Tasmanian Devil

Article

Tasmanian Devil is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 04, 2023 and January 08, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “The second was a Tasmanian Devil from the 1990s”; “there are at least three immortal mammals, although the third one is also a Tasmanian Devil”. It most often appears alongside Bob, Ramchandra, Texas.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 04, 2023
  • Last seen: January 08, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

January 04, 2023 · Original source
“Not species. Two individuals. The first was a dog who lived somewhere in North America six thousand years ago. It got cancer. The cancer mutated. The mutant cancer became a sexually transmitted disease. It spread from dog to dog. It’s still around today, “canine transmissible venereal tumor”. Still made of living cells from that one original dog. That’s immortality, of a sort. The second was a Tasmanian Devil from the 1990s. Same story, now it’s Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease. It’s spread to 95% of the Devil population and will live on as long as the species itself.”
“It won’t be a facial tumor. Facial tumors work for Tasmanian Devils, but if a human got a facial tumor they’d notice immediately and get a doctor to remove it. We’re thinking cardiac rhabdomyoma. Heart tumor. Pretty benign, lots of people never even know they have one. And nobody wants to operate on those, open heart surgery is a nightmare. So it’ll sit there in the heart, occasionally bud off cells that go to the genitals, get sexually transmitted, and swim to the heart of the new host.”
January 08, 2023 · Original source
4: Comment of the week: Lars Doucet tries to defend the claim in the recent Bay Area House Party post that the moneychangers in the Temple were a housing problem (see also David Manheim and Robert Jones’ replies, and the threads underneath them). Also, Adam Strandberg corrects me: there are at least three immortal mammals, although the third one is also a Tasmanian Devil.