[runwayrunway]

I'm going to interrupt my normal posting schedule briefly to discuss naming airplanes. Don't worry, I'll post the regularly scheduled Friday review after this, but first I'm going to talk about naming airplanes.

When I say that I don't mean naming types of airplanes. I mean giving the airplanes names. A lot of airlines do it. Back in the day you had your Clipper This, Flagship That, Star of the Whatsit, so on. Lots of airlines name theirs after places. Aer Lingus names theirs after Irish saints. SAS names their Vikings. FedEx Express gives theirs human names, like Gabriel, Richard, JobEdokat, and Meredith.

The year is 2023 at time of writing. Clipper This, Flagship That, and Star of the Whatsit are now all relics of a distant past where a plane ticket cost more than some cars and airports sold life insurance at kiosks. That age is long past. Delta, United, American...all cowards, their airplanes long unnamed. Though the practice is alive and well elsewhere, for some reason it has largely gone dormant in the United States. There are few exceptions, but there are exceptions, and there is one in particular which stands out from the rest. Just one carrier on a mission and their 289 individually named flying machines.

I would like to present you with a curated selection of things which jetBlue has named their airplanes. There are many more - 289, to be specific. Take a look through them all if you care to. But this is a list of my favorites. Just a bit of appreciation for a true titan of aircraft-naming in an era where the art seems all but lost.

Roses Are Red, This Plane is Blue (N3104J)

Aruba, Jamaica, Blue I Wanna Take Ya (N2016J)

Blue's That Girl? (N997JL)

Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Bluetiful (N996JL)

Don't Mind If I Blue (N971JL)

Blue Kid On The Block (N913JB)

1. Fly JetBlue 2. Repeat Step 1 (N807JB)

Shantay, Blue Stay (N794JB)

#Follow @JetBlue (N334JB)

Enough about me...let's talk about blue (N712JB)

Big blue people seater (N705JB)

Bippity, Boppity, Blue (N565JB)

Blue-yah! (N187JB)

Badda Bing Badda Blue (N534JB)

FuhgeddaBlueDit (N3113J)

Boogie Woogie Bluegle Boy (N3062J)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue A320 (N329JB, an Embraer E190)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue E190 (N793JB, an Airbus A320)

And, my personal favorite:

How's My Flying? Call 1-800-JETBLUE (N715JB)

(Although if you can read that, you're probably too close. Incidentally, 'If You Can Read This, You're Blue Close' is an A320-200 with the registration N729JB.)

[hellothanksjellyfish]

Every single one of these is an OPI nail polish color

[teamrocketgender]

[newyorkcitywater]

emailing is a blood sport and i just won first kill

[newyorkcitywater]

emailing is a blood sport and i’m bleeding out actually

[pityboy]

affirmations for when you have to send emails

[aximili]

op i wish only the most wonderful things in your life.

[transgirlcelestialudenberg]

The right mad lad actually did it, what a hero.

Josh Thompson hired clown – who reportedly mimed crying as the paperwork was handed over – as emotional support aide

[pterofied]

Looks like my dads been at the gardening again

[pterofied]

Just chillin

[slow-riot-deactivated20200720]

[slow-riot-deactivated20200720]

This is the best joke I have ever made.

[pterofied]

Looks like my dads been at the gardening again

[captainamerica-inmiddleearth]

Has anyone ever seen that picture of the horse in the pool with the sunglasses wearing dog in its back and the ’D’ from the Hollywood sign thrown in the bushes?

[captainamerica-inmiddleearth]

Ok this is the picture… Can someone explain it to me?

[tryclops]

wow the live action bojack horseman looks great

[baphometmachine]

I need Help

Hello there, my name is Nin and as we all know, corporations are scumbag things determined to hurt people. In this case, a con artist energy company decided it was acceptable to steal money from my family, or well specifically my mother. Moreover, stealing money from a woman with dementia, because scumminess has no limits. This sucks at the best of times as you can imagine. Its a lot worse if you’re like us, and the money they stole means we’re going to end up starving.  So I need some help getting the money together to cover this issue so the company will leave me and my mother well alone and we can actually exist and eat and I don’t have to feel so stressed constantly. To cover the costs I have Icon commissions open for $20, examples are below and I can be messaged if you’d be interested:

I also have background painting commissions open for $35:

I want to try and offer as much as possible to make ends meet here. Arts the one thing I can do actively. Though if you do tabletop stuff I could also maybe advise on character builds for tips??? If desired you’re also free to throw money my way via: Paypal : https://www.paypal.me/ninola 

Ko-Fi:  https://ko-fi.com/ninola  

Anything over $9 is entitled to a doodle request just make sure you tell me in the description of what you’re sending over tells me what to draw and who you are so I can tag you in it! Thank you for reading this and thank you for any help you can give. Reblogs anything ect is appreciated greatly <3!

[resolutionblue]

yes hello id like to submit a pattern for best description

[aiweirdness]

GANCats

A new paper from NVIDIA recently made waves with its photorealistic human portraits. Called StyleGAN, the algorithm had a new training dataset pulled from Flickr, with a wider range of ages and skin tones than in other portrait datasets. (If your pictures are on Flickr with the right license, your picture might have been used to train StyleGAN). Thanks to that big dataset, a new method of generating images, and a staggering amount of computer power, its human faces are indeed impressive. But, to prove that their method doesn’t just work for human faces, they also generated bedrooms, and cars… and cats.

The cats are so much fun.

In many ways, generating cats is more of a challenge than generating human faces, since cats can be in so many different poses. It has an easier time generating texture than figuring out where all the legs and tails go.

I’ve noticed that for some reason, whenever it generates kittens, one is normal and the rest are haunted. There must be something difficult about pictures containing multiple subjects.

Its humans are even worse, proving that the difference between it and the version that was impressively good at generating human faces was all in the training data.

Speaking of training data, StyleGAN’s training data was something called LSUN Cat. Evidently, LSUN Cat’s images were sourced from the internet, because when it generated some cats, it added meme text to them, assuming that white blocky lettering is just part of what “cat” is.

It also attempted to generate cats with the Shutterstock watermark, although actually spelling “Shutterstock” proved tricky for it.

Another delightful thing about its internet-derived dataset: quite a lot of the cats look an awful lot like Grumpy Cat. She’s only one cat, but she had a profound impact on what StyleGAN thinks cats look like.

There are far more amazing cats than would fit in this blog post. In this bonus material, I’ve collected a few more of my favorites, including several with meme text, perfect for your internet communication needs. You can get them by entering your email here.

You can look through 100,000 example cats, and generate your own, here.

[libraford]

Spider plant, spider plant

Does some things that spiders can’t.

Clones itself in a pot

Makes the air fresh when it’s not.

I’m… gonna steal this spider plant.

[libraford]

Spider plant, spider plant.

 Friendly cubicle spider plant.

 Kinda like Fieri’s hair 

But takes formaldehyde from the air. 

Look out, i stole a spider plant.

[pterofied]

Spicy Water™️

[dr-archeville]

Where to Download All the Books That Just Entered the Public Domain

Public Domain Day was yesterday, but you were probably hungover, so here’s how to download the tens of thousands of books that became legal to download for free in 2019.

Starting at midnight on January 1, tens of thousands of books (as well as movies, songs, and cartoons) entered the public domain, meaning that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under US copyright law.

Per the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, “corporate” creations (like Mickey Mouse) can be restricted under copyright law for 120 years.  But per an amendment to the act, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation.  This means that this is the first year since 1998 that a large number of works have entered the public domain.

Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923 — including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost — have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing.  It’s a big deal — the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate.  Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.

So, how do you actually download these books?

It largely depends on what site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, you can probably find it on another.  For instance, ReadPrint.com, as well as The Literature Network (mostly major authors), and Librivox (audio books), Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.

There’s also a handful of archiving projects that are doing extensive work to digitize books, journals, music, and other forms of media.  A blog post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain listed some of the most recognizable works published in 1923, as well as links to download these books on digital archiving projects Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Gutenberg Project.  The books include:

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion

Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links

Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis

Robert Frost, New Hampshire

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay

D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo

Bertrand and Dora Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization

Carl Sandburg, Rootabaga Pigeons

Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front

P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

E.E. Cummings, Tulips and Chimneys

In total HathiTrust, a massive digital archiving project, has also uploaded more than 53,000 works published in 1923 that just entered the public domain.  Over 17,650 of them are books written in English.  Similarly, Internet Archive has already uploaded over 15,000 works written in English that year.

Project Gutenberg, which has over 58,000 free downloadable books, has digitized five works that entered the public domain in the new year: The Meredith Mystery by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, The Golden Boys Rescued by Radio L. P. Wyman, White Lightning Edwin by Herbert Lewis, The Garden of God by H. De Vere Stacpoole, and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.  I’m going to be perfectly honest: I recognize exactly zero of those books.  But like most if not all digital archives, Project Gutenberg had some books from 1923 available for download before January 1, 2019 (like Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf.)

If you’re interested in academic papers, Reddit user nemobis also uploaded over 1.5 million PDF files of works published in academic journals before 1923.  Your best bet for actually finding something you want to read in there is to know which academic paper you’re looking for beforehand and check the paper’s DOI number.  Then, search for the DOI in one of nemobis’s lists of works — one list includes works published until 1909, the other includes works published until 1923.

It’s worth noting that projects like Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg rely on volunteer efforts, so there’s going to be disparities in the number of books available for download depending on where you go.  But over the next several days and weeks, it’s safe to expect many more books will become available legally and for free across the web.

[pkjd]

The all-new “Fruits Basket” TV anime series will have its broadcast premiere in 2019 on station TV Tokyo.

[nutsacktorturer]

sir that’s my emotional support lobster

[bi-arikado-deactivated20200601]