shoutout the community run wikipedia mastodon account. Pretty funny to see the official Wikipedia account respond to peoples hornyposts lol

https://wikis.world/@wikipedia

Oh dang this is on Mastodon? Gotta follow this account now.

My favorite of all time is the beautiful simplicity of the first version of the article "YouTube", by Gary, Christmas 2005:

YouTube is a website for hosting videos. It is similar to Flickr, except instead of photos, it is for videos.

Clicking on newer revision lets you walk through time.

Love me some 1792

We call a bicycle that you've had for so long that out has no original components (and perhaps a frame swap along the way) Trigger's broom after the only fools and horses sketch

Now we need to take the original phrases and rebuild the first version of the article elsewhere. Then we will ask ourselves which one is the same ship of theseus article

There is plenty of porn on Wikimedia Commons.

You can also check the diffs to see exactly what changed! Seeing how major articles progressed (especially ones that started in the early 2000s or when the subject was only marginally notable) is a lot of fun.

And honestly, if you're doing that and see someone who put in a lot of good, thankless work, dropping a "thanks" on their talk page even years later (or even just using the 'Thank' button) would probably make their day.

Is the title a phrase?

Where does it come from?

Horny users providing images for body parts and whatever.

In the game Nier Automata there is an NPC in the main settlement who talks about how he won't replace his leg since it's the only piece of him that hasn't been replaced. He feels that if he replaces his legs he would no longer be the same person. This made me think of that.

😂

Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him.

He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs—you know the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face.

On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand-new handle for your ax.

The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the spring when, on one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade.

Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand-new head for your ax. As soon as you get home, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded earlier. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed-trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same ax that beheaded me!”

Is he right?

Edit: You can even watch this (slightly altered) quote in live action!

Read and watch John Dies at The End. You simply must.

John Dies At The End by Jason Pargin. My favorite book series of all time, no contest. That’s how the book starts.

The fifth book, There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs, is releasing this year.

Well someone has to show what a cumshot does look like.

One related to this I always wondered.

A man and woman marry, they grow old, the woman dies.

The man, marries a new.hotmyoung wife, 40 years his junior.

The man dies.

The woman remarries, again, a much younger man.

She dies, the man remarries.

And so on.

What is the family dynamic here? Is it all one long chain of the same couple?

What if we have kids involved. Not like, imbreeding, but the same process starting a generation removed. Are the many times removed couples step parents or step inlaws or anything to the generstion down couples?

Also kidnapped Helen of Sparta when she was prepubescent so that he, already in his later years, could groom her and forcibly wed her. Also left the person who gave him the thread, who betrayed her entire family to save him, on an island in the middle of nowhere —as far as he was aware, left to die— without even giving her the decency of a goodbye, according to some sources. And no, don't come back at me with "Dionysus told him to do it in a dream". First, not in all sources, and second, do you make it a habit of immediately doing whatever your drunken night terror tells you to do, as long as you dreamed it, when the life of your paramour is on the line?

No, fuck Theseus. Should have been left to rot with his ass glued to a chair in hell.

"Ship of Theseus"? It's in reference to a ship which was used to row out to Delos every year for a ritual, but it was very specific that it had to be the same boat that Theseus used. So, as the pieces broke and had to be replaced, eventually every original plank, nail and line would have been replaced. After all of those replacements, which occurred one at a time over decades, is it still the same boat? If you collected all of the old replaced bits of the original boat, then put them together into a boat, would that be the original ship? At what point does it stop being the "ship of Theseus"?

If you're talking about History repeating itself, the joke is that the wikipedia page is, itself, now a ship of Theseus. It has the same URL (we call it the same thing), but none of the original remains. Is it still the same article?

I worked for a company whose ancient accounting system could be described as Software of Theseus.

Its important to mention that the leg is also robotic. They're all androids.

Edit: It's not that important, I should've said "Just to clarify" instead.

If your parent dies and your step parent remarries there isn’t a familial line involved in my experience. Like their new partner doesn’t become your quarter parent.

If the guy has a new head is it the same guy though?? 🤔

i'm sorry I had to have a computer think for me but this is what it gave me

This is a delightfully strange thought experiment, and I see exactly why you’re asking. Let’s break it down, first without kids, then with kids weaving through the chain.

1. The basic chain: no kids

You’ve got a sequence like this:

· M₁ marries W₁. W₁ dies.
· M₁ marries W₂ (40 years younger). M₁ dies.
· W₂ marries M₂ (much younger). W₂ dies.
· M₂ marries W₃ (much younger). M₂ dies.
· … and so on, alternating.

Is it all one long chain of the same couple?
No, it’s a relay race of spouses. Each new marriage involves a completely new person who wasn’t part of the original couple. What links them is that they “inherit” the previous widowed partner, but the couple itself is always a fresh pairing. You could call it a serial marital lineage, not a single couple.

The relationship between any two non-adjacent people in the chain is simply “my late spouse’s later spouse’s later spouse…”. There’s no standard family term for it. M₁ and M₂, for example, are co-husbands of W₂ (sequentially), but they have no legal or blood relation to each other.

1. Introducing kids into the chain

Now imagine each marriage in the chain produces children. Crucially, no inbreeding — everyone marries outside the chain. For simplicity:

· M₁ + W₁ have children A (Generation 1).
· W₁ dies. M₁ + W₂ have children B (half-siblings of A, sharing father M₁).
· M₁ dies. W₂ + M₂ have children C (half-siblings of B, sharing mother W₂).
· W₂ dies. M₂ + W₃ have children D.
· and so on.

Let’s map the relationships to the first set of kids A, and then “down the chain”.

For child A (from the original couple):

· W₂ was A’s stepmother (father’s second wife). That relationship remains even after M₁’s death, though legal ties often fade without adoption.
· B are A’s half-siblings (same dad).
· C are A’s half-sibling’s half-siblings — no blood relation to A. They are the children of A’s former stepmother with her new husband. You could say they are A’s ex-step-siblings or step-half-siblings — no standard term, just a biographical link.
· M₂ is A’s stepmother’s new husband. Not a stepfather, because he didn’t marry A’s parent. In some extended family trees he might be called a step-stepfather (jokingly).
· W₃ is even more remote: stepmother’s new husband’s new wife. That’s a step-step-stepmother — purely biographical.

What about “generation down” couples?

Suppose A marries someone X, completely outside the chain.
Is M₂ (W₂’s second husband) a step-parent-in-law to the couple A + X?
No. A’s in-laws are X’s parents. M₂ is not A’s parent, nor X’s. The link is too tenuous: “my father’s widow’s new husband”. That might be a quirky mention at a wedding but has zero legal or customary standing.

Now suppose B (child of M₁ & W₂) marries Y. B’s mother W₂ is still alive? If W₂ is still alive when B marries, M₂ would be B’s stepfather, because W₂ married M₂ while B was a child (possibly). In that case, M₂ is a step-parent to B, and he would be the stepfather-in-law to Y. That’s a standard relationship, as long as the step-relationship formed during B’s childhood or adulthood through marriage.

So the “many times removed” couples only become step-parents or in-laws to the specific children whose parent they married. The further the chain moves from those children, the more the role evaporates into “person my ancestor’s widow later married”.

1. A concrete multi-generation picture

Let’s make it visual with ages so you can see the strange generational overlaps:

· M₁ born 1900, W₁ 1900 → kid A born 1925.
· W₁ dies, M₁ (now 50) marries W₂ born 1940 (40 yrs younger) → kid B born 1950.
· M₁ dies, W₂ (now 30) marries M₂ born 1970 (40 yrs younger) → kid C born 1980.
· W₂ dies, M₂ (now 40) marries W₃ born 2000 (40 yrs younger) → kid D born 2010.

Now:

· A is 25 years older than W₂ (her stepmother is younger than her).
· B (born 1950) is 20 years older than stepfather M₂ (born 1970).
· C (born 1980) is 20 years older than stepmother W₃ (born 2000).

When C marries someone Z in, say, 2010, his stepmother W₃ is only 10 years old at the wedding — a bizarre but legally valid stepmother-in-law to Z, because M₂ married W₃ while C was a child or adult. This can create intergenerational absurdities where step-parents are younger than stepchildren, but the titles stick.

1. Answering your core questions directly

What is the family dynamic here?
A cascading string of remarriages that creates a web of half-siblings and step-relations across wildly mismatched generations. It’s not one couple but a lineage of conjugal partnerships that “hand off” younger spouses.

Is it all one long chain of the same couple?
No. It’s a chain of different couples, each linked by one common member with the previous couple.

What if we start a generation removed? Are the many-times-removed couples step-parents or step-in-laws to the generation-down couples?
It depends which “generation-down” couple you mean:

· For the children whose actual parent is in the later link of the chain, yes — the spouse of that parent is a step-parent, and thus an in-law to those children’s spouses.
· For children further up the chain (e.g., A’s children, grandchildren of M₁), the later spouses are at most step-step-grandparents — a descriptive curiosity with no real familial weight.
· The chain dissolves into “my ancestor’s widow’s later spouse’s later spouse” which no culture formalises.

In short: you’ve invented a marriage matryoshka where each generation’s step-relations nest inside the next, but the titles dilute quickly. Delightfully, it remains entirely legal and non-incestuous as long as no one marries a blood relative.

I should really read that if it's the first part. I knew it existed but nothing else till now. Do enjoy the Dune novels for their philosophy bits (mostly as intro to a chapter as an idea but you can see the ideas used in the actual story sometimes or perhaps all the time and I missed some)

😐👍

But is it the same article?

It's a shame so many people don't want to raise their quarter children. Deadbeats.

Yeah, the imheritance part feels wacky. Especialy, as I understand, spouses do not pay inheritance taxes. So you could just, keep passing things on endlessly.

You really should, Jason Pargin just in general is a blast to read. All of his stuff is top drawer. The ship of Theseus theme does tie into the story in a heavy way, but that’s all I will say about it. Of his books the John Dies series are my favorites just because it opened me up to the gonzo Lovecraftian genre for the first time and satisfied a longing for the type of story telling I had always craved in my bones but had never known existed before that book and has lead me to many more great books in the genre (fucking read Skullcrack City, holy shit, it’s so good!) but the Zoe Ashe books are just as good and hit that same nail but with a Blade Runner on meth kind of feel, and I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a standalone story in a real world setting that still manages to go so god damned far off the rails.

Also, the movie is a lot of fun, but watch it before reading the book or you’ll hate it. It doesn’t spoil anything from the book, they only managed to get maybe 15% of the story in there, and it doesn’t at all touch on the core theme of the book and the scenes and setup are not the same as what you get from the book, but it was made with genuine love of the source material and they did the best they could with what they had to work with.

AI;DR

I’d say yes, you’d need a lot more overhaul to hit ship of Theseus levels, I think a head replacement counts as a simple repair, you know, like changing out an air filter.

If I wanted to read dice rolled sentences I would do it myself. The computer does not think for you, stop posting slop.

Well that was about one small village worth of water, thank you.

If we wanted an AI opinion, we could ask it ourselves. Don't share that garbage.

He's animated by the same evil entity

If each new pair had a child, you'd have a long chain of siblings. Eventually a child would have a sibling older than their parents.

That's up to local law. Inheritance probably flows through the chain, children would probably need to be adopted to formalise their relationship with whatever adults, presuming a couple of steps happen quick enough to leave them with no remaining biological parents whole still children

Were there children at every step they'd probably be a chain of half siblings rather than all be half siblings of all

Bicycles are very much their frame. They aren't analogous to a wooden ship whose wood is replaced piece by piece over time

if you collected all the old

The old parts were broken or rotten, you can't make a ship out of them

You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same ax that beheaded me!”

Is he right?

Does that grant it some additional symbolic power over him? Then, yes, I'll gladly concede the point and chop him down again with "the same ax".

Can we justify creating a separate "Original Ship of Theseus" page for demonstration value?

Nah, for that kind of plot armor you’d probably want to blast something like Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler or Home Sweet Home by Motley Crue.

That's not the original clap gif!

Or is it, but just modified?

It is simultaneously the same axe and not the same axe. In a strict material sense, the final axe bears no relationship to the OG axe but in the figurative sense it is the same axe.

We must accept this paradox in the same way we must accept that our bodies are in a constant state of renewal and the person we were seven years ago has been completely renewed at a cellular level (maybe bones are exempt but brain cells don't last forever). We tend to think of ourselves as a continuous process and our identity persists and is stable. On the other hand, it's easy to argue that we are not the same person as we were seven years ago, we have grown and changed physically and spiritually. Only our identity documents contend that our identity is static. We seek stability and certainty everywhere and find it nowhere. If we can accept the ever changing nature of the universe at large we can find solace in constant change because that's how it will always be.