I Do Think It's So Fun That There's A Limit To The Maximum Size Of A Structure That Your Mind Can Conceive

Doctor calls you with your bloodwork results and just says “I’m really mad at you” and then hangs up

Reminder: Being a system isn't an identity or a label. It's a fucking mental disorder caused by childhood trauma. You cannot choose to be a system. you cannot transition to being a system. You cannot be a system without trauma.

We are not gatekeeping systemhood. It is quite literally the criteria and psychological process of forming a System. Systems don't require you to have a medical diagnosis, you just have to actually fit the criteria because how else the fuck do you expect yourself to be a system? Go identify with something else. Make up your OWN words. Don't fucking steal ours! And don't steal our tags and invade our safe spaces.

It's interesting to me how much people struggle to intuit differences of scale. Like, years of geology training thinking about very large subjects, and I'm only barely managing it around the edges.

The classic one is, of course, the mantle- everybody has this image of the mantle as a sort of molten magma lake that the Earth's crust is floating on. Which is a pedagogically useful thing! Because the intuitions about how liquids work- forming internal currents, hot sections rising, cool sections sinking, all that- are all dynamics native to the Earth's mantle. We mostly talk about the mantle in the context of those currents, and how they drive things like continental drift, and so we tend to have this metaphor in mind of the mantle as a big magma lake.

The catch, of course, is that the mantle is a solid, not magma. It's just that at very large scales, the distinction between solids and liquids is... squirrely.

When cornered on this, a geologist will tell you that the mantle is 'ductile'. But that's a lie of omission. Because it's not that the mantle is a metal like gold or iron, what we usually think of when we talk about ductility. You couldn't hammer mantle-matter in to horseshoes or nails on an anvil. It's just a rock, really. Peridotite. Chemically it's got a lot of metal atoms in it, which helps, but if you whack a chunk of it with a hammer you can expect about the same thing to happen as if you whacked a chunk of concrete. Really, it's just that any and every rock is made of tons and tons of microcrystal structures all bound together, and the boundaries between these microcrystals can shift under enormous pressure on very slow timescales; when the scope of your question gets big enough, those bonds become weak in a relative sense, and it becomes more useful to think of a rock as more like a pile of gravel where the pebbles can shift and flow around one another.

The blunt fact is, on very large scales of space and of time, almost everything other than perfect crystals start to act kind of like a liquid- and a lot of those do as well. When I made a study of very old Martian craters, I got used to 'eyeballing' the age based on how much the crater had subsided, almost exactly like the ways that ripples in the surface of water gradually subside over time when you throw a rock in to a lake. Just, you know. Slower.

But at the same time, these things are more fragile than you'd believe, and can shatter like glass. The surface of the Earth is like this, too. Absent the kind of overpressures that make the mantle flow like it does, Earth's crust is still tremendously weak relative to many of the planet-scale forces to which it is subject- I was surprised, once, when a professor offhandedly described the crust as having a tensile strength of 'basically zero;' they really thought of the surface as a delicate filigreed bubble of glass that formed like a thin shell, almost too thin to mention, on the outside of a water droplet. On human scales, liquid is the thing that flows, and solid is the thing that breaks. But once stuff gets big or slow or both, the distinction between a solid and a liquid is more that a liquid is the thing that doesn't shatter when it flows. And it all gets really, really vague, which I suppose you'd expect when you get this far outside the contexts in which our languages were crafted.

ah the good ol' eastern european childhood nostalgia

i owe my life to diamond, iceberg and ESPECIALLY pristal. however, i myself would be bromo

@entities-of-posts The Buried?

women & bitches love my cavern

The funniest homophobia I ever experienced was a Mormon lady at my work telling me she would accept me being gay because we have to get along as coworkers but I really should consider not being gay because gay people have sex like animals (especially gay men) and she just couldn't stop thinking about it and how gross we are. She started really getting distressed, near tears, and saying 'I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop." over and over and miming some kind of sex acts with her hands and I was like ?????? What is happening???? One of the other Mormon ladies had to come over and pat her on the back and help her sit down to help her calm down and our boss gave her the afternoon off due to being too upset to work.

god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything

SHAPE HELL

Yup.

"when people ask how you're doing, they don't really care." most of them do, actually, the amount they care is just directly proportional to how well they know you. you're just mad you can't be the main character of the Twice Daily.

Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say "the ten hells" or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard "power word:scrunch" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.