James Pitt

@sahelanth.bsky.social

1229 Followers 555 Following

this is all Tiktaalik's fault

Blingee GIF of Eliezer Yudkowsky being tormented by Roko’s Basilisk.
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
My therapist: ‹laughs at a joke l said› Me (to myself): This is great. I'm going to get a good grade in therapy, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve
tweet from @wolfpupy: in today's and all other time's housing market, a dirt cave is the best place to live
Herman Cain, who famously died of COVID he contracted by giving a speech at a Trump rally about how COVID was nothing to be scared of
Adactylidium is a genus of mites known for its unusual life cycle. An impregnated female mite feeds upon a single egg of a thrips, rapidly growing five to eight female offspring and one male in her body. The single male mite mates with all his sisters when they are still inside their mother. The new females, now impregnated, eat their way out of their mother's body so that they can emerge to find new thrips eggs, killing their mother in the process (though the mother may be only 4 days old at the time), starting the cycle again. The male emerges as well, but does not look for food or new mates, and dies after a few hours.
Kiritsugu and Shirou Emiya from the Fate/Stay Night franchise.
As a parasite it is permanently attached to its host, and after piercing its host's cuticle with an unpaired stylet, a rootlet system used to absorb nutrients enters through the hole and grow into the host's tissue. The adult form develops inside the larva, and can become either a sac-like parthenogenetic female, or a fully developed free-living, non-feeding and sexually-reproducing male or female.
Short version: leftists see conflict where liberals see feedback loops in big harmonious overall system. (This is the ending of Ana Teixeira Pinto’s essay “The Pigeon in the Machine,” which argues that mid-century “cybernetics” scholarship provided a way to model social conflict without having to acknowledge that there are opposing sides in conflict).
Rudolf Hilferding’s quote about how financialization makes it easier to seize the means of production, as a Minion meme
Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible (1998), a movie about how if someone made a list of all US spies, someone could then steal that list
Movie poster from “Escape From New York.” Except with “York” changed to “Wark,” because I am in Newark. And with Snake Plissken’s face replaced with a seal, because seals say “wark!”
An image showing that a person answered yes much more readily when asked “Were you aware of something?” than when asked “Did you see something?”
tumblr thread where someone replies with an image of Hilary Clinton to the viral post "i love you evil women i love you amoral women i love you scrappy women i love you selfish women i love you pathetic and desperate women i love you women who will do anything it takes to survive at any cost"
gif from The Simpsons, in which a doctor explains that Mr Burns is healthy because his numerous diseases cancel each other out
Karl Friston, neuroscientist known for the “free-energy principle”, which is basically a claim that all learning and all behavior boils down to trying to make predictions match reality better
a Jinro soju frog statue. he looks like the grumpy frogs in a better mood.
cover of “Markets Not Capitalism”, a left-wing market anarchist book I do not wholly agree with but greatly enjoyed
“The Excesses of God” by Robinson Jeffers: Is it not by his high superfluousness we know Our God? For to be equal a need Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling Rainbows over the rain And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows On the domes of deep sea-shells, And make the necessary embrace of breeding Beautiful also as fire, Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom Nor the birds without music: There is the great humaneness at the heart of things, The extravagant kindness, the fountain Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise If power and desire were perch-mates.
After transitioning, he noticed that people who were not aware of him being transgender treated him with respect much more than when he presented as a woman. After delivering his first seminar as a man, one scientist was overheard to comment, "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister's [believing work published under his deadname to be his sister's] work."
Scene from “The Good Place”, in which an AI keeps assuring someone she has the file he is asking for and then hands him a cactus instead.
Mike Duncan on the same topic: “A different leader making slightly different decisions dies happy in a big fancy bed instead of getting shot in a basement. The great idiot theory of revolutionary history also has a very specific subset to it. It's not just that our sovereigns and their ministers are doing a bad job and therefore bad things happen, although that is very much the case. It's also that people around the bumbling sovereign, who are smart and ambitious and capable, get extremely frustrated with the very act of watching the bumbling sovereign make such a hash of things. It's offensive to their intellect and their pride. Why is my great nation or kingdom being ruled by such an idiot? And thus offended, these educated members of the ruling class start entertaining the idea that it might be necessary to remove the incompetent sovereign. Incompetent rulers will always invite challenges to their rule, and incompetent rulers presiding over society whose structural forces are generating discontented energy, well, that's going to invite a revolution.” From Revolutions: Appendix 2- The Ancien Regime
Pikaole’s pygmy falcons.
An account from the Battle of Osowiec Fortress in World War I: “At the same time the 76th Landwehr regiment, having gathered in the forest to the west and south-west of the village of Sosnya and having lost approximately a thousand of their people totheir own gas which had crept towards the west as they approached the fortress, attacked the village of Sosnya where very few remained alive by then. After crushing the skulls of 36 dead men, a part of the enemy forces moved from there towards the flank” https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/u6h663/i_have_the_first_english_translation_2021_of_the/
several old wolfpupy tweets about problems
Google’s AI advises you to use an iron to remove wrinkles from your scrotum
Then, as to evidence of early colonial practice, the Court cited three colonial restrictions the state invoked, but cautioned that “we doubt that three colonial regulations could suffice to show a tradition of public-carry regulation.” It then went on to distinguish those regulations. Then, curiously, it said: “Regardless, even if respondents’ reading of these colonial statutes were correct, it would still do little to support restrictions on the public carry of handguns today.” Apparently even on-point historical traditions have a shelf life that modern circumstances can render irrelevant. The rationale is worth quoting in full because it seems to me to turn historical inquiry on its head:
Audiobook of “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa,” a marine’s WW2 memoir known for openly discussing exceptionally harrowing conditions and being less self-exonerating than his contemporaries.
post explaining Cybersmith’s deal 1/3 taken from https://www.tumblr.com/maripr/680504539475001344/can-you-explain-the-human-pet-thing
they did
“I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU BUT I AM CURSED TO SPEAK LIKE GUY FIERI” by Megan Williams
another person’s experience with a cat pushing open weighted doors: “he got strong enough to push that aside so I added a second 25 lb weight and he managed to push all 50 so I gave up because I realized I was just making him buff and angry”
excerpt from Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”, about how he spent his career critiquing excess trust in shaky fact claims, and worries he inadvertently bolstered excess distrust of solid fact claims.
Text exchange: Pink: did you know a spider can hold eight guns at once Yellow: how does it WALK Pink: did you know a spider can hold seven guns at once
Hemacite figurine faces. They have shiny black skin and red eyes. Hemacite endures surprisingly well, and I think a lot of 40k players would love to have minis made out of blood.
cover of “The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All”, a Laird Barron horror story collection
marshmallow peeps
Posts from @crystal.undertow.cards: ‬ “[a man and a woman having missionary sex for the purpose of reproduction within the bonds of marriage where the man has power over the woman] this too is yuri i could argue this in a court of law. i could do anything. none of you know my power.”
A tweet from @jana-aych-ess.bsky.social‬; "the full text of moby dick will not fit on your body it's like 700 pages long" says the tattoo artist. but she is wrong. I will grow
Bureau of Labor Statistics chart showing inflation staying very close to 2% from like 1999 to 2020, and then spiking past 6% during Covid.
Dril tweet: IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL
webcomic by Branson Reese in which an uncanny-looking cat claims to be god https://www.branson-reese.com/archive/2017/6/4/cat-in-a-tree