This might be stretching the intent of being useful with the stuff I’m curating, but still...a donkey who figured out how to sing when she couldn’t communicate as donkeys usually do? Of course that’s worth knowing about.
Tom Paris was a Timelord Cup-a-Soup.
I have logged into Tumblr for the first time in many, many months specifically to make the case for a fan theory that seems to be sadly underrepresented on the internet.
Can we please consider the time Tom Paris turned into a timelord?
I refer you to Voyager, Season 2, Episode 15 "Threshold"
- Tom Paris experienced all of time and space simultaneously when he crossed into Warp 10.
- He died and came back to life
- He evolved two hearts. He had moments of lucidity interspersed with almost deranged behavior, characterized by intense arrogance.
Timelords became what they are through exposure to the time vortex. (Doctor Who, Series 6, Episode 7, "A Good Man Goes to War")
Tom Paris took a massive hit off the unshielded time vortex and turned into a Timelord...cup-a-soup style. Then he kidnapped Janeway for inexplicable reasons, de-evolved them both into amphibian people via exposure to the unshielded time vortex. This is not dissimilar to what happens to Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen in Doctor Who, Series 1, Episode 11, "Boom Town," in which Blon looks into the heart of the Tardis and is regressed to an egg.
Fun fact: Star Trek fans hated "Threshold" so much it doesn't get recognized as canon by many.
Now, I know Doctor Who wasn't in its hey-day when Voyager aired, and I'm not arguing about intent on the part of the writers. I am just saying the shoe fits really rather nicely.
Corollary: The Tardis travels at the equivalent of Star Trek's Warp 10, the primary problem with which (B'ellana Torres notes in "Threshold") is navigation.
Personally, I am delighted with "Threshold" for its contributions to my personal head canon, and I invite the haters to sit with their discomfort a minute and give it a second chance with 23 years and a Doctor Who resurgence to reshape their perspective.
melissamwalshe reblogged
Linguistics Halloween Jokes
What are the ghosts of dead phoneticians called? Spectral-grams
What does a linguist dressed up as a pirate wear on their face? An I-PAtch
What do linguist children say when asking for candy? Affix-or-treat!
What does a linguist-ghost say? /bu::::/
What does a linguist become if bitten at the full moon? A wordwolf
What do you call several jack-o-lanterns with the designs that change depending on their environment? Allo-phompkins
What’s the most pragmatic way to disguise yourself? Wear a Gricean Mask-im
Why can bags of bones travel through time? Because they’re skele-tense
What would you call a famous linguist with an appetite for brains? Noamnomnom Zombsky
What is the appropriate month for making linguistics halloween jokes? Wugtober
Your annual reminder that I very much want to see your linguistics Halloween costumes or pumpkins (from this year or previous years!). Use the tag Linguistics Halloween.
Souicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrepus
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious backwards is not dociousaliexpilisticfragicalirupes. It doesn’t even follow a consistent internal logic of what “backwards” means. This has bothered me since I was old enough to spell, and it only just now occurred to me that Tumblr basically exists for the sole purpose of pointing this kind of stuff out.
“Practically perfect,” my foot, Mary Poppins.
melissamwalshe reblogged
Anonymous asked:
How do you do it? How do you ooze compassion and kindness in every word you write? Were you always like this? Is it a skill you learned and then how?
I think I’ve gotten nicer and better at communicating over the course of the last few years. It’s a skill, like most things, and responsive to trying, like most things, but really I suspect that a lot of it is being in a situation where you can sustainedly try; most people who are jerks on the internet are not trying to be kind and failing, they’re trying to do something else, and unless being kind meets their needs they won’t do it.
For me, a situation where I can sustainedly try to be kind means having social support and affirmation that I am safe, that I have interesting things to say, that I can do independent moral reasoning, and act on it, and this isn’t presumptuous or selfish but is an essential skill for everybody. I think that people who find themselves being meaner than they intend to on the internet often don’t have that, or don’t have enough of it.
If that’s you, prioritize being equipped to be nice, instead of trying to already be nice when you’re scared and hurting. Prioritize finding people and ideas and inspirations that make you feel good about who you are and what you have to say and about your right to engage in internet discourse as much or as little as you please. When you feel secure, and assured in your right to think and express yourself, when being wrong wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world because you know yourself to be valuable in many ways, then you’re equipped to be nice, and it’ll come much easier.
(There is a kind of niceness that comes from being scared that ever disagreeing with anyone makes you bad, or that to be worthy of participation in the world you have to be perfect, or that you should keep trying interactions that make you miserable because prioritizing yourself would be selfish. This is lousy cut-rate niceness. Reject it. Reject it by ceasing to care about being nice, if you need to do that.)
And from that point then I think it’s practice. Some specific things that help me:
1) When i write, I try to have a wide audience of people in mind. I try to imagine someone who has done the thing I’m condemning; someone who has been hurt by it, someone who thinks it’s bad but is in an environment where that’s unacceptable to say out loud, someone who thinks they’d be a bad person to have an opinion about it… When I write a sentence that is going to make one of those people stop reading, I try to rewrite it. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I could but it’s too much effort and I want to actually get this post out. But when I can, I think it makes my writing kinder.
2) When someone is a dick, you can actually just pretend they weren’t.
The rationalist community periodically has fights over steel manning, which is where you try, when you encounter an argument, to think about and develop the version of the argument most compelling to you. (Advantages: you can end up understanding ideas you hadn’t really understood, and being better able to imagine why you might hold them. Disadvantages: if you are talking to someone, you are suddenly talking about ‘the version of your position that makes sense to me’ which is often not their actual position, which is extremely frustrating.)
So steelmanning has problems, but I’ve had great luck with nicemanning, which is where you just respond to exactly what someone said but ignore the thing where they’re being an asshole. I think at least some people on tumblr are jerks to get attention, and if it doesn’t work they stop. Some others are jerks because they’re upset, and when they’re calmer, rereading what they said will probably bother them more than a scolding from you about it. I delete a lot of obnoxious anons and I’m much more likely to delete anons if they’re obnoxious, but if I decide to answer one I try to answer it exactly like I’d answer if someone asked that question without being rude. They usually stop being rude, if they continue the interaction.
And often people weren’t trying to be a jerk, and interacting with them like they were nice and reasonable turns out to be 100% correct because they were trying to be nice and reasonable and just miscommunicated. And on those occasions I always feel really glad that I treated them that way.
(There are lots of problems with this if you would feel obliged to answer an ask if it were polite, instead of feeling free to answer whatever asks you please. Or if you feel miserable when you get anon hate and it’s painful and stifling not to call them on it, or if you will beat yourself up for being even the tiniest bit rude to someone who just was horrible to you. Like I said earlier, lots of being nice is about having the sources of support and confidence which you need. If trying to be nice is making you miserable then something has gone wrong somewhere.)
3) Vary topics a lot. I think there are a few things you’ll have to say on any given topic, and then all the discussion that follows will get steadily more about social/cultural/tribal stuff, and it’s so much harder to be nice when you’re doing that. Say those first few things. Then leave that topic until you have more new things to say, and talk about something completely different. If your blog is mostly about your ideas, then it’s much much easier for it to be a kind blog than if it’s mostly about people, who are not always possible to consistently be kind about. I suspect that this also changes the tenor of your audience - you attract people who are there for the ideas, and they will ask you questions about ideas and help you refine your ideas, and the community will be pleasanter, and this will make it easier to be kind.
Wow. I feel like I’m a better person for having read this. I need to come back and study this post in depth.
This is great. And the beginning invites the reflection that not being nice serves a function sometimes: it communicates fear or pain. So if someone is not being kind, it might be worth trying to spot and maybe even address their fear/pain if you’re in a position to offer help or comfort.
Picard and Dathon on tumblr
Sometimes I think about the rise of shared cultural references and memes as a dominant method of communication. My sisters and I will have one of those long conversations entirely in gifs and emoji, possible annotated with deeply complex comments like “LOL, same” or “Me.” And it make me think: some day our descendants are going to have to kidnap an alien diplomat and force him in to a surprise survival exercise in order to establish some shared experience from which to build a peaceful relationship. #thosetamarianfeels
melissamwalshe reblogged
New My Little Ponies, designed by neural network
The Kingdom of Equestria is inhabited by thousands of colorful, magical ponies, whose life cycle, socioeconomics, and biomechanics are best not investigated too closely. Their names are usually something like “Rainbow Dash” or “Diamond Tiara” or (my favorite because she’s totally a grad student pony): ‘Twilight Sparkle”.
Often the plot calls for crowd scenes (usually involving ponies in great peril), and I worry that some day the creators of My Little Pony will run out of names. In the spirit of being helpful, I decided to put a computer to the task of generating lots of new ponies.
I used a program called a character-level recurrent neural network (char-rnn), which looks at examples of text (Pokemon, or Harry Potter fan fiction, or even guinea pig names) and learns to imitate them. I gave the neural network more than 1,500 names from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Wiki, and let it start learning.
Result: partial success.
It did come up with some pretty plausible-sounding ponies, certainly not as weird as some of the ponies that have already appeared on the show (such as Groucho Mark and Button Mash and Buzzard Hooffield).
Star Blueberry Sprinkle Cherry Bolt Berry Spy Sweet Glints Cheer Belle Sunferry Sunshine Star Sweet Bolt Cherry Curls Mint Flower Bright Seas Flight Star Plum Flower Sweet Suns Brash Clouds Cheery Breath Cloudy Daze Big Blue Brass Flare Blue Chile Coco Mane Neon Brush Strawberry Sun Sugar Top Cinnamon Mark Glowberry Amethyst Mist
The neural network also came up with some seriously tough-sounding ponies, ones that you would definitely want on your side when fighting giant killer cupcakes, or whatever the peril is this week.
Cold Sting Scarline Shoot Bolt Sunder Bright Dark Role Sob Dancer Sunsrot Masked Rock Roar Starlich Command Pony Deader Pony Flint Sting Steel Roller Dark Candy Scarphore Creep Well Prince Still Stare Rust Crack Colder Sanderlash Bitter Star
But the neural network’s results weren’t all successful. It also came up with some ponies that probably wouldn’t be on the A-team.
Dunder Dort Tardy Pony Flunderlane Flueberry Sherry Marina Doof Want Cone Starf Dad Star Star Flurtershy Starly Star Mr. Atple Pony Pony Packy Pack Pinky Swoll Apple Apple Dim McColt Free Sing Fail Poney Hoof Tasting Spar Dirky Flithers Arple Robbler Chest Star Barp Moon Mr. Wander
It also invented some ponies that are just plain weird.
Lilie Lice Billy Boon Wootson Mice Full Fish Crest Suns Sun Ramen Breek Smarky Hondsarors Blither Bon Persy Belly Pony String Heart Swinkleshine Flint Cream Star Sandlime Rocky Scooppony Piemonk String Punch Apple Stork Bunny Maze Lilac Ruster Winker-Moon Charmy Vine Swan Break Wags Pine Pearlicket Nandy Quark Firey Up Tracklewock Packin Flustershovel Aoetel Pakeecuand Tapshine Sugar Cloudsdalou Sandy Apple Mitten Splash Silvermice Butter Flash Agar Swirl Cheese Breeze
And a list of ponies you might want to avoid:
Clotter Raspberry Turd Blueberry Pants Benny Sweat Parpy Stink Blue Cuss Groan Rear Pony Lace Crunk Rade Slime Derdy Star Swill Brick Colona Pocky Mire Hoofed Snarch Apple Ronch Trowel Pony Smanky Hank Princess Sweat
Pony pictures created using: http://www.dolldivine.com/mlp-fim-pony-creator.php
The neural network also generated some ponies that would definitely not appear in a kid’s TV show - I’m not sure where it learned some of those words. If you want the unfit-to-print ponies, fill in your email here and I’ll send them to you.
Can’t. stop. laughing.
melissamwalshe reblogged
I won the freaking Sidewise Award!
I co-won the Sidewise Award for short fiction along with @adamrov and Ben Winters. I am honored to be in their company.
Click here for “Treasure Fleet” and the other excellent stories in Tales From Alternate Earths.
Click here for some notes from the world of “Treasure Fleet.”
Thank you all.
SO excited by this!!!!
Really clearly told story that illustrates the seriousness of doctors writing off women as fragile whiners instead of listening to their symptoms.
melissamwalshe reblogged
Darth Net: Star Wars characters invented by neural network
Neural networks are a type of computer program that imitate the way humans learn. If you give them a long list of examples of anything - paint colors, Broadway musicals, cat names, and even guinea pig names - they’ll teach themselves how to generate similar examples.
Last week, I tried giving a neural network a list of Star Wars planets and sure enough, it was soon producing plausible planets that (mostly) would have passed without comment as part of the Star Wars universe.
Now, I try the same thing with Star Wars character names, thanks to another list from blog reader Chris Jones. It turns out that it works pretty well.
Garan Sande Seran Bant Bri Dalrhon Joff Bala Bun Bana Betti Cantha Boen Cemenan Shilen Carton Doylan Wannaar Jo Grailis Greki Ves Lar-V Male Rob-V Rachal Slin Sran Baran Saran Rantar Tanter Mana Kane Captain Kreet
You’ll notice there’s a “captain” at the end of the list… the neural network would occasionally produce captains and commanders and admirals, but it’s rare that it would spell them correctly. This is because I was using some pretty aggressive dropout settings to prevent the neural network from memorizing entire names from the tiny input dataset. I was essentially forcing it to learn to function with only a small fraction of its neurons working at a time, so it had to stick to very simple rules that could be implemented with just a neuron or two. The upside: the neural network began to work with short Star Wars-y letter combinations rather than entire words. The downside: lots of “Cammanders” and “Anmirals”.
Inquisisor: Sarth Bertor Grand Andiral Chenge Shelte Anmiral Carn Daralo Admira Sanos Anmeral Teeran Salan Cammander Copta Carmander Sorod Comtander Jan Ganaral Danter
Some of the other names were also less than successful, but that’s not the neural network’s fault. It only knows about the words on its own list, not the rest of the English language. If a word sequence is pronounceable according to its rules, it’s perfectly valid as far as it knows.
Jan Moron Reme Mold Ban Sand Mo-Da Cat Dars Werdo Math Bins Mad Danran Santa Salane Bun Mans Bare Center Granter Matter Broth
But my favorite part was the Sith lords.
There were enough Darths in the list that at the very lowest-creativity settings, everyone was a Sith lord. Here are some of my favorites:
Darth Teen Darth Tannin Darth Ben Darth Toes Darth Teena Darth Darth Dorth Darth Darth Mon Darth Man Darth Darth Sans Darth Band Darth Mall Darth Tall Grand Moff Darth Salt
I would like to see the costumes for some of these.
Want more Darths? Sign up here and I’ll email you an 8-page pdf of output straight from the neural network.
Oh no not Darth Darth Darth! He’s three times as bad as a normal Darth!
(a) I think it says something about the haphazardness of your linguistic worldbuilding if a 2017 neural network is good at producing names that would pass for valid.
(b) Darth is scary. Darth Darth Darth gets murderously annoyed with people trying to get his attention. Darth Darth, however, is just Space Moon Moon.
melissamwalshe reblogged
Writing is spending 30 minutes researching Greek mythology to give your character a resonant middle name, then changing the line so nobody uses that name. Then blogging about it.
melissamwalshe reblogged
If space travel doesn’t involve sea shanties then I think we’ll have missed an opportunity.
You see though, for sea travel you want big strong people who are capable of managing rigging. For space travel you want small low-mass people who are technically educated, as they are called, nerds. Your space shanties are going to be less booming and more squeaky.
gdanskcityofficial
in so far as there will be space shanties, they’ll be filk
I call shenanigans on the big strong people; sailors were young and malnourished by modern standards, and climbing around the rigging is easier if you’re small and light.
rainaramsay
Like, I am 100% in favor of shanties in as many situations as possible, but I’m having trouble coming up with a mode of space travel that would require multiple humans to move in concert, thus necessitating songs with a strong beat to move to.
Sea chanties were for providing a strong beat to move to. Space chanties might very well arise just because we’re bored, out there between point A and point B for so long.
(Also yes, @gdanskcityofficial up there has the right of it.)
Space shanties are for warp piloting. Under warp drive, human time perception and time as measured by crystal or atomic oscillators don’t match. Starship pilots listen to a small unamplified chorus singing a careful rhythm while keeping their own eyes on a silent metronome that the chorus can’t see, linked to a highly-precise atomic clock. How the chorus and metronome fall in and out of sync tells the pilot how to keep the ship safely in the warp bubble and correctly on course.
Depending on route, a typical warp jump can last anywhere from one to ten minutes, and most courses consist of five to fifteen jumps before a necessary four to six hour break to check the engines, plot the next set of jumps, and give everyone a chance to recover. A good shanty team, with reliable rhythm, a broad, versatile, and extendible repertoire, and the stamina to do 3-4 sets a day over the course of a voyage, is just as vital to space travel as a pilot, navigator, or engineering team.
frosttrix
YESSSSS
Other reasons Shanties will experience a revival in the space age:
- We will sing for any freaking reason, or no reason at all, and Shanties are FUN to sing.
- Deep Space is a lonely place and recruiting people suited to long periods of isolation might be a good idea. People from Newfoundland/Labrador, for instance.
- SPACE WHALES
- THEY’RE DEFINITELY REAL I FEEL IT IN MY SOUL
- “What Do We Do With A Drunken Sailor” is basically a revenge fantasy against your most incompetent co-workers and if there’s something humans love doing, it’s being petty.
I left my alter drifting In another quantum brane His eyes are sort of shifty But we’re otherwise the same
If the timeline branches one way I’m alive and he is dead But if we go the other Then it’s me who croaked instead
So remember when when you’re sailing ‘Pon the hyper spatial sea If your life you would preserve Do not trust the evil me.
@danbensen Do you remember that poem you wrote back in junior high about the spaceship that crashed? I half remember a line about the crew being as dead as a fish on Neptune.
It occurs to me that another function that folk music serves is to commemorate the times when the shit hit the fan and either the heroes survived through great cleverness or died in horrible pain. I imagine that space travel would include a fair number of those sorts of instances, so if space folk music is for company and entertainment, the songs would probably include some mournful ballads about dead crews. Especially if you’ve got a generational ship.
Anyway, my memory of that poem was that it was a comedic treatment of tragic circumstances, and it’s making me giggle to imagine it set to mournful music and preserved by generation after generation as an ode to some early pioneers in space travel.
melissamwalshe reblogged
Hello writer friends! I make stories happen with my face, how about you?
Who’s been here before? *raises both hands*
For “All of the above,” press 5, burn your manuscript, and start over.
Biology side of Tumblr (I’m looking at you, @danbensen): any reading recommendations for more deeply understanding RNA editing and why it’s not as useful as standard evolution?
“Like the proverbial court jester who can openly mock the king in his own court, artists who occupy marginalized social positions can use their art to challenge structures of power in ways that would otherwise be dangerous or impossible.”
melissamwalshe reblogged
coeursfideles
The Shepherd of the Hills (Henry Hathaway, 1941)
Technicolor photography by W. Howard Greene
Love seeing sheepdogs at work.
I have now watched So Much Critical Role that I’m starting to notice everyone has their own styles of rollin’ dice and they’re all real cute
- Marisha sorta just drops hers but she lifts her hand way up in the air afterward like there’s RECOIL on that shit
- Sam leaves his hand up in the air too but it’s very Gilmore-esque. Quite elegant, 9/10 for style. “Ah yes, what is this thing that I rolled - ah, ‘tis garbage”
- Liam just tips his dice over like a cat knocking something off a shelf. Sometimes he does this sneaky lil finger twirl thing. tryin 2 be stealthy.
- Once in a while Laura holds dice in both hands. prayin to dice gods probably.
- Taliesin always shakes his dice back and forth a bunch of times - obviously one must warm the dice up before rolling if one wishes to guarantee a fuckton of nat 20s (Laura does this too, but Taliesin will do it for D A Y S)
- Travis has some nasty SPIN on that throw and sometimes he puts his SHOULDERS into it dude rolls dice like a MAN doin a SPORT and I love it
I need room to roll. If the table’s full and things aren’t rolling well, sometimes I have to roll on the floor.