she loves iron man, that's why

The title is how my boss once explained my actions to a co-worker. No, seriously.

[thecrumbez]

Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).

I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.

[erratic-dragon-fruit]

out of the tags with you

[trufflesmushroom]

patricia lockwood has officially completed 6 years of her full 1000 year sentence

[trufflesmushroom]

patricia lockwood has officially completed 7 years of her full 1000 year sentence

[warmhappycat]

When will she be up for parole?

[chaosthedemon]

Should Patricia Lockwood be granted parole

yes

no

Voting ended onMar 27

[trufflesmushroom]

why would any judge of any court grant her parole.

she literally kick miette.

she kick her body like the football.

[absurdlyinaccurate]

me, the motherfucker with over 50 abandoned works in progress: i have an idea

[heartcollectioncupcake]

[a-s-fischer]

If you want a good object lesson about what we can and can't know about the past, we don't know Ea-Nasir was a dishonest merchant selling shoddy goods.

What we know is we have found a cache of complaint tablets about him selling low quality copper as high quality, in a site that was probably his own residence. We know multiple people complained he was a cheat. It's entirely possible they were right. It's also entirely possible that he kept these complaint letters as records of people he would no longer do business with, because they had made accusations and threats in order to bully him into giving them free copper. That is an equally valid interpretation of the evidence.

My point is not that we have maligned Ea-Nasir, my point is that thousands of years later, we do not and cannot know.

[kindigo]

Actually he wrote all the complaints himself with various sock puppet accounts to drum up sympathy subscribers to his Claytreon

[earhartsease]

it's all a huge misunderstanding, it's nothing to do with actual copper it's about him having a policeman fetish and our theory will be finally vindicated once someone unearths the missing tablet where he wrote "so sue me, I do like a man in cuneiform"

[elodieunderglass]

He wasn’t picky about them either - I heard he was into low-quality coppers

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[laerugo]

#tapping the reblog button with utmost care because i’m handling a historical artifact (via @malarkiness)

[mortimermcmirestinks]

holy shit OP is not only still active but is still making absolutely banger posts in this exact style 11 years later

[rue-nightly]

A 2025 update

[modern-politics111]

[scotty-wolf-lover1968]

important and encouraging

[pcamtschatica]

Found a great (free) documentary on the Freedom House Ambulance Service here- https://www.wqed.org/freedomhouse/ (has captions too)!

[hoodiedeer]

I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve heard about this. like for years I’ve been thinking “imagine if the police were in charge of ambulances and firefighting, all the horrible problems that would cause, wouldn’t it be better if they were a separate thing, etc” as a way to better understand/explain the fundamental problems with the existence of police. that framing was part of what made me start to understand why my friends were saying “ACAB” and “abolish the police”. I had no idea it was literally once historically like that and not just a hypothetical tbh

[ardentdelirium]

Interview with one of the original members of Freedom House Ambulance

[scriptmedic]

This is cool as shit, and a part of my own career’s history that I didn’t even know about.

[cincoflex]

It’s Black History Month; this NEEDS to be reblogged.

[frociaggina97]

"i don't care if they make their whole way though uni with chatgpt" i think you guys are so internetpilled that you have forgotten there are actual jobs out there that require people to know what they are doing in any way possible or else people die

[frociaggina97]

i know a lot of people study just to get paid well but girl this is engineering be for fucking real take this seriously

[ironborealis]

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

So if you're going to blindly trust the AI to do critical work tasks, I hope you're prepared to be making an apology tour for the rest of your life if it all goes wrong.

[legendof]

[starpains]

on “the blond,” “the older man,” and other crimes against third-person limited

You know that thing where a story is written in tight third person limited — we’re meant to be inside someone’s head, seeing the world through their thoughts — and then suddenly the narration says “the blond frowned” or “the shorter woman sighed” about a person the POV character knows really well?

That’s called antonomasia — using a descriptive label instead of a name. And it’s fine when we’re talking about strangers: “the cashier handed her the receipt,” “the tall guy blocked the door.” The POV character doesn’t know their names, and we just need a quick way to tell people apart.

But the moment it’s used for someone the POV character already knows, it breaks immersion. Because that’s not how our minds work. We don’t think “the older man smiled at me.” We think “Mark smiled.” Or maybe “my boss” if that relationship matters in the moment.

Third person limited means the narration sits inside someone’s perception. Their inner monologue is the story’s voice. So when you switch from “Mark smiled” to “the blond smiled,” you’ve pulled the camera away from their mind and turned it into an outside shot.

If you want to create distance or irritation, you can do it on purpose —

“The idiot from accounting emailed again.”

That’s character voice. That’s judgment. That works.

But otherwise?

As soon as your POV character knows someone’s name, use it. While we do tend to worry about repetitions, names rarely register as such to the readers.

If you need variety for rhythm, use relational or emotional identifiers that make sense in their head: her friend, his partner, their teacher, the person they loved.

Because inside someone’s thoughts, there are no “blonds” or “brunettes.”

There are only people they know.

[wisteria-lodge]

Really good explanation of the fundamental problem with this type of writing.

(and why it's one of my huge pet peeves)

[eastgaysian]

i must not get mad online. getting mad online is the mind-killer. getting mad online is the little-death that brings total obliteration. i will face my urge to get mad online. i will permit it to pass over me and through me. and when it has gone past, i will turn the inner eye to see its path. where the getting mad online has gone there will be nothing. only i will remain

[elalmadelmar]

I gotta say, so much queer intra-community horseshit dropped off my shoulders when I decided to adopt a firm policy that everyone is the expert in their own identity, the single most knowledgeable person about what it's like to live life in their own skin, and that if someone describes their experience in ways I find contradictory or paradoxical I should do them the courtesy of presuming that they are striving to express something very specific and nuanced, rather than leaping to the conclusion that they're just dumb and using words wrong.

Sure, there are some combinations of identity terms that I look at and go "hmm, I don't get how that works." I'm still a human being. But there's a big difference between not getting how something works versus insisting that it doesn't.

[kagedtiger]

There's a big difference between not getting how something works versus insisting it doesn't

[dependsoncontext]

[awed-frog]

thanks I hate it

[siderealsandman]

You Got a Friend In Horse 

[garrettauthor]

YOU DO NOT HAVE A FRIEND IN HORSE

[britcision]

You Got A Lotta Friends In Horse

[ailithnight]

CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH THAT THOSE ARE NOT FRIENDS IN HORSE

[redstonedust]

put rainbow laces on all my shoes recently which is fun and sexy but has the side effect that i have gotten multiple "i like your shoelaces" from strangers and like. i cant NOT "i stole them from the president" in return. just in case. but its recieved mostly awkward laughs and looks of confusion. embarrasing myself in public out here over my damn shoelaces.

[redstonedust]

[beggars-opera]

I'd still trust you with my life doctor tbh

[scrollingdown]

[ekjohnston]

...this is my new favourite chart

[beardedmrbean]

Not entirely sure what to do with this information

[ryebreadgf]

[thesefallenembers]

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

OKAY HOLD UP I KNOW THIS IS A SHITPOST BUT I HAVE A DEGREE IN THIS

Okay, so when we talk about the meaning of words, we are talking about denotation, the dictionary definition of the word, and connotation, the context in which native speakers associate with the word. Connotation is why just looking up synonyms of words doesn't always work.

When teaching this to ESL learners, my favorite example is the word "accumulate." Accumulate means to gather or collect in the dictionary definition of the words. The error in the example is for someone to say "I accumulate things" instead of "I collect things." This sounds wrong, because despite the denotation of the word, the most common connotation of accumulate is that a process done over time and without intent. Water accumulates. Dust accumulates. Money accumulates. But a person cannot say they accumulate things, because that is not a natural usage of the word.

However! As a writer who likes to learn new words, you can now use this knowledge to your advantage. Consider the following sentences:

Bob collected unread books until they piled high around his bed.

Versus

Books accumulated around Bob's bed, turning it into a fortress of unread words.

Both sentences are telling us the same thing - but the latter gives us a bit more insight on Bob, in that he's not intentionally obtaining so many books and not reading them, and that's a far more interesting thing to learn. The more you learn these words in context, the more you can use them to enrich your own writing. Embrace the thesaurus - but pay attention to those example sentences and how those words are actually used!