@gallifreanpotterhead / gallifreanpotterhead.tumblr.com
Oval-shaped playing cards with French suits (German, late 19th century).
Published by A Twietmeyer.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
this sucks so bad i need to [remembers suicide jokes only worsen my mental health] put on the best talent show this towns ever seen
guys this post is a big hit on the adolescent psych ward
Fish in the great lake being like
Wait shit wrong fucking post
Rage. In my heart. All-consuming. FUCK AI.
For those who don't know, this piece is titled 'Unfinished Painting', by Keith Haring. He painted it about a year before his death of AIDs. I believe he actually finished other pieces between this one and his death. He left the majority of the canvas blank to represent his life and art career cut short due to HIV/AIDs. This was a deliberate choice and commentary about all that we lose (both personally and culturally) by ignoring the AIDs crisis at the time (1989). He was devastated he didn't have time to make more art. 'Finishing' Unfinished Painting is straight up spitting on Haring's grave and shows no understanding to the meaning behind the art. The AI interpretation doesn't even follow his extremely recognizable shape language and symbols. This is why people are angry about AI art. All commerce images and no meaning or humanity
The purpose of that tweet was pointing out how stupid AI is. It was a series of tweets sarcastically "completing" art to demonstrate how fucking stupid and empty that is and how it often robs the art of its point. It's making fun of AI bros. You're getting mad at a cherry-picked half-joke taken out of context to create a scenario that didn't exist. There's no one to be mad at here.
This is like if I put on a clown outfit and climbed into a cardboard box and said "Oooh, I'm a big man, vroom vroom, look at me in my cool Tesla Cybertruck, the most serious of hardcore trucks!" and honked my clown nose and then somebody just posted the part where I said "Look at me in my cool Tesla Cybertruck" with no context and everyone got really mad online fuming "I cannot BELIEVE that Derin bought a cybertruck!"
Sufficiently advanced extremism is indistinguishable from parody. There is nothing in the content or presentation of the tweet itself to indicate that its OP is not an AI bro.
Meanwhile the cardboard clown car is obviously a cardboard clown car.
No, in the context of the series of tweets it was very clear what the message was. Cherry picking this part and pretending it's complete to give the impression that it's serious would indeed be like cherry picking that one phrase and omitting the cardboard and clown outfit to give the impression that the cybertruck statement is serious. Did you read the original tweet series or are you just assuming that the joke couldn't have been clear?
The modern status quo is to take everything at face value. Research is dead.
Not entirely right actually, let me correct myself. Its less 'an era of the death of research', and more so that the pace is set too fast. One hour ago is yesterday's news. Its react or be left behind. The death of research isn't the cause, rather the effect. If you take the time to research the topic, you're too late and everyone has moved on.
People need to get used to being slow again.
The way twitter works makes it a little difficult to research the context of every screenshotted tweet, which is why I put an explanation in (since I saw the tweet in its original context). Most of the time I'm like "try reading the article instead of just yelling at the clickbait headline" but in cases like this I think the blame lies pretty firmly at the feet of the person who took it out of context in order to dishonestly upset people. It's a little difficult to track down the people who do this (there's absolutely no reason to assume it's OP, they could very well have innocently copy-pasted this screenshot off Facebook or something, ragebait gets spread like that all the time).
Things like this aren't always easy, or indeed worth it, for every reader to try to track down context for, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to do so. But I do think it's worth keeping in mind that most of these quick little out-of-context bites on the internet that infuriate us are engineered to do so. If you see some stupid take on the internet, some completely unhinged AITA entry, some nonsense sound bite that suggests the world is full of evil idiots, there's a pretty high chance that its entire reason for existing is just to piss you off.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion at this point that if a tweet's point cannot be understood on it's own, especially when part of a series and also especially when intended to be parody, then it's badly done. There is enough space for the OP to have made clear the tweet, even in a series of them, is parody. They didn't, and now it's easily taken out of context because of that.
This is the nature of the internet now, it's time people understand that. You can give us the actual context all you like, but if it's not included in the screenshot, it no longer matters.
If you read a random paragraph from the middle of a Terry Pratchett novel and don't understand the plot of the whole novel, is he a bad writer for not explaining the whole plot in every individual paragraph? Somebody could post that paragraph out of the context of the rest of the story and people could mistake what it was about! Terrible writing!
Cutting famous one liners so Gough Whitlam just says "god save the queen" after being sacked
That particular disappointment of the more literate-than-average child upon discovering that “gaol” is just pronounced “jail”
what
I don't have a devil and an angel on my shoulders, I have these two.
They're both the angel. I get two, because up on my forehead is a balcony with two devils.
there’s gotta be an audience for m*cbeth fanart on here
Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi
Goes insanely hard
To provide further context from what I understand the bill wanted to take the rights guaranteed to the Maori in said treaty and expand them to all New Zealand citizens. The issue with that is that it sort of defeats the point of the protections of the treaty.
The Treaty of Waitangi is not even that good of a treaty. But it is better than any treaty the Crown signed with indigenous peoples
And it absolutely was not meant to be
The treaty as written screws over Māori, and was written in Te Reo Māori and English with deliberately misleading translations to Te Reo Māori. I'm not an expert by any means, but basically the Te Reo Māori version has clauses that promise much more independence and sovereignty, while the English version does not
However
The English version promises them rights as Citizens
From what I remember from University 10+ years ago, this clause, this sentence, was added last minute by the writer of the treaty. Like, right before the big signing at Waitangi.
And the Crown was PISSED
Because now they had a legally binding document that promised, in their own language, to treat Māori with the same rights as they would English. Which was absolutely not the goal. The goal was to trick Māori into signing away their lands and that honestly still did happen. The treaty was not a good faith proposal by the Engliah.
But its still better than anyone else got, and it's better than no treaty. And because nowadays we can't just ignore the Te Reo Māori side of the treaty, the government's of the past few decades have been honouring Māori sovereignty, honouring their stewardship of the land, and undoing a lot of the bad faith "sales" or straight up stolen land.
Except our current fuck nuggets, who want to make Te Reo Māori an endangered language again, and steal back that land because they want to mine on it and sell it and they hate that Māori stewardship is so environmentally focused and not profit driven.
So, in a way, the current government is more true to the intentions of the Crown who initially came up with the treaty.
But since those guys were colonising bastards, I don't see "honouring" them as anything good.
Even with criticism of the treaty, without it, Māori would lose a lot of protections to their lands, their culture, their language, and as a country we would go backwards to a time when they were even more discriminated against
Toitū te tiriti
Uphold the treaty
Captain America and Superman are Jewish responses to the Nazi idea of the ubermensch that ask different, but equally compelling questions in response to it. Captain America asks "what if the ubermensch was real, and he loved Jews?" and Superman asks "what if the ubermensch was real, and he was a Jew?"
And the Jew in question is Bucky Barnes
the question Bucky's character asks is "what if the ubermensch was gay, and he railed me?" this is a third, equally important, question
Honestly devastated to see people reblogging the original post, which was a set up for this gag, without the punchline.
[video by soupygarbagejuice. original caption: stuie]
“I guess I would scream too if I knew a God could hear me” is too much of a raw line to come from a tik tok about a cat
the best part is the line is “i guess i would scream too-ie”
i read the cutest reddit thread today where this 19 yo boy was “babysitting” his 15 yo little sister while his parents were away on vacation and she got this horrific period and needed to be taken to the ER.
and this sweet 19 yo boy was doing all he could to take care of her, giving her meds and water and then packing stuff up to go to the hospital once reddit was like “yeah if she’s soaking two tampons in an hour you should go” - but being only a little older than a child himself, he didn’t know what to pack, so he brought like three things, and one of them was SUNSCREEN.
lmao everyone on reddit was like “you’re a really good brother but sunscreen?? for the hospital??” lmao they are roasting him. also op’s sister changed his name in her phone to “spf” and their dad calls him “bananaboat” now. this guy is never living this down
(also his sister is ok and it turns out their family has some kind of genetic blood disorder)
the brother kind of reminds me of that post that’s been going around abt that abandoned five-week-old kitten that was taking care of a few two-week-old kittens that were somehow with him and he was just trying his best but he was so small
I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.
I'm thinking about the argument I got caught in yesterday- the subject of it doesn't matter.
Often, pseudoscience and misinformation comes packaged with a lot of very important sounding words, and the jargon gets to the point where it seems like a lot of work to fact check it. Which makes the 'I encourage you to do your own research' statements real obnoxious. If it's phrased in a way that's impossible to navigate, good luck.
It sucks, but you gotta.
If you don't want to fact check individual words, that's fine. That's a lot to ask of someone that's just trying to figure out whether something is true.
This is where we get into something called 'lateral research.' Instead of trying to draw a map to a sentence, you check the credibility of their source material.
This is your Snopes, your Fact Check/Media Bias, your Follow The Money.
Knowing more context about what someone is saying will save you a lot of time and energy.
If you're not sure about something, question it.
I feel like I've been throwing this around a LOT lately, but:
Practice SIFT! SIFT is based on lateral research and can be very helpful for these situations.
DON'T just share information without doing your due diligence.
whyyy the fuck does this not have more notes please rb this more often qwq
Well, I mean... probably because I posted it like an hour ago.
STOP
i have found this post and infographic and i want to share it
INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE
zetabrarian's blog says they are a socially progressive librarian monsterfucker, which a quick scroll through their blog seems to support. This makes them pretty cool but not necessarily the perfect source -- anyone can say they are a librarian, and surely not every librarian is correct about processing information
FIND BETTER COVERAGE
if i go to a search engine (in this case google via firefox) i see that several universities, libraries from large municipalities (like Los Angeles) as well as the BBC all agree that this is a real method experts in information fields recommend. I wouldn't necessarily take any single one of these sources as 100% credible, but they are individually reasonably reliable, and taken together indicate a high probability of factual information
TRACE TO ORIGINAL CONTEXT
A brief search reveals that the SIFT method was created by Mike Caulfield, who is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. This is an extremely good source of information for how to process information on the internet. As the creator of the SIFT method, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops.
I could not find a post or page about SIFT written by Mike Caulfield himself, so i went to the University of Washington's website for this page about it, since that is the university that employs him.
It corroborates the above information, though there are a few notable differences. For example, under the "trace to original context" section in the Washington U. source (again, as close to the original as i could find) this step contains advice to check the date. This seems very good to include, as in the fast moving world of internet information, things become outdated or get updated very quickly, and yet first takes and outdated articles hang around and get shared for a long time.
EXTRA CREDIT
I personally find that it is important to outright search for the opposite information. For example, I put in a few searches like "Mike Caulfield discredited" "Mike Caulfield wrong" "SIFT method bad" etc. I found nothing showing me any indications this method has any problems. Interestingly, somehow this did turn up an article about news literacy on Medium, which was actually written by Mike Caulfield in April of 2017
There’s a little rat inside your head.
This rat doesn’t know anything, but it knows that sometimes snacks fall into its cage, and sometimes the floor shocks its feet. It likes the snacks, and it hates the shocks. It will tell you to do things that produce snacks, and it will tell you not to do things that produce shocks.
This little rat is not the only power inside your head, and it might not be the strongest, but it’s there and it has influence.
So pay attention to how you’re treating the little rat.
If every time you learn something new, you say to yourself “ugh, I’m so ignorant for not already knowing this,” you’re shocking the rat. You’re teaching it to be afraid of learning new things, to associate it with embarrassment and self-criticism.
Remember to feed the rat instead. Tell it “now I know, and that is good,” and let it eat its snack in peace.
If every time you take care of yourself and your home, you say to yourself “ugh, I never do this enough, and I’ll never get it right,” you’re shocking the rat. You’re teaching the rat that it was safer when you didn’t try to take care of things.
Feed the rat instead. Praise what you have done, forgive what you haven’t, so the rat can feel safe.
When the rat takes a step in the right direction, even if the step is too small or slow or not in quite the right direction, feed it. Don’t shock it for being imperfect; it’ll only learn not to take any steps at all. Feed it, and let it get bolder, and take bigger steps, and give it bigger rewards for those bigger steps.
Be kind to your little rat.
🐀🐀🐀 *pat, pat, pat*
When the rat takes a step in the right direction, even if the step is too small or slow or not in quite the right direction, feed it. Don’t shock it for being imperfect; it’ll only learn not to take any steps at all.
This is exactly why Perfect is the enemy of Good, whether the perfectionism is self-directed, or at each other.
Direction matters more than location. If you - or the person you’re concerned with - is moving in the right direction, encourage the progress.
A politician dies…
And ends up standing in front of the pearly gates. Saint Peter looks at him for a second, flicks through his book, and finds his name.
“So, you’re a politician…” “Well, yes, is that a problem?” “Oh no, no problem. But we’ve recently adopted a new system for people in your line of work, and unfortunately you will have to spend a day in Hell. After that however, you’re free to choose where you want to spend eternity!”
“Wait, I have to spend a day in Hell??” says the politician. “Them’s the rules” Says St Peter, clicks his fingers, and WOOMPH, the guy dissapears… And awakes, curled up with his hands over his eyes, knowing he’s in Hell. Cautiously, he listens for the screams, sniffs the air for brimstone, and finds… Nothing. Just the smell of, is that fabric softener? And cut grass, this can’t be right?
“Open your eyes!” says a voice. “C'mon, wakey wakey, we’ve only got 24 hours!”. Nervously, he uncovers his eyes, looks around, and sees he’s in a hotel room. A nice one too. Wait, this is a penthouse suite… And there’s a smiling man in a suit, holding a martini. “Who are you??” The politician asks. “Well, I’m Satan!” says the man, handing him the drink and helping him to his feet. “Welcome to Hell!” “Wait, this is Hell? But… Where’s all the pain and suffering?” he asks. Satan throws him a wink. “Oh, we’ve been a bit mis-represented over the years, it’s a long story. Anyway, this is your room! The minibar is of course free, as is the room service, there’s extra towels next to the hot-tub, and if you need anything, just call reception. But enough of this! It’s a beautiful day, and if you’d care to look outside…” Slightly stunned by the opulent surroundings, the man wanders over to the floor-to-ceiling windows through which the sun is glowing, looks far down, and sees a group of people cheering and waving at him from a golf course. “It’s one of 5 pro-level courses on site, and there’s another 6 just a few minutes drive out past the beach and harbour!” says Satan, answering his unasked question. So they head down in the lift, walk out through the glittering lobby where everyone waves and welcomes the man, as Satan signs autographs and cherrily talks shop with the laughing staff. And as he walks out, he sees the group on the golf course are made up of every one of his old friends, people he’s admired for years but never met or worked with, and people whose work he’s admired but died long before his career started. And out of the middle of this group walks his wife, with a massive smile and the body she had when she was 20, who throws her arms around him and plants a delicate kiss on his cheek. Everyone cheers and applauds, and as they slap him on the back and trade jokes, his worst enemy arrives, as a 2 foot tall goblin-esque caddy. He spends the day in the bright sunshine on the course, having the time of his life laughing at jokes and carrying important discussions, putting the world to rights with his friends while holding his delighted wife next to him as she gazes lovingly at him. Later, they return to the hotel for dinner and have an enormous meal, perfectly cooked, which descends into a food-fight when someone accidentally throws a bread roll at the next table (where Ghandi is having a game of truth-or-dare with Marylin Monroe). As everyone is falling about laughing and flinging breadsticks at each other, his wife whispers in his ear… And they return to their penthouse suite, and spend the rest of the night making love like they did on their honeymoon. After 6 hours of intense passion, the man falls deep into the 100% Egyptian cotton pillows, and falls into a deep and happy sleep… And is woken up by St Peter. “So, that was Hell. Wasn’t what you were expecting, I bet?” “No sir!” says the man. “So then” says St Peter “you can make your choice. It’s Hell, which you saw, or Heaven, which has choral singing, talking to God, white robes, and so on”. “Well… I know this sounds strange, but on balance, I think I’d prefer Hell” says the politician. “Not a problem, we totally understand! Enjoy!” Says St Peter, and clicks his fingers again.
The man wakes up in total darkness, the stench of ammonia filling the air and distant screams the only noise. As he adjusts, he can see the only light is from belches of flame far away, illuminating the ragged remains of people being tortured or burning in a sulphurous ocean. A sudden bolt of lightning reveals Satan next to him, wearing the same suit as before and grinning, holding a soldering iron in one hand and a coil of razor-wire in the other. “What’s this??” He cries. “Where’s the hotel?? Where’s my wife??? Where’s the minibar, the golf-courses, the pool, the restaurant, the free drinks and the sunshine???”
“Ah”, says Satan. “You see, yesterday, we were campaigning. But today, you voted…”
Jeff, this isn’t a joke; I’ve just had a spiritual awakening.
This is from Primitive Technology, a YouTube channel full of unvoiced videos of a guy trying to build useful stuff from scratch out in the Queensland wilderness. He has a scientific approach and a clear love of nature, his work provides a great insight into what was possible for early humans with the tools and methods they had available to them.
reblogging to add even more context:
this is afaik the guy that started the whole “dude with a single simple tool builds a house out of only things he can find in the wilderness” style of videos!
now, what probably came to mind upon reading that are the exploitative, environmentally unconscious, and generally faked ones, but that’s not what he does. Those are imitations spawned by people trying to replicate the success of many of his videos, and not caring what they have to do in order to do it.
instead, his videos are educational, environmentally conscious, and also much more reasonable in scale since they’re legit. and from what i remember he’s not really in it for success, it’s more just something that happened incidentally.
I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.
Oh some of you don't know about the squids. I talked about them in another thread that went kinda viral somewhere or other but one of the reasons you should not swim in the open ocean at night in many parts of the world is that the water starts teeming with these:
And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans! But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators. We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free. In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)
There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:
And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:
There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered. The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:
No for real:
Absolutely! Also, the Humboldt squid will hunt in packs, sometimes with one flashing brightly to draw attention while the others approach in near unseeable camoflage!
Beautiful footage of the nefarious sea demons also :)
Also because I can't reblog every addition together:
Okay where's the other 1199
I absolutely adore Humboldt squid. I saw a doc once where a scientist was cage diving to study them, and one of the squid squeezed it's entire massive body through the cage bars, bit the guy and squeezed right back out.
Why isnt this an animal that's already long gone viral like honey badgers once did. This is the animal that actually gives no fucks. People really are just that obsessed with bigger squids I guess? But the bigger ones frankly come across as big softies in comparison. One big sea monster can never be as intimidating as a thousand coordinated man sized sea monsters.
This is why I thought that if mermaids had a cultural equivalent to lycanthropy it'd be weresquids. Fun fact nocturnal marine life increases activity on the brightest nights ie the full moon.
This is all fascinating but I'm reblogging it exclusively for the phrase "got nearly squidded from existence."
