Hi, I'm Emma.

an assortment of stuff. i often forget to tag. sorry.  i follow thousands of blogs.  i'm bad at replying. talk shit - get blocked.

[popepauljohn]

[fuckyeahasexual]

Hello you need to see this drag performer talking about quantum physics, queer existence, and non-binary identities.

[enbees-and-aros]

[Video Description: A drag queen — who is credited as Amrou Al-Kadhi / Glamrou, a drag performer, writer, and filmmaker — stands in front of a microphone and explains,

“Quantum physics is this incredible sect of of physics, which basically…

With like, Newtonian physics — I think of it as heteronormative physics — where its basically ‘What are the fixed universal principles that govern the world? If I do A, will B happen? What are the formulas that’ll tell us anywhere in the universe, “What will happen if I input this?”’

Quantum physics is equally a “real” sect of physics that basically looks at subatomic particles — so the very smallest things in our universe, not the macro things — and they contradict basically everything that Newtonian physics shows us. So, the most famous experiment is the Double Slit Experiment, where you fire an electron and it should go through the left or right hole. And then every now and then, it goes through both at the same time. And we don’t really know why. And sometimes, the same subatomic particle is in different locations at the same times.

And quantum physics shows that actually reality itself is basically a majority approximation of what’s happening sub-atomically. So when people spew the biological essentialism argument on me. Like, particles themselves are non-binary, and do things that contradict each other all the time, we just can’t see them all the time. And that gives me a lot of comfort, that if subatomic particles defy constructs all the time, why should we believe in fixed constructs of gender, or any kind of reality?” END DESCRIPTION]

[naamahdarling]

“Newtonian physics is heteronormative” is not the take I expected to see on my dash today, but it is 100% inspirational.

[inky-dumbass]

i needed this

[just-shower-thoughts]

People who like rocks see cool rocks everywhere. People who like birds see interesting birds everywhere. The tree on your yard could be an exceptional specimen. The world around you could be amazing and magical, but you aren’t enough of a nerd to see it.

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

I gave my mum Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking: Eleven Walks Through Expert Eyes for her birthday this year, it’s a book that revolves around this idea: the author invites 11 specialists in different things to walk around a boring city block with her one after the other so they can point out to her the things they see, that she doesn’t notice. There’s an expert in typography talking about what the variety of fonts on urban signs can tell you about the city’s history, an entomologist pointing out all the urban insects no one pays attention to, a geologist, a sound engineer…

[thegreenpea]

See this is what I mean by “there are more wonders in this world than you can ever dream of and all you need to do is listen to its stories and see it’s magic. ”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Imperial Wars Always Come Home

Imperial wars never stay overseas. They always comes home sooner or later.

Even by the standards of 2020, recent events in Portland, Oregon - a city I know well and deeply love - still have the capacity to shock. They’ve showcased the deployment of unidentified federal agents in military-style camouflage, armed with military-style weapons, who have beaten and tear-gassed protesters. This same paramilitary force has also occasionally snatched people off the street in unmarked vehicles and employed (or plan to employ) mass surveillance tools, including drones. The current administration has indicated that it sees Portland as a testbed for these tactics and deployments, with every intention of using them on a broader scale nationwide.

To put it mildly, this is not good. Portland is hardly under siege by violent anarchists. We’ve seen mild vandalism of federal property and a few businesses in a restricted section of the city, coupled with largely peaceful protests against police brutality (a particularly vexing problem in a left-leaning city with right-leaning law enforcement institutions). For all but the most committed authoritarians, this is not a sufficient reason to deploy what amounts to a new paramilitary federal police force, much less to let them off the leash to beat, gas, and detain American citizens at will.

This is American policing shorn of any accountability and reduced to its most fundamental, animalistic drive: to maintain a particular social order, benefiting a particular group of Americans, through the open application of violence.

[anexperimentallife]

If you're a man, and a woman friend confides in you about how shitty men are, it's because she considers you one of the good ones--someone it's safe to vent to. Don't ruin that vibe with some "not all men" crap. She knows. That's why she's talking to you. You don't have to say it; she's already telling you, just not in so many words. If you were one of the ones she was talking about, she wouldn't be confiding in you about it, so instead of getting offended, you should feel honored, my droogie.

[note-a-bear]

I really do think that the whole sense of "any interaction with children is predatory" is what enables predators to win over kids so easily.

When you're young and no one ever shows you healthy intergenerational interactions outside of close family and/or authority figures (and kids are most often taught to simply obey and not question adults of [perceived] authority), any time someone in that position gives you positive attention becomes almost heroic. And it certainly becomes intoxicating, especially for ~weird~ kids with 'uncommon' interests, or kids who just simply don't get regularly indulged by adults in their lives.

Yes, we have to be aware of and mindful of how people who would prey on kids use being nice, or just listening, to kids. However, if kids don't know that they *can* challenge adults, or that there *are* ways adults can interact with and educate them that aren't simply rooted in authority, they'll have a harder time recognizing that an adult *isn't* behaving the right way.

Simply treating a child as if they're a being in your community, and a being with inherent worth, isn't predatory. That's just what being part of the world is.

Why else do you think they say it takes a village to raise a child?

[note-a-bear]

Tl;dr: the less we isolate children from positive, meaningful, age appropriate interactions with adults outside their immediate family unit the harder it is for predators to convince children that their attentions are healthy or permissible. AND the harder it becomes for those predators to isolate children from people who would intervene on their behalf.

[theworldismyoysterandiamthepearl]

“Baby goats Marion and Juniper met walrus pals Pakak and Mitik during yesterday’s walk around the Zoo! 🐐💙🐐”

quote and pics from https://www.instagram.com/ptdefiancezoo/

[gallusrostromegalus]

I do rather like this trend of “While everything is closed, lets take the Animals that can be put on leash and walk ‘em around the zoo so they and the other animals can see each other”.

[babyanimalgifs]

Cows trying to scare Canada goose 

(via)

[etakeh]

THE FEDS RETREAT.

This is so fucking amazing to me.  

[magsgotswags]

This is an excellent shieldwall. 

[nikomorti]

greeting from Chile <3 aguanten quienes luchan.

[nikomorti]

 let’s say i saw a guy, friend of a friend who saw another..using one of this as a shield against little metal balls shooted by  farm pigs….and he says that all you have to do is put some straps and you are good to go

[nikomorti]

btw you DROWN teargas bombs …how you do it is up to you, be aware that they are  HOT so please use gloves and  decide BEFORE the battle if you gonna be drowing teargasbombs or in the front line. as Ron Swanson Said  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq46oeK_JDQ

[anarchblr]

[bogleech]

Still been obsessing over fishing lures lately but like, look at them

Blind cave gummi man

Jar of space virus

Don’t bully him :(

a family of honkulating dwimpuses

“Uhh this is how a duck swims right? Hoo boy. At least I remembered that they’re about two and a half inches long.”

Jeremy

[machonemonkey03]

Fuck it, went ahead and i made a crappy doodle of jeremy.

[bogleech]

I only posted Jeremy hours ago how did you draw almost practically EVERY detail of him!?!

JEREMY SCIENCE FACT: he has more friends.

“Stupid idiot little fish like to pretend they’re one big fish but I’m too high-IQ to fall for that” - a fish once

This wants to be somebody’s OC so bad.

This demon eyed tadpole isn’t even silly it’s just radical

Moomin larvae

Sometimes a fish is just like “hell yeah I have no idea what I’m looking at so it is D E F I N I T E L Y going in my mouth”

[adhdbri]

On to the next hobby...

[rainydaydecaf]

I always wonder why this is seen as a bad thing. Who cares if I don’t stick with a hobby longer than a month? What does it matter if I flit from one project to another based on whatever holds my interest at the time?

There’s nothing wrong with trying new things! If it makes you happy, however briefly, then it’s not a waste of time. I always look back with fondness on those brief obsessions with making jewelry or paint-by-numbers or whatever, because it was fun and I learned something, and what’s the alternative anyway? Doing nothing? Sitting around with twitchy fingers and too much pent up energy? Hating myself for not being “good” at anything just because I dropped karate after a few weeks?

Fuck that. My hobby is trying new hobbies.

[glumshoe]

I can’t stop laughing at this clip art of an assassin because the subtle but unmistakable spread of his butt cheeks reminds me of a frog.

[argumate]

“the subtle but unmistakable spread of his butt cheeks”, much like “cerulean orbs”, sounds like a phrase ripped from fanfiction

[glumshoe]

hang on, combine them. now it’s about a shirime yokai. 

“There, nestled in the subtle but unmistakable spread of his butt cheeks, was a single cerulean orb that glistened with passion. The pupil was blown wide, like a pool of ink, and if he stared at it any longer, he half-feared he might tumble into its depths and be lost forever...”

[argumate]

it’s beautiful! the abstract concept of collaborative creation I mean, not this disgusting monstrosity you just invented

[philosoverted-deactivated202006]

Do you ever lie awake wondering how the heck Gimli knows what a nervous system is

[systlin]

Clearly dwarves have medical knowledge far more advanced than that of the other races.

[gallusrostromegalus]

His Majesty Dr. Gimli, son of Gloin, Neurosurgeon, M.D.

[filthyprotozoan]

gimli trying to explain his studies to legolas, a flat-earther

[hubris-i]

#*scroll down* #*remember that middle earth is canonically flat for elves and round for everyone else* #*scroll back up & smash that reblog button"

[fridge246]

tired: legolas took gimli to valinor with him because they were bffs/in love/etc. 

wired: legolas took gimli to valinor to prove the world was flat after arguing with him about it for decades

[jemthecrystalgem]

Sorry it’s what to elves

[dvandom]

So, in Tolkein lore, the world was originally flat, with most of the land in the middle (hence Middle Earth).  But the Numenorians (men who were rewarded with their own Atlantis-equivalent island for service in the first big war against Melkor, but eventually Power Corrupts etc) tried to invade the uttermost west which was basically Elf Heaven.  To put an end to that sort of thing, the creator of the world Bent The World and made it a sphere…but left elves able to treat it like a flat disk.  So elves can sail west and reach Elf Heaven, but a man or dwarf or hobbit who sails west will eventually wrap around to the east coast of Middle Earth.

[moomoobooboo-deactivated2020102]

This is why Legolas can see for such great, almost impossible distances. The Earth does not curve for him.

[endreal]

Legolas said fuck the horizon

[divinegaeity-deactivated2023101]

God I fucking love high fantasy

[whitepeopletwitter]

[raginrayguns]

George Francis Atkinson - Botany for High Schools (1910):

Fig. 51. A. cross section of the stem of an oak tree thirty-seven years old, showing the annual rings. rm, the medullary rays; m, the pith (medulla). B, cross section of the stem of a palm tree, showing the scattered bundles.

[honeylemony]

[averruncusho]

banana tree: *slurred* hold my cocktail

[theconcealedweapon]

Imagine if the good cops striked and refused to work until the bad cops were held accountable.

I wonder why that never happens.

Could it be because there are no good cops? That's the only reason I can think of.

[dreamjerky]

[aiweirdness]

Once again, a neural net tries to name cats

Last year I trained a neural net to generate new names for kittens, by giving it a list of over 8,000 existing cat names to imitate. Starting from scratch, with zero knowledge of English or any context for the words and letter combinations it was trying out, it tried to predict what letters might be found in cat names, and in which order. Its names ranged from the strange to the completely nonsensical to the highly unfortunate (Retchion, Hurler, and Trickles were some of its suggestions). Without knowledge of English beyond its list of cat names, it didn’t know what letter combinations to avoid.

So I decided to revisit the cat-naming problem, this time using a neural net that had a lot more context. GPT-2, trained by OpenAI on a huge chunk of the internet, knows which words and letter combinations tend to be used together on the English-language internet. It also has (mostly) figured out which words and letter combinations to avoid, at least in some contexts (though it does tend to suddenly switch contexts, and then, yikes).

When I trained GPT-2 on the list of cat names using Max Woolf’s colab notebook, it still retained a lot of what it had learned from the rest of the internet. Gone were the strange names like “Tilly-Mapper” and “Balllucidoux” - it had a bunch of real words it could use instead. Here are some of the names it came up with - and the Morris Animal Refuge (who you may remember from that time they used neural net names for their guinea pigs) has given some of these names to some highly adoptable kittens.

First, neural net can do fancy:

Taffeta Pompompur Monocle Tom Glitter Notion Tinnitus Cheesemonger M. Tinklesby Linklater Soap

It can also do the opposite of fancy:

Scat Cat Butthole Gangrene Moisture Grotesque Petard Oilbag Buttwig The Cream Meatbag Dr Fart Fudge Putty Scumbag Constipation BUTT

And it can also do names ranging from tough to downright sinister:

Miss Vulgar Lillith The Vamp Elle Fury Deadbolt Romeo of Darkness Starmaker Fist Warning Signs Bibles Smoked The Firestarter Higher Rune Scarlet Be Thy Coat Kill All Humans Bones Of The Master Mr. Sinister Evil Whispers Spawn Serendipitous Kill Stranglehold

(Starmaker and Sparky Buttons are from a litter that had upper respiratory infections that damaged their eyes, but even though their world is kinda cloudy, they love to play and cuddle.)

I’m a particular fan of the Very Weird cat names:

Honeystring Dr Leg Tom Noodle Pinball Scene Peanutbutterjiggles You’re Telling A Lie Beep Boop Thoughts Bobble Bun Atmosphere You Name It Whiskeridoo Sparky Buttons

Seemingly This Guy Various Authors Chicken Whiskey Fish Especially Thelonious Monsieur Ringo Shuffles Sweet Cakes EXTAs (Eye Stalks) Checker Spin Donut Quin Two Patz Grandpa He Glad Funky Moe Fluttering Feelers Accepted A Tribute Chewie Bean PLEASE Gregory Chimney Notable PRODUCT LEGEND Weird Science Platinum Not Suitable For Character the Enforcer

Did I mention these cats are adoptable? If you live near Philadelphia, you live near these kitties!

Bonus content: yet more cat names!

[pastrygeckos]

Ok I can’t stop laughing at Scat Cat Butthole

[leafcrunch]

most of these are functionally indistinguishable from what people actually call their cats

[out-there-on-the-maroon]

I’m obsessed. “Scarlet Be Thy Coat” and “Bones Of The Master” are especially fascinating. 

[validwarriorcatsnames]

This blog and all forms of naming warrior cats is hereby replaced with this AI. Clan leaders are obscolete