cauchys-special-boy

[cauchys-special-boy]

On the bank of the Yalong river a young man and his aging father sit and fish. The father says "when I was your age I was in the army of a warlord" as he casts his line into the river "his name was Liao De, and he was feared by many"

A fish nibbles on the line, and the father begins to reel in a little bit

"one day Liao De came across a cart moving a shipment of grain, and allowed the driver to make a decision. He could either be shot dead, and the grain would be distributed to a nearby village for free. Or, he could live, but the village will be burned."

Then the line yanks, the father reels in the fish quickly, it is an impressively sized catfish

The young man says to his father "That will go nicely for dinner"

The father says "ah, I can do as Liao De. There is a family in our village that has gone hungry, the children are too young to work, the father is an alcoholic, and the mother is bedridden"

The father takes the fish and takes a stick, breaking the stick to be the same length as the catfish.

"we can eat it tonight, and the family will not have dinner, or I can bring it to them and cook for them. However, you will not be able to eat until you catch a catfish bigger than this one"

The young man thinks for a while and asks what the grain cart driver did. "I will only tell you the first thing he said to us. I will not tell you his decision, as this one should be yours"

The son agrees and the father says "He said 'my wife lives in that village'"

The son decides to let the family eat tonight, as so the father takes the catfish to them and prepares it for cooking.

In this small home in this small village, laughter can be heard from inside for the first time in a year. People begin to hear this and investigate. They bring their own food and cook with the family, they give them enough to make it through the season, and all are merry

The son sits at the bank and catches 300 catfish, none of which are bigger than the one his father caught. The sun turns into stars, and the stars turn into sun. In the morning, he is finally able to catch one big enough, and returns home.

The son and father eat together, and the father expresses his pride in his son's selfless act.

"So what happened next?" Asks the son excitedly "what happened to the village?"

The father begins to tell him "We began by burning the farms and salting the earth. Anyone who stayed in their home was to be lit on fire, anyone who escaped was shot with an arrow. Screams filled the valley that night, and it's said you can still sometimes hear it in the wind. There were no survivors"

"but father!" The son asks "the cart driver told Liao De that his wife lived there! Was it a deception? Did Liao De intend to go back on his deal?"

"No" the father says "Let me finish the sentence the cart driver told us for you. 'My wife lives in that village' he began 'you know my wife gives me no respect! I told her I was seeing an acupuncturist and she told me she was seeing an acupuncturist too, a long with a farmer and a soldier on the sides'"

"ah!" The son says as he figures out who the cart driver was "the driver of the cart was the great Rodney Dangerfield!"

"yes son, yes he was"

[cauchys-special-boy]

for the first time in what's coming up on 5 years, ive managed to brick my arch install badly enough i can only fix it with a live disk. pretty sure i know what caused it and if im right it was my fault. unfortunately because i got lazy in the past 5 years i don't have one handy. so this will be a fun day

#will in the future make sure i can always boot to an environment with no fancy gpu shit

[cauchys-special-boy]

not to get all in your medical business but it sounds like your bowel habits have been unusual lately, which, that + losing weight more easily than normal (as I think you also brought up a few weeks ago) can sometimes be a red flag for digestive issues? I am not a doctor ofc but if it keeps up then it may be worth checking out.

signed,

[a person of IBD experience]

if you think I'd go to a dokkktor just for having diarrhea a couple times you're insane

[cauchys-special-boy]

Notice the huge difference between economic advice and, say, medical advice.  The typical doctor will tell you, “Cigarettes are bad for your health, so stop smoking.”  For an economist to give smoking advice, in contrast, he needs to know more than the mere fact that smoking has a downside.  He needs to discover a discrepancy between actual and perceived downsides.  Do you under-estimate the health risks of smoking?  Then economics tell you to smoke less.  Do you over-estimate the health risks of smoking?  Then economics tells you to smoke more.  Unlike doctors, economists know how to give advice and respect pluralism at the same time.

Caplan

#caplans view of econ is...generous #but doctors should be more like that

[cauchys-special-boy]

How it feels being a boy on tumblr

[cauchys-special-boy]

The silicon valley sounds like some awesome sci-fi landscape and it sucks that that name is wasted on a place that answers the question what if Hoboken was worse

[cauchys-special-boy]

when you're sick you're either a prince moder or a dog moder. prince moding is when you demand many little treats, drinks etc. i personally prefer to drag myself off to a secluded corner to either die or recover, aka dog moding

[cauchys-special-boy]

As I gaze at the structural column in Copley Station, cracked nearly in two and held together with zip ties that have been carefully painted over to match the column underneath, I feel my soul intertwined with that of a small Italian boy of days gone by, who also stopped to look up at a large, groaning, newly painted tank full of molasses

#it's fine copley is like that #it's where i saw a blond man panicked asking his friends which line went to bc

[cauchys-special-boy]

[cauchys-special-boy]

There's this perception on here among neurodivergent people that neurotypical social behaviour is all fake and arbitrary. That it's a cruel, baseless game played to "weed out" ND people or to cause pain and complicate things on purpose.

This is wrong. All of those social rules and nuances ARE communication. Sorry if this is rude but it's not the NTs' fault if things don't gel- the gap goes both ways. Just because communication doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean it's random or purposeless. Remember this post?

Every interaction in an NT conversation has purpose, and communicates something, and I don't understand why nobody ever explains this to ND people. There's information on basic stuff like facial expressions, but never what any of it actually means.

Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to, or feeling out their understanding of the world, or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together. It's not literal. The words are, but the broad scope isn't.

A conversation is not just an exchange of words, it's an exchange of acknowledgement, attention, and emotional understanding. Of course it confuses people when their part in that exchange is met with flat affect or unembelished words. It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.

#facial expressions are made up but that's it #and the insight is real just leans heavily on context

[cauchys-special-boy]

Even the top has to douche

[cauchys-special-boy]

my neighborhood is nice but I would lose like half the trees for a single halal food cart

[cauchys-special-boy]

if oompa loompas were real they'd be some of the horniest motherfuckers in the comments under pictures of instagram thots

not even sure this would be true but you'd definitely be racist for saying it

[cauchys-special-boy]

competitive dreaming world champion

#onrtrp

[cauchys-special-boy]

making a vaguely personal vent post and getting a couple hundred reblogs with tags saying #does anyone else see it or has it not started yet   #imminent death andy   #he doesn't know   #28 days to live and he's worried about this   #2 weeks 2 hours 22 minutes make a wish yall   #the equivalent of seeing a bunch of bloodstains before a boss door in ds3   #oc: the sickly dier

[cauchys-special-boy]

impostor syndrome is a common problem in academia. For example my colleagues keep putting me in the airlock and ejecting me into space

[cauchys-special-boy]