tired rat obsessed with phantom hourglass

"Oh I don't normally use AI, I just wanted it to plan my trip"

You lived on this planet for decades, you know what you like, there are hundreds of websites where you can type into any search engine " things to do in [area]" and have at least a hundred different options.

"Oh I only use it so I can figure out what to make during the week with what I have"

The most popular website as you type in "recipes" into google have sections where you click dinner- quick and easy and those usually rely on staples + 1 or 2 items. I found 30 recipes on chicken alone.

"I had a writing idea, so I typed a few sentences into Chat GPT and I was able to write 20 pages with it."

Yup.

Seriously, the spear has reach.

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

The use of human-shaped figures to harm or curse people is well-attested in European magical traditions, often mentioned in accusations of witchcraft. So to the European mind, stabbing a nail into a doll = trying to kill the person the doll represents. But for the Bakongo people, there's a figure called the nkisi nkondi, which is (usually) a figure with nails pounded in it that houses a spirit to hunt down disease-causing evildoers. It's superficially similar, yes, but the underlying belief system is different.

When white colonizers saw the Kongo people with their nail-covered "fetishes" (a derogatory term for ritual objects in a maligned culture), they made the assumption that they must have been used for the same purpose as poppets in medieval European belief. And since, by that time, belief in curses was seen as primitive, it was transposed by the colonizers onto African religion as a way to call it evil. As descendants of West African people, kidnapped and dragged to the Americas, Black Americans who preserved these traditions were subject to the same racist stereotypes.

Armitage ends the essay by stating that, while the nkisi nkondi is not the direct origin of the concept of the voodoo doll, its misinterpretation by Europeans led to negative assertions about African religions that became widespread in popular culture. The survival of these practices through hundreds of years of oppression in a white supremacist society is a fascinating topic, and I worry that, by accepting one tour guide's explanation as an unquestionable final word, we're shutting ourselves out of learning.

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

rest stops on highways

trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic

schools during breaks

those little beaches right next to ferry docks

your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep

the lighting section of home depot

A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease.