katie-the-bug

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Penguin escapes killer whales by jumping onto a boat.

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“How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realise this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realise this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didn’t do those things with their mouths?”

— Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari, Yuval Noah)

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SPACEBALLS 2: THE SEARCH FOR MORE MONEY

Director: Mel Brooks Year: 2027

"After 40 years we asked, what do the fans want?... but instead we're making this movie!" - Mel Brooks

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the idea of a clutch purse is nightmarish to me. the whole point of bags was so we could escape the torment of holding things. and now u gotta hold a bag.

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Creationism: Isn't it impossibly convenient that the physical properties of the Earth just happen to be so perfectly suited to the existence of human life?

The Anthropic Principle:

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love it when a queer character's identity is the least interesting thing about them. like yes she's trans but that's less plot-relevant than the fact she's a wanted fugitive on 6 different planets

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my trauma didn't give me my upsetting tastes in fiction. I spent my tween years finely honing my own home-grown and organic tastes in upsetting fiction, then a bunch of other unpleasant stuff happened to me, and most of it just so happened to coincidentally align with my preexisting narrative obsessions. this is the best way to do it tbh, always make sure to predict and pre-game your Problems so you've got the right metaphors and themes locked and loaded so you can cope in an artistically enriching way.

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Exactly!

And don't give me any of this "metaphor" or "symbolism" stuff. You said there's be a Leviathan, so where is it? Where is my leviathan, Mr. Hobbes?

(Voicing a loosely-held opinion just so you can say something funny is always valid.)

I’m biased against books with an animal in the title but don’t feature that type of animal as a major character.

I don’t care if it’s a good book, if you want that species of animal in your title you have to earn it!

(I’m only somewhat serious, and I just thought that was a funny sentence)

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(Can't reblog the original post because Mr. Prokopetz got fed up, but that doesn't mean I'm keeping my thoughts to myself.)

This is the kind of thing I'm aiming for when I think about the humans in the science fantasy setting I've invented to amuse myself. Admittedly, there's multiple species in there that are indistinguishable from humans, but most of my reservations are about the Actual Humans From Earth, Bona Fide Homo Sapiens, because I don't want the setting to revolve around them or treat them as "default."

Part of this is accomplished by introducing humans later in the plot - which has the added bonus of surprising anybody who was taking it for granted that my setting was a galaxy far far away - and by calling them "Tellurians" instead of "humans" or "Earthlings." The rest, I think, can be done by making them weird. Not in a "framing human norms as insane by alien standards," because while that is fun, the discount humans in the setting have most of the same features so the effect just won't be there. It works better for me to add an unrelatable gimmick to solidify humans as Just Another Fantasy Species.

The in-universe chain of events that created this alternate future humanity is too much science fantasy / cosmic horror bullshit to comfortably explain here. The gist of it is that after Shit Goes Down in the first half of the 21st century, a growing number of people have magical fire powers and an even greater number worship or at least acknowledge the newly apotheosis'd Fire Goddess, the source of said powers.

This solidifies into a noticeable gimmick over the following centuries. Fifty years on, they expound on the humanist symbolism of fire to the diplomats of the first extraterrestrial civilization they meet. Twenty years after that a regime of alien conquerors goes down in (beautiful, magical) flames. Each new city on each terraformed planet features a shrine of eternal flame that serves as a place of peaceful contemplation for all, at least until a pyrokinetic kid decides to do something funny. Their oaths and idioms steadily incorporate more references to fire and the Fire Goddess as the decades wear on. Three hundred years after Shit Goes Down, they're making alien tourists nervous by putting torches and braziers everywhere with the casualness only a population that's 20% firebender can have.

By the time the adventures of some space opera protagonists lead them to Earth, it's a Planet of Hats, and most of those hats are on fire.

In conclusion: I think I've gotten sufficiently freaky with it.

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breakfast

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I didn't realize that an em dash was anything other than a " - ", which I use all the time. Where does that put me on the scale of LLM to Real Human?

"this is DEFINITELY written by AI, I can tell because it uses the writing quirks that AI uses (because it was trained on real people who write with those quirks)"

c'mon dudes we have got to do better than this

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Maybe the years-old popsicle from the bottom of the freezer will save me.

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Hey I have a really really stupid thought. Anomalocaris is a Cambrian explosion creature and its name means a shrimp unlike the others. However if you translate it in modern instead of ancient greek it can mean queer (as in gay, but kinda derogatory) shrimp.

I feel we could have anomalocaris as a mascot or something because it is such a cool animal

Sorry I know the world is burning, but I feel we need to still have stupid nerdy thoughts

Look at it. It is such a goofy looking creature

ANOMALOCARIS SAYS GAY RIGHTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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it’s been ten years

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There's something about atheism that I've repeatedly tried and failed to put into words on several posts on this blog but I think I finally got it.

Atheists are the only religious minority who, even (or sometimes even *especially*) in ostensibly progressive spaces are not allowed to ever act like they're sure of their beliefs.

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Why don’t we let the guy whose every plan could be reasonably construed as an abstract suicide attempt take a crack it