It Was Worth A Wound

It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!

this is actually really helpful and affirming thanks

*in tears* Thanks kitty, I needed this...

This page from one of my history books looks like a lesbian utopia.

Source: Reclaiming Lost Ground by Neale McGoldrick & Margaret Crocco

Very similar vibes - this 1899 illustration from Puck of butchy (for the time) lesbians looking like the coolest, hottest women to ever walk the earth

Everyone reblog this. Mandatory.

mark, my words. *mark brings me my dictionary* thank you mark

reblog this and put in the tags which capital cities you’ve been to

I love it when a classicist has clearly gotten so lost in the BCE sauce that their perception of time has become deeply warped. Case in point: the article I’m currently reading just described the Byzantine era as “a period relatively modern.”

Stop that’s too funny

objectively, they're right

I'm terrible for this but I'm a palaeontologist so my time perception is even more screwed. My partner was excited about an old stone circle from about 7000 years ago and without thinking I went "oh okay, so not that old".

There’s a quality that certain books/movies/TV shows have that leads me to say, “Yeah, I can see people making fanfiction of that.” It’s something to do, I think, with how tight the story is, how much feels open-ended or like it could be elaborated on.

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.

And sometimes you’ll read or watch something and you’ll say, “Ah, low squiggability,” and then you’ll open tumblr and find out that everyone else seem to think its squiggability was very high indeed.

affirmations when opening a stuck jar:

Riga, Latvia

[image description: photo of a manhole cover featuring a design of a fish walking on two birdlike legs.]

thanks for sending this in @al-the-grammar-geek !

Any day now

people have suddenly started reblogging this post of mine from february 8th, 2012. great bit everybody

Reblog if you're kinda irrelevant and don't know a single person who actively uses tumblr

Sherlock finds a new friend!

Catching their breath.

[x]

This has so much “We did what last night?” vibe!

LOL

I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called “Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers,” which was published in I think 1975? I’ve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and it’s lowkey fascinating

There’s a whole paragraph that’s like “okay, find the keyboard. Don’t panic if it has more keys than a typewriter, that’s normal. Really, it’s fine. The extra keys don’t make things harder. It’s FINE”

Thought this section was particularly interesting:

Can the computer create something? At first glance it seems obvious that it can. Animated computer graphics, with their fluid transitions and whiplash perspectives, look strikingly new. And if one watches the machine doing animation work, there seem to be lengthy periods when the computer is acting “on its own.”

But if one observes these processes in more detail, it becomes clear that creation is not occurring within the machine. First of all, computer graphics are not unique. Computers have yet to generate anything that cannot be done by hand—and usually already has been done. Second, the apparent ability of the computer to “act on its own” is the outcome of thousands of hours of patient human effort to refine its instructions. The computer can manipulate a shape for us if we have already informed it what a shape is, what the rules for shape manipulation are, what this specific shape is, and so forth.

You can start an automobile engine and it will run by itself, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s being creative. It’s just running.

Somebody in 1975 had a better understanding of why artificial intelligence is not in any way “intelligence” than the majority of today’s intellectual minds.