@helloitisistephen / helloitisistephen.tumblr.com
This is honestly better advice than “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”
By all means try again. But do that after you figure out WHY you failed!
[id= Screencaps of Ms Frizzle from the Magic Schoolbus that are captioned: “If at first you don’t succeed… find out why.” /end id]
A computer science student named Priyanjali Gupta, studying in her third year at Vellore Institute of Technology, has developed an AI-based model that can translate sign language into English.
photography by @runaround_hound!
He’s a musician
There's always something sincere and lovely about seeing animals, especially dogs, experience things like trampolines and whatever the hell you'd call this thing. He's figured out how to make it make the noise and he's having a blast! Peace and love on Planet Earth, etc. etc.
This is one of the funniest noises I've ever heard in my life
for the love of god unmute
how?? just how?
imagine simping for capitalism this badly
A Christmas Carol never even says that Scrooge gives up anything at all, or even somehow stops being super-rich. He just stops being a dick about it and starts using his wealth to help people. Scrooge isn’t even written as an indictment of rich people, since plenty others appear in the story and are presented as perfectly nice people. Scrooge is a miser. He doesn’t even use his money to help himself, which is called out as the reason he dies within the year. Learning to care for himself is just as much part of the Ghosts’ lessons as learning to care for other people.
how dare Charles Dickens, a man once sent to work in a factory at age 12 while his father was in debtors’ prison, inflict such Wokery upon us as “caring about the poor”
the beatles are an infuriating band to me as a relentless contrarian. liking them is cliche, hating them is cliche, being indifferent towards them is cliche. it's impossible to have an novel or interesting take on the beatles in current year. like how am i supposed to win here?
When someone told me that the Beatles wrote Yellow Submarine, I didn't believe them. Like I flat out insisted this was false. I KNEW it was a folk song and I wasn't going to be fooled by people trying to prank me into gullibly believing that it was written by the Beatles.
I grew up singing Yellow Submarine in the playground, like that stupid llama rhyme, or "I'm a little teapot", or "London Bridge is falling down" or "Ten Green Bottles". They're all stupid little rhymes that are obviously older than the trees, not written by some band in the 60s; they're really stupid songs with simple tunes, obviously the kind of thing you'd come up with while camping with your band of idiot rabid cub scouts to distract everyone from putting each other's eyes out with marshmallow skewers, not the kind of clever lyrics or pretty melody that you'd write if you were an actual band of musicians.
And they're obviously all kids' folk songs, they all have variations - you can sing "ten green bottles standing on the wall, ten green bottles standing on the wall, and if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there'll be nine green bottles standing on the wall", or you can sing "ten bad gamers standing on the point, ten bad gamers standing on the point, and if one bad gamer should need to take a piss, there'll be nine bad gamers standing on the point" or if you're really edgy you can sing "two tall towers" or, you get the picture. Kids make shit up! And I knew just as many variations for Yellow Submarine - like, who hasn't heard "we all live in a yellow submarine, we didn't like the colour so we painted it green, green scared the fishes so we painted it red, red wasn't waterproof so now we're all dead"?
I'd even sung it in singalongs with scout troops who didn't like us singing anything too copyrighted, so, like, it was basically confirmed in my head that it was a folk song! Probably older than submarines!
And I'm still a bit dubious of the fact that the Beatles wrote it - like, I've looked it up and confirmed that I'm not being pranked (or if I am being pranked then a lot of Wikipedia editors are in on it), and there does seem to be a lot of evidence that the Beatles did genuinely write Yellow Submarine, but.... I don't know. A part of me is convinced that they heard some kid singing it and immediately copied it and tried to pass it off as their own work or something. Or that there's a conspiracy of some kind. Or. Something. The song is just SO DUMB I cannot believe it was ever seriously SOLD FOR MONEY. WHY WOULD YOU BUY THAT FOR MONEY.
Like, this sounds about as real as if you tried to convince me that someone did a cover of "twinkle twinkle little star" and hit #1 on the charts back in the 50s and then called themselves more popular than Jesus and got assassinated, like - no, that's not a thing that happened. I do not care. On a logical level, fine, I admit I was wrong. On an emotional level? Fuck you, no, that was a collective fever dream, there is no way that happened in the real actual world.
I don't know if I'm "winning" but I do know that I have confused and angered a lot of people with this, so, here, I guess.
Baby Beluga is from 1980.
"the devil went down to Georgia" should be from like the mid 1800s
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita says that abortion reports aren’t medical records, and that they should be available to the public in the same way that death certificates are. While Rokita pushes for public reports, New Hampshire lawmakers are fighting over a Republican bill to collect and publish abortion data, and U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to collect and provide data on the abortions performed at its facilities. Just last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed legislation that would have required abortion providers to ask patients invasive and detailed questions about why they were getting abortions, and provide those answers in a report to the state. All of these moves are part of a broader strategy that weaponizes abortion data to stigmatize patients and to prosecute providers. And while most states have some kind of abortion reporting law, legislators are increasingly trying to expand the scope of the data, and use it to dismantle women’s privacy.
Rokita’s ‘advisory opinion’, for example, argues that abortion data collected by the state isn’t private medical information and that in order to prosecute abortion providers, he needs detailed reports to be public. In the past, the state has issued reports on each individual abortion. But as a result of Indiana’s ban, there are only a handful of abortions being performed in the state. As such, the Department of Health decided to release aggregate reports to protect patient confidentiality, noting that individual reports could be “reverse engineered to identify patients—especially in smaller communities.” Rokita—best known for his harassment campaign against Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the abortion provider who treated a 10-year-old rape victim—is furious over the change. He says the only way he can arrest and prosecute people is if he gets tips from third parties, presumably anti-abortion groups that scour the abortion reports for alleged wrongdoing. He wants the state to either restore public individual reports, or to allow his office to go after abortion providers without a complaint by a third party. (Meaning, he could pursue investigations against doctors and hospitals without cause.)
Most troubling, though, is his insistence that women’s private abortion information isn’t private at all. Even though individual reports could be used to identify patients, Rokita claims that the terminated pregnancy reports [TPRs] aren’t medical records, and that they “do not belong to the patient.” [...] As I flagged last month, abortion reporting is becoming more and more important to anti-choice lawmakers and groups. Project 2025 includes an entire section on abortion reporting, for example, and major anti-abortion organizations like the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Americans United for Life want to mandate more detailed reports.
[...] As is the case with funding for crisis pregnancy centers and legislation about ‘prenatal counseling’ or ‘perinatal hospice care’, Republicans are advancing abortion reporting mandates under the guise of protecting women. And in a moment when voters are furious over abortion bans, anti-choice lawmakers and organizations very much need Americans to believe that lie. We have to make clear that state GOPs aren’t just banning abortion, but enacting any and every punitive policy that they can—especially those that strip us of our medical privacy. After all, it was less than a year ago that 19 Republican Attorneys General wanted the ability to investigate the out-of-state medical records of abortion patients. Did we really think they were going to stop there?
@jessicavalenti writes a solid column in her Abortion, Every Day blog that the GOP's agenda to erode patient privacy of those seeking abortions is a dangerous one.
can we stop promoting the idea that nature has to look beautiful to be good?
The fact that he’s not actually struggling but just learned a habit from watching his human buddy snap bamboo is so precious.
Certified Library Post
[Images are tweets by @ RandiJoDalton reading:
As a Mohawk librarian, when I defend audiobooks, it's personal. My people were telling stories orally long before stories came packaged in book form. There are many ways to "read" something. There are a thousand ways to tell a story.
When I assist a patron, I'm not helping them find the right book, I'm helping them find the right story. Whether it's a book or a movie or a comic or a video game - there is a reason that specific medium calls to you. There is no shame in the way your brain receives information.
The settler-colonial belief that stories in book form are superior is classist, racist, and simply untrue. It is virtue signaling at its cringiest. Anyone who has a favorite voice actor will back me up. Alternate story telling methods make for rich sensory experiences.
A good story is all in how it unfolds. And how it unfolds is different for different folks. You have a unique perspective. Lean into it.]
[Images are replies from @ lcspoering
It's absolutely ableist as well. My patrons are blind, visually impaired, have physical and learning disabilities that make traditional print all but impossible to read, and, to a person, audiobooks are an incredible vital part of their lives.
Also! Audiobooks are not a new thing. As early as 1931, the American Foundation for the Blind began creating "talking books" for veterans of World War I and other visually-impaired people. Commercially, audiobooks began being produced and sold in the 50s.]
