Pastelbat @pastelbat@awoo.space

"It's so silly that the scholars in Monster Hunter classify almost everything you run into a subtype of Wyvern."
"Every irl land vertebrate is a subtype of Lobe-Finned Fish, though."
​

I think my brain's been on a "the concept of 'nature' is hella weird" kick lately more than usual because of playing the Monster Hunter World expansion a lot

which is like, the worst possible example for this kinda discourse but apparently my brain will take anything as a jump-off point to waffle about cultural narratives or sth

People should experience sitting on public transport in a manual wheelchair for a few hours before yelling 'ban cars'

You don't even get a decent parking brake, let alone brakes proper, so get a railing in a nice cozy deathgrip for the next few hours

"How far back does the 'Tuff man does badcrimes, to protect society from badder tuffmans, doing badder badcrimes!!' trope go?"

"It resurged post 9/11, but 80-90s media was full of it already. The 70s also had its versions, and going back further.. The Noir Detective genre of the 1920s.. Do I know any examples before the 1920s..?"

🧠​: "Thomas Hobbes, 'The Leviathan', 1651."

"Damn. I mean.. You're not wrong."

Many schools of thought hold up a set of criteria and say that parts of the self that are the self are those parts that fit the criteria. Other phenomena observed inside the entity are not the entity.

The categorisation of the negative image is also the categorisation of the positive image

The transmission of an external system of categorisation, and thus personhood, via the message that the entity has already ingested another system of external categorisation that is producing perceptual bias

the endorsement or denial ability of an entity to self-analyse and deem its self analysis accurate, is at the root of a whole lot of ideas

https://store.steampowered.com/app/201270/Total_War_SHOGUN_2/

Total War: Shogun 2 is free (to keep) atm, also very good

If you can list a few villain-names in pop-culture fantasy works off the top of your head, then chances are good you can just copypaste that if you ever need to recite a list of unpopular Roman Emperors

Like, we're symbiotically entangled with dozens of other creatures and, like many other species, adapt and change our local ecosystem according to our needs, and use tools creatively and in response to our situations

There's a fundamentally Romantic idea of 'man in nature' as some achievable ideal-state lying at the base of all this which I'm sure Rousseau would go wild for (pun intended)

The idea of a "natural human lifespan" relies on separating "natural tool-use" from "unnatural tool-use"

If food replicated from data to a molecularly indistinguishable copy tastes worse than the original dish

..Do humans taste worse after going through transporters?

I liked the show up until the last few episodes

It seemed like it might genuinely embrace "synthetic life is different from organic life! And that's fine, actually? Diversity of life and experience is.. Good?"

But then they end the series on a note of "It's good only if they're like organic life! In that it's innate that life will always die and that's beautiful. Anything else is a meaningless unlife full of spoopy tentacles."

(Hydras are, presumably, evil tentacle synths on a deep-cover mission to Earth)

So: a big dramatic journey that hits a lot of high notes, then crashlands straight into Caveman Science Fiction in the final act

(http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjB3c4woT20

Smog - Bathysphere

(using #batplaylist so people can filter if becomes a regular thing)

https://soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast

Relistening to a really good podcast on late Roman history

Patrick Wyman's really knowledgeable on the topic, and explicitly doesn't just homogenise the ethnic/political groups involved in that period ("the romans", "the barbarians", "the goths", etc).

It also goes into what life would be like for people on the ground in various places, times and cultures, not just a sweeping overview the wider political phenomena.

Is good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUPA0C60YDE

Morcheeba - Enjoy The Ride

(video CW: vomiting)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__p2IpVAEQU

Handsome Boy Modeling School - Sunshine

Hack up the identities that are handed down to you with gleeful abandon
melt down their core ideas
discard what you will
cast the parts you wish to keep in new forms
stitch in other parts
construct new parts entirely
vandalise yourself

You were never theirs to define in the first place.