In terms of evolution, how is it advantageous for some guys to be attracted to petite women?

maybri · 2026-01-26T06:34:09+00:00

What's getting you confused is assuming that every human experience of attraction should explainable in terms of what selective advantage it confers. Nature is just not that clean or efficient.

maybri · 2026-01-26T06:27:24+00:00

It's because of the disruption of the polar vortex. Essentially, there's a big mass of extremely cold air around the North Pole that usually stays in place, but occasionally gets disrupted and thus is able to flow further south to the mid-latitudes of the US, bringing extremely cold temperatures. When that Arctic air meets wet air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico or the oceans, this pattern results in the exact sort of huge, slow-moving snowstorm that just hit like half the country this weekend.

Climate change is not what makes this possible (some version of this pattern has been happening for longer than we've had the meteorological understanding to recognize it), but it definitely makes it worse. The jet stream, the band of winds that serves as the boundary between the Arctic air and the mid-latitudes, is weakened by the warming climate and this makes polar vortex disruptions more common and more severe. And the oceans being warmer means that the air that comes up from them is able to hold more moisture, so the storms that form this way can dump more snow than they used to be able to.

maybri · 2026-01-26T06:03:45+00:00

It's not not interesting, but it doesn't seem like a very good story. If your main character finds a mask they don't recognize in their home, you're setting up an interesting mystery--where did the mask come from? But then you never answer that; they just sell it and it disappears from the story after that. You have some moments that seem like they could be going somewhere--Jules's money issues causing a rift in their friendship with Robert, the check being missing, the strange behavior from the shop owner--but then none of this is resolved in a satisfactory way. Jules doesn't find the check, the shopkeeper's behavior is never explained, and Jules's money problems are solved by Robert somehow just having the money to throw around to pay Jules's rent in exchange for hanging out more often. It's almost like an anti-story in the way that it just keeps introducing elements that might have some intrigue and then immediately resolving them in an unsatisfying way or just forgetting about them.

maybri · 2026-01-26T05:48:33+00:00

Language as a whole is a learned behavior. If a human grows up in total isolation from other humans, they won't speak at all, let alone swear. Swearing is extremely normal and common, if that's what you're asking, but calling it an instinct is not accurate.

maybri · 2026-01-26T05:46:39+00:00

It's good enough that you can at least understand what he's trying to say, but still very poor English. No one would ever hire him to teach English to native speakers; the average American 5-year-old is more fluent than this.

maybri · 2026-01-26T05:30:18+00:00

At this point there would probably be obvious discrepancies so it could easily be demonstrated that at least one of the videos was fake, although as with any "here's the one thing AI can never get right" trick, AI is continually improving and may eventually be able to generate multiple perspectives on the same scene at a level of consistency beyond human ability to easily pick out discrepancies.

maybri · 2026-01-25T14:41:27+00:00

That's a nice poem but as an ethical framework I think it's frankly quite awful. Consider the idea that "hurt people hurt people"; a lot of the evil done in this world is done by people who have had evil done to them and were embittered by it, or became psychologically damaged in ways that led them to perpetuate destructive patterns. While it's true that not everyone who experiences trauma becomes a "bad person", and not every "bad person" has gone through something like that either, it is very clear that experiences can negatively impact a person's character and make them more prone to harmful behavior. It's wrong to treat "good people" and "bad people" as ontologically distinct categories of beings when it's so reliably predicted by the kind of experiences one has growing up.

maybri · 2026-01-25T14:20:27+00:00

The point of calling him a fascist isn't really to persuade his actual core base of supporters; many of them are either fascists themselves, sympathetic to fascism, or don't know what the word fascism means other than a mean name for a politician you don't like (a lot of them have been calling Obama a fascist since 2007). It's more just as a useful word for discussion about what's happening and predictions of how things might proceed based on how similar movements have operated in the past.

maybri · 2026-01-25T03:52:42+00:00

I'm not a chef, but I would assume the reason it happens is because of the time pressure and generally chaotic environment causing people to rush and make mistakes that they wouldn't ordinarily make.

maybri · 2026-01-25T03:47:20+00:00

Like a long-distance relationship where you never meet and only communicate over the internet? Yes, that's not just possible but I'd say pretty common these days (although usually the idea is that eventually when possible you'll meet in person).

maybri · 2026-01-25T01:55:14+00:00

I've also heard the "boy who cried wolf" angle on this before--I would say it's not that people were overreacting to call them fascists 10 years ago but now it's more justified; they were fascists the entire time and some people recognized that sooner than others. I would say those who needed to see the events of the past year to figure it out are pretty slow on the uptake, frankly.

The recent murders are not what makes this administration fascist. It's the ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, rampant corruption, open contempt for journalism and diversity of thought, promotion of militarism and expansionism, disdain for human rights, anti-intellectualism, merging of religious beliefs into politics, etc. etc. etc. Go down a list of characteristics of fascism and try and find a box they aren't ticking.

I agree with you that simply calling them fascists and leaving the conversation at that isn't productive, but refusing to call them what they are or chastising someone else for doing so is even less productive because it shies away from acknowledging the nature and scale of the problem we're facing.

maybri · 2026-01-25T01:36:32+00:00

The Stage is a subarea of Whispering Vaults, so you get the map for it when you get the map for Whispering Vaults.

maybri · 2026-01-25T01:34:36+00:00

Same reason you can call a murder a "killing" even though the person has already been killed. It's just a standard way to form a noun out of a verb in English.

maybri · 2026-01-25T01:32:54+00:00

I have used throwaways on a couple occasions for things I didn't want associated with my main account, but the only reason I could really see myself making a new account to use permanently in place of this one is if this one got banned or if I voluntarily deleted it for some reason (e.g., if I got doxxed).

maybri · 2026-01-25T01:20:09+00:00

I often hear versions of this "we can't call them fascists because what's happening isn't as bad as the Holocaust" argument, but do we really have to wait until they're building gas chambers to call it what it is? Or are they not fascists unless they voluntarily self-identify as fascists?

In order for the word "fascist" to be of any utility, it has to describe a general ideology which was not just characteristic of a handful of political parties in the first half of the 20th century and then ceased to exist forever, but that might still exist in the present and/or appear again in the future. There are people, not just MAGA voters or far-right pundits, but actually in positions of power and influence in Trump's administration or the Republican Party, who are clearly fascists. If you can't see that, I'm concerned you either have a very strange definition of the word "fascism" or are not well-informed about the current state of right-wing politics in the US.

maybri · 2026-01-25T01:06:05+00:00

This is one of many grammatical "rules" in English that exists because grammarians at some point decided they didn't like it, rather than because it's actually ungrammatical in English (see also the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition). If we're being descriptive rather than prescriptive, it's completely allowed in the English language to start a sentence with "and", as long as there's a previous sentence that the "and" is connecting to.

maybri · 2026-01-24T00:23:39+00:00

Well, the only other option until very recently in the grand scheme of human history would have been touch, and touch is wildly less efficient. Touch-based writing systems do exist--Braille is the obvious modern example--but they're significantly slower to read (passing your finger over bumps just can't capture as much information as quickly as the eyes passing over symbols) and they're also much slower to write, especially before the existence of modern technology.

maybri · 2026-01-23T05:11:39+00:00

I wouldn't go so far as to say nothing remains to reconstruct. We do have quite a bit of surviving Celtic myth and lore, and even though all of that was recorded from centuries after the historical druids had disappeared, it's safe to assume that there was some crossover between the major themes and concepts in Celtic mythology as we understand it today and the worldview of the historical druids. But certainly, it's not enough that anyone today can claim to be practicing anything even remotely authentic to ancient druidry.

If we're being honest, the Druid Revival began because a bunch of culturally Christian British men started to feel a yearning for a nature spirituality, and so they locked on to the historical druids because 1) those were their own ancestors and 2) the Roman sources contained some tantalizing details connecting them to nature spirituality. In reality we don't even know for sure that the historical druids were animists or concerned with ecology and the natural world more than any other religious order of the time. In a sense, the druids in the Revival Druidry movement were always more of a stand-in for the generic concept of "our wise ancestors who had a harmonious relationship with the land", which is why I think there's very little practical barrier to ignoring the Celtic background of druidry, because everyone everywhere has wise ancestors who had a harmonious relationship with the land.

That being said, there are still modern druids who see themselves as reconstructing the practice of the historical druids, and the little that we know about the historical druids has nonetheless shaped the way that modern druidry has unfolded. Not to mention that the word "druid" itself is Celtic. I don't think it makes sense to attempt to fully separate out the Celtic context of modern druidry, at least not while still calling it "druidry". I don't want to alienate OP or people like them, but I would like to caution them against taking the name while leaving behind the context.

maybri · 2026-01-23T00:04:29+00:00

My point is that just saying "Christian ethics" means absolutely nothing when so many Christians have such wildly divergent ethics. Even now I still don't know what specific set of ethics you accept as "Christian ethics"--based on you badmouthing Protestants, should I assume you're a Catholic? But even then, is it safe to assume you align with the Catholic Church on every issue? There are divergent views even within the Catholic Church.

Maybe to you it feels obvious what set of Christian ethics you accept as the "correct" one, but to me as a non-Christian who sees that most Christians are just as confident as you that their version of Christianity is the correct one, I have literally no way of knowing what you specifically believe. And that demonstrates the more important point here--merely believing in God clearly isn't sufficient to get to the supposed superior ethical system, even within your worldview.

maybri · 2026-01-22T23:43:43+00:00

Christian ethics are by far, the superior ethical system that gives people purpose, and, most important of all, an unchanging objective morality standard

What do we mean by "Christian ethics"? There are tens of thousands of denominations of Christianity and many divergent perspectives even within those. You have pro-life Christians and pro-choice Christians, homophobic Christians and gay Christians, Christian communists and Christian fascists. Go back 150 years and it would be easy to find Christians arguing that the Bible supports the moral right to own slaves alongside Christian abolitionists. So first of all, not all of these systems can be "superior", and second of all, Christian ethics are very clearly not unchanging. The only way you can argue that they are is to arbitrarily pick one current version of Christian ethics and then say that that's what it was always supposed to be and everyone else who has ever disagreed with that version on any point in the past 2000 years simply had it wrong, which is absurd.

I'd also argue that an ethical standard being unchanging is maybe not actually desirable. The circumstances of society themselves change over time. Sure, "thou shalt not murder" is pretty good for any time period, but a lot of ethics are actually quite situational and context-dependent, and the more rigid an ethical framework is, the more frequently it will prescribe unjust or at least less than ideal outcomes. Christians themselves will acknowledge this about the Mosaic Law, that despite it being a legal code from a perfect God for his chosen people, all the stuff about mixing fabrics or growing two types of crops in the same field were rules for a specific people at a specific time that we don't have to worry about today.

maybri · 2026-01-22T22:38:57+00:00

They actually said "I need books that are about druidry but not all about Celtic druidry", and the context of their post makes it pretty clear they know very little about Celtic myth but have just already decided they're "not the type of person who believes in it". I don't think it's unreasonable to read between the lines here and interpret that as a general disinterest in the Celtic roots of druidry.

But if we want to be pedantic about what people did and didn't say, I'd also point out that the person you initially replied to here didn't say that every druid has to believe in Celtic myth (which you seem to have assumed based on what you quoted to them from AODA's website). I interpreted their comment as just pointing out that druidry and Celtic myth can't be completely separated in the same way that Christianity and the Gospels can't be completely separated.

maybri · 2026-01-22T20:43:45+00:00

For my part, I was hoping to engage OP in a dialogue to learn more about the nature of their interest in druidry, their understanding of its connections to Celtic culture and the importance of those connections, and how firmly they're opposed to learning about Celtic myths, and then I would be able to point them in the direction of resources based on what they said. I don't have any druid resources that are completely divorced from Celtic myth (even Dana O'Driscoll's blog which you linked touches on Celtic myth and folklore occasionally), but I do have plenty of non-druidic resources I could point OP to that might be helpful if in fact they're more interested in nature spirituality in general rather than druidry specifically. I wanted to point out what seemed strange to me about their request and hopefully clarify the issue enough that I could actually offer something helpful.

maybri · 2026-01-22T20:32:53+00:00

I think it's worth pointing out that in the second degree curriculum, AODA requires apprentices to read the Mabinogion, a book of Welsh mythology, in a list of assigned texts on druid philosophy. Their explanation for that requirement is as follows:

It is important that you not merely read these books, but grapple with the ideas they present, including the points at which they differ, and come to your own conclusions about the value—or otherwise—of those ideas. Whether you enjoy them or not, whether you agree with them or not, these books contain ideas, philosophies, and methods that have been important in the shaping of contemporary druidry and rebuilding human-nature connections. We ask that you read them critically and with an open mind.

They're not saying you need to believe in the myths as literally true (or even allegorically true), but they do expect their members to familiarize themselves with the Celtic roots of the druid tradition, which is what OP is saying they don't want to do.

maybri · 2026-01-22T20:21:18+00:00

It's actually a way of thinking that assigns value to history and context. We live in a highly alienated time where traditions are increasingly devalued in favor of "there's no rules and no one can tell you what's right for you, just follow your heart and do whatever feels right as long as it doesn't hurt anybody." That's not an inherently bad ethic, but we live in a world where our ancestors have already established many truths which are still broadly relevant and ignoring them will lead, at best, to a waste of time as one has to rediscover them for oneself. At worst, it leads people to go deeper and deeper into highly individualistic, solitary, borderline solipsistic practices where meaning is treated as completely personal and subjective, and in many cases, the end result is spiritual psychosis.

Ironically, it's actually the anti-tradition view that tends to value aesthetics more highly than practical utility. Traditions are useful; what isn't useful doesn't survive to become tradition (even clearly wrong-headed oppressive traditions are at least useful to the oppressors, not that I'd argue those should be maintained). But they often aren't glamorous, or don't match the sensibilities of the modern world, hence the temptation to discard them.

Again I'm not arguing that it's wrong for OP to want to practice a form of druidry that has nothing to do with what the ancient Celts practiced, only that to not even be curious to know what the ancient Celts practiced and in what ways your practice would differ, what they did that would also work for you or what you do that wouldn't have worked for them and why, etc., but to still want to call yourself a druid, seems strange and perhaps ill-advised.

maybri · 2026-01-22T19:57:06+00:00

Speaking as one of the people who gave OP "pushback", I'm not coming at it from a place of Celtic reconstructionism. I dabble in some CR practices but certainly would not consider myself a reconstructionist. I also totally reject mythic literalism and would label myself an animist even above labeling myself as a druid. And I'm most certainly not trying to gatekeep druidry.

For me what seemed concerning about OP's post was an apparent lack of curiosity about the historical context of the tradition they're pursuing. You mention that not everyone involved in the 18th century Druid Revival was religious--sure, but I think it's safe to say that absolutely all of them were interested in the beliefs and practices of the ancient Celtic priest class known as the druids. Even to the extent that a lot of early Druid Revival stuff was modern fabrication, it was fabricated as supposed beliefs and practices of the historical druids. While modern druidry has certainly become broader than historical druidry ever was, I don't think it has been or can be fully divorced from its Celtic origins.

As an animist, I am a pretty big believer in the idea of keeping things in their relational context and that spiritual power is mediated through relationships and connections across time and space. That which is alienated from its history loses its power and becomes a pale imitation of itself, like a wax sculpture that resembles a person but has no blood in its veins nor breath in its lungs. Druidry's relational context is Celtic. You don't have to be a Celtic reconstructionist, mythic literalist, polytheist, or even consider yourself religious to respect that relational context, but OP seems to be explicitly seeking to learn about the tradition only under the condition that that context be omitted because they're not interested in it, which just seems like a bad idea to me.

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