jake
21d ago
Cartoonist/lay theologian/general esotericist Owen Cyclops had this to say in response to MrBeast posting such a picture:
once again we must review that normal people are now exposed to things every day that would, literally, previously have only been madness inducing items from fairy tales and ancient legends.
Yes. Don't create the Torment Nexus, etc. I wonder if you could package it to the masses by calling it a pocket-sized Mirror of Erised. But give it another 20 years and people will be able to climb inside the mirror. What then?
The wonderful dream of what might have been only becomes a cognitohazard if you wake up, I suppose.
jake
21d ago
If you're looking for another person for editing, feel free to message me. I can provide a sample from my own writing if you'd want to see my bona fides.
jake
23d ago
In a coincidence of timing, I've spent much of the day going through the telegram channel "Palestine English News Updates" (gazaenglishupdates) in another round of my continuing effort to locate video of the alleged mass murder of civilians. Content in the channel is only very rarely blurred, so if any of you plan on opening it, be warned: it contains extremely graphic images and video. I found a single video of the moment an individual was shot, and none depicting the moment where a group was shot at or attacked with explosives, but I relied entirely on search terms, and in a channel going back to Oct 23 that has 10K images and 20K videos, that's plenty of chances for me to miss one or several hundred.
What I didn't miss is the plentiful video and images of starving children. While the cause might be up for debate, that children are starving isn't. It's intuitive anyway: not easy to feed people in a warzone, the only food is coming in from the outside, people and especially children are going to die from malnutrition and starvation.
Israel might not "intend" (apply as heavy caveat to that as you wish) for civilians to starve, but starvation walks hand in hand with war and death. They knew it would result from the start, and it is strictly true that if the IDF stood down and withdrew, fewer people would starve. Should they? Good luck finding an impartial answer to that.
jake
27d ago
Probability estimates, anyone?
I don't know who Candace Owens is, and although I've seen her name mentioned online, I deliberately refrained from finding out more because I don't have the time or inclination to go down those rabbit holes. But now the Stupid Edgy Internet Shit is mainstream news
Consider that you, in American spaces, only knew vaguely of Owens before news of "Sued by the wife of the President of France." Why is the French First Family taking this so seriously? It's witch-hunt logic but given that no matter the result of this lawsuit, millions of people will become new believers in Brigitte being a man, the only winning move is not to play.
P(Woman) is highest if they'd never acknowledged it. It's inherently undignified for any woman to "prove" what they are, it's a debacle for the French First Lady.
P(Man) increases with threat of litigation, and I'd argue it probably increases further with the actual filing of suit. Owens' defense could argue for medical testing. It's the point of the lawsuit and Owens will argue the documents were forged and that justifies tests. In the fictional court-of-perfectly-principled-justice Brigitte might be ordered to be tested, in the real world there's not a judge in the US who will order such testing for the wife of the President of France. It would be itself an instant international incident beside the separate incident of a US court rejecting the authenticity of French government documents. Point being here, P(Man) is superficially but not actually reduced by taking the matter to court, even US courts where truth is an absolute defense.
Another is P(MSM Emmanuel) and P(Emmanuel's Behest). Doesn't take much to find him in some very homoerotic pictures, and maybe that's a French thing, genuinely. If it's not and he is a man who has sex with men, this could be his closeted overreaction. Although now that I think about it, I wonder what would happen if someone with reach alleged this with Melania Trump. Does Don bring the hammer down? But Macron and Trump are very different men.
There's also P(Third-Party Plot); a US faction seeing an opportunity to financially crush Owens and the Macrons assisting an ally, perhaps not entirely willingly. This is an enormous reach but it still makes more sense than the First Lady of France suing a gauche American for calling her a man.
Nice. I'm a bit of an architecture nerd, especially for houses. Within the last year or so I came across Cliff Tan, aka "Dear Modern", famed internet feng shui expert. I had no opinions on feng shui before watching his videos, or the closest I had was Frank Lloyd Wright's epithet against interior decorators as "inferior desecrators." But watching Tan redraw floorplans, or make perspective drawings of rooms he then modifies to have harmonious feng shui, the work speaks for itself and I'm a believer. I wouldn't say in energy flow as such, but energy flow as a phrase to describe the ineffable feeling of a living space that's just "right." And it's repeatable, anybody can follow the rules of feng shui to rearrange their living spaces. I'd already mostly arrived on it intuitively, but those slight touches work, and I did it for the sunroom at my parents' house and my dad immediately said it was better.
I have a couple MagicaVoxel models I worked on just for fun around the time I started watching Tan's vids. The first was an idea I had before that I'd gone through a few versions of before starting over with some of the ideas of feng shui. The kitchen is both too open yet claustrophobic, I was thinking of it as something like an architectural challenge. I had the idea of you having to enter a courtyard to even reach the main entrance of the house, and I wanted a kitchen on the courtyard, but as you can see I weigh symmetry heavily so that resulted in me putting the kitchen as the main entrance, and that's bad. The rooms on the other side of the courtyard are bedrooms, the halls on them have slightly better flow, though the bedrooms should be like a sitting room and an office, and the blue rooms on the halls are bathrooms and should be flipped with the doors beside them for best flow, and then the doors to the left and the right of the kitchen removed in favor of windows. Of course what would be actually best is for the courtyard to open to a small foyer, then a sitting room, then I'd personally put another courtyard with halls on either side to reach kitchen/dining . . . if I return to this it will be to start over again.
Which I kind of did back then, when I realized I'd modeled myself into a corner, was go to just modeling a room.
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