i wanna be in the room where it happens

Kat. 21. find my art on @katmjclements. this is my personal. mostly it is yelling about space and superheros.

[plainoldsamvimes-deactivated202]

This popped up again on reddit today, and I realized I’d never posted it here. Possibly Sir Terry’s best interview response, ever.

[theweefreewomen]

[image text: O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell kay. But in the UK think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epi of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections—That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala, Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghwad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that, What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.]

[binary-bird]

style/sequential art experiment feat. incorrect hamlet quotes.

[binary-bird]

Hamlet as a D&D paladin.

Keep reading

[pilferingapples]

like not only did Hugo NOT get paid by the word  NOT ONLY did Hugo’s editors beg him to please shut up NOT ONLY do all the digressions carry core messages to the larger point of the book 

there is  ALSO a nonzero chance Hugo came up with some of the core ideas for  Les Mis under the guidance of ghosts , and sometimes comets

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO ADVANCE THE MOST BORING POSSIBLE THEORY FOR WHY IT’S A LONG BOOK WHEN YOU COULD HAVE GHOSTS

[the-thrill-be-damned-deactivate]

what’s this about space rock ghosts

[pilferingapples]

omg you’re gonna love this

while Victor Hugo was in exile–this started around 1853– the family’s friend Delphine Girardin introduced them all to table-tapping. Peak Spiritualism time, right?

Hugo totally fell in love with the idea, at first hoping to make contact with his dead daughter Leopoldine. Which he started to think he had! I would not laugh about that. 

But then  he started to get “messages” from all manner of ghosts and spirits, including:

-Shakespeare, now, as a spirit, finally able to access the Truest Language of Humanity (French) -A Comet -Andre Chenier, who dictated the ending of an “unfinished” poem that just happened to be one in a collection Hugo hadn’t finished  - The Spirit of the Sepulchre  - Napoleon III, From The Future, When He Was Dead  - Jesus  -Plato -A Lion , Like,A Four-Legged Animal That Goes Roar, But Now Dead and Speaking French , GOD’S OWN LANGUAGE, because of course -Aliens from Mercury - AND MANY MANY MORE 

all speaking French and frequently speaking in RHYMED ALEXANDRINES 

all sounding remarkably like Victor Hugo, though without him apparently realizing this, given that he frequently scared himself into near-faints at these Revelations and telling him, among other things, that he was going to be hailed as a PROPHET OF THE NEW AGE but had to accept not being Known as such for a while yet

and I will ABSOLUTELY laugh at all that, because OH HUGO  

I SWEAR I am not making this up , there are books collecting the records of the sessions, because of course he was recording these WORLD CHANGING REVELATIONS 

anyway then he got back to writing and among other things finished up Les Mis in the years to come , so SPACE ROCK GHOSTS may have had a hand in the novel! Or not!  Who can say what voices move the soul of an author?  Except that whatever they are, they speak in French.

[retrogamingblog]

Super Smash Bros moves performed by Marvel stuntmen

[scissorspider]

i was about to joke about how my political stance is “end lawnmower culture” but then it occurred to me that i actually Am against lawns as suburban status symbols and wastes of land that Could be used to sustain native flora & fauna and grow food for people, but no, instead they are these huge useless swaths of land that need Constant maintenance, the process of which is not only destructive, but Incredibly Loud

[turtletot43-deactivated20180723]

You know that actually is the purpose of a lawn? They started as a trend of the French monarchy - the ones revolutionaries beheaded for being self indulgent assholes.

It exists purely as a status symbol that says, “I have land but I don’t have to use it for anything productive. I can invest time, money and resources in maintaining an entirely useless crop on land I’m not farming just because it looks pretty.”

Lawns offend me.

[bigwordsandsharpedges]

Why have that stunted golf course in front of your suburban house if you can’t even water it? Get one of these instead.

[pollymol-deactivated20181115]

Unite Against the Lawn

[vikingofficial-deactivated20241]

Pro tiny house, anti grass lawn. Prioritize practicality.

[whitefriartuck]

This is actually really interesting because back in the 1950s and 60s in Australia when we started getting large waves of Southern European migrants one thing the Italians and others would often so is buy a little suburban home, then tear out the ornamental flower beds and lawn and useless trees and plant fruits, vegetables, grapes and even olives. It was considered completely scandalous by their Anglo-Saxon neighbours because lawn was considered an aspirational thing and the ideal was to go from not needing a kitchen garden and having an ornamental garden to show how well you were doing.

[botanyshitposts]

when i was at the san antonio botanical gardens last week they had a whole setup of tiny faux houses showing different potential layouts to alternate yards!! the focus of the exhibition was on replacing a lawn with other plants to conserve water (they partnered with the san antonio water system for this); lawns just…don’t do well in draught conditions, as you could probably guess. meanwhile native plants are VERY well adapted to the climate. from their website: 

WaterSaver Lane features six cottages that demonstrate different types of drought-tolerant landscaping, including one showing what not to plant! Find a variety of landscapes that minimize lawn and include more groundcover, perennial flowerbeds and herbs, native and adapted plants, and patio space.

here are a few of their examples (the exhibit has full mini yards to see but im pulling these pics off their website): 

cottage garden

spanish courtyard

hill country

they also have an adapted version of the traditional lawn. i know that this is a very lawn-abolitionist post, but in this particular hot take on the lawn discourse they’ve shown how replacing traditional lawn turf with low-water grass species, perennial shrubs, and shade trees can create the same kind of look in a more environmentally friendly manner:

[penguinindminor]

@kcstarke

[norsesuggestions]

Now i infodump about the name of Kiruna, because i got feeling

the history of the name of the city of Kiruna, which is a several language story. Kiruna is named after the Mountain were much of the iron ore it mines is located.

The mountain name was the Northern Saami Girronvárris (“ptarmigan mountain”. The name references the many of the bird species ptarmigans used to live there once upon a time. Before the mining). The finnish speakers, who were a significant portion of the miners, finnishized that northern saami name to Kiirunavaara.

várris/vaara both translates to mountain, so when it was time to name the mining town, which mined the iron of Girronvárris and Luossavárri (which in its turn was finnishized to Lousavaara. It translated to “salmon mountain”. Which referencing once upon time it was a good location to fish salmon)

Anyway! When it was time to name the mining city in the early 20th century, they snipped of the Mountain part of the finnishized name.

So Kiiruna. Then it was decided, that to be able to market this city in sweden, the finnish name, which was already a finnishsation of a north saami name should swedishfied, because they already on a roll here

So Kiiruna became Kiruna because “they believed not swedish speakers could say Kiiruna”

(= read: “we are colonial mine owners, and who live in the early 20th century sweden, were swedes were in a nationalist fever, so we want to make the uralic origin of the name more low key, by spelling it according to swedish ortoghrapy. Because if you spell something Kiruna, swedish ortoghrapy already says it shall have a long i.)

Anyway, that was a story of swedish colonalism in sapmi, told via a long story of the history of a cities name.

Source

http://www.samer.se/3267

[norsesuggestions]

here a excerpt from the saami parliement in sweden which perhaps explains this in a easier way to follow than i:

“Finsk och svensk kolonisation i Sápmi har lett till att vissa ortnamn blivit ”förfinskade” eller ”försvenskade.  I norra Sápmi, i Norrbottens län, kan platser ha tre namn: ett samiskt, ett finskt och ett svenskt. Det visar att finsktalande kolonister nådde platsen före svenskarna. Ett exempel på just detta är hur samernas traditionella namn på Kiruna, Giron, blev till Kiiruna på finska, som i försvenskad form blev Kiruna. Gironvárri, Fjällripberget, är namnet på det fjäll där järmmalmen i Kiruna bryts sedan början av 1900-talet. ”

http://www.samer.se/3267

[dreariesdrawlings-deactivated20]

into the spider-verse spoiler no context

[fineinteriors]

The Starfield Library, Starfield COEX Mall, Seoul, South Korea.

[penguinindminor]

@kcstarke hnnnnnnng.

[engardepretsallez]

Fencing News: Rules change for saber and foil (and epee)

Not an april’s fools this time. 

For saber, the rule proposal is to bring back the flèche into the game. This would allow fencers to cross their legs going forwards in sabre. (Page 3-4 in PDF)

For foil, they want to test it out without white lights. If i’m understanding well, the machine wouldn’t register an off-target hit and the bout would continue even though there has been an off-target hit. (Page 2-3 in PDF)

Plus, epee fencers could get red carded for non-combativity, strongly encouraging fencers to be less passive. (Page 9-10-11 in PDF)

Go check out the PDF!

http://static.fie.org/uploads/20/100197-11.2%20doc.%20gral.%20%20reglements%202018%20ang.pdf

[redthefencer]

Thoughts, everyone?

For me, I thought non-combativity was already something you could be penalized for (or maybe just after one minute the director calls halt? I am a sabre fencer. Please explain).

I personally think sabre is aggressive enough as it is (this is coming from a sabre fencer, y'all) and they do not need the cross over fleche (I’ve been knocked over by many a flunge. I am five foot two and tired of being a bowling pin! We do not need a fleche guys. Y'all do plenty of damage with the flunge!).

And I’m honestly curious. Why do we have white lights in foil but not in sabre? Where does this rule originate? Would it still be a foil bout without the white lights? I’m a sabre fencer. Please explain.

At least this is not the Russian box of death. *screams* *sirens in the distance* *death in general*

[dankmemeuniversity]

[that-binese-guy]

@kcstarke

[probablybadrpgideas]

Your paladin has sworn a solemn oath to the gods that when it comes to the innocent of the world, they will never give them up, never let them down, never run around and desert them…

[probablybadrpgideas]

All chaotic-aligned characters are required to wear cowboy hats.

[sufficiently-uncool-deactivated]

the player’s guide to DM-speak!

“You wouldn’t know”: If you ask to roll, say, history, and your DM responds with this, it usually means, “This is a vital plot point that you aren’t supposed to find out until later, so I won’t tell you regardless of what you roll”

“I mean, you could”: The DM is strongly suggesting you don’t do the thing you were just about to do. But it is your choice… if you reeeeeally want to.

“Oh, fuck”/“Oh, shit”/et cetera: “I DID NOT EXPECT YOU TO MAKE THAT DECISION AND I DID NOT PREPARE AN OUTCOME”

“Oh, fuck”/“Oh, shit”/et cetera: “I JUST REALIZED I DID NOT BALANCE THIS COMBAT CORRECTLY”

“Hang on…”: “Where the FUCK did I put this in my notes?”

“Oh boy”/“Oh god”/“Oh no”/et cetera: I either just rolled REALLY well or REALLY badly. You’ll find out soon enough.

“It seems like…”/“As far as you can tell…”: What I’m about to say your character notices, is nowhere CLOSE to what’s actually going on.

“Make a [skill] check”/“Make a [skill] saving throw”: I’m having you make this roll, but I’m not going to tell you what it means until later, when you’re going to regret it.

A hard, firm, “No”: “Please for the love of GOD and ALL that is holy I am BEGGING you not to put me through whatever BULLSHIT you’re planning.”

[mooretimetoplay]

- What you know in character though: Please stop fucking metagaming at my table

- I’ll give you that: Contrary to your mistaken belief, you are not correct about this particular rule, but I have a story to tell and will let you have something unimportant yet cheaty if it shuts you up for six goddamn seconds

[amiplayingright]

- Yeah okay: That’s absolutely not allowed for in the rules but I wanna see where it goes

- I guess so?: Please gods no I didn’t plan for this

[probablybadrpgideas]

An urban fantasy Mimic who preys upon conventions by imitating a blue police box which appears in improbable locations.

Once rumors of people disappearing start to go around hunting actually gets better.

[aiweirdness]

SkyKnit: When knitters teamed up with a neural network

[Make Caows and Shapcho - MeganAnn]

[Pitsilised Koekirjad Cushion Sampler Poncho - Maeve]

[Lacy 2047 - michaela112358]

I use algorithms called neural networks to write humor. What’s fun about neural networks is they learn by example - give them a bunch of some sort of data, and they’ll try to figure out rules that let them imitate it. They power corporate finances, recognize faces, translate text, and more. I, however, like to give them silly datasets. I’ve trained neural networks to generate new paint colors, new Halloween costumes, and new candy heart messages. When the problem is tough, the results are mixed (there was that one candy heart that just said HOLE).

One of the toughest problems I’ve ever tried? Knitting patterns.

I knew almost nothing about knitting when @[email protected] sent me the suggestion one day. She sent me to the Ravelry knitting site, and to its adults-only, often-indecorous LSG forum, who as you will see are amazing people. (When asked how I should describe them, one wrote “don’t forget the glitter and swearing!”)

And so, we embarked upon Operation Hilarious Knitting Disaster.

The knitters helped me crowdsource a dataset of 500 knitting patterns, ranging from hats to squids to unmentionables. JC Briar exported another 4728 patterns from the site stitch-maps.com. 

I gave the knitting patterns to a couple of neural networks that I collectively named “SkyKnit”. Then, not knowing if they had produced anything remotely knittable, I started posting the patterns. Here’s an early example.

MrsNoddyNoddy wrote, “it’s difficult to explain why 6395, 71, 70, 77 is so asthma-inducingly funny.” (It seems that a 6000-plus stitch count is, as GloriaHanlon put it, “optimism”). 

As training progressed, and as I tried some higher-performance models, SkyKnit improved. Here’s a later example.

Even at its best, SkyKnit had problems. It would sometimes repeat rows, or leave them out entirely. It could count rows fairly reliably up to about 22, but after that would start haphazardly guessing random largish numbers. SkyKnit also had trouble counting stitches, and would confidently declare at the end of certain lines that it contained 12 stitches when it was nothing of the sort.

But the knitters began knitting them. This possibly marks one of the few times in history when a computer generated code to be executed by humans.

[Mystery lace - datasock]

[Reverss Shawl - citikas]

[Frost - Odonata]

The knitters didn’t follow SkyKnit’s directions exactly, as it turns out. For most of its patterns, doing them exactly as written would result in the pattern immediately unraveling (due to many dropped stitches), or turning into long whiplike tentacles (due to lots of leftover stitches). Or, to make the row counts match up with one another, they would have had to keep repeating the pattern until they’d reached a multiple of each row count - sometimes this was possible after a few repeats, while other times they would have had to make the pattern tens of thousands of stitches long. And other times, missing rows made the directions just plain impossible. 

So, the knitters just started fixing SkyKnit’s patterns.

Knitters are very good at debugging patterns, as it turns out. Not only are there a lot of knitters who are coders, but debugging is such a regular part of knitting that the complicated math becomes second nature. Notation is not always consistent, some patterns need to be adjusted for size, and some simply have mistakes. The knitters were used to taking these problems in stride. When working with one of SkyKnit’s patterns, GloriaHanlon wrote, “I’m trying not to fudge too much, basically working on the principle that the pattern was written by an elderly relative who doesn’t speak much English.”

Each pattern required a different debugging approach, and sometimes knitters would each produce their own very different-looking versions. Here are three versions of “Paw Not Pointed 2 Stitch 2″.

[Top - ActualJellyfish; Middle - LadyAurian; Bottom (sock version) - ShoelessJane]

Once, knitter MeganAnn came across a stitch that didn’t even exist (something SkyKnit called ’pbk’). So she had to improvise. “I googled it and went with the first definition I got, which was ‘place bead and knit’.” The resulting pattern is “Ribbed Rib Rib” below (note bead).

[Ribbed Rib Rib - MeganAnn]

Even debugged, the patterns were weird. Like, really, really nonhumanly weird.

“I love how organic it comes out,“ wrote Vastra. SylviaTX agreed, loving “the organic seeming randomness. Like bubbles on water or something,” 

SkyKnit’s patterns were also a pain. Michaela112358 called Row 15 of Mystery Lace (above) “a bit of a head melter”, commenting that it “lacked the rhythm that you tend to get with a normal pattern”. Maeve_ish wrote that Shetland Bird Pat “made my brain hurt so I went to bed.” ShoelessJane asked, “Okay, now who here has read Snow Crash?”

[Winder Socks (2 versions) - TotesMyName]

“I was laughing a few days ago because I was trying to math a Skyknit pattern and my brain…froze. Like, no longer could number at all. I stared blankly at my scribbles and at the screen wondering what had happened til somehow I rebooted. Yup, Skyknit crashed my brain.” - Rayn63

[Paw chain 2 - HMSChicago]

On the pattern SkyKnit called “Cherry and Acorns Twisted To”:

“Couple notes on the knitting experience, which while funny wasn’t terribly pleasurable: Because there’s no rhythm or symmetry to the pattern, I felt I was white-knuckling it through each line, really having to concentrate. There are also some stitch combinations that aren’t very comfortable to execute physically, YO, SSK in particular.

That said, I’m nearly tempted to add a bit of random AI lace to a project, perhaps as cuffs on a sweater or a short-row lace panel in part of a scarf, like Sylvia McFadden does in many of her shawl designs. As another person in the thread said, it would add a touch of spider-on-LSD.” -SarahScully

[cherry and acorns twisted to - Sarah Scully]

BridgetJ’s comments on “Butnet Scarf”:

“Four repeats in to this oddball, daintily alien-looking 8-row lace pattern, and I have, improbably, begun to internalize it and get in to a rhythm like every other lace pattern.

I still have a lingering suspicion that I’m knitting a pattern that could someday communicate to an AI that I want to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War, but I suppose at least I’ll have a scarf at the end of it?” -BridgetJ

[butnet scarf - BridgetJ]

There was also this beauty of a pattern, that SkyKnit called “Tiny Baby Whale Soto”. GloriaHanlon managed somehow to knit it and described it as “a bona fide eldritch horror. Think Slenderman meets Cthulu and you wouldn’t be far wrong.”

[Tiny Baby Whale Soto - GloriaHanlon]

Other than being a bit afraid of Tiny Baby Whale Soto, the knitters seem happy to do the bidding of SkyKnit, brain melts and all.

“I cast on for a lovely MKAL with a designer I totally trust and became immediately suspicious because the pattern made sense. All rows increase in an orderly manner. There are no “huh?” moments. There are no maths at all…it has all been done for me. I thought I would be happy, yo. Instead, I am kind of missing the brain scrambling and I keep looking for pigs and tentacles. Go figure.” - Rayn63

Check out the rest of the SkyKnit-generated patterns, and the glorious rainbow of weird test-knits at SkyKnit: The Collection and InfiKnit. 

There’s also a great article in the Atlantic that talks a bit more about the debugging. 

If you feel so inspired (and don’t mind the kind-hearted yet vigorous swearing), join the conversation on the LSG Ravelry SkyKnit thread - many of SkyKnit’s creations have not yet been test-knit at all, and others transform with every new knitter’s interpretation. Compare notes, commiserate, and do SkyKnit’s inscrutable bidding!

Heck yeah there is bonus material this week. Have some neural net-generated knitting & crochet titles. Some of them are mixed with metal band names for added creepiness. Enter your email here to get more like these:

Chicken Shrug Snuggle Features Cartube Party Filled Booties Corm Fullenflops Womp Mittens Socks of Death Tomb of Sweater Shawl Ruins

[elodieunderglass]

This is Everything, if you didn’t already know

[picsthatmakeyougohmm]

hmmm

[bunjywunjy]

George Lucas emerging from hyperspace because he heard J.J. Abrams said a bad about the Prequel Trilogy