The BFG of AGI

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

she transitioned

99% of "mysterious disappearances" esp of people in their 20s who start acting weird for 48 hours and then vanish are not mysterious, thats just when a lot of reality-obliterating mental illness tends to kick in and it's pretty easy to get a short circuit in your brain that makes you go family guy death pose in joshua tree national park. it's not any less tragic, it's just a documented phenomenon and not particularly predictable. its a big reason the medical advice is for people with a family history of schizophrenia to completely avoid weed and psychedelics. "people just go crazy sometimes" is a principle of human health that used to be a lot more accepted prior to the american midcentury and to a certain extent thats a healthier way to conceptualize and prepare for the risk, as opposed to the modern assertion that anyone acting weird is dangerous and broken forever.

you should have a rough outline of a plan for if any of your loved ones experiences psychosis, it really does happen a lot. UTIs can cause psychosis. taking drugs, even safe drugs, or prescription drugs, can cause psychosis. i was once prescribed a heavy regimen of vitamin D because i was deficient, but the doctor never told me to stop taking it, so i moved to california, stopped being deficient, and developed vitamin d toxicity with downstream hyperparathyroidism which triggered significant hypomania that was undetected and uncontrolled for yeeeeeeears. i just slowly got Weird and started making impulsive decisions based on slightly out-of-gamut beliefs. i drove cross country by myself to have a love affair. the love affair was real, the series of decisions leading to burning down my life in pursuit of it were based on not great brain function however. etc. you see what i mean. churchill mentioned depression being the "black dog who stalks us" (one reason for Churchgrim's multi-referential name) but theres another, stealthier dog called Insanity and it's closer to some people than others but man it sneaks up on you. every time i see one of those "guy gets weird and drives into the wilderness forever" missing persons stories i think "yeah i could totally pull that off"

"van gogh cut off his ear what a lunatic" you are 3 nights of bad sleep, getting unexpected upsetting news and taking a substance as benign as coffee at the wrong time away from doing the same hope this helps

Very much a thing, unfortunately.

my friend keeps sending the groupchat voice notes of her eating bussy and calling it "asmr"..... bro go study for your physics exam 😭

This is about as unrelated as it gets, but I was once on a cooking competition show as background. I had a prep list, and while the contestants were front-stage, I was in the back of the shot, doing the prep list, looking chef-y, alongside some other BG. The prep list was double-duty, it was also making stuff for the contestants to use later, but our main job was just to make the kitchen look busier. I imagine that in most shots I was in, I was at best an out-of-focus blur behind the main shot. So at the beginning, the contestants are showing off their knife skills and making little fruit sculptures or whatever, IDGAF, and they were being interviewed at the same time. "What does cooking mean to you?" and that kind of stuff. I . . . was not supposed to be interviewed. I was BG. The interviewer apparently, did not know who was a contestant and who was BG, so they came over to me. And after all of these eloquent long-winded philosophy-and-dream guided answers, they come to me, and go "What is cooking?" And me, deep in focus on looking professional and getting the prep list done and not listening to the interviews, aware that I'm not supposed to talk or be talked to (I'm not paid for speaking lines!), but also aware I am the focus right now, but also aware that they will cut this out of the televised part and I can relax and shrug him off, but also suddenly aware there's still a live audience and I can't just shrug him off, but also confused because I didn't realize he was fishing for a deep philosophical answer: "Cooking is making food". Well. I got a laugh out of the live audience, and they must have decided to keep the line because my pay was upgraded from "SSE" (Special Skills Extra) rates to "Speaking" rates.

best answer

deleting my blog and finding all my old mutuals as various documents because pdfs are the new tumblr