Apocalypse Watch

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Sheffield was one of my favorites, who died too soon alas.

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Now thatā€™s my kind of apocalypse. Volcanoes are so cool! (Unless they cover the country with a foot of ashā€¦)

Edit typo.

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Speaking of, here is The Apocalypso, by National Health.

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IT BEGINSā€¦

i for one hail our cephalopod overlords.

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33

What if we donā€™t know their genders?

ā€¦

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hmm, a fair point. i honestly was only thinking of the term in a non-gender, ā€œthese things rule usā€ sort of way anyway.

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Iā€™ll buy that. Though I mourn our languageā€™s lack of edgeladies.

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Itā€™s not what you prefer, itā€™s what they prefer that matters. As the the likely intelligent successor to humansā€™ domination of the planet, you do NOT want to peese them off!

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39

The octopuden arenā€™t waiting!

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40

In case you havenā€™t already heard, some on the far right are convinced that ā€œantifaā€ are plotting a violent coup and/or anti-white genocide tomorrow, and they need to get out there to stop this. They are wrong. They-- armed right-wingers-- may end up shooting someone. This worries me.

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41

I think about this fact way too much. Like could we develop octopus life extension technology to see what kinds of amazing things they could do in their 20s & 30s?

Or are they just like me, ā€œsmartā€ in the sense they can learn things quickly, but forget it all just as quickly, doomed to a progression of hobbies given up before true mastery is achievedā€¦

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42

Now that is a science fiction novel waiting to be written.

A 30 year old octopus may be indeed be amazingly (or frighteningly) smart, but I think they probably have a version of ā€œsmartā€ that is completely different from ours.

I also have the progression of hobbies problem, but in my case, I tend to substitute perfectionism for mastery. Thus I spend months on something trying to get it just right. Like an illustration Iā€™ve been working on for 10 months . . . :roll_eyes:

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So I finally watched Arrival, on the small screen, with ear protectors, and shielding my eyes from strobes-- should have work it with the eye patch.

Now it presents the strongest version of the Sapir-Worff hypothesis, about how language affects our perception of time.

English, Gullah-Geechee, Scots, and other Germanic languages lack any concept of the future, as opposed to choice (will+verb), obligation (should+verb), and so forth. Does this make it harder for us to value events after the present, and to acknowledge crises such as global warming?

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Iā€™ve heard and read, but have no links on hand, that the words for time and their concepts vary from culture to culture, with the determinative variable being lattitude.

Equatorial lattitudes, where the day lengths are always 10-14 hours and the temeratures warm to moderate have less need of nuance around the vocabulary of time, and donā€™t have to plan as long term to not be done in by the elements.

Much as, say, the Inuit have a lot of words for kinds of snow.

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