Rabbit Cube

tl;dr: There's no evidence the interview that this was mentioned in even exists, no evidence the route of the cable has ever changed, and the whole story seems to originate from one dude's podcast.

A) resource guarding

And

B) Harry Potter

So naturally, every time someone didn’t have a pencil she would charge them 10 house points (which, even in schools where there is an actual house point system, probably doesn’t fucking happen). She openly held the belief that she had to ascribe value to these precious writing implements or else no one would appreciate them, a concept evidenced by, i kid you not, how when homeless people are given houses for free they let them fall into disarray, because they didn’t pay for the house and therefore didn’t care about it. I, a pissed off 13 year old with a vendetta against power hungry teachers and also JK Rowling, brought a 100 pack of pencils to school so that whenever someone had to ask for one, instead of being charged a fictional currency and upsetting their fellow, deeply competitive students, i would just give them one. If the pencil didn’t come from the teacher, she couldn’t charge points for it.

This upset her. She couldn’t assert her power over the 1st period Advanced 8th Grade Math Class anymore. For i, The Pencil Liberator, had come to put an end to her tyrannous behavior.

ENHANCE

shout out to all the trans men on this site that are normal about trans women

shout out to all the binary (+non GNC) trans folks on this site that are normal about nonbinary/genderfluid/multigender/GNC/etc trans people

shout out to all the perisex trans people on this site that are normal about intersex (and intertrans) people

the biggest hurdle honestly is probably just that at a certain point the rate of a device results in qualitatively different capabilities as you ascend the power-law curve. babbage could envision a general purpose computation device in the early 19th century, and the biggest conceptual leap from that to a cell phone is orders-of-magnitude improvement, but this gets you from "a way to speed up tedious by-hand computations for mathematics" to "a complete modern information-technology ecology," which is qualitatively fundamentally different. there are people who do grasp the Implications of that sort of thing intuitively (ray kurzweil predicting AI in the 2020s just based on increasing computational power) but there are a lot of smart people who have trouble with that sort of thing. and then of course "at a certain point of computing sophistication you can use statistical methods to train a machine on the whole corpus of human language and get a computer program that has enormous general-purpose capacities starting from nothing but blobs of random numbers" is also deeply counterintuitive. i still have trouble with it!

but i wonder how far back you can go and still find somebody smart you could Explain The Smartphone To. you would have to explain a lot more about the basic operation of electricity and magnetism to newton, hooke, and huygens; but they seem like they'd get there pretty quick. certainly newton would. and you don't have to delve into relativity here or anything that's really going to cause a philosophical headache: newton might be quite relieved that you can point to specific physical waves as your medium for electromagnetism, especially if you mention as an aside that that model works for gravity, too. i guess if you go back too far and you lose symbolic algebra--and concepts like "the square of the distance" become principally about geometry, and not a free-moving mathematical abstraction, you lose a major conceptual tool for the formalisms. and once you hit the 15th century you might lose inertia, momentum, and the idea that terrestrial and celestial matter all obey the same rules.

up until that point, during the day lily continued to dress in masculine clothing and even attended galleries showing gottlieb’s paintings of her. which was kind of iconic. she got to stand in a room full of people who were marveling her beauty, not knowing she was right next to them. it must have been such a cute little secret for them as a couple.

here’s gerda and lilly together

not to mention that for most people there is no real “after” to a transition. especially for these trans historical figures who had to balance identity and safety at all times.

i think having a wife paint these portraits must have felt really amazing for lily. to be able to see herself through the eyes of someone who loved her. i’m very much seconding op on the getting teary eyed.

here are some of my favorite gottleib lily paintings

If you hung out on sites like Jayisgames a decade ago, this was the mountain to climb. “Can I make a game as respected as No-One Has to Die?” I look at games like You Can Save Everyone and go “Yeah, this is trying to be No-One Has to Die.” And if you weren’t on those sites, you’re probably going “WTF even is this?”