Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

This is so well put I am stunned

— Cecilia Tan, from Uncanny Magainze 18 (via violetephemera)

Geez, it must be horrible to work for a boss like that…

imagine Bob Ross painting in the style of Hieronymus Bosch

“this little demon down here is kind of lonely, let’s give him some happy little friends. little demon party.”

#Hieronymus Bob

It’s your tortured human soul, you can choose how many blackbirds you want to fly out of his anus. Just as many as you think it needs.

there really is a tumblr discourse rhetoric hole that people, and disturbingly a large amount of very young people, jump down into. a place where people cease to be real people, concepts cease to have real life applications, and reality itself warps away into a mess of rhetoric and useless words thrown around for no particular reason other than it equates to status in a virtual reality to do this.

internet activism and social justice are good, necessary things; but the moment that you stop taking into consideration the offline effects and applications of your speech and behavior, when you stop valuing the off-tumblr goals for that activism, when you stop seeing things and people as real but as only concepts or tools in a debate or rhetoric, your activism not only ceases to be meaningful; it becomes a dangerous thing in itself.

activism is not a performance. it’s not a manipulation of words to see how many people you can get to agree with you and/or applaud you. it is a practical effort for positive change. if you can’t remember that, you’re not doing activism. 

From the May 16. 1955 story VICTIMS AT YUCCA FLAT—Mannequins show varied effects of atomic blast. According to LIFE, “A day after the 44th nuclear test explosion in the U.S. rent the still Nevada air last week, observers cautiously inspected department store mannequins which were poised disheveled but still haughty on the sands and in the homes of Yucca Flat. The figures were residents of an entire million-dollar village built to test the effects of an atomic blast on everything from houses to clothes to canned soup.” (Loomis Dean—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #1950s #Nevada #mannequins

My first thought seeing this was of all the mannequins in Fallout. I wonder if Bethesda took some inspiration from the Yucca Flat tests.

Bruh

Когда не хотел потревожить кота

“When you don’t want to disturb the cat”

A neural network invents diseases you don’t want to get

Science fiction writers and producers of TV medical dramas: have you ever needed to invent a serious-sounding disease whose symptoms, progression, and cure you can utterly control? Artificial intelligence can help!

Blog reader Kate very kindly compiled a list of 3,765 common names for conditions from this site, and I gave them to an open-source machine learning algorithm called a recursive neural network, which learns to imitate its training data. Given enough examples of real-world diseases, a neural network should be able to invent enough plausible-sounding syndromes to satisfy any hypochondriac.

Early on in the training, the neural network was producing what were identifiably diseases, but probably wouldn’t fly in a medical drama. “I’m so sorry. You have… poison poison tishues.”

As the training got going, the neural network began to learn to replicate more of the real diseases - lots of ventricular syndromes, for example. But the made-up diseases still weren’t too convincing, and maybe even didn’t sound like diseases at all. (Except for RIP Syndrome. I’d take that one seriously)

The neural network eventually progressed to a stage where it was producing diseases of a few basic varieties :

First kind of disease: This isn’t really a disease. The neural network has just kind of named a body part, or a couple of really generic disease-y words. Pro writer tip: don’t use these in your medical drama.

Second kind of disease: This disease doesn’t exist, and sounds reasonably convincing to me, though it would probably have a different effect on someone with actual medical training.

Third kind of disease: Sounds both highly implausible but also pretty darn serious. I’d definitely get that looked at.

Diseases of the fourth kind: These are the, um, reproductive-related diseases. And those that contain unprintable four-letter words. They usually sound ludicrous, and entirely uncomfortable, all at the same time. And I really don’t want to print them here. However! If you are in possession of a sense of humor and an email address, you can let me know here and I’ll send them to you.

I have every last one of these diseases

Leukopenia is a real disease!

This also serves as a great list of potential band names. (I have no musical talent, but I am ready to name my terrible band Fungle Pain. Or Cat Heat if we are terrible girl band)

Also, I don’t play Sims anymore, but if I did, I’d be nabbing that Tossy Blanter as a legacy founder name.