#{thought processes}

Artfight 2025

These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material. But each man’s experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred facts upon which to reason, ninety-nine depend on authority.

Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other. This act I call intuition. Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering.

Thus in a geometrical proof each step is seen by intuition, and to fail to see it is to be not a bad geometrician but an idiot. The skill comes in arranging the material into a series of intuitable “steps.” Failure to do this does not mean idiocy, but only lack of ingenuity or invention. Failure to follow it need not mean idiocy, but either inattention or a defect of memory which forbids us to hold all the intuitions together.

Now all correction of errors in reasoning is really correction of the first or the third element. The second, the intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking. You can give the man new facts. You can invent a simpler proof, that is, a simpler concatenation of intuitable truths. But when you come to an absolute inability to see any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing.

Every teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they “can’t see” some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a refusal to see, resulting either from some passion which wants not to see the truth in question or else from sloth which does not want to think at all."

It's sort of like Mass Effect if instead of a cover shooter it were a spaceship combat simulator from 1992. It's great. (And also, after a lot of copyright lawsuits between the developers and publishers, open-source freeware! The Ur-Quan Masters is a fanmade quality update with the creators' blessing.)

The first aliens you're actually likely to meet are the Spathi, a species of cowardly bivalves who call you "hunam" and are both drily cynical about your claims of peaceful intent and stoically shameless in avoiding danger. (They also, incidentally, speedran bronzesmithing to nuclear power in less than a century, so trifle with them at your own risk.)

Each day when we awaken we call forth the traditional Spathi prayer:

"Oh God... Please don't let me die today! Tomorrow would be so much better!"

When they surrendered to the Ur-Quan, the Spathi High Council voted enthusiastically for the "impenetrable force field" option, but alas! in a cruel miscommunication ended up as battle thralls anyway.

The Ur-Quan left a detachment of Spathi on the moon in case the humans tried anything tricky, then took their fleet corewards. In their absence, the Spathi decided it would be safer to watch from a little further away. You find the base on Pluto, populated by an officer named Fwiffo who drew the short Ta Puun stick every time and is doing his best to make it look like they're still fully-armed and staffed. Everyone else has "strategically redeployed" one at a time back to Spathiwa as reinforcements to defend against something called the Ultimate Evil, whom they believe may attack them at any moment:

As yet, the Ultimate Evil remains largely unmanifest, and its powers and exact intentions are still a bit obscure, since it lurks just outside the range of even the most sensitive, long-range detectors... which we feel gives conclusive evidence as to The Ultimate Evil's nefarious intent.

For some reason, I got in the mood to share some music with him. He tends to like softer, blander, singer/songwriter stuff, but I had his attention. So I started with Devo videos. I either sent him 3 or 4. Then every bit of info I know about Mr Mothersbaugh and DEVOtional.

Then I got off on a tangent on Booji Boy. So I shared the page of the guy who makes the masks. And a video from a few years back with quite a number of people with Booji Boy masks on.

Then, because the mask guy makes a bunch of other great masks, I remembered his Eddie mask. So then my poor kid gets subjected to some Iron Maiden and how Eddie has changed through the years.

Then, I sent him the video for Run DMC “Tricky”. Since I know he likes the magicians, and he likes Run DMC; and that kinda ran into a brief history lesson on the popularity of Adidas in the US.

My Depression: We're irredeemable garbage. Why do we exist?! All we do is take up space! Why do people like us?! We're the worst kind of person! Bio-mom should've aborted us! Ahhhh! ;_;

Me: *thinks about the cute sick fic making the rounds today*

Me: lena was the one with a cold

Me: yeah lena was super cute and cuddly

Me: no, it was kara taking care of lena

Me: wait