ah yes

It isn't easy for me either.

process:

Portrait of Mevrautje Inej

inspired by the amazing fic Serves You Right by @linearao3, for all your undercover kanej needs, incl kaz being very into playing inej's servant ;)

[THE BASTARD OF THE BARREL]

INEJ GHAFA: “And you? What do you want, Kaz?”

SHIVERS [Heroic: Success] Oh shit. You want her.

HALF LIGHT [Easy: Success] This is really bad. Would you die for her?

CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Success] I might.

HALF LIGHT [Easy: Success] You would, wouldn’t you. You stupid idiot. What are you going to do?

DRAMA [Medium: Success] Say something. Something romantic. You’re standing at the rail of a ship. The setting is with you. Show her your heart.

HALF LIGHT [Impossible: Failure] Be vulnerable? Who are you fucking kidding, buddy?

YOU: “To die buried under the weight of my own kruge.”

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

(link to original)

"All this digital art stuff, you know, it goes way over my head. But my wife, y'see, she has this cousin Lou. Now Lou's a real smart cookie, knows everything from Blender to Clip Studio, but the one thing they won't touch is AI. Says it wastes a whole lot of electricity for something that only looks good at a glance.

See, a computer, it can't think through things like a human can. You or I, when we look at a drawing of an apple, we can compare it to real apples we've seen. If you show us a drawing of some orange thing with spikes coming out every which way, well, we can tell you that sure doesn't look like an apple.

But a computer? All a computer can do is look at pictures of apples. And if you give that computer enough pictures of apples that are a little bit orange, or a little bit bumpy, well. It might just decide that spiky orange thing is an apple too. It takes a whole lot of pictures of apples to get the computer mostly good at guessing when things are apples or not.

Now, that's bad enough when you just want your computer to tell you what it sees. When you want a computer to make an image, though, that's where Lou says you really run into trouble. You put a piece of paper in front of me, give me a pencil, and tell me to draw an apple, it won't win any awards. But it'll be a new drawing. Nobody's ever drawn that exact same drawing the exact same way before.

But if you take your computer that's gotten pretty good at guessing when things are apples, and you tell it "okay, draw me an apple", it can't make a completely new drawing of an apple. Instead, it'll take the pictures you've given it and mash 'em together. Maybe, at the end, you won't be able to tell which pictures it used, but if you ask it for enough drawings of apples, you'll start seeing patterns...

I'm sorry, I'll get out of your hair. I know you have to get back to your painting.

Just one more thing... how many fingers does that man in the corner have?"

Columbo in compromising positions

I KNOW! YOU KNOW!

Him: you better not be a sultry coquettish alcoholic deadbeat father when I get there

Me:

— Kurt Vonnegut (via lazypacific)

i've put together a recommended reading list titled WHAT DO WE DO AFTER THE REVOLUTION FAILS: A PRIMER

the list gets its title from an essay by george jackson published in the black panther newspaper on august 28, 1971— in it, jackson discusses the failures of revolutionary movements, failures of reform, and the questions and issues necessary to tackle in "raising a positive mobilization of revolutionary consciousness in a mass that has gone through a contra-positive, authoritarian process"

in other words, what do we do after the revolution fails?

part of the work of raising revolutionary consciousness is education; i'm aiming to do my part by providing some resources that i have found particularly motivating and consciousness-raising irt my own political growth

this recommended reading list is a living document. the titles included will be updated with pdf links as they are found and archived. these sources are recommended not as gospels, nor should they be viewed without meaningful criticism, but are beneficial starting points for critique and revolutionary thought to begin

if you have questions about any of these titles, want assistance in finding copies, or want to talk about any of these topics, message me! i find it hugely important to do my part to help folks educate themselves and raise their revolutionary consciousness; no one does this work alone, and if you are feeling stuck/isolated/overwhelmed by what to do next, let's walk together

i really really liked the lil digital care package idea from @boombox-fuckboy, so here, have some lil recs and goodies from me !!

here is a link to a google drive folder. in there you'll find pdfs of:

games and podcasts:

last but not least, here is a great site for tv shows and movies, and if you're looking for anime/manga, go here, because the "never ever share your 🏴‍☠️ links!!!!!!" people are Wrong, and also you should download whatever you want whenever you can so you have it Forever

i cannot hate myself into a version of me i will love.

i cannot punish myself in any way that will unmake the past.