Why do I have this @mortified-muskrat - Tumblr Blog

Posts

birdys-crisis-corner

The Adventures of Dark Nation (a collected work)

you can check out the other comics here.

Birdy 🖤

cokoakeostuff

this drawing came to me in a dream (I was sroolling)

kou-sai

Pretty mid Concept art that i made for my Manga 👍

I tried to do something different, but tbh, i still need to studdy a lot more, but that's already pretty cool.

say0ranarts

for those who come after.

sadscruffy

kumaicecream

kata4a

in the same way that there are parts of american culture that I'm ashamed of despite not buying the idea that individual citizens should have to answer for their country's flaws, I find myself embarrassed by the fact that one of the if not the dominant mode of interaction on tumblr is a sort of aggrieved moral righteousness

followthebluebell

Made out of pipe cleaners by someone's who's only had cats described to them.

tanadrin

i am reasonably certain a smart person could explain to ben franklin (a smart person and something of a polymath) the fundamental principles behind the operation of a smartphone down to a pretty precise level of detail, without too much trouble, except stopping to walk him through mathematical formalism and defining terms. maybe the biggest problem you'd encounter is the notion of a band gap and how it makes a transistor work--that's where you really have to make a big leap into the conceptual world of quantum physics, and either you'd have to black-box it or spend a long time explaining no really this is our best model for very small scale physics and it has enormous predictive power. one area he might get sidetracked on is initially conceiving of a multipurpose device as, in principle, a sort of aggregate of many smaller miniaturized devices: a radio and a library and a music player and a calculator etc all separately packed into one small machine. and this isn't a stupid intuition--on some level this intuition for imagining future technology persists in science fiction at least as late as the original Star Trek!--but it's also one that's easy to correct. i feel like ben franklin could understand the concept of general-purpose computation and symbolic manipulation: the popularization of this framework as a general approach to mathematics postdates him, but not by a lot.

the biggest hurdle honestly is probably just that at a certain point the rate of a device results in qualitatively different capabilities as you ascend the power-law curve. babbage could envision a general purpose computation device in the early 19th century, and the biggest conceptual leap from that to a cell phone is orders-of-magnitude improvement, but this gets you from "a way to speed up tedious by-hand computations for mathematics" to "a complete modern information-technology ecology," which is qualitatively fundamentally different. there are people who do grasp the Implications of that sort of thing intuitively (ray kurzweil predicting AI in the 2020s just based on increasing computational power) but there are a lot of smart people who have trouble with that sort of thing. and then of course "at a certain point of computing sophistication you can use statistical methods to train a machine on the whole corpus of human language and get a computer program that has enormous general-purpose capacities starting from nothing but blobs of random numbers" is also deeply counterintuitive. i still have trouble with it!

but i wonder how far back you can go and still find somebody smart you could Explain The Smartphone To. you would have to explain a lot more about the basic operation of electricity and magnetism to newton, hooke, and huygens; but they seem like they'd get there pretty quick. certainly newton would. and you don't have to delve into relativity here or anything that's really going to cause a philosophical headache: newton might be quite relieved that you can point to specific physical waves as your medium for electromagnetism, especially if you mention as an aside that that model works for gravity, too. i guess if you go back too far and you lose symbolic algebra--and concepts like "the square of the distance" become principally about geometry, and not a free-moving mathematical abstraction, you lose a major conceptual tool for the formalisms. and once you hit the 15th century you might lose inertia, momentum, and the idea that terrestrial and celestial matter all obey the same rules.

but where do you lose the idea of an ordered, mathematical universe in general, the idea that abstraction and empiricism, and the formulation of quantifiable natural laws (and not of natures and ends) is how you understand physics? is that a 17th century/enlightenment thing? are there individuals before that transition who would still get it, or how complete and limiting was that sort of Artistotlean worldview? this i don't know enough about the history of science to say.

eightyonekilograms

Me: “And through these luminiferous aether waves I can obtain a boundless quantity of erotic images from the Orient.”

Ben Franklin: “Do continue.”

artbyblastweave

Playing through Bloodmoon. I find it really funny that the Viking frat house’s response to their missing-stair sex pest lout member is to breathe a sigh of relief when he finally takes a (really annoying) hostage because it means they can just step back when the inevitable crusading hero shows up and let them kill his ass. Yeah they swore some kind of fuckass fraternal oath that stops us from doing anything about this but there’s no rule against the big man on campus furtively casting his gaze towards the closet where he has her tied up while strategically emphasizing certain syllables of his denial of knowledge

artbyblastweave

There’s a post that periodically does the rounds about transcribing standard d&d dungeon crawling tropes into American suburbia (in a largely condemnatory way, which ends up being the coolest thing ever despite their best efforts) and this is a prime example of something that would be incredibly funny to translate similarly. Picture a pi kappa whatever-the-fuck with an evil frat boy so incredibly physically powerful that the lesser frat boys are at the mercy of wandering gigshare vigilantes to end his reign of terror

tsarina-anadyomene

Too much alienation is a problem. But I think complete non-alienation would be a form of democratic totalitarianism—the kind which Berlin and Mill (rightly) fear. A little alienation is good. The issue is that utopias are always being imagined by people whose main hobby is politics and the result is something I can only regard as a vision of hell in which we are all touchy-feely and in some nebulous form of "community" with each other. Everyone's whole life becomes public. And the arguments in favor of privacy are always rather instrumental and it's fine to have such arguments. But I think they miss that what makes privacy so nice is that it's privacy! I want time and space all to myself. Anyone who's breathed a quiet sigh of relief when everyone else has left their house knows this. Increasingly everything is for everyone.

markovchaingang

that performative male shit was ridiculous. "oh but what do i do if my boyfriend's just acting a bit gay for clout" okay well first off what you need to do is pick a god and thank them profusely