Dark One Had Cometh

started watching season 8!

Reminder: https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Over_a_Barrel

https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2011/03/settler-ponies-and-buffaloes-in-my.html?m=1

https://sanguinity.dreamwidth.org/49268.html

tweeter @frienem does the best HDB cosplay I've ever seen in my life

Artificer: How dangerous could this place be?

Wizard: It’s full of French!

Artificer: Exactly, if we’re gonna roll Initiative, they’ll surrender in first round.

Philosophers:

we live in a society where there are more sexy vampires than sexy werewolves in media and i think that says a lot about why our economy is the way it is

I HAD to gif this

Forever in the Cloud

A well-known, global tech corporation launches a service that enables you to upload your consciousness to a digital cloud, allowing you to exist forever inside a virtual world where you can live out your ideal life, experiencing whatever life you want to live and enjoy. However, there’s a big catch: this process is irreversible. You can’t go back. Once you’ve been uploaded to the virtual reality cloud, you are there forever. Would you be willing to upload yourself to this digital afterlife? How do you think most other people would respond to this scenario? 

Share your thinking and make sure to use details and examples to support what you have to say. 

[N.B. — yes, this writing prompt is similar to the premise of the show Upload]

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Every time my body betrays me I keep fantasizing about this idea. Every time I get diarherra after eating something I once could but now my stomach no longer agrees with, get sweaty and uncomfortable, struggle to lock the button on my pants or try to be productive only to fall asleep in my fucking chair, I think of this very concept. Don't tempt me like this.

I saw this on quora and thought it was cool and wanted to share it on here.  Its a long read but crazy.  Its from Erik Painter

They did try. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible. So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him.

The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. There were about 400 words in the Code.

The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter and then they were translated into Navajo words. In this way English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).

For the letter substitution part of the Code the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog”. Or other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical.

Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. None were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” n Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver.

A note here as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the military before WWII. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. They borrow very few words and have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for telephone, or train, or nuclear power are all made from Navajo stem roots.

Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.

The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.

For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.

Here is an example of a coded message:

béésh łigai naaki joogii gini dibé tsénił áchį́į́h bee ąą ńdítį́hí joogi béésh łóó’ dóó łóóʼtsoh

When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:

“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “

You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”

“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.

Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Coder Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.

I love what humans can do with language.

HE RUINED MY DREAM JOURNAL!!!

Ｉ ｄｉｄ ｎＡＵＧＨＴｔ！ Ｍｉｓｔｅｒ Ｅｌｅｃｔｉｃ ｓｅｎｄ ｈｉｍ ｔｏ ｔｈｅ   ｐｒｉｎｃｉｐａｌ＇ｓ ｏｆｆｉｃｅ ａｎｄ ｈａｖｅ ｈｉｍ ＥＸｐｅｌＬｅｄ！

The line delivery, the acting, the fact that I can hear this without sound, the way they’re treating it as though this is a murder trial, and Mr. Electric’s reaction to this are part of what makes this scene hilarious

I will always reblog Mr. Electric Kill Him

It’s so funny

when i say i laughed like a gremlin

Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

this is such a hack joke but i had to make it

one of my favourite callbacks 💀

I really, truly think people would not ship Kabru with Laios or even really like him as a character if he were written female. Not! Because he wouldn't be a good character. But because I think people would amplify/demonise his negative traits and turn him into an evil caricature of what his character is (manipulative, people pleasing, untrustworthy, etc)

Like I see people making jokes about him lying about his intentions to get closer to Laios- he's the silly little advisor who fantasises about killing the king teehee- and I find it hard to imagine that the majority of the fandom would like any if those things as much if he were a woman. I've seen female characters be absolutely hated for less.