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@speculatives
A good fictional character needs to go through all of these sequentially in their narrative arc
[image description: screenshot defining the word fey /fā/ (adjective)
Overrefined, exaggerated, or affected.
Effeminate.
Having or displaying an otherworldly, magical, or fairylike aspect or quality.
Having visionary power; clairvoyant.
Appearing touched or crazy, as if under a spell.
Fated to die soon. /end description]
I actually haven't been able to stop thinking about this article all day. I'm jittery. Emily Wilson destroyed Christopher Nolan. She basically said "it was nice of him to renew interest in the Odyssey even if he didn't understand the Odyssey at all and did a bad job at it." I feel so vindicated. I'm gonna ride this high for weeks.
Wilson, whose work on Homer’s epic was praised by Nolan, said his film was grandiose and superficial with ‘nothing convincing to say’
Also, separately, I have to include this quote that is not in the Guardian article. It was an in an article from The Times where Emily Wilson was interviewed, but it's behind a paywall so I'm putting a screenshot/alt text instead of just the link. Emily Wilson is such an icon for saying this.
"[Emily Wilson] does, however have views on the women of The Odyssey. 'By Nolan standards this was great for women characters. By Homer standards it was a bit disappointing.'"
QUEEN SHIT POP OFF
Because of Re: Carmilla, I thought you all would enjoy my edition of Carmilla :
The holes go all the way through, the sides of the book are red, and on some pages the text is colored red just under the holes !
I was so happy when I found it in a little french bookshop specialized in queer texts ❤️
Sex and the City (1998-2004)
actually we should start headcanoning female characters as being terrible with children
stop mother-ifying fictional literally all female characters. that fictional woman would not know what the fuck to do with a child
fanfic about the LIS specialists recruited onto Project Hail Mary to make the library of All Human Media Ever sorted, catalogued, searchable, and useable to a team of astronauts from three different countries
As you know speculative LIS is becoming my niche of choice, so I am going to be thinking about this all day during work. Frankly my instinct with a project of this scale would be crowdsourcing/folksonomy. Make all the content publicly accessible and encourage the online community to tag and translate it. If you run with the idea that historian Stratt also intended the media library to be a record of human civilization if the project failed and our species was wiped out, why stop at English/Russian/Mandarin? Let everyone take a crack at it. Everyone's probably feeling very scared and helpless with the astrophage crisis; offering a massive citizen science project would be a good way to make regular people feel like they're contributing. Then have some experts do a final pass for QC and massage the user tags into a better indexing system. (I assume you'd need indexing to speed up searches--idk the power of the computers on the Hail Mary but I feel like they'd crash if you tried to full text search All Of Humanity's Media Output.)
That's how I'd do it but given that her 'I do what I want' evasion of copyright might not extend to making everything accessible to the entire online population and iirc Stratt being kind of controlling and particular about who she works with, I'm not sure that's how she'd do it. Unfortunately since she made everyone speak English as the lingua franca (authorial bias showing imo) she might just put everything in English to shrink the amount of data. That would simplify the project but you lose a lot in translation, so that's better if her goal was simply to aid the mission crew vs preserve Earth's cultural heritage.
I'll have to chew on this more while at work switching every link I've ever made away from open in new tab rip
#I LIKE open in new tab #but it doesn't meet WCAG 2.2 AAA #we're not being held to that yet #but I might as well brace in case we are later #project hail mary #this is also a situation where a machine learning tool could be very useful imo #more on this after work. I'm imagining a #crew and SME interviews -> ML tool development -> automated indexing and abstracting -> human QC workflow for a non-crowdsourced approach
Actually I have 7 minutes before I have to sign on. If our priority is just mission effectiveness rather than cultural preservation, the strategy I'd probably take off the top of my head is:
Qualitative interviews with the crew and relevant subject matter experts. Go through that data to identify themes/topics most likely to be relevant to the mission.
Have LIS or related experts transform those themes into a controlled vocabulary.
Develop an automated tool that can ingest your content, generate a brief abstract, and assign index terms from the controlled vocabulary.
Have human expert review of the tool's output. (This will probably need to be spotchecking if you've got a small team of experts; again we are talking about all of human cultural output here.)
This is basically the other side of the scale from the first suggestion - it would give you a faster, more targeted search that would help you zero in on mission-critical content. (After all you probably don't need your search tool running through the scripts for 50 years of General Hospital when you're trying to find emergency treatments for a crewmember experiencing arrhythmia.) The tradeoff of course is that if you end up needing something you weren't expecting (like, say, linguistic theory because you just met an alien) it might not be as effective.
(None of this is touching on how this much data is being STORED of course. I have to imagine at least the audiovisual content is compressed and only the index is being actively searched, and content is unzipped if it needs to be accessed. Which again points to needing a really good indexing system. But I'm not a computer scientist.)
Ok now I am really signing into Microsoft Outlook. Goodbye
This is really interesting! These are really cool ideas.
Would it make sense then to have a two-tiered system:
One for scholarly work and relevant nonfiction overseen by a team of specifically selected specialists focused on mission-critical topics, probably first prioritizing medicine, engineering, biology, genetics, astronomy, chemistry, physics, computers, and psychology (though I do think translation and linguistics would go in a high priority tier—if the paper they really need is in French or Japanese or isiZulu they don’t want to leave their astronauts SOL) and then as time allows branching out into food and nutrition science, ecosystem and environmental science, geology, mathematics, history, archaeology (look. you don’t KNOW what you’ll find out there), with academic work on topics like economics and music and literature probably being at the end of this priority scale or put into…
The folksonomy/citizen science initiative specifically for fiction, popular media, and entertainment topics, on a separate indexing track so if you’re looking for actual medical information it won’t turn up House M.D. but if you want to see what nonsense the House writers came up with it’ll still have been fully tagged and searchable by dedicated show fans. If Stratt expects to go to prison anyway and the world is dying, I can easily imagine her concluding that either no one is going to be paying money for media in a few years as global economies collapse, or certain softwares will become globally critical and the owners of it don’t retain the right to profit off the end of the world, so sure, release the archive of pop media to everyone and give them a crack at it.
They can be going in tandem, with the categorizational whims of the world not affecting the organization of mission-critical data but also the specialist team not having to spend their time also going through 16,000 episodes of General Hospital.
I also imagine the ship’s computers would have to be programmed in with the index of physically Where each SD card on each topic is…
Lol I saw this after I made the last post. I agree, I'd definitely split fiction and nonfiction at the very least. (Might want to continue splitting into more specific subject areas to speed up searches and avoid tons of irrelevant results; I often bypassed the discovery tool in favor of subject databases for a reason.) Lots of scholarly academic content already *has* indexing applied to it; the role of experts might be mostly to massage the different thesauri into one controlled vocabulary (which probably would be in English unfortunately, just based on how the majority of scholarly work is published + existing database interfaces + what machine learning tends to handle most easily + the common language of the crew). That being said they might need to do more indexing work for content that never made it into major databases. After all, they brought Grace on specifically recognizing that sidelined work and/or people operating outside of academia still have valuable ideas. He might have Opinions on this matter.
Folksonomies focusing on fiction/cultural work would make sense. The tough one for me is the open web since it's such a mishmash of format and genre. Some professor's janky web 1.0 HTML webpage might have valuable information but it's not going to be indexed in Web of Science. Could you automated a webcrawler to identify academic/nonfiction vs fiction/entertainment webpages? (Beyond just registering .edu domains.) Probably, with human QC followup, and then the sites get sorted into the appropriate bucket.
I'm contemplating what organization you'd want for the fiction. Title search, obviously, if you're searching for something familiar, but beyond that, what would the crew be looking for? (LIS saying: you organize in order to retrieve.) Language, culture of origin, medium, obviously, but I'm imagining they might look for content based on mood or feel and am now envisioning folksonomy contributors in a vicious war over whether something is uplifting or not. The sun is being eaten by alien microbes but the hot topic on Twitter rn is whether The Murderbot Diaries is #cozy or not.
Hi
Fountain 2
a world where we can meet
has anyone drawn art of anthy as thats the princess by amado or did i just imagine that
me analyzing my favorite characters:
From Lost In Translation by @quekerahkerah (which is so fun, go read it rn!!!)
does anyone else feel like we need to raise the standard for writing quality across all mediums like right now
found a bunch of erotica books to add to the gay scifi database today and realized there seems to be a significant spike in those starting in 1969. which confused me for a minute but then i remembered: moon landing
1969 is such a funny year to look at in the database. its like. gay erotica. gay erotica. gay erotica. timeless classic the left hand of darkness by ursula k. le guin. lesbian separatist novel. gay erotica
happy moon landing anniversary everybody
crazy ai suggestions for responding to my advisor’s email
inside every grad student are two wolves
@iamthepulta
The first person to perform an EVA in outer space was Alexei Leonov. He was almost stuck out there, when the pressure differential caused his spacesuit to expand and stiffen. The suit's new dimensions couldn't fit through the airlock, so Leonov was forced to bleed atmosphere out of his suit until it shrunk enough for him to pass through the airlock--hoping he didn't run out of oxygen or get the bends first.
