BIRDMAN EXTRAORDINAIRE

latest FFXIV version spoilers / birds are very good

[aemperatrix]

      vintage Milliat Fleurs postcards

[spark-my-camera]

[yoshitaka-koga]

アカハラ

[phantomrose96]

When you meet Edward Elric he gives off the impression that he's the short-tempered hot-headed "violence is the answer to all life's questions" kind of protagonist, and it's in fact incredible character craft that he's actually the character who ends the series with a negative-3 kill count.

[phantomrose96]

people killed: 0

direct orders of "you really really need to kill this guy" ignored: 1

ongoing murders being committed by Ed's own friends/colleagues that Ed got in the way of to specifically stop that murder from happening: 2

[phantomrose96]

God's worst soldier Edward Elric. Showed up as the youngest member of the Amestrian army, took millions of dollars from them, never followed a single order, helped dismantle their fascist regime, left with a lower kill count than he arrived with, then fucked off to go be a house-husband. Character of all time.

[aka-blaa]

You know, when you said "negative-3 kill count," I, who haven't seen the anime, thought, "He resurrected 3 people?????" But I'm seeing here on the wiki that apparently resurrection in this anime is a terrible idea.

[phantomrose96]

Official addition to this post.

[zxid]

collection

[fishlung8877]

[chippedfang]

relax....its shrimp time...

[samspicturesandwords]

[brynalyn]

[flannelfishguy]

The new shrimp tank is done, and the shrimp have moved in!!

I put that tank together with just the leftover hardscape and plants from my other tanks! Almost all of it was leftover from the 20 gallon long tank. The only things I bought specifically for that tank were the filter, sand, and some moss. I’m proud of how well it turned out!!

Oh and I got some cool pics of my shrimp too :)

[tytonidyke]

Shrimp update: extremely eggnant!!

[fishstims]

shrimp.archives on instagram

[samspicturesandwords]

Let's scrape biofilm with mama!

[chippedfang]

its my birthday today, so you must look at my shrimps.

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[optionalcausality]

My fear is the combo of "I am clicking on a button to tell me a made-up answer instead of spending any amount of time and effort to look this up" and "The output is Mostly Fine so let's just put what it says without making corrections/edits".

Because they do go together. Once someone has adopted the attitude of "it's Mostly Fine", especially if they're doing this for time-saving purposes, then they stop reading it to check if it actually matches the assignment.

I expect that in about fifty years, there's going to be a human-curated list of the publications from this time period that must be corroborated by a second source because the information therein was partly generated by the bullshit machine whose output cannot be trusted.

[all-pacas]

do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny

[all-pacas]

in the late 90s there was an anime called initial d which was all about street racing and drifting. naturally every single drift was played for great drama and excitement.

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

[wigmund]

There's another level of the madness that is the Gimli Glider saga.

Unbeknownst to the pilots and the air traffic controller, the decommissioned air base they were going to land at had been converted into a race track complex - Gimili Motorsports Park.

There was a sanctioned sports-car race taking place on what had been the runway along with sizeable crowds. The same runway that Air Canada 143 needed to land on. So it ties back into Initial D again.

[miracoll]

[starshipgenius]

They Throw These at me Because I am so Beautiful and a Star.

[ryebreadgf]

once I snorted a fat line of nuance and everything started depending. watch out