Kobayashi Maru

Amanda, 30s, Wisconsin, USA. Demiwoman, white, asexual, something-romantic, Romantic, bipolar II (they/them/theirs or she/her/hers). ENFP, Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff, NG Cleric, Taurus. Museum curator at heart if not in paycheck. Loves shipping and Dean Winchester. Reblogs: politics, aro/ace, Supernat, MCU, DW, Yuri on Ice, Merlin, D&D, whatever strikes my fancy, etc. Take a look at my Resolution19 tag for a collection of 2019 New Years' Resolution stories.

[mockva]

[vorbisx]

Replacing physical buttons and controls with touchscreens also means removing accessibility features. Physical buttons can be textured or have Braille and can be located by touch and don't need to be pressed with a bare finger. Touchscreens usually require precise taps and hand-eye coordination for the same task.

Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment's notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.

Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a "locate then press" style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.

When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?

Who is allowed to control the physical world, and who is making that decision?

[draculasdaughter]

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

[three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat]

Listen, this is serious.

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?

[whateverthebeeswant]

Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.

[three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat]

Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.

[teachingtales]

Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid

[professionalwritingnerd]

[irockasingranite]

Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.

Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.

So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.

[twinkenjoyer-deactivated2023083]

if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge

[afoxwithpenguins]

Don’t mind me, just gotta share this with my bf so that he knows what websites to avoid

[astudyinpanda]

Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.

[viking369]

Always reblog.

[shithowdy]

american blackbirds are icterids but european blackbirds are thrushes but american robins are thrushes but european robins are flycatchers and they are named robin because (checks notes) brits in the 1400s called them "robert" on account of they are just some familiar guy who shows up in your yard. hold on post canceled is that really why they are called that? what the fuck. they did this with jackdaws and magpies too? i can't even be annoyed. how human. "who's that? that's bob." fuck dude it sure is.

[whyenn-reader]

part of being an adult is figuring out what eveyone else's definition of "going crazy" is. to you it is not sleeping for 60 hours, writing 80k words in one sitting and expiriencing enough anxiety to kill a horse. to beth from accounting its buying a ticket to Columbus, Ohio. and to your friend its consuming so much ketamine you lose all of your posessions and wake up with five broken bones in a ditch somewhere and then proceeding to do it again the next day. to your other friend its writing a letter to their favourite actress about how much they appreciate her work. to your neighbour its laughing loudly in a grocery store whilst in pajamas. maya from uni hears the voice of her dead father making jokes with no punchlines and she considers that to be quite normal - to her going crazy would be hearing her husband instead. your downstairs neighbour will take night walks naked sometimes and claim there is nothing weird about him. there are literally no rules to life and all meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

[targetedknowledge]

[bogwatr]

Saw the most beautiful thing at Pride the other day

[goldenaltar]

concept: no astrophage au where eridians and humans still make first contact but like, properly. a whole diplomatic mission meeting in the middle of space to save travel time. stratt is humanity's greatest representation. the eridian equivalent is equally as scary and secretly soft. it's all very star trek.

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

cut to grace curled up with rocky while he sleeps like a baby.

[kyoshi-lesbians]

my controversial opinion is I don’t think Zuko was confused by “my first girlfriend turned into the moon”

[kyoshi-lesbians]

he was there during siege of the North. he infiltrated the spirit oasis. he has an uncle who studies spirits and the spirit world. he watched the sky go dark then the moon suddenly reappear like everyone else in the entire world did. and most importantly he watched zhao get eaten by a giant godzilla fish spirit.

[kyoshi-lesbians]

his entire life since he saw that beam of blue-white light in the south pole has been ‘this day has already been so goddamn weird’

[edgar-allan-possum]

The only really new information was that that was Sokka’s girlfriend

[library-graffiti]

Important opinion in the tags that I need to have be part of the post:

[clearascountryair]

Also, Iroh was there? He literally watched Sokka make out with the moon spirit. And you want to tell me that a romantic sap like him would not have immediately told Zuko about this romantic tragedy? Please, Zuko has known about this for ages, he just knows that this is not an acceptable situation in which to say “yeah, I know.”

[terriwriting]

Sokka: “My girlfriend turned into the moon.”

Zuko: “I know.” “Yes.” “She sure did.” “Uh huh.” “Tell me something new.” “Are we still talking about that?” “That’s rough, buddy.”

[alexseanchai]

[image: tags by samwisethebold: #it’s not that he doesn’t get what sokka means #it’s that how on earth do you respond to that]

[uberguber89]

When you put it like that, this is actually a legendary display of tact on Zuko’s part

[hungwy]

people born in 2000 should be like 12-14 now. but they’re not. that’s how fucked up our world is now

[how-not-to-human]

The older this post gets the funnier it becomes

[duchesspeggy]

My cousin born in 2000 is a licensed psychologist.

[shepardoftheearth]

that’s how fucked up our world is now

[goldensunset]

>‘this thing is too generic and tropey’

>look inside

>forefather of that genre

[firestorm09890]

[frankbelloriley]

[foralittlewile]

Something else I see people keep forgetting: between humans and Eridians, we are the astronauts. And we are good at it.

Eridians' perception of the world relies on something that is completely absent in space — sound. They haven't been looking at the stars their entire existence the way we have. Their concept of aliens might only be as old as their discovery of astrophage. They made a bad ship, because it was their first one ever! Rocky himself says they rushed it, and that multiple (vital) things broke. Their mission was just as much of a Hail Mary pass as ours was — they had no idea what they were doing, if they could even travel in space safely. And, as it turns out, they couldn't.

Humans are the ones who have been doing it over multiple lifetimes. Mary is state of the art. We've been space farers longer than most humans have been alive. We can actually see through space. We are more likely to survive exposure to the void. We can encase our lighter, more flexible, more mobile bodies in a material that lets us walk outside of our ship, and, to a degree, we can get our bearings out there in a way Eridians just can't.

Eridians are not looking at Mary and thinking she's a bad ship. They are not thinking humans have no idea what we're doing. They are looking at this species that can walk in the stars, have been perfecting machines to take us to them for decades, have been dreaming about them and mapping them and naming them for millennia, and used all of that to save them, and thinking, wow.

[psychedelicmoonpie]

My favourite Adrian headcanon is that they're a biologist/zoologist who has seen so much shit, they're completely unphased by any and every alien habit of Grace's.

I mean full-on khaki-shorts-wearing, traversing-wilderness-with-nothin'-but-a-machete Adrian who yoinks snakes outta trees and pets swamp puppies and will unflinchingly dig around in elephant faeces for signs of a rare parasitic tapeworm if needed.

Oh, humans eat socially? No problem, Adrian has observed many many animals eat. Did you know that an obscure species of small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid also eats socially? Adrian can give you a not-so-short presentation on them.

Oh, the human has no external carapace and so its internal sounds are absurdly loud, wet and off-putting? No problem, Adrian was just conducting an expedition last month researching the incredible eridian animal, the Wet Loud Worm from the south-east region of Wet Loud Wormland. They're desensitised, it's fine.

Oh, Grace leaks often from many orifices and it can be a bit of a learning curve to get used to? No problem for Adrian, see Wet Loud Worm paragraph again!

Meanwhile, Rocky is bewildered as to how he's managed to third-wheel both of his relationships, because both Adrian and Grace are nerds who nerd out about things, and Adrian is shaking in their carapace with enthusiasm to learn more about human culture and biology, not to mention everything about earth animals. And yeah, sure, Grace might be a molecular biologist, but he'll be damned if he'll pass up an opportunity to learn about alien fauna from a fellow scientist, and yes, Adrian, he'd love to hear about the small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid, and he's so excited to learn more about the Wet Loud Worm, do go on.

[the-grey-hunt]

#zoologist adrian would be absolutely captivated by the concept of Plants. erid doesn't have those#you mean your atmosphere is so clear your entire planet has ground level sunlight and there's an entire subsection of life#defined by their ability to turn it into energy... because the rest of it DOESN'T? sure you synthetize vitamin d out of it#but that's nothing#saviour grace why don't you photosynthesize question? skill issue question?

[memewhore]

[ferrettaur]

So like an hour ago I just lear🪨︵︵ned that— what the fuck was that. Someone just skipped a rock across my post did you see that

[kikmessenger]

sits on my own blog like it’s the edge of a lake wistfully

[kikmessenger]

skips a stone over a few posts

[anexperimentallife]

[caxycreations]

This isn't very hard when you know some of the most genius strategies in human history were incredibly stupid, circumstantial events that led to victory by sheer luck of that strategy working.

Case in point: Tsun Zu's rival defended a city with 10 men against Tsun's army of hundreds by disarming his own soldiers, dressing them in plain clothes, INVITING Tsun's army to come in, and it only worked because Tsun knew the guy was an ambush master and thought "if we attack the city he's inviting us into, we will die." and left without even trying ON THE BASIS OF HIS RIVAL'S REPUTATION AND NOTHING MORE

Another example: Tsun Zu, on being told his soliders were out of arrows during a battle against a city across a river from them, had his men craft scarecrows, put them on a boat, send it out on a line, leave it there for half an hour, then pull it back in and used the arrows the enemy had fired at the boat to restock their own ammunition. It only worked because it was foggy and the enemy couldn't tell the difference between the scarecrows and actual soldiers.

Stupid things like that work INCREDIBLY WELL if the circumstances favor them, so you really don't need to come up with some multi-layered, Shikamaru-esque strategy. You just need to come up with a strategy you like for the characters involved, then write the circumstances (weather, environment, individuals involved) to favor it enough that it works.

[ariaste]

Even better cheatsheet: Study history, steal liberally. Those genius plays listed above? Free for the taking, and I guarantee 99% of your audience will have never heard of them.

True genius is simply in knowing how the guy before you did it.