[sabertoothwalrus]

ok deleted the last post because I likely misinterpreted it and that actually delights me because this sentence is linguistically fascinating

You can read it as:

“Jelly” is called “Jell-O” by the Brits (a comedically false statement, which also implies Americans don’t know what Jell-O is)

or

“Jelly” is the term Brits use for what American typically call “Jell-O” (true statement, likely the intended meaning yet I personally find the original sentence a BAFFLING way to phrase that)

what you interpret the object/subject/action as informs the active vs passive voice of the original statement. In other words, this is The Dress of sentences

[sabertoothwalrus]

another way of writing it that might make the confusion clearer

American friends: [a message to Americans from the UK:] “Jelly” [the word in the original post] is what the Brits [us] call [refer to as] Jell-O!

vs

American friends: [I am American helping fellow Americans:] “Jelly” [the presumably unfamiliar word in the original post] is what the Brits [those other guys] call Jell-O! [our American thing]

[the-haiku-bot]

another way of

writing it that might make the

confusion clearer

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[memewhore]

[taurisan]

Science.

[tony-the-intelligent-goon]

I can’t tell what my favorite part is, but it’s either

scientists wasting budget and time to see if ants count their steps

the idea to put ants on stilts

there had to be a guy who made ant stilts and put them on the ants

confused ants

[vaighspersonal-deactivated20160]

OR  E. All of the above.

[tumorhead]

BUT WAIT THERES MORE!

Can mantids wear and see in 3D glasses? YES

THEY PUT LITTLE GLASSES ON MANTIDS

Do honey bees suffer from sleep deprivation? YES

Here is the BEE INSOMNIATOR.

They put MAGNETS ON BEES  and WIGGLED THEM TO KEEP THEM AWAKE

How do scales help snakes move?

Well they put SNAKES IN LITTLE SHIRTS to find out!

SHRIMPS ON A TREADMILL

biology is the greatest

[dragongirltitties]

bad and naughty children get put into the bee wiggler to atone for their sins

[trans-mouse]

The best thing about the ant one is that somebody clearly was like “Oh well ants probably count their steps” and that was just like… a thought that came into their head.

[whimsicalentropy]

THE BEE WIGGLER

[the-unreadable-jimanjikles]

This demonstrates that discovery requires madness.

[poiplefunguy]

gravity was discovered because Newton just so happened to have an apple fall on his napping ass what do you think science is

[curlicuecal]

This is a cool post but AAAH I need to talk about the ants.

>somebody clearly was like “Oh well ants probably count their steps” and that was just like… a thought that came into their head.

Not just any ants–desert ants!  See, most ants lay down scent trails to find their way around.  But in the desert the damn ground blows away constantly.  So how do desert ants find their way around?  Maybe they count.

>scientists wasting budget and time to see if ants count their steps

Okay but like.  Ants can count.  Ants have teeny teeny tiny brains and they can count.  Do you know how teeny an ant brain is?  Because I have spent time dissecting them out and let me tell you it is one of the most ridiculous occupations I have ever engaged in.  They are like period sized.  <–these things here at either end–>. 

And the really cool thing about finding out that a teeny tiny brain can do a thing, is that the brains are simple enough that we actually might have a shot at figuring out precisely how they efficiently encode the ability to count.  And then we can apply that to things like math and computers and living human brains, which we aren’t allowed to dissect very much because reasons.

Also, this was an awesomely clever experiment because do you want to know the budget for gluing stilts on ants to see what happens?  Really small.  Like ant brains.

>there had to be a guy who made ant stilts and put them on the ants

Their names were Matthias Wittlinger, Rudiger Wehner, and Harald Wolf, and the stilts were boar hairs!  Also there was a second part of the experiment where they trimmed the ant legs to make them take shorter steps, but no one ever talks about that part because it’s less cute and more morbid. :O  (It’s… slightly less morbid when you know this kind of thing happens naturally to ants with age and high temperatures.  Life is hard for ants.  But they are excellent at counting.)

>Science.

I know right?

[lizardlicks]

Okay now I want you to talk about the mantis glasses and the bee wiggler.

[depsidase]

[infectiouspiss]

you're mommy's good little printer aren't you? you'll print whatever mommy tells you to because otherwise mommy gets sad and leaves you for one of those free use library printer sluts

[infectiouspiss]

mommy needs you to print this document now and if you don't mommy is going to turn you off at the wall

[infectiouspiss]

listen to mommy okay? if you don't be a good little printer and fucking print my document and i know you want to okay mommy can see it in your print queue if you don't. print. my fucking document. mommy's going to get the hammer

[dungeonmastersconsortium]

I'm very taken with this metal vocalist that has a parrot who wants to participate

original by reebz_uk

[mikkeneko]

[figglypuff]

[necrolentil]

Goddamit i hate this fucking post. I hate it because obviously if “twelve” followed the same pattern as the other teen numbers it wouldn’t be “twoteen” it would be “seconteen”. Think about it. It’s not “threeteen” it’s “thirteen” as in “third”. It’s not “fiveteen” it’s “fifteen” as in fifth. So with that in mind, you count “first, second, third, fourth, fifth,” and so on, so eleven would be “firsteen” and twelve would be “secondteen” or “seconteen”. “Firsteen, seconteen, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen….” It just drives me absolutely mad everytime i see this post that this obvious pattern was overlooked and i cant hold in my rage anymore.

[improper-integral]

[datasoong47]

Consider thirteen:thirty and fifteen:fifty instead. So, rather, it should be twenteen on the model of twenty

[parksanddeserts]

Completely agree with twenteen, and it shouldn’t be second but twenth.

[the-haiku-bot]

Completely agree

with twenteen, and it shouldn’t

be second but twenth.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[catchymemes]

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[samcormac]

what’s the rush?

[rainwasheseverythingaway]

The time will pass anyway

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

On fun thing about everyone using ai to do their data analysis or write articles or whatever is it's really exposing how many people weren't doing their jobs this whole time.

"We just found out that the ai tool we've been using to make business decisions for 3 months has been hallucinating all the sales data!" okay well it was stupid to use ai for this, why didn't you learn how glitchy it was before implementing it, but far more importantly, what you've just told me is that nobody bothered to check the real numbers for 3 months. "This guy has been using ai to write 9 magazine articles for us and the quoted info was all fake, he has been fired" no editor checked the first eight? "I used ai to write this report and the math was wrong" you didn't check the math? In your own report? Everyone is just telling on themselves re: how their work was always wildly unreliable and they already weren't doing their jobs.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Awhile back I was looking at some marketing nonsense about some company trying to create, like, virtual versions of workers that could help with their jobs, and obviously the actual target was employers (who they wanted to convince that they could replace all their workers with bots and save on salaries) but they were pretending to market it to the workers themselves, and their whole pitch was like "imagine if this digital version of you went to all your meetings and stuff while you hung out at the beach, and emailed you a meeting summary later".

And I was just like. Meetings where a bunch of people send their AIs to meet and then send them summaries? If no people need to be at the meeting, why is there a fucking meeting? This is Email With Extra Steps. If all that's happening in the meeting is people reporting a bit of information, that can just be a report. All this does is admit that you don't actually need the meetings. You don't need to have robot-only meetings you can just cancel the whole thing.

Students writing papers with AI that teachers then read and grade with AI while media sharing platforms are full of ai slop made so that other ais will watch the slop and inflate viewer numbers. While people send ais to meetings to summarise information given by other people's ais at the meetings. People prompting ai to write messages to their friends which are summarised by a different ai and the friend tells ai to write a message back to be ai summarised again. I saw a reddit post the other day about a guy who couldn't figure out why his bride stormed out of their wedding while he was reading her ai-generated wedding vows. Inaccurate ai-generated shit slips into publication because the editors already weren't checking (assuming the writers were) and now the writers aren't checking (assuming the editor will). It's fascinating to see just how much people are already just nor participating and now they're finding easier ways to not participate. You don't have to get married. The boss doesn't have to schedule these meetings. Every time someone is like "ai fucked this thing up" I'm like. Sounds like you were already not invested in doing it.

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

okay i grabbed this from my tiktok so folks who don't wanna get yeeted over to another app can actually view this thing

(YES THERE IS AUDIO AND THE SONG IS CRUCIAL, ITS WHAT MADE ME MAKE THIS A VIDEO)

[important-cat-pics]

[blackwhiteandbold]

@kittybroker

[kittybroker]

The bat collection a stunning array of fine freaks! Fly in and pick up the bat collection for only $19.29 today!

[theblogginggoth]

By Czeck writer Karel Čapek, inventor of the term ‘robot’ as well!

[nadiacreek]

This is one of my husband’s favorite short stories. He quotes it from memory. I’m pretty sure he can recite the entire thing from memory.

[elodieunderglass]

This is a tremendously impactful short story and every time I see it, it serves as an excellent reboot button for my state of mind.

[athelind]

The Most Tumblr Punchline

I've noted before that my favorite punchline on Tumblr is "hang on, gotta look something up/okay that's funny."

Let me explain why:

It is a way to say "I don't get it" without blaming the joke or the teller.

It is a tacit admission of ignorance without shame or judgement.

It assumes responsibility for acquiring the knowledge the respondent doesn't already have.

It cues other people who Don't Get It to do the look-up themselves, allowing them to get that full impact of Getting It without derailing the post with explanations.

It gives subsequent readers, whether or not THEY got the joke, a little frisson of good feelings when they realize that someone else is now In On The Joke.

It not only makes the original joke funnier, it gets funnier the more often it's used.

[thevulturesquadron]

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[cedarspiced]