Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

@Austin_Dern It's okay, most likely the worst we get is a day or two of shutoff. I can't imagine it's gonna be longer than Monday at the ABSOLUTE worst, in which case you're better believe I'm gonna make @anthracite find us a B&B or something. IT'S A DRAGON ADVENTURE! ^________________^

(They're at the water board right now and are like 15th in line, with about an hour before the same-day cutoff so we'll probably get off scot-free...)

mars is watching

mars is waiting

https://gfycat.com/capitalforkedfrigatebird-nature

there's this passage in the 3rd section of gulliver's travels, where there's a whole society of scatter-brained scholars living in a city of clouds

and they have a whole caste of assistants whose only function is to follow them around with little air-filled bladders on a stick and bop them on the head when they're about to walk off the edge of a cloud and die

why am i mentioning this and what does this have to do with the adorable art-genius dragon lady i live with and love?

no reason at all but on a totally unrelated note maybe our water will be turned back on by tomorrow if we're lucky 🙄​

(at least unlike the laputans, peg actually appreciates her attendant...)

Fuuuuuuck it's pretty out here in NOLA today. I keep reflexively thinking "dammit, is it August already, have I wasted another summer?' And then I remember that is not a meaningful concept here. Winter here is basically Seattle summer. It'll be even BETTER than this.

Best. Exile. Ever.

@Oneironott @emanate Jesus, that's fuckin' cute.

@anthracite Oh! Say hi to the Squad for me! 🐯​

@Austin_Dern Oh, that. That's a trick we use to get Terrans off their guard. The Law of the Jungle* entitles us to EVERYTHING.

*actually some random glyph-scratches in half a dead gazelle, but... you know... they're good scratches

Once upon a time, I worked for in the office of a rather conservative, now defunct construction company in Medford, MA. I have a lot of stories about them, but this one's about the woman who I trained to take over for me as administrative assistant.

At the risk of sounding mean, she really had one of those hamster-wheel minds, where anything she had been taught becomes The Way It's Done for all eternity.

Well, we chatted, like officemates do, and one day we were talking about my Asian Studies degree. And she went on this long, chipper spiel about how Chinese people have "this book" that sits on a pedestal in their front room and it has all the hours of the day listed in it, and it tells them what they should be doing at any given hour.

To this day... I have absolutely no idea what the ever-living fuck she was talking about. And this story has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anything that happened today, my previous rants, nor anything else.

I'm just still rabidly curious to this day WHAT THE BOUNCING CHRISTNUTS she had *actually* seen in those poor Asian folks' house—she was so generally uninformed I'd give about 1 in 5 odds they were even Chinese—and how the hell she managed to get this idea into her head.

I feel so much better now, you folks are pretty rad and thank you for letting me vent about my odd obsessions. Rawr, etc. <3

@mmsword Or as they """ironically""" put it, "FIFTH DIMENSIONAL CHESS."

Thanks, guys, I hate it.

@KitRedgrave Aw, yeah, spoilers do kinda ruin the effect!

@Leucrotta That's seriously what happened. *nod* We live on a real crazy planet.

@LexYeen@snouts.online Aw, man, I was afraid that might happen, since it's a bloody ancient article and probably from A Whole Web Ago. :) Sorry about that!

@mmsword It's... it's... it's just so consarned closed to sorcery in its logic, it's maddening, you know? It's so fucking reminiscent of the fundies of my adolescence, who genuinely believed that if we so much as TOUCHED a D&D book—or for that matter, a Quran—we'd get contaminated by Forces Of Evil.

I also want to clarify: it's not about whether this guy turns out to be a Nazi or not. Let's face it: these days, the odds are not that low. And it's still entirely plausible that this is what this guy was doing.

What bothers me is both the logic used to defend it—"well, this stuff does happen, so it's definitely what's happening here"—in the original Twitter thread, and the character attacks on anybody who advised caution, asked for more evidence, or expressed skepticism.

And the flimsy evidence that was originally presented. ( https://twitter.com/_Anunnery/status/1158584553952272384 -- WARNING MEMETIC HAZARD) Besides the assembly-kit numerology, it was stuff like "they mentioned a fence" and "there was a gun in it" and "they used the word 'solution'."

If it had been something like "Listen, they have a Pepe icon and constantly complain about immigrants, here are the relevant tweets," that would have been the end of it then and there. I would not have been particularly alarmed nor skeptical.

Also, it really weirds me out that through all this, nobody could ever explain exactly how participating in the "30-50 hogs meme WOULD HARM ANYBODY." The user who started it even admitted that it wouldn't. The whole logic was "Nazis hide secret Nazi number in meme, and we repeat it, and..." And what, exactly?

I know I'm making too big of a deal about this, but... do you see at least some of why this worried me? If this was invented out of whole cloth—and I don't know for sure that it was, but nobody's shown me otherwise yet—then there's no limit to what Earnest Young Leftists could invent. This is not the first time I've seen it. And it's not the first time I've seen them attack someone just for being skeptical of it.

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.