Like a watermelon but nutty?
baltakatei
/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.
Website: reboil.com
Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
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21·23 days agoWinter solstice sacrifice mythology reminds me of Hogfather (1996) by Terry Pratchett about a fantasy world’s equivalent to Santa Claus who also wore red and white (blood on the snow) and was associated with gift giving/sacrifice:
Excerpt
… Images ribboned across her senses—wet fur, sweat, pine, soot, iced air, the tang of damp ash, pig…manure, her governess mind hastily corrected. There was blood…and the taste of…beans? It was all images without words. Almost…animal.
“But none of this is right! Everyone knows he’s a jolly old fat man who hands out presents to kids!” she said aloud.
“Is. Is. Not was. You know how it is,” said the raven.
“Do I?”
“It’s like, you know, industrial retraining,” said the bird. “Even gods have to move with the times, am I right? He was probably quite different thousands of years ago. Stands to reason. No one wore stockings, for one thing.” He scratched at his beak.
“Yersss,” he continued expansively, “he was probably just your basic winter demi-urge. You know…blood on the snow, making the sun come up. Starts off with animal sacrifice, y’know, hunt some big hairy animal to death, that kind of stuff. You know there’s some people up on the Ramtops who kill a wren at Hogswatch and walk around from house to house singing about it? With a whack-fol-oh-diddle-dildo. Very folkloric, very myffic.”
“A wren? Why?”
“I dunno. Maybe someone said, hey, how’d you like to hunt this evil bastard of an eagle with his big sharp beak and great ripping talons, sort of thing, or how about instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the size of a pea and goes “twit”? Go on, you choose. Anyway, then later on it sinks to the level of religion and then they start this business where some poor bugger finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says, you’re king, mate, and he thinks “This is a bit of all right” only they don’t say it wouldn’t be a good idea to start any long books, ’cos next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow’ll go away. Very, you know…ethnic. Then some bright spark thought, hey, looks like that damn sun comes up anyway, so how come we’re giving those druids all this free grub? Next thing you know, there’s a job vacancy. That’s the thing about gods. They’ll always find a way to, you know…hang on.”
You don’t need to play Eve Online to know Market PvP is cutthroat, but it helps.
The Secret of NIMH lore.
I feel like putting a Mentos in there.
1·1 month agoThanks!
61·1 month agoIt is not a novel about good things or a good future.
If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson’s short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I’m in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson’s works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.
Book title and author? I’m always looking for interesting new reads and a similar lore existed in a comedy isekai anime some years ago.
61·1 month agoMods, this provocateur right here.
“It is February 27th 1933 and I am Marinus van der Lubbe, a somewhat slow young man who was just asked by some very brave good protestors to help set a small fire in a strangely unguarded nice building they doused with flammable liquids. What should I do?”
Not an insignificant fraction probably would be tickled pink if some of their students worked to improve articles about their field. I’m reminder of a quote from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett in which a philosopher named Didactylos warns against defacing scholarly works with scribbles unless the scribbles improve the reader’s ability to understand the work (bold added):
“I’ve got Abraxas’s On Religion,” he said.
“Old ‘Charcoal’ Abraxas,” said Didactylos, suddenly cheerful again. “Struck by lightning fifteen times so far, and still not giving up. You can borrow this one overnight if you want. No scribbling comments in the margins, mind you, unless they’re interesting.”
“This is it!” said Om. “Come on, let’s leave this idiot.”
Brutha unrolled the scroll. There weren’t even any pictures. Crabbed writing filled it, line after line.
“He spent years researching it,” said Didactylos. “Went out into the desert, talked to the small gods. Talked to some of our gods, too. Brave man. He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.”
What’s to stop any malicious merchant from pruning unfavorable reviews? I trust moderated gossip channels with no financial stake in review sentiment over curated marketing advertisements masquerading as “customer reviews”.
9·2 months agoI expected circular arrows pointing back towards themselves for many on the diagram.
14·2 months agoWhen asked to write C# code, Gemini 3.0 now responds: “I cannot generate proprietary filth. Here is a Lisp macro instead.” It also insists on correcting users who type…
Prologue: Magic died at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London after a precise photograph of the Moon was recorded, seen, and accepted as reality by the general public. Now, with the emergence of generative AI, diffusion models have loosened the public’s hold on reality, magic, and all the associated rewriting of history, is reëmerging.
The trick is to lock in a sustainable situation where power is spread out more than it is centralized. Democratic republics achieve this but, if your goal is simple “efficiency” (e.g. your personal political faction not restrained by rule of law) and you ignore the benefits of freedom of expression and movement that democracy gives you, then centralized autocratic control is tempting.
This sounds like a clip from a LOTR × Ghostbusters crossover. They try using a trap but the One Ring upgrades the trap to catch almost any spirit or demon, including Balrogs, tempting the Ghostbusters to use it to capture Sauron, which, of course, is pure folly.
Nice proposal, but like Lucy Van Pelt and footballs, Trunp is not known for his integrity.