top 10 workouts to become the blade that cleaves the world

develop your worldcleaving muscles with this one weird trick

Kegels

I cannot describe how much I laughed at this.

Sound is VERY important.

BABBY

Are fedoras really that bad?

YES YES THEY ARE

I don’t really believe this mumbo jumbo

I mean it’s a goddamn hat.

Right..?

The white rose, it symbolizes the unique beauty of all the women who wish not to be with a nice guy such as myse-

I wonder if this works with other kinds of hat…

Nothing ventured, nothing gained…

WHEEEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE LIKE A BIG PIZZA PIE THAT’S AMORREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Men of Tumblr are my favorite kind of people…

wait, does that mean?

oh boy…….

Luckily, this nonsense doesn’t work on girls.

Observe…

IT’S GOTTEN BETTER!

This post is immaculate

It can’t be true.

And it can’t possibly work on motorcycle helmets.

I must test it.

Nothing happening so far…

HOLY SHIT IT WORKS

What in the world?

Oh why not? This should be interesting.

Here we go!

Were all mad here in Underland!

What the hell! Never Again!

… Actually …

One more time.

the-masters-shadow hahahahahahahhaahhahahahaa pffffdf

This is such a beautiful thing

Jesus christ

Ah, man. What a great post. *ties ballsack tightly with a hemp rope* TAKE IT FROM HERE DELORES! *Delores the amazon dressed in tight leather puts on a pair of spiked high heels. She starts stomping the sack* Oh! Ow! Oh god! Fuck yeah in the sack! Thats my sack! Oof! Oh! The sack baby, OHH!

yo what the fuck happened to this post

I’m. I’m not the only one seeing this right. Please tell me I’m not the only one seeing this.

Samantha: do the people know about Ampersand Island?

me: ... no.....

this is Ampersand Island. every time I come across a beautiful, interesting, or unusual ampersand in my archival travels I take a screenshot and place it neatly in this little pile on my desktop

people who have never grown food for sustenance or to supplement their diet have such an extreme view of it. I guess that’s what happens when generations of people are living lives completely divorced from cultivation, harvesting, processing, slaughtering. in theory they believe it’s the easiest thing ever - that it should come naturally to every human ever born, simply because you’re a human. then you ask them if they would ever kill a chicken hypothetically, and they act like you shot their pet in front of them.

The first time I saw a deer up close was in my grandfather’s back yard; I was about four years old. I don’t remember the reason that my mom dropped me off at my grandfather’s house for an afternoon, but I know that it was unplanned - because he was in the middle of processing a deer. It had been field dressed, organs already removed, and was hanging by its ankle tendons from the t-shaped steel pole at one end of the backyard clothesline. I was startled, worried, concerned that the animal was hurt. There was blood! There was flesh!

My grandfather responded by calmly explaining what he was doing, step by step. Explaining why he was skinning the deer, and quartering it, taking it from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venison

By the time he was cooking tenderloin medallions and plating them up to me with grape jelly (don’t knock grape jelly on meat until you’ve tried it!) and instant mashed potatoes, I wasn’t startled or concerned anymore. I had a deeper understanding of the way the world worked, of my role as a consumer, a predator. Of the responsibilities that entailed. I couldn’t have explained it then, of course, with my 4-year-old mind and vocabulary - but Philosophy had been set into motion. This is a core memory for me. 

I did not have nightmares about the butchered deer. 

More people should be introduced, as little children, to their place in the ecosystem and the responsibilities that entails.

I’ve never personally butchered anything but my family used to grow some of our own vegetables when I was a kid. Corn, squash, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, etc. we even tried grinding our own flour for a little bit but that didn’t last long because if you’ve ever ground flour by hand you understand.

People have such a romantic view of farming and growing food but a lot of my summers as a kid was spent trying to come up with ways to stop birds from eating our vegetables, planting other plants and releasing insects to keep other insects away, and pulling weeds.

Food doesn’t just sit there all pretty growing in the sun. Everything wants to steal it away from you. Agriculture even on a small scale is a never ending battle against insects, other plants stealing water and sunlight, birds, small mammals. You are not the only one who wants the fruits of your labor.

It’s important to remember that. Every tomato you eat is one that survived the never ending assault of insects and birds.

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.

Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.

"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: 

Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.

There are ten trillion pictures of flowering trees to the point where they sometimes seem trite and overdone. But then you see a tree in full flower and go holy shit this rules and I've gotta show this to everyone so they can experience the same magic and wonder and there are ten trillion and one pictures of flowering trees

beating (hit indie game by mortis ghost) OFF ❌

TWITCH | YOUTUBE

i am constantly under attack for the crime of being attracted to beautiful women

"My guys"

Sounds like a mob boss who's particularly fond of grammar, sort of like count dracula from sesame street but different.

context according to instagram:

original image from the magazine:

Found a scan of this issue on the Internet Archive (it's the back cover). This scan is 4000x6000 for all your high resolution needs!

The caption reads: "Defeated by roses. Near Turin's Lingotto station, along a lonely path, Miss Guida Concetta Rinino, 28 years old, who was bringing a nice bunch of roses to a relative, was accosted by an unknown young man. The young woman, rather than losing heart, defended herself with extraordinary energy, using the bunch of flowers as a weapon. So it was that the scoundrel, his face all scratched up, had to flee. (Drawing by Walter Molino.)"

Incredible. At a distance I understand how the woman might appear to be the abuser and the man the sympathetic victim, but the second you zoom into the man’s face the pink-cheeked rage- not remorse, or rejection, or embarrassment- not heartbreak or despair- but RAGE- the deeper story speaks itself into your suspicions.

And the bit where they’re HER roses? Almost a relief, but also sadder, as she will arrive at whatever event without them, or with them destroyed.

Do you think when the righteous anger and anxiety and annoyance fade, when she arrives at her destination- will her loved ones applaud her? Will she be proud? Will her hands shake? Will she walk home with company from then out, and for how long?

In this moment, she is provoked into anger. Anger is good- it appears strong. But look at his face. Would you put it past him to linger there after dark, in case she returns alone?

What story will HE tell, of ‘I was perfectly polite, but she didn’t even give me a chance- women like that, they’d swoon for a jerk in a heartbeat, but kind and flattering men like me?…”

I love this piece. It paints both stories while illustrating the power dynamics and struggles at play. This should be shown in art classes

my potion #MyPotion

per The Chart, this is a "Hell at the Bell":

This is easily the most enduring thing I've ever made. Godspeed funny little jpeg. See you again soon

Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.

Hi!!! One of my parents got meningitis when I was a kid.

They were in the hospital for nearly a month, the rest of us were all placed in medical quarantine, there were several points we thought they were gonna die, and even though they survived, it was a SUPER close call and they lost about two years of memories from the ensuing brain damage.

Like… a two-uear-long cookie-cutter pocket of thoughts and memories went missing right out of their brain. It’s an inflammation of the brain that cooks it alive.

I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THERE WAS A VACCINE.

I WILL BE GETTING IT.

This is Charles. He wants to go on a journey around tumblr. could you show him around?

It’s my honest pleasure, Charles, to aid you on this quest.

Pussy is out it’s old news. So is cock. We need to come up with something new

(nodding sagely) cloaca

(Nodding in agreement) knife wound

i went to strong apes that kill you island and

go on

she hasn’t responded, im gonna go check on strong apes that kill you island. BRB!

⠀

the lesbian computer from portal was right. given the circumstances ive been shockingly nice

insane like/reblog parity on this post btw

Yay