wolframhydroxide
@wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on The Matrix 13 hours ago:
So, as Cypher made clear, the main draw of the matrix was that he didn’t have to spend his entire life being miserable, with shit to eat, and nothing interesting to do. Soo… What about the constructs? If they could simulate people and sensory input with fidelity, couldn’t they simulate the experience of a juicy steak? Why, when they weren’t actually spending their time outside the matrix doing much other than sitting in a spaceship, wouldn’t they just spend 6 hours a day in the construct? Wouldn’t that have given them all much more practice with breaking the construct of the matrix, and also let them have the nice stuff that the matrix offered, and also knowing that they were the masters of their own destinies? It seems like Morpheus was just a shitty manager, and Cypher was unfulfilled in his job.
- Comment on Pitching or catching? 5 days ago:
Be forewarned: it’s definitively from the 1870s. They didn’t yet understand cellular respiration, there are a couple of seriously racist paragraphs (most notably one in which the article author states as a well known fact that the “hyperborean” people are all candle thieves, because supposedly they ate the candles. They didn’t yet understand the nature of dinosaurs, either. However, the chemistry experiments seem fun, if potentially deadly at times, including some terrifying instructions on how to make chlorine gas, capture it, combine it with hydrogen gas, seal the container, then expose it to light and watch it explode as the photosensitive reaction makes hydrochloric acid. Fun times. Anyway, it’s a very entertaining read, and there are six volumes of the stuff. I’ve only gone through the first thus far.
- Comment on Pitching or catching? 5 days ago:
It would be like sticking your penis in pineapple juice. It contains digestive enzymes that are very similar to stomach acid. The reason that butterwort (another carnivorous plant) is called by that name is that you can use the plant’s dew to curdle milk. Just like how you can use acid or enzymes to cure food, it would cure your penis. Not very quickly, but it would happen, and that tingly, prickly feeling of eating a pineapple that you get on your lips and in your mouth when you eat a bunch of pineapple at once? That would happen to your penis, but it would happen faster, and burt more, because the penis is a very sensitive organ.
- Comment on history repeats itself once again 1 week ago:
I agree with most of that, except for this: Theseus clearly didn’t give a flying fuck about angering the gods, because right after kidnapping Helen, he went into the underworld to try to kidnap Persephone, the wife of the Lord of the Dead. You can’t expect me to acknowledge that Theseus was devout enough to think a fever dream was a sign to abandon Ariadne and that she’d be fine, but not afraid enough of the gods to try to kidnap a goddess out from under the nose of the lord of hell.
- Comment on history repeats itself once again 1 week ago:
“Ship of Theseus”? It’s in reference to a ship which was used to row out to Delos every year for a ritual, but it was very specific that it had to be the same boat that Theseus used. So, as the pieces broke and had to be replaced, eventually every original plank, nail and line would have been replaced. After all of those replacements, which occurred one at a time over decades, is it still the same boat? If you collected all of the old replaced bits of the original boat, then put them together into a boat, would that be the original ship? At what point does it stop being the “ship of Theseus”?
- Comment on history repeats itself once again 1 week ago:
Also kidnapped Helen of Sparta when she was prepubescent so that he, already in his later years, could groom her and forcibly wed her. Also left the person who gave him the thread, who betrayed her entire family to save him, on an island in the middle of nowhere, as far as he was aware, left to die, without even giving her the decency of a goodbye, according to some sources. And no, don’t come back at me with “Dionysus told him to do it in a dream”. First, not in all sources, and second, do you make it a habit of immediately doing whatever your drunken night terror tells you to do, as long as you dreamed it, when the life of your paramour is on the line?
No, fuck Theseus.
- Comment on what’s your best “nitric acid acts upon trousers” moment? 1 week ago:
Yes, silver nitrate. Also, she would have had that lesson painted on her face for at least a week.
- Comment on Lord Lucifer, hear my prayers 2 weeks ago:
Absolutely! And I never claimed it didn’t. However, the solidification of what “hell” is, and what “Lucifer” looks like, is in large part thanks to popular sources like Dante and Milton.
- Comment on Lord Lucifer, hear my prayers 2 weeks ago:
The person asked the question, specifically, why Christians conflate the two, and whether it is true that they are always the same person. Notice that the question asks not just for a dogmatic response, but a comparative religious analysis. While it is true that “Christians treat them like the same person”, saying “they are the same person” doesn’t answer the question.
- Comment on Lord Lucifer, hear my prayers 2 weeks ago:
Literally ignore the other people. They clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. The name Lucifer originally referred to Venus, the morning star. It comes from Roman Latin, long before Christianity was a thing. The Hebrew name for Venus is mentioned a single time in the bible, referencing a Babylonian king who was given the title. You can probably thank St. Jerome for replacing the Hebrew name for the planet with “Lucifer”. Never, not once in the bible, is Lucifer conflated with the devil. In fact, even the original Satan was called the Adversary not because he was YHWH’s adversary, but because he was effectively God’s District Attorney, prosecuting the wrongs of mortals. The entire conflation with Satan as evil happened between the recording of the Hebrew bible and the development of Christianity. Hence why Satan is pretty much only mentioned in the New Testament.
Pretty much every single thing modern Christians believe about the devil, or especially hell, was made up in the middle ages, and a hefty amount of that by Dante alone.
- Comment on Close enough 5 weeks ago:
Should definitely be in the “penguins” zone.
- Comment on Electricity explained 5 weeks ago:
*Royal Institution
Faraday’s lab was at the RI.
- Comment on Lmao 1 month ago:
Definitely read the book. The book is about the existential elation at discovering a solution to a dire problem, so knowing poorly a communicated versions of every solution will likely ruin the book for anyone serious about the hard Sci-Fi.
- Comment on What would you do? 1 month ago:
You know shit’s fucked when The King In Yellow, the very manifestation of the idea that knowledge can kill, is having to defend the value of education.
Ever day we stray
further from godtoward lost Carcosa - Comment on Real 1 month ago:
If you didn’t have plate tectonics, you’d have a lot of problems with the atmosphere, and there’s a decent chance that life wouldn’t evolve, as the energy differentials generated by tectonic activity are those which life hangs onto, from nutrients, to oxidation, to geothermal heat.
- Comment on I'm not saying that I agree. But I understand. 1 month ago:
Excellent catch. You can also see that both major ticks say 6’
- Comment on The birbs are woke 1 month ago:
Sounds like you would enjoy either “The Hungry Gods” or “Children of Strife” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you choose to read Children of strife, you really need to read the first three Children of Time books first, though.
- Comment on It hurts. 1 month ago:
Still a better system than Boston, having navigated both MANY times. To call Boston’s streets a “system” is an insult to the very concept of order.
- Comment on It hurts. 1 month ago:
As someone who drives through Boston often: it’s the worst-planned city I’ve ever seen. I am fairly convinced that the underground tunnel system is actually creating an eldritch sigil of chaos (a last Good Omens), and it is not uncommon to encounter a seven-way intersection, where two of those ways are train lines, but aren’t marked, so at night, you can accidentally find yourself on train tracks. It’s like if someone bargained with the Fey to make a city.
- Comment on get zapped, idiot 1 month ago:
I would point out that they also have long asses.
- Comment on omg hes just like me 2 months ago:
Nice
- Comment on omg hes just like me 2 months ago:
As in “topographically”, which specifically refers to land surfaces?
- Comment on omg hes just like me 2 months ago:
*topologically
- Comment on NaRuLe 2 months ago:
Yeah, it’s not as clear here that the entire joke relies on these being written out. I personally think this whole joke would actually work best as a person passing notes during a test and trying to cheat THAT way.
- Comment on NaRuLe 2 months ago:
Smbc? This is just a compound version of smbc’s original comic: www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2349
- Comment on BAAAAAABY SHARK DO-DO-DO-DO-DO-DO 2 months ago:
Yeah, we were singing it a long time before the internet was a thing accessible to children. It was passed down by those who went to camps along with such songs as “da moose da moose”
- Comment on meat honey 2 months ago:
Actually, that’s a really good point to which I really want to know the answer. We have to assume that, since it’s effectively fermented meat, the prion would survive, but maybe they’re really efficient at turning all of the protein into unbound amino acids?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Ah, yes, whatever would we do if nobody was stopping international conflicts from getting out of control? If the UN werent there to stop them, we might have the most-heavily-armed nation in the history of humanity actively funding genocide by a client state (with the actual diplomats saying their goal was to start literal Armageddon), kidnapping heads of state, assassinating heads of state, and suborning the second-most-nuke-filled country’s annexation of another country by lifting embargoes! Man, could you imagine if the headquarters of the United Nations were in THAT country, and everybody just… Did nothing? Man, what a crazy world we would live in.
- Comment on Finally, an optimal monitor configuration! 2 months ago:
But it reduces the us able space in the middle, as any rectilinearly-designed webpages will have areas on the far left and right that aren’t viewable except in small parts while scrolling.
- Comment on Ray is basic. 2 months ago:
Sharks are older than the current rings of Saturn, and I’ll bet that the e-ring or f-ring (whichever one is primarily made of ice spewed out of enceladus) has been around for a few billion years.