To being an "us", for once

food porn, social justice, various squishy fandoms, and whatever else catches my fancy today. My tag cloud.

[freakytikigifs]

Ryan Gosling and James Ortiz as Ryland Grace and Rocky PROJECT HAIL MARY

[hgedits]

You are the bravest human I have ever met.

[synchodai]

Convenience isn't bad because of some inherent value in toil or it rots your soul. Convenience is bad because it often comes at the cost of an exploited underclass. I don't care if someone wants to taxi their meal to their house instead of making it themselves or even driving to the restaurant themselves. I care that meal delivery apps underpay their workers (they don't even consider them their workers), provide no workplace protections, and prey on their desperation.

The desire for convenience is a morally neutral thing (no matter how many capitalists want their workers to see unproductivity or aversion to the "grind" as a moral failing). Companies that sell you only convenience by making it worse for yourself and for others are not.

[allosaurusfragilis]

This probably isn't going to change people's minds, but sometimes it is easier to evoke sympathy for dogs than it is to evoke sympathy for trans folks.

Giving money to J.K.Rowling is the same as giving money to eradicate transgender people. I'm sorry, but it's true. Equivocate all you like, but it's as true as the day is long.

[lonestarflight]

Apollo 17 vs Artemis II

[mementochao]

Despite everything, it's still you.

-------------------------------------------------

Also prev tags:

That's really cool actually

[tanoraqui]

#excuse me but are you telling me that the Apollo pic is made with the help of the SUN and the Artemis one with the help of the MOON??? #that's actually so poetic i want to cry

@gorandomshesaid wait i need to sit with this one. wait.

[victoria-pedretti]

PROJECT HAIL MARY 2026 — dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

[toastyglow]

"everyone is paying super close attention to everyone else all the time" actualy statistical error. hypervigilance georg, who enters fight or flight when someone starts breathing differently, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[bakurapika]

#this one's for the people who hear 'people aren't paying that close attention to you! I mean do YOU pay that close of attention to them?'#and go: unfortunately yeah!!!!!!!#you are georg hope this helps. love u#hang in there one day u will be able to pay less attention all the time

[me-is-me]

My dad sent me this…

I’m not crying… no. Yeah. I am crying.

[tvdoctors]

THE PITT 2.14 • 8:00 P.M.

[penelopepennington]

Really cool context incoming: another reason that heart attacks in women were missed more often is that global hit tv drama ER was not able to show naked breasts on TV for much of its run, meaning male heart attacks were shown more frequently because they could more easily film defib scenes. This meant that female presentations of heart attack (nausea, back/jaw pain etc) were under-represented, and women were generally less aware of what symptoms to look out for.

When ER did show exposed breasts during a resuscitation scene (in 2004!) it was incredibly controversial (this wasn't long after the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident). NBC even blurred the actor's nipples.

The fact that Noah Wyle wrote this episode kinda goes to show how this conversation has been a long time coming and I'm really pleased he made such a big deal out of it!

[voyaging-too]

I don't want to be overly dramatic and overly negative about the AI translations I've been working with. They are bad, yes, but I don't want to overstate their badness because that would obscure the specific points I'm making. Some AI translations, the best AI translations, are not that bad. Some of them are still bad to the point of being unusable, but others are better. They're not good, but they're mostly serviceable, and it's extremely impressive that a machine can come up with something serviceable, something comparable to the work of a very mediocre human translator.

A client who hires a subpar translator who accepts being underpaid, in order to avoid paying professional rates for a professional, is getting subpar work. A client who uses AI to get work cheap and fast is getting worse than subpar work. But AI is getting better, it might soon be at the point where laymen can't tell the difference, and then, using AI instead of paying a human will mostly be a labour rights issue, and that's a far thornier question. (Note that I'm not talking about using AI translators to read something for yourself, or to communicate in your daily life: I'm talking about AI translation for publication, using AI for something you expect other people to pay money for.)

My actual point about AI translation is that even when it's fairly good, when it makes few errors and conveys the message intelligibly, it lacks something. I'm not talking about heart and soul here, nothing to do with some intangible human quality: I'm talking about specificity. AI works with great averages, and so it automatically irons out nuance. If you write something unusual, AI will assume it's an error, instead of an intentionally unusual statement. This is regression to the mean, and based on the texts I'm working with, it's an Anglophone, American mean. If you say something that's true of 1980s Hungary, it might slightly alter the sentence to "make sense" for 1980s US. Some alterations are factual, these are more serious errors but also easier to edit out. But other things are harder to catch, slight shifts in tone and valence, an erasure of the original, specific, non-American perspective, and the end result is a text that doesn't have anything wrong with it, but is markedly simpler and dumber than it should be. And flattening complex, knotty, peripheral perspectives into something closer to a monoculture is, in the long term, intellectually devastating.

[a-k1tty]

A while ago, I was proofreading AI translations of subtitles. The video was an interview with a couple of game devs talking about their game. “The game” was frequently mentioned. And then, all of a sudden, the translation talked about football. I did a double take. Where had that come from?

The original sentence went somewhere along the lines of “from the veterans who have been with us for a long time to young people only just getting into the game” and the AI translation assumed that there was only one game young people could be getting into. It had to be football. So that’s what it put in.

That moment really clarified for me this regression to a cultural mean described above. Only one thing made cultural sense, right? Too bad the actual video was about something entirely different.

[voyaging-too]

Yes that's such a great example of what I was talking about! And this one is obvious enough and weird enough that you could catch it in proofreading, but if the mistake is subtler (or if there's no proofreading, and let's face it there usually isn't), someday soon we'll end up in a world where everyone likes football and drinks beer and does, says, thinks, believes only the most statistically average things to do, say, think and believe.

[a-purely-objective-frog]

Disregard everything I said earlier about Eridians making Grace some Earth plants so he doesn't get sad - new idea!

One of his students finds out about the "human no see plant get sad" phenomenon and gets the class together to make him lil plants for his bubble so he doesn't become sad.

They're children, so the plants are not even vaguely plant shaped. They're mostly just rocks that have been painted with something they're are pretty sure is "green."

Anyway he loves them so much he starts leaking everywhere and puts them in special places all over his bubble. He's incredibly protective of his lil "plants" and is completely devastated when they get confiscated for being accidentally suuuuuper poisonous to humans. So the Eridian scientists make green paint that won't accidentally kill him and his students redo them.

And once it ends up in the news, he starts getting "plants" from kids all over the world. He's like Santa receiving letters if those letters were all incredibly heavy attempts at alien plantlife by blind children. He couldn't be happier.

[samirasystole]

like lots of smart people have pointed out, we are not being taken into robby's emotional state this time. no bathroom visits, no flashbacks or stunted breathing in the hallways. and while there are interesting converstations flowing around about how we treat mentally ill folks when we only see it from the outside. think about the reason they chose to do this.

it's pretty clear to me. season one, his emotional state was very much about him. he was having a very hard time, but was still overwhelmingly kind or at least tried to. he had his moments, has his thing where he doesn't hold people to similar standards etc etc. but it was very much about him and how he experiences the toll that this job and his life has taken on him. his feelings, his interiority, his reactions. this season however, we don't have that. and i think the main reason for that is simply because it's not all about him. behaviors don't exist in a vaccuum, the pitt is trying to show us how this affects others. especially when the person suffering has great authority and responsibility.

they did such a fantastic job of setting up his emotional state in season one that we kind of already know how he's doing, albeit he's doing worse this time around. we're just not being shown. but we see that things are worse by him talking to others, how he reflects his state onto them, how quickly he lashes out, and how that amplifies the(lack of) respect he shows to certain people. the pitt expects us to already know how bad he's doing, and expect us to also realise that mental health doesn't just affect him, it affects the people around him too. we are supposed to be mad, to feel sad for samira, and simultaneously know that he is in a terrible state. i think it's very much on purpose that we see that he is far past needing help, but that it's not just him suffering this time, it's them too. a crisis like that isn't exclusive to his inner worlds and they are letting us know that by refusing to even show his inner worlds in the first place

and while we have to confront our own view of how we see him, the camera doesn't have as much empathy for him this time, while in turn it's giving us a view of the people experiencing it. this is a drastic shift from season one. why? because the crisis has escalated beyond just himself. the people around him don't get to see his inner world, and neither do we.

he's their coworker and their boss. all they see is how he talks to them; which surely should concern them, but rightfully mostly makes them angry and annoyed. his flaws and biases are showing up more openly, and we don't get to say "oh but he just cried in the bathroom, be nice to him" because they don't get see him do that, we don't get to see him do that. and while the people around him aren't granted as much interiority to how they are necessarily feeling, the lack of his internal emotions on our screen tells us enough about where our focus should be. on the big picture of how a lack of healing shows up on the outside. how it bleeds through the cracks and breaks the system and it's people down more

the system doesn't grant people empathy. he hasn't gotten the help he needed since covid. neither has dana, neither has samira, neither have any of the people who work there. and because he has this authority, his behavior bleeds into theirs. they are in one big cycle of making each other worse while he's unknowingly greasing the heels. something that's not his fault, but reflects him being the product of this system for the last 30 years. he has responsibility, a lot which he isn't taking, but until something or someone intervenes and makes sure he gets that help, no one will get that help either. his character is a reflection of a system that hasn't been working for a very long time. and if it breaks or kills him, that’s all the testament we need to reaffirm that he is both a greasing the machine that is the US healthcare system, while also falling victim to it himself. when will the cycle break? the cracks are clearly visible and he’s the physical embodiment of that

[alicexz]

You know how Degas did studies of ballerinas? This is… kind of like that!

(On Twitter / Instagram ayyyyy) 

[sherdnerd]

The most accurate thing about Star Trek is starfleet captains' penchant for dramatic speeches about humanity and hope. Turns out astronauts are actually just like that.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[hardrockerhippie]

At first i was like: why the hell is this on tumblr?! And then it suddenly made sense...

[captainsblogsupplemental]

[obi-waankenobi]

#i like to think data took him all the way to the brig tossed him in and left#and then came back 60 seconds later and was like ‘i believe i have successfully played a ‘practical joke’ on you :)’#riker loses it & claps him on the back like ‘wow. good job u rly had me going. dont ever fucking do that again’ Perfect.

[ingridverse]

Actually it’s 73 seconds. Data, knowing something of how human minds work, estimates that Riker will give him 60 seconds to come back (because humans prefer “round numbers”, however arbitrary the units). After 60 seconds it will take 4 seconds for Riker to fully process the conclusion that Data is, in fact, not coming back after all, and an additional 9 seconds to build to the optimum level of anxiety. 

After all, comedy is timing.

[sniperct]

[approximate-ritual]

Has anyone Jewish explained to the The Pitt fandom why curling up in a corner and saying the Shema is such a loud act of utter desperation? Like, okay, the prayer is a declaration of faith, but do you know why Jewish people say it every night before bed and when they're in complete disaster scenarios?

It's supposed to be the last thing you say before you die.

Like, saying it at bedtime is kinda like Christians saying "now I lay me down to sleep", but you also see the grievously ill and those in natural disasters and people who are otherwise in truly hopeless situations reciting it. Not to beseech G-d to rescue them, no, but because you want your last words to affirm for yourself and all Jewish people that you believe in G-d and his oneness.

So seeing a doctor in the middle of a hell shift, that hell shift, curl up on the floor, rocking and saying it? That's powerful shit right there.