Astral Codex Ten

Santa Claus

4 min read

Santa Claus

Article

Santa Claus is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 13, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “I blame Santa Claus”; “‘Some topics, like Santa Claus and Hermione Granger’”; “whether Santa Claus was justified in punching Arius”. It most often appears alongside Christmas, Elon Musk, 9-11.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 13, 2022
  • Last seen: October 10, 2022

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.

Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
April 13, 2022 · Original source
The study found effects at 500 mg glycyrrhizin per week, which corresponds to eating about two or three sticks of licorice per day for an entire pregnancy. Who does this? Finns, that’s who. All of these studies have been done in Finland, which is apparently a country of disgusting licorice junkies. I blame Santa Claus.
A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows
May 30, 2022 · Original source
No mortal can truly understand the mind of DALL-E, but I think that either it’s more confident in who Herschel is than who Brahe is, anchoring it to “stained glass depictions of specific historical figures who are known not to be Santa Claus”. Or possibly “Tycho Brahe” sounds kind of fanciful, like the sort of person who might secretly be Santa Claus if you dig a little deeper, but “William Herschel” sounds like a respectable English historical figure who has far too Jewish a name to be Santa.
If you give it a subject that sounds like the kind of thing depicted in medieval stained glass, it will depict it in a medieval way. If you give it a subject that sounds more modern, it will depict it in a more modern way. Some topics, like Santa Claus and Hermione Granger, form vast black-hole-like attractor basins in conceptual space, dragging in anything even remotely related, and turning the scene into Christmas decorations or Harry Potter fan art.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
3: The third big controversy in the comments was whether Santa Claus was justified in punching Arius.
First things first - this story is probably fake. The first reference to St. Nicholas hitting someone at a council was a thousand years after his death. The story says he lightly slapped (rather than punched) an Arian heretic (rather than Arius himself). So this false-to-begin-with tale grew in the telling - but we’re talking holiday myths, so fine, let’s say Santa Claus punched Arius. Valjean writes:
Inline links: writes
I have had weird feelings reading this. I am from Russia, and this precisely what has happened here (without focus groups though). In soviet era, Christmas was banned as too religious, and replaced with New Year celebrations (in the night from 31st of December to the 1st of January), which are as massive a holiday as Christmas is in the US. For New Year, families come together, decorate a spruce tree (which is called a New Year Tree rather than a Christmas Tree), and give each other presents which are supposedly distributed by Grandfather Frost, who is totally not Santa Claus despite being an old jolly bearded guy giving the presents. (He has evolved from the East Slavic mythology rather Cristianity, so while he was briefly banned, the soviet government was much less strict about that, as, in accordance with the post, they feared Pagan opposition much less than Christian opposition). And Christmas in Russia is mostly celebrated by people who are indeed religious.