intransitivelie

intransitivelie, 17 hours ago to random

I don't do anything for a living. I stave off the icy hand of death through my exploited labor, but I'm not living, I'm just not dead yet.

intransitivelie, 2 days ago to random

What the fuck do you British people mean when you say, "lash yogurt with honey" or "lash fries with salt?" Speak English! You invented the language for fuck's sake.

intransitivelie, 2 days ago to random

Lots of people use the Tragedy of the Commons to illustrate issues with humanity, but not only is the a Tragedy of the Commons actually just an excuse to privatize everything, but it's not as illustrative of human nature as people think. It turns out that most people don't take advantage of others (for a definition of "most" that's more or less inclusive depending on how pessimistic about human nature you feel). Plus, one bad actor doesn't automatically fuck the Commons up (not that it doesn't, just that it's not automatic). The Commons can go along just fine and rebound from selfishness with very little active effort to do so.

A better illustration, I feel, is the zipper merge. It illustrates how human nature doesn't work at scale in the modern world. Let me explain what it is if you're not familiar.

A zipper merge is when two lanes of a road go down to one lane and cars have to merge together. A true zipper happens when you're supposed to alternate merging from the left and right, but even if it's, "Lane ending, merge left," you wind up in a similar situation. And nine times out of ten, it causes a traffic jam that didn't need to happen. But in the ideal, a zipper merge alternates left and right, like teeth on a zipper, and ideally doesn't cause any slowdown.

So why is it an illustration? Well, first, the most efficient and effective way of merging two lanes of traffic is a zipper. You don't need signals of any kind, you use the entire area of road you're given, and ideally it works. We can communicate this to everyone involved and it won't make a damn bit of difference. Knowledge of the ideal's benefit won't matter.

Second, as long as density of cars remains below a critical mass, zipper merge works even when everyone doesn't do it the right way. Humans manage to muddle along just fine when we're not being expected to deal with too many others. Society works ok in small numbers. It just doesn't scale well. Like the zipper, we break at scale.

Third, one bad actor will fuck everything up in a zipper merge at scale. It's not a guarantee, but it's certainly more likely than in the Commons. One driver who refuses to let their neighbor merge will slow that lane, and may slow their own as well. At scale, the zipper merge has no defense against selfishness. You can't actively work against it as a non-selfish actor, not without making things worse.

Fourth, well-meaning drivers fuck things up too. You can be totally altruistic and slow down to allow multiple people from the other lane to merge, which in turn causes a backup in your lane. You can think ahead and get over into the lane that's not ending, or the one which seems to have the most cars, pushing that lane over the critical threshold, and also not efficiently utilizing the entire available road area. You can just have a moment of indecision which slows things down enough to raise the density. The ideal is actually somewhat lazy and selfish in a zipper merge, just not lazy or selfish enough to ruin things for everyone in the opposite direction.

Fifth, communication is key but is basically impossible. If perfect communication existed between humans, it wouldn't do away with our issues at scale, but it certainly would make us more resilient. But it isn't, just as it's impossible to talk to the person next to you in the other lane.

Lastly, no one blames the complex situation arising from the interaction of fairly simple rules for the issues that arise. Traffic is usually blamed on some identifiable thing, but traffic jams usually happen because of a confluence of a simple situation, a density of traffic, and minor actions, ones which we don't realize are causal. At a sufficient density and speed, I can create a traffic jam by touching my brake pedal. Not even slowing my car. Just signaling my intent to do something reasonable. And I will likely never know I did anything.

There's also the fact that traffic is something that only arose within the last century or so, and our monkey brains aren't capable of dealing with it. Before that, traffic was the result of too much density in an observable way, with an observable cause, at a speed which was probably slower than we can walk. We didn't need a zipper merge before cars existed. Roads weren't complex enough, traffic wasn't fast enough, and humans could correct more easily for situations that arose.

In summary, society is like traffic. At a small scale, it works. It can work even at scales which make our monkey brains, which really can't deal with more than a few dozen people at a time, shudder. But at a certain point, when the density gets too dense, or the situation too complex, or the speeds too high, we break down. Bad actors can ruin everything easily. Merely being a passive participant makes us causal to the problem. And we're just not capable of seeing that because we've had no preparation for it.

intransitivelie, 4 days ago to random

Catalog implies the existence of dogalogs, which is just more fun to say.

intransitivelie, 5 days ago to random

It sure is super fucking convenient that the diets that make us the healthiest are also the most expensive, most inconvenient, and taste the worst. Plus exercise sucks. So yeah, bang up job on designing humans, no notes.

RickiTarr, 7 days ago to random

Listen, the Victorians had their issues, but pussy and cunt are boring, give me Mossy Mound and Cave of Unimaginable Delights any day.

intransitivelie, 9 days ago to random

Just had to add another hole to my belt, not because I'm getting skinnier but because my belt is stretching.

Alice, 12 days ago to random

Fuck Marry Kill with Snap, Crackle, and Pop...go!

@RickiTarr I’m so sorry, please look away.

intransitivelie, 12 days ago to random

I saw some trans flags in the sky. Between this and the rainbows, I'm starting to think maybe god is gay after all.

intransitivelie, 20 days ago to random

If property damage is violence, oil spills are mass violence and should be prosecuted as such. Flint, Michigan is violence. Wrongfully evicting homeowners is violence. Failing to maintain our infrastructure until it collapses is violence. Destroying homeless encampments is violence. Strip mining is violence.

But they're not. After all, if they were, we'd have to do something about it. Since we're not a violent people.

intransitivelie, 20 days ago to random

Sing a song of sixpence
A pocket full of rye
Four and twenty blackbirds
Jockin' Mike D to my dismay

docpop, 20 days ago to Starwars

I'm heading to Alamo Drafthouse in SF tonight to take part in a 21 hour marathon viewing of #StarWars movies. That's Star Wars 1 through 9, with live performances of the 501st Legion, and some bits of trivia and games. Rogue One and Solo will not be included.

I haven't watched episodes 1-3 since they were in theaters and I'm curious if I'll like them any better now than I did then.
https://drafthouse.com/sf/show/star-wars-marathon?cinemaId=0801&sessionId=59461

intransitivelie, 20 days ago to random

This isn't a poll, but if you bite a vampire, do you turn into a vampire? Dracula rules would indicate no, but Anne Rice rules are less clear. White Wolf rules, which are kind of a hardcore version of Anne Rice rules, only turn you into a vampire if you drink a vampire's blood while you're currently dying from a vampire having drunk your blood, so if you're hale and hearty you just become a ghoul (if I recall correctly a roleplaying game I never really played from 30 years ago). I don't know Anne Rice's books that well, though I've always given her props for squaring the "vampire contagion" circle fairly elegantly.

More interesting perhaps is the question of whether biting a werewolf makes you a werewolf. I feel like there's less consensus here. White Wolf werewolves might not be contagious at all (I have forgotten pretty much everything about them). It seems to me that if lycanthropy is presented as a pathogen, whether or not it actually is one, then biting a werewolf is as good as being bitten by one. In the movie Werewolf, for instance, not only is being injured by a werewolf a cause of lycanthropy, but lycanthropy seems to be an STD, which is important as it means it can be bloodborne.

That's odd because the werewolves in Werewolf (which is a truly awful movie, but it does reflect some tropes) are said to be Navaho skinwalkers, and Navaho legend, in as much as I'm familiar with them, don't make lycanthropy out to be a disease at all, but rather a state of spiritual uncleanliness resulting from the use of magic. And honestly, that jibes with European werewolf lore until it was picked up by Hollywood. European lycanthropes aren't necessarily spiritually unclean; berserkers didn't view themselves as practitioners of bad magic, for instance, but they were voluntary lycanthropes and to the best of my knowledge weren't contagious.

Anyway, based on my read of myth, if we're talking a vampire of the Dracula tradition (which encompasses Anne Rice as she clearly draws from this tradition) and a werewolf of the Werewolf tradition (whose ancestors are the European contagious werewolves, even ones which are understood to be a curse rather than a disease) the odds are pretty good that if a werewolf bites a vampire, the vampire is going to turn if it does, while the werewolf will probably remain unchanged.

That goes out the window though if there are any alterations to the basics. If vampirism is contagious without conscious effort by the vampire, is it contagious only to the dead? Can undead people be turned into werewolves at all, given that dead werewolves revert to their human form? Is "vampire curse" just a stronger magic than "werewolf curse," or vice versa? And what of donuts?! Tell me, what of donuts?!

All of which to say, there's no right answer, possibly even if you specify exactly which vampire is bitten by exactly which werewolf. Only in cases where a story actually has a werewolf bite a vampire can you say for certain, and even then only for those two creatures.

But I feel like the odds are better that a human who bites a werewolf will become a werewolf than that a human who bites a vampire will become a vampire. Suggesting, in turn, that unless vampirism is contagious in the exponential way (which it obviously isn't or we'd all be vampires) there should be a lot more werewolves than vampires running around because lycanthropy is more contagious to humans. And lycanthropy could be a highly-contagious bloodborne pathogen without violating common sense. Most people who get bitten by werewolves get killed by werewolves, and werewolves are usually understood to be alive, not undead, so dying of werewolf-mauling means you're out of the running. Also, werewolves don't need to create additional werewolves in the process of survival.

But while being killed by werewolves is probably the most likely outcome of an encounter with one in werewolf form, if they're contagious, they're contagious no matter which form they take, as suggested by Werewolf. Lycanthropy would be sexually-transmitted as well as transmission by other bodily fluids. There's no indication that it has achieved airborne status, but bloodborne pathogens wiped out half of Europe. In a world with werewolves, we'd be awash in them.

So don't worry about vampires. They're small potatoes. Worry about werewolves.

intransitivelie, 22 days ago to random

I don't tell stories about my spouse often because I don't feel like they're my stories to tell. But they have struggled with mental illness, which is a bit like saying that Tokyo has struggled with Godzilla. When we first met they were totally unmedicated (it's okay, so was I) and were not doing well, apart from their life totally falling apart.

Some days, the only thing I had was begging. I would cry and say, "Please," through the tears because I had nothing else to do or say. Sometimes it was please don't leave, sometimes it was please don't give up, sometimes it was just please, to them, to god, to whatever.

It's not good. It's very much not good. It tears a piece of yourself out and uses it to power the invocation. Humans aren't meant to beg abjectly, or maybe we are but we don't know how to do it properly. We're not meant to live at rock bottom. I'd argue that we're not actually meant to reach rock bottom, that when we do, it represents a failure somewhere. I don't hold with the idea that one has to hit rock bottom to recover. But that's neither here nor there.

I don't know where my rock bottom is in many ways, for which I'm profoundly grateful, but I do know what it'll take to make me debase myself, to throw pride out the window and beg. I know that I would beg for my life, all other things being equal. I would beg for other people's lives. My pride is worth relatively little to me. I don't say this as a mark of pride, by the way. One should value oneself enough to care about debasing one's coinage, so to speak. I don't really. I'm not worth very much to myself and that's another sign that there was a failure somewhere.

I don't have a moral to this story. Just something that was brought to mind for reasons which are probably apparent if you follow me.

intransitivelie, 22 days ago to random

This is approximately where I am except I have one other thing to say. @gwynnion shouldn't have to, so I will. Read her excellent thread first and behave yourselves or you get the hammer.

https://mastodon.social/@gwynnion/112367155546224540

intransitivelie, 22 days ago to random

Sweeney of a Lesser Todd
Your Arms Too Sweeney to Box With Todd
The Todds Must Be Sweeney
Hands on a Sween Toddey

Ok, that's out of my system.

intransitivelie, 23 days ago to NoStupidQuestions

Okay, here's your fun #question for the day: what movie should be made into a Muppet movie, with every single character being played by a Muppet except one, which will be played by Timothée Chalamet? Show your work. #BoostsWelcome

intransitivelie, 25 days ago to random

I just got applauded for bringing out a music stand. It is the most applause I've ever received, by a wide margin. I think it's funny, but it's also a little sad because I think the most applause I've ever gotten as an actor, for myself, was maybe 300 people. Which isn't nothing, and I'm not complaining. It's just kind of funny.

There's something really incredible about getting applause for a performance from a large group of people. It's not why I do theater, but it doesn't hurt. Sitting backstage while the orchestra gets applause ain't bad either.

I've performed for tiny houses. I think my record may be 7 people. I almost did a performance for one person once, but we decided discretion was the better part of valor since the one person in the audience was the wife of one of the other actors and she'd seen it before, plus the snow was really starting to come down. We were prepared to do it though. You perform for who shows up. The show must go on. Etc.

But there really is something about a big audience. I'm not talking thousands of people, though I'd cheerfully do a show for that many. It varies based on the size of the audience space. I've worked at theaters where 50 people was a very nice house, and theaters where 50 felt totally empty. It depends. And sometimes you get a sell-out crowd which is dead. Just totally without energy at all. That's a killer for a comedy, but it's not fun for any performance. And the thing is, they paid just as much for their tickets, and they may enjoy it just as much, so you have to go on. You learn to bring your own energy.

But a big, enthusiastic crowd just gives a performance a real kick in the pants, both from the perspective of a performer and a spectator. That's why we do live performance, rather than just playing a recording. It really is something else. I don't even mean the applause, which, not gonna lie, is amazing, but it's just the energy transfer. It's the kind of thing they used to riot over on opening nights of controversial pieces. It's the kind of thing that during certain periods of history you could only get through religion. It's a big group of people who are all there to join in something larger than themselves. And the audience is vital to that.

If you've never been in the house during a live performance when it's just really flowing, you owe it to yourself to find a theater or a concert hall or a barn or whatever and see some live performances, whether that be music or theater or dance or opera or whatever you fancy. Doesn't have to be professional. Doesn't have to be anything super special. You being there, ready to see something, makes it special. On behalf of all the folks who've performed for ten people, seven of whom were asleep, make it eleven. Make it one hundred eleven. Make it one thousand eleven. Hell, make it one.

We don't have a strong culture of performers appreciating audiences, but believe me, you are appreciated. Theater without an audience is just masturbation, if I may speak for my own chosen artform (shots lovingly and gently fired), and while playing music without an audience is more often done, it's still only performing when someone watches. You may be the one person in the house who makes the audience hit that tipping point from lousy to good, from good to great. And that's magic.

intransitivelie, 26 days ago to random

I'm going to need everyone to come up with a different word for "librarian" because when I'm skimming headlines I see "Alabama decides librarians biggest threat to society" and my brain cheerfully substitutes "libertarians" and I nod and say to myself, "Well, they're not wrong."

"Keepers of Knowledge?" "Loremasters?" "Magi?" "Wisdom Guides?"

Ok, so maybe libertarians should be forced to change their word to "Unconscionable Dipshits" but I foresee a few problems with this plan.

intransitivelie, 28 days ago to random

I like the sort of magic that the dungeon master never allows. Give me a spell which will topologically deform a human into a ball with five holes in it, preserving mass and density. Give me a spell which rips the cuticles off of a target's fingers. Give me a spell that ruptures capillaries. There are a million ways to do 10d6 damage. Give me one which does 1d6 damage by removing the target's toes, making them slightly unstable and unable to run. Make their tears slightly acidic. Throw their back out. Bagziz's Necromantic Chiropractic, causes d4 damage to target, reduces their Strength by d6 until major healing magic is used on them or until Bagziz's Necromantic Chiropractic is cast on them again, at which time they take d4 additional damage but feel much better.

I don't know. I'm exhausted.

intransitivelie, 29 days ago to random

I've realized something, which is that I can't work 40 hour weeks. It doesn't matter when I work, I just can't do an extended number of 40 hour weeks. I'm disabled in some way. I'm broken. It is what it is. I will never be a fully productive member of society. I suppose I should just walk cheerfully into the abattoir.