Absurd Alhazred posted:

Ook ook!

Sagebrush posted:

there's a good quote (maybe in this thread!) from a primate researcher who's like

"The main difference between the primates is how they handle a screwdriver you accidentally leave in their enclosure.

A gorilla will look at the screwdriver, sniff it, pick it up, put it back down and ignore it from then on.

A chimpanzee will pick up the screwdriver, turn it over, play with it a bit, then use it to murder a small animal or another chimp.

An orangutan will pointedly ignore the screwdriver until it thinks you aren't watching, then pick it up and hide it in a secret location, and later use it to build a spaceship to return to its home planet."

Outrail posted:

And a human will inevitably stick it in their butt.

Which I guess makes sense since orangutangs are our closest relative?

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

No, that's chimps.

oldpainless posted:

But people look different?

oldpainless posted:

But people look different?

oldpainless posted:

But people look different?

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

No, that's chimps.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Nope, that's bonobos.

Sagebrush posted:

there's a good quote (maybe in this thread!) from a primate researcher who's like

"The main difference between the primates is how they handle a screwdriver you accidentally leave in their enclosure.

A gorilla will look at the screwdriver, sniff it, pick it up, put it back down and ignore it from then on.

A chimpanzee will pick up the screwdriver, turn it over, play with it a bit, then use it to murder a small animal or another chimp.

An orangutan will pointedly ignore the screwdriver until it thinks you aren't watching, then pick it up and hide it in a secret location, and later use it to build a spaceship to return to its home planet."

theflyingorc posted:

A while back, an orangutan escaped at a zoo, and he basically just... Went to the zoo, same as a human would. They found him and put them back in his cage, he had a great day.

clarenecessities posted:

there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”

ossacordis posted:

I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.

winchysteria posted:

have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks gently caress it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s poo poo is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist poo poo. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the rear end one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

so the place goes dead loving silent as every giant rear end poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

Solice Kirsk posted:

Is that an avs story? The lack of capitalization always throws me off.

Outrail posted:

Of all the primates to use as a derogatory metaphor why the orangutang? They're awesome. I want to be a chill old man of the forest and occasionally poop on tourists.

theflyingorc posted:

A while back, an orangutan escaped at a zoo, and he basically just... Went to the zoo, same as a human would. They found him and put them back in his cage, he had a great day.

Whiz Palace posted:

"Orangutan" is from Malay for "forest person" so they've been seen as intelligent for a long time.

Friend posted:

That was the first time. The second time Ken Allen escaped, he was found throwing rocks at his archenemy Otis the Orangutan.

quote:

Once again, he wandered around the zoo, posing for photos with tourists.

quote:

As an adolescent, he would regularly unscrew the bolts of his cage and explore his nursery at night, returning in the morning and putting it back together before his keepers arrived.

theflyingorc posted:

Orangutans are the best

EorayMel posted:

No body move, nobody get's hurt. No harm no fowl. Ka Ka bitch. Yeah, I'm the first muthafucka that ever made a mistake in life ever. So may I burn in hell with spicy Orangutang pinecones stuffed up my virgin rear end.

Shelobe posted:

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(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

EorayMel posted:

punk rebel ecks posted:

What was life like under China during Mao's reign anyway? We're there just a series of communes everywhere, or was just every store and industry nationalized?

Grape posted:

You had to have Mao represented in every home, so part of the party apparatus was training lots of Mao lookalikes to go around and share living spaces with families.
You'd have people continuing a lot of their normal everyday life. Like cooking meals, tilling the field, doing laundry. But part of the day would revolve around "tending your Mao", giving the lookalike attention and asking him stuff about Mao Zedong thought.
The Maos would spend the day with the families, and at night they'd join together in a big tent on the outskirts of the village or city and bunk together for the night.

The party itself would check in on the scenario every once in awhile. If a village had a sick Mao, the whole province might be punished. But if the Maos looked happy and well fed, you could get a huge subsidy from Beijing.

Grape posted:

Hua Guofeng famously was recruited from the ranks of the Maos. But after he was pushed out of power the policy was phased out for obvious reasons.
Many of the Maos were transferred to archives work deep in government facilities, creating a situation talked about by party officials called "Going to the Maos".

"Basically you would have to go to Xian People's Archive 35 or some such to retrieve some sort of document, and you would catch glimpses of a large dark warehouse full of Mao men. A Mao would greet you at the desk, asking what you needed. Then would gesture back at another Mao, who you'd watch retreat into the back, interacting with more Mao shaped shadows. A network of Maos going through file cabinets. You would leave with your document but you'd never forget them, these Maos."

Grape posted:

For a brief period during the 80's, a similar policy was shaped around Deng Xiaoping lookalikes filling the same role as the old Maos.
it was abandoned quickly after the vast majority of the Dengs turned out to be wily and poorly behaved. Various stories around China from this period have small mobs of tiny grinning old men causing constant mischief. Things like taking communal tractors on joy rides, loitering around in front of shops while smoking and cussing at passing people, and constant fighting over girlfriends.

CannonFodder posted:

From that thread:
ejstheman
Jul 22, 2008 19:22
Reg Date: Feb 11, 2004
On the off chance this isn't a retarded troll, you might want to consider your actions more carefully in the future. What would happen if everybody posted a message for 90,000 people to see, any time they needed a hand with something like this? That is, imagine that 90,000 people each posted messages like this with the same frequency that you do (i.e. one per year) There are 365 days in a year, so that's about 250 messages a day. If people did that on SA, nobody would buy accounts or post anything worthwhile, because the board would be choking on spam, so of course it is against the rules. You need to think this stuff through.
--------------------------------------

Imagine a community with that many active members.

Nuclear War posted:

Does anyone have a resource for the adaptive systems posts? i could only find one and I would love to read the Nihilism one again

Friend posted:

That was the first time. The second time Ken Allen escaped, he was found throwing rocks at his archenemy Otis the Orangutan.