For my own posts unrelated to fandom I use the tag #texto, there are stuff in spanish and english about different topics, some are kind of (or very) personal but any interaction (rb, comment, etc) with them is ok anyway, that’s why I use readmores :)
I feel like Aziraphale and Crowley would either have a really over-the-top white wedding with loads of planning and it would be the event of a lifetime
OR
they would get really goddamn drunk and get Vegas-married.
Both. They’d plan the event of a life time then get drunk say “fuck it we love each other why do we need to do all this” and go get Vegas married
You can tell when someone’s frame of reference for “normal people” is more “people at the church sponsored ice cream social” and less “people on the bus”
the people in the notes saying “people on the bus aren’t normal” are the people this post is talking about.
I took the bus for three years when I lived in Honolulu and haven’t lived anywhere with even usable public transit since, but in those three years I had dozens of utterly bizarre experiences that were also Perfectly Normal. This is because the human condition is vast and also Very fucking Weird.
Kid one the bus next to me whose backpack starts moving and it turns out he’s got three chickens and a painted turtle he caught in there? This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been catching small game and transporting it home in whatever they had since we invented bags to put chickens and turtles in.
I traded him three king-size snickers bars I had on me for the turtle because I vaguely remembered that many freshwater turtles were toxic to eat (incorrectly, as it turns out, but this was when I still had a Nokia Brick that lived a blissful, internet-free existence), and didn’t want him accidentally poisoning his family, but didn’t want to just. Steal his hard-won turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been cautious about poisons, looking out for strangers kids and bartering shit since before we were technically humans, probably.
Having acquired a turtle, I now needed to transport the turtle to the on-campus pond that effectively served as an Invasive Freshwater Turtle Containment Zone, but did not have a bag that could adequately contain him so I had to sit the rest of that bus ride, at the station and all through the next bus ride holding the turtle like the world’s angriest hamburger. Multiple people were curious about and delighted with the turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans love an animal, especially one that is capable of appearing grumpy, and hands are for holding things.
By the time I got back to Campus, the anthropology and child psychology building that the Invasive Turtle Containment Pond was in had closed, so I had to figure out how to climb the tree over the wall and get down off the roof while holding The World’s Angriest And Sharpest Hamburger. I eventually ended up having to briefly shove the turtle into by bra to get up to the initial branch and off the roof without breaking an ankle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans are, as a species, a bunch of barely-evolved arboreal frugivores and really good at Tree Physics, and I don’t know a single titty-having bitch out there that hasn’t used their bra as Emergency Pockets at least once, if not daily.
I released the turtle into the Turtle Containment Pond and then had to solve the problem of getting back OUT of the locked building, but Nokia Brick never loses a signal or drops a call (including that time I accidentally dropped it off a 13-story building in the middle of a call to my parents and the damn thing BOUNCED but kept the line open. I miss that phone every day.) and while campus security has been carefully trained to not let people IN to places without proper ID and a call to someone inside, they assume that if you got locked in somewhere, that you got in by legitimate means and not Lemur Shenanigans, so i just called them, apologized that I’d been working late with headphones on and didn’t realize I’d been locked in. This is Perfectly Normal, people have been lying to cops since laws were invented, and will continue to do so because all cops are bastards.
Anyway, everyone should have access to good public transportation because freedom of movement is a human right and meeting a broad spectrum of humanity is good for your mental health and spiritual welfare.
Not to be all “they should teach occultism in schools,” but they should. I don’t believe I’ve ever attended a history-of-science class that was more substantial than “Yeah like back in ancient Greece we thought there were only four elements and for a hot minute we thought that electrons orbited their nucleii like little planets, pretty wild huh” without ever touching on why these ideas were accepted as truth or the development of the methodology uses to discredit them. And I think this ignorance is a major contributing factor to the dismal reputation of STEM people. We have no inkling as to why we think what we think, which turns science into just another blind dogma instead of the pursuit of truth.
Before you get your engineering degree I think you should be able to explain why Medieval doctors thought the bubonic plague was caused by the negative influence of the planet Saturn as well as explain why they were wrong.
I feel like what’s making this even harder to pursue is the fact that there aren’t a lot of sources on to why we thought what we thought, compared to what we thought and when. I at least have not seen those personally, but make I wasn’t looking hard enough. Still, there should be more research? academic papers? whatever on the logic behind obsolete knowledge.
@violentferalcat The short version is that the old stuff was believed largely because it worked, at least for the data that they had and the situations they were applied to (medicine is kind of the exception to this rule). I’m not exactly an expert, but I did my undergrad in a liberal arts college with a very strong emphasis in the history of Western thought, so we did Ptolemy in addition to Newton and Einstein, Phlogiston in addition to modern thermodynamics, etc. There’s this old saying among physicists that whatever their new theory is, it has to “reduce to reality;” that is, no matter how esoteric their cosmology gets, it can’t be true if it doesn’t cash out to plain jane Newtonian mechanics under the conditions that Newtonian theory was developed. It turns out, this is true of many scientific advances.
Let’s take Phlogiston first: Phlogiston theory existed because it made correct predictions. In fact, if you really wanted to you could model most of the thermodynamic things you’d want to model with Phlogiston theory. The change to modern thermodynamics happened when people noticed that if you burned a metal until it became a calc, it actually gained mass. In modern chemistry, we model this as the metal taking in oxygen as part of the process of combustion, so it makes sense that the mass would increase. But Phlogiston theory says the phlogiston exists in the metal, and then is expelled in the process of combustion. But the math still works if you’re willing to bite the puzzling metaphysical bullet of giving Phlogiston negative mass. This winds up being a curiosity in the case of thermodynamics but it makes a huge difference in astronomy.
Ptolemy’s system stuck around for over a thousand years because it worked. Epicycles are a crime against humanity and elegance both, not to mention parsimony, but the thing is is that they worked. If you were a sailor your navigator was intimately familiar with the Almagest and if he used it right that book was as real and correct as the satellites that beam directions to your smartphone’s GPS. And it works today! If the technological means of navigation ever fail and a ship’s navigator has to break out the musty old star charts, those star charts were created and will be used with math that comes from Ptolemy, even if the navigator hasn’t read a word of the Almagest. The math is simpler! Well, it’s specifically simpler if you’re sitting on earth, because it’s specifically made for an observer on earth. epicycles are a horrific kludge, but they turn out to be a useful kludge, not only in preserving the metaphysical biases of Ptolemy’s day, but more importantly in being a sort of… mathematical fiction that’s simpler and easier to calculate at the cost of not being as broadly applicable as Newtonian physics. If I were to get all occult about it, one might say that the mathematics for making epicycles work contain within them the seeds for Newtonian celestial mechanics, latent and encoded, until Newton could unfurl them properly.
I think the ability to switch between these kind of frameworks on command is an important part of the way occultists like @cryptotheism think. Noticing where the facts that you’re observing could ‘reduce to’ two separate narratives or theories, and there’s not a way of determining which so you’re free to swap between them wherever it’s convenient, seems to me to be pretty important to the whole project.
Background: an “epicycle” is a circle added to a planet’s orbit. Imagine you’ve got a planet with a circular orbit, but instead of the planet being directly on that orbit ring, it’s on a second, smaller circle, and that small circle follows the bigger circle. It’s honestly kind of elegant.
I literally just gave a talk about the history of Lunar Science, and mentioned the geocentric models and epicycles, and I made a point to remind everyone in the audience that despite how silly we think these theories are now, they worked. You can mathematically figure out the positions of the planets in the skies using Ptolemy’s model.
Epistemology. What everyone here is discussing is epistemology - the study of *how* we know what we know, and what exactly counts as knowledge. And yes, many many things would make more sense to people of we exposed everyone to epistemological studies and their history at a young age in widespread education.
I love ineffable husbands because their dynamic is 100% just “the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one” but who is who changes from moment to moment and sometimes it’s just “they’re grumpy” or “they’re soft”
We are thinking about organising a hetalia ship week dedicated to Hetalia’s France and Germany !
This Gerfra week would be from the 16th to the 22nd of January 2023. So this is an interested post to see who would want to participate or would enjoy this event!
The prompts are still undecided, so we have created a poll to chose them! Any suggestion or idea is welcome! Here is the link : https://forms.gle/bw7iW2sUoMRTGcQo8
