A computer science student named Priyanjali Gupta, studying in her third year at Vellore Institute of Technology, has developed an AI-based model that can translate sign language into English.
This is what we need AI for. Not generating pictures using millions of stolen pieces of art, or generating shitty false articles using the stolen work of hundreds of thousands of writers. AI can be good, and it can be used for good things. This is an incredible feat and I hope Priyanjali gets the recognition and support she deserves for this amazing project.
I was today years old when i found out that i was allowed time off to vote. Something no boss has ever told me.
Reblogging now but I’m also scheduling this to post again at the end of October, when folks may need a reminder that they may have right to time off work to vote.
i do think it is a shame that a lot of gerard ways earnest approach to discussing their psychosis, mania, and more recently, their thoughts of committing violence, is often treated as the butt of a joke or simply watered down to “girl you’re so strange hahaha <3” as if it is not an attempt to appeal to feelings not everyone experiences and it is genuinely admirable of them to go on stage to talk about these things. like they’re generally stigmatised beliefs and it’s like. you all do understand that this is a real experience, yeah? it’s not an oddity, it’s quite hurtful to genuinely reach out and have your authenticity be treated as a joke because someone finds it unfathomable that someone lives this way.
wait do people read first person stories and think they’re the ones in the story???
Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like “I would not do that” and I don’t understand that mindset.
First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn’t about you???? At least I thought it wasn’t. What am I missing? I’ve always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character’s mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.
I see first person stories like I’m sitting down across from the narrator getting the wildest tea imaginable
One of my favourite parts of working with kids is like… Very Gently subverting their idea of gendered topics… Like if a girl goes ‘no, sharks are a boy thing’ and you go “UM ACTUALLY THATS STUPID AND INCORRECT” they get freaked out, but if instead u go “Are you sure? Cause I think sharks are awesome, here’s a scale picture of a Megalodon” it’ll blow their tiny mind and they’ll be shitting themselves over it for days. 100% effective, 10/10 recommend
Good example of this happened in a class I taught recently. Kids were making predictions about a text we’d be studying based on an illustration of the character: boy with spiky blonde hair wearing a pink football kit.
The first kid to respond said, “I think this is a girl that likes to play football.” I said “what gave you the idea that the character is a girl?” Obviously they pointed out the pink, to which I replied how pink was one of my fave colours and they just looked at me wide-eyed. Then the next said, “No it’s got to be a boy. He’s got short spiky hair.” Of course, I then listed all the female people they might’ve heard of who also have short spiky hair and, honestly, the puzzled looks on their little faces were priceless.
Anyway, they continued to debate which gender the character was using phrases like: “but he … and look at his …” or “so why is she … and maybe her …” which was the point I decided to stop them and ask: “If we can’t be sure whether the character is a he or she, should we really be using those pronouns?” And I kid you not, without any persuasion from me and after only the briefest of discussions, these children unanimously agreed that the best pronoun to use would be “they” until they knew their gender for certain. They then continued their discussion using gender neutral terms throughout without any fuss whatsoever. And these are 6 and 7 year olds.
Hey the message of this post is great and all but ‘a scale picture of a meglodon’ what the f u CK
Honestly my seven year old neice screamed once I told her that girls can have short hair and now shes pestering her mum for short and also blue hair
By the way here’s a scale picture of a Megalodon
“Who cares about rules?” And things to that effect are great ones to use on kids. I’ve had many a young child insist I have to be a girl because I have tits, I just hit em with the old “I dont care I do what I want!” And it always works.
my favourite thing in english subtitles for asian dramas is when the translation is constantly talking about chess when we can see with our own eyeballs that the actual game being played is go
“you’re being being reckless with your pawns😏” “i’ll be the one to take your king 😎” and the whole time the board looks like this
it’s so strange to me that so many people genuinely seem to think ‘sexual attraction to trans people’ is the antonym of transphobia. like coming onto a post about transphobia - or, more often, transmisogyny - with 'lmao nobody in these replies slurps girldick or eats boypussy’ is just so absurd. what other axis of oppression do you treat like this? do you ask racists why they don’t want to fuck asians and black people, or can you perhaps realise that in that case is it not only absurdly inappropriate to counterpose the two, but that sexual fetishism of oppressed people is itself a common, if not ubiquitous form of bigotry?
Was just watching my crested gecko change colors and thinking how cool it is we live in a world where some animals just can decide 'yeah, I'm tired of tan, lets throw some brown on that instead'.
some of the best writing advice I’ve ever received: always put the punch line at the end of the sentence.
it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:
doing it wrong:
She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.
doing it right:
Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.
Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.
This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.
Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:
She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.
Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:
She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.
Because the ghost is in the middle of the sentence, it’s presented like it’s a mere shelf-blocking pest, and thus less important than the REAL goal of this sentence: the grape jelly. The ghost is diminished, and now you get the impression that the character is probably not too surprised by ghosts in her pantry. Maybe it lives there. Maybe she sees a dozen ghosts a day. In any case, it’s not a big deal. Even though both sentences convey the exact same information, they set up the reader to regard the presence of ghosts very differently in this story.
some of the best writing advice I’ve ever received: always put the punch line at the end of the sentence.
it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:
doing it wrong:
She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.
doing it right:
Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.
Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.
This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.
Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:
She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.
Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:
She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.
Because the ghost is in the middle of the sentence, it’s presented like it’s a mere shelf-blocking pest, and thus less important than the REAL goal of this sentence: the grape jelly. The ghost is diminished, and now you get the impression that the character is probably not too surprised by ghosts in her pantry. Maybe it lives there. Maybe she sees a dozen ghosts a day. In any case, it’s not a big deal. Even though both sentences convey the exact same information, they set up the reader to regard the presence of ghosts very differently in this story.
A bread is one of the most vulnerable animals on earth of all time. It can die in a number of different ways, which include being smashed, being old, being rottened, being crumpled up, getting too hot, having water put on it, and having water not on it but being in the air a lot (the water (mist)). The bread’s favorite way to die is being eaten, but the world is a complicated place, and it does not care for what the bread wants, and so it dies in a variety of ways which are not the preference of the bread.
Humans are considered the bread’s natural predator, and also, are the bread’s mommy (make/give birth to the bread). Humans are a large species of ant or plant or ele phant with two grasping appendages which they use to give birth to the bread. They also have one hole which eats the bread, and some other holes, which the bread is not allowed near, generally.
Some bread can go in the fridge. Some bread has fruit in it. Scientists don’t know why, as putting fruit in the bread is considered yucky, and scientists have difficulty imagining an organism that likes yucky things.
There is the anteater, which is an organism that likes yucky things, but scientists do not need to imagine it, because it is real.
String identified: A a t t a aa at a t. t ca a t a, c c g a, g , g tt, g c , gttg t t, ag at t t, a ag at t t t g t a a t (t at (t)). T a’ at a t g at, t t a ccat ac, a t t ca at t a at, a t a at a c a t t c t a.
a a c t a’ ata at, a a, a t a’ (a/g t t t a). a a a ag c at at at t t gag aag c t t g t t t a. T a a c at t a, a t , c t a t a a, ga.
a ca g t g. a a t t. ctt ’t , a ttg t t a c c, a ctt a ct agg a ga tat c tg.
T t atat, c a ga tat c tg, t ctt t t ag t, ca t a.
Closest match: Saccharomyces pastorianus strain CBS 1483 mitochondrion, complete genome Common name: Lager Beer Yeast
if i had a dollar for every pixel in this image i’d have 15 cents
if i had a dollar for every ounce of rage i felt in my body after i read this comment i would have enough money to buy a cannon to fire at you
actually I did the math, they would have $225, not $0.15
sis i’m right here….
if i had a dollar i would buy a can of soda :)
while you’re there could you buy me an apply juice please?
sorry i only have a dollar
:(
hey I just realized my friend Vriska is right, they would have $22500 not $225
^my friend Vriska
if i had $22,500 i would buy a can of soda and an apply juice
You can buy anything you want with $22500
yeah and they want soda and apply juice
apply juice to what
directly to the forehead
Great post guys
String identified: a a a t ag ’ a ct a a a c ag t at a t ct a g t a ca t at acta t at, t a $, t $. ’ gt …. a a a a ca a :) ’ t c a a c a? a a a :( t a a gt, t a $ t $ ^ a a $, a ca a a a a c ca atg at t $ a a t at a a a c a c t at ct t t a Gat t g
Closest match: Barbus barbus genome assembly, chromosome: 1 Common name: Common Barbel
Like, I support the fuck out of trans girls and young trans women, don’t get me wrong. But it would be nice to see some more pics of middle-aged and older trans women, too.
Speaking as a slightly older-than-tumblr-average trans woman (I’m 41), we’re out here. It’s just that most of my peers don’t hang out on Tumblr, they’re on Facebook or Twitter.
I’ll be 37 this year. Wow … that hurt to say, a little. But yeah, we’re here. <3
39 here, and quite proud of it. Also not on Facebook for what it’s worth. I like the peers I have here on Tumblr. :)
*sigh* fine. FINE.
i’m… 39. i just turned 39.
i’m only owning up to it because i was terrified of transitioning at 34 and i would do anything to alleviate that fear for someone else.
we are NEVER talking about this again tho
35 now (just got home from a shoot and an outcall when this was taken)
… the women above me give me lots of hope and joy
THIS IS MAKING ME SO HAPPY OMG
It’s always really nice seeing pictures of older trans people, because quite often on here it’s the transitioning teenagers, and it’s scary because it makes it feel like we don’t have a future
I’m not sure that people who aren’t in academia know how disruptive the loss of Internet Archive is for us.
I’ve been working on a big project all week, and suddenly losing access to the dozens of out-of-print and out of date radio astronomy books that my library doesn’t have has thrown a massive wrench in the works. A lot of them are pretty hard to pirate, too! Most of what the IA has and does is stuff that most people will never have a reason to seek and nobody has a financial incentive to store, and that’s precisely why it’s so valuable.
Hey just adding from the comments, OP clarified IA is not GONE. It’s just down right now due to a malicious hacking incident. The information in the archives is still there, just inaccessible to the public right now.
The IA workers are currently slowly working to bring it back up, but are moving slow and cautious so as to avoid further issues, and hopefully implement security measures to make something like this less likely to happen again.
Do not despair, unless you have a current research project that is.
The (hopefully temporary) loss of the Internet Archive has negatively affected my daily life. There is music on there I can’t find anywhere else, books and films and radio broadcasts that simply don’t exist elsewhere online. There are research materials there that I need for my wip and it will be a lesser work without access to that information. It’s a crucial keystone of the online ecosystem and its absence is real and noticeable
Literally sick to death of twitter throwing a fit every single day about art depicting visibly trans people, GNC trans people, etc, and calling it a hateful caricature. ESPECIALLY when often it turns out to be explicitly based on someone the artist is friends with, and people still say the most horrible things about their appearance.
Like, I get it. Many trans people feel defensive because there absolutely are a lot of shitty caricatures of us. And since two out of the three ‘controversies’ I’ve seen most recently were transmasc artists drawing transfem characters - Yes, trans artists should think about the ways they depict other types of trans people and ideally not stereotype them and show their diversity too.
But all too often people just project their own issues and judgements on a particular piece of art and basically end up making up a guy to get mad at.
This is the one I saw today -
It’s not even a drawing of a trans woman, turns out. According to the trans man artist who drew it, the piece is called 'genderless’ and it’s based on a real person he knows. It’s at a gay bar.
And it bothers me that people were so quick to assume, and many even to double down on gendering the person depicted in this drawing. This is just a clear representation of a trans person whose gender and sex are ambiguous, intentionally. They are intentionally visibly trans, but crucially, not in a way that tells you anything about what type of trans person they are.
Or do these people just not realise there are transmasc people who look exactly like this? Who have stubble and hairy chests and small, 'deflated’ breasts. It’s not uncommon at all. There are trans women who look like this. There are nonbinary people and genderfluid people and agender people and genderqueer people who look like this.
So it’s honestly really shitty to assume a trans artist just decided to draw a hateful caricature at a gay bar instead of simply representing one of these people. Which is what actually happened.
Frankly it just feels like weird respectability politics, and some people having a disgust response to a visibly non cis, non comforming body presented in a neutral way. And finding ways to justify that after the fact.
(At least in some cases. I have no issues with trans women who didn’t personally like it and suggested at least the name of the art piece should be available for context in a little plaque or something. That makes sense!)
Hot take even trans people who “look like” transphobic caricatures deserve to be celebrated and perhaps we should instead be targeting people who think looking like that is a bad thing.
YEAH thank you!! Like I don’t know how that’s not obvious to more people
There were so many replies just absolutely insulting this person’s appearance and reinforcing the idea that looking like this is wrong or disgusting. Someone said “my partner looks like this and I think they’re beautiful” and got told they were insulting their partner with the comparison. As if looking like this is some unthinkable flaw
i’ll always be happy to spend the time here with you
gee i wonder who i wrote this post for 😏 *slyly nudges my mutuals who are lined up like dominos but does it a little too hard so the first one falls over and then the rest follow in a conga line of destruction that bruises at least several peoples shins and i panic and run away in the ensuing smoke and chaos while they’re all distracted*
“don’t mass reblog/like :/” coward. fool. somebody just went through and liked and reblogged 64 things from my blog in the span of half an hour at most. and i’ve never felt more alive in my life
This isn’t Instagram, my darlings. It’s not considered creepy (except by people imported from Instagram and frankly they need to learn the culture HERE before trying to boss anyone around) or weird or particularly distressing. Many of us don’t even look at our notifications to realize that you’ve done it.
And frankly, I put that on my blog to bring me some joy. If it brings you joy too, put it on your blog along with the next fifty posts in the same theme. (If you’re reblogging my fics, thank you, I love you 3000.)
newbie asked if we’re supposed to look out for ‘red flags’ in interlibrary loan requests in reference to a request a patron had made for a book about cannibalism. she was looking expectantly at me like she was expecting me to be equally aghast at this……..girl why would you work at a library if you want to play book police
I’m fascinated to know what kind of world this girl lives in. For what reason are those books in the library at all if not to be checked out and read? Are they there as honeypots for Problematic People™? If you check out a Red Flag Book™, you’ve fallen into the Evil Person Trap™ and need to be taken in for reeducation, I suppose.
I know I just restating the point of that post but respecting religious freedom will sometimes require you to respect someone’s belief that religious beliefs are categorically untrue, and there are a lot of people who are unable to handle this, and even more people who think they agree with this but haven’t really grappled with what it means.
Something that a lot of religious folks don’t seem to realize the extent to which non-religious people, more than any other religious minority, are expected to walk on eggshells around other people’s beliefs at the expense of their own for the sake of social decorum, in a way which no one else is expected to do with theirs.
To name a bit of an example I have personal experience with. When I was mourning my cousin a couple years ago, I was constantly faced with the situation of people trying to comfort me from a religious perspective.
And whenever this topic comes up, the conversation is always about how “you have to be mindful of their intentions, they’re trying to reach out to you and comfort you in the way they know, they’re being nice, you have to appreciate the effort they’re making, you have to meet them where they’re at and appreciate their attempt to help you”. Which is what I did, of course. In this situation, replying to their attempt to comfort you with any reminder that you don’t believe in this stuff is considered a big social faux-pas that will make you look like an asshole. And to an extent I agree, it can be rude and needlessly combative.
But somethin I feel it’s conspicuously absent from any conversation surrounding this type of situation like. Any interrogation of *why* is going “sorry, I don’t believe in any of this, this means nothing to me” considered a bigger social faux-pas than trying to comfort a grieving person with religious beliefs you know they don’t hold.
Why, even when you’re literally grieving, the onus is on you as a non-religious person to be mindful of other’s worldviews and tread lightly and meet them where they’re at and not contradict what they believe in and never the other way around.
I don’t think it should be rude or needlessly combative- I don’t like it when Christian’s start spouting at me when I’m grieving. I understand they mean well but it comes off as tone death and frankly kinda emotionally manipulative to do this.
Religions and cults often “get new converts” from exactly this, people who lost someone, etc. are way easier to convince than just some random person, so it’s understandable that it feels “emotionally manipulative”.
Yeah that’s kinda what I’m getting at here-I haven’t experienced this particular brand of Christianity much PERSONALLY (mostly because I’m young) but like this SHOULDNT be acceptable behavior and the fact that so many atheists I know have experienced this and it’s considered RUDE for us to put out foot down about it is-
The thing about Cottagecore is that is a fetishized aesthetic of country life, divorced from labor and idealized by a primarily urban audience with a backward looking ethos of tradition. They are not prepared for the stresses of a rural life: farming; harvesting; tapping pumpkins to ensure none of them have been replaced with flesh; losing out on income by having to use one of your pigs in a blood sacrifice to paint protective sigils over your doors and windows; checking cracks and chimneys for the flesh-vines of the Pumpkin Lord; having to decide, before the Growth is complete, whether that’s really your tradwife or an amassment of vines, leaves, and blood in the shape of your tradwife; ignoring their desperate pleas that “I’m me! No! No!” as you burn them alive, realizing too late you picked wrong; and the exploitative corporate nature of commercial farming in 2024. All seen through a deeply colonial lens, of course
When I made this post I did not expect it to be an effective test of which Tumblr users actually read a post fully before reblogging, and yet
“Truscum/transmeds are the only ones who really care about trans people.”
Never mind that that’s not true; it’s outright manipulation of vulnerable people.
anyway, skye is a boy and i support him way fucking more than i would ever support truscum
I fixed it.
@vince-dafreak anyway you dont get to play god and decide peoples gender for them and you being a trans man doesnt give you authority over others peoples presentations and identities!
THANK YOU FOR FIXING THIS POST YOU’RE BLESSED
Truscums: wants you to hate yourself and kiss cis people’s asses
Trans people: want you to love yourself, dysphoric or little dysphoria
reblogging for the fixed editions.
I got so pissed when I saw the OP, then got all happy at the reblogs. Skye is a man too dang it!
-Aemeon
This is literally that “I like gay people who are quiet about it” post but in a different flavor
whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.
and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.
