Tundras Are Soooo Pretty Aand Beautiful To Look At Smears Of Best Ever Colors On Flat And Muted Greens

hey what the fuck. our temple!

the temple of online teens to thirty somethings who listen to swans and natural snow buildings and the microphones and black midi and car seat headrest and coil and daughters and duster and godspeed you black emperor and have a nice life and neutral milk hotel and sigur ros and songs ohia and xiu xiu and animal collective and aphex twin and my bloody valentine and the velvet underground and talking heads and kate bush and joanna newsom and nick drake and captain beefheart and fishmans and the residents and les rallizes denudes and the smiths and the gerogerigegege and kero kero bonito and death grips and bjork and stereolab and radiohead and kanye west and slint and slowdive and cocteau twins and nas and a tribe called quest and elliott smith and television and pixies and sonic youth and dinosaur junior and the strokes and pharoah sanders and talk talk and black country new road and sufjan stevens and ajj and jeff buckley and sweet trip and leonard cohen and frank zappa and depeche mode and the clash and the stooges and unwound and tom waits and boards of canada and fiona apple and arcade fire and brian eno and boris and merzbow and sunn 0))) and melvins and ween and mount eerie and portishead and lcd soundsystem and wilco and big thief and pavement and kraftwerk and candy claws and yes and gang of four and sun kil moon and sun ra and burzum and death in june and current 93 and nurse with wound and psychic tv and this heat and wire and nick cave and bob dylan and the dismemberment plan and grouper and the brave little abacus and herbie hancock and beach house and patti smith and charles mingus and fugazi and minutemen and american football and yo la tengo and boredoms and wipers and the mars volta and fleet foxes and oasis and pulp and big star and sophie and flying lotus and the flaming lips and thundercat and mf doom and weezer and stars of the lid and jeff rosenstock and red house painters and tim hecker and steve reich and david bowie and lou reed and nico and jpegmafia and danny brown and husker du and misfits and r.e.m. and the replacements and soft machine and van der graaf generator and scott walker and philip glass and pj harvey and low and big black and new order and magdalena bay and steve roach and neu and can and magma and spiritualized and mort garson and henry cow and john zorn and faust and ornette coleman and xtc and the books and oneohtrix point never and nujabes and de la soul and rush and king gizzard and the lizard wizard and the cure and capn jazz and mitski and lana del rey and weyes blood and bon iver and giles corey and silver jews and the mountain goats and clipping and machine girl and deaths dynamic shroud Has just fallen into the ocean. ssorry

if there's one thing ive learned from my math education it's the ability to judge a textbook by it's cover:

fancy cover with actual picture, fewer than 15 years old, $300: absolute dogshit. time wasting exercises, poor exposition, that weird gloss they put on the pages probably makes it too toxic to use as kindling

title is just name of subject, referred to by author, 50 years old with like 3 editions: excellent. compact proofs, exercises good enough people refer to them by number in conversation. available for free by foraging somewhere they grow naturally

title is some shit like paul's notes, "cover" is just default latex titlepage, distributed as pdf to grad classes or by advisor: best coverage of whatever (usually niche) topic it's about in the world. crystal clear exposition. solutions to exercises available by emailing grad students working under author

enough flat earth theory, its time for flat earth praxis

i think we shouod terraform earth to make it completely flat because itd be fun

"does a story need to mean something" i think i know what people are trying to get at here but it is also worth reiterating that 1) stories or narratives always convey meaning, question of 'need' irrelevant 2) that meaning is not necessarily or solely determined by authorial intent and it's not a property that the story in itself possesses transcendentally but comes about also as the result of an interpretive act occurring within a given set of social relations and circumstances. the iliad probably did not mean to homer exactly what it does to me. a generative language model can't imbue its output with its own 'intent' and yet if i read that output and interpret it, i'm engaging with it in a way that creates meaning, structured by the particular narratological frameworks or schemata i've learned. a story might 'mean' something internally, and 'mean' something quite different when that internal meaning is contextualised in its social and historical circumstances. etc.

i don't really like when people say dungeon meshi is accidentally good autistic representation, because while i understand not wanting to make conclusions without explicit confirmation from the author, there's always the weird assumption that non-western authors somehow don't know about things like neurodivergency/queerness/etc. (on top of the assumptions that east asian authors are somehow more naive or oblivious to "western" social issues).

given that dungeon meshi started being published in 2014, it's not really a "work belonging to its times"—it's as contemporary as any other media we discuss on this site, which means it should be fair to assume it engages with contemporary topics (and at the very least, you shouldn't say that the representation is accidental with so much confidence)

but anyways, the chapter "perfect communication" in ryoko kui's "terrarium in a drawer" is some of the most straightforward autistic representation I've seen, and from now on I'm going to assume that laios's character writing is absolutely intentional in that regard:

i wish these replies a very die

not to promote misogyny but i think this should happen i think it would be really funny

I believe the English phrase is “odd duck.” Yes. Jan Kargad was an Odd Duck. He was born in 1922, right after Georgia joined the Soviet Union, in a commune outside of Batumi. But this was not a normal commune no. His parents were strange people. A small group of Dutch fuckers, very protestant people, started a winery in the countryside where they could read their bibles. You would think they did not get along with the Marxists, but you would be wrong. They loved work. The bible loved work. There was no problem.

Well, that is not entirely true. Jan was a bit of a problem. He was born with a “weak constitution.” We do not know what that meant exactly, but farmwork would give him seizures and very high fevers. He was not a good child for farm work. So, they taught him arithmetic. Young Jan was in charge of counting grapes and bottles of wine and so on. Maybe the Apparatchik did not mind a child doing all the counting, maybe he was bribed, maybe he did not give a shit. I do not know. But Jan was in charge of all the counting and, what is the fucking word- logistics. Yes. Logistics. And he was very good at logistics. 

There are theories as to his upbringing yes. Studying the bible alongside Marx and Lenin and so on. But I do not believe this. In Chechnya in those days many studied the bible and Marx like Jan Kargad, but we did not become like Jan Kargad. I think perhaps it was the fevers. One sees things with a fever when it is bad enough, yes. 

Kargad also studied the capitalists. He was very good at this. He read Adam Smith, but also Issac Newton, the South Seas bubble, and most famously the Tulip Panic. They say his journals were filled with pressed tulips. He was a bit of a, what is the fucking English word- pervert. A pervert for organizing things and numbers and so on. Jan Kargad loves logistics like a man loves his wife, and tulips are a symbol of this for him. They became a microcosm for him. You see how the bud unfolds into many petals, its is very similar to how capitalism unfurls into its many aspects in the world. But, I am getting ahead of myself. 

One day, after all of his schooling, Kargad has a terrible fever, more terrible than any fever he has ever had. This is in the early 1940s some time. After this fever he becomes strange. Well, stranger than he already was. He speaks of men with golden dog masks, their necks chained to the sun, tulips growing from their eyes, all of that shit. He never goes outside again. He becomes fearful of the sun. He does not let it touch his skin. 

He writes intensely for the next three years. I have seen his original notebooks and they are stained with sweat. This man is not well, but he writes. He does not get help, because he is very good at analyzing agricultural output. I believe it grounded him some how, to spend days without sleep, reading spreadsheets about grapes and wheat and so on. 

He is no longer christian. He throws out all of the crosses in his home, and replaces them with grape-cutters. They are similar to a sickle, but with a long handle, for reaching up and cutting off high bunches of grapes. He becomes obsessed with this idea of the grape cutter, and he begins to paint. And this is where many first learn of him. He influences a group of artists who become famous in the southern soviet union, though they are occasionally derided as being “mystical.” I personally? I love the drawings. Many figures reaching up to pluck grapes from the sun. It becomes the central theme of his work.

Here people discover his strange writings. But first he is considered a strange mystic. His early writings are still very christian yes, and this influences how he is read in the west. Many think he is speaking of hyper-economics or whatever fetishistic bull shit the americans are calling it. But I do not think so. His work is very soviet. There are stories yes, of good soviet men drinking coffee and loving spreadsheets like a man loves his wife, and in this they become a little bit like Jan Kargad. They are –you do not have an English term for this– cutting grapes from the sun. But this is not a serious phrase you understand. These men are perverts.

posting the spotted hyena vision diagram again