sometimes i think about the history of coffee culture in islam and how it spread like it’s so funny
discovered by sufis who decided it was a miracle from Allah since it allowed them to stay up late into the night for night worship
miracle beans = UNLIMITED DHIKR
cue scholars debating for years about whether it’s haram or halal and if it should be classified as an ‘intoxicant’ or not
fast forward to 16th century ottoman empire, where a woman had the legal right to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with enough coffee
europeans called it the “mohammaden gruel” or “devil’s drink” bc they believed it to be a “bitter invention of satan and his followers”
fast forward to pope clement viii finally giving in and tasting it to see what the hype is about and then stating: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”
pope clement viii then proceeds to BAPTIZE THE COFFEE BEANS
the tags on this post are some of the funniest i’ve ever seen in my notifications but this one made me choke on my Mohammedan Gruel
I love trying to look up the lyrics for a song and instead having the Genius website make my phone hot while it loads five ads and autoplays a video of Oop Slurp explaining the meaning behind his song She Fuck Me Like I’m Dr Phil
We know that moving your existing work into Ellipsus can take a ton of time. (We’ve been there. 😵💫)
So, we’re thrilled to introduce our very first step toward a full-fledged document importer—you can now import any Markdown (.md) file directly into Ellipsus! ✨
And that’s just the beginning! Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out improvements—textcolors, image embeds, and more granular styling—to make your import experience even better. ❤️🔥
Just a quick not friendly reminder: someone who has apologized for past mistakes, made amends for past actions, and clearly no longer holds past beliefs, is a far better person than one who digs up old dirt and uses a person’s past that no longer exists against them.
If you are hell bent on sorting every person in the world into groups of either “has done something problematic” or “is ideologically perfect and has never made any bad decision” then ever person into the world is going to get sorted into the problematic group. The sooner you acknowledge this truth, the better.
That doesn’t mean accountability doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean there aren’t unforgivable wrongs. It just means that people are human and therefore make mistakes. Refusing to acknowledge that nuance makes you delusional, not morally superior.
We don’t punish the behavior we want to see. We want people to grow and mature and become better. It’s a good thing for people to change their mind and be better.
Hi Friends, I want to share with you guys this YOUTUBE channel that I run with a good friend of mine. Could I ask you guys to consider Subbing. It would really mean a lot if we could hit our goals by the end of this year! I really appreciate it! Thank you and more uplifting memes to come!
First discovered near Kume Island in Japan by local divers, pictures of the animal attracted media attention in 2017. But they weren’t given their formal taxonomic description until 2024
isekai about a nyc apartment block getting teleported into a fantasy realm, and how this group of people who previously have only had incidental contact with one another come together to build a vibrant community in their new circumstances. there’s a season-long arc about introducing bagels and pizza to the fantasy world that gets into the details of sourcing ingredients, developing new technologies, and learning how to work with supernatural substitutions.
Clarifying question: just the people or the buildings and animal life too?
And does it include random people on the street at the time of the transfer?
oh the whole thing for sure, im picturing the whole city block with a crust of sidewalk just dropped onto the outskirts of a small medieval village. im thinking theres probably a corner store and a couple other things included too, so youve got the people who work there or were shopping at the time of the transfer too.
i hadnt thought of animals but having a whole thing w pigeons would be awesome too; have new york feral pigeons meeting with tamed messenger pigeons of the era, a raccoon that was sleeping in a trash can eats a magical necklace and starts talking. love it.
ALT
fucking love this. an army of monster rats descend upon the kingdom, led by a single subway rat under the banner of a half-eaten pizza crust
But they do not anticipate the rise of the Hero, their one, true, and most worthy foe—
drawing furries kissing is the hardest thing in the world and its intentionally hard in the same way nintendo switch cartridges intentionally taste like bitter chemicals so kids dont eat them
fuck these stupid ass animauls
that’s why you draw them giving head instead which is much easier and more common according to what e621 has taught me :3
Imagine if you met someone who can’t eat watermelon. Not that they’re allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven’t figured out how to do that. So you’re like “what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon.”
And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they’d figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.
This goes back and forth. No, it’s not an emotional issue, they’re not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things (“it’s watery?” they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?
“It’s red on the inside?”
Wait, they’ve never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there’s no way to get human jaws around it.
“Oh, you’re supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides.”
And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it’s easy, it’s ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there’s no way that someone just can’t eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.
If someone can’t do something after being repeatedly told to “just do it”, there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.
Yep.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.
If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. […]
I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.
I always look for the trick before I start. This is why I can build a computer and repair an appliance and sharpen knives and figure out which tool to buy. Mostly YouTube videos.
I voted in the Victorian state election on Monday (no credit, it’s compulsory) but the election itself isn’t until the weekend, the polling place has been open all week and practically empty besides the people working there so you can just waltz in any old time and to the business without doing anything barbaric like waiting in a goddamn line.
except of course if something dramatic happens tomorrow and I happened to want to change my vote well obviously I couldn’t, I’ve already voted! and conversely I could have just as well placed my vote a month ago, I don’t think it has changed since then, so keeping the polling place open for one (1) week before the election is a fairly arbitrary choice – why not allow you to vote any time, more than once?
this would immediately present a problem for secret ballots: the reason I can’t change my vote is that it’s not linked to my name, so repeated voting would be cumulative, but this should be easy to fix if my vote is stored under an opaque hash and the link between that hash and my identity is stored elsewhere, much like the way postal votes are mailed in a double envelope so that the identity can be separate from the ballot.
at that point there would be little need for elections as such and even less need for polling as you could change your vote at any time, and it would open up possibilities for more experiments with liquid democracy and more fine grained representation.
I voted in the Victorian state election on Monday (no credit, it’s compulsory) but the election itself isn’t until the weekend, the polling place has been open all week and practically empty besides the people working there so you can just waltz in any old time and to the business without doing anything barbaric like waiting in a goddamn line.
except of course if something dramatic happens tomorrow and I happened to want to change my vote well obviously I couldn’t, I’ve already voted! and conversely I could have just as well placed my vote a month ago, I don’t think it has changed since then, so keeping the polling place open for one (1) week before the election is a fairly arbitrary choice – why not allow you to vote any time, more than once?
this would immediately present a problem for secret ballots: the reason I can’t change my vote is that it’s not linked to my name, so repeated voting would be cumulative, but this should be easy to fix if my vote is stored under an opaque hash and the link between that hash and my identity is stored elsewhere, much like the way postal votes are mailed in a double envelope so that the identity can be separate from the ballot.
at that point there would be little need for elections as such and even less need for polling as you could change your vote at any time, and it would open up possibilities for more experiments with liquid democracy and more fine grained representation.
[Image ID: Screencap from unspecified website in dark mode. Text reads:
“After that that stupid thing from Bezos and Musk about how a trillion humans would mean a thousand Mozarts, it got me thinking.
We clearly must have Mozarts today, and at least a couple of them probably got the same upbringing he did to nurture their skill and talent, and we would therefore have:
a musician of significant talent, dedication and skill,
who can write music across a bunch of different contemporary genres,
who explicitly draws from the work of other musicians to build their style, and
who is willing to do the musical equivalent of shitposting and wear fancy outfits while doing it.
I can only conclude that the modern-day Mozart is Weird Al Yankovic.
I will not be taking questions.”
Followed by: a portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a photograph of Weird Al Yankovic, in similar ¾ poses with similar eyebrow-raised and smiling expressions. End ID.]
i think a lot of people who have never done music do not understand how absolutely implausible weird al’s skill level is. you can say “so many musicians can do at least one of his songs, obviously”, and yes, they can, but they couldn’t do all of them. you have people who studied ten or twenty years to be able to do something genuinely incredible, and they’ve specialized and focused and developed the ability to produce a particular kind of thing, and they do it really well, and then this guy comes along and says “welp, time for a new album”, picks ten of them, and duplicates their shtick well enough to be clearly recognizable.
this man produced a piece of music which an experienced listener can hear and say “oh, that’s Frank Zappa”. how? not even Frank Zappa sounds like Frank Zappa!
Is weird Al doing different shit now? Bc if he was writing pastiches this would be true, but all I’m really familiar with is the stuff where he just rewrites the lyrics to an existing song, or does a polka cover of it.
Weird Al’s “style parodies”, or original compositions explicitly in the style of a particular artist or band, are approximately as numerous as his actual song parodies. Generally the Regular Parodies get all the attention, they’re the big money spinners, but his style parodies are both numerous and legendary.
Dare to Be Stupid, the title track off the album of the same name, is probably the big one that people would know - a more Devo song than actual Devo, and that’s according to Devo themselves.
An incomplete list of other ones that rule, actually, are:
Germs (Nine Inch Nails)
I’ll Sue Ya (Rage Against The Machine)
Pancreas (The Beach Boys)
Craiglist (The Doors)
My Own Eyes (Foo Fighters)
Bob (Bob Dylan)
Everything You Know Is Wrong (They Might Be Giants)
Trigger Happy (The Beach Boys again but from a different era)
The discography of American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, actor and parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic consists of fourteen studio albums, two soundtrack albums, nine compilation albums, eleven video albums, two extended plays, two box sets, forty-six singles and fifty-four music videos. Since the debut of his first comedy song in 1976, he has sold more than 12 million albums—more than any other comedy act in history—recorded more than 150 parody and original songs, and performed more than 1,000 live shows
He has done so, so much more than just the dozen or so parody songs that everyone knows.
the fact that we have a global economy but no way of coordinating it seems like one of the biggest challenges humanity faces, although arguably that’s just a corollary of our inability to coordinate anything else at the global level.
Out of curiousity, do other countries have way too many religious folks who froth at the mouth at the sign of any potential one-world anything or is that just a USA thing?
I think there’s a differing valence there where people inside the US fret about One World Government run by some amorphous combination of the UN, the Pope, the Illuminati, or whatever while people outside the US already have One World Government and it’s run by the US.
But are you normal about your friend who wears the corrupted amulet?
Do you allow your friend to spill blood as the amulet demands? Do you accept the amulet as a sapient force whose needs are important and must be met without question? Do you give the amulet a little kissy whe n it gets lonely
The American Dream is kinda bullshit, I really don’t want a wife and 3 kids and a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and 2 cars in the driveway.
I want like an apartment or condo in a midrise building on a street with street trees and a small cafe on the corner across from the grocery store where I can walk to a train station that has a train system that goes across the entire city. And a gay boyfriend
I might be willing to live in a streetcar suburb with a small shotgun house where I can take a streetcar across the city and there’s a cute restaurant and a barber and a grocer and an artists studio on the main road that I can walk to every night
The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes
and we need that! keeps us humble.
Then I’m just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT
It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE A CHILD?!!
I’m 16, that’s like, barely a child
I’m in my 30s. You are baby
I’m older than both of you in a trenchcoat.
honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it’s humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.
theres a reason lots of kids develop gender dysphoria around 10-14 and its not because its a social contagion but its because puberty is really fucking distressing when you’re trans, and thats when it becomes too much to handle.
“this kids develop a problem with their assigned sex at birth when their assigned sex at birth characteristics begin emerging… suspicious.”
this happened months ago. i cannot keep it in any longer. a while ago i went on a porn site ive never been to and it asked if i was over 18 and i misclicked and said no and it automatically sent me to google images of puppies and kittens. i still cannot get over how funny this is.
i need everyone on this entire platform to understand that acting like pedophiles will inevitably rape children unless we persecute them is Exactly the same fucked up logic that homophobic straight girls use to argue that they cant share a private space with a lesbian bc she might rape them
or, you know, the entirety of the trans bathroom bullshit
these are the people you are rhetorically siding with when you make that argument
This sounds like a shitpost but people should be allowed to be horny. As in, sexuality is just part of life for most people and there’s no reason for consensual sexual behavior to be punished. A celebrity getting “caught” at a sex club shouldn’t be a scandal. No one should be fired for having a fetlife profile outside of work. Nudes getting leaked shouldn’t be career-ending. Denying and hiding (consensual) sexual interests doesn’t make anyone more professional, it just makes everyone more repressed. And sterilizing ourselves to be better work drones isn’t productive, it’s just creepy. I’d rather my surgeon get absolutely railed on camera and come to work in a good mood, frankly.
