chapotraphouse Wheaties • 6 days ago • 100%

Oh, *Wizard of Oz* is such a silly children's story! No, it's an incomprehensible screed about the gold standard, the lion and the scarecrow and the tinman are supposed to be biting depictions of, like, long dead guys in 19th century US politics. What was it trying to argue? Fucking no idea anymore. Let's make a Jack Black film about *Gulliver's Travels*! What... it's supposed to be about the British empire? What do you mean, it's just a funny story about little guys! Flatland is like 2% science fiction and 98% about class society, but don't tell that to the guys who spent a whole documentary misinterpreting what researchers mean by "observe" when talking about quantum physics. I'm tired of these obvious political satires, make it inscrutable again! It doesn't matter how clearly you spell it out, people are gonna miss it anyway, so why not give anime artists another weird thing to draw on for when they run out of source comics?

movies Wheaties • 2 weeks ago • 98%

I liked half the ending. It's a shame that we had to slam the brakes for the other half of it so ::: spoiler . Dukat and Kai Winn can be satanists. I like the idea that Sisko ends up joining the Prophets outside time, but it never really feels like the writers knew what to do with him being a spiritual figure for Bajor. This ending just kind of happened. ___ ::: Anyway, I'm posting this 'cus there used to be a user here with the name SiskoDidTwoThingsWrong, and i'm wondering what those two things were? Keeping the cure to the changeling disease seems like the most obvious one. I'm curious what the second is

science Wheaties • 2 weeks ago • 98%

https://www.livescience.com/animals/birds/mice-on-remote-island-that-eat-albatrosses-alive-sentenced-to-death-by-bombing-scientists-decree >Invasive mice are devouring albatrosses alive on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, so conservationists have come up with an explosive solution — "bombing" the mice. > >Mice have been wreaking havoc on Marion Island, between South Africa and Antarctica, for decades. Humans accidentally introduced the mice in the 19th century, and the rodents have since developed a taste for wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) and other threatened seabirds. > >The Mouse-Free Marion Project, a collaboration between the South African government and BirdLife South Africa, is trying to raise $29 million to drop 660 tons (600 metric tons) of rodenticide-laced pellets onto the island in winter 2027, AFP news agency reported on Saturday (Aug. 24). > >The project plans to send a squad of helicopters to drop the pellets. By striking in winter when the mice are most hungry, the conservationists hope to eradicate the entire mouse population of up to 1 million individuals.

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 3 weeks ago • 100%

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/28/health/cdc-warning-boars-head-deli-meat/index.html

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 3 weeks ago • 100%

 https://www.tumblr.com/aquasine0/759552071146094592/j-aliens

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 2 months ago • 97%

>Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good. > >It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong. > >Shame and guilt are ***DE***-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into *not* doing bad. > >Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues. > >Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)* > >Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to ***start*** to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame *does*! > >You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to *motivate* for that stuff! > >If you want it in a simple phrase: > >You can shame someone *out* of being a bad person, but you can't shame them *into* being a good person. --- It was nice to see this put so clearly. This election cycle has left me exhausted and demotivated, and this hits it square on the head. stolen from https://grungekitty-77.tumblr.com/post/754482938951892992/fun-fact-that-was-literally-what-inspired-me-to

badposting Wheaties • 2 months ago • 100%

Hello, I think i'm done interpreting shapes as the phonemical representation of ideas and meaning, how do I go about not doing that?

music Wheaties • 2 months ago • 100%

It's such a cornerstone of theater, the music is so damn good. Somehow I expected it to be from like the 1800s

news Wheaties • 2 months ago • 100%

www.aljazeera.com

>The court said Israel has no right to sovereignty of the territories, is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force and is impeding Palestinians’ right to self-determination. > >It said other nations were obliged not to “render aid or assistance in maintaining” Israel’s presence in the territory. It said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and existing settlements must be removed, according to a summary of the more than 80-page opinion read out by Salam.

effort Wheaties • 3 months ago • 92%

It gets bandied about as though it's in contrast to nature, separate from it. Like, *"I'd take civilization over nature any day; there's lions and tigers and bears out there!"* As if we left evolution, red in tooth and claw, behind. There's a reason Marx and Darwin are contemporaries. I'd like to here propose a distinction; a difference in kind and scale. There's Generational Evolution -- Darwin outlined this while sketching finches and pinning insects to corkboards. It's slow. Generations upon generations, infinitesimally small changes seeping through populations bit by bit. He described it as "survival of the fittest" but I think *"perpetuation of the first thing that just so happens to work"* better captures it. And then there's Behavioral Evolution. If the first sort of evolution was slow, this one is a lightning-strike. Genetic Evolution needs a bottleneck to up the pace - needs to crawl right up next to extinction for a new trait to propagate in only a lifetime or two. *We*, on the other hand, just need to talk to each other. We learn. Our behavior changes at the rate we allow it to. Of course, it's not as if we're no longer subject to that older sort of evolution. Genes still do their thing - but, again, that wheel turns *slow*. It's got a great and terrible momentum. We don't harness it. Not this century, or the next. Hell, probably not even this millennium. We have a much more attainable goal - harnessing Behavioral Evolution. At present, we use words like "civilization" as though we already have. As though we're not still stuck ***perpetuating the first thing that just so happens to work***. As though liberal-democracy nation-states were some deliberate design and not just classes of people acting out of material self-interest, reacting to others doing the same, enriching themselves via the latest scheme that happens to work. It's funny; here in the US, the people who deny evolution and the people who champion market economics have such a broad overlap. --- this, I believe, is how we frame the struggle of the 21st century. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the *evolution* of class struggles." Communism is the belief, the dream, of putting consciousness in the driver's seat. Of making dialog *the* defining evolutionary pressure, rather than a mere component.

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 3 months ago • 100%

written in the fucking 1970s

sino Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

I thought i would try to learn to read Chinese characters. I saw a thing somewhere once that said characters are organized by the number of brush-strokes in them, so in the past you kinda had to already know what you were looking up to find anything on it. I got the internet though! 世 - this is the first character I learned, and according to Google translate, it means 'world'. Wiktionary says it means other things to, like 'society', 'generation', even 'woman' and 'marriage'?? those last two feel like they're more contextual.  [stolen from wiktionary] seeing it written out, it makes me think first of the horizon, with pillars or towers rising above it. shadows extend from them. it makes me think if how people discovered/verified the curve of the Earth by measuring shadows, so it seems fitting. The next one I've learned is "大", which appears to be a suffix meaning 'big/much/very'. it's supposed to look like a little guy with arms stretched out to emphasis how BIG something is! ...again, going on Wiktionary for this... Which gives me 世大 - BIG WORLD (google thinks this says university...) ::: spoiler or, alternatively ___ Very Society :marx-joker: ::: ...am i doing this right? Or, at least, not terribly wrong? I kinda wanna hit the point where I can read Mao or *Three Body Problem* in the original text.

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

I know it's spelled "minute". That was a typo and I am not going to fix it.

emoji Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

for when you want to say YES very emphatically while talking like the guy who directed *Citizen Cane*

emoji Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

for when you feel on top of the world, but also as small as a mouse

videos Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

www.youtube.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uWW--w4SRs :the-brain: YES   

effort Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

...the punchline is that no matter how clear, how careful, how poetic the message is written -- we all will still just skim the fine print. Hell, I do it. Do it all the time. Twitter is successful because most of us get as far as the headline. So... why not write only in headlines? That's a mistake. Writing only mono-logs is the equal and opposite mistake. Conversations happen when you talk and listen. Maybe not in equal parts. Sometimes you listen more than you talk. Sometimes you talk more than you listen. Do you listen to your own words as you say them? Catch the spokenmis word? The licked tetter? I live in the Constantinople of the British empire, the US of A. My government is facilitating a genocide. Our private industries build the weapons that slaughter children families communities. Our publicly traded stock market does better the more blood is spilled. I hate it here. The people around me are too overworked, too sleep deprived, too hope-shattered, too cynical, too scared to do anything. I WILL NOT LEAVE. I will do everything in my power to bend history away from the slaughter. I WILL BE SO GODDAMN PATIENT AND CARING AND CAREFUL AND LOVING. And I will make sure people know. I WILL HELP THEM UNDERSTAND. I WILL DRAG THIS COUNTRY, KICKING AND SCREAMING, INTO THE 21st CENTURY and that's enough monologing... ...Is what I said a few days ago; ## `THE SECOND COLD WAR BEGAN AS SOON AS THEY PROCLAIMED HISTORY TO BE OVER.`

badposting Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

...the punchline is that no matter how clear, how careful, how poetic the message is written -- we all will still just skim the fine print. Hell, I do it. Do it all the time. Twitter is successful because most of us get as far as the headline. So... why not write only in headlines? That's a mistake. Writing *only* mono-logs is the equal and opposite mistake. Conversations happen when you talk and listen. Maybe not in equal parts. Sometimes you listen more than you talk. Sometimes you talk more than you listen. Do you listen to your own words as you say them? Catch the spokenmis word? The licked tetter? I live in the Constantinople of the British empire, the US of A. My government is facilitating a genocide. Our private industries build the weapons that slaughter children families communities. Our publicly traded stock market does better the more blood is spilled. I hate it here. The people around me are too overworked, too sleep deprived, too hope-shattered, too cynical, too scared to do anything. I WILL NOT LEAVE. I will do everything in my power to bend history away from the slaughter. I WILL BE SO GODDAMN PATIENT AND CARING AND CAREFUL AND LOVING. And I will make sure people *know*. I WILL HELP THEM UNDERSTAND. I WILL DRAG THIS COUNTRY, KICKING AND SCREAMING, INTO THE 21st CENTURY and that's enough monologing

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 5 months ago • 100%

...really, we've not really incorporated it into our understanding of the natural world, either. The closest we got was the late 19th century project to justify the racism we were already doing (or "Social Darwinism", when it's attempting to appear grown-up and respectable). The way we talk about class is still firmly grounded in 18th and 17th century ideas. An evolutionary perspective would have us thinking about this along multiple generations, across enough spans of time that the individual is incidental - a part contributing to a greater system. On this scale, it doesn't matter how good, how just, how longsighted this or that president or industry titan or """great man""" is, cus soon they'll be dead. Someone else moves in to take their position. It's the structure around them that truly continues, that defines the flow of history. That kind of thinking is anathema to the US civic tradition. We are discouraged - in schools, in churches, on television, in our art - from such broad considerations. It doesn't matter that *statistically* most people here die in debt having worked all their lives -- *they* just didn't do enough willpower! So they must *deserve* their sorry plight! The `Elect`, whether chosen by God or the Market (not much of a distinction, for a lot of people here...), are thus equally deserving of their 'success'. Even our atheists think like this! They've just replaced 'God' with an Operating System. They belittle religion for projecting a familiar patriarchal figure into the great unknowns of the cosmos, then turn around, point to the sky, and say it must be a desktop interface. And non of the underlying assumptions change! The aesthetics and the words are different, but we're still trying to cram a planetary biosphere of billions of people down the throat of a framework that refuses to consider anything bigger than the individual!

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 5 months ago • 97%

(id look up the quote, but it's funner to butcher ideas and re-arrange them in new language) i feel like that's not just the US as a nation state, but Yankee culture and society in general. Like, I'm starting to think we're just not capable of incorporating new experience into our collective learned behaviors. Not even after COVID - the polite thing isn't to mask up or even hand-sanitize when you have cold or flu symptoms, it's to pretend like nothing happened (and AIDS barely gets talked about and only in the past-tense...) Most of the art and music and literature getting remixed remade and referenced is from the 20th century, or has roots beginning in that time. In terms of infrastructure, very little built this century seems to have any amount of longevity in mind. Geopolitically we're still doing Cold Wars and proxy-conflicts -- even when those have been rendered obsolete by *our own fucking actions* the previous (and first...) time there was a big Cold War. And we never stopped funding and arming settler colonialism, even with practically unanimous condemnation in the UN (take away our VETO for the love of all things good TAKE IT AWAY) i don't know that i have a conclusion for this. On a personal level, living in the 20th century US but having 21st century tech reminds me way too much of *Fahrenheit 451*. It's maddening. Like I'm trying not to notice the great big Amygdalae on the Healing Church; there's no outlet for the Insight so it's just hovering there and i'm scared to walk too close to it for fear of how others respond.

badposting Wheaties • 6 months ago • 93%

i like yankee most, becase it can be shortened to yank as in 'yanking your chain' and also because it makes canadians (north montana w/extra French) mad if you call them that

food Wheaties • 6 months ago • 100%

...Make a national programme to replace all the lead pipes in the country. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. Why the fuck should water come into a home on command and still not be drinkable? We're a crule hospice of a country. The kind of half-funny tragedy that just makes me furious. Perhaps I've been drikning too much tap water. Damn damn damn damn. There would be more exclamation marks here, but I have restraint. obligitory    <flag of the cruel hospice

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 7 months ago • 100%

 stolen from https://conzoop.tumblr.com/post/744316560609525760 but tumblr wants a login for that blog so see it here https://punkitt-is-here.tumblr.com/post/744320980025999360

Seeing posts sit at the front page of "Active" and "Hot" for multiple days, I'm wondering if there's a way to address this. The "Scaled" sort seems to do a better job of promoting newer posts. Perhaps if it were set as everyone's default, we might see more activity funneled to newer things, rather than lingering on the same posts for multiple days? If it turns out to not improve things, would it be difficult to revert back?

memes Wheaties • 7 months ago • 100%

stolen from https://ellevandersneed.tumblr.com/post/743590377245835264

emoji Wheaties • 7 months ago • 100%

request for an empty space emoji, for blocking out space and making more complex combinations with other emoji

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 7 months ago • 100%

spam this at the /r/neoliberal dorks if you want

chapotraphouse Wheaties • 7 months ago • 100%

www.theonion.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/10384011 > read more: https://www.theonion.com/new-law-requires-snap-recipients-to-balance-food-on-nos-1851278899

earth Wheaties • 7 months ago • 100%

en.wikipedia.org

>Portia is a genus of jumping spider that feeds on other spiders (i.e., they are araneophagic or arachnophagic). They are remarkable for their intelligent hunting behaviour, which suggests that they are capable of learning and problem solving, traits normally attributed to much larger animals. ># Intelligence > >Portia often hunt in ways that seem intelligent. All members of Portia have instinctive hunting tactics for their most common prey, but can improvise by trial and error against unfamiliar prey or in unfamiliar situations, and then remember the new approach. > >They are capable of trying out a behavior to obtain feedback regarding success or failure, and they can plan ahead (as it seems from their detouring behavior). > >Portia species can make detours to find the best attack angle against dangerous prey, even when the best detour takes a Portia out of visual contact with the prey, and sometimes the planned route leads to abseiling down a silk thread and biting the prey from behind. Such detours may take up to an hour, and a Portia usually picks the best route even if it needs to walk past an incorrect route. > >Nonetheless, they seem to be relatively slow thinkers, as is to be expected since they solve tactical problems by using brains vastly smaller than those of mammalian predators. Portia has a brain significantly smaller than the size of the head of a pin, and it likely has less than 100,000 neurons [!] (for comparison, a mouse brain has about 70 million neurons [!!] and a human brain has 86 billion [!!!]). > >Portia can distinguish their own draglines from conspecifics', recognizing self from others, and also discriminate between known and unknown spiders. ># Social behavior > >Members of the species Portia africana were observed living together and sharing prey. > >If a mature Portia male meets a sub-mature female, he will try to cohabitate with her. > >P. labiata females can discriminate between the draglines of familiar and unfamiliar individuals of the same species and between their own draglines and those of conspecifics. The ability to recognize individuals is a necessary prerequisite for social behavior. smort spider