captious-solarian

[captious-solarian]

Tigers with a frozen milk brick on a hot day

[captious-solarian]

It was pretty fucking good yeah

On the other hand… there was a lot of resting on our laurels, of denial that the problems aren't yet solved, of blind trust that they'd solve themselves whether we worked for it or not, of turning our noses up at imperfect solutions because we expected a perfect one to turn up.

Nowadays, there's a lot of despair, far more than the actual atrocities warrant (and that's already a lot). For example, I constantly meet people who expect billions of deaths from global warming, and are understandably pretty deflated.

That's kind of easier to work with. Realistic assessments (even if very grim), a look at all the progress made, a look at all the work that can be done, can bring hopeless people back in the saddle. Even just in small ways like calling their representatives. Even in non-altruistic ways like "oh looks like I personally won't die of this, I should plan for the future"

what must it have been like to have been alive during an era where the cultural zeitgeist was that the future was looking bright

[captious-solarian]

Least Bittern (Ixobrychus exilis). They do this fairly often, straddle reeds as a spot and catch fish and insects without having to fly.

[captious-solarian]

While I'm defending annoying behaviour: I think the hate on that kinkless Kinktober event is excessive.

It's perfectly fine to run an event with weird constraints. Nobody is forced to participate.

If I demand fics exclusively in the form of National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence exam booklets, then far fewer people will submit an entry. The tradeoff is how badly I want that specific type of fic vs how badly I want more participants. Trying to ridicule organisers into broadening entry criteria doesn't seem terribly helpful.

I do think some of the specifics are a little eye-rolling, mainly the grandstanding about how the constraints make the fic morally better. But the gigantic dogpile is out of proportion.

It's also quite unwise to use a generic tag like "CaitVi Kinktober 2025": people not participating in the event will also use it, and then the organisers will see stuff they don't want to see and be annoyed.

[captious-solarian]

I'm with the cow orker on this one actually. "Fuck you, fuck your timewasting meeting, fuck your bullshit 'icebreaker' question, I'm not spending even one second thinking about it, you get slop." We stan a misanthrope.

at our weekly allstaff meeting at work we always do an icebreaker question. today it was just tell us your hobby. that was the question. and i watched my coworker next to me go into chatgpt and ask it "hobbies." am i working with fake people am i being truman showed what the fuck is going on in here

[captious-solarian]

it's really embarrassing how much self control i have to exert when you put me in front of a tray of convenient and tender meat like if you put meatballs in front if me the fuckers are gone in milliseconds. same true of roadted brussels sprouts or basically anything that's a nice little dense and textured morsel. i am the hors that d'ouvres

[captious-solarian]

If organized inceldom had originated on tumblr it never could have gotten traction because the grievances of those guys would be utterly mystifying to anyone else. "Women are unreasonable whores won't even look at you unless you're Thomas Cromwell". Puzzling and immediately dismissed, no indulgent NYT hear-them-out pleas

[captious-solarian]

translatology themed Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes out with a german guy who is an ardent admirer of Walter Benjamin's Task of the Translator so she starts using german idioms translated word for word into english¹. George, a strict adherent to Vermeer's Skopos Theory² ("always been a skopos guy. it's straight to the point. what's going on in hermeneutics? nobody knows! no idea, no skopos!"), makes fun of her for this but then grows a moustache and retrieves his toupé to resemble Benjamin more closely so Wilhelm will think he's in deep translatological thought when he's just looking out the window. the plan backfires, as Steinbrenner associates his new look with Trotsky³ ("shave that beard off George, we're running the Yankees here, not a newspaper!") Jerry is dating a brasilian girl who studied under Rosemary Arrojo, and is accused by Kramer of supporting monolingual regimes bc he wouldn't learn portuguese for her. However, concluding he should show more interest in her work, he tries to impress her by reading Cixous' Reading with Clarice Lispector, in reaction to which the girl breaks up with him ("she broke up with me, George! she said she wanted Cleopatra in bed, not a colonizer!" "Cleopatra?!" "Yes! Can you believe it?" "Nah, you don't have the nose for it.")⁵ Kramer misunderstands Anthropophagic Translation⁶ and thinks Newman wants to eat him.

[captious-solarian]

That's JRRT. JKR is Batman's nemesis.

wasnt jkr the guy who got assassinated by the president? why is he bad?

i. ive been thinking about how to reply to this for like ten minutes. i can’t even add anything. it’s already perfect .

[captious-solarian]

When a Roman makes a dumb mixup and self-harms about it, everyone praises his badassery. Unfortunately, you can't get the same effect if you have a tumblr account.

“the trick, professor, is not minding that it hurts,” I declare as I barehand a couple dozen test tubes from the -80 freezer at work

[captious-solarian]

Link to the Science History Institute publication about the poll (PDF, 4MB). I don't know why the article doesn't link to it.

I'm confused by the results: the buckets add up to far more than 100%, so some must overlap, but they sound mutually exclusive…? Do "no more than" and "up to" indicate different things?

…wait, they add up to 116. Did they scale the results by the number of elements? That'd be an absurd mistake

based on this article

[captious-solarian]

Was this technique ever used for stealth historically? I feel like the part where you stick the bow up to flip it over your head would be very visible.

We need to talk about “stealth archery”

I’ll take any excuse I can get to remind people that the jarmakee is a real technique!

Please consider supporting these videos on Patreon

[captious-solarian]

bowyonet…

Stick em with the pointy end!

There’s a long video that covers this in more detail!

[captious-solarian]

Are two weapons always better than one?

There’s a longer breakdown of this on Patreon!

[captious-solarian]

sometimes tiktok is actually incredibly good

[captious-solarian]

Since you didn't deny inventing them, I assume you invented:

Stories with space travel

Stories about prejudice or exploitation

Stories where something bad happens to a character

Quakers

Some things that I have been mistaken for inventing on this webbed site that I definitely did not invent:

The phrase "torment nexus"

The popular scifi story 17776

The entire r/hfy genre (somehow)

The concept of a generation ship

Using rotation as a substitute for gravity in a weightless environment

Using rotation as a substitute for gravity on a generation ship

So many biological technologies, both real and fake, that I've lost count

Computers made out of brains. Please I am begging some of you guys to read one scifi story that I didn't write. Most of the stuff people think I invented is stuff that was old hat in scifi before I was old enough to read.

I don't know why I keep getting credited with random stuff but it's safe to go forward in life assuming I didn't invent dick. If you think I invented something you're almost definitely wrong. Assume I'm referencing something else or that I stole it from somewhere. I love stealing.

[captious-solarian]

hell is full. heaven is full. god created a new holding space for souls called hurgle and the only thibg to do here is this infinitely expading jigsaw puzzle of a finely detailed pigeon. we are just slowwwwwly creating little tufts of feathers for eternity . yesterday , greg found a corner piece