Just Nerdy Things

Exactly What it Say on the Tin 26/White/Culturally Jewish/Atheist Male/Bi/Cisgender

[podcastwizard]

this is an ad for some game where you learn culinary facts but i really thought they were suggesting that instead of doom scrolling i enjoy a delicious seafood boil and you know what? so right

[ferithtolkienesque]

The Silmarillion fandom is genuinely insane. Like, you hang out on tumblr, read fic on AO3 and you think, yeah. Lots of people have read the Silmarillion. It’s Tolkien. Everyone’s read Tolkien. Barnes and Noble has a whole bunch of the HoME and also a bunch of books by people writing about the legendarium. This is mainstream, surely.

But then you actually touch grass and talk to normal people. Not even that, you talk to people who self diagnose as hard core Tolkien fans. And. None of them have read the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is famously a book that nobody reads.

And yet. On AO3 The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth has more works than The Lord of the Rings. Think about that. That’s baffling. It’s ridiculous. Like I realize that LotR fandom is split a bit by the movie, but still. The Silmarillion has almost four times as many fics as the LotR movies. Everybody has watched the movies!

I need to know what percentage of people who actually read the Silmarillion went on to write fic or draw fanart about it. Because it must be insane, surely. Like, I’m pretty sure the Silmarillion wins some kind of record in this department.

Thinking about the fanfic bell curve where on one end you have “Perfect, needs no improvement or elaboration” (LotR sits here) and on the other you have “So bad it’s no fun to even think about” with the middle being the fanfic zone. But I think there may be a secret fourth Silmarillion option. Which is a book that is perfect* but simultaneously non existent. It’s not even a real story! The language is super pretty and deeply incomprehensible (especially to people who, unlike me, were not raised from early childhood on both the Bible and classic literature). And it’s more of an outline and an abstract painting of cultural and world building vibes (not cultural and world building facts and information) than an actual narrative. There are story hooks galore. There are vivid and fascinating characters, but their lives are glossed over and you only get one or two paragraphs of prose that will reorder your brain chemistry and haunt you forever. There are countless more characters who only exist as names, the implication of whose existence is fascinating. All of this is deeply frustrating, both to casual readers who just want a Normal Enjoyable Book, and super fans who want All the Lore. But it is catnip to anyone who engages in transformative work.

*I am aware that not anyone who is a fan of the silm thinks it’s perfect

[nachosforfree]

I'm obsessed with this tweet

[dsmsix]

“hamsters are not, in fact, euthanized by being exploded with lasers”

[novella-november]

If you are on a Windows 11 computer, pause everything you are doing for one minute and:

Open computer settings

Click on Accessibility on the left-hand menu

Scroll down the Accessibility menu and click on the Keyboard Option

Under the "related settings" tab, click "Typing" which should have a description of "spellcheck, autocorrect, text suggestions."

Turn off the AI "correct misspelled words"

and most importantly: turn off Typing Insights.

[ID: a screenshot of the above mentioned Windows 11 settings, showing that Typing Insights is now turned off, with the following description from Microsoft: "Windows is using artificial intelligence to help you type To help you save time and type efficiently, Windows can learn to suggest words, autocorrect spelling mistakes, and interpret swiped typing. Take a look at the insights below to see up-to-the-minute stats on how Windows has learned to improve typing for you. These stats are stored only on this device and Microsoft does not collect the typing insights data." End ID]

"But Mx. November, it says right there Microsoft doesn't collect the typing insights data!"

I mean, yeah, it says that..... for *now.*

It also only specifies that Microsoft themselves don't collect it, and they wouldn't have made this something that I was automatically, secretly opted in for without my knowledge if they didn't have something to be gained by me not knowing it exists!

I only found this because a cat walked on the keyboard and turned on Filter Keys and while trying to figure out why my keyboard was just making chirping noises instead of typing, I happened to click on "typing insights" by accident.

Generative AI, and especially AI that is used to "personalize" and track your activity across the web and on your computer are never going to be in your best interest, it is always going to serve these companies in whatever way will line their pockets the most, and all it takes is updating their terms of service once, and then all of that data they promised they weren't collecting suddenly all belongs to them.

[3000s]

what the hell did i do

[3000s]

home goods blocked me

[3000s]

they told me to go Home cause i'm no Goods

[goon]

[twinkhole-destroyer]

you ‘had’ sex? where did it go

[twinkhole-destroyer]

you guys can’t do this to me

[toddsolondz]

STOP BEING HONEST STOP BARING YOUR HEART 2026 IS THE YEAR OF RIDDLES AND ELABORATE LIES

[uglywhitefatherfigure]

[transcyberism]

serious answer: I ran some quick math (below the cut) and found out that this ant would impart about ten times the amount of energy as an impact by a 45kg Howitzer round, or one thousand times the energy yield of a typical handgrenade. Ordinarily I would expect something like an ant to disintegrate on impact at high speeds, but there is simply so much energy in that ant that it would have nowhere else to go but forward - even if it completely exploded on impact without penetrating, you would definitely die and definitely need a closed-casket funeral. If it simply went straight through without meaningful disintegration, carrying the majority of its energy away with it, with this being a hypersonic projectile (actually, it's a relativistic one) it still would definitely shred at least a grapefruit-sized hole in you just from cavitation damage. Given the ridiculous speed, it would also create a significant amount of heat and a concussive sonic shockwave as it did so, definitely killing you instantly and probably turning you into charred ground beef.

TLDR yes you would be super mega dead

first let's use a more sensible unit than mph. 100000000mph is 44,704,000m/s. that's more significant figures than we need but I'll leave that to the end. for reference, c is exactly 299,792,458m/s meaning our unlucky ant is traveling at about 15% of the speed of light.

next let's find the mass of an ant. googling it, it looks like 1-5mg is an oft-cited figure, so let's say it's a little sugar ant that only weighs 1mg (because that's an easy number for math, and because I want to know the best-case scenario in case this is somehow survivable). that's 0.001g or 0.000001kg (important for next step.)

to find how much energy the ant will impart, we use the formula E(k) = 1/2 * mv², which results in a value of very nearly one gigajoule (1GJ ≈ 999MJ), which is neat because we started with one significant figure and now we're ending with one too.

[raptor-goblin]

oh but the ant so small I can take it

[transcyberism]

that's true I didn't think of that

[brucebocchi]

[kosmogrl]

don’t take my defeatism too seriously I will always begin again and again no matter what

[ursulaklegay]

actually i love growing older and learning how i work as a person like realizing what kinds of fabrics feel best on my skin or what brand of yogurt i like best or how I want to be touched. watching myself change, enjoying brussel sprouts when I used to hate them as a child, understanding why I got angry in that one conversation 10 years ago… there are so many mysteries inside me that i have yet to unravel and there will always be more and sometimes i think maybe its all worth it

[noah-wyles]

she's the best of us

[luxiomahariel]

they should invent a taking care of your own body thats easy

[luxiomahariel]

and not one william dollars !

[itwashotwestayedinthewater]

Aborted Abortion Doctor: i would have loved to give you a safe abortion..... if i wasnt aborted. by me.

[depsidase]

[hasufin]

You know, treating this seriously, people don't get what was wrong with the Soviet Union.

It wasn't the fucking Communism. Now, maybe Communism doesn't work. Maybe it inevitably leads to a failure, or eventually becomes capitalism in all but name. Maybe. We don't really know, because every economic failure in the Soviet Union could be attributed to two factors:

Economic Isolation: The USSR was blocked from the wealthiest parts of the world. Part of that was Soviet choices, but a big chunk was also the USA sabotaging them at every opportunity. The Soviet economy didn't have access to markets, couldn't grow industry effectively, and was unable to implement technological improvements.

Authoritarianism: This is the big one. The authoritarianism in the Soviet Union elevated incompetent toadies who didn't know anything about their jobs, and who implemented disastrous policies which ignored science in favor of ideology. People like Lysenko, or RFK jr. At the same time, it also forced out and punished people for not telling the leadership what they wanted to hear, so there was no chance to correct mistakes.

And the thing about these issues is, they're not unique to Communism. And they are just as disastrous in any economic system.

But people have been trained to fixate on "Communism", and thus have eagerly embraced the economic isolation and authoritarianism which were always the real problems.

[chimaeraundying]

first name PLACE last name HOLDER / parents didn't NAME ME till I got OLDER