or uh. i guess that's "cycling" to people who don't come from my hometown

at what point did we abandon the real world to live in a cartoonish satire cosmos concocted by the most brazenly hamfisted soviet propagandist imaginable

i hate that lazy, overused, moronic plot device so god damn much

they too readily function as excuses to let this world burn.

old-school paganism is much less comforting. it does nothing to assure you that evil will be punished, that your suffering has some kind of meaning, that the gods are on your side. but in reality those are all socially corrosive things to believe

this is to my mind the central problem with the abrahamic religions & their ilk. yes, it may be comforting to tell yourself that everything that happens is part of your god's plan, but actually think about it for 5 seconds and you just tangle yourself up in the philosophical rat's nest of theodicy

a thunderstorm doesn't care who it strikes down. a flood will drown the good as readily as the evil. morality is a human invention that the gods long predate. on the whole I think that's a much more sensible & constructive way to think about divinity

none of this impeded their worship, because (most) pagan gods don't serve a moral function. they are personifications of the great natural powers, magnificent and numinous, sometimes intervening for mortals on whim, but unequivocally dangerous. beings to be respected and feared

i identify sexually as "transneptunian rubble pile"

is this a Germanic thing? Brits seem to do it too so it's probably not something we picked up from Amerindian languages. wonder if anyone's done a paper on this yet

afaict "up" = "mostly north," "down" = "mostly south". I'm less sure about "out," whether it codes lateral motion or just distance. I think I mostly "out" with destinations that are wilder/more rural or just further from large population centers

and TLS as used irl is jaw-droppingly horrendous

like. hierarchical PKI isn't necessarily an inherently bad idea? but it really only makes sense in a centralized network, and even then TLS without fine-grained delegation extensions would be woefully insufficient

"lexi wtf are you reading /r/singularity" because i hate myself, next question