if we could speak with lobsters and understand each other I think they might be able to share some really good wisdom as such a long-lived species.
but then I realized. the problem with such a plan
ALT
it seems there are even more problems with this plan than I first thought. learning a lot today
what was the problem you had in mind
well compared to those it seems silly now. not to speak for the entire human race or anything here, but the way lobsters communicate is not typically considered ideal.
oh.
Finally, piss rich communication.
All the millions of years of animal evolution and linguistic development on this planet have culminated in this post, to be quite honest.
Ahah! So the lobsters are pissing on the poor to ask them how they can help! This makes sense.
i literally love when people realize positive reinforcement works like yes its so silly isnt it. but it literally works humans love juice reward too
Back in grad school I TA’d a couple 400 level courses on stone tool production and zooarchaeology that involved a lot of technical memorization that required the students to learn complex terminology very quickly. They were two of the only such undergrad courses the program had (I think the third was Mesoamerican Pottery, and there was a grad course on Human Osteology), so none of them would have encountered much if any of this info in the two years since their first intro courses. There were over a dozen quizzes in each course, nearly one a week, and the grades were known to be abysmally low compared to the lab reports because of how much time you needed to spend in the lab handling the material in order to study for it.
I like being paid to have fun, so I bought some Transformers stickers and put one on every quiz that got over 90% (ie. the ‘A’ range). Any quiz that got an A+ got Optimus Prime himself. B grades still got a “good job!!” and any passing grade at all got a smiley face, but no sticker.
Y'all, 4th year arky courses are FULL of nerds. The MINUTE the first quizzes were handed back they went nuts over the stickers. There were stars in their eyes, they were crowing in excitement. These were students in their mid-twenties. Only one person got an Optimus Prime on that quiz, and when I told them the sticker rubrick and the requirements to get Optimus you could practically see the fire it lit. They would get those stickers. Optimus Prime was going to be theirs.
I fucking ran out of stickers TWICE throughout those courses. I had to go and buy whole packs JUST TO HAVE ENOUGH OPTIMUSES (Optimi?) for all the A+ quizzes that came in every time. That meant i had more generic TF stickers to promote the B grade papers to stickerdom. The materials lab was full of students every week, studying for these quizzes. They hyped each other up for them. They petitioned me to sticker their lab reports and final projects too (of course I did).
The prof, a delightful 80-something socks-and-sandals hippy of a guy who supervised my honours thesis, was fucking beside himself over this. He thought it was the best thing ever. He joked that the marks that semester were so abnormally high that he needed to look over the tests himself in case I was going too easy on them (I wasn’t, those TF stickers were expensive). He had to look over them anyway in case *I* made a technical mistake grading them, which meant he was the first to see the stickers each time XD
Anyway, it’s true. I’ve yet to meet an adult who didn’t enjoy a sparkly sticker reward.
We have to keep reblogging this so future historians will read it and puzzle endlessly over its meaning
The heavy implication that historical ‘abstract’ poetry that people have been analysing for ages without being able to conclude the meaning could have just been shitpost level in-jokes between poets is sending me.
Okay, but unironically yes.
One of my favorite examples of this is “The Raven,” by Edgar Allen Poe.
You’ve undoubtedly read countless analyses of the symbolism and themes of the Raven. But if you’re the sort of person who writes metered poetry, it’s something entirely different.
It’s a hysterical, but historical fact that Poe wrote it for a bar bet. One of his editors said “Nobody could ever write a coherent poem using trochaic octameter” and Poe said “Hold my beer.” And because he was one of the greatest phonic poets in human history, he used what would have been an awkward rhyming scheme for anyone else and he packed it full of alliteration, assonance, and sibilance.
It’s the equivalent of the drum solo in the live version of YYZ.
Asking AI for information is like asking your drunk uncle for information. Usually wrong, definitely untrustworthy, and a little bit racist.
when we say “Google used to work” we mean “Google used to be a tool that would direct you to reliable websites, such as government information sites, at the top of its results”. Google no longer does that, because Google makes money now, and the way it makes money is to show you ads, and you don’t increase the stats for the search tool and look at more ads if you leave Google and go to reference sites or government portals or encyclopedias or research papers. Google would rather you stayed on Google, so it gives you AI and ads and makes it hard to find anything trustworthy.
So, now you have to be your own old-Google. You have to think: Who knows this information? and: Where will they publish it?
I mean this as a directive. You have to learn to do this. You have to think: Do I need a visa for this country? Where will that information be made available by an official source? and take yourself to the government website. You have to think: Is my dentist open on a Saturday? and find your dentist’s website, and call them up if they haven’t put their hours online. You have to think: How long was Teresa May prime minister? and go to Wikipedia or the parliamentary website and work it out from there.
Consulting reliable sources is a necessary skill, and I’m sorry if you’re only learning it now, I know that’s a burden, but you can’t get the real answers any other way.
You need to think: Where would the number for the financial aid office of my university be listed?
Because the number in the AI summary may be your university, but it sure as hell isn’t the financial aid office.
This website sometimes seems to think that leftism is when you can buy cheap things, and the cheaper they are, the more leftist it is. I really don’t know how to explain the world to people like that.
I made a post a few weeks back about how electronics should be big, expensive, and repairable. A lot of people responded that they agreed with big and repairable, but it should be cheap too.
Here’s the problem with that, cheap and well-constructed are mutually exclusive. They simply are. As long as you have an economy where people are paid for work, even with a robust safety net or even universal income, all costs eventually boil down to labor.
Yes, there’s raw materials and such, but those are then converted into usable materials using, can anyone give me the answer? That’s right, labor.
Simply put, money is a physical representation of labor. This isn’t a controversial stance, this is extremely basic baby’s first Marxism. Like, you say you go here, but you don’t seem to understand this.
The reason things like LCD panels and disposable LED lights and hard disks are so cheap is because their production has been opitmized to produce the most of a specific item in the least amount of time. An electron tube for a radio takes a skilled technician an hour or so to make and costs you $30. Transistors can be made by the thousands on a fully automated production line in the same time and cost you less than a buck each.
If you want a laptop computer that you can service, repair, and upgrade, you have to engineer it to be serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable. That means someone has to be paid to do that. You have to use more materials in order to make it large enough that you can access the servicable parts, which means you have to pay for more materials. You have to provide quality control for all the various extra connections that make servicability possible, someone has to be paid for that. You have to be willing to reject products that make it to final assembly and do not check out for quality control, which is incredibly expensive.
So no, you can’t just make things “Big, Cheap, and Repairable.” Being cheap and well-made are completely orthogonal to each other.
i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.
“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside
“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)
we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.
we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.
two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺
got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks
expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv
was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this
tiny……….
the class went well and they asked if i wanted to do another one in a couple weeks and i said yeah, and they’re taking uh… fuck, what’s the word for inventory when it’s people?? attendance?? whatever, they’re trying to see who’s interested to get a feel of if it’d be 1 three hour class again or if there’s too many kids so we’d do a couple classes. anyways, i love the emails from Concerned Parents.
“will there be knives involved?” we are baking cookies.
“what temperatures does the oven get to/will it be hot enough to burn?” we are baking cookies.
“will there be [insert ingredient used in cookies]?” we are baking cookies.
“are you using fahrenheit or celsius?” ??????? d-does it matter?? it’s going to get Hot. (also celsius; this is ontario)
“are the ovens childproof?” no?? i’m assuming you’re asking if i’m going to let your kids reach into the ovens while i’m staring out a window in another room. i will not be allowing your children to use the ovens. they will not be left unattended.
“why is the library baking class taking place at the high school?” the library does not have 10 ovens. the library does not even have 1 oven. the high school has many ovens.
“what if i don’t want my child to have cookies? can you let her make muffins instead?” this is a baking class for cookies. we are baking cookies.
“cookies aren’t healthy. why don’t you make [insert whatever]” do you know how many cookies i can make with a $40 budget and a trip to the bulk store? we are making cookies.
“who needs a class to bake a cookie, why not teach something more valuable?” IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE COOKIES, KAREN, IT’S ABOUT FAMILIARIZING CHILDREN WITH THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BAKING/COOKING/FOOD, ABOUT TRYING NEW THINGS, MAKING MISTAKES AND REALIZING THAT THE MISTAKES ARE NOT ONLY OKAY TO MAKE BUT VALUABLE IN AND OF THEMSELVES, FAMILIARIZING THEM WITH INDEPENDENCE, THE UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THINGS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM A NEW AND BETTER WHOLE, ALL WHILE HAVING TRYING TO INJECT A MODICUM OF JOY INTO THEIR LITTLE LIVES. SORRY THAT THERE ARE CONCEPTS AT PLAY YOU CAN’T SEEN TO UNDERSTAND HERE. MAYBE YOU SHOULD COME JOIN AND I’LL LET YOU MAKE A FUCKING COOKIE.
I believe the Mormon church has more sway on US law and politics than any other religious organization
Like they’re the flag bearer and strategy think tank for the strongest examples of religious interference in the law even if you see evangelicals and catholics making moves they’re using the LDS playbook
The LDS church is directly responsible for organizing a decent chunk of “religious freedom” coalitions over the years. The primary reason why they don’t get more flak for it is that they’re primarily seen as a regional power both by outsiders and those living within the mormon corridor. Pretty much everyone who looks at Utah for even a couple of seconds understands that it’s Like That because the mormons have to sign off on any proposed legislation, but then they’ll just assume that this phenomenon is limited to Utah and that the church doesn’t have any meaningful impact on anything outside of that bubble.
Ensign Peak alone is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, and the church regularly pours massive sums of cash into PACs throughout the nation in support of conservative political campaigns. The most tangible impact the LDS church has is on the wider political landscape of the US via its spearheading of attempts to replace public education with charters or home schooling, and yet the biggest criticism most people have about it is that those poor bastards in Utah will never get to experience the joys of recreational THC. Like, girl, one of the wealthiest, least financially transparent nonprofit organizations on the continent is constantly pouring money into the Heritage Foundation.
YES EXACTLY
I cannot emphasize enough that the Church quite literally has overthrown election results in Utah. Like you all know this, right? Utah voted for some of the best, healthiest marijuana laws in the country that would have made chronic pain for millions disappear overnight and it passed by a LARGE margin. People were ecstatic. The election results came out and people were beyond excited. And the state refused to honor the fact that it passed because the Church simply told them not to. My friend was in the Capitol building and watched the legislator she worked for see before his very eyes that the law did not apply to these men and watched the election be overturned quietly. Politely. The law shifted and adjusted just enough that people wouldn’t riot, but not in any way what was actually passed. Utah is the testing ground for controlling the narrative. The goddamn NSA has one of its biggest offices there.
You all know this, right? You know that when you mock people in Western states like Utah you’re talking about people who live under theocratic laws that they didn’t vote for and can’t vote out of and gerrymandering so severe that despite the majority of voters in Utah being registered Democrats, it’s blood red because they built it that way… right? You know this? Please tell me you know this.
And then once you tell me you know this, promise me that you will actually internalize that the red states are not your enemy, they are being held hostage.
Louder for the folks in the back please:
…the red states are not your enemy; they are being held hostage.
This isn’t specific to the church fucking about with politics, more the republicans actively working against the people - my sister has been keeping us apprised of the gerrymandering debacle that’s been ongoing in Utah:
The court decided that they would meet for a special session to pass an amendment to the state constitution saying that, actually, if they didn’t agree with something the people voted on/passed they wouldn’t have to uphold that decision
They don’t meet again until January so god knows what hijinks they’ll come up with to keep the state voting districts fucked up
This is only ONE example of how red states will stop at nothing to suppress votes and prevent loss of power. Please please PLEASE make sure you are registered to vote and fight things like this when they happen!!
And we remember how they can have influence in other states, too, right?
🎨 You don’t need cutting-edge tools or a high-end machine to create meaningful art.
This pixel art landscape was created entirely in MS Paint, the same simple program that comes pre-installed on Windows. I use it for most of my background artworks because it helps me focus purely on composition, color, and detail without overcomplicating the process.
Even my PC is a humble, older machine. Yet despite the limitations, my work has been featured in major galleries and on screens around the world.
For animation, I use other tools (mainly because MS Paint doesn’t support animation), but I still apply old-school onion skinning techniques to keep the creative process simple and hands-on.
The takeaway? You don’t need fancy software or powerful hardware to make something beautiful. Creativity finds a way.
ALT
