Cyrus Draegur

Especially now that aniwave is dead ;_; good night sweet prince

I fucking love the symbolism of Ukraine’s flag so much. Clear blue skies over golden fields!🌻

i do wonder just how much of their combat capacity they’ve dumped into invading ukraine. i’m sure they wanted the world to believe that the force they’re exerting on ukraine is but a fractional whisper of their “true power”, but so much about russia has exposed itself to be a paper tiger thus far that i actually wonder if they may even be overextended on just trying to invade ukraine and actually utterly defenseless in the practical sense everywhere else.

their defence may be rather … non-credible one might say :3

six hundred thousand dead orcs.

how many more must die before they stop throwing themselves into this meat grinder?

imagine being a russian soldier, receiving deployment orders for siberia, and then crying tears of joy and relief because thank GOD they’re not sending you to ukraine.

It’s interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion.

One such example of a group of people who had NOT developed religiosity I’m aware of, interestingly, also did not develop mathematics or written language, because the capacity for abstraction which form the substrate that religions grow upon is ALSO a prerequisite for speculative concepts like symbolic meaning and set theory.

I’m speaking of certain mostly out of contact tribes of humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people
And even they, despite living with an exclusively direct observation empiricism-based worldview, are still susceptible to collective hallucination (though they don’t cultivate it into an organized system that will ever persist beyond those who directly experienced any given hallucinatory event).

This right here. If we didn’t have religion, practically the first thing we’d do is begin hallucinating about one. There’s a “religion”-shaped hole in every human brain, basically, even though things that we wouldn’t necessarily readily recognize as religious patterns could come to fill it, wholly or partially. Our pattern recognition/reconstruction and predictive modeling systems will always generate hallucinations that, like most heuristics, are fundamentally not reality but MAY nevertheless offer sufficient utility (or the feeling of utility) that the synaptic connections they comprise will end up self-reinforcing.

The amount of vigilance it would take to continually purge these cognitive patterns would be more expensive and exhausting than most of the potential dangers of letting them exist.

But it’s possible to mindfully decide to cultivate the features and aspects of what emergently congeals there such that it’s more likely to be harmless, such as certain hobbies, fandoms, habits, or ritual-esque behavioral patterns.

Reflecting on our experiences against an anthropomorphized hypothetical observer to gain insights we would otherwise miss shows up even in places like computer programming - see “rubber duck debugging” - sufficiently strict religious sects would most certainly decry this activity as idolatry to a false god, even if YOU clearly do not classify a rubber ducky as a god. Because, again, the root of religiosity is group consensus of a socially shared memetic hallucination. what they perceive becomes a component of their beliefs even if it doesn’t become a component of yours.

This leads me to often consider spirituality, magical thinking, ritualistic behaviors, and religiosity in general as a bridge between our animalistic impulses and instincts vs. our sapience, or whatever you might label “higher” cognitive functions that enable abstract decision differentiation.

Central planning committee knows what’s best now eat your slop or it’s the gulag for you /s

Nestle

HP

Apple

Tesla

There are more but those are the first that came to mind that I don’t have to go dig up a list.

The class war has already been going. It’s time we fight back against the aristocracy, and burn their ivory towers to the fucking ground.

NOBODY WAS DRAFTED INTO VIETNAM WHEN THEY WERE FUCKING TWELVE DIPSHIT

AND, MOTHER FUCKER, YOU DO NOT GET TO INSINUATE THAT THE “DUCK AND COVER” CARTOONS WERE SOMEHOW MORE TRAUMATIZING THAN CODE GRAY DRILLS, LET ALONE SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY DIRECTLY EXPERIENCING ACTUAL FUCKING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

FUCK. OFF. IN. HELL.

at least Vietnam veterans could afford a fucking home when they got back

You know what, STAY fucked off. I don’t need filth like you in my feed. BLOCKED.

I don’t think any alphas had actually been born yet to witness it let alone comprehend it.

Tell you something homie:

Having no hope is, in my opinion, better than having false hope. You aren’t waiting around for some external savior to recognize that you’re struggling and swoop in to rescue you. You know that anything you get will arrive to you only by clawing it from the cold dead hands of the elders.

Yeah it sounds bleak but realize this: THEY don’t know that.

THEY, those fucking parasite boomers in their ivory towers, think you’re just like the millennial doomers who will roll over obediently and then do no worse than look sad and make sad noises when we get cheated ALL OVER AGAIN.

When they turned their back on US, we stayed docile, simpering, begging. When they turn their back on YOU, you are going to stab them thirty six times, slash their throats, and dig out their organs with a shiv fashioned out of one of their precious participation trophies, and eat them raw and howling.

… Or at least some of you will. And I for one hope that when it starts happening, we doomers will either stay out of the way, or for ONCE in our FUCKING LIVES stand up to protect you from the death throes of the worst generation.

You have it in you. It’s growing. Keep feeding it.

If you weren’t old enough to understand what was happening when watching the twin towers fall and grasp the gravity of it while it was happening, you’re a Zoomer. (And that’s a good thing)

Elder millennial here. Born in 1985.

The millennials watched several thousand people die on live television when we were kids and then everything went downhill from there. I was in high school in September 2001. Old enough to just barely understand what was happening, too young to do jack shit about it. Frightened, we looked to guidance from our Gen-X and Boomer teachers and elders. They told us to sit down, shut up, do as we were told, and everything would be fine. By and large, we did. By and large, nothing, not one fucking thing, ended up fine.

I say this to illustrate that this is why, and how, we are the DOOMER generation. We got piled on with the baggage and bondage of manipulation and lies from the Boomers who climbed the social ladder and then pulled it up behind them, and their Gen-X toadies who rode their coattails half way up hoping they wouldn’t get noticed and shaken off to land back down here in the dirt with the rest of us.

And the thing that sets the Zoomers apart is that you witnessed this happening, every single crucial step of the betrayal from every authority figure from the president on down to the homeroom teacher, and by gods… You Learned.

Zoomers, in my view, seem to possess a preternatural hyper-awareness that any promise made by anyone who has something they can take from you is good for nothing. Some people say “Zoomers don’t give a shit” like it’s supposed to be an insult. HA. No. I see what’s really happening. They’re jealous. Giving a shit was a mistake. It was a mistake we Doomers made. And I am pleased, if not in awe, when I see Zoomers not falling for the bait. You have largely withdrawn yourselves from the rat race, and now it’s running out of rats. Maybe now those fucking rats can finally starve holed up and isolated in their mazes. You, meanwhile, may very well build a better way to live. And whether or not I get to participate, I love to see it.

Go get 'em, Zoomers.

Big real estate killed malls. They aren’t as efficient at generating rent due to their maintenance and upkeep costs, so real estate holdings firms are hell bent on liquidating them, subdividing them, and redeveloping the land piecemeal in ways that better optimize for fine access control and not having to take care of any “dead” non-money-making spaces such as the concourses between the stores. Instead: just parking lots between store fronts.

Now there’s a Walmart, a Home Depot, an Applebee’s, a mattress store, a liquor store, and maybe a transient party supply store that will occasionally occupy a space on a seasonal basis. When a slot isn’t occupied by a tenant, they get to shut off the power, water, and climate control completely, and not have to end up wasting electricity or fuel conditioning the air of a space no one goes to right then.

If you WANTED to make a mall work, you could, especially if you added faux “residential” space (actually retail space where the product being sold is storage and privacy, with “sleep” being “against the rules” but they built it to intentionally not know that that’s what the “customers” are doing there). Residential malls would guarantee a constant customer and worker base as people come and go to visit family and friends and end up shopping along the way.

But they don’t want that.

They want to sell a MINIMUM viable product, and charge maximally for it.

it has in fact been a delightful creative aid for brainstorming fiction, actually!

The things are fantastic at “yes-and” improvisation and extrapolating from a premise.

If I want to build a world and populate it with loosely defined ‘impressionistic’ background info that doesn’t necessarily require fully fledged lore that interconnects, it can do a great job at showing where the lore could go if i decided to explore there. It’s great at suggesting character names, place names, and ways to fill in blanks that make it easier for me to pick or reject individual elements.

In a story idea I’ve been marinating for a while, one character possesses advanced medical knowledge in a world where germ theory, medicine, and surgery never developed because people had access to ‘healing magic’. The problem is, healing magic works on all organisms - including parasites, bacteria, and cancer, which means trying to ‘heal’ someone with an infection makes the infection worse because the pathogens benefited from the healing magic.

I asked AI to extrapolate more detail about this character’s background and it suggested that his father was the village healer and simply didn’t mention his mother at all.

Those two little details exploded in my imagination as an entire history of emotional conflict:
His mother fell ill with a bacterial infection that magic couldn’t fix when he was too little to do anything about it even though he knew what was wrong and how to help her, and so he blamed himself.
His ‘strange ideas’ about physiology, epidemiology, and concepts like hygiene and medicine put him at odds with the traditional teachings his father, and made the other people in his village view him as a ‘problem child’.
This led him to be quiet and withdrawn until he befriends the protagonist, and it is her falling ill when the same disease that killed his mother that motivates him to try again with the rudimentary resources he was able to secretly scrape together since.

(this is an ‘isekai inversion’ where all the reincarnators are disillusioned and discouraged, and the protagonist is a native of that world who travels around finding them, putting them in touch with one another, and motivating them to pursue their specializations again. A nuclear engineer, for instance, won’t be able to get much done in a world where the scientific method hasn’t been codified, manufacturing doesn’t exist let alone precision machining, and chemistry has not clawed its way to distinction out of the vague, secretive, formless depths of alchemy)

…complex almost entirely wholly-hallucinated answers that only have as much bearing on reality as ‘some dude who is very talkative and heard about a bunch of stuff second-hand, and who is also high as balls and experiencing a manic episode where they think they know everything’

and i suppose blimps and dirigibles are further to the right and lower than the graph displays u_u

hexbear isn’t even malicious. hexbear is spicy at best. not nearly as bad as lemmygrad, which is outright repugnant in its overt hostility. hexbear users are at least CAPABLE of communicating, whereas in my experience lemmygrad users pull the animal farm squealer move and defecate on the floor before storming out.

thank you. i was pinched for time and distracted so i couldn’t really figure out why it wasn’t embedding.