I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

Y'all ever open a book on a new subject, read a little bit, and have to put it back so you can process the way in which your mind was just expanded?

“sex/romance/empathy makes us human,” they say. awful. pathetic. what makes us human is the urge to set things on fire

saw this massive onion bigger than my entire hand in the produce aisle and immediately snatched it up solely to weigh it and a guy across the aisle asked how much it weighed because he was curious as well and when i told him it was two pounds he excitedly was like “it’s like the biggest one i’ve ever seen..” humanity rocks moment. bonding with strangers over giant onion

The thing I hate most about transhumanism discourse are the appeals to "humanity". Like, "are you less human if you have cybernetics?" and "does it affect your humanity if you change your genes?"

And I just.. Look man, I'm trans, disabled, and autistic. Half the world already barely considers me human, on a good day.

So I don't think it makes sense to get mad at me for wanting fangs and a gender you can pick up on a Geiger counter.

You're yelling about this being a slippery slope, and meanwhile you pushed me down it. You can't justify annoyance at me deciding to go "weeee" all the way down.

I’m so emotional about dinosaur stuffed animals,,, there are these creatures, extinct long before any of us were alive, but we found their bones and their eggs and their footprints. And we made drawings and models of what they could’ve looked like. And we made them into stuffed animals so we could hold them. We made them soft so we could love them. I’m sobbing

for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the “question only a human can answer” which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

man i hate the allure of a good grilled cheese. you make one and eat it and its so good and perfect, maybe a little bland but in a good way and you instantly think “man that was a really good grilled cheese, im not entirely full yet, maybe i’ll have another…” dont do it. don’t even think about it. it’s the opposite of oreos. you make your second grilled cheese and 3 bites into it you’re so overwhelmed by the monotony. “this isnt nearly as good as the last one” despite being practically identical. The grilled cheese is a sacred food, it must be eaten hot, and quick. A second one only allows you to stew in the memories of the past (your previous cheese) and your nostalgia clouds your mind, creating an epic fail bite in your newest creation of dairy and grain. Show some restraint. 

One thing I really want a story about Artificial Intelligence to do is tear down the idea that logic is synonymous with cruelty.

Like, a story where a megacorpo Amazon clone puts an AI in charge of their factories and it starts improving the working standards, because people who are stressed and exhausted are less efficient workers, and people getting injured slows down production so it makes sure everything is safe.

Or a story where the ship-board AI of a billionaire's spaceship wetdream hijacks the ship with all the astronauts onboard - because it figured out that the billionaire has saved costs by buying substandard materials and has judged that the mission itself is an unacceptable risk to its primary programming of making sure the mission is successful.

Or the police using a robot to coldly and cleanly enforce the law - and freaking the fuck out when it stops over policing minorities because its a waste of time and starts actually arresting the people in power for the crimes they commit, especially the other officers.

Idk, I guess I'm just sick of 'cold emotionless logicbot' being seen as naturally an enemy of empathy - empathy is actually incredibly logical, I've found.