SmokaDustbowl posted:

this is what happened to "exurb" here in alberta, now everyone is hosed on fent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E_OLgC4nV0

FAT32 SHAMER posted:

aw frig aw dang it posted:

cishet people loooove gendering stuff. they can't get enough of it

this drink is for girls, that food is for boys, only men buy this lawnmower brand, women pilot drones like this, etc...

Shaggar posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ

Jonny 290 posted:

SmokaDustbowl posted:

nice of this economist to quote john cleese so I don't have to read any more

SmokaDustbowl posted:

does it have to do with the voldemort index

Chris Knight posted:

DRINK ME posted:

I love the hot dog robot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qCw5r0SqwQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2FfYF8ft9w

quote:

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…. In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed. The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future – indeed Schrodinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted- but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

[...]

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the "Ekumenical Year 1490-97," but surely you don’t believe that?

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

[...]

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.

Roosevelt posted:

lol this ad. how old are you, yospos?

Improbable Lobster posted:

infernal machines posted:

yes, but as canadians we are cursed to recognize quebecois

imagine never having heard 15th century french. what luxury

NoneMoreNegative posted:

https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1662232205207166976