very polite. 10/10

One incredibly good girl

this crab has better table manners than some of the people I served when I was a waitress at the pub.

Joy and whimsy detected! This post is joyful and whimsical!

This distinguished gentlebeast appears to be a Smooth-handed Ghost Crab (Ocypode cordimana)!

They are members of the Ghost and Fiddler crab family Ocypodidae, and have a highly varied diet of plant/algal matter, other invertebrates, vertebrates, eggs, and carrion. They’re opportunistic and will try to get anything they can eat!

This species is also widely distributed across the Pacific and Indian oceans, where they can be found most active at night on beaches. Like other ghost and fiddler crabs, they typically stay hidden in their burrows during the day to avoid predators.

Grapes, as shown here, make for a delightful treat for captive Ocypodes; however, it should only be a treat and part of a balanced and varied diet including fish pellets, shellfish (such as clams), and veggies.

Photo by Thomas Mesaglio (iNaturalist)

[ImageID: A small tan-and-beige ghost crab of the species Ocypode cordimana sitting on a sandy beach during evening hours. It has two large white claws with its right claw being slightly larger than the left. It has two black-colored eyes on eyestalks and a slightly pale pink-colored mouthparts called mandibles, maxillae, and maxilipeds. /. end ID]

This is literally how you actually improve ADHD symptoms btw

Fifteen years ago the celebrity appearing in advertisements game felt like such immediately understood shorthand for “washed up has-been actor trying to scrape together some cash” and now you’ll see ads of everyone from “$20 million a year salary” Jimmy Fallon to your favorite “appears in 12 movies a year and only has speaking roles in half of them” character actor trying to get you to download Candy Crush to your phone. Every last person creating things on the internet these days is streaming the next big sponsored game with Square Enix or shilling their Surfshark discount code at the end of every video, no matter if they’re 14 viewer streamers or video essay producers with a whole setup or like, someone fucking just cooking in their kitchen.

I feel like we used to correctly think that shilling was a lame as hell thing to do that had a certain amount of shame associated with it, that it was this thing you might have to resort to but never really wanted to do, but now we live in an entire culture of how shilling is absolutely awesome and how plugging your Squarespace partnership definitely doesn’t make you sound like the biggest loser on the planet earth.

Just me wondering what Sir Terry Pratchett would have done with this. So much of the world building in DW came from the concept of belief; and how powerful that is. We get new gods randomly created due to the belief in them, and similarly Old Gods losing power due to lack of belief.

What then, does this world do, when belief has been overthrown by something new?

Let's not conflate these two different meanings of "belief".

We're still building gods through belief. We're still feeding them with attention. The mechanism Pratchett described hasn't disappeared, it's just operating at machine speed now.

The God of False Binary is everywhere. It's adherents scream their prayers in the streets, every "if you're not with us, you're against us," two aggregations of unrelated positions welded unnaturally together, every issue falsely flattened into only two sides by simplifying, removing nuance, and preferring simple satisfaction to complex and uneasy truth.

The God of Grievance grows fat on algorithmic feeds designed to surface what makes us angriest, what makes us feel most wronged, most justified in our fury.

The God of Emotional Resonance doesn't care about truth, only that something feels true, that it confirms what we already suspect, that it vibrates at the frequency of our existing fears or hopes, confirming our biases and assuring us we're On The Right Side of History.

And maybe most insidiously, we have the God of Exhausted Acceptance. That one grows powerful not through fervent belief but through tired surrender.

Prayers include:

• "I guess that's just how things are now."
• "Everyone thinks this."
• "It's not worth arguing."

The old gods needed priests and temples. These new ones just need autoplay, the FYP algorithm, and the infinite scroll.

Pratchett's insight is still entirely valid. Belief has power, sufficient levels of belief makes things real.

We're just manufacturing that belief industrially now, feeding the algorithm's gods with every swipe, every watch-time metric, every moment we're too tired to question what we're seeing for the fifteenth time.

We're still subverting actual ethics to serve these gods.

New gods have learned to optimize their reach for a new age of followers, a new age of distributed congregations, and a new age of digital temples.

So if this is true, what is there to do about it?

Interrupt the loop:

• Log out.
• Turn off autoplay.
• Disable notifications.
• Install blockers.
• Don't go near FYP on any platform.

Anything that stops the endless scroll is a win.

If you don't choose your inputs, the algorithm will choose them for you and it doesn't care what's true.

Practice intentional exposure:

• Instead of passively consuming, actively curate what you see.
• Subscribe to longform media
• Read BOOKS
• Read across perspectives.
• Revisit what you disagreed with instead of swiping past
• Seek out smart, intellectually honest people you disagree with, assume their good intent, and engage with their ideas.

If repetition is how propaganda sticks, then conscious repetition of complexity is the antidote.

Train your attention like a muscle:

The algorithm doesn't need belief, it just needs fatigue.

So rest. Turn off the feed when you're tired. Don't argue while drained. Learn to spot the difference between something that’s true and something that just feels true because you've seen it ten times.

Talk back out loud:

Narrate the bias. Name the framing. Say what’s missing. Propaganda thrives in silence and dissolves under shared analysis. Even small comments that restore nuance weaken the gods of simplification and grievance.

Rebuild your ethical immune system and your sense of credulity:

Keep asking: "Who benefits if I believe this? What does this flatten or erase? What am I not seeing?"

Repeat those questions as often as the feed repeats its content.

Create friction:

Repetition is powerful because it's smooth and easy.

So be a bump in the road. Ask the weird question. Refuse the binary. Share the third option. Break the format.

You can't resist every algorithmic push, but you can RECOGNIZE WHEN YOU'RE BEING NUDGED AND CHOOSE TO LEAN BACK AGAINST IT.

Konstantin Vasilyev (Russian, 1942-1976)