Cyrus Draegur

Especially now that aniwave is dead ;_; good night sweet prince

not everyone actually KNOWS what they’re imbibing though. There are discrete pipelines of rhetoric that drip-feed poison that oftentimes isn’t even noticeable until it’s too late. Little baby-steps of escalation. Getting roofied is not full consent!

each human being comprises a wide foundation of autonomous sensory and telemetry systems feeding data up into a stack of reactive animal impulses of competing interests which present options to a capstone observer process that has executive influence in deciding which options to embrace and cultivate vs which ones to ignore and atrophy and that capstone, your actual SELF, is a much smaller piece of you than you think it is, and it CAN be overwhelmed by junk info flooding the lower sections.

People. Get. Brainwashed. People absolutely CAN and DO become prisoners within their own bodies as their willpower is overwhelmed and swallowed by propaganda and rhetoric, becoming possessed by an ideology that replaces them and transforms their body into a shambling zombie whose only goal is to SPREAD THE INFECTION. You can see it take hold whenever you’re trying to tell someone something that opposes their worldview, watching their eyes glaze over mid-sentence before they are swept under the thrall of canned responses that they neither actually believe nor even fundamentally understand.

Mostly it happened to our parents and grandparents who drank the tea party’s kool aid and then promptly got swept up into the MAGA cult, or worse, Q-Anon. There might be a shred of the person they used to be in there somewhere, but make no mistake, that person is not in control anymore. That person who loved you as family once has been replaced by a ghoul that will sacrifice you to the false god of its ideology now.

No matter how much high-minded philosophizing we pile on top of ourselves, deep down these bodies are still animals beholden to flawed instincts and senses that can be manipulated, misled by illusions, or even driven to outright hallucination.

TL;DR: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA.

(but i’ve upvoted you because ‘brainfucked’ is DEFINITELY a valid alternative way to describe this shit XD)

Well, unfortunately it is indeed an infectious agent that hijacks the infected to manufacturer more of itself and cannot metabolize or reproduce without directly utilizing the machinery of a host AND its medium of transmission, metabolism, and reproduction is the mind, so “mind virus” definitively fits the bill.

But so do most memetic constructs.

I have some doubts that Russia’s nuclear weapons are even in operational order.

maybe they try to launch them, and they just self-destruct inside their silos. or, they fly, but fall out of the sky still in Russia, or, they actually fly all the way to the destination, but fail to detonate.

to be sure, this is not something that we should wager on. I just think it would be funny if it turned out that way. just a fun little daydream of imperialist fascist scum getting put in the ground where they fucking belong.

Central planning committee knows what’s best now eat your slop or it’s the gulag for you /s

I generate virtual credit cards that are locked to a null balance so if they try to charge it they get nothing.

I’d love if Doctor Who ended up entangled with Maguire+Garfield+Holland VIA Doctor Strange even though Strange doesn’t remember Peter anymore…

Ah, yeah, Venom is just a suit in the same way that a TARDIS is just a box, heh.

IIRC, isn’t it that you don’t actually wear a symobiote as much as it kinda completely absorbs you? Sort of like … After a caterpillar goes inside a cocoon, it … Dissolves. Into caterpillar goop. And then the goop reforms into a butterfly.

i’m so glad you post on lemmy fediverse too <3

i’m asexual but you’re just so damn pretty i like seeing you for the artistic value X3

it has in fact been a delightful creative aid for brainstorming fiction, actually!

The things are fantastic at “yes-and” improvisation and extrapolating from a premise.

If I want to build a world and populate it with loosely defined ‘impressionistic’ background info that doesn’t necessarily require fully fledged lore that interconnects, it can do a great job at showing where the lore could go if i decided to explore there. It’s great at suggesting character names, place names, and ways to fill in blanks that make it easier for me to pick or reject individual elements.

In a story idea I’ve been marinating for a while, one character possesses advanced medical knowledge in a world where germ theory, medicine, and surgery never developed because people had access to ‘healing magic’. The problem is, healing magic works on all organisms - including parasites, bacteria, and cancer, which means trying to ‘heal’ someone with an infection makes the infection worse because the pathogens benefited from the healing magic.

I asked AI to extrapolate more detail about this character’s background and it suggested that his father was the village healer and simply didn’t mention his mother at all.

Those two little details exploded in my imagination as an entire history of emotional conflict:
His mother fell ill with a bacterial infection that magic couldn’t fix when he was too little to do anything about it even though he knew what was wrong and how to help her, and so he blamed himself.
His ‘strange ideas’ about physiology, epidemiology, and concepts like hygiene and medicine put him at odds with the traditional teachings his father, and made the other people in his village view him as a ‘problem child’.
This led him to be quiet and withdrawn until he befriends the protagonist, and it is her falling ill when the same disease that killed his mother that motivates him to try again with the rudimentary resources he was able to secretly scrape together since.

(this is an ‘isekai inversion’ where all the reincarnators are disillusioned and discouraged, and the protagonist is a native of that world who travels around finding them, putting them in touch with one another, and motivating them to pursue their specializations again. A nuclear engineer, for instance, won’t be able to get much done in a world where the scientific method hasn’t been codified, manufacturing doesn’t exist let alone precision machining, and chemistry has not clawed its way to distinction out of the vague, secretive, formless depths of alchemy)

…complex almost entirely wholly-hallucinated answers that only have as much bearing on reality as ‘some dude who is very talkative and heard about a bunch of stuff second-hand, and who is also high as balls and experiencing a manic episode where they think they know everything’

hexbear isn’t even malicious. hexbear is spicy at best. not nearly as bad as lemmygrad, which is outright repugnant in its overt hostility. hexbear users are at least CAPABLE of communicating, whereas in my experience lemmygrad users pull the animal farm squealer move and defecate on the floor before storming out.

fade into the wilderness and forget the message for the rest of my life

what makes the state the state is not anything written on paper.

it is the state’s monopoly on violence.

Sovcits need to get this through their thick fucking skulls: If one fails to comply to a government’s demands, that government will fucking murder them. They’ll come up with a reason. Not because they need one, though, but merely because it’s more convenient for them if they can present a rationale as to why SOME livestock are ripe for the slaughter while the rest of us are “”“safe”“”.

Every one of those bastard pigs can end anyone’s life with minimal consequences; they are all too often entirely ABOVE THE LAW.

Understanding and accepting this is necessary to SURVIVE. Keep up the charade of civility, or the jack booted thugs with their shiny tin badges will come to kick down your door, shoot your dog, ‘civil asset forfeiture’ seize anything they want, put a lien on your house for the “cost” of the “service” of ruining your life, and then foreclose on your shit leaving your family homeless and there is N O T H I N G anyone can do about it except make themselves a less convenient target.

it’s her behavior and ideology that makes the painting accurate :3

if she weren’t rich, i’d feel bad for her. her status and authority, unfortunately, make her an acceptable target for nonviolent criticism, such as really ugly portraits.

oh yes! Anatomically modern humans have been around for like 200,000 years before we developed agriculture and started to develop permanent settlements!

it has been approximately 12000 years since our ancestors constructed what are now the ruins at Gobekli Tepe. But saying it’s been exactly 12,000 years would be silly, so let’s toss in some variation and call it the present 12,024 years since then. I like this because it puts the history we presently call “ancient” into perspective. By this measure, the bronze age began around the year 6,800 and its collapse happened around the year 8,800. Two thousand years, our species toiled at working bronze. Yes, a lot of explosive progress (some of it literal) happened in the 11,900s, but it took us over eleven thousand years to get there in the first place. We’re really not so far from the 11,500s when we were just getting used to connecting the whole globe with transoceanic trade. It seriously stunts our achievements to write off everything that happened prior to year 10,000 as if it were irrelevant.

moreover, they drink bugs. liquefying their insides and sluuuuuuuuuuuuuurping it up

“We have 🐼 at home”