The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • I am not sure, but I believe that this political abuse is further reinforced by something not mentioned in the text:

    • Twitter is mostly short texts, lacking situational info, subtlety, signs of doubt, etc. Those require a lot of contextual info to accurately understand, but as a piece of content is retweeted most of that context is gone.
    • plenty people are not honest; they’re assumptive as a brick. They make shit up = assume = bullshit as it goes, never acknowledging “hey, I don’t actually know this, it’s just a shower thought, it might be wrong”.
    • people holding minority views are more often dogpiled, and by bigger dogpiles, than people holding majority views. Kind of like the Petrie Modifier, but with worldviews instead of sex.

    If I’m right this is breeding grounds for witch hunting: people don’t get why someone said something, they’re dishonest so they assume why, they bring on the pitchforks because they found a witch. And that’s bound to affect anyone voicing anything slightly off the echo chamber.

    And I think that this has been going on for years; cue to “the Twitter MC of the day”. It would predate Musk, but after Musk took over he actually encouraged the witch hunts for his own political goals.




  • Thanks for sharing this data - it’s great.

    It actually makes sense; if cat urine contained ammonia the smell would be gone once you washed your cat’s impromptu litterbox, since ammonia is both volatile and highly soluble. And yet it keeps stinking - this hints that there’s something else there producing that ammonia by decomposition. (Probably proteins. Cats eat a lot more protein than we do.)

    Note: chlorine gas is the one that leaks from an open bleach bottle, and gives it a distinctive smell. The ones created by reacting bleach with ammonia are chloramines, considerably more poisonous.


  • By “textual info” I mean plain language, like we’re using now. It’s theoretically possible to encode it in khipu, not just for Quechua but for any other language; but doing it in a practical way is another can of worms.

    Instead what I think that they used is what the video calls a “semasiographic system” - there are standardised codes for almost everything worth registering (from a bureaucratic PoV), and the officer/kamayuq is expected to be able to decode it.

    For a silly example using English, it would be a lot like writing “Jn Smth in ptt 20 mze 35” and then reading it as “John Smith stored 20kg of potatoes and 35kg of maize here”.


  • Ah, the khipu. The way that it represents numeric info is somewhat well understood already:

    • it’s all base 10, positional. The tens/hundreds/etc. of different strings in the same khipu are aligned.
    • zero = no knot
    • 1~9 in the tens, hundreds etc. are represented by 1~9 simple knots
    • 1 in the units is represented by a figure 8 knot
    • 2~9 in the units is represented by a long knot with 2~9 turns

    This might sound complicated but it’s really elegant, and representing the units in a different way allow you to cram multiple numbers into the same string.

    So for example. Let’s say that you want to record 234 and 506 into a string. You’d do the following:

    • 2 simple knots
    • 3 simple knots
    • long knot with 4 turns
    • 5 simple knots
    • space
    • long knot with 6 turns

    In some cases there might be geographical info in the khipu too, with numbers representing localities. Kind of like postal codes. The material of the string and the colour likely encode some info too, but AFAIK nobody knows it any more.

    I’m almost sure that it doesn’t contain any sort of textual info, though. Like, something you can read. Classical Quechua had at least 17 consonants, this would be impractical to represent through knots, specially as Quechua tends towards large words.

    My bet on both “paired” khipukuna is that one encodes income, another outcome. Kind of like double bookkeeping but for material.


  • I’m glad that I followed the source and found these:

    I’m catching Reddit refugees in jars and filling them with leaves and sticks and yummy berries and then I’m shaking them vigorously before letting them back out, into the wild.

    Do NOT feed the Reddit refugees!!! // They must learn to hunt on their own, lest they become dependent on the native Tumblr lifeform for food and shelter!!!

    Redditfugees, you say? *grab shotgun* GET OFF MY LAWN!


    And yes SCP writers often abuse the [REDACTED] thing. It was supposed to be used when not saying it chills you more than saying it, as it lets your imagination run wild and straight into the precipice.



  • I’m almost sure.

    Your typical instance only defeds another as a last case scenario, due to deep divergences or because of blatantly shitty admin or user behaviour. But, past that, they’re still willing to let some shit to go through - because if you defederate too many other instances, with no good reason, you’re only hurting yourself.

    That’s simply not enough to create those “corners”. Specially when all this “nerds vs. normies*” thing is all about depth - for example the normie wants some privacy, but the nerd goes all in, but they still care about the same resources.

    *I hate this word but it’s convenient here.





  • Plenty people. For stuff like

    • insisting on a subject after I clearly said “I don’t want to talk about this”
    • throwing a tantrum against me for something that is clearly not my fault
    • sending me multiple messages sequentially, containing nothing of value
    • trying to proselytise their stupid superstition, whichever it may be
    • bossing me around with uncalled advice, after I said to drop it

    And I don’t feel bad for ghosting any of those. At all.


  • My two choices:

    • Pontic Steppe, around 3000 BCE. Likely region where Late Proto-Indo-European was spoken.
    • northern Lazio, around 650 BCE. If possible/reasonable I want to spend a bit of time in an Etruscan city, then in a Faliscan city, then in a Sabine one. I’m OK travelling by foot if necessary, as long as there’s always people talking around me.

    In both cases I want to be able to record everything people say. Preferably video, but audio is good enough. I just want to know better about languages of the past.

    It’s kind of tempting to include 1450 Uruguay as a choice, since we barely know anything about the Charrúa language. However the Charrúa weren’t exactly friendly to outsiders, so this option would be only if neither side can interact with each other.


  • Originally Anglish was a lot like Siegfridisch - a single guy (Paul Jennings), replacing borrowings with new expressions coined from native words, just for fun. Jennings framed this as how English would be if the Normans were defeated in 1066, and he published it in a satirical magazine (Punch).

    It does look more serious nowadays, though. Anglish started out in 1966, and the people picking the idea up focused a lot on making it more consistent. (And also because Jennings wasn’t being as playful as Zé do Rock.)

    Kind of off-topic, but can you believe that practically nobody knows Zé do Rock here in Brazil? Even if a chunk of his stuff is written also in Portuguese. (He also plays with the language, his “brazileis” is… weird, but in a good way, to say the least.)




  • That is correct but it does not contradict anything that I said.

    Even if Old Norse is Germanic, Old Norse words in English are still borrowings. “Borrowed” does not mean “not Germanic”, it means “not inherited”, both things don’t necessarily match.

    This is easier to explain with a simple tree:

    Only words going through that red line are “inherited”. The rest is all borrowing, the image shows it for Old Norse words but it also applies to French (even if French is related to English - both are Indo-European) or Japanese (unrelated) or Basque (also unrelated) etc. words.

    But I digress. In Anglish borrowings from other Germanic languages should still get the chop, as seen here and here.

    From a quick glance The Anglish Times does a good job not using those borrowings. The major exception would be “they”, but it’s rather complicated since the native “hīe” became obsolete, and if you follow the sound changes from Old English to modern English it would’ve become “she”, identical to the feminine singular. (Perhaps capitalise it German style? The conjugation would still be different.)