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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Xuebing Du
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@witchychaoschild
Overlock Stitch by @clothes_reetzy
Damn, that's useful
Finally a hand sewing tutorial on a hemline that isn't just the ladder stitch! the ladder stitch disappears when you tighten it, but it's not meant for hemlines because it breaks really easily! The overlock stitch is more stable, so it holds much longer, and it won't pucker or warp the fabric!
tags by @gallusrostromegalus
OH HELL THE FUCK YES
washing dishes is evil because you go "oh fuck there's so many dishes this is gonna take foreverrr" and then you enter the dish abyss and emerge with your abdomen somehow covered in water and your hands all wrinky and then you look at the clock and what felt like half an hour was actually 10 minutes
And then you eat sonething (as you have to do at sone point) - and suddenly there are dirty dishes again🙈
do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny
in the late 90s there was an anime called initial d which was all about street racing and drifting. naturally every single drift was played for great drama and excitement.
in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.
in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."
what is a side-slip, you ask?
it's drifting.
the guy goddamn drifted his 767.
in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.
and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:
this is somehow starting to make the rounds so because i am a pedant i am going to take this time to talk a little more in depth about air canada 143, the GIMLI GLIDER
so you may be wondering: how the hell does a 737 (capacity of roughly 100-120 people) run out of fuel midair? the METRIC SYSTEM, that's how!
up until the early eighties, airplanes would have three people in the cockpit: the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. generally speaking, the pilot's job is to fly the airplane; the first officer's job is to provide support, monitor instruments, and assist (the pilot and FO will swap roles periodically), and the flight engineer's job was to watch over all the fuel gauges, electrical systems, hydraulics, etc., to make sure they were all working properly, as well as taking charge of things like "setting engine power."
however, in the early 1980s -- when this story takes place -- the flight engineer role began to be made obsolete as computers and more advanced systems became capable of doing most of that work. the boeing 737 of this story was one such plane: actually, air canada 143 was quite a new airplane at the time of the accident, and had no flight engineer.
also in the early 1980s? canada was making the switch from the imperial system to metric.
neither of these things is bad in and of themselves. but put together? one of the flight engineer's jobs was to monitor fuel; it hadn't yet been made clear whose job it was now. canada, at the time, was doing refuelling in a convoluted "the fuel is weighed in pounds but put into the plane as liters" system that required Math and Conversion.
let's talk about AIRPLANE FUEL. unlike a car, you don't take your airplane to the station and fill 'er up: fuel has weight, and airplanes care a LOT about weight. way more than you'd imagine. it's the pilot's job to therefore calculate a) how much fuel they need to get from A to B b) how much extra/emergency fuel they need for safety and c) if and when they need to refuel and by how much. is there bad weather in the area? where's the nearest backup airport? if i need Ten Fuels to get to alberta and there's storms in alberta, i need another Two Fuels to circle around and kill time before landing safely, plus another Five Fuels to get to calgary in case alberta is impossible. my airplane is fully loaded, which means it's heavier than usual, so needs another One Fuel for takeoff power. so altogether i need Eighteen Fuels. except i'm in canada in the 1980s so now i need to figure out what that is in liters, and this used to be the flight engineer's job, and idk man. maybe it's 5 liters? that sounds right?
...you see the issue. it isn't that anyone was slacking off, but no one was quite sure what the conversion was, and so instead of giving the soon-to-be Gimli Glider 18 Fuels, they took off in that fucker with nowhere near enough fuel. to make things worse, the plane had a broken fuel gauge, which was a whole other thing and series of comical misunderstandings, but basically it meant that not only was there No Fuel, but the fuel gauges looked something like this:
the very-soon-to-be crashed airplane's day started off normally. they did a little hour long flight from one city to another with no issues. because they knew the fuel gauges were being silly, while on the ground they did a "stick test", which i'm imagining involved a tree branch, basically checking that yep, there was fuel in the tanks, we're good! (in actuality, what it was doing was measuring the weight of the fuel. except, again, they had their maths all backwards, so due to this convoluted conversion process they went "our fuel weighs 5 kilograms, which equals 20 pounds, which equals 18 fuels, which equals 900 liters." just. silly math. i don't want to make these guys out to be idiots: they would obviously have never flown the plane if they had realized their mistake. but the other problem was of course that the process was already convoluted and required multiple conversions; imagine how much worse it would be if, like these pilots, it was a new system you weren't used to!)
so they boarded their passengers and set off from montreal with the intention of flying to edmonton. and that's when things all went terribly wrong.
pictured: the intended and my interpretation of the actual flight.
all this set up leads to the actual flight, which is almost boring in summary: while high up in the sky, the plane suddenly ran out of fuel. this is bad. we do not want this to happen. the pilots had no idea what was happening at first, but i mean: it was pretty obvious. there's no fuel. no engines. no power. you're 30,000 feet in the air in a 64 ton machine and gravity is going hey girllll heyyyy.
but the thing is, airplanes are really cool. like, this is what got me so interested in these plane crashes and accidents: airplanes are awesome. because first of all: just because you weigh as much as a building and are thousands and thousands of meters in the air? doesn't mean the airplane just falls. hell no! without power, an airplane will still stay in the air, losing altitude, sure, but gliding fairly safely and manageably. this doesn't mean you're safe, but: when air canada 143 lost all power, it still had time and options. it also had... the RAT.
the Ram Air Turbine, or the RAT, is an amazing fucking guy. if an airplane loses power? a hatch pops open, and a little propeller drops down automatically. he's wind powered, and he will provide just enough backup power to keep the most critical systems online, even without fuel or engines or god. we LOVE the rat. and the rat leapt into action here, providing the pilots with enough basic systems to keep going.
this doesn't mean that air canada is out of the woods. landing without power is not easy! the trick to landing an airplane is doing it at a nice shallow angle and low speed, which involves things like "doing nice steady turns to line up with a runway" (no time, we're falling steadily), "using engines to get our speed right" (what engines), "getting to the correct altitude and speed to touch down gently" (we have NO POWER we can't go "oopsie too low" and pull up and adjust). if a plane loses too much speed, it WILL fall out of the sky (a stall) because the aerodynamics stop working. if it's going too fast, you're not landing, you're diving cockpit first into the ground. without power, you can turn, but turns will reduce speed. you can't level off or go back up. you are Going In A Downward Direction. the trick is figuring out how fast and how far and aiming at a runway.
this is also where ATC comes in! we love air traffic controllers!! air canada called a mayday, and ATC leapt into action. their job becomes to Get Them What They Need. air canada wants to go anywhere in canada? atc will move everyone out of the way and get them any runway in the northern hemisphere. when this happened, air canada 143 was near winnipeg, which was their initial goal: this IS going to be a crash landing, and the nearer they can be to emergency services, the better. however, the first officer was doing Good Math, calculating their rate of decent vs distance flown, and soon realized that even though they could literally see winnipeg from the windows, they just weren't going to make it. they were falling too fast.
enter: GIMLI. the first officer had actually trained there during his air force days; it's a former base with two runways. it wasn't ideal, because ATC had no information on it and it lacked instruments and equipment (normally, for example, airports will have locator beams and so on to help an aircraft lock on to the runway at the Correct Safe Angle), but... better than a field or lake. one of the dangers of this type of no engine landing is actually being non-committal: waiting too long to make a decision, trying to maximize time in the air rather than land. this makes sense! it's probably pretty human instinct! prolong that crash as long as possible! but it's much, much better to simply Commit and Prepare and Go For It. and that's exactly what air canada now did.
they told ATC they're going to gimli and made the turn. the cabin crew was meanwhile preparing the passengers for a crash landing.
the crazy thing about plane crashes is, actually, that they are very survivable. don't get me wrong: they're bad. people die. but the number of worst case scenarios where dozens of people still, somehow, survive? shockingly high. of course, you don't want ANYONE to die. i would be terrified if it was me. but cabin crew had to know it would probably be... well, not okay. but that if they got everyone prepared and braced, people were going to make it out. people were going to survive this. possibly most of them. possibly all of them.
as the plane approached gimli, problem #87 came up: they were still too fucking fast. they're gliding down! they can't stop! normally, a plane would simply slow down with flaps, or maybe do a couple of big circles before reorienting themselves towards the runway to lose some speed and altitude, but they don't have time -- or altitude. and that's where the theme song KICKS IN
here are reasons you DO NOT DRIFT airplanes, by the way. it can fuck up your engines: engines work in part by taking IN air, so flying at a Drifting Angle means that's all wrong. the aerodynamics are wrong. you're losing speed VERY fast. you can get OUT of the drift, but now your engines are fucked. on the other hand, this plane effectively HAS no engines, but... there's a reason people don't drift planes, okay.
another plot twist: gimli air force base was no more. the runways were still there... but it had been turned into a drag strip, ironically enough. and it was family day! picture this. you're a nice canadian racing fan in 1983, at the strip with your family, cooking hotdogs and poutine on a grill. and a fucking 737 APPEARS OUT OF NOWHERE in front of you. because that is exactly what happened. there were KIDS. on BIKES. with a PLANE HEADING RIGHT TOWARDS THEM. in the mayday episode, the kids tried to outrace the plane in a panic: in the pilot's telling, the kids simply froze in fear.
by the time the pilots realized the runway was occupied, it was way too late to turn back. they landed. in a twist of bad luck that turned into good: without power, they had to manually release their landing gear.... and the nose gear didn't lock. this turned out to be a weirdly good thing: without nose gear, the plane's nose hit the runway and acted as one hell of a brake in ITSELF, grinding on the asphalt as the plane barreled down at high speed. the pilot also intentionally steered the plane into the rail in the middle of the runway, trying to slow the plane even more. and... it worked! the plane came to a stop. everyone was fine. even the kids on bikes.
all this friction caused a small fire in the nose, and so the pilots called for an immediate evacuation to be safe. this caused a bit of an issue: because the nose was on the ground, the butt of the plane was higher than usual, and the back slides were basically just vertical drops. a couple people got mildly hurt using them, as you'd expect.
meanwhile, the drag strip folks were rushing over with fire extinguishers and the like, and the small fire was easily contained (note: do not fuck with burning airplanes. this one had no fuel so COULD be contained). by the time ATC got emergency services to gimli, everyone was safe, ankles were being iced, and presumably everyone was eating hot dogs.
the airplane itself had some minor damage (from when the nose acted as a brake), but was largely intact: it was patched up, refuelled, and took off from gimli a while later, where it flew for another 20 years before retiring of old age.
and that is the story of the Gimli Glider: that time a pilot drifted his plane so hard that he saved the lives of everyone on his plane.
all 69 of them 😎
I had read the story of the Gimli Glider before, and I had seen the video with "Deja Vu" playing, but I never understood where the song came from or why it was supposed to be funny before.
This is "The Most Tumblr Punchline" in action, only I didn't realize there was something to look up.
Now that I do?
Okay, that's funny.
OMG, I love „Mayday“😍 and the story of the Ginli Glider is amazing.
Seeing this put to the track of an 90s anime music is pure gold🤣🤣🤣
Thanks for sharing and explaining it🫶
A cozy Jinmao for consideration :) I just really like how their dynamic grows over time
This piece took 15 hours, so longer than usual by a few hours! I’m still not super confident in this overhead angle but I Really wanted to build the piece around this pose that got beamed into my head while I was on the bus home one day
Looks stuning😍
for anyone who's wondering what the fuck is going on in british politics rn
Ummmm we're really out of the loop and we're from here, we know of count binface from word of mouth but that's it...
Always happy to explain bc this story is hilarious!
So basically Nigel Farage and his party of racist losers, Reform UK, are being investigated for taking extremely dodgy donations. Farage personally took £5 million from a crypto billionaire and another £1 million from a convicted fraudster, and has admitted as much and refuses to say what it was even for.
Parliament is investigating him over it, and to try and stop them he resigned his seat to fight a by-election claiming he'll 'let the people decide' to exonerate him. This is a total stitch-up, because his seat is extremely right-wing and safe for his party.
But all the other parties have seen through this and refused to stand against him, saying they'll only stand in a by-election after the investigation is complete (and given he's now being investigated by the police as well as Parliament, it almost definitely won't exonerate him). So he now looks like an idiot who's wasting public money by forcing his seat to have two elections in a few months.
Now, you might be wondering, if the major parties aren't running against him, who is? The answer: Jeremy Corbyn's conspiracy theorist brother, Billie Piper's crazy ex-husband, a man dressed as a fish finger, another man dressed as a fox, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (the most serious party in the mix ofc), and...
Count Binface. A comedian with a bin on his head with a bunch of joke policies like making Flake 99 ice creams cost 99p and renaming London Bridge 'Phoebe Waller-Bridge'. And he was the first person to say yes, I will stand against Farage, and described himself as a unity candidate.
And there's a hint of truth to it, because polls show more people want Binface to win than Farage. Even if he doesn't win, he's forever going to be known as that bloke who almost lost his seat to a bin. It's especially funny bc he's now trying to call a man with a bin on his head 'the establishment'!
Even if Binface doesn't win (which he probably won't), this whole affair has been deeply, deeply humiliating for Farage and makes him look more corrupt, and unrelatable, than ever. If we're really lucky, this will not only tank his political career, but do so in the funniest possible way.
Thanks for explaining
Was having a convo with a friend in light of the (thankfully now reversed, let's keep it that way) Update That Would Have Killed Tumblr's Identity, and it became a fairly tumblr-ass conversation itself; so why not, I might as well post it: Him: "Y'know, there's a sort of carcinization effect to websites, except they keep trying to evolve into tiktok or twitter. Which is strange, because those are some of the least well-adapted forms in the ecosystem." Me: "Well yeah, it's cuz it's not natural carcinization, CEOs keep forcing them into that shape. I still say the natural state of the website is the forum or the geocities/angelfire page; twitters and tiktoks are like, the pugs of websites. Yeah, they're technically surviving but like. Look at that poor thing. It's not healthy." Him: "Does that make wikipedia one of those deep sea tube worms? An enormous colony of symbiotic cross-links around a single source, surviving for centuries on just dust and hot water?" Me: "...I'm posting this to tumblr." Him (playfully): "Damn, can't call dibs on the notes to it now. Oh wait, they rolled that back already!"
(X)
I wish this feeling upon everyone who wants to wear a dress, its really the best
this makes me so happy as a fat hairy guy who likes skirts and dresses i never get to see guys like me in dresses it’s always skinny twinks this makes me so happy 🥺🥺
like many people have said this better than me but no it IS odd that we've come to think of potatoes as so quintessentially european that their presence in historical fantasy where they're anachronistic doesn't jar. and yes people are trying to have the trappings of post-colonial europe without engaging w the icky colonialism part and yes people are neglecting to imagine what a european cuisine without potatoes would be like.
im fully in favour of 'let people have fun w their fantasy world' but is considering how the potatoes got there in the absence of colonialism not a fun exercise? maybe every year the dragon riders go on a great transatlantic potato pilgrimage
perhaps a good way to sum up the issue here is:
if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope
if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion
this is in spite of the fact that black people were a lot more common in medieval europe than potatoes.
I have a very rough idea in my head that I don't think I can clearly articulate beyond "And that concludes tonight's reports on German air forc—WHAT'S THIS? IT'S KING ARTHUR WITH A STEEL CHAIR"
IDK what this is about, but I want to know more.
This isn't exactly the same idea but it could be but there is more rattling around in here so:
The Blitz here manages to qualify as Britain's Darkest Hour, thus triggering the return of Arthur from the Realm Avalon.
He does not speak a lick of modern English. He speaks an unholy mishmash of Brittonic and Late Classical Latin.
(Honestly I can see the latter becoming a plot point if they manage to get their hands on a Roman Catholic priest to act as a translator. It wouldn't be a perfect arrangement, but probably better than anything else.)
Truthfully he probably gets mistaken for a madman.
Somehow manages to steal a Spitfire out from under the RAF's nose, proceeds to use it to bring down like half an enemy squadron on his own, then lands in a field in the middle of nowhere.
Police and RAF converge on his location on account of the whole "stealing a plane" thing. They eventually overwhelm him with sheer numbers, but he manages to knock out an impressive number of them in the process. I mean, come on. It's Arthur.
"a catholic priest" i mean yeah sure why not but JRRTOLKIEN himself was alive and a teacher at the time so go big or go home.
You know what sure why not let's just make literal real-life JRRT himself a character in this Arthurian return story, he deserves it.
@seajr DUDE
this scenario gives me the Giggles 😂😂😂
this is from the 2000’s btw
Looks like @staff mistakenly censored this comic, which is an ironic and very funny thing to happen
Here it is again. You might want to save it just in case an accident like that happens again
EDIT: HMM. LOOKS LIKE OP WAS BANNED TOO. WHAT A FUNNY. IRONIC. ACCIDENT
In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”
“It insists she’s the mafia.”
“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”
“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.
Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
Having been to several talks on modern ai I can confirm
I always think of this tweet when I see people praising machine learning and the new kinds of AI as a panacea.
Source
Holy shit! That’s awesome😍
on another note, watched The Mummy (1999) the other day and I couldn’t help feel like the O’Connells and the Addams (Addams Family Values (1993) would get on really well ya know? The O’Connells are basically the pastel adventure version of the Addams, surely they would just be vibin’ over tea and crumpets in an extremely haunted mansion having a ball of a time
Morticia: “So what is it you do for a living my dear?”
Evelyn: “We dig up dead people who often have monstrous curses placed on them!”
Morticia: “fascinating”
Gomez: *leaping out from behind a pillar which is encrusted with ominous looking runes* en garde!
Rick: *grabs sword from equally ominous looking wall full of weapons one of which seems to be glowing* fantastic I was getting a bit rusty
Gomez: *nearly in tears* oh he’s screaming nonsensically, what spirit! what reslove!
*Rick and Gomez, still frantically sword fighting*
Rick: Have I mentioned how wonderful my wife is yet, I really feel like I haven’t really expanded enough on how wonderful she is
Gomez: do go on, I would be delighted to hear about how wonderful your wife is, I strongly encourge all men to extoll the virtues of their wives with rapturous praise, however I should perhaps mention my wife is in fact better
*sword fighting intensifies as both men rapturously extoll the virtues of their wives*
Jonathan and Fester and Cousin Itt watch from the bar, where Lurch and Thing are making the drinks.
Jonathan and Thing knew one another from The War; each thought the other to be dead
Their reunion is highly emotional
Rick, whilst swordfighting: My wife resurrected an ancient evil that brought about the plagues.
Gomez: What. A. Woman.
I DID cry because of Sheep Detectives btw
daily affirmations: no body hate you. everybody niceys
One of my favorite things is when I show someone a bunch of different Pokemon and over time I see them go through this list of 1) whoa that's cool 2) no patterns..? What do you mean you "see the picture then make the picture"? 3) these are ALL pokemon?? 4) there are HOW MANY pokemon?? 5) you know ALL the pokemon and there's more than 1000 of them??? 6) how did you even learn- did you watch videos or? 7) this took HOW long? Without a guide or anything? Just- just DID it?
Like okay I forget this is kind of Out There in a lot of ways lmao
