Afterglow

not very new hyperfixation rediscovered write a poem abt it

Alr, so this is just expressing my thoughts after reading It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby, as well as after watching an in depth analysis on it.

Honestly, I really really enjoyed this short story, especially as it is in the cosmic horror genre (absolutely one of my favorite genres).

Now, this is the message that I interpreted from the story:

I think there comes a fear in being unable to live. A fear in not being allowed to live. A fear in trying to make the conscious decision to live. And yet what do we do? Often, we take this conscious decision in our daily lives ‐ and we face this fear - knowing that, although unspeakable horrors may yet lie in the ineffable (or something we know and are unable to explain its ineffable consequences), our lives are good because we exist, and even if we're seen as the "bad man" (quote from the story; it could represent a multitude of things, but i see it, in the context of the story, the want to be able to express one's own individualustic desires, thoughts, and creativity), our 'rebellion' from this absurdity is what makes us ultimately human.

yeah looking back on my interpretation, it's definitely absurdist, but hey, absurdism is one of my favorite philosophies, so I'm not complaining!

Anyway, please go read this short story, it soooooooo sooo good it's such a well-written story.

TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).

Bonus:

Orange brain

Feuer & feu

The German word Feuer looks a bit like French feu and both mean 'fire'. That's a coincidence, because they're not etymologically related in any way. Feuer, like English fire, comes from West Germanic *fuir, while feu stems from the unrelated Latin word focus, 'hearth', which only later came to mean 'fire'. Focus was borrowed into English and many other languages as focus, its meaning 'focus (of a lens; of an ellipse)' created by Johannes Kepler. My new infographic tells you all about these words.

The Sino-Arabica Project

Xiao’erjing—Writing Chinese with Arabic Letters: An Introduction

A writing system is not merely a means of recording sounds and ideas, but itself a carrier of religious and cultural values. In Europe, for

Xiao’erjing is, at its core, a phonetic writing system which represents the phonemes of Chinese using adapted Arabic letters. In its phonetic aspect, Xiao’erjing is thus akin to pinyin, the system commonly used to write Mandarin Chinese in Latin letters, though differing notably in that tones are not explicitly marked. This lack of tone markings may be cause for confusion, given the vast repertoire of homophones in Chinese. In a given semantic context, however, native users of this writing system rarely encounter ambiguity, just as an experienced reader of Arabic or Persian has little difficulty inferring the short vowels of a given word despite the absence of diacritics from most texts.

Sharing this article that I thought might interest both Arab and Chinese speakers following me

Burden "You are not a burden. You HAVE a burden, which by definition is too heavy to carry on your own."

Proto-Indo-Europeans be like “*g̑n̥néh₃mi stéh₂tim” and then they take you into the middle of the steppe

i don’t know why but i’m really amused by the winner of some ‘new kanji’ contest:

compare with the real kanji

座 (seat/gathering), but the two 人 (person) radicals have been moved from next to each other within the 土 (earth) radical to diagonally from each other, making this “social distance(d seating/gathering)”

I may be swinging a fruit bat in a room full of hornet's nests here, but do americans know that most of the world doesn't look the way the US does? Like, specifically concerning ethnic diversity.

Coming from Europe, the fist time I went to the US, I was shocked by it, not in a negative way but in the same "wow, that's a real thing?" sort of way as western people finding out that there actually are that kind of pillar mountains in China, or americans who had never seen Fjord Horses in anything but the movie Frozen finding out that those fantastical yellow ponies are actually real.

And it wasn't some "backcountry rural hick sees Different Colour Person for the first time and dies of shock" sort of a thing. I had travelled before, and at 19 I considered myself quite worldly enough to go to a different continent I had never been on to go meet up a man from the internet, all by myself. I had been all over Europe from Iceland to St. Petersburg and from Norway to France, I have travelled. It was a slow realisation that it's turtles all the way down, that actually got me.

Being in an airport, going from one airport to another, I wasn't surprised by the sheer range of different kinds of people I saw. Airports just look like that, all over the world. Taking one flight after another, I didn't pay much attention to that, because airports just look like that. The "wait, holy shit" didn't hit me until I was already in rural Kentucky, in a fucking Wal-Mart. And if you're an american and the thought of a late teens nordic kid stepping foot into a Wal-Mart for the frist time and thinking "wow, this is actually what America looks like, all the time" makes you want to get defensive, it was by no means a negative feeling.

It was like looking into a bag of M&Ms. That's the only way I could describe it. Every single fucking person, group or family that I saw was apparently different colour and creed than the last ones who passed by. I had never seen black women with styled hair before because in Finland almost every single black woman you see is muslim and their hair is covered. I was used to the concept of large cities being more diverse, in FInland larger cities are the places where you're most likely to see people who aren't white. And I was stunned by just how colourful the population was in goddamn Beaver Dam, Kentucky.

I'm not trying to make any kind of a political point here. I'm just talking from my own experience as a Chronically Online European who has actually been abroad: City streets that look the way they do in the US are completely foreign to most people who are not american. And every time you people start complaining about why a game that's set in Poland, made by polish creators who have never been outside of Poland, only has polish people in it, they genuinely do not know what the hell you're talking about.