MountainMan

MountainMan wrote (edited )

I think you're missing the fact that religious people wholeheartedly believe in their deity. Like.. you can't just decide what to believe, if you believe something is or isn't true then that's what you believe. You can't directly lie to yourself.

So if I thought "there's an all-knowing all-powerful being controlling the universe and I need to worship it", that's just how the fuck it is. If you truly believe that, you can't decide not to believe that. Belief doesn't work that way.

Even as an atheist, it seems nonsensical to abandon god at the exact moment you discover that he doesn't actually condemn you to hell for being yourself. Of course I'd want to spread that information to the others.

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MountainMan wrote

Technology is just knowledge of how to do things, it's basically inseparable from being human (among other species who also use tools). It's a good thing to be able to solve problems with new ideas. Like almost everything else, it depends on how it was made and how it's used.

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MountainMan wrote (edited )

Fungal Elves (temporary name), though they are masters of magical chemistry and experts in almost every species biology, they are seen as unintelligent because they are non-verbal. People see them like people on Earth see monkeys or dogs (they're as friendly as dogs).

Their public image is also affected by their non-hierarchical nature (these are the anarchists of my world). They have a complex society with no leaders or massive cities or armies. Other species see this and assume they're just animals. This has led more than a few "great generals" to some embarrassing defeats.

It should be mentioned that, though many armies have been defeated by the Fungal Elves, very few soldiers died in the conflicts. Fungal Elves are supremely altruistic, and almost always heal their enemy after removing their ability to cause harm. Sometimes this just means taking away their weapon and depositing them outside the forest, sometimes it means going outside the forest and destroying some shit.

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MountainMan wrote (edited )

At some point in history, it had been so long since a star had died that everyone kind of forgot about them dying at all. Normally stars die at a high enough rate (a few per century) to keep their graveyard area contaminated with magic and toxic chemicals, and to keep people telling stories about it, but this one time they just didn't have any deaths for a while.

So several different species settled the area, and started using star-bone tools. Trading these tools to other peoples, who only had wood and stone tools, boosted their economy and allowed them to create a vast inter-species empire. This is also when the formal study of magic really took off, as there was now a plentiful supply of magical "stuff" to mess with.

Apparently nobody made the connection between star bones existing on the ground and how they got there, because at some point stars started dying again and came crashing down on their little empire, contaminating the graveyard once again and setting into motion what we refer to as the Bone Age Collapse.


For millennia, Column Goblins (temporary name) earned a respectable wage transporting goods between oceans on different layers of the planet. They're still employed around most places in the world, but a new city concept is threatening their way of life.

The city of Davitport was constructed at one of the few places on the planet where an ocean on the upper layer gets close to the edge of a gap in the layer, and an ocean happens to also be on the lower layer. For a long time it was two separate cities, one on top and one on bottom. It became a hub for inter-layer trade, drawing a massive population of low-income Column Goblins over the years.

But inevitably, technology did it's thing and better rope was invented. The upper city built davits over the edge to the lower ocean and a canal to the upper ocean, increasing throughput over 100x, and reducing the number of needed workers by over 95%.

Side note: another technology necessary for the davit system was the Bottom-Lock. This allows ships to be pulled up, the gate closed, and water filled under them. Then the water is drained out so it doesn't rain down on the city below. Before this was added, the davits had to be on mobile gantry lifts which would move the ship over the water after lifting, but this required a lot of effort from mages. The lock system only requires magic to seal the gate, which only takes a little effort from one mage.

Before this change, both cities had gotten more-or-less equal hire-rates for Column Goblins, because trade goes both directions. But after the change, the upper city with it's new davits had a massive upper hand. The davits took all the work for the upper city, and a decent percentage of the work from the lower city.

After several popular revolts in the lower city, a war broke out between the two cities (think WW1-style mass death and no-progress, but in vertical caves / stairs, and with magic and maybe medieval tech). Nobody won, it was a total stalemate, and the two cities decided to merge so both would benefit from the davits, but this didn't exactly help the Column Goblins, as now both cities cooperatively use the davit system.

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MountainMan wrote

Reply to comment by !deleted52046 in by !deleted52046

You apologized and then came to a whole new platform and started again, expecting it to go differently? You can't have truly apologized if you're doing the same shit somewhere else, you just said words you didn't mean. A real apology involves some kind of acceptance that you did something wrong.

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MountainMan wrote

Reply to comment by !deleted52046 in by !deleted52046

"Bastard" is derived from the sexist and patriarchal idea that women are subservient to their husbands, and the only legitimate children are those of married couples.

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MountainMan wrote

Reply to comment by !deleted52046 in by !deleted52046

On the off-chance you're not trolling, they're getting more upvotes because they're calling you out for ableist language (and sexist language IMO ("bastard")), which is against Raddle's TOS. This isn't the place for bigotry.

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MountainMan wrote

This is quickly happening to my home as well. Everywhere that used to be beautiful is being covered by slabs of concrete and cookie-cutter houses. The road to my house used to be like a tunnel through the forest, now it's just acres of fucking grass, asphalt where dirt road or gravel used to be, and a bunch of copies of the same fucking house.

It's getting almost impossible to have a home of your own anyways. The realty companies are turning every home they can get their hands on into a rental, and the land is being bought up purely for trading purposes.

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MountainMan wrote (edited )

I'm not calling for them to be attacked. I'm saying it's something you can assume is going to happen. I don't think they should be attacked though.

If I said "if you punch a cop you'll probably be arrested", would you take that as me supporting the police?

edit: okay I did say anyone should be attacked for fucking with people's food, and I stand by that. I'm all for throwing out some milk or whatever people do with it after they take it from the store, but I will never trust whatever they happened to have replaced it with. Just don't fuck with things that people ingest.

It's like how you don't trust a drink after you've left it out of your sight, and if you spot someone fucking with someone else's drink you fucking do something.

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MountainMan wrote

We already know where the line is for the animal industry (it doesn't exist, they'll do anything). The question was about the anti side of things and where that line is. Both things are worth discussing. Whether or not you think it's okay to kill people about this is a legit question to be asking. I misinterpreted what everyone was saying, but was still something to talk about.

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MountainMan wrote (edited )

I was under the impression most people here just plain old thought it was okay to kill people who run the animal industry. I can see how I could have misread some comments, but even then they must be skirting just this side of the line.

Where exactly is your line then? Everyone keeps saying shit like "literally anything you do to these people is okay because they're guilty of much worse". I don't know how else to understand it.

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MountainMan wrote

I agree with literally everything you all are saying, but my question still stands. Why would anyone keep random food forcibly placed in their fridge by strangers? I'm not defending animal slavery here, I'm asking why you'd throw all security and safety knowledge out the window and eat some unverified liquid supplied to you by people who hate you and think it's acceptable to kill you because you're complicit in animal slavery?

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MountainMan wrote

Maybe I'm missing something, but why exactly should someone NOT be attacked for going in someone's place and fucking with their food, adding unidentified liquids which could potentially be contaminated? Like what the fuck did they think would happen? Were they so fucking unreasonable that they thought the store would accept their unknown liquids without question?

I'll fucking attack any one of you if you come in my house and start tampering with food, and then I'll throw every item you touched away because how the fuck could I possibly trust it now?

And then the "OMG I can't believe you touched him what are you doing?!?!?"... Those are the default consequences of doing something like this. Whether you think it's "right" or not, this is just what fuckin happens when you take things that people consider to be theirs. It's quite literally the dictionary definition of "insane" to think it would go any differently.

I think this is nothing but performative nonsense. They knew damn well what would happen. They knew the almond milk would not be accepted. The attack was the goal, not replacing the milk.

I hope this isn't taken as a defense of carnism, the enslavement and rape of cows, or any of the other evil shit. I'm critiquing these people's lack of reason, not their values. There might not be a "right way" to do this, but this is most certainly a really fucking ridiculous way.

If any of you ever do something like this, don't be surprised when you get attacked. That's what's going to happen, and to expect otherwise is your own fault.

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MountainMan wrote

Being raised by conservatives, I was always taught that it was "not throwing the baby out with the bathwater". Obviously I don't see it that way politically anymore, but that's how they see it.

But on non-political things I guess I am somewhat "conservative" by that definition. I agree that it's unreasonable to throw away all the work you've done on a project just because there's a little bug or mistake. It's a positive trait to persist through stumbling blocks. Everything doesn't require a total redesign from the ground up. Reinventing everything every time you find a flaw is wasteful. Not only that, you're not actually learning or improving anything when things get constantly reinvented, you're just shifting the problems to some other unknown place over and over, so they're not as noticeable at first. These are called bugs in the software world, and there's a reason a lot of the best programs in the world are like 30+ years old.

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MountainMan wrote

  1. Why the question mark: "anarchist(?)". Are you unsure about it?
  2. Is there anything unique about the Chinese anarchist scene that you don't see elsewhere?
  3. What kind of stuff do you like? What are your interests or hobbies?
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MountainMan wrote

I hate the fact that school is a "win or lose" kind of thing. If you don't "learn" (memorize factoids and then forget them) 70%+ of the material in the exact amount of time they specify, you're deemed not good enough to do anything in that field forever. Sure you can "give it another go" but why should you have to start from scratch just because it took a little longer to learn a few things?

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MountainMan wrote

Not trying to dismiss what happened to this person, the husband sounds like a total piece of shit, my comment is only tangentially-related:

There are some people who quite literally do not have the ability to understand jokes, and a few of the people like this that I've known almost always thought any joke told near them was "about them" in a bad way, even though it was almost never about them at all.

My grandmother is one of those people. For a long time she thought everyone hated her and felt like she was being abused. Turns out we were all just joking like a regular family and we didn't realize she didn't understand. Now we try to make things more understandable for her, but occasionally a joke slips and we have to re-assure her that we're not making fun of her.

That said, just because you're the subject of a joke doesn't mean you're "being made fun of". Making jokes about each other is a normal thing that friends do.

Again, this isn't really about the person in the article. Their shit sounded legitimately horrible, not that anyone needs me to declare their shit to be legitimate in the first place.

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