out with the math crowd!

Bonus: link to the LCM- Least Common Mathblr discord server. Come hang out!

https://discord.gg/q4nzuEqgFv

[anonymouscapybara]

this is frying me so bad

[anonymouscapybara]

400 possible combinations of hyperparameters stand before me. But only one of them will train America's Next Top Model.

[anonymouscapybara]

‘Useful phrases for the murder mystery writer abroad’ my cartoon for this week’s Guardian Books.

[anonymouscapybara]

then they can introduce the Grothendieck group when everyone’s ready for it!

they should put a disclaimer at the beginning of elementary school math. “from 1st to 3rd grade we work in the semiring N.” y’know so kids don’t get confused by the lack of negative numbers

[anonymouscapybara]

they should put a disclaimer at the beginning of elementary school math. “from 1st to 3rd grade we work in the semiring N.” y’know so kids don’t get confused by the lack of negative numbers

[anonymouscapybara]

Greatest pun of 2025, legendary reach into the depths of time.

[anonymouscapybara]

There’s something contemptible about animals that are just tubes. Like hagfish, worms, snakes, etc. Like they’ve specialized down to the point where they’re not really anything but a digestive tract. Just a mouth and an anus, a geometrically efficient form for the consumption and processing of nutrients, all in service only of surviving another day to consume and process more nutrients.

And sure that’s all animals, all life. But at least when you’ve got other appendages going on you can do other stuff, it doesn’t seem like your whole existence is just eating and shitting. When you’ve got arms and legs and wings and antenna and shit, it seems like you could conceivably be engaged in some greater purpose, in play and joy and manipulation of the environment.

In the end all life is equally meaningless, but don’t remind me of your meaningless by being nothing but a tube. Put some cool ornamental stuff around the tube (which is all nevertheless just in service of the tube) so I can at least pretend to be doing other stuff too.

[anonymouscapybara]

So what was in it for the cultists in the Lovecraft stories? For your normal God or demon or whatever there's some sort of reward or benefit, or the very least some duty to society (ala the Vestal Virgins). What's in it for you if you're worshipping the Guy Who Barely Knows You Exist

[anonymouscapybara]

with 0 notes

the words of the prophets are written in tumblr posts

[anonymouscapybara]

haven’t heard of this before—what’s the story in question?

if you know anything at all about professional philosophy then you know that the husserl scholar story is completely made up lol

[anonymouscapybara]

"currying" you mean the fucking tensor-hom adjunction?

[anonymouscapybara]

i'm of two minds about lex luthor as an elon musk allegory. on the one hand, it feels like a counterbalance we so desperately need after so many years of mcu tony stark, and on the other hand, i think it's pretty important to the superman mythos that lex, whatever his other deficiencies as a human being, is genuinely brilliant, and not, like elon musk, an utter fucking moron.