Hedgemaester

Best ambient drone album I've heard, in many years of daily listening. Almost nothing, in parts. Hey, your loss lol❤️

@DoctorLemma Yeah yeah yeah. To each his lot and none is light.

On this day 31 years ago, a 12-year-old boy was shot and killed while riding a bicycle with his cousins in a village near Lahore, Pakistan. His name was Iqbal Masih. At four years old, his family sold him to a carpet factory owner to repay a debt of 600 rupees, less than $12. For the next six years, he was chained to a loom. He worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for a few cents. He was beaten with a carpet fork when he slowed down. The factory owners deliberately underfed the children so their fingers would stay small enough for the intricate weaving. By the time he was 10, he stood just four feet tall, 12 inches shorter than the average boy his age. One morning, he escaped. He jumped on the back of a tractor heading to a meeting about bonded labour. He heard a man explain that what the factory owners were doing was illegal under Pakistani law. When the man asked if anyone wanted to speak, Iqbal stepped up to the microphone. He never stopped. He helped free over 3,000 children from bonded labour in carpet factories across Pakistan. He completed five years of schoolwork in three. He spoke at international conferences in Sweden and the United States. He told a room full of adults in Boston that he wanted to become a lawyer so he could free every enslaved child in Pakistan. He was 12 years old. Brandeis University offered him a full scholarship and said they would be waiting for him. When asked why he would return to Pakistan when he knew his life was in danger, he said his mission was more important than his life. On Easter Sunday 1995, he was shot in the back while cycling home. He was hit by over 120 shotgun pellets. His cousins were barely touched. He was the target. His funeral was attended by 800 people. In the days that followed, 3,000 people marched through Lahore. Half of them were under the age of 12. After his death, a group of seventh-graders from a school in Massachusetts where Iqbal had once spoken raised $25,000 and built a school in his name in Pakistan. April 16 is now recognised as the International Day Against Child Slavery. The United States Congress created the Iqbal Masih Award for the Elimination of Child Labour in his honour. It is still given out every year.

@Chizitere_xyz blah blah blah blah blah blah

The most ruthless truth you need to face today is that you are rapidly aging out of the window where people will tolerate your lack of emotional intelligence just because you're young, attractive, or "figuring it out." In your early twenties, people will coddle your poor communication, your silent treatments, and your habit of pulling away when things get hard. They excuse it as you being "mysterious" or just going through a phase. ​But the older you get, that exact same behavior stops being quirky and starts making you a massive liability. High-value people, whether that’s romantic partners, good friends, or mentors, do not have the time or the desire to decipher your moods, chase you when you ghost, or teach you basic accountability. They won't fight with you or try to "fix" you; they will just quietly distance themselves. You aren't "outgrowing" everyone; people are just no longer willing to grade your immaturity on a curve.

@RonaldCHRIST12 You dont get that in the Lord of the Rings, do you?

@RonaldCHRIST12 Honestly, this was presented better in ASOIAF. lol. "A notable scene defending slavery in A Storm of Swords (Daenerys IV), is when the Yunkish envoy Grazdan mo Eraz argues that slavery is necessary for civilization and compares it to a natural, albeit painful, necessity."

"We must agree to the cruel-sounding truth that slavery belongs to the essence of culture . . . the wretchedness of struggling men must grow still greater in order to make possible the production of a world of art for a small number of Olympian men. . . . Therefore we may compare glorious culture to a blood-covered victor who carries with him on his triumphal procession the vanquished as slaves, chained to his chariot." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Greek State

@MarsUniversityX either/or fallacy? they are increasingly inseparable and will maybe need to be even closer and even less friction and lag, if we're facing China?

Elon Musk: “I think probably the biggest danger of AI or maybe the biggest danger of AI and robotics going wrong is government People who are opposed to corporations or worried about corporations should really worry the most about government. Government is just a corporation in the limit; it is the biggest corporation with a monopoly on violence The government could potentially use AI and robotics to suppress the population. That’s a serious concern”

@DylanoA4 so i have heard

Reading is so powerful now because, in a culture of doing so many things at once, it's stubbornly singular, when you're doing it you can't do anything else, you can't think about anything else, it demands all of you

@fandompulse LOTR, appealing to Satanists.

Christopher Lee on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings novels: "I read these books when they came out and I was absolutely enthralled. I thought it was the greatest work of literature I'd ever read in my life. I still think so." Is there anything that rivals The Lord of the Rings? Is it the greatest work of literature ever?

@sunnkssdseraph Like love and caring only go one way and kids can be as selfish and shitty as they want? Nyet.

A child who grows up hearing about your sacrifices doesn't feel loved. They feel like a debt. Having a child was your decision. Nurturing and protecting them is your responsibility. "Sacrifice" does not belong anywhere in this. Call it that and you have already turned your kids into a burden instead of a gift.

@EricJorgenson "every book is written the same, like a textbook." But probably Im missing key context?

"Read books, because the data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody is speaking. What’s the output rate of speech? A couple hundred bits per second, maybe a few thousand per second if you’re going full tilt. You can get several times that by reading. The main reason I didn’t go to lectures in college was because the data rate was too slow." --@elonmusk

@readswithravi it can. or suffering can turn ppl bitter.

“Greatness does not come out of intelligence, it comes from character. Character is not formed out of smart people: it is formed out of people who have suffered.” — Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang

@kangminlee Bugs. Insects without free thought. Collectivists.

In Korea, you can leave things out in public and no one steals it. Crime is nearly unthinkable here. The difference isn't the amount of security cameras, but the culture. Some cultures are just better than others. #korean #culture #society #travel #perspective

@pureMetatron What about the best?

What is the worse thing that ever happened in history?

@__Imladris__ what a twat.

"Soy, de hecho, un Hobbit. Me gustan los jardines, los árboles y las granjas; fumo en pipa y me agrada la buena comida sencilla, me satisfacen las setas; tengo un sentido del humor muy simple; me acuesto tarde y me levanto tarde. Me gusta mucho la cerveza." J. R. R. Tolkien

Weird. I remember Democrats reliably assuring me that Haiti is NOT a sh*thole. Never forget.

@ProudSocialist Wasn't this happening across Europe due to Russia paying off local hoods? Thankfully, Americans are made of sterner stuff and are loyal to each other to a fault!

There’s been another fire! Someone set fire to the Raytheon building in Warner Robins, Georgia. Raytheon is one of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers and supplies the US & Israel with their bombs. The fire is being investigated & the person responsible has not been caught.

@L0m3z imagine getting all this from an image. like a woman.

These guys all have the look of prey animals. The terrified, scanning gaze. Braced for sudden flight. Face muscles overworked and contorted by constant autonomic flexing. Like any moment someone is going to leap out from behind a tree and stuff them in a locker.

@cosmosarcive it was just starting to get good! heh black holes are very interesting.

Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose explains, the center of a black hole contains a region where density and the curvature of spacetime become infinite. When physicists try to calculate what happens at this ultimate edge, Albert Einstein's equations simply run away to infinity and stop working. It is a place where an entire star is crushed down to an effective size of zero; a mind-bending cosmic boundary proving that there are still profound mysteries in the dark that our greatest science cannot yet explain.

@_StonersRUs_ see: concentrates and the concentrate scene. in a decades time you might actually be able to smoke the equivalent of that

You would have to smoke around 1,500 pounds of weed in under 15 minutes to actually overdose… 👀

@XFreeze i dunno. not everything is about money.

South Africa has an amazing opportunity to increase its GDP 10x 🇿🇦 If they just simply remove all the racist laws and allow Starlink to operate, the growth potential is massive SpaceX has already committed $28M for Rural Development across 5,000 rural schools in South Africa to accelerate this progress Starlink will literally lift the country’s GDP because high-speed connectivity is the single most important tool for people to participate in the global economy and sell goods and services 🛰️

@CultureExploreX bro, how was anyone smart enough to come up with the first school, WITHOUT THE SCHOOL TO TRAIN THEM< BRO? WITHOUT THE SCHOOL TO TRAIN THEM? Get it?

What if one of the greatest minds in history proved that genius can exist without elite schooling? Leonardo da Vinci never received the full humanist education that shaped the elite men of Renaissance Italy, yet he built a mind powerful enough to outsee many who did. While scholars gained prestige through Latin, Greek, and inherited texts, Leonardo built authority through drawing, observation, dissection, and relentless contact with the world itself. His early studies of plants, faces, drapery, and proportion already showed a man training the eye with unusual seriousness. His anatomical sheets, engineering designs, and notebooks reveal a thinker who used the hand to test what the mind suspected. In works like The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, he turned painting into a form of inquiry, making visible what most people never learn to notice. His life forces a hard distinction that still matters now: Formal schooling can sharpen ability, but genius depends on deeper powers of attention, judgment, and disciplined curiosity. Subscribe to The Culture Explorer if you believe beauty, tradition, and civilizational memory still matter.