A comic I posted here a long while back in its original wide format. It has since been reformatted for Lackadaisy Mobile on Webtoon along with most of the other mini-comics. I figured it’d be much easier to read in a tumblr feed this way.
Mini-comics have long been my go-to guilty pleasure. 2018 has been sucking the joy out of all the nooks and corners of life like a relentless and unforgiving ghost duck, though, and it’s been difficult to mine the inspiration to compose this kind of nonsense. I’m longing to get myself back into that headspace somehow…
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“ Weren’t you the one who said <<Find their weakness and claim the objective>> ? ”
“T-…This is such a low blow, Dr. Ziegler…”
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?
(via vacantkind)
Anonymous asked:
Hi! May I ask how one would say "happy birthday" (or the equivalent) in Middle Egyptian? For a friend :)
thatlittleegyptologist answered:
It’s not possible to say ‘happy birthday’ in Middle Egyptian. We don’t know if the Egyptian’s even had the concept of a ‘birthday’ in their culture. The closest thing you could use would be hrw nfr (heru nefer) which means ‘good day’ or ‘beautiful day’ but is also a euphemism for having sex.
This makes the Chicago graffiti artist who just writes KEEP HAVIN’ A NICE DAY everwhere even better.
I honestly can’t tell whether OP is shitposting or whether “Have a nice day wink wink nudge nudge” just is the closest equivalent of “Happy birthday” Middle Egyptian has.
I can assure you, I wasn’t shit posting. This is the absolute closest equivalent!
O.O
Middle Egyptian is weird. Okay, any language where maze-eye-chicken-bead-banjo-snail-eye is an euphemism for sex is weird. :)
Middle Egyptian isn’t weird, it’s simply a language with different grammar and writing system than the one you’re used to. As a language, Middle Egyptian isn’t any more or less weird or valid than English. This comes across as pretty denigrating (not in the least because you got all the hieroglyphs* wrong), which I’m sure wasn’t your intent.
*The hieroglyphs are, in order:
- Farmyard/reed shelter (h)
- Mouth ( r)
- Quail chick (w)
- Sun (determinative)
- Windpipe & heart (nfr)
- Viper (f)
- Mouth ( r)
hrw means “day”, as indicated by the sun hieroglyph, which in this word functions as a determinative (a sign with no consonantal value that indicates the meaning of a particular word).
nfr means “good, beautiful”. The one-consonant hieroglyphs f and r are not meant to be read separately as nfrfr, but are part of the spelling of the word nfr.
what’s the difference between ninjas and stage crew?
ninjas move silently around walls, stage crew moves walls around silently.
BUT YOU KNOW WHAT IS SO GREAT
The depiction of ninjas as dressed all in black comes from traditional Japanese theatre. Actual historical ninjas didn’t dress in black because it’s conspicuous as hell in the daytime and even at night in the dark a person dressed in solid black tends to stand out; dark grey or blue is better for hiding in shadows. Usually they just wore ordinary, like, people clothes which are far better for blending into your surroundings in than a specialised professional costume.
BUT YOU KNOW WHO DID DRESS ALL IN BLACK LIKE THAT
the stage crew in a theatre
and it was a generally accepted convention that the black-clad stagehands were invisible, so they could be on stage at the same time as the actors and move things around and the audience would just mentally CG them out
but then one day because a director was a GENIUS, during an otherwise normal performance of a play, suddenly a stagehand stepped forward, assassinated one of the main characters and then melted back into the background
THEY WERE A NINJA
AND THE AUDIENCE LOST THEIR MINDS BECAUSE IT WAS AMAZING
and eventually it lost its mind-blow value because after a while everyone had seen a play like that, so although the “stagehands wear black and are invisible” convention continued, the new “ninjas wear black and are invisible until they choose to strike” convention became established, and from then on fictional ninjas have just worn black because it looks so cool.
So in fact the answer to “What’s the difference between ninjas and stage crew?” is “You will never know until they stab you.”
Okay this is the first time I have heard the second half of this information and it’s so much better now.
helenaklein
