Ramblings

Always be cuter-ing

[depsidase]

[realcleverscience]

This is true but missing some context, namely, that newer data center designs are reducing water consumption dramatically, anywhere from 90 to 99.9%, using closed-loop cooling systems.

Additionally, there are a number of other innovations which are concurrently reducing water usage, such as using non-potable waste-water and harvesting water from air on-site.

So yes, this is an issue at the moment. And a serious issue. But it's not an *inherent* issue to AI and it's already being addressed. What we need is to hasten the transition to more sustainable options, and that requires public and governmental pressure. (Similar issue with how data centers are powered: We can demand that they be powered sustainably. And considering the amount of money going into AI, the industry can definitely afford such demands.)

And the same is true of those same data centers when those same data centers are being used to run youtube, tumbr, netflix, google, x-box, tiktok, or whatever - it's using water unsustainably. Frankly, most of our economy is entirely unstable.

But this doesn't mean we need to avoid technology. It means we need to demand that things be run sustainably. We can easily do it, we just need the public will to demand it.

[losergfdotcom]

isolation the most goated coping mechanism i love talking to no one and losing my mind alone

[rabies-baby]

I don’t know the author but boy oh boy this fucking hits

[rabies-baby]

I think one of the worst things I’ve done for myself is when I’m feeling particularly stuck, I will ask myself “what would a main character do right now?” And initially, I was using it as a way to make brave choices, but what is actually happening is my life is becoming a fucking comedy of errors. It’s not good but it’s interesting.

[catchymemes]

[butchniqabi]

[briadeluxe-deactivated20161205]

[adamthegirl]

california wildfires surrounding coronavirus protocols sign. 2020 in an image.

photo by noah berger

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

This looks like something you’d see in a clip advertising a post-apoc survival shooter

[itsmrleorio-deactivated20210107]

So cringy when people are like "cats aren't affectionate i know this first hand!1!" Maybe your cat would follow you around as well if your vibes weren't so rancid

[qlexie]

“hey do you want the rest of my-“

[rabies-baby]

People who finish my food are the best

[xenosagaepisodeone]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[byjove]

my head is hurting from this Facebook post does no one understand Hendrix played a distorted version of Star Spangled Banner to protest the Vietnam War and not as some act of great patriotism, it’s like the boomers who lived through this event rewrote the history and purpose of Woodstock to fit with their nationalism, the 1960s saw some of the worst acts of American imperialism and racism....these “hippies” were not just anti-establishment, they wanted civil rights and they wanted America to stop killing people in east Asia simply because they were a threat to American wealth

[circa1974-deactivated20240207]

not only was it distorted, he played his guitar in such a way that it sounded like bombs, missiles, and gunfire. the music wailed and screamed with anguish. it was meant to express the horrors of the vietnam war in the most raw way possible. take a listen, it’s really an amazing piece of art and should in no way be erased to further fascist rhetoric!

[angelbabyspice]

These the same people who tell Rage Against the Machine to “stop being political” lol

[poetessinthepit]

How the fuck do I know this and people actually alive during the 60s do not. Do these boomers have generational amnesia?

[goawfma]

another industry killed i’ll drink to that 🥂

[hi-im-ryn]

Speed limits in the US also are in place to generate revenue, they don’t make people safer. The original cannonball run was a protest against arbitrarily low federal speed limits, and they demonstrated that it’s distracted drivers that cause crashes, not speed. There are areas where the highway will go from 70 mph to 45 mph for 2 miles as it passes the jurisdiction of a small town, and you know for sure their sherrifs will be posted pulling as many people over as possible, and people hitting the brakes hard at the speed limit signs are getting crashed into on the regular. The way speed limits are usually set is they let people drive the road at whatever speed they feel is safe and comfortable, and then they set the limit at the 85th percentile of the recorded speeds, but then it gets put up to town hall meetings to get voted on and typically the engineers are forced by the Karen’s voting to lower the speed limit by 20 mph or so. So when people are driving on the road, the speed that they would feel safe and comfortable driving is way faster than the speed limit set for the road. Which actually causes way more accidents then if the speed limit was faster. This is why in the US nobody follows the speed limits and pretty much everyone goes at least 5 mph over the limit, with many pushing 15-20 over in some areas occasionally and they face huge fines if caught.

[th1s1s-wayt00-l0ngt0beausername]

YES OMG

[a-book-of-creatures]

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

[a-book-of-creatures]

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

[downinmybeastheart]

So unicorns are real

[a-book-of-creatures]

behold… a unicorn

[gallusrostromegalus]

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

[glamourweaver]

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

[weaselle]

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

[historyisntboring]

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

[excessively-english-jd]

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

[autisticexpression]

Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a

[injuries-in-dust]

It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.

In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:

One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:

The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.

South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:

What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?

The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.

In North America there is the Piasa Bird

Which wikipedia tells me comes from “ the large Mississippian culture city of Cahokia,” it’s describes as

What fossils could have been found in that region:

Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.

Then we get our European style dragon:

One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a Cetiosaurus 

which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.

Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.

Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:

A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.

If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.

[justsomeantifas]

call me ignorant but i genuinely don’t understand why sports have to be split up by gender.

[robobun]

@ everyone in the notes talking about physical performance: if that were the case, then sports would be divided by physical performance. that’s a thing you can measure. that’s a thing that varies by individual. a weak man and a strong man would be an unfair fight in boxing/wrestling/MMA, which is why they divide those sports up into weight groups based on physical performance. but they also further segregate them based on gender. chess is segregated by gender for no reason but sexism. if it’s actually about skill and physical ability, then measure those and separate people by those metrics. don’t do some bullshit gender segregation and pretend like men and women are inherently on different levels no matter their individual abilities.

[justsomeantifas]

💅

[aggrokawaii]

Remember that time a teenage girl struck out Babe Ruth? That’s fucking why. Men are afraid of being beaten by women.

[amuseoffyre]

Remember that time male swimmers were pulled out of training because Kate Ledecky was leaving them ‘broken’ by swimming better than them? Remember how she didn’t even notice, because she was busy actually training?

[notanadult]

Shooting is a sport that has no reliance on strength and so any allowance for gender variation is irrelevant. The last time there was a mixed competition (1992) a chinese woman named Zhang Shan won it.

[murderxbaby-deactivated20190102]

It’s often presented as for the benefit of women. After all, they’ll be heartbroken when they‘re hurt or bested by men.

Projection is a hell of a drug. 

[dick-graysons-left-butt-cheek]

[yungcrybby-anonymousbosch666]

this is why they drug test Serena like crazy. the believe no woman should be that good. let alone a black woman. and black women have always been considered “manly” and less feminine.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

also can we talk about how surfing is segregated as well? like how the dude who won this years international surfing cup or whatever was given $30,000 worth of prize money, while the woman who won the women’s comp was only awarded like $16,000 of prize money???? or whatever it was. but I know it was either half or less than half of what the man won. like why can’t they get the same prize money and when they’re competing internationally in the same competition? they surely have the same level of skill and talent.

[yungcrybby-anonymousbosch666]

the pay gap in sports between men and women is fucking insane.

[torukun1]

The pay gaps, not to mention lack of sponsorships for women athletes who don’t look like models is insane. If you weigh over 250 pounds, no one will sponsor you. It’s why most female Olympic-class weightlifters live in poverty/out of their cars.

[shipitbabyonemoretime]

[intersex-mhacha-deactivated2020]

Reminder that in international (and usually national too) womens athletics anybody with 5m/mol of natural testosterone or higher is disqualified. (See legal case of Dutee Chand vs IAAF.)

Do you or somebody you know have PCOS? You are banned from international womens athletics because you are supposedly in posession of an unreasonable advantage in sports.

Folks disqualified for hyper-androgenism in womens athletics.

Francine Niyonsaba

Caster Semenya

Dutee Chand

Margaret Wambui

And more

-

Why are those disqualified overwhelmingly black and brown? Because testing is case by case when an athletes performance “raises suspicions”. They overwhelmingly test athletes of colour, for being too fast and not meeting white expectations of femininity.

Racism and intersexism(discrimination against intersex people) in sports is abject evil. Desegregate sports.

[jeanjauthor]

All of this.

[ampervadasz]

[catsbeaversandducks]

“Sir, I can has fish?? Thank you, kind Sir!”

[theskoomacat]

Translation:

[weasel? comes up to a fisherman]

Fisherman: Friend, what do you want? [weasel sniffs at a closed bucket with fish] Hungry for some fish, aren’t you? Maybe I should give you a fishing pole? Eager beaver. Let me open it. [weasel is busy digging under the bucket. fisherman gently pokes it] Hey, there is a lid up here. Come on, pick any you want. [weasel grabs a fish and runs away] Hey, no “thank you”? Well, you’re welcome. 

[alexasenna]

I’m NEVER going to get tired of watching Russians interact with wildlife

[thepiscesactor-deactivated20121]

Just an experiment. Reblog if you actually give a fuck about male victims of domestic violence and rape.

[minotaursauce]

Of fucking course

What sick bastard doesn’t