pro tip if you start saying hewwo as a joke it will eventually come to be your standard greeting for all loved ones
Or, in a more generalized form, beware what thou do ironically, lest thou begin to do it ronically.
Started out as a bit, how did it end up like this
it was only a bit IT WAS ONLY A BIT
The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.
So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.
But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.
But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.
Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.
I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.
on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.
The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.
I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.
at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”
hey @foone what font is that printed in?
I dunno, I’m about digital fonts, not real-world ones.
turns out crested gecko feets can’t stick to Mac screens very well
a comedy in 3 parts
[id: Trifle, a brown and orange spotted crested gecko, sliding down a MacBook screen slowly while trying to climb]
thought they needed a little reminder that they still have far more to lose if they double down on this stupidity.
spread the word, it seems they're... very forgetful about this.
A small collection (feel free to add):
@staff You're not very subtle.
I can’t remember who wrote it, but I saw a post going around saying that like, it’s probably not a conspiracy, it’s probably just automated moderation trained on transphobic data, which is worse. It also means that there is likely no easy and convenient fix; if there’s not a “culprit” to fire or reprimand, then it’s the slow, hard process of dismantling a bad system and replacing it with a better one. Which is not to say it can’t or shouldn’t be done, because it absolutely can, should, and must! But it’s going to require staff to put in the work, and while it might take a while, it would be nice if they would at least commit publicly to fixing this issue.
This hack will save your teeth: there are no “right” and “wrong” times to brush your teeth.
It gets in your head that you brush after eating when you wake up and when you go to sleep. Yeah that’s all well and good, but those are times that don’t have a lot of motivation and control…So just…brush your teeth at a different time.
You go to the bathroom in the middle of the day and are like “I should brush my teeth” DO IT!!!! Don’t listen to the other half of that sentence that says “shit but it’s not the right time”
I don’t care if you’re about to eat, or get coffee, or whatever.
If you are there and you want to…do it.
Honestly this hack will solve most of problems. Just stop assigning meaningless “right” and “wrong” to tasks and start saying “I can pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want and society and its expectations don’t really matter to me”.
If there’s no barrier in the first place you don’t have to get over it.
huge ADHD hack. if you can get over the “all or nothing”, moralizing, judging aspect of every action you “should” take, you’ll discover you can get more done than you expect.
I’m a big fan of the 2 PM shower. spend a whole morning feeling lazy and guilty, then just decide to start the day over again, even if it is lunchtime.
you can always begin again. any hour, any moment can be the beginning. you can choose that. the clock doesn’t run you, you run the clock
And if you do feel like brushing your teeth but are about to eat, you can just brush them without toothpaste. It’ll still get a lot of the gunk off, and you can do another brushing with toothpaste later in the day.
do goyische english speakers even know how many words they use regularly are yiddish Do they even know
there’s the obvious like mensch and mazel tov and bris and kosher but also chutzpah and klutz and dreck and kvetch and tchotchke and putz and schlock and SCHLONG! DO YOU GUYS KNOW THAT ONE OF THE FAMOUS TERMS FOR DICK IS YIDDISH! what about shmuck or schtick or GLITCH! GLITCH IS YIDDISH! DO YOU GUYS EVEN KNOW THAT BAGEL IS YIDDISH
well, no, they’re loanwords. english does it all the time with all kinds of languages. café (french), bazaar (persian), and kindergarten (german) are all loanwords. it’s not stealing, because languages aren’t really capable of the malice that implies. there’s also nothing wrong with using words from or learning new languages. what really gets my goat though is when gentiles mock the way yiddish sounds while using its words without even realizing it
[ID: tags: "#i love that yiddish is so pervasive through the english language #but that also makes me think that we (gentiles) stole it from jewish people"]
you should be able take off or put on breasts or a penis any time you want like they're accessories
