Meadmaker librarian @meadmakerlibrarian - Tumblr Blog

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biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

the meaning of life? is to make your bedroom as comfy as possible. that's it that's the purpose

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

the secondary purpose is to equip your kitchen and get really really really into international cuisine

queer-as-city-folk

Old man, sitting in the pool steps reading his book

queer-as-city-folk

Artists sketch

spacemancharisma

UNRESTRAINED SUMMER FUN

stealingpotatoes

you’ve seen project Hail Mary???? Oh my gosh I love Rocky in your style!!!

well now i just havee to draw more rocky in my style

(links // tip jar!)

fuckyeahchinesefashion

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

ariaste

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3

imjunebitch

calling ppl "larpers" to insinuate theyre fake fans of smth/poorly pretending to be smth is so fucking stupid cuz. tell me u have never met a real LARPer without saying u have never met a real LARPer. those guys care. they are fucking locked in dude. like LARP is a lifestyle its a commitment they care so much. they're not fake nerds either like fake nerds just repost LOTR gifsets and talk about how nerdy they are for being into like, fucking batman and stuff. LARPers know their shit. they read the whole Silmarillion. they know who Ambush Bug is. like get LARP's name out of your fucking mouth

teaboot

"Oh yeah, we have an outdoor Corgi, he just gets so bored cooped up inside all day. He knows to stay off the road. Don't worry, he's way too smart for coyotes and the neighbor's know to look out when they drive past."

"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."

"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."

Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars

A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we

It's 2026, "keep your damn pet in a house or in your view" should not be controversial

angel-stars

I had to go on a hunt for this but it was worth it. 100% agree

voidcreations

Look at my birthday cake...

lostinhistory

fouroclockwren

YES OMG BRÜNNHILDE

official-library-posts

official library post

fairycosmos

my dead wife. the ad free internet

#ressucitating her with an army of adblocks #she came back wrong

whatapictureisworth-press

So it’s been awhile since I’ve bound anything, but when I read the Cursed Amulet Story by @sunderwight, I was like, I gotta make an actual, physical evil amulet now. Except the evil amulet is also going to be a book. And the book is like a diary by the guy trapped in the amulet.

pmamtraveller

The Pearl With The Girl Earring by Olaf Falafel

allthingswhumpyandangsty

I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.

littlepagodatree

You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.

allthingswhumpyandangsty

I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.

seananmcguire

As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.

ladycreep-deactivated20201127

talkshows-deactivated20150818

the anniversary of library paste man’s death is in four days.

basketghost

One hundred and ten years ago to the day. Amazing. Incredible.

1dietcokeinacan

RIP😔🙏📚🍯

#it's really amazing to see we havn't got dumber over the years #bookpaste looks kinda sus #yknow it's a white globby mass

mintaii

the magic she loves

tpwrtrmnky

Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

That is the problem.

tpwrtrmnky

Oh and the road infrastructure project is buying up resources other people could have used for literally anything else. With money they promise they'll be making from Wide Car sales any day now.

tpwrtrmnky

Okay so what I'm getting from the notes is that when you try to transplant some techbro nonsense into an offline equivalent, you have to be careful to avoid simply inventing something the Americans are already doing in real life