[feminist-space]

[johanna-swann]

[everydayconman]

The ancient texts were true… They DO have a reaction image for everything…

[the-insidious-dr-grey-matter]

Patrick Stewart dancing and singing on the bridge of USS Enterprise-D. Originally filmed in 1991 as a birthday suprise for Gene Roddenberry, it wasn't meant for public viewing but a copy was made and later included as a DVD bonus.

[doctor-croctor]

Here is your reminder to not take yourself too seriously. Leave room for whimsy and humor.

[mawofthemagnetar]

The problem with being low support needs is that people mentally autocorrect that to “no support needs” and then proceed to give you absolutely nothing and then get surprised when you implode after six months.

[byjove]

There was a trend in the 40s and 50s (not sure if it predates that or if there are places that still do it) where you could get your child’s baby shoes cast in bronze or dipped in bronze and use them as keepsakes or have them mounted as bookends. Better than the resin slop of the modern day in my opinion. My great grandma had my grandpa’s baby shoes made into bookends ends because she loved him very much and he was her only child and it is honestly really cute. My mom got her dad’s baby shoe bookends when she moved out and they were in my living room my entire childhood, she had explained how they were grandpa’s shoes covered in bronze and I thought that was cool.

Then I went to an art museum and saw bronze busts of people and my tiny child brain thought the person’s dismembered head and shoulders were in there…

[cheaphalloweencostume]

every day of my life i read someone being like “why doesn’t this story just solve the problem immediately and casually? they just drag it out and make it an issue” well. because that’s the Story

[mixedgirlrants]

““Mother,” I slowly repeated in Korean. “I am not a boy. I am a girl. I am transgender.” My face reddened, and tears blurred my vision. I braced myself for her rejection and the end to a relationship that had only begun. Silence again filled the room. I searched my mother’s eyes for any signs of shock, disgust or sadness. But a serene expression lined her face as she sat with ease on the couch. I started to worry that my words had been lost in translation. Then my mother began to speak. “Mommy knew,” she said calmly through my friend, who looked just as dumbfounded as I was by her response. “I was waiting for you to tell me.” “What? How?” “Birth dream,” my mother replied. In Korea some pregnant women still believe that dreams offer a hint about the gender of their unborn child. “I had dreams for each of your siblings, but I had no dream for you. Your gender was always a mystery to me.” I wanted to reply but didn’t know where to begin. My mother instead continued to speak for both of us. “Hyun-gi,” she said, stroking my head. “You are beautiful and precious. I thought I gave birth to a son, but it is OK. I have a daughter instead.””

— Andy Marra, The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition (via a-witches-brew)

[banrionceallach]

You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.

Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.

And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.

Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.

[catgirlthecrazy]

On a related note, that post also opened up the world of naps for me. I used to think that napping was mostly pointless for me, because I'm pretty much incapable of falling fully asleep in the middle of the day. But when I redefined naps to include "lying down with my eyes shut for an hour," even if I just spent the whole time brainstorming fanfiction, that was often enough to get me from "exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep" to energized and refreshed

[oldschoolvillageidiot]

I keep thinking about this moment because it was really sweet and unprompted. Catherine was so excited to be there and wanted so badly to do a good job (she did a GREAT job with maybe the hardest episode yet) and to get a little praise from someone with as much Dropout success as Ify? You can't buy an ego boost like that!

She also really IS good at Game Changer because there's no damn way I would've ever figured out the trick, let alone as fast as she did. Also the fact she instinctively just gave away everything she learned to help other constestants. I hope they bring her back for a less chaotic episode soon.

[jacquistheripper]

i think what made count the rice so awesome (if ominous) is that it harkened back to game changer’s fundamentals which is the only way to win is by learning and the only way to learn is by playing. i love the game changers where they get no instructions and it’s more puzzle based because that’s what season 1 game changer was really founded on.

[twilanore]

i refuse to hear any catherine mcafferty slander about this episode

she figured it out so quickly, climbed her way back to the top so well

its not her fault she thinks the louvre looks like a city block or that she doesnt know what spaghetti is

[anthraxofeffervescence]

The core conceit of Lord of the Rings is pretty funny. You are a twenty three year old in a suburb of Maine. The little bracelet in your grandpa’s attic has an inscription on it that is the password to the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. It is up to you to walk to the only hydraulic press in the world, located in Arizona, before the FBI finds the bracelet, kills you, and enslaves the suburb of Maine you currently live in

[anthraxofeffervescence]

Also the 90-year old hobo that your grandpa beat in a rap battle for possession of the bracelet while hiding from the Romanian secret police really loved the bracelet because it was coated in small amounts of LSD and tried to hunt and kill your grandpa to get it back. He was then apprehended by the FBI and instantly gave them your grandpa’s address. Seal Team Six is about to break down your door and shoot you, says your local congressman who can also do cool magic tricks

[bloodyraven1001]

There's a guy in NY who MIGHT be capable of destroying the codes but won't coz he simply wants to spend time with his wife. So it's up to your grandpa's old friend in rural Ohio to get you the friends capable of finishing the task.

[ariaste]

And we must not, at any point, remember the existence of aircraft and ask aloud why we can't just fly to Arizona

[novemberocean]

Peer reviewed tags

[philcollinsenjoyer]

explained to an 8 year old that once a fruit is ripe you only have so much time until it rots so you have to eat it soon and she said so i'll never be able to keep it perfect like this forever? no and there are about a million pieces of art for you unrelatedly

[redstonedust]

my bugbear of the day is that i think its odd when people say "femme trans man" or "masc trans woman" they automatically assume it means no hrt. nothing stoppin someone from going on estrogen and also being butch. you can be 8 years on testosterone and be camp about it. being gnc is a whole spectrum babey open your eyes.

[release-the-sheep]

just witnessed something devastating

guy on the subway with one ear pierced, little gold hoop. other guy on the subway very quickly and subtly googling "which one is the gay ear". it is not the gay ear. visible disappointment on his face as he puts his phone away.

[perfectlynormalperson]

thank you for speaking the truth, @uraeuseraph

[release-the-sheep]

just witnessed something devastating

guy on the subway with one ear pierced, little gold hoop. other guy on the subway very quickly and subtly googling "which one is the gay ear". it is not the gay ear. visible disappointment on his face as he puts his phone away.

[perfectlynormalperson]

thank you for speaking the truth, @uraeuseraph

[tsunflowers]

I’m reading this book about the changing arctic and the author stayed with the Nunamiut people of inland alaska for a while and talked to this high school kid who was like “ugh I hate going to school in the spring I wish I was hunting caribou” and I thought that was charming. you often hear about people who are devoted to preserving their traditional culture and knowledge but it’s rare to hear about someone who’s invested in the old ways out of pure teenage selfishness. school is lame and hunting caribou is awesome

[ot3]

looking for animal references on image searches has always kind of sucked but it's much worse after AI image generation technology has begun to actually past muster, which is why i always just go straight to inaturalist. can't recommend this highly enough. you get to both find out about niche species you've never even heard of and also see some really good photographs like this one

x

[birdsy-purplefishes]

I KNEW I had seen this exact same image before! Good old "Organisms On or Near Appropriate Signs" project.

[ot3]

oh that's a fun project. haven't seen this before. some good ones in here.

[rhube]

Also, I seem to recall inaturalist got on the AI bandwagon, so the signs people might be a safer bet.

[Edit:] oh no, it's the same ppl.

[Edit 2:]

Here’s the next cohort of the Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI

Meet the 20 organizations using generative AI to address tough societal issues.

AI-edited photos are inventing rare bird sightings on iNaturalist, and scientists warn the AI slop could corrupt biodiversity records.

[ot3]

the first source you have linked is about this grant for making enhancements to the kind of machine learning aided identification and labeling/search tools their platform has been developing for almost a decade, and does not involve any AI imagery being generated or shown to users

FAQs What is the history of iNaturalist and AI? iNaturalist has been synthesizing photos and identifications using machine learning since 2017 to provide computer vision suggestions (a kind of AI) on the iNaturalist website and mobile apps. In 2023 we started incorporating observation location into our model training process, which resulted in the geomodel and range maps. All of the training of these models happens on two machines we own and control. Each time we update the model, we write a blog post about the new species that have been added thanks to the observations and identifications from the iNaturalist community. You can read the most recent blog post from April.

the second link is about AI generated or AI enhanced wildlife images being uploaded to citizen scientists database, and the inaturalist director of community support authoring a paper on why this is bad, along with a brief mention of the fact that inaturalist is trying to combat this with flagging that tries to prevent these images from being used in research

“Regular people are posting information that a scientist could probably never get at scale,” said Tony Iwane of iNaturalist, a co-author on the paper. He called the network “almost like a sensor of what is happening on Earth in real time.” His catch: the information needs to be accurate. Feed it bad data and the inferences go wrong. A single AI-invented sighting can suggest a species has shifted its range when it has not. There is a second cost, too. Manipulated images used to train AI identification tools can quietly degrade them.

Fighting back The platforms are starting to respond. iNaturalist now lets users flag images two ways. A fully-AI-generated flag hides the image. An over-manipulated flag drops it to “casual” grade, so it never reaches research databases.

like what possible point could you be trying to make here. what is the purpose of these links.