Played 6,716,271 times

the-leader-in-red:

johncougar:

weirdvvolf:

papauera:

lofticri3s:

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This was recorded by the Portsmouth Sinfonia in an experiment where all the members of the orchestra would swap instruments with each other and attempt to play them to the best of their ability.

favorite things about this

  • literally all the brass starts to get the hang of it and then the crescendos happen and everyone is like FUCK FUCK FUCK??? FUCK. JUST. BLOW RLY HARD.
  • the strings are lazy but also the same. like u can tell a lot of the ppl w/ the stringed instruments may already basically know how to play stringed instruments. like there’s definitely a section at the beginning where you hear a good portion going “oh yeah this is like. a smaller/bigger version of what i do.”
  • all you hear of any woodwinds is just “pffffttt??? pFFFTTTT???? PFFFFFTTTT I SAID PFFFFTTTT!!!!!” bc woodwinds are fucking HARD and you hear after like the first crescendo half of them just give up. they give up. they’re done. fuck this it tastes weird and my lips hurt.
  • that trumpet. that person is fucking TRYING man they fucking GOT this. they may not have figured out notes but they figured out LOUD and they GOT this.

I JUST DIED

I SEARCHED THIS POST FOR AGES OH MY GOD

(Source: skypevevo)

(Reblogged from goshawke)

slinkanorabundyblr:

hillyminne:

lumpatronics:

peteseeger:

rosalui:

onedeadkitty:

tariqah:

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Interspecies lesbianism

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It’s cute guys

nothing but respect for MY lesbian big cat couple

Butch/Butch couple

This is actually hella interesting, bc in simple terms, tigers are extroverts and lions are introverts. There’s more to it, but that’s the gist.

Whenever zoo’s tried to put lions and tigers in the same enclosures, the tiger would eventually try to groom the lioness and play constantly. The lioness would lose patience and snaps at them

So basically what I’m saying is that you have a regal and refined gf who stands at the edge of a balcony during parties, sipping champagne

Then you have the other girl who drank all of the little flutes on the servers platter, and is now drunkenly pointing at her gf and telling everyone that that’s her gf and doesn’t she look beautiful I love her so much

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So I had to draw them in human form???

You drew them in the corresponding ethnicities for their Geographic locations!!! Bless you, you have no idea how sick and tired I am of white human lion king characters.

(Reblogged from feathersescapism)

petermorwood:

dizzyalleycat:

dailycharacteroption:

ohgodhesloose:

jrco-disd:

the-last-hair-bender:

argonianbot:

i dont think you guys appreciate how rad this site is 

because first of all you got your basic fantasy and game race names for like

everything

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BUT AS IF THAT ISN’T ENOUGH

REAL NAMES WHICH ARE GOOD FOR BOOKS

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AND THIS THERE’S MORE????

BAM, PLACE NAMES

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AND STILL MORE

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SO YOU SEE THESE LITTLE OPTIONS HERE

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PLEASE, PLEASE

GO AND TRY TO HELP A GOOD PERSON OUT

This is my go to site for naming literally anything.

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this site also has generators for flags, languages, maps and other cool stuff, seriously it’s awesome, go check it all out and help the site if you can.

The woman behind this fantastic site also makes free music for RPG sessions. Her YouTube is here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG46uU4jlxak8DvmcVqN2oQ

Fantasy Name Generator and its creator are both excellent resources!

I adore this site. I have used it a number of times, and it has things you wouldn’t necessarily expect too! And it’s updated so often, you never know what’s going to be added!

The original link isn’t working any more, so here’s a new one: fantasynamegenerators.com

(Reblogged from everysecondtuesday)

my-moonlight-us:

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The Traveler cat 😻😀

(Source: cat-lover-1001)

(Reblogged from everysecondtuesday)

andailtinfanach:

kanafinwhy:

Potential story concept: space selkies. In their lithe, articulated skins - part spacesuit, part ship, part solar sail, part cybernetic exoskeleton, and somehow not quite any of these - these creatures glide through the galaxy, in the quiet of interstellar space, sometimes alone and sometimes a few together. Sometimes they will come to a solar system, taking delight in frolicking through asteroid fields or dancing in a comet’s ion tail or skimming the tops of planetary atmospheres in the narrowest of flybys, propelled by gravitational kicks from solid bodies or simply carried along on the solar wind. 

Sometimes they might land on a planet, and sometimes that planet is inhabited. Space selkies are curious creatures, so sometimes they will take off their skins to walk on the organic, delicately-webbed feet that their species hardly ever have any use for, a relic of a time when they lived in a far-off galaxy on their own misty planet of swirling hazes and shifting seas, now long gone and largely forgotten. 

The skin folds up very compactly. It makes a tiny ceramic ellipsoid - like a pebble rounded by flowing liquid, but dry and slightly warm to the touch. They carry it with them wherever they go on a planet’s surface, guarding it fiercely as their most precious possession, because their life and their freedom is inside. 

But sometimes it is taken from them. Sometimes they meet the local inhabitants, who take away their skin to study, or to protect them. Perhaps because they are tricked… or sometimes perhaps, they fall in love, and choose to stay. Without the skin, the selkie is trapped, confined to an alien world. And whether they are there willingly or not, they are always looking up, always on some level longing for the quiet vastness of space and the glimmer of the endless stars from whence they came. 

First of all, I love this.

Secondly, in Orkney and Shetland folklore, the seal-people are sometimes said to live in a realm under the sea; they need their skins in order to travel through the sea that parts their realm from ours. This works really well here.

Third, hybrid children. People who look almost human except for the delicate webbing between their fingers, and the subtle shimmer and sheen of their skin. People whose black irises are a little too big, whose eyes reflect the light of the moon a little too well. People who always know where Orion rests in the sky, who stay awake at night watching shooting stars with a nostalgia that they can’t explain.

(Reblogged from harpergetsfannish)

doodlebugart:

More Voltron circus au (cus I really need to be doing this instead of you know…school work)

Pidge is a contortionist and Allura does the aerial silk…ribbon…thing and she’s also Lance’s trapeze partner. 

Lance and Keith

Matt and Shiro

Don’t use without permission 

(Reblogged from doodlebugart)

doodlebugart:

More Circus au stuff. Matt and Shiro. They’re an acrobalance (aka adagio balance) act, Matt’s the “flier” so he’s always the one up in the air and Shiro’s the “base” so he’s always the one holding Matt up.

Lance and Keith

Pidge and Allura

Don’t use without permission

(Reblogged from doodlebugart)

bionic-jedi asked: Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

duckbunny:

armoured-escort:

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

girlwithakiwi:

thejollywriter:

mylordshesacactus:

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

wow okay i’m crying now

“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”

I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.

So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.

So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.

And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.

All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind. 

I dunno. That’s just really stuck with me.

Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.

Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.

He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.

In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.

This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.

This is human nature. Don’t give up on it.

(Reblogged from feathersescapism)

cipheramnesia:

jenroses:

Have I told y’all about my husband’s Fork Theory? 

If I did already, pretend I didn’t, I’m an old.

So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. It’s super useful and we use that all the time.

But it has a corollary. 

You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?

Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens. 

A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

This is super relevant for neurodivergent folk. Like, you might be able to deal with your feet being cold or a tag, but not both. Hubby describes the situation as “It may seem weird that I just get up and leave the conversation to go to the bathroom, but you just dumped a new financial burden on me and I already had to pee, and going to the bathroom is the fork I can get rid of the fastest.”

I like this and also I like the low key point that you may be able to cope with bigger forks by finding little ones you can remove quickly. A combination of time, focus, and reduction to small stressors that can allow you to focus on the larger stressor in a constructive way.

(Reblogged from bonehandledknife)
(Reblogged from nanoochka)

I want to tell a story about a Santa and a fiddling Christmas Tree.

kristina-meister:

So I make costumes. Not your average fitted attire. I mean I do that too, but not just that. I make BIG costumes. Like with metal and shit. So about October-ish, I contacted a costume making studio that does work with a convention called “Dickens-fair”. Maybe You’ve heard of it. It is a Christmas fair that turns the whole center into a replica of Dickens’ London, complete with actors who represent his characters. I had always wanted to go and was just trying to think of ways to help out.

I contacted the head person for costumes for the actors and I told her I make period pieces and I specialize in weird stuff, but also in turning old thrift store items into period attire. She emailed me back and was like “Come meet me” and so I did. I came out to her studio and was sitting with her folks, showing her pictures of all the stuff I’d done I was proud of. Then she says…”Wait…I have an idea.”

She tells me that every year, Dickens-fair has this one performer who is a fiddling Christmas tree. Like What? yes. A tree…that fiddles. Apparently it’s like the fucking Mickey of Dickens-fair. Only, her outfit was made a few years back  from fabric, and kind of looked like a dunce cap with streamers. She told me that this year, the Fiddling Tree wanted a new costume. She says “Can you make a Christmas tree that can fiddle?”

I’m like…no. “If she can fiddle and wear a tree, then I can build a tree that can be worn by a fiddler. Hell yeah.”

And she’s like…”It can’t touch her shoulders, and it has to fit over her normal costume, and it has to be period accurate, so all period ornaments.” 

And I’m like…bitch, “I got this.” 

She says “Come back in a week and meet her and give us your idea.”

So I designed…because I make costumes and I have Christmas in my blood. My mom always tells this story about how when I was like 4, I was with her at the train station in LA and I saw this man sitting on a bench. Now this man wore blue denim overalls, with a long sleeved red shirt, had a white beard, and carried a wooden cane carved with Rudolph, who had a gemstone nose…He was fucking Santa. Admit it. And 4 year old me was like……SANTA? My mom always says I stared at him hard and then tried to climb in his lap, like for real Tim Allen from Santa Clause style, but he was cool, and pulled me into his lap and had a whole conversation with me about whether or not I was being good…in July. According to my mom, he told her he was a professional Santa and this was something he always got from kids, and that he loved it. He then got picked up by a woman in a convertible and drove away.

My mom has been telling me this story since I was five. 

So this year, about 3 years ago, I was like…A Christmas tree that fiddles…I got this.

I mean, I drew this shit. I went to hardware stores and craft shops and I priced out this shit. There were emails about what I could expect to be the substructure. I made a barbie doll scale model with pipe cleaners. I came in with a fucking Plan.

And they laughed and said… “We love the barbie…OK.”

So I had a budget. I had an idea. And I went with it. I made measurements and all sorts of stuff. Let me tell you about this costume…

This woman is 6′2″. She fiddles. She wears, beneath the tree, a full period costume. This means a bell hoop skirt and a corset. I made sure they had a hoop for her that was carved from fucking PVC pipe and a steel boned corset, and I went to work. I had frames…on fucking chains…from MY CEILING. I had the whole thing mapped out.

A lightweight metal skirt in a grid pattern made from chain, linked together in a mesh. gathered at the waist and clipped like a belt. Over the head, a cone-like structure carved out of mesh, mounted on braces that were lashed to the torso with straps bolted into the metal cross-braces. A light aluminum frame. And over this…a cape, made from long dangling chains. Every inch of chain was coated in weatherproofing green paint. Every few links…a limb hacked off a fake plastic Christmas tree. Woven amidst these? A series of handmade and donated ornaments, including fake cookies made from clay, fake candles with a remote control that controlled the flicker. I had paper ornaments, streamers, instruments made of brass, birds, candies made from plastic…I mean I had everything, and all to period. I worked and worked on this for months and had numerous fittings.

The aluminum headpiece came along. I was stressed. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to make this fucking cone mount on her chest so her shoulders would be free. I mean I had ideas - like a cone, but with a back and front piece that came down her torso and to which, straps were fixed that clipped at the sides. This would distribute weight evenly through the corset and allow for freedom of the shoulders. But! I didn’t have a firm plan. I went to the hardware store.

Me. Three months pregnant. All cute and glowy and shit.

And I walked into the section where all the plumbing and flashing is. Now I know my way around. I hate going here because I’m usually hassled by a dude who thinks girls can’t know shit about hardware. But this time…this time it was a nice old man with a snowy white beard, wearing a red shirt and a green apron. I’m like…he’s a Santa…this is fate.

He comes over and says “What can I help you with today?”

And so I tell him the whole story. About the tree, and the odd parameters, the physics, the complexities. I tell him what I’m trying to create, this cone of metal lashed to the chest, and he…

Smiles. 

He tells me, “I’m a Santa. I do it every year. I love this project! I want to help!”

As we are brain storming, and he’s showing me all the products that might work, he mentions to me that he isn’t the first Santa in his family.

“My dad did it for most of his life.”

“Man, I have such respect for Santas. My mom always tells this story about me meeting this man who looked like a Santa at a train station and trying to sit on his knee.”

The man got very quiet. “At a train station?”

“Yeah, like he was wearing overalls and a red shirt and had this carved cane…”

“I remember that cane,” he says.

I turn to him… “The one with Rudolph?”

“With a ruby nose. Yeah. After he died I looked everywhere for it, but I couldn’t find it.”

I stopped. Like straight up stopped moving, with like my limbs all cold as snow. “Wait a minute? What? Are you telling me you know that Santa?”

“I think that was my dad. He is exactly as you say. He worked on the railroad as a conductor for most of his life, and when he retired they gave him free travel. He was always taking trips, and he always went as Santa, because after he retired, he did that full time.”

“Did your mom own a convertible? Like a sleek one?”

“Yup.”

I lost it. I’m in the middle of fucking Ace Hardware, talking to Santa, about my Santa, the one I can’t remember, but always knew existed, and that man is this Santa’s daddy. And here I am…shopping for parts to a fiddling Christmas tree. I cried like a little kid. He hugged me. I apologized and told him I was in my first trimester. He said it was fine. He gave me his card. Told me he was glad to hear his father had had such an impact on kids. He helped me pick out my tree pieces and then checked me out.

I built the best fucking tree you ever saw. I wove metal. I bent aluminum. I used riveters. I worked with saws, and vices, and paint, and glue, and fucking plastic clay. I did everything wearing gloves and a mask because of baby. I did it all like I had a fire under me, because fuck that…I’m not letting Santas down.

And this is what I made.

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This was the dry fitting, the trial run. We fluffed it out with more limbs, added bits here and there, or planned for more. I strung this fucking thing from my rafters on a mannequin and we had a tree decorating party, putting ornaments on it like it was a real tree. Then we had her put on the whole thing, and we watched her play “O Tannenbaum”

And it was the best Christmas moment ever, for me. 

That year, I had free tickets to Dickens-fair. I went and caught sight of my Christmas tree fiddling around, playing songs for kids and spreading the spirit. Then later I saw the fiddler dancing in Fezziwig’s ball, with her tree skirt still on over her dress. It was awesome, seeing this 7.5′ tall tree gliding around, this thing I made, with help from My Santa’s Son.

I was Santa that year. It made my holiday.

So the next time you meet a Santa… it might not be the real guy… but you needed to meet him. And if you are a Santa… this is what you do. This is your legacy.

Keep it up.

(Reblogged from harpergetsfannish)

feathersescapism:

star-anise:

titania-saturnine:

star-anise:

In the 18th century it became fashionable for people of “sensibility” (ie. sensitivity) to tremble and faint with strong emotions and be overwhelmed super easily, and later artists like Jane Austen loved to mock the shit outta that, but extreme emotional reactivity, especially to the point of trembling and fainting, is often a symptom of complex trauma or chronic stress, so what if these days we gave fainting ladies a bit of a break and realize their lives may not have been perfect.

Is “your whole body gets paralyzed while watching an episode on the backstory of a character you find extremely relatable” also included in the list?

Yes! This can go from the brief “riveted with interest/frozen in fear” to full-on catatonia for hours or days.

A lot of Early Modern fiction makes sense if you go “All the Super Extra WTF people are traumatized as fuck.” Since Early Modern Europe had some SUPER not-helpful childrearing practices, like farming babies out, that did not promote trauma resilience, and it was also an age where violence, assault, and unexpected death were incredibly pervasive at every walk of life.

Here’s a brief rundown of ordinary symptoms of the traumatic response:

Keep reading

Also: very common to have lots of “flight” or “freeze” type responses right up until you explode into “fight” bc your hindbrain decides you’re trapped and it’s time to attack until the threat stops moving and then run.

Ask me how I know.

It’s amazing how much History and especially European-Affected History makes so, so much more sense if you start from “so basically everyone is AT BEST seriously fucking traumatised, right, and that’s had the expected developmental effects aaaaaand then it just goes downhill from there”.

I’d say fuck the Normans and I mean, yeah, fuck the Normans so much they have SO FUCKING MUCH to answer for, but also like. those were the people that popularised the basic concept of prisons? and before anyone crawls down my throat for that BEING one of the things they have to answer for… yes, but the thing is that was a step up from prior practice. (which was pretty much just, you know, straight up murder. usually artfully torturous murder.)

in summary: it’s <s>turtles</s> trauma all the way down.

(Reblogged from feathersescapism)

rock-cake-with-a-pin-in-it:

dexer-von-dexer:

danshive:

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

This stuff is cool and much more interesting than the general-AI doomsaying anyway (which I will drag in the tags anyway). :)

Here’s an article about adversarial attacks on image recognition neural networks, and here’s another one about how your training data may mean that your system learns the wrong thing, like “this photo has sheep in” actually being “this photo has places that sheep graze in”.

(Reblogged from julstorres)

jenna-ygray:

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Hey guys! I had an amazing time at the 2018 Ctn Animation Expo!

This is artwork for the banner that was on display at the convention. I still have a couple smaller 7” x 17” prints leftover, so if you’re interested, message me for price and shipping info

(Reblogged from julstorres)

is this what growing up is like

feathersescapism:

spawnofsay10:

chiaroscar:

imagitory:

rcmclachlan:

grand-duc:

wigglyflippingout:

me at 14: wow, protagonists in media my age! how relateable!

me at 28: WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CHILD SOLDIERS? WHERE ARE ALL THE ADULTS? WHO LET THIS HAPPEN AND WHY ARE THEY NOT BEING PROSECUTED BY LAW WITHIN THESE FICTIONAL UNIVERSES

In the same vein:

Me at 14: oh protagonists that are 17-20-ish, they’re basically adults, right?

Me at 28: Oh my Gods you’re babies who left you in charge?!

Ariel: Daddy, I love him!
Me at 14: Yeah, girl, you tell him!
Me at 30:

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Originally posted by plumkat

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Originally posted by imagifary

Marnie in Halloweentown: I’m thirteen, okay? I’m practically grown up! I’m certainly old enough to make my own choices – right?

Me at 7: Right!

Me at 13: Right! …Well, okay, maybe not practically grown up, but still, right!

Me at 28:

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Originally posted by itsprettydead

You either die young or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

This is so true

I mean some of us recognize that at sixteen Ariel is perfectly capable of feeling deep, intense and life changing emotions, and also that Triton is a controlling douchecanoe; and that what the 13 year old means is “I am feeling stifled and dehumanized by how you’re treating and talking to me” and that this is legit and something to keep in mind if only because thirteen year olds are physically big enough that if they REALLY get it into their heads to do something it’s very hard to stop them without resorting to straight up abusive measures; and also that life is not fair and sometimes quite young people have dealt with some heavy shit and that deserves respect and care. And finally that out there is a bunch of people who think WE’RE babies too and everything is perspective.

oh hey someone finally said the thing so I don’t have to! I mean, the actual OP I do relate to, but most of the rest of this thread I’m like…. nah?

(Reblogged from feathersescapism)