why am i not in space @jewelsverne - Tumblr Blog

Wax poetic about Iowa plz

Age 8:

It’s a weekday morning in the mid-summer and I am outside my uniform house sitting in my uniform driveway in my uniform suburb waiting for my friend across the street to wake up when I suddenly feel a sense of unease so strong I remember it for the rest of my life. For a long time I will be unable to explain it, but I felt incredibly isolated in my own front yard. I feel like I live on the moon.

Age 10:

I am fascinated with the idea of the arctic. I want to study wolves. We have an exceptionally rough winter where for one day, it’s colder where I live then it is in Antarctica.

Iowa is boring. Nothing happens here.

Age 12:

My grandmother always gets these nature magazines that she gives me, and they always, always have a picture of a cedar waxwing on the front. It confuses me because they clearly don’t do it on purpose, but I’ve never seen a cedar waxwing in my life where I live in my uniform house in my uniform suburb where things simply do not move during the midday and midnight. The covers always picture the birds sitting in brambles, but where I live the only thing that gets above waist high is the corn and the straggly young trees that line my street, planted by the development, too young to provide any shade from the beating sun. I do not know where the cedar waxwings live, but they certainly do not live where I do.

Age 14:

It’s midsummer and my little brother and I enter the cornfield that borders our housing development by stepping over a gap in the barbed wire and making our way past a half-destroyed chicken coop. The corn is taller then we expected it to be and we leave quickly.

Age 16:

I am still obsessed with the arctic, and for the first time I realize why: because when I drive to school I pass desolation for miles.

It’s hard to explain where I live to my friends online. What do I tell them, that it feels like a desert? That there’s miles and miles of nothing between destinations? Because that isn’t entirely true: or at least, it feels like it shouldn’t be true. There is something there- corn, miles of it- but when the corn comes down in winter, I brace the steering wheel against sub-zero winds pushing my mother’s van from side to side. The wind pushes flakes of it in thin rivers between the cornfields, just thin enough to hover over the road and catch the headlights on it’s way to the next field over. There are no trees here to buffer it. There are no cedar waxwings.

Age 17:

I tour the University of Iowa’s natural history museum, where I am taught that some 95% of Iowa’s native prairies have been bulldozed for agricultural development. It dawns on me that I do not live in Iowa; the cedar waxwings live in Iowa. I live in the shadow of a nuclear blast. I live in a biopunk sci-fi hellscape where yes, things do grow for miles, and that’s the problem. I live in a liminal space spanning acres large, with cities and towns and uniform suburbs forming oasises in strange, fragmented intervals. I live in the belly of a beautiful and terrible thing.

In my independent botany studies I learn that Iowa was not always as suffocatingly humid as it is during the summer months each year; no, it’s humid because the sheer mass of all the corn transpiring water into the air changes the very weather in which I live. I’m not sure how to digest this. I do not know what I thought I knew. Iowa was not always this harsh and unforgiving.

Age 18:

I go to college and for the first time the trees are big enough to shade me when I walk to class. I can bike to a grocery store; I can go places without a car, because there is no corn between me and the next urbanized place. I feel less isolated; there are native flower gardens in central campus and I can’t help but imagine what it must have been like before the corn came.

There was a time with cedar waxwings building nests in heaps of dry grass and prairie soil. There was a time where the snow fell and stayed where it fell, because the trees and plants buffered the dunes. What a sight that must have been, I think: Iowa in it’s full glory.

I can’t imagine it. It is too far removed from my home.

#this has the same energy as where i live #the midwest is wierd

emswift

ho ho holy shit it’s december first (1st)

aiweirdness

It’s time for Cooking With Neural Networks!

Neural networks are computer programs that learn by example. Rather than a programmer teaching them step-by-step rules on how to solve a problem, neural networks try to deduce their own rules by looking at examples of lots of successful solutions.

One of the first problems I tried to solve with neural networks, inspired by this post, was generating new cookbook recipes by letting a neural network look at about 30,000 existing recipes. This, as it turns out, is not a great way to get a coherent recipe. With a memory only a few words long, and without any concept that the letters it was choosing corresponded to ingredients and things that were happening to them, the neural net’s recipes were usually inadvisable and frequently impossible.

As it so happens, I was testing out some features of textgenrnn and turned to recipes as a test dataset. As a result, I have some new “gems” to share with you.

Framework: textgenrnn, longtext mode Memory: 40 characters (default) Training length: ~15 hours on an Nvidia K80 (via Google Cloud) Sampling temperature: 0.6

First, allow me to present some of my favorite individual ingredients:

½ teaspoon ground beer ½ cup crushed sherry 1 lavy milk ½ cup fresh minced or worky sugar ½ teaspoon dried margarine 1 ½ teaspoon minced powder 1 single sugar 1 long granulated sugar 1 green cubes 1 spanish water 2 lb beer stock 1 cup cream cheese seed

And now, the recipes:

Christed Whites Continue Sauce

main dish, discorti, crabmets

Note:: Mix to recipe of sweetened sugar. Add the blueberries a squart until thickens of to a 4" Nut in Marrgarine using; ½ ** esed nam, stew

1 small garlic; chopp 2 eggs 1 cup sugar ¾ cup sugar ½ lb pork * ½ cup black peppers 2 eggs 2 tablespoon sauas slest ½ teaspoon salt ¾ teaspoon marshmall ½ cup chives sauce 1 teaspoon numguinitiso paste ½ teaspoon dry say beef salt 1 medium onion; diced ½ cup coriander or water, sour crushed. In a sea vanil soda, if desired.

Add tomatoes and they browned as the in a sauce. Add spankly mixture about 1 ½ to 6 minutes, or water, unough a ½ is is need, please the mart boiling. Garnish with a sink forilith mushrooms. Whick until sugar and mixture at low bowl. Add the beans. Stir in over mixer.

Add carrot is a salt and taste. Working, nutmeg. Makes 4.

Yield: 6 servings

I guess dividing the 4 sauces into 6 servings is left as an exercise to the reader.

Sheet Pepper

low fat, bbq, bbq, cannings, soup

3 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon sugar

Combine sugar and sugar and sprinkle with the sugar. Place a desired pan, and let stand 1 minute. Add the salt and pepper. Add beef and turkey and sides of cake of butter. Bring to a boil, bake at 350 degrees F. Retep the bottom of pan in a large rack.

Combine the chocolate cheese and the cheese and serve with quarters. Remove from pan and add to strainers and simmer until the sauce forms the clear some eggs and so the finger large soup comes out cleandrated with masil cooking lengthwise and the well some of the beef and the steamed sauce. It is the measure of board with a sloth bone. Serve warm. Sprinkle with dry salt, then add the shallots and salt and pepper. Sprinkle with salt, and pepper. Stir until potatoes are softened. Remove from heat; cover and simmer 2 minutes. Whisk in the milk and butter. Add to bisquins. Stir to make uncooked and serve, up to 2 cups. Pour into 1 cup soup. Add 1 tbsp. cabbage

Source: by Meal-Margarine Crab

The cabbage makes it healthy.

Artich Soup Salad

cakes, cheese/eggs, cassamaes

2 medium onion 1 tablespoon red minced garlic ½ teaspoon salt ½ cup orange milk, baking sheet 1 shredded, chopped ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon crushed milk ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper ½ teaspoon crushed miniature 1 cup chives or canned milk 1 cut into ½-inch can stock 1 single sugar ½ cup chlithed (or cold white wine wine 1 chives.

Fry Puely and oil over medium-read slices on the dish. Add the microwave beef and cook and cook.

From: Baste Fritized Baked Cheddar Let Cookbook

Yield: 6 servings

I’ve got several more blog posts about recipes (using char-rnn rather than textgenrnn). If you want to read more from textgenrnn (which does seem to make different mistakes from char-rnn), and/or get bonus material every time I post, enter your email here.

millennial-review-deactivated20

camewiththeframe

persephonesstrap

This is worse. Looking at these you can tell they have no significant monetary value. They were confiscated as a fear tactic. Nothing more.

arithanas

This picture breaks my heart everytime it appears in my dash. It’s a fear tactic, alright but—

The first one in the left corner: It’s a first communion rosary, and it’s not cheap.

The black one in the first line: That’s a widow rosary and it’s old.

The white one in the second line: is a commemoration rosary. It has a miniature picture in the round part. I haven’t seen that since the 70′s.

In the third line, multicolor one: It’s an Anima mundi, I have only seen those in the hands of Rosary ministery’s old ladies. The oldest ones are from the 80′s after Juan Pablo II came to Mexico for the first time. It’s one of the old ones, I know because the crucifixes are different. The third one on the fourth line: Red and gold. The style is old, the metal is dark, that’s a 50′s rosary, probably a quinceañera one (or it’s maybe older, from the 40′s when the brides carried red roses with their offerings).

The fifth one on the fourth line: It’s a quinceañera rosary with Ignatius’s tear. The style is old and in my part of Mexico is orphan girls who used it. At least it was when I was young. The third one of the fifth line: the blue one with the anchor. That one I have only seen in Veracruz and it doesn’t look new. The fifth one on the fifth line: That’s a 90′s wedding rosary. Black and white patterns were popular on that date. The fourth one on the last line: That’s a first communion rosary from the 30′s. It’s delicate and most probably silver. The rest wrench my heart too, the humble everyday rosaries with wooden beads and knots. Those are cheap and bear the wear and tear of their user handling. But those I described are much more.

Those are mother’s rosaries.

Those are not just rosaries. Those are mementos, that’s the proof of their families stories. They are taking from them the only portable things they can carry to feel the connection to their families. It’s not a fear tactic. Call it like by its name. It’s dehumanization.

antyc67

I’m having decidedly unChristian thoughts about this entire administration.

spiletta42

thoughts against this entire administration are 100% Christian; what’s unchristian is to watch these greedy monsters destroy lives and look the other way

prairiedawn

Reblogging because I feel helpless to do much else right now.

And because these are the pictures that need to be front and center in my conservative parish…I wonder what would happen if I blew one up and slealth stuck it on the bulletin board.

Note I am not courageous by nature. Make me do this. Make me.

questionprompts

Please call attention to this wherever you can. They don’t do this to people they intend to treat fairly or even humanely.

rakhna

reblog this and put in the tags where youre from and what temperatures you think are too hot and too cold to go out in

#minnesota #id love to never exist in a space over 80 F #but i can deal with most stuff above -20 F

angelofsunshine99-deactivated20

“If you’re a fascist and anti-fascists come for you, you have a choice. You can give it up. You can go renounce what you said. You could just go on with the rest of your life and stop turning up at fascist rallies. Anti-fascists probably aren’t gonna buy you a pint and be your best friend, but they’ll move on. But if you’re a person of color, if you’re trans, or a person with a disability, or gay, or Jewish, and fascists come for you, there is nothing you can do that can make them happy, except stop existing. That’s the key difference between the far left and the far right. Anti-fascists organize themselves against those that are building fascism. If you’re doing that, that is something you can non-violently stop doing. If you’re a political enemy of antifa, you can become a friend. If you’re a political enemy of fascism, though, either they lose or you die.”

— @realphilosophytube , from “The Philosophy of Antifa” (via dagwolf)

academicssay

‪The importance of stupidity in scientific research | http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771‬

niggazinmoscow

It’s fucking prison camps holding 1,400 children. that’s fascism.

murphysmom67

This is incredibly difficult to look at. I fear this will continue and he will commit even worse crimes against humanity. I believe the UN is sitting on June 27 to discuss the humanitarian aspects of Trumps decisions here.

gatorfisch

Glad to see major network coverage of this

wheremyscalesslither

So sorry that this isnt snakes but… wow.

thanosdawise

The Perfect Explanation of Privilege – In One Powerful Punchline

“The Pencilsword” is a comic strip by Toby Morris, an illustrator from New Zealand. His most recent comic, “On a Plate” hits hard at the heart of the issues of concerning wealth and privilege.

How many times have you heard the “I’ve never been handed anything on a platter” argument in regard to social security and other social benefits?

Toby wrecks this argument by showing how two children can grow up, be loved and supported, and yet still have two very different outcomes.

Make sure to follow all the way to the end for the powerful punchline. This comic is an increasingly sad reality for far too many of this nation’s children and families.

godshideouscreation

Reblogged from the source since someone deleted the text at the bottom.

adora-korra

this is so amazing

theblackoaksyndicate-deactivate

Not gonna lie this got me a bit emotional.

wildlythoughtfulsquid

REBLOG

historiespast

c-ornsilk

Women boxing on a roof, circa 1930s

THIS IS LITERALLY THE RADDEST PHOTO I’VE EVER SEEN

LIKE SHIT

ARE YOU KIDDING

myheadisloud

can we talk about those cute as heck outfits though

the-headless-vulcan

all this history is buried and we’re lead to believe that women just sat around prim and proper until the 70s

#uhhh #im in love

lj-writes

One thing that bothers me about how TLJ is supposed to subvert the traditional SW idea of heroism is, this subversion just happened to take place after SW was led by heroic women and characters of color. Part of the reason fans of color responded so positively to TFA was because it put men of color and a woman in traditional heroic roles with a modern twist. Finn is a reluctant hero, but a former Stormtrooper who wrestles with his trauma. Poe is a hotshot pilot with a heart of gold, but a humble and kindhearted one who doesn’t rely on toxic masculinity. Rey is a Force user who came from nowhere, but a woman who is also struggling with abandonment issues. The main villain is a moderately attractive young white man. TFA has been criticized for its overreliance on ANH’s tropes, but in a way it was what a lot of SW fans needed, to see themselves in the same, even old-fashioned heroic roles that were denied to them.

But no, as soon as we have Black and Latino leads in main trio, there is a huge insistence that things can’t be this way. Large sections of fandom start to insist that the actual tragic hero and true victim must be the murdering and torturing white guy. Then the franchise itself partly backs them up with TLJ’s so-called subversions–no, Finn is a coward who has to be slapped into place by a wiser woman. No, Poe is a macho gloryhound who has to be literally slapped into his place by white women. Rey is a gullible girl who has to rely on one white guy or another. And none of them can be from a special bloodline because we have to subvert that now, too. Force forbid characters of color and female leads have heritage of their own, that’s solely for white men. Oh, and we’re no longer interested in Finn’s, Poe’s, or Rey’s trauma, the only internal life that matters is the white mass murderer’s.

So the message I get from this is that traditional heroism is boring and no longer for SW the moment characters of color and women have a shot at it. To borrow an image that’s been used in other contexts, it’s like we’re climbing a ladder to get somewhere we’ve wanted for decades. Then, mid-climb, the people who have already climbed the ladder to the top kick it away. While we’re on the ground hurting and wondering what the hell just happened, the white guy who kicked the ladder lectures us from on high how useless the ladder was in the first place and how stupid we were to want to climb it. That’s pretty galling, to say the least, coming from a franchise that still has a problem with letting characters of color and especially Black women simply exist on screen.

This is why it rubs me the wrong way when fans, especially white fans, are so enthusiastic about the subversiveness of TLJ. They’re using faux progressive language while being completely oblivious to, or choosing to ignore, that this “subversion” comes across as a slap in the face to many fans.

itsover09-deactivated20200721

That’s what pisses me off about TLJ, among other things. TFA is subversion enough.

TFA

Finn: The Red Shirt Stormtrooper turns out to be the hero of the galaxy

Rey: The damsel in distress turns out to be a Skywalker Jedi.

Poe: The hot headed rogue turns out to be a humble Resistance Hero.

Kylo: The son of two heroes turns out to be the villain and rejects redemption.

Snoke: The cool and calm calculating big bad instead of the overused sadist trope.

Hux: The young general who stands toe to toe with Kylo.

The ending of the film ends bittersweet, unlike the happy ending of A new Hope. Han is dead, a system is dead, Finn is in a coma and Rey is traumatized from her experiences. But Starkiller base is destroyed and Kylo is defeated. Luke Skywalker is found. The War is just beginning.

TLJ

Finn: Stereotypical Black comic relief - no character arc

Poe: hot head Latino man who never listens - always wrong

Rey: Soft eyes girl who is used as a plot device - no character arc.

Rose: Refuge - no character arc

Luke: Grumpy old man - used as a plot device.

Kylo: Plot device with a character arc.

TLJ isn’t subversion. It’s a polished turd that no one wants to accept is bad.

lj-writes

Exactly. And yet TFA is lambasted for being derivative, while TLJ is hailed as the great white hope of Star Wars. It’s almost like subversion ain’t good enough if it uplifts and empowers female characters and characters of color.

proudtoehaver

I’m going to tell you a story about a colleague of mine. I don’t generally talk about other people in my life online because none of them asked to be put here. Heck I barely talk about myself as there’s too many creeps in the world and I don’t want another stalker. But she okayed this story, so here goes.

My colleague is a biracial Black woman and we’ve both been working at this city’s libraries for years. She’s never really been into scifi or comic book movies or TV-series, but her fiancee is and he often takes her to premieres on this stuff. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy the movies but left on her own she’d be a “I’d watch it after its been out a few weeks and the ticket price is down or when it comes out on dvd” type of audience, certainly nor a die hard fan.

Well, when TFA came out her fiancee, then boyfriend, took her to the premiere and she was completely enchanted by it. When we saw each other after Christmas that year she virtually pounced me to talk about it as I’m the biggest Star Wars nerd the libraries have and its a well known fact. She wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t a white guy about it - yes bf is white - because her bf only found it enjoyable but too much of an ANH/OT ripoff, but she loved it. In her words it was “ANH for everyone who isn’t a (white) guy”.

We spent months squeeing about together and she went to watch it three more times. Once with friends and twice on her own. This was a woman who pre-TFA would never have done so. While she had seen all the PT movies in the theater and enjoyed them it had never been more than once and never alone.

She even started buying merch.

A year later when Rogue One came out bf was away on a business trip at the time of the premiere, but she bought tickets and went on her own to it because TFA had pulled her that much into Star Wars. And though the ending made her sad she still went and watched it twice more.

Fast forward to TLJ.

Due to restructuring in our organization we now work at different satellite libraries and work at the main library on different days, so we don’t see each other as much as we used to, therefore it wasn’t until a couple of months after TLJ came out that I had a chance to ask her what she though.

Now my colleague is a woman who’s very much a “eh, it’s fiction” person in reaction to something she used to enjoy taking a turn for the worse. She can rarely get worked up that much about it, because well, it’s fiction. So when I asked her about TLJ I was not expecting her reaction.

She was livid. I’ve rarely seen her this angry about anything, she’s a very laid back person, and certainly never about a piece of fiction. We spent our lunch break ripping TLJ to shreds.

When I asked if she was still going to see Solo the answer was a flat ‘no’, though when asked her the same question a year ago she expressed some enthusiasm to watch the movie.

Her response to being asked if she’ll watch Episode IX?

*shrug* “Probably. [Boyfriend] will go, so I’ll probably go with him.”

This isn’t a “disgruntled older fan who can’t let go of the past”. It’s a woman whom TFA brought from the general audience category and into if not diehard fan then certainly impassioned casual, a new fan who was willing to throw a good deal of her “for fun” budget at LF and Disney.

TLJ killed Star Wars completely for her, she’s utterly lost her enthusiasm and unless Episode IX somehow works a miracle she’ll be a fan who’s permanently lost to the franchise.

And she’s far from the only former fan with this story.

This is what TLJ and its “subversion” faux progressive shit did. Yes it might have alienated some of the older fans, but I think the largest group of those who’s said goodbye to Star Wars are newer fans who was brought in by TFA or RO, who might have liked the OT trio but who fell in love with the new heroic leads only to have to watch Rian screw them all over.

I’ve seen it echoed here on tumblr and other social media. Many of those who remain are older fans like me, not because we don’t hate TLJ and what it did with the same passion, but because we’ve been in love with Star Wars for too long to let one crappy movie drive us away.

The newer fans, the fans that came with TFA and RO have no such long lasting connection and less hesitance to bid Star Wars goodbye.