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[baroquespiral]

Axonometric Realism | Beate Gütschow | Socks Studio

Beate Gütschow is a German contemporary artist who works primarily through photography. In her work, she analyses the complex and ever-changing relationships between perception, representation and reality.

For her series HC, Hortus Conclusus, she delved into the subject of “Enclosed gardens,” a recurring iconographic motif in Renaissance and Medieval paintings which would depict an idyllic scene contained in the space of a fenced or walled green space inaccessible to an exterior public.

[baroquespiral]

adding as someone who is an actual parapolitics moonbat and doesn't even consider "conspiracism" point blank grounds to reject a claim - and I don't think there's a massive coverup of this in particular, but I don't rule it out - I think there's a more general rule of thumb that's useful to apply here which is like: if you do think there's a huge societywide coverup and every state, academic, news etc. organization is lying and it's impossible to even produce the evidence otherwise except through a complex chain of priors (even if some/all of those priors can be derived from an equally legitimate source somewhere along the line), you have the right to believe and make your extraordinary claim, but not to morally fault others - especially not *the majority as such* - for not believing it. the burden of proof is on you. if I had stronger priors on this my priority #1 would not be shaming everyone into acting counter to their epistemic framework, but building infrastructure for independent research capable of proving and/or curing this secret epidemic. there's a strange desire to have it both ways and simultaneously make the same blanket condemnations of "the science" as COVID skeptics used to make, and assume the same position of social authority that we had when the rationale for social shaming was "trusting the science". but then I see this same cognitive dissonance and desire to have it both ways with regular parapolitics people like when they call you a fed the moment you disagree with them; like, if only feds believed the official cover story, why would they even bother having one?

Friends, I think we need to talk about Covid.

I want to get a few caveats out there before I start:

I am aware that there are people who need to exercise extreme caution about Covid; I live with someone who has two solid organ transplants and who is at the most immune compromised level of immune compromised. *I* have to be extremely cautious about covid.

Masking does prevent a certain level of transmission, and people who think they may have covid should mask and people who are concerned that they may be at high risk for covid should mask.

You should be vaccinated and boosted with the most recent vaccines that are available to you; covid is highly transmissible and very serious, you do not want to get covid and if you do get covid you don't want it to be severe and if you do get covid you don't want to give someone else covid and up-to-date vaccinations are the best way to reduce transmission and help to prevent severe cases of Covid.

We should be testing before going to any gatherings, and informing people if we test positive after gatherings, and testing if we suspect we have been exposed.

It is bullshit that there aren't good protections for workers who have covid; you should not be expected to go to work when you are testing positive

It is bullshit that people who are testing positive are not isolating for other reasons; if you have Covid you should not be going out and exposing other people to it even if you are experiencing mild symptoms or no symptoms.

We do need better ventilation systems for many kinds of spaces. Schools need better ventilation, restaurants need better ventilation, doctor's offices and hospitals and office buildings need better ventilation and better ventilation can reduce covid transmission.

I want to make it clear that Covid is real and there are real steps that individuals and systems can take to prevent transmission, and that there are systems that are exerting pressures that needlessly expose people to covid (the fact that you can lose your job if you don't come in when you're testing positive, mainly; also the fact that covid rapid tests should be ubiquitous and cheap/free and are not).

All of that being said: I'm seeing some posts circulating about how we're at an extremely high level of transmission and the REAL pandemic is being hidden from us and, friends, I'm pretty sure that is just incorrect and we're spreading misinformation.

I'm thinking of this video in particular, in which the claim is made that "your mystery illness is covid" in spite of negative tests. The guy in the video says that there's nothing else that millions of people could be getting a day, and that he predicted this because a wastewater spike in December meant that there was a huge spike in cases.

I've also seen people saying that deaths are where they were in 2021-2022, and that we're still at "a 9/11 a week" of excess deaths and friends, I'm not seeing great evidence for any of these claims.

I know that we (in the US, which is where the numbers I'm going to be citing are from) feel abandoned by the CDC and the fact that tracking cut off in May of 2023. But that only cut off for the federal tracking.

I live in LA county and LA county sure as shit is still tracking Covid.

If you want a clearer picture, you can see the daily case count over time compared to the daily death count:

Okay, you might say, but that's just LA.

Alright, so here's Detroit:

Right, but maybe that's CDC data and you don't trust the CDC at this point.

Okay, here's fatalities in New York tracked through New York's state data collection:

It's harder to toggle around the site for South Dakota, but you can compare their cases and hospitalizations and deaths for early 2022

To cases and hospitalizations and deaths from early 2024

And see that there's really no comparison.

Okay, you might say, but people are testing less. If they're testing less of course we're not seeing spikes, and they're testing less because fewer tests are available.

Alright, people are definitely testing less than they were in 2021 and 2022. Hospitalization for Covid is probably the most clear metric because you know those people have covid for sure, the couldn't not test for it.

Here are hospitalizations over time for LA:

Here are hospitalizations over time for New York:

As vaccination rates have gone up, cases, deaths, and hospitalizations have gone down. It IS clear that there are case spikes in the winter, when it is cold and people are indoors in poorly ventilated spaces and people are more susceptible to respiratory infections as a result of cold air weakening the protection offered by our mucous membranes, and that is something that we will have to take precautions about for the forseeable future, just as we should have always been taking similar precautions during flu season.

So I want to go point-by-point through some of the arguments made in that video because I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about how "THEY" don't want you to know about the virus surge and buds that is just straight up conspiracism.

So okay, first off, most of what that video is based on is spikes in wastewater data, not spikes in cases. This is because people don't trust CDC data on cases, but I'd say to maybe check out your regional data on cases. I don't actually trust the CDC that much, but I know people who do tracking of hospitalizations in LA county, I trust them a lot more. Wastewater data does correlate with increases in cases, but this "second largest spike of the entire pandemic" thing is misleading; wastewater reporting is pretty highly variable and you can't just accept that a large spike in covid in wastewater means that we're in just as bad a place in the pandemic as we were in 2022. We simply have not seen the surge of hospitalizations and deaths that we would expect to see in the weeks following that spike in wastewater data if wastewater data was reflective of community transmission.

The next claim is that "there is nothing else that is infecting millions of people a day" and covid isn't doing that either. The highest daily case rates were in January of 2021 and they were in the 865k a day range, which is ridiculously high but isn't millions of cases a day.

But what we can see is that when people are tested by their doctors for Covid, RSV, and the Flu, more tests are coming back positive for the Flu. Covid causes more hospitalizations than the other two illnesses, but to be honest what the people in the video are describing - lightheadedness, dizziness, exhaustion - just sound like pretty standard symptoms of everything from covid to the cold to allergies. There are lots of things your mystery illness could be.

The video goes on to talk about the fact that people aren't testing, and why their tests may be coming back negative and I'd like to point out that the same things are all true of Flu or RSV tests. People might be getting tested too early or too late; getting a negative test for the flu isn't a good reason to assume you've got covid, getting a negative test for covid isn't a good reason to assume you've got the flu, and testing for viruses as a whole is imperfect. There are hundreds of viruses that could be the common cold; there are multiple viruses that can cause bronchitis; there are multiple viruses that can cause pneumonia, and you're not going to test for all of these things the moment you start feeling sick.

He then recommends testing for multiple days if you have symptoms and haven't had a positive test (fine) and talks about the location of the tests (less fine). Don't use your rapid tests to swab your throat or cheek unless it specifically says that they are designed to do so. Test based on the instructions in the packet.

He points out that the tests probably still pick up on the virus because they're not testing for the spike protein, they're testing for the RNA (good info!)

The video then discusses something that I think is really key to this paranoia about the "mystery illnesses" - he talks about how covid changes and weakens your immune system (a statement that should come with many caveats about severity and vulnerability and that we are still researching that) and then says that it makes you more susceptible to strep or mono and that "things that used to clear in a day or two now hit you really hard."

And that's where I think this anxiety is coming from.

Strep throat lasts anywhere from three days to a week. A cold takes about a week to clear. The flu lasts about a week and can knock you on your ass with exhaustion for weeks depending on how bad you get it. Did you get a cough with your cold? Expect that to take anywhere from three to eight weeks to clear up.

I think that people are thinking "i got a bad virus and felt really sick for a week and haven't gotten my energy back" but that just sounds like a bad cold. That sounds like a potent allergy attack. That doesn't even sound like a bad flu (I got a bad flu in 2009 and thought i was going to straight-up die I had a fever of 103+ for three days and felt like shit for three days on either side of that and took six weeks to feel more like myself again).

Getting sick sucks. It really, really sucks. But if you're getting sick and you're testing for covid and it's coming back negative after you tested a few times, it's almost certainly not covid.

The video then says "until someone provides evidence that it's not covid, it should be assumed to be covid because we have record levels of covid it's that simple" but that's not simple. We don't have record levels of covid and he hasn't proved it. We have record high levels of wastewater reports of covid, which correlates with covid cases but the spike in wastewater noted in december didn't see a spike with a corresponding magnitude of cases in terms of either hospitalizations or deaths, which is what we'd have seen if we had actual record numbers of covid.

He says that if you want to ignore this, you'll get sick with covid, and that about 30-40% of the US just got sick with covid in the last four months (which is a RIDICULOUSLY unevidenced claim).

He says that we need to create a new normal that takes covid into account, which means masking more often and testing more often and making choices about risk-avoidant behaviors.

Now, I don't disagree with that last statement, but he prefaces the statement with "it doesn't necessarily mean lockdown" and that's where I think the alarmism and paranoia is really visible here. We are so, so far away from "lockdown" type levels that it's absurd to discuss lockdown here.

What I'm seeing right now is people who are chronically ill, people who are immune compromised, and people who are experiencing long covid (which may not be distinct from other post-viral syndromes from severe cases of flu, etc, but which may be more severe or more notable because of the prevalence of covid) are talking about feeling abandoned and attacked and left behind by society because covid is still out there, and still at extremely high levels.

I am seeing people who feel abandoned and attacked because the lgbtq+ events they are attending don't require masking. I am seeing people who are claiming that it is eugenicist that their schools don't have a negative test policy anymore.

And this comes together into two really disconcerting trends that I've been observing online for a while.

The claim that the pandemic is still as bad as it's ever been and in fact may be worse but we can't know that because "they" (the CDC, the government, capitalist institutions that want you back in the office, the university industrial complex that wants your dorm room dollars) are covering up the numbers and

Significant grievance at the fact that people are acting like number one is not true and are putting you at risk either out of thoughtlessness (because they don't realize they're putting you at risk) or malice (because they don't care if the sick die).

And those things are a recipe for disaster.

I think I've pretty robustly addressed point one; I don't think that there's good evidence that there's a secretly awful surge of covid that nobody is talking about. I think that there are some people who are being alarmist about covid who are basing all of their concern on wastewater numbers that have not held up as the harbinger of a massive wave of infections.

So let's talk about point number two and JK Rowling.

Barnes and Noble is not attacking you when it puts up a Hogwarts Castle display in the lobby. Your favorite youtuber isn't trying to hurt you when they offhandedly mention Harry Potter.

If you let every mention of Harry Potter or every person who enjoys that media franchise wound you, you are going to spend a lot of your time wounded.

People are not liking Harry Potter at you.

Okay.

People are also not not wearing masks at you.

You may be part of a minority group that experiences the potential for outsized harm as a result of majority groups engaging in perfectly reasonable behaviors.

There are kind, well-meaning, sensible people who go out every day and do something that may cause you harm and it's not because they want to hurt you or they don't care about whether you live or die, it is because they are making their own risk assessments based on their own lives and making the very reasonable assumption that people who are more concerned about covid than they are will take precautions to keep themselves safe.

We are not at a place in the pandemic where it is sensible to expect people with no symptoms of illness to mask in public as a matter of course or to present evidence of a recent negative test when entering a public building in their day-to-day life.

I think now is a really good time to sit down and ask yourself how you expect things to be with covid as an endemic part of our viral ecosystem. I think now is a good time to ask yourself what risk realistically looks like for you and for people who are unlike you. I think now is a good time to consider what would feel "safe" for you and how you could accomplish feeling safe as you navigate the world.

I'm probably going to continue masking in most indoor spaces for years. Maybe forever. There are accommodations that SHOULD be afforded to people who have to take more precautions than others (remote learning, remote visits, remote work, etc.), and we should demand those kinds of accommodations.

But it is going to poison you from the inside out if you are perpetually angry that people who don't have the same medical limitations as you are happy that they get to go shopping with their faces uncovered.

So now I want to talk to you about my father in law.

My father in law had a bone marrow transplant in 2015. That's the most immune compromised you can get without having your organs swapped out.

The care sheet for him after the transplant was a little overwhelming. The list of foods he couldn't eat was intimidating and the limitations on where he could go was depressing. It cautioned against going to large events, it recommended outdoor gatherings where possible but only if he could avoid sunlight and was somewhere with no history of valley fever. It said that he should wear masks indoors any time he was someplace with poor ventilation and that he should avoid contact with anyone who had an illness of any kind, taking special note to avoid children and anyone recently vaccinated for measles.

It was, in short, pretty much what someone immune compromised would need to do to try to avoid a viral infection. Sensible. Reasonable. Wash your hands and social distance; wear masks in sensitive contexts and don't spend time in enclosed places with people who have a communicable illness.

This is what life was always going to be like for people who are severely immune compromised, and it was always going to be incumbent upon the person with the illness to figure out how to operate in a society that is not built with them in mind.

It is not the job of every parent I encounter to tell me whether their child has been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months. That isn't something that people need to do as part of their everyday life. However it IS my responsibility to check with the parents I'm hanging out with whether their children have been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months so I know if it's safe for my immune compromised spouse to be around them.

If you want an environment in which you feel safe from covid, at this point in the pandemic (when the virus is endemic and not spreading rapidly as far as we can see from case counts) it is your responsibility to take the steps necessary to make you feel safe. Some of those steps will involve advocating for safety improvements in public spaces (again, indoor ventilation needs to be better and I'm personally pretty extreme about vaccination requirements; these are things we should be discussing in our school board meetings and at our workplaces), some of those steps will involve advocating for worker protections, guaranteed sick time, and the right to healthcare. But some of the things you're going to need to do to feel safe are going to come down to you.

If you are concerned about communicable diseases you have to be realistic about the fact that our society doesn't go out of its way to prevent communicable diseases - norovirus among food service workers pre-pandemic is pretty clear evidence of that. You are going to have to be proactive about your safety rather than expecting the world to act like Covid is at 2021-2022 levels when it is measurably not.

[baroquespiral]

Ilmatar

Joseph Alanen

1913–1916

[baroquespiral]

I think we have exactly enough, the second one is already pushing it right up to the edge of being funny. not every joke needs to be a snowclone

i think I’m in love. more of this, please

[baroquespiral]

hello. i saw a video featuring aella then saw your twitter through it. i immediately stopped watching the video as i do not agree with many of their takes, but i would like to understand them without watching a video about kinks through the lens of the political compass. could you possibly explain what gender maximalizing is, what a gynocratic traditionalist is, and what the sphere you operate in is called? Thank you. (there was an article when i looked it up but im not going on medium)

wait what video with Aella am I in lol. anyway most of the things in my Twitter bio are at least partly a bit, do not represent any kind of relevant external movement or phenomenon, and you are not going to find explained anywhere else anyway so. "gender optimizationist" is a kind of contrarian response to the formerly popular position of "gender nihilism", a framework that tried to decentre the discourse of innate identity in justifying/accounting for gender fluidity, transition etc. by basically adopting the maximally deflationist position that gender is entirely an ideological construct covering material oppressive systems but letting people identify & do whatever they want with it is truer to the premise of its abolition than restricting specific behaviours and identities as actually existing "gender". I actually do find this useful to bring up when TERFs claim stuff like "trans people believe in innate gendered souls or what role you fit determines your gender" etc. but still think it concedes too much so my own position of "gender optimization" is like, gender is real at least insofar as something we consciously construct, people's identities aren't less objective than their historical origins and we can and should continue the project of shaping and rebuilding it until we make it something that can accommodate the maximum of everyone possible (and leave exits for people who don't want it)

"gynocratic traditionalism" is not entirely compatible with this and while I didn't take either completely seriously I used to struggle with this more before I got into Thelema and clarified my spirituality & ontology in a lot of ways. for completely personal poetic/psychosexual reasons I was simultaneously inclined to read gender as actually real in a metaphysical/spiritual sense, albeit one that doesn't map to biology or patriarchal gender roles and mostly derives from reading The White Goddess by Robert Graves way too young. almost nobody remembers it now but that book was part of the broader "matriarchal antiquity" trend, a huge influence on Wicca and the New Ageier side of second wave feminism, and argues that the original religious/magickal tradition was the essentially henotheistic worship of a Great Goddess of life, death and nature, who was self-sufficient but produced for her own pleasure a secondary male god who dies and resurrects with the agricultural cycle. human gender is then a reflection of this higher metaphysical order, with woman as the superior term in the hierarchy, and the "warrior" dimensions of masculinity being descended from a form of sacrificial kingship ritually representing the life-death cycle of the Goddess' lover. I'd basically argue the "gender optimizationist" position relative to left queer theory but this relative to right-wing mythopoeic traditionalist accounts of gender, which as an intensely capital-R Romantic personality I did at least get the appeal of and offered it as a "feminist" alternative to. people like RFH have kinda picked up the baton of that now although I have some obvious issues with her framings. I used "gynocratic" instead of matriarchal bc one of the interesting things about Graves' version of this hypothesis is it doesn't actually focus on motherhood and reproduction as much as the wombyn TERF stuff; for instance instead of the more famous Wiccan "maiden/mother/crone" formulation for the Goddess' three aspects he uses "maiden/nymph/crone", implying that the default adulthood stage wasn't necessarily settling down and popping out babies but a freewheeling sexuality where reproduction was an individual choice supported by the community, controlled by abortifacents etc. should probably clarify that, after quite a bit of going back and forth on it and my Twitter presence was designed to be plausibly deniable in either direction, I am pretty much a low-Kinsey bisexual cis guy who socialized into predominantly queer, especially trans spaces mostly just due to neurodivergence and general nonconformity. a lot of my weird gender politics is subtly in dialogue with MonetizeYourCat-era Tumblr stuff (imo the more honest version of today's mainstream heteropessimism) about whether it's even possible or ethical to exist as that you didn't mention them but just to have on record re: the other stuff in the bio, "presuppositional leftist" applies the idea of presuppositional apologetics to my left commitments in the sense that they're not premised on any descriptive claim about reality but rather presuppositions of why politics would even matter to me in the first place, and "Canadian materialist" is a joke on Canadian idealism. my Substack bio is more up to date with where I'm at now but I like keeping the Twitter one around bc every now and then someone has a really funny reaction to it I don't really have a "sphere I operate in" so much as I float around the edges of different subcultures, study them and make friends with people I find interesting. currently I feel like I'm kind of in tpot, kind of in the "irony left" and kind of in parapolitics/esoteric "schizoposting". and also trying to carve out a niche in the online subcultural arts scene: my major passion project rn is my indie press and in particular our serial fiction journal (new issue coming out this month!) featuring two of my novels

[baroquespiral]

I think I have said this before but my really controversial take is that the only way out of this contradiction cropping up every generation (and getting radically more weaponized in this and future ones) is to carve out a pipeline from this genre of malebrain into rigorous consistent feminism, to establish a corps of unironic feminist Travis Bickle dark white knights doing the dirty work everyday feminism doesn't want to while binding themselves to its ideal and recognizing their own role in realizing its conditions of possibility

So Sinfest is about a decadent urban hellscape as seen through the eyes of a mentally unstable loner with:

A savior complex toward women and girls, which in practice only makes actual women and girls uncomfortable

Simultaneous obsession and disgust toward sex trafficking, including of children, and toward pornography

Fantasies about cleansing society through heroic vigilantism against the purveyors of vice who control everything and are represented as pimps in stereotypical 1970s-style outfits with feathered hats and all

A racist and queerphobic streak a mile wide

Haven't we seen this before?

(Tagging @feotakahari, @dagny-hashtaggart, and @quasi-normalcy here; may reblog to tag others)

[baroquespiral]

@nostalgebraist

did u know you are an official not-self-published published author now? to be found in a jail library near you! (if you happen to live in the county where ive been sending an inmate yr books after they voiced interest)

[baroquespiral]

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me.

-Emily Dickinson

Happy Pride :) 

[baroquespiral]

Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

[baroquespiral]

It really does encapsulate so much of the fuckedness of the 2010s culture wars that this “mediocre white men, the world owes you nothing” listincle ppl fucking loved to whip out as a rebuke to the chuds of the day directly asked the reader, “So, what have you done to be worthy of a woman with an eating disorder?”

[baroquespiral]

TVTropes is such a weird website because the language (and I guess the 'culture') of the site was codified in an extremely specific era of internet use (mid to late aughties), and by members of an extremely specific and insular subgroup (nerds) that it codified all the tropes in what is effectively a dead language. No one talks like that anymore and yet because there's no renaming or updating, and in the 2000s we thought the future was forever babyyyy etc, it all continues to chug along as part of a world where self-respecting adults use words like "woobie". It's remarkable to me because its not a relic or preserved in amber (an online Pompeii like an abandoned geocities page), people are actively using it! Like finding an island where everyone speaks English in the style of Chaucer. I would be just as surprised if a man on the street greeted me "Hail and well met" as if someone in casual conversation deployed the phrase "crowning moment of awesome".

[baroquespiral]

I appreciate that it’s the opposite of the rigorous scholarship everyone’s trying to do in this thread but I haven’t mentioned the Twyman book on this platform at all yet and if anyone wants to go down some really wild rabbit holes

but to address the anon's original question, it's a Templar/occult thing that's all over all sorts of normie pop culture at this point (and he's recognizing the most bastardized telephone game version of it as "vaguely spooky goat") so nah not that unusual. like he probably recognizes it from Shin Megami Tensei or something

is it normal for a child to recognize something as baphomet? search engine tells me it's a knights templar/occult thing so i suspect not

Every kid knows Baphomet. Every child knows about the history of the knights templar, and how they were persecuted by the church, and how several centuries later a French occultist built a syncretic religion around the invented demon at the center of the anti-templar polemics.

[baroquespiral]

wait wait wait mutuals rb this with a description of ur voice

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COME ON GUYS THIS LEVEL OF WINNING IS POSSIBLE FOR FURUDO ERIKA but also read Mercenary Planet bc Leona is gonna sweep this tournament in a couple of years

>lesbian space atrocities >gun butch trans protagonist >body sharing >hard (gay and communist) military sf >rationalfic-adjacent >hope-against-hopepunk >gambit pileup to unprecedented levels >internet fuckups with way too much power >biocosmist alien religion >Blood Meridian in space >make aliens weird again

for fans of: Wildbow, Warhammer 40K, Animorphs, Code Geass, Hunter X Hunter once it gets really dense, Coquette Dragoon, Barlowe’s Guide To Extra-terrestrials, Remembrance of Earth's Past if it wasn't fascist, The Forever War

the lovely art of baru is by @anthyies!

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Kinoko Nasu's Nouvelle Cuisine

The visual novel scene is as small and new as the medium is. It’s also pretty tight. Everyone knows everyone, and as a result I regularly meet various scene luminaries and other creatives. Recently I had the chance to hang out with the great Kinoko Nasu at a inflation/vore fetish erogame release party we both were at. I didn’t care about the game much and the booze was shit, but Nasu turned out to be a super good guy. He’s pretty charming and as witty as his prose would suggest. By coincidence I found out that, like myself, he enjoys high level cooking. I expressed interest in his cooking and on the spot Nasu suggested we’d have a boys’ night at his place, dedicated to cookery and getting drunk.

————- —– ——– —-

“So it’s like something you do to unwind yourself?” I ask him, as I watch him score eggplants with a ritual dagger of some sort. He nods, shrugs bashfully and tries to elaborate with his halting English. “It is like… I worry much less. It’s not stressful. Just doing with my hands and see what comes out. I get outside of my head.”

“I feel the same I suppose, at least on some level. On the other hand, it’s still an aspiration for me. I’m not a casual.”

Nasu nods his approval. I was unexpectedly quite nervous about this evening, but as soon as I got a glass of wine in me I settled down a bit. Nasu is a great host, and I like looking him cook. I can’t help noticing his delicate hands and enchanting, graceful moves. He had chosen a three-course menu of his signature dishes for us tonight. In theory I’m supposed to help him but he’s handling most of the work by himself, very effortlessly. I’m getting a little bit excited.

We sit to eat at the intimately small dinner table of Nasu’s apartment. His forehead is glistening with sweat and his cheeks are flushed. Cooking is a physical activity in a hot kitchen, after all. As we dig in, I see Nasu steal glances at my direction, trying to see a reaction on my face. Naturally, the food is excellent. There’s a wonderful harmony in the elements of each exquisite dish. I compliment Nasu profusely, causing him to blush deep red. He doesn’t really seem to know how to respond. Could it be that he doesn’t cook to other people often?

“Thank you again, the food was incredible.” I sigh as I sit down on the comfy looking sofa. The living room’s walls are full of posters of all the different versions of Saber from Fate/Stay Night. They continue all the way to the ceiling as well. There’s a life sized Saber statue in the corner and a replica Excalibur on the fireplace mantel. A toasty fire is burning, warming us up. “You’re welcome. Maybe next time, I come to your place and you cook?” “Sure, that’s a deal.” “Looking forward to it. But tell me Aura, what are you guys working on now?” “Well… we have this great concept of…”

—-

“Would you like to stay the night?” he asks casually after it’s already well past midnight. I had been sitting on his comfy sofa, lost in thought and cradling a sniffer of Chateau du Breuil VSOP calvados. The fire is already out. I feel pretty drunk. Suddenly I find Nasu sitting on the couch right next to me, reaching with his hand at my…

“Kinoko-san, I…”

Poached Egg “Kinoko Nasu”

Instructions:

Pickled mushrooms

3dl aromatic mushrooms, like shitake, chanterelle, or other

0,75dl champagne vinegar

1,5dl water

2tbsp sugar

5cm piece of lemon peel

1 bay leaf

whole black pepper and allspice

a couple thyme twigs

1. Concoct a solution by boiling all the reagents in a small pan. Add the mushrooms, boil for a minute and let cool. Drink a cup of tea with your sister while avoiding thinking of the insides of her thighs. Endure a sleepless night as the full moon haunts you.

Eggplant caviar

1-2 Eggplants

1 garlic clove per eggplant

olive oil

thyme twigs

2 tbsp sour cream

1. ——–When the dawn cuts in your eyes, command the blonde foreigner lying beside you to leave the house. She will comply without a word. Return to your laboratory. The blood on your hands is not your own. 2. Cut the garlic into very thin slices cut it cut it CUT IT CUT IT CUT IT CUT IT. Split the eggplants lengthwise and score the cut surface, carefully like a surgeon. Jam the garlic slices in the cuts. Rub with some olive oil and lay a quartet of thyme twigs on top, then return the eggplant halves back together as they were, as if undoing your own work. Enbalm with aluminium foil. Roast in your furnace for about 45minutes to an hour (longer if needed), until the eggplant is soft to touch and you can almost penetrate the wet, hot flesh with your finger. 3. Discard the thyme and scoop the eggplant flesh off the skins, a gruesome task but it must be done. Put in a food processor, add sour cream, salt and pepper and blend. 4. Heat a wok or frying pan and toast the caviar until it gets a bit thicker.

Rucola pure

5dl rucola leaves

1tbsp sour cream

1. Violently rip the rucola leaves apart from the stems. Like an animal.  Like a beast. Parboil the leaves in boiling water for 30 seconds. Blend them with the sour cream, salt, white pepper and a dash of sugar.

Parmesan tuile

1. Grate a small pile of parmesan on a baking sheet and bake in oven for a couple of minutes, until the cheese has melted, bubbling and taken colour.

Construct the dish from the pure, the caviar, the mushrooms, a poached egg and the tuile. Garnish with thyme and rucola leaves and dried mushroom powder. ~ BAD END ~

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reblog if you’ll do whatever a cute girl tells you to do

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the angels in the Cars universe are Ophanim

The decision to make the extraterrestrials for the cars universe ufos was a stroke of genius imo