Saucy Pedantic Wretch

my contribution to the eridian welcoming committee

(template credit to @justcakethanks)

holy SHIT my previous post blew up

(lowkey screamed in surprise and joy when i saw the legend @justcakethanks themself liking my idea)

so yeah. here you go. another stupid one

Mr. White Squid, A Very Handy Crafter

Soft Sculpture by Hiné Mizushima.

The print is available in my Etsy shop! 

ほぼA4ポスターは Etsyショップで扱っています。

Mr. White Squid, A Very Handy Crafter

Soft Sculpture by Hiné Mizushima.

The print is available in my Etsy shop! 

ほぼA4ポスターは Etsyショップで扱っています。

fun fact about character development by the way. you can make them develop worse.

like I mean this very seriously as writing advice. the character should experience events and make decisions that make them different at the end of the story. they should be changed. they do not have to be improved.

they can get worse. they can make decisions of an increasingly terrible nature. they can stop taking risks on kindness. they can discover how much they can get away with. they can find religion, or abandon it, with negative effects on their moral creed. the character has to develop. the character does not have to grow.

The longer it takes for this to come across your dash the funnier it is

Which will fade first? Memories of the Area 51 "raid", or memories of Internet Explorer?

Oh my god....

I always feel so conflicted about this kinda post bc like. There definitely is a cultural problem with people devaluing and ignoring English classes. But also, my high school English classes consistently failed? To actually teach much of substance?

Like I definitely don't think that every school has the problem to the same extent mine did but just. You can't deny that while there are institutions that are meant to be teaching these things, a lot of them are doing a really bad job of it.

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense

holy shit.

You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.

Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.

"a moment on the lips a lifetime on the hips" is so fucking crazy to me because that just sounds like a win/win

prev you're changing my brain chemistry

stepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot) it was on the driveway got out of the car and accidentally (didn't know it was there) stepped on the plum (warm) (on the ground) (it had fallen from the tree) barefoot (no shoes) wearing long pants (too long) (need to hem them) plum viscera got on them (the pants) unexpected plum on the driveway (hot plum) (97 degrees out) already super hungover (throwing up all morning) (should not have been driving at all) and I stepped out of the car (black car) (97 degrees out) and onto the plum (unexpected) (didn't know the plum was there) and it burst (plum nightmare on my only good pair of sweatpants) still we find ways to keep ourselves going from day to day

guess what post just got read aloud in poetry club tonite by an unknowing club member as I watched on in terror

You’d think that once you finally get long term access to a cat and your yearning to have cat access is fulfilled that you’d become slightly less obsessed with seeing people’s cats but no if anything it gets worse

Now you have a whole new dimension via which to appreciate them

Every work of art says things the creator hasn’t considered, but if you’ve really thought about what you’re trying to say then generally the additional dimensions you didn’t know it had are in alignment with your purpose, whereas if you think you’re making no cultural comment at all you are actually making a LOT of cultural comments, most of which will be unflattering to you

Porn is one of the most culturally rich types of media imaginable so the answer is: you cannot do this

“I don’t want to make anything with cultural dimensions. That’s why I only write within the genre that is legally sequestered away from every other kind of storytelling because of my culture’s attitude towards depictions of sex.”

i have for a while been using stepping on somebody's toes as a metaphor for misgendering. and i genuinely think that it's kind of a good one.

if you keep stepping on somebody's toes for a long time at minimum they're probably going to start really hating you and at maximum you might cause them lasting damage.

if you do it on purpose you're a dick. if it's on accident but you keep doing it that person is still going to be mad at you because you don't care enough to try not to step on their toes

if you give a grovelling begging apology after accidentally stepping on somebody's toes one time you're going to make the whole thing awkward, but not giving a quick "sorry" before moving on is still kind of rude.

why do so many freaks go right to “there should be exams or tests before you have kids” when the real solution is better social services, robust infant and child development education that is accessible both financially and schedule/distance accommodating, and resources throughout any stage of a child’s life. genuine question like did you think about any social development before going straight to eugenics

Just very berrybrained right now. I'm picking and eating blueberries everyday and I can never get enough! I like to imagine that every berry has a whole world in them ✨

I'm so obsessed right now that I spent a week of no sleep designing blue space berry lanterns. It's still just a prototype and needs a lot of refining, but I'm pretty happy with it so far :)

Plus the usual painting timelapse!

My dad will listen to me talk about the same ten things that have interested me since I was 8 years old, and I am 27 now but he still thinks they're fascinating. He has like, a best-hits-of-Babylon rants, and when we're in a topic adjacent to them, he'll occasionally just invoke them. We'll be talking about the 1960's, and he'll be like, so, whatever did happen to those original Apollo rocket engines, and he knows what happened to them because I've told him about it like thirty times, and he knows that I know that he knows, but he also knows that I love talking about it and that this is a carte blanche to spend the next ten minutes spinning a yarn about the lost machining arts and the death of knowledge and the constant red-queen-hypothesis style sprint that technology is locked into just to try and preserve itself.

So I'll do the rant again, and he'll listen to it like it's his first time hearing it, and he'll ask the best questions because he's been hearing this rant for 19 years, you can bet your ass he knows the best questions, and it's... beautiful. The words are almost adjacent to the dance.

I can remember reading a book once, where there was a perfect translator. Too perfect, because it translated for meaning alone, independent of the words. A man might ask his wife, "Hey, do you remember that hotdog we shared in 1972?" and the translator would spit out "We have been many different people, but we have always loved each other. Isn't that beautiful?" And I've imagined it for those rant-dances, and tried to imagine what the words would be. I think his parts would just come out to something like "Your handful of intense interests are something that I love about you, and I want you to know that they are not merely tolerated." And my parts would come out to something like "I am sharing who I am with you because I trust you. And I've always been able to trust you. You are, and were, and remain, an amazing dad."

I'm reblogging this because this story ties into it and I want you all to read this story very much. It's from @drenamigmo and it is unbelievably good and I get a little watery every time I think about it. Also, just follow Dren in general, they're good people.

What is red queen hypothesis?

A very streamlined explanation of the red queen hypothesis is this idea in evolution biology that some animals get locked together in evolutionary traps where one animal is evolving an offensive trait as a counter to another animal, who is evolving a defensive trait at the same speed, and that both will evolve in more exaggerated forms until the traits are entirely unsustainable and both die. It comes from the red queen's race in Through the Looking Glass, where she says something about how she needs to run as fast as she possibly can just to stay in place.

If you want examples, some I've heard punted around are things like sabertooth tigers vs. megafauna and some weird ass newts in Yellowstone. The sabertooth theory is that they got locked in a race to eat megafauna that protected themselves with really thick skin, so their fangs get longer to counter the skin, then the skin got thicker to counter the fangs, repeat, and eventually, the skin became so thick that the megafauna couldn't cool themselves properly. Then humans figured out that they could just skip the giant fangs thing and just chase the megafauna until they had heat strokes. Badaboom, now the megafauna and saberteeth are both extinct. The newt example is that there are some newts in Yellowstone that have absurdly high level of tetrodotoxin in their skin. Like, hundreds of times the lethal dose for a human. But! They're preyed upon by birds that have evolved limited immunity to tetrodotoxin. So the newts are stuck always trying to become more toxic, and the birds are stuck always trying to become more immune, and they sit at this uneasy level where the birds can't gorge themselves entirely on newts because then they'll die, but they can eat enough newts that it keeps the newt population down, and neither really has enough evolutionary wiggle room to adapt to their environment in any new ways besides becoming more poisonous and more poison immune. So it's almost like they're not really evolving to adapt to their environment, they're mostly just evolving to adapt to each other, and that means that one day the environment will kill them.

Very useful for describing situations where things are using all of their available energy trying to just maintain balance with a problem that will immediately kill them if they ever relax, and eventually kill them if they don't.

So regarding technology, is that the same as the capitalist goal of growth regardless of it makes sense or is sustainable or necessary or helpful, every quarter has to bring in more money than the last even though resources are finite and the shareholders are doing just fine?

Like there always has to be a new phone every couple years, planned obsolencence, that kind of thing? Im reminded of a fashion show, I dont remember the designers name, where the clothes were badly made and ripping and tearing off the models on the runway as a commentary on how fast new clothes are expected to be designed and produced with not nearly enough time taken to ensure quality.

I don't know that my concerns with how much technology struggles to propogate itself have to do with capitalism as with the pace of technology itself, which is incredibly fast. By the time a generation masters how to use a tool in electrical engineering, it is generally almost obsolete. So there's this tradeoff that exists, naturally, between how cutting edge something is and how well the field knows how to use it. Additionally, there are sometimes older technologies that work better in niche fields that can wind up stranded later because they become extremely expensive without widespread use. There are applications where vacuum tubes aren't just used, but are truly necessary, but since there's not enough consumers to justify mass production in those fields they're almost always being created custom.

To make an analogy of it, imagine that you live in the bronze age. And you know what? Some stuff is actually just better when it's made out of bronze. Like, a bronze knife isn't great because it'll be soft, quick to dull and easy to bend, but bronze works really well in nautical environments. I think we still commonly make boat props out of bronze. So if you're a boat guy, maybe you used to just go to your local smith and ask for a prop and he'd hand you one. But then iron becomes a thing and now your local smith is an iron only guy, and the one the next town over is an iron only guy, and it turns out that the only guy within a week's journey of you that knows how to make bronze is some old as dirt crabby bastard from the old bronze days. And you can get on his wait list, but you're very acutely aware that he's not gonna live forever, and there's not exactly a bunch of young students clamoring to learn this guy's craft, so you're not sure exactly what's gonna happen when he dies. Maybe someone else will pick up his niche, but there's a world of difference between a knowledge handoff and reinventing the field. Experts almost never write down all that they know. They often don't even know that they know it themselves. They just do things in a very particular, almost superstitious way.

And even if, if, that old guy does a real handoff, gets an apprentice and everything, the apprentice is never going to have the same kind of environment the old timer did for learning. They're not going to get the kind of general practice that existed in a world where everything was made of bronze. They won't be made into an expert, they'll be born one. And it will make them worse.

In electronics, we've basically moved through the bronze age, to the iron age, to the steel age, to the diamond age, all in the last 60 years. It's like living through three consecutive Tower of Babel's. There is no system for doing handoffs. There is a terrible struggle for each generation to understand even the one previous, least of all the ones before that. We have to keep running because behind us, the past is going up in flames, and we are afraid of what will happen when all that fire catches up to us.

(Anyway, please read The Universal Translator. It's a very good short story.)