siliconereptilian

androidmaeosauridae

  • they/them

tabletop rpg obsessed, particularly lancer, icon, cain, the treacherous turn, eclipse phase, and pathfinder 2e. also a fan of the elder scrolls and star wars, an avid gamer and reader of webcomics, and when my brain cooperates, a hobbyist writer.

 

the urge to share my creations versus the horrifying ordeal of being perceived. fight of the millennium. anyway posts about my ocs are tagged with "mal's ocs" (minus the quotes). posts about or containing my writing are tagged with "mal's writing" (again, sans quotes). posts about my sci-fi setting specifically are tagged "the eating of names". i'd pin the latter two if they were actually among my top 15 most used tags lol. fair warning, my writing tends to be quite dark and deal with some heavy themes.

 

avatar is a much more humanoid depiction of my OC Arwen Tachht than is strictly accurate, made in this Picrew. (I have humanoidsonas for my non-humanoid OCs because I cannot draw them myself and must rely on dollmakers and such, hooray chronic pain)



skylark
@skylark

James Randi was a gay stage magician who spent most of his life challenging supernatural and pseudo-scientific claims. Best known for confronting and humiliating big names like Uri Geller and Peter Popoff. He had a long and storied career, but my favorite tidbit is an anecdote relayed by James Alcock in his book Science vs. Pseudoscience, Nonscience, and Nonsense, where a University at Buffalo professor accused him of being a fraud, which he happily admitted to. Here's an excerpt from his Wikipedia page:

Randi said: "Yes, indeed, I'm a trickster, I'm a cheat, I'm a charlatan, that's what I do for a living. Everything I've done here was by trickery." The professor shouted back: "That's not what I mean. You're a fraud because you're pretending to do these things through trickery, but you're actually using psychic powers and misleading us by not admitting it."

A younger me might've posted this to r/atheism with an edgy caption but nowadays I'm fucking fascinated by this line. Imagine being an otherwise rational person, working at an accredited research university, steadfastly refusing to believe what a stage magician is telling you because you're sure that psychics are real. I think about this moment whenever someone says something verifiably false, because it demonstrates how much belief is underpinned not by evidence or experiment, but by bias and convenience. It's like that line from Dan Olson's "In Search of a Flat Earth":

They are not trying to explain the world, they are attempting to un-explain it, because those explanations, the real explanations, have become inconvenient

That line was about QAnon and flat earthers, but it scans just as well onto the followers of psychics and faith healers.


blaurascon
@blaurascon
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in reply to @skylark's post:

James Randi inspired (and appeared on) the Skepticality podcast, one of the earliest podcasts ever. That podcast directly lead me to reading The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, which lead to the epiphany for me that got me to eventually deconstruct my fundamentalist Christian upbringing.

So, I'll always have love in my heart for him.

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