“He’s a real patriot! He told me so himself!”

Plus if they double-booked and don’t realize until you start loading, then whoever got the seat first wins.

Just say “window/wall”. And if customers ask “well why are you charging extra” say it’s bc some people like to sleep while leaning against the wall. (true!)

Sure, this is “boring dystopia” material. But a boring dystopia is still dystopia.

Yeah, cats have personalities. But also it can be hard for humans to read them. Like: I think cats generally believe they’re capable of feeding themselves, so if they hang out with a human and rely on it to feed them, then the cat is expressing their trust and affection. Likewise if the cat stands out in the open when the human is nearby, or if a cat remains relaxing when the human enters the room.

That’s how Peter Watts plays it in Blindsight:

A Brief Primer on Vampire Biology

I’m hardly the first author to take a stab at rationalising vampirism in purely biological terms. Richard Matheson did it before I was born, and if the grapevine’s right that damn Butler woman’s latest novel will be all over the same territory before you even read this. I bet I’m the first to come up with the Crucifix Glitch to explain the aversion to crosses, though— and once struck by that bit of inspiration, everything else followed.

Vampires were accidentally rediscovered when a form of experimental gene therapy went curiously awry, kick-starting long-dormant genes in an autistic child and provoking a series of (ultimately fatal) physical and neurological changes. The company responsible for this discovery presented its findings after extensive follow-up studies on inmates of the Texas penal system; a recording of that talk, complete with visual aids, is available online1; curious readers with half an hour to kill are refered there for details not only on vampire biology, but on the research, funding, and “ethical and political concerns” regarding vampire domestication (not to mention the ill-fated “Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares For A Brighter Tomorrow” campaign). The following (much briefer) synopsis restricts itself to a few biological characteristics of the ancestral organism:

Homo sapiens vampiris was a short-lived Human subspecies which diverged from the ancestral line between 800,000 and 500,000 year BP. More gracile than either neandertal or sapiens, gross physical divergence from sapiens included slight elongation of canines, mandibles, and long bones in service of an increasingly predatory lifestyle. Due to the relatively brief lifespan of this lineage, these changes were not extensive and overlapped considerably with conspecific allometries; differences become diagnostically significant only at large sample sizes (N>130).

However, while virtually identical to modern humans in terms of gross physical morphology, vampiris was radically divergent from sapiens on the biochemical, neurological, and soft-tissue levels. The GI tract was foreshortened and secreted a distinct range of enzymes more suited to a carnivorous diet. Since cannibalism carries with it a high risk of prionic infection2, the vampire immune system displayed great resistance to prion diseases3, as well as to a variety of helminth and anasakid parasites. Vampiris hearing and vision were superior to that of sapiens; vampire retinas were quadrochromatic (containing four types of cones, compared to only three among baseline humans); the fourth cone type, common to nocturnal predators ranging from cats to snakes, was tuned to near-infrared. Vampire grey matter was “underconnected” compared to Human norms due to a relative lack of interstitial white matter; this forced isolated cortical modules to become self-contained and hypereffective, leading to omnisavantic pattern-matching and analytical skills4.

Virtually all of these adaptations are cascade effects that— while resulting from a variety of proximate causes— can ultimately be traced back to a paracentric inversion mutation on the Xq21.3 block of the X-chromosome5. This resulted in functional changes to genes coding for protocadherins (proteins that play a critical role in brain and central nervous system development). While this provoked radical neurological and behavioral changes, significant physical changes were limited to soft tissue and microstructures that do not fossilise. This, coupled with extremely low numbers of vampire even at peak population levels (existing as they did at the tip of the trophic pyramid) explains their virtual absence from the fossil record.

Significant deleterious effects also resulted from this cascade. For example, vampires lost the ability to code for -Protocadherin Y, whose genes are found exclusively on the hominid Y chromosome6. Unable to synthesise this vital protein themselves, vampires had to obtain it from their food. Human prey thus comprised an essential component of their diet, but a relatively slow-breeding one (a unique situation, since prey usually outproduce their predators by at least an order of magnitude). Normally this dynamic would be utterly unsustainable: vampires would predate humans to extinction, and then die off themselves for lack of essential nutrients.

Extended periods of lungfish-like dormancy7 (the so-called “undead” state)—and the consequent drastic reduction in vampire energetic needs— developed as a means of redressing this imbalance. To this end vampires produced elevated levels of endogenous Ala-(D) Leuenkephalin (a mammalian hibernation-inducing peptide8) and dobutamine, which strengthens the heart muscle during periods on inactivity9.

Another deleterious cascade effect was the so-called “Crucifix Glitch”— a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex10, resulting in grand mal-like feedback siezures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across H. sapiens vampiris via genetic drift, and—suddenly denied access to its prey—the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history.

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

I was at the gym and “Edge of Seventeen” started playing and just from the start of the song I thought: “aw yeah, Eye of the Tiger!” but then I realized it was the Stevie Nicks song and I was like: “even better!”

Well you’re the winner, and guess who writes the histories!

" As god is my witness … I thought whales could disintegrate!"

ikr “there’s never been any other successful systems” is a tip-off that either they’re trolling, or they’re so invested in their own beliefs that they’ll never see anything else.

It’s kinda like saying “of course I should worship [the christian] god, since he’s the only god who’s ever existed!”

aw yeah true, I miss the Subway of the 90s, the food was noticeably better and worth the money. Over the past 20 years they just kept taking shortcut after shortcut and now it takes like stuff you could take out of the freezer yourself.

Look closer, and you’ll see that obviously she’s a centaur and only lost her back legs. Probably in the recent Centaur-Pirate Wars. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur-Pirate_Wars

I get whatcha saying, but there was this place I used to go that would make this awesome Torta Oaxaqueña (various Mexican food in a hamburger-like bun) that I don’t think I coulda ever made myself.

Reminds me of that anime Hyouge Mono, about a Sengoku-period nobleman who’s really into aesthetics. Occasionally the anime will pop into that exaggerated-slightly-grotesque-face aesthetic as a reaction shot.

Obviously you’re not dregged to the flit-flow.

hey, fr tho, I wonder if making up micro-slang is a useful technique for countering the AIs somehow?

It was still a lot more homogeneous culture back then.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but this particular statement is questionable. Definitely you can say there’s a big-budget mainstream entertainment industry, but even in the early 1900s there were movies, records, and sporting events aimed at various non-white populations - a lot of them weren’t preserved, unfortunately. Then there have always been people who ignored “worldly” entertainment for religious reasons, or who stayed more in tune with the culture of “the old country.” There’s always been an underground (often risque) and alternative/experimental. And there’s also been people who follow “high art” vs “popular art.”

I don’t mean to sound nitpicky, I’m just trying to emphasize that there’s always been a lot of stuff of all kinds out there.

Yeah, exactly. Violence is contextual. Sometimes you just want to get the drunk out of the bar. Sometimes you want to hurt someone enough to leave you alone. Sometimes you want to defeat your opponent in a fair fight. Sometimes you want to get as many people as possible and catch your enemy by surprise – but even then you may not want to kill them bc you want to “win the peace as well as the war.” Obviously no single “style” is gonna cover all of these. (and one of MMA’s contributions was to emphasize how you could mix them together.)

I think it made Traditional Martial Arts dojos modulate their claims. It provided a venue of “live” instead of scripted adversaries in a variety of styles, which made it difficult for unscrupulous TMA dojos to make claims about how powerful their arts are. (i.e. you can just say “why don’t you go use it in MMA?”) Of course there’s still value in TMAs: exercise, discipline, competitions, skills like punching and falling and kicking, etc. And MMA has its limitations too, it’s just another rule-based competition, see Rory Miller’s “Meditations on Violence” for one discussion on this.

MMA’s had a great impact on traditional martial arts. It made people think about what to do if you come across a grappler, and specifically a ground-fighting specialist. Previously, among the major TMAs only judo really thought about it. The dishonest dojos will say something like: I just won’t let them get that close. Which is BS. The more honest dojos will say something like: that’s not really our focus, but we sometimes have a visitor do a seminar on that.

Everett True - !truecomics@midwest.social