The Queen of the Superficial

In case you’re wondering this is a synopsis of Sarah Gailey’s delightful novel “American Hippo” which is actually two novellas squished together but THAT’S OKAY WE DON’T CARE IT HAS HIPPO COWBOYS AND A NONBINARY ROMANCE

also the hippo thing was a real proposal in history that thankfully went nowhere.

i feel like it’s important to note this is the cover

 A GIFT OF VIOLENT, UNEXPECTED GLEE

What does it take to teach a bee to use tools? A little time, a good teacher and an enticing incentive. Read more here: http://to.pbs.org/2mpRUAz

Credit: O.J. Loukola et al., Science (2017)

@clockworkrobotic

“Friend? Friend push ball? I push ball. I do good.”

Bees.  Smart enough to push a ball, not smart enough to not be fooled by a stick masquerading as a bee. 

maybe they know and they’re just being polite

Other dimensional beings are undoubtedly amazed at what human beings will accept as human beings too. “But it’s just a stick with a person on it.”

#excuse me neil but what the FUCK was that #thanks for that terrifying thought (nooby-banana)

NEIL WHY. WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT.

This turns up on my dashboard. And I read it and am impressed that someone writes exactly the post that I’d write, without actually reading the name of the person who posted it.

And then I’m puzzled at all the Neil Why’s, and realise that this was me in the Wayback Long-ago.

At least I’m consistent.

And, I should point out, we are no closer to being able to spot the extra-dimensional stick “people” who move unobserved among us.

State of mind: Gina Linetti

skin color ref because some of yall non-black poc and whites keep fucking up as if yall don’t know there’s other shades of brown when u racebend for woke points or something 

(non-black artists please reblog)

Please reblog regardless of your race/ethnicity.

heres a chart I made for myself showing diffrent undertones and how that affects the skin if anyone’s intrested

Use this to make a skin palette in your art program!

Also! This photography project by Angélica Dass has thousands of photos of people, with a Pantone color assigned to each! It’s very helpful as a resource !!

And some examples of the project!

character: *has frost powers* me: your backstory is family related trauma isn’t it

what is frozone’s family trauma

His wife put away his super suit

How it do be

listen supernatural is bad and the vast majority of us are aware that it is bad and love it anyway because it is just specifically the right kind of bad. but. unironically, i sometimes get Upset because a lot of concepts and ideas and lore spn uses/creates are fucking COOL but their coolness cannot be explored properly because of per season yu-gi-oh stakes. like, just off the top of my head:

you feel me?

In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”

I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help

Having been to several talks on modern ai I can confirm

I always think of this tweet when I see people praising machine learning and the new kinds of AI as a panacea.

spwinkles

“May you have a life of safety and peace”, said the witch, cursing the bloodthirsty warrior.

The words of the slain hold tremendous power.

It’s why any sensible warrior is a master of swift endings. Such as an arrow through the eye or a clean separation of head from shoulders. In a pinch, a slit throat will do. Though it really is best to avoid giving your enemy the chance to make even garbled curses out of their last bloody breaths. For even those without the slightest touch of magic have been known to make a curse stick if it’s uttered on the cold brink of death.

Eindred the Bloody collected curses in the same way that other warriors collected scars. Even in the wild chaos of battle, he was known to take a knee, pressing his ear to a felled enemy’s laboring lips.

May your every loved one die screaming in pain.

I hope you die with your eyes stabbed out and your heart in your hands.

You will never know happiness.

Your existence will be suffering.

May your greatest enemy rise from the grave and never leave you alone.

The last was his most recent curse, and Eindred wondered if it meant some great murdered brute was tracing his steps, waiting to catch him while he slept.

Eindred crossed the peninsula with a company of barbaric warriors, gaining a new curse from every enemy he felled. Not all of them would stick, he knew. But some undoubtedly would. And he would deserve every one.

Others in his company treated him with to wary, sidelong glances, because surely it was dangerous to travel with one so cursed as he. But Eindred was a force in battle, relentless and unstoppable as an icy winter gale, and so they swallowed their complaints, and contented themselves with leaving a wide berth on either side of his scarred, patchwork arms.

Eindred was marching at the back of the company when they came upon the village. It was a collection of squat, wooden homes tucked beneath a snow capped mountainside. From thatched rooftops, wisps of smoke from cooking fires rose, painting the blue sky in pale, meandering strokes. 

This company tended to leave such settlements alone, and Eindred was glad for it. No warriors would be found in tiny mountainside villages, and though he might live to fight, he had no interest in wholesale slaughter. 

This time, however, the company leader - a silent, brutish man, held up a hand.

Their company was running low on food, it turned out, and even from a distance, the warriors could see the village’s sheep - a trail of white spots on the green hillside.

Eindred was disappointed when, ultimately, violence erupted in the quiet village, though he did not lay down his thick handled blade.

The shepherd boy had refused to give up his master’s sheep, and when he shouted, a blacksmith had burst from his home, wielding a great hammer in his hand. 

The battle was short. 

When all was done, four lay dead. The shepherd, the blacksmith, and two young men who’d foolishly taken up crude wooden spears. The rest of the villagers huddled, terrified in their homes. The warriors expected to slaughter the sheep with no further trouble, but when they turned back to the field, an individual stood blocking their way.

His hair was dark - as the hair in these parts tended to be, and his face was sharp, both nose and cheeks splattered with freckles. Golden eyes beheld the warriors, and he watched them with a steady, measured gaze. Without the slightest hint of fear, he stood before them, his simple robe fluttering in the icy mountain’s breath, and said: “These are simple people. They have little in way of money or goods. It wasn’t for nothing that the shepherd, blacksmith, and teenagers died. They need these sheep. And I cannot allow you to take them.”

The other warriors in the company laughed at the young man’s foolishness - for that was what it looked like to them. Eindred did not laugh, however. Though the stranger’s voice was light, the air stirred around him. 

It was rare to encounter one who commanded magics. Rare - but not impossible. And so Eindred alone was unsurprised when the young man turned his golden eyes to the heavens and summoned great branches of lightning which cleaved the skies above them. The world erupted and the men around Eindred screamed.

Eindred, who’d expected something like this, had already begun running. 

Later, he would think it odd that the witch hadn’t bothered to move. But in the heat of battle, with lightning splitting the field at his back, Eindred’s attention had narrowed to the rough point of his blade - and then, the crimson place where it pierced the witch’s chest.

The skies silenced as Eindred pulled the wet, crimson blade free of its target. 

It took just a moment for the witch to fall, but in that single, infinite moment, Eindred was subjected to the full weight of that golden gaze.

Legs folding beneath him, the witch crumpled, collapsing back onto the wild, wet grass. Eindred knelt beside him, grimly eager to hear the curse and be done with it. Surely a curse at the lips of one so powerful as this would finally bring an end to things? 

To take one’s own life was an unspeakably shameful end for a warrior such as he. But a curse? Well, one couldn’t help how the wrong curse might speed things along.

The witch’s black hair was damp from the dew in the grass, and when he turned, it stuck to the side of his face and neck. His mouth opened and closed. Holding his breath, Eindred leaned in.

“-my hut…it’s just past…the next hill over,” the witch whispered. “In it, I keep medicines and herbs. For the villagers. And travelers who pass.”

Eindred shook his head. He didn’t understand.

Impossibly, the witch smiled. When he lifted a hand, Eindred twitched, expecting to be struck.

The witch’s bloodied finger, however, did nothing more than tap his chest. And then, in a wet, rattling breath, the witch, with his great power finally spoke his curse. 

“May you live a life of safety and peace.” 

Eindred sat, his thick, scarred knuckles braced in the dirt as the cold mountain wind whistled down the hillside at his back.

“What?” he whispered. 

But the young man’s golden eyes were blank and empty, and the other warriors lay dead in the field. Only the relentless wind snapped and whistled in answer.

Eindred left.

Within a month, he’d joined up with another company. And it soon became clear  the witch’s death rattle had been a curse of great power indeed. For wherever Eindred traveled, peace inevitably followed. Enemy warriors surrendered and when they didn’t, members within Eindred’s own company had sudden changes of heart. As for Eindred himself, not a single person would raise a blade against him, and Eindred had never been the sort who could raise his own blade against one who had no wish to fight.

And so for another month he wandered, hapless, without even the dark purpose of collecting curses which had driven him for the last several years. 

He’d been raised with a sword in his hand, brought up knowing full well that his job in life would be to cut short the existence of any who stood against him. Not even thirty, and his soul was exhausted, worn ragged by such an life. And so, he’d sought a way out if it. Eindred had accumulated a terrifying number of curses - curses which would surely have felled lesser men than he. Before everything had gone wrong in the tiny village, he’d been sure it was only a matter of time before they overcame him.

But now, the witch’s single curse had overpowered them all.

Eindred was safer than he’d ever been in his life. He’d never known such a quiet, terrible peace. 

After another month, he returned to the mountainside village. He didn’t have any good reason to return - other than perhaps the distant hope that a villager’s rage might be enough to overcome the curse. As he climbed the grassy hillside, he resigned himself to potential death by club or rake.

Keep reading

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN but it’s just memes

[Inspiration in source]

sir these are my emotional support 120 tabs of unread fanfiction

I’m not gonna lie. I’m a die hard horror fan and I would absolutely find a way into that other apartment.

crying 🥺

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”