Assuming you have infinite time, a bucket, and a movable bottomless hole, it is possible to use the bucket to bail all of the water in an ocean away. The bucket cannot contain all the water in the ocean, but all of the water in the ocean can be contained in the bucket. Or, in other words, the bucket can contain all the water in the ocean, but all of the water in the ocean can't be contained in the bucket.
The trick is that the bucket can be filled until it is full, and emptied until it is empty. A full bucket can be emptied but not further filled; an empty bucket can be filled but not further emptied. The discrepancy between full-ocean-basin and empty-ocean-basin is much greater than the discrepancy between full-bucket and empty-bucket.
If this were a logic class, your final assignment would be to resolve this to the satisfaction of a being with no concept or understanding of time without imparting to said being a concept or understanding of time. It would be imperative that your solution not use secrets like "capacity" and "limit". You would have one hour in which to do this, and it would represent two fifths of your final grade.
You would later realize that you can no longer understand the notes you wrote for the class. This would be both comforting and distressing in equal measure.
I did the math, and it appears that, based on reasonable estimates of monkeys and bloons from Bloons TD5, the bloons outnumber the monkeys by around five orders of magnitude.
This is far beyond the ratios seen in any war, and is closer to anteater-ant ratios,
To YA novel protagonists: Cut it out, I couldn't care less about your blasted feelings. I'm sick and tired of my feelings and opinions, I don't wanna put up with yours.
If you absolutely must have pathos (which, I suppose, is only fair, given the importance of pathos, logos, and ethos), I'm far more patient with "I miss my parents/hometown/civilization more than I can bear, curse that evil king" type emotions than with "I want to kiss the evil king's non-evil son more than I can bear, but he probably won't be cool with me if I stab his dad" type emotions.
I swear, if I have to put up with one more teenage love-triangle where one of them is prophesied to defeat the great evil and save the day, I'm going to start kidnapping authors and start making them write about actually functional adults or genuinely likable children dealing with living in the world where this stuff is going on.
And, not to let antagonists off the hook, to YA antagonists: I'm tired of your darn excuses for being awful all the time. We all feel like hopeless-helpless-worthless-dirt-in-a-world-full-of-unfathomable-suffering-that-can't-comprehend-our-ideals a lot of the time, and we all went through years-long stretches of feeling-like-everything-is-a-nightmarish-catastrophe, that doesn't mean we go around throwing bicycles onto roofs or poisoning water supplies or wiping out all life in the world.
Not that I don't appreciate the purpose of the moral temptation here, and the opposition to the heroine(s) and/or hero(s) and his/her/their worldview(s), but I feel there's something of a double standard in who gets to be redeemed and join the good guys after committing heinous actions and who gets painful comeuppance after merely being unpleasant and annoying.
...Okay, okay, I'm just salty because I lost a bet with a sibling on which way a YA love triangle would resolve and which characters the author was going to punish.
Future generations won't care about the economy we have now, the quality of life we have now, or any of a hundred other things that concern us so much.
Future generations, if they think of these specific years, will think of them as the time when Notre-Dame de Paris burned.
It is the pyramids that remain, not the people who built them.
Of course, by "future generations", I mean in the far future.
But, then again, I could be wrong.
Though centuries younger than the pyramids, the scoundrel reputation of Ea-Nasir and the knowledge of the low quality of his copper is kept in the hearts and minds of the living.
Future generations won't care about the economy we have now, the quality of life we have now, or any of a hundred other things that concern us so much.
Future generations, if they think of these specific years, will think of them as the time when Notre-Dame de Paris burned.
It is the pyramids that remain, not the people who built them.
If we're going by that timescale, I think asserting that the Notre Dame will still be around at all is a pretty big assertion.
Future generations won't care about the economy we have now, the quality of life we have now, or any of a hundred other things that concern us so much.
Future generations, if they think of these specific years, will think of them as the time when Notre-Dame de Paris burned.
It is the pyramids that remain, not the people who built them.
If we're going by that timescale, I think asserting that the Notre Dame will still be around at all is a pretty big assertion.
Yes, it's a big assertion. My pessimism is not, in fact, absolute.
The way the ancient Egyptians lived is indeed of interest to some people - anyone with an interest in history, really.
Saying that a people's sole contribution to the future is whatever buildings they leave behind is rather superficial and short-sighted in my opinion.
There are legacies other than architecture. There are many ways in which a people can leave a wonder-work to last the ages, though stonework endures better than many things. It is not superficial to count as a people's last remaining contribution to the future that which was, with such infinite effort, made to outlast everything else its creators made. It is not short-sighted to think that the people of the far future will care about such things.
Few notions have done as much damage to the world and to humanity as the notion of "survival of the fittest". A base tautology in which "fittest" is redefined to refer to that which attains survival, a seemingly self-justifying mixture of means and ends. No other animal, fungi, protist, bacteria, or plant has a notion of "survival of the fittest".
~Sayings of Aliroz, The Last Konungr of Eysre, volume XI
"Humor is worse than war: wartime enemies may become peacetime friends, but the enmity that comes with humor lasts forever." ~Sayings of Aliroz, The Last Konungr of Eysre, volume VI
The flow of thoughts and ideas is like the flow of water.
One cannot stop it without causing a flood.
It can be redirected, and thus, to some extent, controlled. Civilization depends upon this.
It is a means by which terrible blights spread, if one lets them.
That which sustains, and that which poisons, may be easily mistaken for one another, and easily mixed.
It ought to be regarded as the inherent and essential right of all people, and not as a commodity for oligarchic interests to purchase, pipeline, and pollute as they see fit.
It gets tired and peters out when it tries to go the long way around YO MOMMA!
~Sayings of Aliroz, The Last Konungr of Eysre, volume IX
"Absurdism does not count. Wonderposting, though unpleasant to any unfortunate enough to witness it, is necessary for health and well-being. This is especially true considering the high amount of fiber in the heaper's diet."
~Sayings of Aliroz, The Last Konungr of Eysre, volume II
Anonus was right about Paramount for years and years before I realized. Odradek was right about long-form video criticism for years and years before I realized.
Though it comes far, far too late, y'all were right all along, and deserved more credit at the time.
It's frustrating when you're trying to do historical research and a person seems to exist entirely in references to one or two things he or she did.
I'm like "NOOOO, I need birth-death dates and locations for you and your parents get back here I need to know whether you're related to other people with the same surname".
For the record, "poli-reg" is an awkward neologism I came up with to refer to politically-defined regions like states, empires, provinces, counties, nations, and so forth.
The fact that our default maps are representations of poli-regs more than anything else is concerning to me. Maps of Language, culture, religion, or any other thing which may be used to define a region, are more of an obscure and "alternative" representation.
To be fair, maps are questionable things by themselves. One does not need a map of one's own home. Maps are most often something made and used by people who are outsiders to the place being mapped, and the desire to map a place is often the desire to claim it.
Sometimes, there isn't a way to properly describe something that happened, and the best approximation is still too inaccurate to be a good description.
Currently-accepted understanding maintains that logos is objective while ethos and pathos are subjective and holds that thus logos is inherently superior to ethos and especially to pathos.
It seems that current modes of thought deeply distrust emotion at any level other than the individual. Societies are expected to react to situations rationally and not have feelings powerful enough to influence decision-making.
In other words, we cannot deal with emotion on the societal level.
This is shown in governance. Those serving in the highest of offices are supposed to be stoical and calm in the face of disaster, and similarly even-tempered at all other times.
In the psalms of King David there is more emotional range than in the last hundred and fifty years of English-speaking politicians.
Modernity can hardly admit the existence of an internal experience, much less allow it substance, worth, validity, or significance. The solution to the problem of unmanageable-but-undeniable internal distress was to systematize an understanding of the self (and of internal experience) which modernity could accept as real. Thus, since modernity accepts the reality of bodily illness, their causes and effects, a similar systematized understanding was necessary to "diagnose" problematic happenings in the internal existence: Mental Health.
The fact that modern society requires a doctor-type person to give a diagnosis in order to accept that the internal experience is worthy of consideration, is a fact which I find unsettling.
I think, perhaps, that previous societies had greater understanding of the internal experience than we are willing to admit. Or, to put it another way, perhaps previous societies had an empathy which our modern pathos-distrusting worldviews cannot allow, and to compensate we have created logical systems because logos is the only tool we have left, and when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Perhaps nothing sums up this better than the existence of the word "pathological".
We can't exclaim "In their streets they shall gird themselves with sackcloth: on the tops of their houses, and in their streets, every one shall howl, weeping abundantly." but we can speak of "distressing increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among all people, most particularly the youth".
Specifically, it's a Darkest Dungeon reference, but Darkest Dungeon's core concept was "to try to bring Lovecraft into the Middle Ages, to get him out of the 1920s", according to its creators.
Ugh, boss battles; only sometimes good, and that only in moderation.
Of all the major frustrations the computer games of my childhood had, only that one remains popular, and even has become more widespread.
Unskippable tutorials, janky camera nonsense, loading screens long enough for one to make a sandwich and eat it, poorly-made escort missions, poorly-made stealth missions, absurd collect-a-thons of items in sadistically hidden spots, none of THEM are seen as a normal and crucial part of the game experience, but RPGs, Platformers, Shoot-them-ups, Bullet Hecks, FPSs, open-worlds, certain games with pretenses of being RTSs, Roguelikes/Roguelites, all seem to think that I enjoyed boss battles as a kid, rather than that being the point where I had to get my big brother to beat it for me.
Sometimes, I'll want to replay Shovel Knight, but then I'll remember that Propeller Knight exists, and so I don't. The Binding of Isaac, already undermined as a roguelite by the complete inability to leave a room without killing all of the enemies inside of it, collapses under its terrible boss battles. Everybody told me that Hollow Knight was good, and it probably is, but I gave up when I realized just how much of a bossfight gauntlet it was.
Yes, yes, I know it's a skill issue, but put the same amount of difficulty in a level instead of a boss, and I find myself much more patient, and more willing to replay.
Comments
~Sayings of Aliroz, The Last Konungr of Eysre, volume VI
Also, I lament the departure of GMH