the collection

CASTSTATION

It's possible, encouraged even, to praise Delicious In Dungeon without the smug undercurrent of "...unlike those other manga".

Guy reading primarily pulp fantasy: It sucks how fantasy novels always go for such lowbrow fanservice tbh...

Outer wilds is definitely up there as one of my favorite games of all time, I especially adore the soundtrack

I absolutely love the Travelers theme, I've never really cried or teared up while playing a game before but this managed to really get me hard

just wanted to have a crack at it, and I made another visualizer for it too. The scope in 3d looks very nice :)

The thing that abled people who advocate for the disabled community don’t get is that there are times when disabilities/accommodations clash. Horribly.

Like I spent years having to come up with a solution to get therapy dogs into a series of residence halls. Why years? Because we had to decide who got to stay and who got to leave: the people who needed therapy dogs or the people with severe allergies to animals. Who got the alternative housing? 

Things like fidget toys might seem great for some disabled people but having them in the room could be distracting/overstimulating for others. The same goes with stimming. It can’t be helped but neither can the anxiety that another person in the room feels as they watch/hear it. Additionally, something like a weighted blanket might immediately calm one kid down and send the other one into a panic attack due to the claustrophobia it causes. (*Points to myself*)

Every Metro bus in New York City has a series of seats at the front that can be lifted up to accommodate people in wheelchairs but if I’m in one of those spots then someone with a cane/walker has to journey even further to sit down.

The flashing lights of a fire alarm are there to help deaf/hearing impaired but if they’re not properly timed, they can also cause a person to have a seizure.

The worst part about all of these is that there is rarely a concrete solution that makes everyone happy/safe. And I’m not here to offer any because I don’t know them. I’m just here to remind you all that as you’re taking your education/health classes, as you’re reading your textbooks, as you’re preparing to go be an advocate, just remember that there is rarely ever such a thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to advocacy and that something you do that can help one disabled person might actually hinder another.

Food for thought.

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

This article is actually about a very serious problem. If you overgenerate electricity it increases the phase frequency of the power grid, and if that goes out of sync with your generators (including solar panels) it can destroy them. In the kind of way where your power grid is fucked for months. It is very very very very bad.

California started a program to make solar panels more affordable by offering very low interest rates for solar panels, to allow people to benefit from their lifetime $/energy cost that's below fossil fuels, without having to worry about the high frontloaded cost. However they did not do this for batteries. And power grid quality batteries with massive energy storage and serious charge-discharge lifetimes, are expensive.

And they did this because while solar panels are cheaper than fossil fuels per kilowatt hour of electricity over their lifetime, solar panels plus batteries are not. And California wanted a supplemented free market solution and didn't really want to think about the part that direct government intervention in the form of taxation and paying for this change would be necessary.

So everyone in California just kept adding solar panels to the grid with no disconnect mechanisms, until eventually it hit a point where at noon, solar panels generated more power than the entire grid needed. With no batteries to store the excess. This is a motherfucking power grid killer. It is a scenario where people get left in the fucking dark for months because of how badly it destroys the powergrid.

So the power grid authorities did the only thing they could do. They called up every industrial plant with heavy duty equipment and ovens they could and paid them to turn it on full blast (because using that equipment costs money in wear and tear even without the electricity cost). And in doing so, avoided disaster.

That's what this article is talking about. They are solar panel researchers criticizing a capitalist adoption strategy and promoting direct government intervention to create renewable energy. However as with most newspapers they don't get to choose the title, the editor picks the most provocative title that will get clicks.

Okay here's another case where I originally reblogged the first part without thinking, and now we have the proper context. Damn

Keeping this quote to my grave

its so disgusting that you actually have to practice skills to retain them. just stay in my brain for retrieval pleaaaaaaassssssseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Frieren Art Nouveau Style

Elie Saab | Spring/Summer 2024 Couture

I think the reason I dislike the Joker being given backstory is not that I don't want to feel sympathy for the Joker (I mean, that's a small part of it) but rather that I think it undermines the point of the Joker. I don't mean as a character with motivations, I mean narratively. Others have probably said this before, and better than I'm about to, but this is my blog and I'm going to ramble.

The whole point of the Joker that some writers seem to miss (especially films! films are ADDICTED to backstory for some reason) is that there IS no real reason. He's a primary antagonist because his entire schtick is that nothing matters, and that's funny as hell. He can treat people's lives as a joke because they don't mean anything.

Bruce, or Batman, as the protagonist is the exact opposite of this. The motivation to save others from what happened to him as a child is rooted in this concrete, fundamental-to-Batman truth: everything matters. This is why Bruce's parents dying in a random act of violence in a before-then obscure alley has had such staying power: it wasn't a massive event that changed the lives of dozens or hundreds. It was a small thing, a statistic in the grand scheme of violent crime, with no real motive other than desperation or greed. And it changed someone's life completely. For Batman, the hundreds of small acts that fill a patrol all matter because each person does.

Joker's obsession with Batman hinges on him believing the exact opposite, and trying to convince him that he's wrong, and that THE joke is that nothing matters at all-- walking away from a victim and torturing a victim have the same moral weight because there is no moral weight. The point isn't to be the most evil or the most cruel, the point is to prove that it's all pointless.

In a way, this means Joker's greatest ally is the apathy of Gotham. Every person who turns away or keeps walking with their head down and claims "not my problem" supports his claim that nothing matters, because Gotham is proving by inaction that it's pointless unless it impacts them personally. Nobody else matters unless I do, and then it's too late. Do I think Joker's crimes are Gotham's fault, narratively and within their fictional world? Not exactly. But I do think Joker isn't actually an embodiment of chaos but is a representative of what Batman is actually fighting against: a Gotham that doesn't care.

Batman's existence is a defiance of this. His work, masked and unrewarded, is a symbol of the fact that no wealth, no material comfort, no border of security, no past trauma, no law, no excuse justifies not caring. Every life matters, even if it isn't your own, even if it's a stranger. He can't kill Joker in-world because of his moral stance on killing. He can't kill Joker narratively because Gotham won't kill Joker. Batman's driving core is a relentless anti-apathy, and Gotham's current collective social spirit is that they are helpless and not responsible for it.

Joker thinks it's funny that anyone would care, and Batman thinks someone not caring is the opposite of funny. Caring can often hurt, but it isn't pointless. Every single life saved or lost creates a ripple effect that matters and hurts or helps others. Each victim Joker encounters is met with the same presupposition: "I can hurt you and it doesn't mean anything because you're nobody. It doesn't hurt Gotham because Gotham isn't anyone."

Every person Batman saves is saved by the same presupposition: "If I can save you, it's like saving all of Gotham. Everyone matters...because each single life matters."

The more people that build their lives on caring regardless of how they think it impacts them personally, the less sway the Joker has. Every person who shuns apathy is another person who will fight back against the Joker's Chief Joke: It doesn't matter.

And they fight back best by, like Batman, looking at each individual they come in contact with and deciding, "Yes, this one matters."

This is also why Joker really only does his crimes when Batman is active, and makes sure he knows of everything he gets up to.

Every crime, from robbing a bank to nuking a city is a performance, with Batman as the audience. If Batman were to die, or disappear, the Joker would stop too. He never wanted to prove to the world that nothing mattered. Only to the one person who personified the opposite.

Pssst if you have ublock: https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

if ur dealing to the people on the left you’d just say “$45 a gram” and theyd be like “yeah bro sure dude i gotchu thats legitness ur the man” but the ppl on the right u gotta finesse like “my normal price is $15 a g but this stuff is called Cosmic Throat Cum Squirt Haze so the lowest i can go is $50″ and theyd b like “wow… so cultured… i cant wait to smoke this out of my native american themed bong…”

: 0 !!!

Do y'all not remember the russian spies that plagued tumblr??

this site has been on a noticeable decline from the moment they expunged the russian chaos agents

Tumblr had what

I like how the consensus on this site was that despite being a constant dumpster fire of failure, the one thing the admins were able to successfully figure out was an international espionage ring orchestrated from the kremlin as opposed to thinking maybe, just maybe, they banned a bunch of funny black people because hillary ate shit in 2016

uhhhhh no this really happened and it was not a conspiracy to ban a bunch of funny black people, unless you mean the fake black people the troll accounts posed (source: npr) as 

additional sources: https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-russia-trolls-propaganda/  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/24/tumblr-says-russia-used-it-for-fake-news-during-2016-election

It’s really fucking weird that people are pretending this didn’t happen.

I can specifically speak about lagonegirl as I was a follower. They never spoke to their followers. Their posts all had a similar format to Vox posts at the time. They would leave a written funny comment on their posts turns out those were taken from Twitter users and written out like it was their own words. The many popular Black tumblr users rebloged the posts and added more funny comments and post would get widely shared.

I’m starting to wonder if this is a new Russian scam. Get people to belief it didn’t happen so they can do it again.

having sorted through the replies on this post, there are two camps:

1. people saying yes, russian psyops on social media accounts were totally a thing. they copied real content (which could be traced back to their original sources) but edited and modified in ways that helped them shape the conversation in the direction that served their purpose.  source: here are 5 sources documenting it

2. people saying no, russian psyops was never a thing.  uhhhh, duh! pfff, you believed that? cringe. OBVIOUSly fake. 

I gotta add they were on *all* the damn socials, it’s just that Tumblr hoards its old junk whereas all the others only want new content front and centre. If we didn’t sift through our ashes so much we’d have forgotten, too.

Oh yeah I forgot to add before this fell out of the queue, obviously no one thinks staff figured that out on their own. It was a massive international intelligence operation that also included facebook, reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube, buzzfeed somehow, and teams of competent professional intelligence analysts.

Afterwards the inquiry concluded that the russian trolls (of whom several were in fact indicted) specifically targeted Black voters to divide and undermine their vote

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49987657

They piggybacked on BLM

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/russian-trolls-went-attack-during-key-election-moments-n827176

And they focused on Black Americans as prospective assets

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/17/tech/russia-2016-election-social-media-report/index.html

op was purpose-designed to alienate and disenfranchise Black Americans, “a bunch of funny black people” try a bunch of digital blackface, just a wholeass online minstrel show

We’ve lived through such interesting times, haven’t we?

[without glancing up from my Library Book about History]

Ok guys you do know that every major Empire employs PsyOps pretty much 24/7, right?

The United States Cyber Command is a fucking agency with a published budget.

China’s combination Space Force and Cyberwarfare Army was formally launched in 2015. These agencies have full-time employees, you know? This is what they do.

Russia has been big into telecom as a vector for Imperial directives all throughout the history of the technology and they did not miss a beat when we switched from analog to digital.

Every time there’s a big election, there’s folks on some government payroll on every social worth a damn trying to steer the conversation. This isn’t even new! It’s just another branch of Propaganda, really, which all Empires engage in. They did it with television. They did it with Radio. They did it with newspapers. This is basic Statecraft.

Cultivate Skepticism.

There are far more players to this game than just Russian Trolls, and this year is an important one. Tumblr is a small pond but something is sure to show up. Be wary. Stay calm. Fact check.

Stay safe out there.