Tricked Coffee @trickedcoffee - Tumblr Blog

poplockandcroc-deactivated20251

I think about this image almost everyday

crazy to see "I can't believe these young scholars let the homunculus do their homework" coming from wizards who I know copied all their spells from Sparikus's Commentaries on old grimoires when they were apprentices

kaijuerotica

every time i hear the phrase "lesser of two evils" i respond "lesser of two weevils" and no one ever understands. no one ever remembers...them

argumate

I never read Philip K. Dick's Ubik before (and it seems to be one of his few books not to be a film premise?) but it's tempting to quote large chunks of it because it's frickin' wild

yorickless

one of my favorite parts of ubik was the descriptions of all the characters' outfits when they're introduced. it's not really remarked upon or relevant to anything but they're all wearing completely insane shit I remember it being really funny

m-accost

"He eyed the individuals who had begun to fill up his office; they gathered near one another, none of them speaking. They waited for him. What an ill-assorted bunch, he thought pessimistically. A young stringbean of a girl with glasses and straight lemon-yellow hair, wearing a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts, that would be Edie Dorn. A good-looking, older, dark woman with tricky, deranged eyes who wore a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks; Francy something, a part-time schizophrenic who imagined that sentient beings from Betelgeuse occasionally landed on the roof of her conapt building. A woolly-haired adolescent boy wrapped in a superior and cynical cloud of pride, this one, in a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers, Runciter had never encountered before. And so it went: five females and - he counted - five males. Someone was missing.

"Ahead of Joe Chip the smoldering, brooding girl Patricia Conley, entered. That made the eleventh; the group had all appeared.

"You made good time, Mrs. Jackson," he said to the mannish, thirtyish, sand-colored lady wearing ersatz vicuna trousers and a gray sweatshirt on which had been printed a now faded full-face portrait of Bertrand Lord Russell."

And then on the next page we find that G. G. Ashwood is "wearing his customary natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemp-rope belt, peekaboo see-through top and train-engineer's tall hat."

A bit after that, we're introduced to Tito Apostos, "A bald-headed man, wagging a goatish beard" who wears "old-fashioned, hip-hugging gold lame trousers" and a "kelp-green mitty blouse" with "egg-sized buttons", Don Denny, who wears "a polyester dirndl, his long hair in a snood, cowboy chaps with simulated silver stars" and "sandals", Sammy Mundo, "A weak-nosed young man, dressed in a maxiskirt, with an undersized, melon-like head", and Fred Zafsky, "a flabby, big-footed, middle-aged, unnatural-looking individual with pasted-down hair, muddy skin plus a peculiar protruding Adam's apple - clad, for this occasion, in a shift dress the color of a baboon's ass."

argumate

it is vital that our crack team of psi-inhibiting inertials be capable of operating undercover without arousing suspicion from telepaths

m0th0er

lazenby

i dont really get novels. why does everyone read them?

You know that thing in a cartoon where the characters are watching a cartoon on television? And how the cartoon they’re watching is always drawn in a simpler or more abstract style? Or how a painter who paints somebody painting a picture has to make the painting-in-the-painting a little vague and not as sharp as the other things in the picture? Imagine the opposite of this, imagine a cartoon where the characters watch regular, real-life HD video, or imagine a painting where the person in the painting is holding a real photograph, not a painting of a photograph. Now imagine that it were possible to drag this relationship into real life: imagine that we were the cartoon characters and that it were possible to make a painting that would be to us what the photograph was to the painted person, to watch video that was actually sharper, more detailed and less abstract than the real life you perceive with your own eyes.

This is not possible with a photograph or a video, but this is exactly what a novel is.

afieldinengland

normal country latest

trickedcoffee

radiofreederry

thegreatgrumbolia

crusaderfortruthiness

aorish-deactivated20251222

like idk why we have to have gender-segregated chess if the men can't behave around women then ban them for life, it's fucking chess it's not like it matters or anything

phaeton-flier

To my knowledge it's an encouragement to women thing, rather than a weight class thing or a preventing abuse thing; like if there's a women's league with women's champs it shows girls they can play chess too

aorish-deactivated20251222

but that just sounds like a weight class thing? if you've got to artificially segregate all the girls off in order to have "women champs" then that's just reinforcing the idea that there wouldn't be women champs otherwise. which maybe there wouldn't be as many but if you never show the girls beating the boys then that's not very convincing that "girls can play chess too"!

phaeton-flier

A valid concern!

I think theoretically the difference is that for some sports—say, the 400 m dash—if there were mixed events you would expect women to win very rarely, and thus not want to compete. And this difference isn't due to training or attention or background stereotypes discouraging women from joining. But just biology, muscle mass on mans frames or whatever

Whereas with chess you don't expect that—well, Bobby Fischer and many others say that women can't play chess, but I don't and you don't and many others don't—you expect men and women to have no inherent differences. But there are more men who get into chess, get encouraged at a young age, see greats of chess and get inspired. And less women, Because of the lack of the same.

My model here is that given enough time I expect we'll see women grandmasters and such, and in the mean time having women's leagues helps get attention and practice more than it affirms the idea that women won't join the men's league.

I don't know enough about the state of youth level chess tournaments to know what the gender split/ratings are there—maybe girls in the youth leagues, not competing against the best of the best from around the world, would produce more "girls can beat boys, see?" Games. Or maybe that's already happening, again I want say I'm not on the pulse here

aorish-deactivated20251222

I think theoretically the difference is that for some sports—say, the 400 m dash—if there were mixed events you would expect women to win very rarely, and thus not want to compete.

i think this *is* probably true, but I also don't really see it as a problem. I don't think we should have a separate women's 400m dash either! but we recognize that the reason we have one is that women would basically never win against men, even at the high school level, and so we're basically carving out this exception so that some women win some of the time.

And I think that the problem is that when we do this with chess we're giving into the Bobby Fischers and other sexists that there's something inherently inferior about women when it comes to chess. I'm sure that the women in chess already suffer from enough self-doubt and other pressures (sexism, harassment, cultural pressures), so a formal segregation that's more or less equivalent to the 400m dash in saying "we're giving you a separate league because you are worse" doesn't exactly help!

tattahitotsunosaetayarikata-dea

Why is this sentence in the future tense. There are 42 female grandmasters, the first earned that title in '78, the highest-rated reached #8 in the world in '04.

phaeton-flier

That was a mistake! I confused "grandmaster" with "current world champion"/"best living player", rather than a specific title. "One day the person popularly called the greatest living player in the world will be a woman"/"one day a woman will be talked about the way Bobby Fisher or Garry Kasparov are" would've been a better way to phrase it, and also would've pointed the way to further discussion on the issue (e.g. "Would a woman who achieved as much as Kasparov be talked about as much, or would her successes not get her as much fame because she was a woman", etc)

centrally-unplanned

I do always find these discussions odd because we don't have gender segregated chess, right? We have the "global chess leagues", primarily FIDE and all of the other national organizations and the like that circle around it. These are open to anyone, they aren't gender segregated at all, they haven't been for many, many decades, and women compete in them all the time. And then there are some bonus women-only leagues to because women like women-only competitions, and the chess player base is like 90% men and women enjoy and benefit from women-only spaces for many reasons across many domains and chess isn't gonna be an exception to that.

There is always this sort of implication here that the women's chess leagues "hold back" or like split apart women but I really don't see any evidence for that. Female players who are taking the game seriously all play in the open brackets too. I guess you could make an argument that the money going into the FIDE Women's Cup is like wasted or creating negative incentives? I'll hear it out, but that is pretty granular and org-specific, I don't think it would generalize. So far I would say that the track record for women's chess orgs for getting more women involved in the game is pretty good, actually, there has been strong growth in the numbers over the years. Maybe it would have happened anyway, maybe with online play and twitch streams you need them less? I can invent the argument, but I don't think we are there yet. Clubs with no members fade away naturally, they seem to be doing fine right now so are a net positive.

#yes #thank you #people keep repeating the “chess is gender segregated” line #when it literally isn't #there are better things to be mad about lol

str-ngeloop

maybe it's useful to act as though platonic realism is true.

str-ngeloop

me, an anti-realist pragmatist: it's useful to act as though statements about abstracts correspond to an absolute world of forms. so, no, but actually, yes

str-ngeloop

i have noticed this is actually a very common implicit worldview for serious people these days

str-ngeloop

haha wait a minute....

the practical, conditional, worldly, changeable, and bodily parts of me believe, for practical reasons, in an abstract true world of absolute forms.

but of course, the abstract, ideal, absolute, and mental parts of me believe, for abstract, ideal reasons, in only an eternally mutable, flowing, ungrounded and conditional state of affairs.

cogitoergofun

Ruling: Thumbprint scan is like a "blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking."

The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law.

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had to grapple with the question of "whether the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone was testimonial," the ruling in United States v. Jeremy Travis Payne said. "To date, neither the Supreme Court nor any of our sister circuits have addressed whether the compelled use of a biometric to unlock an electronic device is testimonial."

A three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit ruled unanimously against Payne, affirming a US District Court's denial of Payne's motion to suppress evidence. Payne was a California parolee who was arrested by California Highway Patrol (CHP) after a 2021 traffic stop and charged with possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, fluorofentanyl, and cocaine.

There was a dispute in District Court over whether a CHP officer "forcibly used Payne's thumb to unlock the phone." But for the purposes of Payne's appeal, the government "accepted the defendant's version of the facts, i.e., 'that defendant's thumbprint was compelled.'"

Payne's Fifth Amendment claim "rests entirely on whether the use of his thumb implicitly related certain facts to officers such that he can avail himself of the privilege against self-incrimination," the ruling said. Judges rejected his claim, holding "that the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone (which he had already identified for the officers) required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking."

"When Officer Coddington used Payne's thumb to unlock his phone—which he could have accomplished even if Payne had been unconscious—he did not intrude on the contents of Payne's mind," the court also said.

seymour-butz-stuff

Turn off biometric unlocking on your phone.

trickedcoffee

fyi if you restart your device it'll disable biometrics until you've logged in with your PIN (true for every device I've had at least)

theonion

The task of reporting is not a simple one. Each and every day, reporters and editors at publications like The Onion make difficult decisions about which issues should receive attention, knowing that our coverage will influence not only how people think, but also how they act. This responsibility is at the core of an ongoing debate over whether news coverage of transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people is unduly biased. As the world’s leading news publication with a daily readership of 4.3 trillion, The Onion is compelled to weigh in.

We firmly believe that it is journalism’s sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible.

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