zompist bboard

I don't see any posts from Zomp in this thread that it would have made sense as a response to, and now the post I was responding to seems to've vanished. That's cool, whatevs.

how is giving your conpeople historically-implausible Christianity different from making them immune to all disease and giving them government free from corruption and a society free from theft? I thought about giving my conpeople historically-implausible Islam once, but now I realize this would be...

Trailer for Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever. See also Title of the Song . [LATE ADDITION: The Onion's some bullshit happening somewhere report is an instant classic of the meta-genre.] (I leave finding meta-blog posts-about-every-blog post-ever as an exercise for the reader. There's a lot of them.) ...

[breaking hiatus with some industrial-strength Weird for all the ZBB homies]

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Die Antwoord.

It's... it's just... it's...

Well, part of me wants to warn you not to watch it. But that's just the non-ninja part.

The main advantages that industrialized modernity has in terms of hygiene are the invention of the extensive modern sewer, germ theories of disease leading to sterilization and antiseptics, and the awesome array of tools employed in modern dentistry (though dentistry did exist, contrary to popular b...

Lady Gaga by way of the Neutra Face font, as delivered by bearded dudes. Happy New Year.

(Redefining the word "hiatus" to indulge a question about Arcél's nomads.) I'm intrigued by the commanding range the nomads -- first Nyuam and now their successors -- appear to have. They seem to be afoot rather than mounted... so why do they have the edge in conflict they seem to have developed, an...

Random atmospheric phenomenon, proof of alien visitation or just the next wave in movie viral-marketing campaigns? The halo cloud over Moscow.

Farewell transmission from Songs: Ohia, just as a random treat.

rickardspaghetti wrote:The pros and cons of singing in your native language.

Ex-cellent.

dhokarena56 wrote:There is a Miracle of the Translation, it's when the Elenicoi came to Almea...

Yes, Translation. Not Transformation.

Yiuel wrote:I like the Bé's philosophical dilemma between emotionalism and rationalism, it's not something we see a lot in European philosophy.

It isn't? That's news to me.

I do think Zomp puts an interesting tweak on the old theme, though. Lots of fun.

One of the most unintentionally funny blogs I've ever seen . Note the hilariously rambling stream-of-consciousness posts, and then click through to the comments threads. Notice on many of them how the "replies" are written in a suspiciously similar style and tone? I believe it may be the first time...

Vote for Charity Beaver! [Charity] divides her time between Cooper, the Dallas Country Club, and Equinox. . . “I’m a wino,” she says, laughing. “And I love cheeseboards" . . . . In addition to Cru, she loves Nick & Sam’s Grill and Mi Cocina. . . “I train a lot of the Highland Park cheerleaders,” sh...

BTW do you know what /dZO~k/ is? I did not. Thank you for that... I think I'm going to have to do some more reading about Bengali religion. The west currently appears to be in a state of limbo, slowly slipping back into supernaturalism. Oh, it's not slipping "back" into anything, supernaturalism ne...

Eg. Here in Bengal, you still hear about priests trying to kidnap small children for human sacrifice. Very very rarely, but it does happen. This one intrigues me. In North America, there are periodic hysterias about "Satanic Ritual Abuse" that sometimes include stories of human sacrifice (and alway...

I don't think the Confucian examination system really qualifies as "crazy." That system contributed heavily to China's unprecedented efficiency as a "pre-industrial" state, after all. (The current Chinese mania for English only seems "crazy" from a specific standpoint. China is dead-set and focussin...

I see a few of them in Montreal. I'd like to answer them once. In a long winded way. Really? I thought Montreal of all places would be safe from the fundies, but then I recall seeing a movie with neo-Nazis in Toronto of all places, so go figure. Every place urban soaks up population from much more ...

Japan really is the Kevin Bacon of historical discussions, isn't it. I hadn't noticed that before.

Gorgeous pic.

I'd be fine with pictures, personally, I'm not likely to put HL2 on my machine.

The butt-hating Jamaican evangelical is pretty hilarious, actually.

I think we're about due for some Japanese Weird, so here it is: RoboGeisha. And be warned, it is no ordinary Weird, nor even ordinary Japanese Weird.

(... and that Red House commercial is freaking classic.)

I must say that of all the Almean materials, some of my favourites are the personalized notes from obscure peoples. Drollery! I love drollery. The Kereminthic fisherman is good stuff.

Don't rainforests have more biota per square kilometer than a temperate savanna Sure, but ironically the high biodiversity typically means that food resources useful to humans tend to be very dispersed. That's why hunter-gatherers in tropical rainforests on Earth are usually very marginal populatio...

Basically, anywhere you see dense populations in tropical rainforest zones, they're agriculturalist populations. (Yes, Yiuel, I made reference to SE Asia's agriculturalists already.) West Africa is an example of this -- and those population densitites have had consequences for the region's ecology, ...

Don't rainforests have more biota per square kilometer than a temperate savanna Sure, but ironically the high biodiversity typically means that food resources useful to humans tend to be very dispersed. That's why hunter-gatherers in tropical rainforests on Earth are usually very marginal populatio...

I just read 1491, so I thought maybe the jungle population stuff came from there. One of the ideas espoused there is that the Amazon was actually much more heavily populated before European contact than is currently possible, due to environmental destruction, and loss of the knowledge of traditiona...