nerd violence

the house md promo pic of house in a wedding dress with the sloppiest smeared makeup look. Literally what was the point of that

my highest calling in life is agent of chaos by proxy

never let it be said that I cannot compromise

the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

We literally cannot let them start charging 80 dollars for video games 70 dollars was already outrageous 60 was pushing it. 80 fucking dollars. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR DAMN MIND. For MARIO?!?!?!?!?

they call it the switch 2 because you see the price and switch 2 another console

em dash is so fucking sexy. puts her in a paragraph 8 times.

do you ever just suddenly feel the weight of more years of exhaustion than you’ve been alive

#yeah except i lived through it #i may have been a kid but 2000 was traumatizing

i regret to inform you that this was george h.w. bush, 1988

I’m at a sociology conference and just attended a memorial for one of the giants of our field, and one of the panelists told this story…he was at a meeting with this guy, who he got his PhD under and had a long standing relationship with, and he was bemoaning the current state of the world, and he asked this old professor, “how can you be so optimistic? I can’t ever be anything but a pessimist.”

and the old professor said, “you little fucker, I’m going to make a statement and then I’m going to take you out to the parking lot and beat your ass. What good does your pessimism do?”

and that really struck me. not the least because I also knew this old professor and he very rarely swore, so I know this was something he was really worked up about. what good does your pessimism do? What GOOD does your pessimism DO. I’ll be thinking about that for awhile.

- Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity (1989)

"It helps me be prepared!"

As a recovered pessimist raised by a horrendously toxic pessimist: No, it doesn't.

Foresight and practicality are completely separate qualities that can exist without pessimism. You can acknowledge the worst that might happen and prepare for it without having a completely negative worldview.

And pessimism can absolutely exist without those qualities. Which is a miserable way to live.

There actually is academic work that point out how cynicism can make you more gullible, and how fascists take advantage of it. The Jewish German political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about it in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). I wanted to include this passage, even though it's long, because incredibly important. And true.

"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leader for their superior tactical clearness.

This leader is spared from ever having to be accountable to his own statements. Naïve are those who thought then (or believe now) that such a leader would be brought down by his lies, or made to adhere to his promises. ‘The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is fool-proof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretence’. In yesterday’s totalitarianism and in today’s totality, the fake dominates. Gullibility embraces the fake, and cynicism embraces gullibility. The totality is immune from truth because the very idea of truth is dissolved within it."

i always click the "track package" button as soon as i get the email. "oh boy i wonder where my package is!" warehouse.

@bovineblogger any thoughts?

colloquially, yes! it all depends on what you personally would call a cow! when you get into semantics it makes a it a bit more confusing.

because to farmers, 'cow' only refers to female cattle that have given birth! a heifer is a female that hasn't, a steer/ox is a castrated male, a freemartin is a female that was masculinized in the womb, a bull is an uncastrated male.... blablabla!

to add another layer, 'cow' and 'bull' arent labels exclusive to cattle! a female yak (that has had a calf) would be called a cow, while a(n uncastrated) male yak would be called a bull!

but those distinctions dont really matter if you're not the one keeping the animals. to the average person a bull would be considered a cow, because that's just the word a lot of people use for cattle! i dont think arguing over what 'cow' really means is useful because, just like all language, people use it differently!

thanks for coming to my ted talk. :3

img src x x x

Wait, back up a second actually... A freemartin is what now? That's a new word for me. What's "masculinized?" Is that just a thing that happens sometimes in cattle? Or do the humans do it? And if so, why?

I am filled with the curiosities

A freemartin is a heifer calf that is born twin to a bull calf! Because of the way bovine placentas work, the calves will exchange blood between each other. This means the heifer gets exposed to testosterone and anti-Mullerian hormone, and as such, she'll end up gaining traits more associated with bulls and steers!

In a business perspective, the freemartins are steer and are treated as such (ie, they typically get sold for meat), but they can be used for heat detection without pregnancy risk!

Freemartins happen in deer too and have been recorded in goats and sheep (and pigs iirc).

parent cats are crazy because they have the protectiveness of a parent but at the end of the day theyre still just cats

your mama plays with toy mouse. and feather on stick

no sentence fills me with utter loathing so much as "i asked chatgpt"

house is a girl you have to take care of her

the house. a house. your house. building. residence. abode. not that faggot from the tv show

I don’t mean to be old but computer used to just have games. U didnt have to pay for em either but if u wanted u could get a little CD that put the game onto the computer and you could play it forever and ever even if the company that made it went to hell and shit. You didn’t even need the internet or wifi or anything. And it was pretty neat

It would be a finished game, too. If you played long enough and did really good you could go to all the places and get all the stuff. You never had to pay more money later it was just there. onn compter