Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Relevant to my two previous rants, this article is really important to me and contains a puzzle game that you might find really interesting. I'd be very gratified if you would take a moment to look at it.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick-puzzle-to-test-your-problem-solving.html

@001zlnv I've seen some interesting scientific studies that have tried to do just that. I'll see if I can dig it up sometime—there was an edu-game a bunch of researchers made to inoculate people against manipulative "fake news" strategies... AND IT WORKED in clinical trials.

You know what else really pisses me off?

Christians who see The Number of the Beast in places where it's just three sixes, not the number "six hundred and sixty six."

IT DOESN'T EVEN FUCKING WORK THAT WAY. That would be utterly meaningless in the original Greek, because Greek DIDN'T HAVE PLACE VALUE. The Greek for 666 is χξϛ (600+60+6). You CAN'T GET 6+6+6 out of that, period.

So, like, a good 80-90% of Christian hysterics over THE BEAST doesn't even have a Biblical basis. It's taken on a life of its own, and so many innocent things have been rejected and demonized, from UPC symbols (whose check-digits vaguely resemble the code for sixes) to Barack Obama (don't even get me started), because these people won't take ten fucking minutes to do some fact-checking about the document that's supposedly the whole center of their world. >_<

Bad memetics. It's like wildfire. Or a plague that constantly spreads and mutates. A bad idea like this takes on a life of its own. And after a while, people don't even remember or care why it was associated with Raw Elemental Evil in the first place. And they defend it with strategies that have everything to do with social connections and personal honor, and nothing to do with fact. This is why this stuff tends to scares me so much.

And yeah, this is about that "30-50 hogs = Nazi dog whistle" thing. If you don't know what I mean, good god, don't ask, because it's what made my brain hurt so much earlier that I was tempted to flee. I still haven't seen any link to evidence that the meme originator had any warning signs *besides* the "30-50 is awfully specific" argument.

Even if they did find one, it still wouldn't explain how the hell spreading those numbers would have caused any real harm, or what it was supposed to accomplish for the Bad Guys. And it looks like the original accuser has walked their case back on Twitter, too. I just... got a real bad feeling from the whole thing, and given my aforementioned history, I think I had a right to.

So let me tell you a little story.

Way back in the early 1990's, I was subscribed to Sears's Prodigy service, which was a lot like America Online, which was a lot like pay-by-the-month Facebook. *smirk*

And I was on a bulletin board for They Might Be Giants fans. And one day out of the clear blue sky, somebody posted a long breathless rant about how they'd "proven" the song "Spider" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmQYICF7ExU ) was about WW2.

Their theory was absolutely airtight: "Spider" was the Nazis. The second voice was the Japanese saying they"d "get rid of" their enemies. The voice saying "must stop" was the victims of the Holocaust.

And the TMBG board went WILD. It dominated discussion for days. People were shocked they'd never thought of it before. They filled in the rest of the story to show where Italy and Russia figured in. They found further clues in other songs. One guy, who had innocently picked the handle "SCHPIDER!" apologized all over himself for his insensitivity towards the victims of genocide.

Except, of course that this whole theory was all complete bullshit. I have NEVER seen anyone seriously espouse this theory outside of Prodigy, and the composers are on record as saying: "Spider is the product of an idle afternoon messing with the sampler." It's just a spy-jazz riff with a bit of pulp comics action.

All I'm saying is... false pattern-matching is a real thing that happens. It doesn't mean that every dog whistle or easter egg you find is unreal nor unintended. But you should be real, real careful what patterns you trust, and you should always consider the possibility that the five-pointed star you see is nothing more than five dots. (See page 00053 [84/121 on pdf]: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/downloads/Principia%20Discordia.pdf)

Or that the 666 you see is nothing more than 13 stars. ( https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trademark-of-the-devil/ )

This is a real big deal for me guys. I'm not trying to pick fights with anyone, but I will not shrink from using the word "triggering" here. This kind of apophenia is exactly the tactic that the vile folks at the Trinity Broadcast Network used to convince me of Biblical inerrancy and the Fundamental Evilness Of The Queers And Commies when I was a teenager.

I was real, real lucky to get out, and when I see any signs of similar thinking on my own current side, my first impulse is always to run away screaming in self-defense. It genuinely scares me. And maybe my threshold for it is too low, but... that's what happened to me, that's what I am, and dammit, I am never looking for Numbers Of The Beast nor faces in tortilla shells ever again.

No details, because I'm in enough trouble. But seriously, fuck our side sometimes. Being the "good guys" doesn't equate to "being the people who can never, ever hatch a completely batshit or dangerous idea, because we are the good guys."

And my Fellow Travelers who genuinely seem to it does... well, they scare the ever-living daylights out of me, because in my experience that's how Bad Guys get made.

And I'm taking a damn nap. @ the tigress and die.

_ΣD◂)

@Austin_Dern @troodon The humans MUST appreciate them! They're giving them free career skills training! =(^)_(^)=

@Phorm It was worth a try! ;)

@Phorm

> I mused to myself that the internet was essentially boiling down to a war of /context/ over content. Because context shapes content and its interpretation.

Shit, that's VERY quotable, foxlady. That's a really good insight. I might have to crib that one, with your permission.

We need a newer, better, gayer McLuhan is what we need.

I tried to be that for you all. So help me, Great Sekhmet, I tried.

@zx3 EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT

EVEN IF THAT ADVICE CAME FROM A MISOGYNISTIC ASSHOLE

DO IT ANYWAY BECAUSE EVEN AN ASSHOLE CAN FIGURE OUT A THING DAMMIT

@chimerror Yyyyyyyup. That's EXACTLY what led me to break out the Reynolds Wrap this morning. :>

I mean, I'm an ex-fundie. I used to have full-fledged OCD around the Number Of The Beast. I know ALL ABOUT the dark magic of manipulating numbers until you get what you want out of them.

(And believe me, a tiger head requires, like, a whole roll of the stuff....)

What if the (4,8)channers are deliberately trying to persuade the left that AS MANY THINGS AS POSSIBLE are right-wing dogwhistles, from the OK sign to all ten digits, as a willful attempt to culture-jam us into total paralysis?

Mind you, the following sentence is the weakest possible evidence and should never be taken as proof of ANYTHING, but... "I wouldn't put it past them." (I mean, seriously, that's precisely what the OK sign thing is—they've openly TOLD us as much. And yet we still keep walking right into it.)

And if that's not what they're doing... should we maybe be trying to do it to ​them? 😈(Honestly, I fear they might actually be too far ahead of us on the Meme Warfare tech tree. We gotta up our game.)

Ok, I'm back. For now. I think I gotta get outta town REAL QUICK.

They're on to me. 🐯∨​​

(Thanks to @troodon for the link and the WONDERFUL surprise at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN_yfRMnJiY )

@Phorm *facepalm*

And FIVE SECONDS LATER, Frank Zappa's "Artificial Rhonda" (a song about an inflatable doll, from the EXTREMELY problematic Thingfish album) comes up.

COME NOT IN THAT FORM, LADY KAŬĈUKA! COME NOT IN THAT FORM! 🙀​🙀🙀

#DidErisPutYouUpToThis

@Phorm So what you're saying is we need to do a round of bubbleheaded geniefox filk...

I'll fire up the random playlist and see if the Martian Latex Gods* speak to me. :>

*what, you think we WOULDN'T have those?!?!

@Phorm Hahaha, it's ok hun, I PROMISE none of y'all did anything wrong—just distancing myself because the last thing i need today is a frolic in a semiotic labyrinth. Mostly I just wanna stay away from the folks in that Twitter thread, right or wrong—and if they're right, I REALLY wanna keep my distance from Hog Patient Zero. Y'all are cool. 😽😽😽​

ok running away for real now, love y'all 😽​

if you find me in a week scrawling kitty-emoji gematria on the wall of a nola alleyway and lecturing a pack of stray kittens about the 144-digit true name of Bast it ain't my fault 🙀​

@LexYeen@snouts.online It's not unlike snorting the blue flowers from A Scanner Darkly, or huffing the soul of St. Janos Hypercleats out of a thermos.

Tigers have a lot of body mass and damn near impenetrable brains. =^___^=

@LexYeen@snouts.online The secret is you start off by finding a web kook and just eating their fingers one at a time until you build up an immunity. You have to work your way up gradually to, like, Flat Earther hearts and anti-vaxxer livers, or the toxins can be deadly. =^_____^=

If you want to imagine the future, picture the human race somehow getting its brain caught in one of those novelty finger traps and not being able to get it out, forever.

I just ate Simpsons-Viking-Debate-grade brain poison by accident, through no fault of my friends, and I think I'm gonna bail on the Internet for a bit. There's a whole fucking city out here that presents no more deadly memetic labyrinths than, "Huh, I wonder what that pretty crow is thinking?" Gonna go talk to her instead. 😽​