Quick Reference
Debunking Common Misconceptions
Formative Ideas
Poetry and Stories
Specific Fandom Stuff
Everything Else
"It depends."
Because I never remember how to type that English short "i" sound.
Gives you up to 3 days based on your location, all in spaced ASCII.
A handy source of reminders and guides for adding a few curb cuts to your game - it probably needs a few more than you, the person who's been working at this thing day and night for weeks or years, might assume.
Notwithstanding the quick reference placement, it's definitely best to read and internalize this one bit at a time.
A collection of different relaxing ambient sounds to play while you study or shitpost. Be inspired by the brave knights battling the giant bees for control of the alien train station...
A beautiful takedown of the neuromyth that our brains are fundamentally structured around Low, Middle and High parts that correspond to the lower and higher forms of some progressive evolution culminating in man.
The "Hero's Journey" is a distortion and an arbitrary limitation, invented and popularized by men with some fairly specific agendas that have little relationship with any truth about the human condition.
A thing to attack the libertarian economic ideology in a way that's framed even at the thought experiment level. Not a single word in the comic or the lengthy commentary about capitalism or how private land ownership works in the real world every single time - a truly astounding dedication to kayfabe.
A debunk of the old "we ran out of goats to trade for this cow so let's agree to use these rocks" just-so story - applied, inter alia, to some new ill-considered proposals based on that story.
Of course the predecessor evils, the Know-Nothings, the Klan, the Birchers all go further back; this is strictly about the anti-abortion "pro-life" angle - or, rather, grift. The Evangelicals had basically no theology of fetal personhood until it became politically convenient.
Far from being a bloodless liberal gotcha, I’m reading these examples as a demonstration of how necessary abortion is. Everyone getting an abortion here is blameless for that - the only issue is their refusal to acknowledge it.
A cursory glance at Palestine’s geography would reveal that most of it is part of what is known as the Fertile Crescent ... The region has historically been known for its crops and agriculture. As a matter of fact, if we are to look at the average annual rainfall in the area over the last 100 years, then Ramallah has a higher average annual rainfall than Paris, and Jerusalem has a higher average annual rainfall than Berlin. ... The severe drop in the amount of cultivated land in the Naqab after 1948 attests to this fact.
A brief survey of the historical context of much of the Old Testament to show that much of the Zionisto-Christian narrative we see used to justify any number of genocides of the centuries is not that, but rather actually a collection of polemics to unify a particular political bloc of Canaanites againt various Canaanite and foreign enemies. (Warning: if you're anything like me, perhaps a preceding misconception to get over before reading this is the deeply-trained instinctual recoil at the thought that we're basically reading the literal text of the Bible like we're supposed to read Humbert's literal account in Lolita.)
Gender relations emerge internal to cultural dynamics whereas racialization is imposed onto one culture by a dominant culture as part of class/colonial oppression. The latter historical process means forcing the dominant gender relations onto the gender relations of the exploited
- i.e., gender and race are two fundamentally different ways of classifying people and redistributing power, one imposed between communities and the other arising within communities. (I'm reminded of this one exchange on Jay Leno's show when Ellen Degeneres said being gay was like being black, whereupon Jay turned to Kevin Eubanks and asked him about his experience coming out to his parents.)
Every Pascha some bad memes about the origins of the English word for it come up. They are wrong.
The first of these options reads en ho as a time reference (until). The second is a literal translation (in which); while the third sees the phrase as a causative (because). [...] when the servants do return, the master commends the first servant for being faithful not successful. What is the master really seeking?
The headline is a bit misleading as it's really about Luke's parable of the minas and the actual talents parable does not give the relevant background.
"Vulture bees still produce honey (the normal, golden type we can find in our supermarkets) by collecting nectar. They simply eat the meat and store the rotting flesh in their hives." An in-depth look on both what the actual fact of the matter is, and what sorts of signs to look for in the social media misinformation.
Sparta was a horrific mess of abuse, genocide and oppression that had a perfectly mediocre performance in combat. None of its austerity and brutality made it any better at the things it was purported to improve. A warning against the worst impulses of our society today.
A.K.A. Five Regularly Recurring Reasons Communities Of Outcasts Become Toxic And Implode. Worth a re-read every so often even if you think you're familiar with them.
I get the desire for revenge, the overwhelming urge to unleash righteous destruction in our frustration at the system. But if we ever get to that point, and these horrible people are no longer a threat or obstacle, there will be better things to do.
As linked on the Wikipedia page on "white people". A solid overview of how these ideas evolved - or rather were made up and imposed - over the past 400 years.
This had been a foundational piece for me back when I was still a young quasi-Randroid edgelord. Gentle, firm and relentless.
The essay from Gravity and Grace from which we get that famous line about imaginary versus real evil - and good.
An attempt to codify our aesthetics. Mostly descriptive, mostly relatable.
This changed the entire way I approached driving - and other things. I recommend watching the video first, to keep things fairly concrete and easy to visualize.
A look at the Aztec human sacrifices and their commonalities with Christian soteriology, from an Eastern Orthodox Christian point of view. Reading this as a prospective convert in early 2014 was one of the things that finally breached an old cognitive barrier I didn't realize I had about "savage" and "enlightened" religious belief systems.
This excerpt from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy resolved a bunch of conflicts I had about why institutions get hijacked and what has to be done about it. Any and all institutions may be questioned and considered for rejection, even if the fundamental values justifying their existence remain the same.
This video is like a monument to everything I wish I could have told my past teenage self. It is a criticism not meant by any means to condemn, but to find a better way forward.
The body is but a temporary knot in matter, a knot which will be untied again.
The first time I'd ever read about Jainism was in a brief entry in the physical encyclopedia we had when I was a child. I thought it was stupid and hadn't thought about it until I read this around my late teens. I was not expecting to see it again in my early forties and for it to hit no less hard than it did then.
I've read many attempts to retell and reinterpret the story of the fruit and the exile from the primordial Garden. Almost all of them get lost in the politics and power dynamics in a way that withers their own mythic power. Not this one - it's all there. That small, still quiet of loss and pining for something that both always was and never could be, that vibe of a children's storybook that contains layers adults can barely comprehend. This is mythic storytelling at its best.
An application of modern technological understanding to the dream of being uploaded and transcending the physical form.
There is so much more. So much more.
On representation, reading between the lines, and supporting troubled people you care about.
The ending we should have had, at least in retrospect. Featuring a cut that does "Spanish Sahara" the same justice as the canon ending does for "Obstacles".
Twenty years after I read the books for the first time, I'm faced with this article - and everything that I had noticed and so hastily repressed all those years ago suddenly poured back in in a whole new light.
The Red Lotus aren’t allowed space to exist as rational actors or to present serious arguments, their only purpose is to serve as a marker–a kind of “here be dragons” warning sign–to fence in the map of the possible. Individually somewhat sympathetic perhaps, but in a pitiable way. Insane. Which is sad because as they’re written–however inadvertently–I think there’s a strong case that the Red Lotus are the best damn heroes in the entire history of the Avatar universe.
A long Tumblr thread going through the historical context of Romeo and Juliet and debunking some things about Romeo. tl;dr contemporary audiences would have considered them both kids trying to do the right thing. And Paris the worst of creeps.
A thorough dissection of how, far from being an originally good work whose author turned bad later on, J.K. Rowling's creation has always betrayed her authoritarian bigotry. If you don't want to watch an entire lengthy video, though, Brianna Wu covers similar points here and compares them unfavorably to how analogous themes are much better handled in another highly popular normie-geek-core franchise.
A Flash-containing browser and assets to let you read a story that defined a generation.
A transcript of all of Happy Noodle Boy's dialogue in the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac graphic novel. For educational purposes only.
In mental health circles, it’s often noted that seeking help for a symptom is often correlated with increased symptom severity.
This article does such a great job of making sense of something I'd noticed out of two gender-questioning people independently at the same time, in such a similar pattern despite wildly differing gender experiences otherwise.
Just as different definitions of metal serve different communities, we, as planetary scientists, find it useful to define a planet as a substellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and has enough gravitation to be round due to hydrostatic equilibrium, regardless of its orbital parameters.
Pluto is a planet. Who are you going to trust, your desire for secret counterintuitive pedantry or your own eyes? It just depends on what you're doing with the classification.
A collection of fun, beautifully elegant, fully self-contained Javascript games. It's like the fulfilment of everything I had wanted to do back when DHTML was new. They even work on mobile!
A gorgeous fishbowl simulator. Try not to run out of oxygen.
I loved Buuf-Deuce back in the day, until eventually an issue with certain buttons made it unusable. This version of the Buuf icons for Linux fixes those.
Someone's compiled a list of a bunch of the longer stories and novellas that have been posted to Tumblr over the years. (Link is to my own reblog for stability but if it's been a while you might want to check the post itself.)
A bunch of websites that load at under one megabyte. I haven't submitted this site (or the one-page LibTech1) because of the numerous download links and my goal is to make sure that's the only reason.
Some amazing shots in here.
A wonderful Web 1.0 collection of stuff that was also my first real exposure to Middle-Earth commentary and fanfic.
Suicide Food actively participates in or celebrates its own demise. Suicide Food identifies with the oppressor. Suicide Food is a bellwether of our decadent society. Suicide Food says, “Hey! Come on! Eating meat is without any ethical ramifications! See, Mr. Greenjeans? The animals aren’t complaining! So what's your problem?” Suicide Food is not funny.