[ceruleanheaven]

month starting on a monday we have no excuse guys lets get to work and lock the fuck in

[ceruleanheaven]

yk its actually very chic and avant garde to start on tuesday the second

[ceruleanheaven]

many claim theres nothing more subversive and revolutionary than starting on wednesday the third

[ceruleanheaven]

there are simply no words in the english language that can describe starting on thursday the fourth. thats how iconic it is

[ceruleanheaven]

choosing to start on friday the fifth. i just think its very inspiring

[duskodair]

relistening to Taz and I'm really enjoying listening to each arc and relating it to the relevant bird.

like yeah here there be gerblins is about lup it's about you should have thought about that before throwing my dog in the fire, it's about falling in love with Barry Bluejeans, it's about trying to save so many people but failing, it's desperate odds and flying away from a disaster you couldn't avert, it's about being bitten in the back by an earlier decision to trust someone.

murder on the Rockport Limited is about Dav. It's about seeing the truth behind the illusion. it's about a town of people all with the same face. it's about losing the driver and trying to save the vehicle without him. it's about the youngest member of the crew holding a book that catches the truth and stops it reaching its destination. it's about beheading and loss of identity. It's about remembering to get your roommate pringles

petals to the metal is about Merle. It's about don't be chopping on these sweet sweet babies. it's about reaching out to someone you love who has been consumed by a power they can't fully control. it's about dying in the hope they can be saved. it's about racing as fast as you can, with all that you have, in the hope that something can be saved in the end.

crystal kingdom is about taako. it's about loving someone you've lost so much you'd turn the world to crystal to try and save them. it's about Kravitz. its about learning more from thousands of realities to make new and wonderful things. its about walking through your legacy. its about the best sandwich and taako's good out here. its about seven birds being seen, its about the thousands of lives that Boyland touched

the eleventh hour is about Magnus. It's about rustic hospitality. it's about recklessly breaking reality trying to protect people you love. it's about fate and choices you make in life. it is being a small town hero. it is making promises and keeping them. it's about the downfall of a corrupt leader and the people he took down on his way. it's about fallen temples and burnt out buildings. it's about embracing the inevitable and holding the hand of the clock that strikes your doom as the weapon that will save you

the suffering game is about Barry. It's about looping through endless pain again and again in the hopes of reaching a dream. it's about liches and death and love. it's about losing your body and being saved from permanent death by the power of your friends' love. it's about working out how things are working and then pulling them apart to understand them. it's about choosing to lose everything in the hopes that it might let you save something. arms outstretched. trust Barry, love Barry

the stolen century is about Lucretia. it's one hundred years of journals. It's learning world after world and watching them die. It's working to protect those you love by saving the light. It's about running away again and again, and loving only in goodbyes. it's about being alone and dying again and again. It's about bonds growing stronger even as something comes relentlessly to consume them

story and song is about the starblaster flying into, not away from the storm. it's about hear that babe, we're legends. it's about bringing together all the arcs and all the relics into one hope to undo mistakes. it's about the magic in a bardsong. it's about the light of creation being used as a barrier against darkness.

[fairycosmos]

there's just nothing that beats being at home. the world will try to convince me i should be doing more and it's like yeah but im at home

[fairycosmos]

like if youre at home right now just take a minute to be like UGH yes im at home 

[victusinveritas]

Letterboxd reviews of A Knight's Tale.

[song-of-the-spheres]

Vorkosigan Saga re-read, two favorite bits/banger quotes per book Shards of Honor // Barrayar

[oddly-romantic]

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

[headspace-hotel]

There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.

Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.

[mikkeneko]

"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: 

Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.

[ba-sing-saying]

I just finished reading The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold yesterday and I can honestly say I’ve never read a book that felt like that.

It’s like a combination of the morbid fascination of watching a car crash in slow motion layered with the upbeat thrill of a heist movie plus politics intrigue and spy-movie style paranoia, all in a gigantic blizzard swirling around this one little guy. I didn’t know how I would be able to become attached to a character in this series after reading Shards of Honor and Barrayar, because I loved Cordelia so much as a protagonist, but Miles Vorkosigan did the job. Truly the character of all time.

He’s a strategic genius. He can figure out a solution to almost any problem. He’s in love with his childhood best friend and gets shut down repeatedly. He serves as the officiant at her impromptu wedding to a guy he saved through another random act of kindness, and plays out the roles of three different people in it like some kind of vaudeville comedy act. He makes people laugh. He inspires everyone around him to genuine loyalty and trust. He was playmates with the current emperor of his home planet when they were kids and is the heir of an aristocratic family. He refuses to get anything by nepotism and uses his mother’s maiden name when he meets people so they won’t know who he is. On a whim, he decides to help a random stranger and has to lie to do it. He commits to the bit so hard that he ends up faking his way into running a mercenary fleet whose existence was initially a complete lie and stopping a war he had nothing to do with. He has stomach ulcers from how stressed out he is. He refuses to break a promise, even when doing so would allow him to escape the web of lies he’s woven. His house of cards is always one gust of wind from toppling and he’s somehow able to keep it standing by sheer force of character. He will not stop because if he does he’ll have a nervous breakdown.

Genuinely the most fascinating and lovable combination of wet rat energy, goodest boy ever, and rogue with a heart of gold. No one is doing it like him. I’m going to read all seventeen books in this series or however many there are, and then everything else Lois McMaster Bujold has written.

[thegaymertrainer]

Ribbon dancing I was not aware of your evolution 🤯

[strange-aeons]

If I don't see any code geass cosplayers at the revolution themed dashcon I'm gonna be ... well, unsurprised. Because it's a largely forgotten show from 2006. But still slightly sad ... because the revolution themed dashcon is an excellent habitat for code geass cosplayers

[strange-aeons]

Besides being My Childhood Cringe and the reason i made my first tumblr account in 2011, code geass is still one of the craziest, most genre confused pieces of media i’ve ever seen.

It's about the horrors of colonialism and war and genocide. It's a high school drama. It's a sexy mecha show. there’s titties everywhere the 2006 fan service is absolutely tasteless and egregious. But don't get distracted, this is a show about rebels fighting to overthrow an evil genocidal empire except for when it's about the world’s largest pizza, yes, the world's largest pizza. Sponsored by Pizza Hut. This Show Is Sponsored By Pizza Hut. Major characters will die in devastating ways that you will remember forever. Buy Pizza Hut. The fandom is mostly yaoi of the two male leads but they’re not canonically queer. There are some canonically queer side characters! but watch out! you’ll wish there weren’t! It takes place in the futuristic year of 2017, which is actually in the 1960s if you convert the shows alternate universe calendar into our own.

If you were to ask me whether this show is good, bad, or so bad that it’s good, i would have to tell you honesty that it’s good. The pizza hut titties out horrors of colonialism show is good.

[unusual]

Japanese is an incredibly fun and rewarding language (if you’ve ever wanted to learn it for ANY reason, most importantly including the “silly” reasons) but the fearmongering and capitalist intervention involved in the language learning process have given it a reputation as an “impossible task” for English speakers, leading to confusion and dkn learners and weird pessimist attitudes about the whole thing. In this thread I will explain how to effectively learn and retain Japanese. This is a tried, tested and true method; probably 99% of all people who try to learn Japanese give up, but everyone I’ve met who has tried and stuck with this has been at or above N3-N4 after 6 months or less including me

[unusual]

You can teach yourself Japanese for free if you have a little free time every day and a computer

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

Remember to consult yomitan and cure dolly where needed, that’s what it’s there for. As you can see I am quite normal about the Japanese language, so if you have any other questions or need help with anything else feel free to shoot me an ask and I will get back to you promptly. Japanese is not your enemy and it is not impossible. It is your friend

[geeses]

reblog to diminish the horrors from the person you reblogged from

[horsefigureoftheday]

Horse colors are easy. For example, the left horse is flaxen liver chestnut and the right horse is silver dapple

Left is flaxen chestnut and right is golden palomino

Left is perlino and right is amber champagne

Left is dun and right is buckskin

Like I said, easy!

[soaked-doors]

“no one is born in this world to be alone!”

[enki2]

[sitronsangthoughts]

I've seen a fair amount of fat liberation activists explain that they have always been fat, they're not about to stop, and that's natural and beautiful and fine. That's an incredibly important message.

What I've seen less - and what I want to remind people of - is this: if you've become fat, that's also natural and beautiful and fine.

When you're a fat person who has been thin in the past, that comes with its own brand of shaming. People take your history of thinness as proof that you don't have to be fat. You often fear the look of disappointed surprise in the eyes of someone you haven't met since you were thin. People try to determine "what happened". They don't see your fat body as just you, but as a sort of symptom that isn't part of you.

Becoming fat is not a tragedy, it's not a sign of failure, it's not a bad or shameful thing. The thin you is not the Real you. You are always real and always worthy of freedom, respect and peace. You are allowed to be fat no matter how or when you became fat.

[systlin]

Is there any better feeling than an email notification that a useless bullshit meeting you didn't want to go to has been cancelled.

[shadowicepuma]

An email notification that two useless bullshit meetings you didn't want to go to have been cancelled?

[systlin]

I hope everyone who reads this has TWO bullshit useless meetings they didn't want to go to cancelled <3

[flythesail]

You should automatically get time off work until the light returns to your eyes and you feel like a real person again