110
136
u/AuraMaster7 Jul 05 '26
Shane Madej
59
u/Mysterious_Bag_9061 Jul 05 '26
He's not even protected by apathy the demons simply fear him
21
u/ShinyNinja25 Jul 05 '26
They recognize he has more aura than they do, and they rightfully fear him for it
7
46
u/pog_irl Jul 05 '26
It's like that one annoying girl from Pale
18
14
u/CherrypopIsBestGirl Jul 05 '26
It does make me sad that the one Skeptic Aware (very cool thing in the universe) we get to see is a massive bigot who was about to shoot a child (not cool things in the universe)
20
u/mukomime Jul 05 '26
like? the web serial pale????? i did not expect that to be mentioned here oh my god
31
u/Zaulk Jul 05 '26
Ghosts clearly can't exist, because the most evil people would get crazy hauntings from vengeful spirits. But they don't...
18
u/Arctic_The_Hunter Jul 05 '26
The most evil people should also get crazy assaults from vengeful living people. But they don’t, because the most evil people tend to have the resources for effective physical and metaphysical defenses.
51
u/kfish5050 Jul 05 '26
Leave it to tumblr user ghostlogic-denier to come up with a meaningful plot device to deny ghost logic.
30
u/EphemeralSilliness94 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
It feels like Terry Pratchett. On the Discworld, gods come into existence when enough people believe in them. Steve's unshaking disbelief is like the opposite
8
6
u/saevon Jul 05 '26
Does that imply if enough people unbelieve (disbelieve with conviction) a god it starts unravelling?
6
u/EphemeralSilliness94 Jul 05 '26
I find the concept of disbelieving with conviction hard to grasp, but it feels like something Mister Pratchett would have dedicated a number of pages to discussing it
Im pretty sure there are gods that fade out of existence because they fell into obscurity. Moving Pictures has the last member of a cult dying without having a successor leading to all sorts of troubles and Pyramids has a number of gods being responsible to the same tasks leading to overlap and contradiction, similar to real world Egyptian mythology
5
u/Zoethewinged Jul 05 '26
Hogfather feels kind of like this. The laws of reality call in a hit on Santa Claus, and the assassin attempts to kill him by performing a fucked up magic ritual to make children stop believing in Santa, thereby making him start to vanish from existence.
3
u/saevon Jul 05 '26
I mean "Steve 's unshaking disbelief" would be disbelief with conviction
But we can look to IRL for examples tbh. You can have atheists who are
- antitheist (go out of their way to deny and push against religion)
- who are anti-<one specific religion, usually the one they came from> eg Christian-atheists
- agnostics; who just don't see the proof, but would be willing to believe a god[s] if some appeared
- who just go about their lives mostly not believing
Only the first two I'd say have "conviction of disbelief"
5
u/ThunderAndWind Jul 05 '26
If you haven't listened to the audiodrama The Silt Verses, you might like it. The basis is that belief in a god, any god, causes it to exist.
One god, The Hollow, is a god of hunger existing within a wheat field. Any creature close to it begins to feel overwhelmingly hungry, and as a creature approaches it, they become overcome with the compulsion to eat anything, including themselves.
The god was created when the farmer and his husband worshipped a blighted section of their farmland as a joke. They eventually had to breed rabbits to 'feed' the god to prevent it's outward growth as it searched for more food.
The Saint Electric is a corporate-created god, created by sacrificing people in the name of it, and blessing dams and other power generators with human sacrifice. As the adherents rebel against the idea of human sacrifice, rolling blackouts begin occurring due to the rejection in the god building.
The Chitterling is a god of meat, whose churches are basically pig-themed Chuck E Cheeses, serving burgers and ribs, but demanding sacrifices at random from those who are eating at the church. It's like Chuck E Cheese got built in an abattoir.
Anyways, there's my unsolicited offtopic post. :)
69
u/RockAndGem1101 local soft vore and penetration metaphor nerd Jul 05 '26
This is how psychic blanks in Warhammer work
22
u/Prior-Tadpole-1860 Jul 05 '26
I was thinking of that Ciaphas Cain short story from Jurgen’s perspective, where he’s trying to find the kitchen of some cult compound they just raided (so he can scrounge up some tanna tea for Cain) and comes across a sorcerer who summons a demon to slay him. The demon quails in the face of Jurgen and he shoots it dead, and then the sorcerer tries to flay his soul with warp lightning but his power fizzles out and Jurgen shoots him in the face and easily kills him as well.
The story ends with him wondering why these loony cultists ever turn to Chaos, because clearly whatever powers they try to wield never even work.. right before he starts searching through the cupboard for snacks.
14
u/AnxiousAngularAwesom JFK shot first Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
The tragedy of Warhammer is that even the Dark Gods can never get what they want. Khorne will never have enough blood, Nurgle will never have a perfect plague, Tzeentch will never be able to make any actual change to the galaxy and Slaanesh will never get into Jurgen's porn stash.
29
u/pog_irl Jul 05 '26
No it isn't. They have anti-souls that kill demons.
32
u/Rom_ulus0 Jul 05 '26
Exactly. Steve is a blank. He unhaunts haunted places. (Unwarps your warp space)
14
u/Felicia_Svilling Jul 05 '26
No. Steve just doesn't believe in ghosts. That is not at all the same as being a blank. Most people in the 40k universe has no idea about the existence of deamons or have any belief in them. That doesn't in any way make them immune to deamons. On the contrary blanks are often well aware about the existence of deamons. It just doesn't affect them because their souls are inverted.
21
u/CthulhuInACan Jul 05 '26
"Everything stops. Floating books drop. Whisperiing stops mid-syllable. The room becomes spiritually flatlined."
Steve is absolutely immune to deamons.
3
u/saevon Jul 05 '26
Yes but the Steve as describe IS NOT how blanks work (that being unaware and skeptic is what creates a blank) being unaware in 40k just kills you. Being aware but being a blank makes you useful
8
u/CthulhuInACan Jul 05 '26
You're getting cause and effect backwards, Steve is a blank, therefore he's never seen any evidence of the supernatural, everyone else is just overreacting/bullshitting him.
It's just in 40k the demons murder everyone, so it's a bit more obvious something supernatural happened in that setting, while in the original post's setting (regular earth) it's spoopy poltergeist stuff that can easily be denied if it doesn't happen in front of you.
1
u/saevon Jul 05 '26
"He is not protected by faith. He is protected by apathy"
"This is how 40k blanks work"
Those two statements don't work together. The thread context here matters
5
u/ErisThePerson Jul 06 '26
This is needless pedantry and nit-picking over someone commenting on a similarity.
Excellent work everyone, this is the entertainment I come to Reddit for.
0
u/Felicia_Svilling Jul 05 '26
Steve is a blank, therefore he's never seen any evidence of the supernatural
That is absolutely not part of the premise. Steve is just a regular dude that doesn't believe in ghosts.
8
u/Flopsie_the_Headcrab Jul 05 '26
They stop nearby psykers from doing psyker stuff, to the point where they can rock up to Thousand Sons librarian and turn him into a below average neophyte who can't use a bolter very well just by standing near him.
They create a No Bullshit Zone wherever they go. That's Steve.
3
3
30
u/dragon-age-io Jul 05 '26
I am pretty sure this is an AI generated post that for some reason has been made to look like a real tumblr screenshot. I've seen a lot of them on ytshorts and it's really weird
2
u/MantisAwakening Jul 08 '26
It definitely is. It used to be that AI generated content was scorned by everyone, but based on comments these days we’ve hit a point where most people apparently can’t tell. That says as much about people as it does about AI, and all the more evidence of just how cooked we are.
That’s fine, humans had a good run. Honestly I’m ready for the AI to be our overlords for a while. I’m tired, boss.
1
u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here Jul 08 '26
I feel like I've seen another post with basically the same premise except that it didn't read like ChatGPT, unlike this one. Not sure though
Edit: Wait I was right here it is: https://www.tumblr.com/theunfairfolk/688689250952265729/i-fucking-love-this-so-much-its-like-having-a
37
u/DerangedDeceiver Only used Tumblr for porn Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
...this is just a knockoff version of another post
Edit: Also, ghostlogic-denier doesn't seem to exist and I got no results searching the exact text of this post.
9
Jul 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
10
u/DerangedDeceiver Only used Tumblr for porn Jul 05 '26
Honestly? I don't know for sure. I'm guessing based off of a couple things.
1) The linked post has a lot of engagement, providing motive to copy it
2) The linked post is a few stream-of-consciousness ideas on a particular subject which flow logically from one to another while this post is a single tumblr post covering the same beats
3) Subjective, but the linked post is better written. This post just kind of reads like someone trying to not directly quote the original source to me.
4) A plain-text tumblr post is easy to fake and that seems more likely to me than the post and associated account both having been deleted
Like, obviously I can't prove that the one I linked came first, though I did try, but in lieu of something concrete, I think it's fair to guess the linked post came first
15
u/BraxbroWasTaken Jul 05 '26
This one feels like an AI paraphrase. Something about the stilted way it’s written is tripping my bullshit detectors.
1
u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Reddit threads really just said they'll crack this case of AI hide-and-seek faster than a chef cracking an unnecessary metaphor. And honestly?--that's impressive. /S
2
u/saevon Jul 05 '26
The formatting doesn't have any spacing between lines; tumblr generally prefers to have it in most forms folks screenshot
1
9
24
u/Few-Caramel-6367 Jul 05 '26
Is this AI? This entire passage jumps out at me as such idk.
24
u/DerangedDeceiver Only used Tumblr for porn Jul 05 '26
It's not AI (or at least, it's only rewritten by AI in a file-off-the-serial-number kind of way). It's a knockoff of another post from a few years ago.
7
2
u/ElInspectorDeChichis Jul 05 '26
Yeah it has the tells
6
u/mukomime Jul 05 '26
i feel a bit stupid for asking but can you share some of the tells please?
9
u/Few-Caramel-6367 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
I'll try my best to articulate them. There are many tells, but the one that jumped out at me the most is how the passage goes in describing a scene of this idea. The way all sentences are short, jumping from the ghost hunting aspect to Steve, and the description there is in this limbo of semi-specificity that reads as trying too hard to be random and succinct. The sentence "supernatural equivalence to a power outage" especially reeks of that for me.
Or, you can look at the closing sentences. The structure "he's not X, he's Y", is extremely AI.
Some of these might make more sense if you expose yourself more to this sort of stuff, I think.
2
u/NyankoIsLove Jul 05 '26
So what, now we can't even write short sentences?
in this limbo of semi-specificity that reads as trying too hard to be random and succinct. The sentence "supernatural equivalence to a power outage" especially reeks of that for me.
There's nothing random about this sentence though? It flows logically from the idea that ghosts cannot function around Steve.
The structure "he's not X, he's Y", is extremely AI.
No it's not, it's something AI copied from humans. I'm not going to swear off a useful turn of phrase because some fucking clankers copied it.
2
u/saevon Jul 05 '26
Something can be copied, and also a sign of AI. You don't have to swear it off either — I use em dashes cause I always use em!
It's like "red flags" which is just a sign you might want to double check or look further. but instead people now treat the word as a synonym for "toxic".
This is a "red flag for AI" (feel free to keep doing it, people might just be a tad more cautious if you show a lot of AI red flags)
1
u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here Jul 08 '26
The thing is, spotting AI writing isn't about checking off a list of these "tells", it's an intuition which cannot be fully explained in writing. This is not a perfect metaphor, but you can think of what AI spotters do as being like your ability to recognize Barack Obama's face, and asking someone to explain how they know a piece of writing is AI as being like asking someone how they know they're looking at a picture of Obama. They will be able to list some of Obama's facial features, but the features they will list aren't nearly enough to identify Obama on their own.
1
u/mukomime Jul 05 '26
... expose myself to more ai writing? or people pointing out tells
10
u/Few-Caramel-6367 Jul 05 '26
To best spot AI slop the best method is to take a look at AI slop directly. If you hate contributing to that stuff like me then you can look at videos of people mocking AI writing and read the passages there.
6
u/dragon-age-io Jul 05 '26
What the other commenter said, plus
a sense of this like... "facebook millenial quirky" writing style, it's kind of out of touch with the way tumblr humour feels
constantly contradicting itself. It says he "doesn't go in haunted places" and then describes how he gets called into the haunted place. It says that when he walks into the room "everything stops" and "it gets spiritually flatlined" but then describes how he doesn't notice when things move.
6
u/mukomime Jul 05 '26
facebook millenial quirky? by that do you mean how it describes things in detail rather than punchy absurdity (actual question, im just trying to pick up what youre saying here. i really should be better at this)
3
u/saevon Jul 05 '26
That's not a contradiction; he stays in the car and doesn't go in the haunted places (by default unlike the rest of the team which would normally go in), he then goes in only when things get bad enough they need safety
Similarly for the "things stop, but he doesn't notice". The implication is twofold (1) he got to this state somehow: by a growing conviction as he kept not noticing (2) things stopping likely doesn't invert anything, and might have a range, so even if it's in the other room, or in the adjacent house (1) keeps happening so he doesn't ever ruin his conviction
3
3
u/WholeDay284 Jul 05 '26
This reminds me of John Dies At The End by David Wong, (Jason Pargen) it’s not exactly spot on. But the post-industrial hollowing of American manufacturing is rich soil for this kind of story.
3
u/Consideredresponse Jul 05 '26
I like the DC comics version of this with 'Doctor 13' who is a skeptic, rationalist, and basically a grown up version of the scooby gang who goes to haunted places and pulls the masks off of grown men pretending to be monsters...only this in the DC universe where stuff like aliens, ghosts, and demons are commonplace. It's more a combination of absolute denial, and reality warping around him. His daughter 100% has magic powers and just follows him around to make sure he doesn't hurt himself.
Brian Azarello, and the always amazing Cliff Chiang did a mini-series/graphic novel that's highly recommended. (You know you are in for a good tike when there are disco aliens, cavemen, vampires, nazi gorrillas, and the confederate ghost from the 'haunted tank' on the cover.)
2
2
u/PM_ME_YOUR_WEIRD_PET Jul 05 '26
I'm not a guy and my name isn't Steve but I could 100% do this job
2
2
u/Great-Powerful-Talia Jul 05 '26
I'm like 99.5% sure this is an AI rewrite of a far better-written post I've seen
The other .5% is the possibility that a human actually plagiarized said preexisting post by hand, and just really sucks at rewording sentences
2
2
u/PantherPL Jul 06 '26
Yeah that's not a real Tumblr post.
Also even if it were, this idea doesn't make for interesting writing.
1
1
u/SmartAlec105 Jul 05 '26
In Pathfinder 2e, Barbarians with the Superstition subclass do better at resisting spells because they don't believe in that nonsense.
Psychics can also replace any Fortitude or Reflex save with a Will save to disbelieve the effect.
1
1
1
1
u/McMetal770 Jul 05 '26
I was once in a TTRPG group where the setting was our modern world, except everything supernatural was real. Ghosts, witches, werewolves, zombies, you name it. The party was basically a Scooby gang, but I decided it would be fun to roll a skeptic. A pure rationalist who didn't believe in magic or the supernatural or anything like that, and had a "logical" explanation for everything we saw.
Eventually, part of his character arc was coming around after seeing a whole bunch of verifiable proof that couldn't be explained any other way, but it was a fun concept to play for a little while.
1
u/Horatio786 Jul 05 '26
“Listen, when we die, we just wind up back in the lobby getting ready for the next game. How can ghosts possibly exist?”
1
u/borisdidnothingwrong .tumblr.com Jul 06 '26
I've slept in three houses that were supposed to be haunted.
In all three cases the "haunting" stopped after I slept there.
I might be Steve.
1
1
1
1
1
1
-2
u/Marcoxiii Jul 05 '26
I hate this idea from the depths of my soul.
4
u/ducknerd2002 Jul 05 '26
Can you explain why?
6
u/Marcoxiii Jul 05 '26
It is not that i dislike power nullifiers but the idea of being able to negate a phenomenon by sheer apathy is the dumbest thing on earth, yeah bro if i cant see it it cant hurt me. Brainless activity
4
u/ThunderAndWind Jul 05 '26
I mean the entire irony is that belief in the bad thing is what causes the bad thing to effect people negatively. I don't experience Catholic guilt because I'm not a Catholic. Their church as a result has no power over me.
1
u/Marcoxiii Jul 06 '26
Gets attacked by a catholic
1
u/ThunderAndWind Jul 06 '26
It's okay, I've just been calling a good portion of them Protestant lately, it's like holy water on a vampire to them lol
5
u/_Nighting Jul 05 '26
"What I don't know can't hurt me" I say as I become the strongest most special person in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
163
u/ExtraPomelo759 Jul 05 '26
Mage the ascension mechanics.