Meh @im-a-normal-cat - Tumblr Blog

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

the-murmuration-project

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

depsidase

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

i am delighted to inform you that wild bears seeking out and swinging on hammocks is in fact a fairly common occurrence!

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

thanks to @fandomislife03 for this extremely important information:

#as somebody born and raised in black bear country this is accurate #theyre also fond of backyard playgrounds

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

UPDATE: they also do this with backyard swimming pools

(and yes, same applies to kiddie pools)

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

oh 10/10 tags:

#The mama bear we have around here in the summer knows what she's doing#she stretches out in the sun under the fruit trees#and sends her cubs up the trees to throw fruit down to her

feminist-space

baddywronglegs

The people who insist AI is smarter than a human are doing their fucking damnedest to manifest that

memecucker

Invention of bread is weird bc it’s like some Neolithic ppl were like “hey you know that tall grass thing that’s sorta edible but not really how about we take it and grind it into a very very fine powder which is extra backbreaking right now bc the wheel won’t be invented for awhile and then we mix it with water and heat it up and you know what let’s also toss some mold in there just to see what happens”

quoms

there are a number of distinct steps though, each of which can be observed in isolation. “grind tough seeds to make them edible” is practiced with other foods besides grains (like acorns). the natural next step after that is to add water, which gives you porridge: a common ancient roman meal was puls, very similar to modern cream of wheat. once you have that you also have a simple dough, and baking it to preserve it is a logical experiment (as is baking some you forgot about and left out for a few days, just so you don’t waste it... voila, leavened bread)

there could have been, and probably was (though i’m not an archaeologist) a substantial time between each of these innovations. it’s not too hard to imagine people being chill with “grind seeds for soup, select plants for bigger seeds” for a good while

quasi-normalcy

Do you ever wonder how many amazing things are fated to go forever uninvented because each step necessary to invent them is a completely unintuitive thing to do?

noctumsolis

Okay, that's not how bread was invented. I wrote a potted history, I could try to dig that out if anyone is interested?

quasi-normalcy

Please do

panecultus

I'm putting this on my bread blog, because of course I am. Also tagging @appendingfic who I think expressed interest.

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

There's a lot more to it, in terms of the cultivation of grains and the development of milling, than I've written here. It's been a process of millennia to go from chewing sprouts to eating soft white bread like that pictured. But every step along the way was small and simple.

quasi-normalcy

I never would have guessed that beer pre-existed bread. I've always just assumed that beer was an accidental discovery by breadmakers.

jenniferrpovey

Nope, beer came first. Mead is also very old.

headspace-hotel

Thanks, ancient humans!

thirtyknives

Australian First Nations people developed their own bread making culture independent of the beer-base route. As far as I'm aware, pre colonial Australia had little to nothing by way of fermented drinks at all, so the likelihood of beer being part of the evolution of native breads is unlikely. Their breads, made from native grasses, are both leavened and unleavened. There's also different bread making practices using different grains, dependent on location - Australia is big and Indigenous culture over here is no more a monolith than it is anywhere else. Kamilaroi bread is different to Yuin bread, for example.

The colonization of Australia actively suppressed Indigenous knowledge, and creating an image of the idle wandering tribes was required to justify taking Aboriginal lands. This means a lot of the archeology of how First Nations people developed their breads has not just been lost but deliberately suppressed. The idea that they were settled enough to have ovens, let alone a bread-making tradition, is only now really being examined. I wouldn't be surprised if the grains-porridge-bread route was true for Aussie breads, though.

sunspotpony

People also are smart enough to observe nature and recognize the way the harsh heat of the summer sun dries things out quickly. They also are smart enough to see that dry things last longer. And that ground plants are easier to eat than whole, and also take up less space for the same amount of food. But the it’s loose and gets everywhere, so making them solid like clay with a little water or fruit juice would be reasonable.

I imagine some early forms of bread probably came from somebody putting some rudimentary pancake batter on a hot rock in the summer to let it dry, and the finding out it fucking slaps.

And if one thing works, the I imagine many things work similarly and probably made variations. People are astoundingly creative and observant especially when they don’t have a bunch of preconceived notions, when they’re bored, and when trying new things can potentially save lives.

@panecultus — in the tradition of bread making you researched, do you know if the practice pre or post dates the use of fire?

@thirtyknives — out of curiosity, do you know/are you willing to share offhand if Yuin bread or Kamilaroi bread predates fire usage?

If it’s in your sources already, I probably missed it. Reading is hard for me and my brain is a sieve. A mind like a steel trap that’s already been sprung. Apologies if redundant inquiries, and thank you.

panecultus

Oh it massively post-dates the use of fire. Humans have been using fire for perhaps as much as two million years (that is, since 2MYA (See link) whereas this bread tradition dates to only around ten thousand years ago (10kYA.)

Since the addition from @thirtyknives I've learnt that there are grindstones in Australia dated to sixty thousand years ago (60kYA) around the time humans first arrived there. Which is fantastic but also decidedly post-fire.

So we had both fire and grinding long before actual bread. This naturally leads to various breadmaking traditions around the world developing separately by building on those older technologies.

ilyasmole

Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney at The Center in NYC

umbrellanumber5-deactivated2021

This.

This is why people who stay in my life are neurodiverse like me!

nottoolateforthegame

Huh

thisisnotjuli

this!! I swear I lost like all my friendships bc of this, like I had a group of friends in hs that one day I realized “huh I haven’t talked to this people in a while” and popped in to say hi and they were all awkward?? because they hadn’t seen me in a while?? and that’s when I realized that friendship works different for them?? I was like yeah I haven’t talked to you in like four months but it’s not like I’ve forgotten about y'all why would anything change, and they were all like we haven’t talked to you in four months why are you here again acting like nothing happened? and it was really confusing for me

mimir-bashir

YEAH! THAT!

Also I have a thing where I just put the people on pause. If I don’t see them or contact them, my brain kinda put them in stasis. I don’t think about them nor misses them, and I stay on what I last knew about them (how they look, what they study/work). So when we meet again I’m like “wait, you’ve aged?” and I have the same familiarity with them thanI had before.

gender-snatched

Anyway all my mutuals I haven’t messaged in forever - this is why

official-lucifers-child

oh my gods this makes so much sense??? there are people who i haven’t talked to at all for literally over a year and we’ll pick up like nothing happened, but for their people it’s just like…… falling apart but onesided???? i think we’re still on the same level but actually we’re strangers??

link-the-feral-anon

Ohhhhhh

shark8-my-leg

OHHHHHHHHH….

quarra

Ok but listen, on the other side of this, as a person who moved hundreds of miles away from everyone i knew and then became a hermit for several years, it was SUCH A FUCKING RELIEF to get in contact with an old friend and have him be like, “my friendship levels do not degrade, so in my mind we are still awesome close buddies” and i almost fkn cried. I thought he would be mad or would have moved on because i had slacked on my reaching out to him and staying in touch and doing all the friendship things. But NOPE. 800 miles of distance, depression, and life changing circumstances didnt steal our friendship and i am SO GRATEFUL.

thatlittleegyptologist

#came back to tumblr after four years #lottie and I immediately went like that spiderman meme yknow tags via @rudjedet

I have literally no friendship degradation whatsoever. I will not have spoken to someone for 5 years or more, and they’re still as much a friend to me as if I had only seen them yesterday. I’m just very bad at communicating if someone is not in my direct orbit. So when Sonja reappeared on this site I basically screeched into her notes like a banshee because I was delighted and we picked straight back up where we’d left off.

elodieunderglass

Happy to go on the record that I don’t expect regular contact and will welcome hearing from people after a long time

beyondthisdarkhouse

Holy shit, I didn’t actually realize this was a Thing.

hail-dondus

It looks like they’re dropping a teaser trailer for the new Harry Potter reboot tomorrow

Just a few important and gentle reminders:

🫶🏻 DO NOT WATCH THIS FUCKING SHOW 🫶🏻

If you claim you support human rights - not just trans rights but human rights in general - yet still plan to watch this show, unfollow me. You’re a fucking hypocrite and I don’t want you following me.

Do not watch it even if you’re hate watching it, it still contributes to streaming revenue and views!

The adults in this reboot of the franchise are FULLY accountable for choosing to do this show and accepting a pay cheque over supporting a minority group. Even if they claim they support trans rights, they’re cowards and don’t actually support them at all.

The kids do NOT deserve abuse or hate, whether it’s because you’re comparing them to Dan/Rupert/Emma or because you’re boycotting due to the author’s views. They are literal CHILDREN.

Your nostalgia over a children’s series about kids going to school is NOT more important than trans people being respected and having rights. As long as JKR is still alive, she profits off of this.

demonicae

And, just so you know, JKR profiting off of HP has DIRECTLY led to the disintegration of trans rights in the UK.

For example...

It follows an announcement in December that transgender members would be banned from joining.

From yestersday. This follows on from the UK supreme court ruling last year that equalities laws would be based on 'biological sex only.'

That supreme court ruling got through, not because 'everyone believes in it.' But because JKR directly payed MASSIVE amounts of money into right wing thinktanks, politicians, and TERF influencers.

Harry Potter directly funds transphobia and anti-trans laws in the UK.

She pours her money into the J.K Rowling women's fund. Meaning Harry Potter revenue directly pays for right wing transphobic pearl clutchers to take trans people to court and to stamp out the rights of trans people in the UK.

It is also hurting cis women in the UK because now we're all fucking paranoid about being 'transvestigated,' being abused in public (for 'not looking cis enough') or being denied services because some snotty billionaire decided she gets to decide who is or is not a 'woman' (based entirely on her weirdo, white, billionaire-class definition of the word.)

tio-trile

Something something vampires have no reflection so he can't even try to see his brother's face anymore when he looks into the mirror

hellostranger1961

the choctaw vampire hunters in sinners, photographed by eli joshua adé, smpsp.

catchymemes

aeliad

HI LET’S SHARE NICOLE’S WORDS ON THE SUBJECT!

It has been literal years but every time I see Martin’s tweets posted somewhere and his word is shared as truth while her post is not shared it sort of reiterates the fact that we trust men to speak about feminism more than we believe women who experience it.

Interesting, innit? https://medium.com/@nickyknacks/working-while-female-59a5de3ad266

wiseacrewhimsy

Reading her account of how their boss treated her blows me away. Men are so emboldened that they will literally admit to illegal discrimination casually and face no consequences.

the-geek-cornucopia

In all the years of seeing this post I’ve never seen a link to her side. Didn’t even know she’d written one.

pluts04

Adding screenshots of her post. His whole post is there without needing a link. Hers should be, too.

Also, she posted this is 2017! It’s fucking 2020 and I’ve seen his side of this for years, but it took 3 years for her side to make its way to my dash…

thou-creature-of-the-deep

I’ve reblogged his story at least twice; it’s time for Nicole’s.

satan-is-hugs

It’s 2023 and i just now learned that Nicole’s response was also out there

wickedsick

Which Geometric Transformation is the Hottest?

Rotation

Translation

Uniform Scaling

Non-Uniform Scaling

Reflection

Shearing

Voting ended onMar 10

bumpscosity

aytmadashis

The full textless cover art for The Broken Binding limited editions of the Green Bone Saga. Illustrations by Randy Vargas. [x]

batmanego

im having feelings about the uffington white horse again

batmanego

so essentially there’s this cool horse drawn into the hills in england made out of chalk and it’s like 3,000 years old.

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?

batmanego

couldn’t agree more we’re best friends now

sirfrogsworth

Ironically, hard light is bad for recording sexy time.

It will highlight every pore, every vein, every wrinkle on your nutsack.

One day I will end this ring light fad. It is my ultimate side quest.

sirfrogsworth

It seems my lighting advice has given people a mistaken impression...

sirfrogsworth

These outtakes where the flash didn't go off are also AI generated.

I like this spooky dutch angle one.

I was just starting to learn flash and I didn't have all the equipment I needed. Since corgis are quite short, I had to put the lighting on the ground. The off camera flash was on a tipped over lightstand with a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse the light.

But I had no wireless triggers. And the only other way to trigger a flash, is with another flash. So I used the on-camera pop up flash to trigger the main flash.

But I had two issues.

First, I did not want that dinky on camera flash affecting my picture.

Second, triggering a flash with a flash is best done indoors. The flash will bounce all around the room and eventually hit the sensor so the main flash triggers. When you are outdoors, there is no bouncing.

SO... I took a little handheld makeup mirror and angled it toward my main flash. This blocked the dinky pop up flash and sent the beam of light towards the main flash to trigger it.

I was lying on the wet morning grass, holding a camera in one hand, a mirror in the other, trying to aim the mirror exactly toward the main flash, making crazy noises to get Otis's attention, and trying to get the focus point on his face so I didn't get a blurry photo. Also, Otis was much more interested in sniffing things than posing for a photo.

Here is an overhead view that might help explain.

I await all of your comments saying my amazing drawring is clearly AI generated.

Only 30% of the time did the flash actually go off. Aiming the mirror was tricky and I was doing like 8 things at once. I wasn't even sure I got the photo I wanted. But when I came back to the computer there was one that stood out and it is one of my favorites I've ever taken.

It was the best combination of monumental effort, great discomfort, perfect foggy sunrise light, and just pure luck.

Unfortunately, people like me who use advanced sculpting light techniques are getting accused of using AI more and more. Not really sure what to do about it—other than show the 30 awful photos it took to get the good one.

My 80s sunglasses photo and spoon photo get called out the most.

But it's just good old fashioned gradient lighting which has been used in product photography since the days of film.

So, no need to be suspicious.

hollowedskin

Photography like sirfrogsworth's is what the fucken AIs were TRAINED on.

kestrelsandcentipedes

Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.

12b6

there i fixed it

kavjacks0219

This is a really shitty thing for someone to do. It’s insane to believe that this woman who has literally built and supported business across multiple industry is somehow less capable of becoming a lawyer than literally anyone else who ISN’T a lawyer… not to say that anyone who is a practicing attorney is has the ability to gauge the capability of someone they don’t know, personally. Anyone who isn’t supporting this, is a piece of shit.

12b6

You misunderstood the point of this post, let me explain:

As someone who spent money and grueling time to go through law school, take the bar, and become a lawyer, I have a knee-jerk, eye-roll reaction to any statement that anyone *will* be a lawyer when they haven’t yet done any of what it takes. Kim has to first pass California’s “baby bar” on first year courses before she is even eligible to take the actual bar, which basically no one who does the apprenticeship route ever passes.

Her dad was a famous lawyer and she has all the resources she wants at her fingertips, and good for her that she wants to take on this challenge. But telling the world that a college drop-out doing an apprenticeship is to definitely be a lawyer three years from now is misleading, and annoying for me to see, that’s all. This profession is not a right, nor a shiny thing you can just buy. It’s a privilege that you have to earn with time, money, and a lot of hard work, and even then requires luck to get.

12b6

This has aged well

12b6

It is now 18 days from 2022 and Kim has finally passed the baby bar, which means she has two more years and the bar exam left

🍷

12b6

Am I back after more than three years of not posting to note that Kim Kardashian failed the CA bar today, November 8, 2025? Yes I’m that petty 🍷 how are y’all???

biglawbear

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