riza hawkeye is the smartest fucking character in fma because she looked at herself, a shy sheltered daughter of landed gentry, and she looked at roy, an arsehole with a heart of gold desperately in need of a tragic backstory, and she saw the genre they were in, shōnen anime, and then CLAWED her way out of fridged wife-hood thru sheer grit and long-distance murder and we salute

one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it’s happening right now and it’s still good even if it’s not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like… this is it. this is life. you’ll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don’t love life for what it is now and make the most of it

Comic by @shhhitsfine

This has been going around my work and friend group on other platforms, and I thought it deserved a place here too.

#it’s a good limitus test. take out the specifics of drinking or not drinking alcohol vs owning a dog or not #it’s basically 1) would you spend an evening laughing and enjoying conversation with someone and walking away like ‘that was good.’ #and 2) do you trust this person has a basic level of willingness and ability to care for others and repay your trusting in them? #it’s just getting you to tap into the unconscious micro-tells our brains collect about other people #which are by far the most accurate assessment tools we have to judge peoples’ characters on the fly and in general (via purplehawke)

I was tagged by the beautiful @minikate–24-05

5 things you’ll find in my bag: keys, my wallet, a notebook, a pad, a pen

5 things you’ll find in my bedroom: anatomy books, a guitar, a piano, books, watercolors

5 things I’ve always wanted to do: see the polar lights, build a cabin in the woods, buy a painting, pick a random shopping cart at the supermarket and live the week with whatever was inside, do a really long trip by foot

5 things that make me happy: chocolate cookies, seeing a cat, star sighting, drawing, playing the piano

5 things I’m currently into: Star Wars, socks, painting with watercolors, drawing, surgery

5 things on my to do list: go to the doctor, start running, start dancing in an academy, be less awkward and more natural with new people, let my hair grow

I did go to the doctor! I also started running, I'm way less awkward and much more natural with new people and my hair grew to be super long.

Dancing, you're next

My favorite thing about Roy Mustang is that he somehow managed to keep up his egotistical shallow womanizer reputation despite simping like a hopeless lovestruck idiot for exactly one person and one person only, to the degree that his enemies knew exactly who to go after to use against him most effectively not once but twice

@minikate–24-05​ tagged me,

1. last drink: tea 2. last phone call: a friend from university, to catch ‘el metro’ (barcelona’s subway) together 3. last text message: “okis no pateixis” - “ okay, don’t worry” 4. last song you listened to: Papaoutai by Pentatonix 5. last time you cried: not so long ago, because of my neuroanatomy exams (I passed, thankfully) 6. dated someone twice? nope 7. kissed someone and regretted it? yep 8. been cheated on? no 9. lost someone special? someone who remains my friend but is no longer “someone special”

10. been depressed? yes, i had a huge depression once. even though it wasn’t pleasant it taught me to look at life in a different way and see the beauty of being alive, to appreciate every single detail and care less about other things 11. gotten drunk and thrown up? no

fave colors: 12. blue 13: yellow 14: white

in the last year have you… 15. made new friends? YES 16. fallen out of love? yes 17. laughed until you cried? yes 18. found out someone was talking about you? yes and it was kind of creepy. STORY TIME! This summer I was working at a summer camp, when there were no children on the camp I called one of my best friends and I was wearing a shirt and my bikini. Sooo, a month later I’m talking to a friend of the team of the summer camp and I was telling her something that happened to me while I was calling that day. She then told me that she had a picture of me in that exact moment. (wut?). The thing is, at that moment she was searching me and asked a boy of the team if he knew were I was, and in turn he send her pictures of me. 20. found out who your friends are? yes 21. kissed someone on your facebook friends list? no

general 22. how many of your facebook friends do you know irl? all of them 23. do you have any pets? I have three cats (Tesla, Mel and Miki) and a dog (Duna) 24. do you want to change your name? no 25. what did you do for your last birthday? I was working in the summer camp. we went for drinks and ate some sandwiches. (the boy I had a crush on, which I had never gathered the courage to talk to, sat next to me on lunch and told me that his name was birthday present. I freaked out and didn’t know what to say, moments later he said, well I see that I’m not appreciated here, and stood up and left, and I died) 26. what time did you wake up today? 11:15 27. what were you doing at midnight last night? sleeping 28. what is something you can’t wait for? summer 30. what are you listening to right now? my brother trying to fix my laptop 31. have you ever talked to a person named tom? no 32. something thats getting on your nerves? I’ve bitten my tongue and it hurts 33. most visited website: university site, yay so much fun 34. hair color: dark brown 35. long or short hair: right now, medium length?. but I’ve worn a pixie cut and I had it below my waist line til a couple years ago when I decided that I wanted the shortest of bobs. 36. do you have a crush on someone: no, but I still sometimes think of the summer boy 37. what do you like about yourself: my hair is awesome, lately my skin has gotten better (meds), my earrings, I can play the piano quite well, I can paint, I can make clothing. 38. want any piercings? yesss, I want to add four earrings more to my ears ( a triple forward helix on my right ear and a medium helix on the same ear) 39. blood type: A+ 40. nicknames: coffee, seacia 41. relationship status: single

42. zodiac: leo 43. pronouns: she/her 44. fave tv shows: I don’t know, right now the only tv show I watch is riverdale and El tiempo entre costuras (time between seams) 45. tattoos: I want some sunflowers over my right hip bone, some daisies on my right scapula, lavender between my breasts, a little sun on my left achilles tendon and cassiopea on my left ribcage. All of this will wait til my grandma is no longer here, because she hates them and I don’t want to hide them or lie to her 46. right or left handed: right 47. ever had surgery: no 48. piercings: my earlobes were pierced when I was a baby, I had an upper earlobe on my right ear at 12. Two helix piercings on my left ear at 17 and an upper lobe piercing on my left ear at 18. 49. sport: I played volley as a little child, at 8 I started artistic skating, trained for years until I became professional and then I had to leave it because of a lesion on my ankle, then I did tennis for a year, after that I signed up for a gym and now I swim. @minikate–24-05 promised to teach me basketball on the third term. 50. vacation: mountains 51. trainers: a pair of sketchers

more general 52. eating: I’ll have lunch soon 53. drinking: water, always. And tea

54. watching? Riverdale, Death note and El tiempo entre costuras

55. waiting for: summer, star wars IX, getting a flat near my campus 56. want: sleep, flat stomach, time to read and paint 57. get married: maybe, if I find someone that I like and likes me 58. career: I wanna be a plastic/maxilofacial surgeon or cardiologist

which is better 59. hugs or kisses: hugs 60. lips or eyes: lips 61. shorter or taller: taller. 62. older or younger: I don’t care (but my record shows me younger, I don’t know how I feel about that) 63. nice arms or stomach: arms 64. hookup or relationship: relationship. 65. troublemaker or hesitant: erhm, not hesitant, that’s for sure. 

have you… 66. kissed a stranger: no 67. drank hard liquor: yes 68. lost glasses: never worn any 69. turned someone down: literrally no, but in fact yes 70. sex on first date: that’s a no 71. broken someone’s heart: not 100% sure, but yes 72. had your heart broken: yes

73. been arrested: no 74. cried when someone died: yes 75. fallen for a friend: yes

do you believe in 76. yourself: yes 77. miracles: yes 78. love at first sight: pfff maybe 79. santa claus: no 80. kiss on a first date: maybe 81. angels: yes

other 82. best friends name: I don’t feel like giving that title, I love my friends but sometimes you give “the title” to someone and then you realize that no. 83. eye color: brown

84. fave movie: Narnia, the Lion the Witch and the wardrobe 85. fave actor: no idea

I tag @thegirlwiththedroid because we’re mutuals but I don’t know her and she seems nice so I’d like to know her.

I saw this post from 5 years ago and thought it’d be fun to see how my answers have changed :)

1. last drink: cofee 2. last phone call: my mom, she lost her phone so I called in hopes of hearing the phone and find it 3. last text message: “En Umbra hay:” 4. last song you listened to: LLYLM by Rosalía 5. last time you cried: yesterday, because I was feeling stupid and a huge disappointment to everybody and myself because I didn’t score as high as I wanted on my MIR exams 6. dated someone twice? no 7. kissed someone and regretted it? yes 8. been cheated on? no 9. lost someone special? yes

10. been depressed? yes and it sucks

11. gotten drunk and thrown up? no

fave colors: 12. green 13: blue 14: orange

in the last year have you… 15. made new friends? yes :) 16. fallen out of love? yes :( 17. laughed until you cried? yes 18. found out someone was talking about you? yes and it was truly awful 20. found out who your friends are? yes 21. kissed someone on your facebook friends list? yes

general 22. how many of your facebook friends do you know irl? all of them 23. do you have any pets? I have two cats (Mel and Tesla, RIP Miki) and a dog (Brisca, RIP Duna) 24. do you want to change your name? oh boy, long story 25. what did you do for your last birthday? nothing special, wait, lies, I flew from Cairo to my home. 26. what time did you wake up today? 11:14 (only a minute sooner than 5 years ago, lol) 27. what were you doing at midnight last night? watching youtube I think 28. what is something you can’t wait for? beginning my surgery residency 30. what are you listening to right now? my mom in the bathroom  31. have you ever talked to a person named tom? no 32. something thats getting on your nerves? nothing really 33. most visited website: Google sheets 34. hair color: copper (dye) 35. long or short hair: super long hair 36. do you have a crush on someone: no, thank god 37. what do you like about yourself: my love for thrifting 38. want any piercings? no more piercing for me for the moment 39. blood type: A+ 40. nicknames: none 41. relationship status: single (I’ve had a 4 year-long relationship since I first posted this, but right now, freshly single)

42. zodiac: leo 43. pronouns: she/her 44. fave tv shows: I LOVED Hospital Playlist 45. tattoos: none 46. right or left handed: right 47. ever had surgery: yes 48. piercings: my earlobes were pierced when I was a baby, I had an upper earlobe on my right ear at 12. Two helix piercings on my left ear at 17 and an upper lobe piercing on my left ear at 18. I added a middle helix piercing on my right ear at 20.  49. sport: I played volley as a child, at 8 I started artistic skating, had to leave it because I badly broke my ankle, did tennis for a year, then started going to the gym, took swimming for a couple years and now I run and do yoga 50. vacation: mountains 51. trainers: a pair of sketchers

more general 52. eating: food 53. drinking: coffee

54. watching? Fauda

55. waiting for: doing the MIR exam again I guess 56. want: It’s so sad that last time I wrote flat stomach in here, but tbh, I still wish for it 57. get married: I don’t think it’ll happen 58. career: WHY DID I EVER WANT TO BE A CARDIOLOGIST whatever was going on in my mind????? Hopefully I’ll start my general surgery specialization next year.

which is better 59. hugs or kisses: hugs 60. lips or eyes: lips 61. shorter or taller: taller. 62. older or younger: I don’t care but close to my age. 63. nice arms or stomach: arms 64. hookup or relationship: relationship. 65. troublemaker or hesitant: troublemaker

have you… 66. kissed a stranger: no 67. drank hard liquor: yes 68. lost glasses: never worn any 69. turned someone down: no 70. sex on first date: no 71. broken someone’s heart: yes 72. had your heart broken: yes

73. been arrested: no 74. cried when someone died: yes 75. fallen for a friend: yes

do you believe in 76. yourself: yes 77. miracles: yes 78. love at first sight: pfff maybe 79. santa claus: no 80. kiss on a first date: yes 81. angels: yes

other 82. best friends name: many 83. eye color: brown

84. fave movie: Narnia, the Lion the Witch and the wardrobe 85. fave actor: no idea

I tag my friend @minikate--24-05 but! she must do as I did, find the old post and make it new <3

I love how fma villains just assume that there's something going on between them

mundane scenes are important.

This is some unconventional writing advice, but here me out, because it's important and I don't see it being talked about enough:

Not every scene you write has to be essential to drive your plot forward. That's it. And your story doesn't need to be at high stakes at all times to be considered interesting, either.

Your scenes, that you include, should always be crucial to your story. Not important. Crucial. So, yes, it is important that your story isn't filled with scenes that don't affect or drive your plot forward, but it is also okay to include scenes in which your characters simply... exist.

Maybe it's not necessary to show your characters at work, signing papers at a desk (unless a dragon comes in and sets fire to the place or they get fired), but it might be necessary to have your characters invite a couple friends over, make some pancakes, and crack some jokes! A scene like that, while it might not contribute much to the overall plot of your story, will help bring life into it!

Giving your audience glimpses into your characters life, not only helps them connect with your characters, but it's a way for them to start caring more deeply about both your characters and the relationship between them.

Your story CANNOT simply be ACTION ACTION ACTION. Yes, it is important for your scenes contribute to your plot, but you can't forget the importance of establishing characters, as well as the world they live in and the dynamics between them!

YOUR PLOT IS ONLY HALF OF IT. If a scene is rendered useless in terms of plot development, but contributes in any way to the development of a character or relationship, it is not useless, nor is it a waste of space!

Learn what it means for a scene to be completely useless and what it means for it to be useful in terms of characterization, worldbuilding or exposition. You don't need to cut those scenes. Every scene has to serve a purpose, but there is a lot of purposes to be served.

So let your characters breathe, even for just a second. There needs to be down time. Otherwise the emotional impact you try to bring upon your audience won't come into play, because they have not been given enough time with your characters to start caring about them.

YELLOW/GOLD in Period Drama Costuming Appreciation

Crimson Peak (2015) costume design by Kate Hawley Black Sails (2014-2017) costume design by Tim Aslam In the Mood for Love (2000) costume design by William Chang Dance of the 41 (2020) costume design by Kika Lopes Poldark (2015-2019) costume design by Marianne Agertoft Fargo (2014- ) costume design by J.R. Hawbaker The Green Knight (2021) costume design by Malgosia Turzanska Dickinson (2019-2021) costume design by Jennifer Moeller

I spent the weekend reading Naomi Novik’s new book, A Deadly Education. I could not put it down and also could not stop hooting and hollering out loud into the night as I read it, as the rest of my family tried to sleep. Highly recommended if you’re looking for something magical and dark but also hilarious.

it’s so fucked up when you see something you KNOW is a portal to somewhere but you can’t figure out how to activate it. this is the most frustrating feeling that plagues modern man.

I’ve seen this post easily 12 times now and EVERY TIME it’s just a different cat looking at a different door. 

Not only that, some anthropologists think that cooking is what MADE us human- as in the ability to consume large amounts of EASIER-to-digest calories (with all the pathogens killed off and the tough cell walls broken down) is the thing that allowed us to devote evolutionary energy to growing larger brains, and solidified the beginnings of communal human civilization. Have you seen how many hours a day pandas spend chewing on raw bamboo? Cooking let us take a shortcut so we could evolve in other ways. Especially bread, bc it’s a lot of caloric energy packed into a portable chunk you could take with you for days and days. Also in order to have bread you have to have grain farms, so bread (and beer, also made from grains) sort of catalyzed humans settling down into centralized permanent settlements. So cooking (and eventually farming) didn’t just help us physiologically evolve into our current form, but also shaped our social structures from the beginning. You should watch the Michael Pollan documentary “Cooked,” on Netflix! It’ll rock your world.

Source: “What makes us human? Cooking, new study says,” National Geographic

Evolutionarily evolved to love Bread

There’s a strong theory that we didn’t invent farming to make bread.

We invented it to make beer.

#and unlike modern beer ancient beer was really great #it was full of calories and usually a lot safer to drink than local water #the ancients had their priorities in order

@t-e-reynolds ok so boom

no because i think we're forgetting some important history

i hope they find a stupid tiny fish or something on mars and make mining illegal, just like the devil’s hole in california

these endangered bastards and their bathtub-sized habitat (just the surface shelf of a giant cave structure thanks) singlehandedly pissed off SO many businessmen lol

That addition is GOLD

OH MY GOD BABEY BABEY BABEY

Kicky beans

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.