my head is a museum

art, bodies and the city

[dracofidus-deactivated20200523]

DO NOT QUESTION MY COLLECTION OF JANE AUSTEN SNAKE PHOTOS

A MAN IS ALLOWED TO HAVE A HOBBY

[dracofidus-deactivated20200523]

okay, so, here is my Pride and Prejudice collection:

Elizabeth Bennet:

Jane Bennet:

Lydia Bennet:

Mr Darcy:

Mr Bingley:

Mr Collins:

George Wickham:

Lady Catherine de Bourgh:

Please don’t judge me

[shiisiln]

Why would I JUDGE you this is FANTASTIC

[oliviacirce]

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she Did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, Sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used— She stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and Would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and Found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering Questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag— And was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers— Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands— Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped —has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.” I think this poem may be making the rounds, this week, but that’s as it should be.  (via oliviacirce)

[oliviacirce]

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she Did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, Sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used— She stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and Would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and Found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering Questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag— And was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers— Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands— Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped —has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.” I think this poem may be making the rounds, this week, but that’s as it should be.  (via oliviacirce)

[myheadisamuseum]

Capturing dreams

How cool would it be if you could take screenshots of your dreams to show other people how weird they are?

[myheadisamuseum]

Dream journal - Tiger Village

Because I tend to have crazy dreams that don’t make much sense to me (although sometimes there is an element I recognize from the day/week before IRL), I decided to keep a dream journal.

Last night, I dreamed that I was in a special place called ‘Tiger Village’. It was an ancient village with wooden houses and someone had shown me an old photo of it, which zoomed in on an orange speck between two houses, supposedly a tiger. I didn’t believe them, so I decided to go see for myself. When I arrived, I climbed up a nearby mountain to get a good view of the village, and from up there it looked more like a labyrinth. But indeed, between the abandonded buildings, you could clearly see not only Bengal tigers, but also leopards, snow tigers, etc. It seemed they had gathered here from all over the world to just sit, chill and play. I was staying in a cabin on the mountain side, and I recognized a girl from my old university. We started talking and she told me that in order to leave the cabin, you could not go back the same way, but had to walk through the Tiger Village. So we started observing people going back through the labyrinth, in order to figure out the best strategy to leave. I definitely didn’t want to stay there for the rest of my life. At one point, a young Lynx cub accidentally came into the cabin, which was supercute, because it started to run around and play. What was scarier, though, was that it’s mom had followed the cub and also came in. I tried to make a cute video to show my friends later, but despite trying a billion times, could not get them in front of the camera, so I gave up. At the end, only my college mate and me were left in the cabin. She decided to stay for a little longer, because she was dead scared of going into the labyrinth. Cue one of those dramatic scenes from the movies, where they know they won’t see eachother ever again. “Are you sure you’ll be alright here by yourself?” I asked, and she replied “Someone has to tell the next travellers that the only way out is through the Village. I’ll stay.“ I, on the other hand, thought I had seen enough and found a strategy to make it out alive.

That’s when I woke up..

(P.S. I’m superallergic to cats and for that reason do not enjoy being around them at all.. Does that make it a nightmare instead of a dream?)

[prostheticknowledge]

Image-To-Image Demo

Set of interactive browser-based machine learning experiments put together by Christopher Hesse turns doodles into images with various neural network trained image data. For example, in ‘edges2cats’, your simple doodle will be recreated with image data from a dataset of cat pictures:

Recently, I made a Tensorflow port of pix2pix by Isola et al., covered in the article Image-to-Image Translation in Tensorflow. I’ve taken a few pre-trained models and made an interactive web thing for trying them out. Chrome is recommended.The pix2pix model works by training on pairs of images such as building facade labels to building facades, and then attempts to generate the corresponding output image from any input image you give it. The idea is straight from the pix2pix paper, which is a good read. …

[On edges2cats:] Trained on about 2k stock cat photos and edges automatically generated from those photos. Generates cat-colored objects, some with nightmare faces. The best one I’ve seen yet was a cat-beholder.Some of the pictures look especially creepy, I think because it’s easier to notice when an animal looks wrong, especially around the eyes. The auto-detected edges are not very good and in many cases didn’t detect the cat’s eyes, making it a bit worse for training the image translation model. 

You can also try doodles in datasets comprising of shoes, handbags, and building facades.

You can play around with the neural doodle experiments here

[stfuprolifers]

The UN Sent 3 Foreign Women To The U.S. To Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified.

The human rights experts concluded that the country falls far behind most others.

The United States continues to embarrass.

The delegates were appalled by the lack of gender equality in America. They found the U.S. to be lagging far behind international human rights standards in a number of areas, including its 23 percent gender pay gap, maternity leave, affordable child care and the treatment of female migrants in detention centers.

The most telling moment of the trip, the women told reporters on Friday, was when they visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced the hostile political climate around women’s reproductive rights.

“We were harassed. There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,” said Frances Raday, the delegate from the U.K. The men repeatedly shouted, “You’re murdering children!” at them as soon as they neared the clinic, even though Raday said they are clearly past childbearing age.

“It’s a kind of terrorism,” added Eleonora Zielinska, the delegate from Poland. “To us, it was shocking.”

In most European countries, she explained, abortions are performed at general doctors’ offices and hospitals that offer all kinds of other health services, so there aren’t protesters waiting to heckle the women who enter.

The women discovered during their visit that women in the United States have “missing rights” compared to the rest of the world. For instance, the U.S. is one of three countries in the world that does not guarantee women paid maternity leave. The U.N. suggests that countries guarantee at least 14 weeks of paid parental leave. Some countries go further – Iceland requires five months paid leave for each parent, and an additional two months to be shared between them.

“The lack of accommodation in the workplace to women’s pregnancy, birth and post-natal needs is shocking,” Raday said. “Unthinkable in any society, and certainly one of the richest societies in the world.”

Another main area of concern for the delegation is violence against women – particularly gun violence. Women are 11 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than in other high-income countries, and most of those murdersare perpetrated by an intimate partner. While the Obama administration has talked a lot about combatting violence against women, its efforts have been frustrated by Congress’ inability to pass new federal gun restrictions.

[upslapmeal]

While the delegates were shocked by many things they saw in the U.S., perhaps the biggest surprise of their trip, they said, was learning that women in the country don’t seem to know what they’re missing. “So many people really believe that U.S. women are way better off with respect to rights than any woman in the world,” Raday said. “They would say, ‘Prove it! What do you mean other people have paid maternity leave?’”

[savvymavvy]

The US is so far behind in women’s rights, people don’t even believe that other countries allow Paid. Maternity. Leave. Good lord.

[daloy-politsey-deactivated20171]

But “feminism isn’t needed in the first world!”

[sashayed]

oh my god? oh my god? oh my god? oh my god?? oh m

[crowarmy]

[wit-witch]

PATRIARCHY IS ABOUT MALE CONTROL OVER FEMALE BODIES.

[carohoku]

Yay my saga of having to be stuck in airport from 10am until another flight at 1pm thanks to ableism.

[outrageauxbonnesmoeurs]

Vintage women being badass. You’re welcome.

[love-as-thou-wilt]

Don’t fool yourself into thinking ladies were demure and silent in the past. 

[just-grasping-at-straws-deactiv]

I would like more female characters being this open

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

“where do you see yourself in five years”

slightly dehydrated, eating refried beans out of a can in an abandoned old metal trailer in the desert. My look can be described as “grungey power ranger shounen.” With me are four other people with similar aesthetics, dipping their feet in a duct-taped wading pool and sharing a cooler of popsicles. Against a cinder-block fire-pit that may or may not shelter multiple rattlesnakes leans a bright yellow vespa that may or may not be able to hover, and a goat is chewing on what’s left of a potted plant just outside the trailer’s front door. On an old radio with antenna longer than I am tall, tuned into an un-locatable radio station, my chemical romance crackles in and out. The government thinks I’m dead and my student loans are void. Things are good.

[spiritscraft-deactivated2025031]

The ending really floored me.

[copperbooms]

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

[rodimuss]

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

[prismatic-bell]

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

[sussexbound]

i love this post

[tom-at-the-farm]

“Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry” [x]

[marauders4evr]

What the HELL did they do to the White House website?

Okay we’re going through this bit by bit.

First of all, this is the first thing that pops up when you visit the website:

But wait, it gets worse.

Once you get in, you see that Trump’s inauguration takes up the entire main page. You know what? I’m fine with that. I mean it makes sense.

What I’m not fine with is this:

As of yesterday (I’m on the Wayback Machine), these are the issues that the Obama Administration listed, leading to pages which went into detail about these issues and what the Administration was doing about them.

Again, that’s from the Obama Administration.

This is the current Issues Tab under the Trump Administration:

No, I haven’t cropped it. That’s it. That’s the entire list. All of those are the issues that Trump’s Administration cares about.

The civil rights page? Gone. Climate change page? Gone. Health care page? Gone. Disabilities page? Gone. It’s all gone. Everything is gone.

They also completely took away all of the pages on Obama’s initiatives, all of the pages on internships and involvement in the White house, all of the pages on different ways to protest (other than the We The People petitions), and for some reason, they even took out most of the pages in the history section. The famous virtual tour? Gone. A detailed history about the architecture, the decor, even theee customs and traditions? Gone.

 But here’s the best part.

Most of the ‘Briefing’ section has been cleaned out as well and the tab for weekly addresses has been completely removed.

Well isn’t that just…disturbing?

[drelltheunclean-blog]

It’s worth noting that this happens every presidency, the Obama administration’s whitehouse.gov will be archived and none of this was taken down by Clownstick himself. Not that it makes me feel ANY better about the next four years, but for once it’s not on DOFUS

[marauders4evr]

So just for you, I spent the past half hour tediously searching through the Wayback Machine.

This was the page Obama had right after he took office after Bush:

Notice how, even though the website changed overnight, he still put in a huge list of issues including virtually every one listed on the website yesterday?

But wait, there’s more.

I went back and looked at how Bush’s page looked before the Obama Administration changed it. And guess what? Bush had an entire list of issues that resembled the ones listed on the website yesterday.

But wait!

There’s more!

Back when the Internet was new and the webpage was just a bunch of text, Clinton had an entire list of issues like the ones listed on the website yesterday.

So, no, this isn’t something that always happens. The website changes but the issues have always stayed the same and they’ve always been prominently displayed.

Until now.

[cosmicmoves-deactivated20170412]

People are acting like his team has not had literally the entire transition period to get his webpage together. They didn’t get this as a last-second assignment before the inauguration. There is absolutely no excuse for this. It’s either a complete and total disregard for these issues, or it’s a complete and utter failure to prepare. Both of those are unacceptable.

[baronessvondengler]

I love posts like this with the full receipts…

[loveniaimani]

[legallynonbinary]

The LGBT+ page and the HIV page are gone too.

[prostheticknowledge]

Give your kids futuristic names with a neural network!

Medium post from Nate Parrott uses neural networks to generate new first names of the future:

We live in the future. Computers drive cars, fight parking tickets and raise children. Why not let machines name our children, too? What if a computer program could find the ideal baby name. Maybe it’s a perfect combination of both parents’ names—or maybe it’s a name that’s completely unique.

I trained a neural network on a list of 7500 popular American baby names, forcing it to turn each name into a mathematical representation called an embedding. Once I had a model that could translate between names and their embeddings, I could generate new names, blend existing names together, do arithmetic on names, and more.

More Here

[theslaybymic]

Why Are Girls So Often The Most Celebrated Witnesses To War?

Tweeting from amid the chaos and destruction of eastern Aleppo, Bana al-Abed shared scenes of unimaginable violence interspersed with snippets of normal girlhood ― losing her baby teeth, tying her hair up with pink bows, reading picture books. She became a symbol of her nation’s conflict.

[creeping-nerd-napping-bunnies]

“Perhaps there should be a permanent moratorium on yet another girl being referred to as the Anne Frank of this hellhole or that,” she wrote. “Young women under threat are not interchangeable. To treat them as such is degrading, not just to Anne Frank, but also to the other young writers with their own incomparable stories to tell.”

- Francine Prose

[gdfalksen]

Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

Why can’t we have a movie about him?

[elasmata]

He was often called “Sempo”, an alternative reading of the characters of his first name, as that was easier for Westerners to pronounce.

His wife, Yukiko, was also a part of this; she is often credited with suggesting the plan. The Sugihara family was held in a Soviet POW camp for 18 months until the end of the war; within a year of returning home, Sugihara was asked to resign - officially due to downsizing, but most likely because the government disagreed with his actions.

He didn’t simply grant visas - he granted visas against direct orders, after attempting three times to receive permission from the Japanese Foreign Ministry and being turned down each time. He did not “misread” orders; he was in direct violation of them, with the encouragement and support of his wife.

He was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, a year before he died in Kamakura; he and his descendants have also been granted permanent Israeli citizenship. He was also posthumously awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania (1993); Commander’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1996); and the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2007). Though not canonized, some Eastern Orthodox Christians recognize him as a saint.

Sugihara was born in Gifu on the first day of 1900, January 1. He achieved top marks in his schooling; his father wanted him to become a physician, but Sugihara wished to pursue learning English. He deliberately failed the exam by writing only his name and then entered Waseda, where he majored in English. He joined the Foreign Ministry after graduation and worked in the Manchurian Foreign Office in Harbin (where he learned Russian and German; he also converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church during this time). He resigned his post in protest over how the Japanese government treated the local Chinese citizens. He eventually married Yukiko Kikuchi, who would suggest and encourage his acts in Lithuania; they had four sons together. Chiune Sugihara passed away July 31, 1986, at the age of 86. Until her own passing in 2008, Yukiko continued as an ambassador of his legacy.

It is estimated that the Sugiharas saved between 6,000-10,000 Lithuanian and Polish Jewish people.

[returnofthejudai]

It’s a tragedy that the Sugiharas aren’t household names. They are among the greatest heroes of WWII. Is it because they were from an Axis Power? Is it because they aren’t European? I don’t know. But I’ve decided to always reblog them when they come across my dash. If I had the money, I would finance a movie about them.

[westsemiteblues]

He told an interviewer:

You want to know about my motivation, don’t you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. Some Japanese military leaders were just scared because of the pressure from the Nazis; while other officials in the Home Ministry were simply ambivalent.

People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people’s lives….The spirit of humanity, philanthropy…neighborly friendship…with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation—and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.

He died in nearly complete obscurity in Japan. His neighbors were shocked when people from all over, including Israeli diplomatic personnel, showed up at quiet little Mr. Sugihara’s funeral.

[fahrlight]

I will forever reblog this, I wish more people would know about them!

[rhube]

I liked this before when it had way less information. Thank you, history-sharers.

[mousezilla]

Tucked away in a corner in L.A.’s Little Tokyo is a life-sized statue of Chiune, seated on a bench and smiling gently as he holds out a visa. 

The stone next to him bears a quote from the Talmud; “He who saves one life, saves the entire world.”  

I had no idea it existed until a few weeks ago, but it’s since become one of my favorite pieces of public art. 

[brainflossandmindfrills]

@evokerhythm @heytherehydrangea