Liquid Azoth

The Opposite of Consistent

[damnbluewires]

you ever heard a lightning fucking scream?

youre about to

[foolishmeowing]

I went through synonyms and decided "Temerity" sounded the most like a Classical Virtue-sounding word for the Chuunibyou ideal

"The Temerity of Saint Megumin"

[godslush]

Time for another group of these, ahead of time relative to Bsky! I'm just really happy with a few of these and am impatient to share them, LMAO

I don't know what to call this group, but they're all related; their unlocks are based on kill-counts, their weapons (mostly) bounce, and are available in Big Trouser's shop, and they all get more Amount as they level.

Oh, and they all transform, even if two of them haven't had their transformations released yet. They've been teased in trailers/leaks.

[dreadwedge]

I love to be exposed to the dissonance created by the juxtaposition of ideas within my rectangle. Almonds are kind of cute. Much is wrong in the world. The United States is an existential threat to planet earth. The stars shine so brightly. If CS Lewis wasn’t such a coward he would have given us a Fat Mr Tumnus

[anxietyproblem]

[lew-basnight]

I used to crash at one good friends house a lot in high school. There wasn’t a spare bed but there were these two chairs made of folding cushions that could be laid out as a bed, and I would push them together to make an almost comfortable place to sleep. But they would always separate during the night.

I had a very intense dream I still think about all the time, where everyone in the world had, somehow, also had to sleep over at my friend’s house on the two chair-beds. And the whole human race was tired and cranky because the cushions kept separating, and international tensions and violence were escalating.

Until we started a campaign called “push them together.” Yes, it’s rough for all of us, we’re all sleepy and grouchy. But that’s just how the bed is. When they separate, you just have to get up and (here was a hand motion of pressing your open palms together as if to pray) “push them together.” Neighbors feuding? Push them together. Nations at war? Push them together. Disagreement with a friend? Push them together. There were public service announcements and it was referenced at a Super Bowl halftime show and TV and movies. It was the We Are The World of sleeping over at my friend’s house.

Sometimes when I’m peacemaking out in the real world to this day, I’ll still catch myself pressing my hands together before I remember it wasn’t an actual international movement, just a dream from forever ago.

[auxryn]

Many people are aware that copyright originated as and remains a protection for publishers, not authors.

However, there are longstanding rights intended to protect authors. These are legally called 'the moral rights of authors.' Good naming.

These rights include:

The right to attribution. To have your name on your work. Don't repost peoples work without attribution.

The right to use a pen name or to publish anonymously. Publishers should protect the privacy of authors. Service providers shouldn't require posters to provide ID.

The right to integrity. Editors should not cut up your work to make it say something you do not endorse.

So let's review:

❌ AI harms authors because it violates copyright.

✅ AI harms authors because it violates their rights to attribution and integrity.

[liquidazoth]

This is great except for the fact that neither of those rights (attribution, integrity) are being 'violated' by genAI in any established sense. ChatGPT is not "reposting people's work without attribution". The only sense I can see an argument for that happening would be search summarization and the like - and in those cases a) it's not simply reposting the material, and b) there usually *is* a little attribution chip. I also fail to see how genAI violates the right to integrity. You'd have a better case arguing that a ransom note made from letters cut out of magazines violates that right. Or that fanfiction authors are violating it on the daily (hello Anne Rice). The training process distills like a hundred billion pages of text into a statistical model that can produce plausible continuations of any input, and then gets further shaped to serve as a chatbot. I *suppose* you could frame that as "[cutting] up [the author's] work to make it say something [they] do not endorse", but the model is not in any meaningful sense an "editor", and the works being trained on are not being chopped up in such a way as to suggest the original authors' hold some particular view. By all appearances, you either do not understand how the models work (sure, fine, not everyone pays attention to the tech), do not understand the moral rights you are advocating for, or are stretching the definitions in order to make a rhetorical point about technology you have already made up your mind about. I get that half the planet wants a clean knock-down argument against AI, but this ain't it chief.

[eka-mark]

Accurate reckoning. The entrance into the knowledge of all existing things and all obscure secrets.

opening lines of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, c. 1550 BC

(source for this translation)

[raginrayguns]

By the way, this is what people are talking about when they refer to an ancient Egyptian value for π:

[yaldabaothadeez]

So they have pi = 4*64/81 ~= 3.16

Not too bad

[charnel-grounds]

Marc C. Green, “Wait! We have treats!”

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

@liquidazoth

[alexanderwales]

I do think it's a beautiful thing when an author is clearly going for a metaphor, but the diegesis gets in the way. The story has symbols, but they're not just symbols, they're real things that exist within the world of that story, and as soon as the reader thinks about this, the symbol can be shattered.

I don't know what it is I find nice about this, but maybe it's the wet impact of meaning-making against base reality.

[psychofuturist]

playing 𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖘𝖘 and making 𝖑𝖔𝖛𝖊

[rabbit-antlers]

My Morrowind experience.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

[parttimepunner]

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

[adeptarcanist]

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

[im-flashtoo]

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

[huiopl064]

When you're so tired that all math just sounds like

We will define a trivial shape as something you can draw on a piece of n-paper without lifting your mind. This definition may seem unnecessarily rigorous, but it will do for now.

Convince yourself that the 0-sphere and 10^14-supermultiplexa are the only two trivial manifolds.

We can ignore the supermultiplexa for now, since it is indistinguishable from Ray Bradbury.

If we focus on the 0-sphere, we may notice that by multiplying it by any acidic manifold (a manifold whose pH is greater than 7) you get a basic salt, which proves that all basic salts are divisible by the 0-sphere.

[officialscud]

thought this old behind the scenes pic had some crazy good framing so i did some weird science to it and made it into a (fake) painting

[saint-batrick]

holy shit, this has some of the most wildly sensual energy i have ever seen.

[cipheramnesia]

The Last Temptation of Data

[youzicha]

Osmazome

I had the idea of going through Project Gutenberg’s collection of old cookbooks to see how they use the word “savoury”. The results are kindof inconclusive, but in the process I came across this intriguing paragraph from 1861:

We have said that gelatine forms the basis of stock; but this, though very nourishing, is entirely without taste; and to make the stock savoury, it must contain osmazome. Of this, bones do not contain a particle; and that is the reason why stock made entirely of them, is not liked; but when you add meat to the broken or pulverized bones, the osmazome contained in it makes the stock sufficiently savoury.

Osmazome? Apparently, there was a theory that meat contains a chemical compound that accounts for the taste. It was popularized in The Physiology of Taste (1825):

The greatest service rendered by chemistry to alimentary science is the discovery or even more the exact comprehension of osmazome. Osmazome is that preeminently sapid part of meat which is soluble in cold water, and which differs completely from the extractive part of the meat, which is soluble only in water that is boiling.

It is osmazome which gives all their value to good soups; it is osmazome which, as it browns, makes the savory reddish tinge in sauces and the crisp coating on roasted meat; finally it is from the osmazome that come the special tangy juices of venison and game.

[…] it is to husband this substance, as yet largely unrecognized, that the maxim has been propounded that in order to make a good bouillon the pot must only smile with heat, a truly worthy expression considering the country from which it came.

Osmazome, discovered at last after having for so long delighted our forebears, can be compared with alcohol, which tipsified many generations of men before any of them knew how to strip it naked in the analytical process of distillation in a laboratory.

During the action of boiling water osmazome gives place to what is understood more especially by extractive matter: this last product, reunited with the osmazome, makes up the juice of meat.

The name is coined from Greek osme ‘scent’ + zomos ‘soup’.  @quoms talked about the umami-shaped gap left by the transition to a “scientific” understanding of flavor, but maybe if things had gone slightly differently, we would now be discussing how bonito flakes taste osmazomic…

[shieldfoss]

Oh hadn’t you heard?

(2S,5S,8S,11S,14S,17S)-17-{2-[(2S)-2,6-Diaminohexanamido]acetamido}-8-(hydroxymethyl)-11,14-bis(3-hydroxy-3-oxopropyl)-2-methyl-5-(2-methylpropyl)-4,7,10,13,16-pentaoxo-3,6,9,12,15-pentaazanonadecanedioic acid

[argumate]

sounds like the phlogiston theory of cooking

[amanda-baeza]

[romanceyourdemons]

the holy 35mm of damascus is a supposed documentary of the crucifixion shot by st. vopicus the cinematographer, a freelance videographer who was passing by calvary while shooting a documentary for the roman travel agency and happened to capture the death of christ on tape. there are several supposed prints of the holy 35mm in existence, one housed in the church of the holy cinema in st. petersburg, one in st. vopicus’s cathedral in madrid, and one copy and the negative supposedly housed the vatican. according to one legend, in the fourth century a group of wealthy romans known for persecuting christians sat down to watch a planet of the apes film, but the secretly christian projectionist swapped out the reel for the holy 35mm; all of the wealthy romans burst into a terrible inferno and perished, except for the emperor’s mother—st helena—who was converted on the spot. the holy 35mm is kept under utmost security, having been viewed by fewer than a dozen people in the past century, with no public screenings in recorded history. roger ebert saw it in 1978 and gave it three stars out of four