Wasteland, Baby

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

oh so THAT’S the answer to why you need an ai that can tell croissants from bear claws. That actually makes sense.

what a great day to remember that all aces and aros belong in the lgbt community

what a great week to remember that all aces and aros belong in the lgbt community

Spider-Verse fanfiction idea I’ll never get around to writing:

Teacher: Congratulations, Miles. Your paper on multi-dimensional physics has attracted a TON of interest from our Science Mentorship partners. We’ve found you a really wonderful Science Mentor who’s going to be helping you prepare your Youth Science Innovators presentation this week.

Miles: Oh, wow, my parents are gonna be so proud.

Teacher: So, let me introduce you to Dr. Olivia Octavius. Thank you, doctor, for being part of this mentorship program.

Liv: It’s my pleasure, I’m just happy I can help inspire the science community of tomorrow.

Miles: … D:

Important additions:

- Liv is 100% legitimately invested in being a good Science Mentor. After all, today’s young scientists are tomorrow’s reality-warping coworkers.

- Miles’s paper was an edited version of his research on small, stable inter-dimensional portals, so he can hang out with Gwen/get multiverse help against major threats.

- Sometimes, Miles forgets to be scared or angry at Doc Ock and starts actually learning from her, except she inevitably proposes something super unethical and then unconvincingly adds “…theoretically, of course” and Miles starts planning how to counter whatever doom-bot she’s just come up with as Spider-Man.

- May Parker has been helping Miles with spider-gadgets and general science stuff after school. At some point, she and Liv have an angry shouting match over who gets science-custody of their science-nephew.

- Miles has to figure out how to turn down a very plush internship offer from Octavius at the end of the week. His parents insist he take it, he fails to come up with a good reason not to that doesn’t involve Spider-Man knowledge. His parents have Liv over for dinner, she speaks highly of their son and his bright future. The family loves her.

- When Liv eventually figures out his secret identity, she goes full punch-clock villain and keeps mentoring Miles while fighting Spider-Man’s attempts to stop her Bad Idea Science.

This is the best and also so good I love

Ock: MILES YOU HAVE SCHOOL TOMORROW WHY ARE YOU HERE

Miles: BECAUSE YOU’RE TRYING TO KILL PEOPLE OLIVIA

Eventually…

Someone: “Our primary suspect is Doc Ock.”

Miles: “It’s not Doc Ock.”

Someone: “How do you know?”

Miles: “Because Liv promised to stop causing mayhem on school nights if I agreed not to tell Floyd she’s the one who keeps taking his food out of the company fridge.”

Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson in HAMILTON

i think at least part of the reason that people are generally more eager to point out/can more easily identify homophobia and sexism in fiction is because these concepts tend to move from reality to fiction generally unchanged. no matter how fantastical the setting, sexism is still sexism if the woman in question is an alien. homophobia is still homophobia if the gay couple consist of two elves.

when concepts like racism/antisemitism get translated into genres like sci fi and fantasy, they're altered in a way that makes them less recognizable. these concepts then become genre defining and are implicitly accepted. inherently evil races are normal in fantasy; repackaged colonialism is par for the course in sci fi. antisemitism and racism are abstracted and there's deniability when you make your villains non-human.

the race that's a jewish stereotype isn't human, so they're not jewish and not antisemitic. that violent fantasy race described with ethnic features isn't human, so they're not people of color and their vilification isn't racist. in the future of science fiction, we'll have moved past racism and religion to a world that's culturally western and christian (but they don't say 'jesus christ!'). in fantasy worlds, humanity (and capacity for good) is implicitly equated to whiteness.

because these concepts are by now so intrinsic to the genres they inhabit, they get passed on unquestioningly. this adds another layer of plausible deniability, because these things are normal, everyone's been doing them all this time. it also means that people are extremely reluctant to discard the concepts which are the cornerstones of the genres they know and love. even when people try to tackle the bigotry of inherently evil races in fantasy and sci fi, the way they discuss species is often still incredibly racialized, even if that's not their intention. attempts to 'redeem' these races skirt around the stereotypes and bigotry of their coding, because those stereotypes are their defining features.

homophobia and sexism aren't so hard to disentangle. you ignore a bit of writing here, you write a fic where two men get married. it doesn't require tearing down the conventions of genre and rebuilding from the ground up. it doesn't require acknowledging that the works you hold near and dear to your heart are deeply, fundamentally flawed and honestly, in this way irredeemable.

i'm not saying you can't like lord of the rings because tolkien described orcs as 'mongol-types.' give up on the idea that the secret to enlightenment is dropping "problematic" interests until you're left with some kind of mythical, morally pure and unproblematic ideal work of fiction. take the time to think critically about what you engage with. be aware that there are creators of color who create their own canons and reinvent these genres from a different perspective.

understand that acknowledging the flaws and implicit bigotry in media isn't an attack on you or the things you like, but a discussion that needs to happen. and please, please think for yourselves instead of foisting that labor on marginalized groups.

Reblog this if you’re polyamorous, searching for a cryptid, trying to communicate with demons, willing to throw a Molotov cocktail at a police car, really want more tattoos/piercings, or just really love nonbinary people.

No one will ever know which one 👀

check out this spotify playlist of men covering women’s songs without changing pronouns

nice

the same user made a playlist of women covering men’s songs without changing pronouns!

double nice

GREAT playlists but here’s a fave of mine that’s not on there - Joan Jett’s cover of Crimson And Clover!

Doctor of War & Sorrow

Madame of Fire & Madness

Sky puppies

Forgive me. Maturity is making me poetic. Frozen II (2019)

Erika: “Okay. Okay. Okay. Um. I’m getting—I’m gonna get—I’m gonna commit to these, uh, dishes. I’m getting dishes. It’s my first set of dishes. Um, they’re flat black and cool and each of them is a little bit [voice breaking] chipped and imperfect, just like me, and I’m gonna commit to these and I love them and I’m gonna buy them.”

Taliesin, offscreen: “Repeat after me.”

Erika: “Okay.”

Taliesin: “Flatware’s not a metaphor for my life.”

Erika: “Flatware’s not a metaphor for my life.”

Taliesin: “Very good.”

Erika: “Okay.”

Taliesin: “You’re doing good.”

Erika: “Thanks.”

Taliesin: “I believe in you.”

Erika: “I love you.”

Taliesin: “Love you. Go for it.”

Erika: “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.”

imagine still thinking nerd shit is counterculture couldn’t be me

star wars is a multibillion dollar franchise, the lord of the rings trilogy won 17 oscars, harry potter has 7 bestselling books + 10 movies and a theme park, the mcu is still massively popular 30 wildly interconnected movies later, game of thrones was the biggest show in the world for a decade, and we’ve had 50 years of star trek with how many reboots and spinoffs exactly??

you aren’t oppressed for liking fantasy/sci fi shit please put on sunscreen and deodorant and go outside and accept that every human alive was born with the knowledge that darth vader is luke skywalker and leia organa’s father

i don’t usually check the notes on my posts but @ everyone who has seen star wars but apparently didn’t know darth vader was also leia’s father: i’m dying to know how y’all thought twins worked

I think a lot about who I am to other people in the world–particular who I am to strangers as a mere concept in their lives.

Today this woman called our information desk and said, “my son’s band is playing tonight. I want to come see him, but he never answers his phone…..I want to be there. Have you heard anything about his band?”

And I felt so bad for this lady but I’m not in the music scene around here so I had to tell her no, sorry.

Five hours later, I’m hiking and run into a group of guys setting up for some outdoor performance, and as I watch them unload the drums it hits me.

“Hey,” I said, “are y’all in a band?”

They said yeah and smiled and I told them “one of your moms called today. She wants to watch you play, but she can’t get a hold of you. Call your mom.”

And they all pulled out their phones and started discussing whose mom it probably was as they presumably dialed their own.

And now, unless we meet again and recognize each other, that’s who I’ll be forever to those guys–some mysterious courier for mom-messages who came out of the woods and told them their mom called.

I didn’t even tell them why their mom called me. Who am I to their mom?? Nobody even asked. They just took my word for it and called their mothers.

Amazing.

I’M LAUGHING!!! THEY DIDN’T EVEN ASK WHO I AM.

we make fun of thorin getting lost in the shire but you know the nazgul also had to keep asking for directions to find bag end so maybe hobbits’ city planning is just wack

The Hobbits have spent generations making their roads complex af to keep Gandalf out

Theory accepted 

#which is why they’re always so sulky whenever he shows up………….#oh………….you found ur way back………………how nice…………….. (via @thisbrilliantsky)

Which is also why Gandalf is always late

but of course this is the absolute Least successful way to keep GANDALF of all people out, because-

which is really in short supply lately.

so while the hobbits think they are being hostile. what they are actually saying in Gandalf-speak is “please come back. we love you.”

Gandalf needs environmental enrichment