on identity, healing the inner child, fursonas, and cringe culture
this is my only popular post i wont ever mute notifications on bc it means so much to me and im always so happy to read how people have connected with it. if this resonates with you, furry or not, i love you
Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.
Was it because the physicists were super-smart MIT-blackjack-team forerunners who took the casino for everything it was worth? Actually, the complete opposite: they didn’t gamble. At all. After all, they knew their statistics. Most of them were broke grad students who had no intention of throwing away their stipends on fundamental misunderstandings of Poisson processes. As a result the casino gaming floor was dead. Sometimes the winning move really is not to play.
Me the only time I’ve ever been to Vegas - had one beer and didn’t gamble a cent. Funny thing is, they happily welcome back hacker cons, and you’d think hackers would be at LEAST as aware of probability. Apparently not!
When I was a kid living in LA, we went to Vegas pretty regularly, since it was only about 4 hours away. My parents would find coupons in the LA Times in the off season and we’d go for a few days. Our whole family could stay in one of the fancy Strip hotels for like $20 a night, and there were $5 all-you-could-eat buffets with actually good food. Plus the arcades were amazing. And so was the hiking! Which is what we were really there for. Red Rock Canyon, with all its tiny caves that you can easily climb up to, is amazingly fun when you’re a little kid. Our vacations were very much subsidized by gamblers.
Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.
There are… a lot of places where large groups of scientists probably aren’t welcome a second time.
All of those places should be regularly subjected to large groups of scientists.
Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.
Was it because the physicists were super-smart MIT-blackjack-team forerunners who took the casino for everything it was worth? Actually, the complete opposite: they didn’t gamble. At all. After all, they knew their statistics. Most of them were broke grad students who had no intention of throwing away their stipends on fundamental misunderstandings of Poisson processes. As a result the casino gaming floor was dead. Sometimes the winning move really is not to play.
Me the only time I’ve ever been to Vegas - had one beer and didn’t gamble a cent. Funny thing is, they happily welcome back hacker cons, and you’d think hackers would be at LEAST as aware of probability. Apparently not!
When I was a kid living in LA, we went to Vegas pretty regularly, since it was only about 4 hours away. My parents would find coupons in the LA Times in the off season and we’d go for a few days. Our whole family could stay in one of the fancy Strip hotels for like $20 a night, and there were $5 all-you-could-eat buffets with actually good food. Plus the arcades were amazing. And so was the hiking! Which is what we were really there for. Red Rock Canyon, with all its tiny caves that you can easily climb up to, is amazingly fun when you’re a little kid. Our vacations were very much subsidized by gamblers.
Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.
There are… a lot of places where large groups of scientists probably aren’t welcome a second time.
All of those places should be regularly subjected to large groups of scientists.
the first person to turn an apple to sauce… what hubris. no other fruit gets this treatment. well, except for the wretched tomato. but that’s a punishment, because the tomato is morally corrupt.
One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.
(This is obviously a generalization that isn’t true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I’m proceeding from there.)
This “top three priorities” framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”
Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”
It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)
it is maybe a little mean to tell people “hey. by repeatedly saying ‘oh whatever you want!’ 'oh whatever is easier for you!’ 'really don’t worry about me!’ when someone asks you what you want, you are making the situation more uncomfortable and inconvenient for everybody than if you would just state your preference” but i really do feel it needs to be said. oftentimes people are genuinely invested in making you happy + doing something nice for you + catering a small bit of effort to make you more comfortable and by repeatedly trying to make yourself small and unobtrusive you are preventing them from doing these things and dragging out this social situation as they continue to try to help you and you continue to deny them the chance. you’re allowed to have a preference for something. and someone would not ask you what that preference was if they were not ready and willing to cater to it. 'but what if my request is unreasonable—" well it’s not a request if someone is asking You. and if it’s unreasonable then someone will just not do it. but honestly with so much love in my heart i think saying 'i would rather have chocolate than vanilla’ is an easier step than making everyone live through you agonizing over what an inconvenience it would be to express what you want
there’s a file called whatever_YYYYMMDD.csv with data generated every day
every day, we process the day’s data and also reprocess a few days back
the way this is done involves copying over the various whatever_YYYYMMDD.csv files for the last few days from one folder to another
the way this is implemented is via a script that takes the earliest date and latest date we’re processing today, converts them to a number in YYYYMMDD format, and loops between them
not a date. a number.
if one of those numbers is 20240612 and the other is 20240615, this is fine. it just hits every number in between them, which matches up to every existing whatever_YYYYMMDD.csv file in between those dates
if one of those numbers is 20240630 and the other is 20240703, this is slightly less fine. It’s going to check a bunch of numbers that do not correspond to any dates, like 20240646. so it runs dozens more times than necessary, trying to move files that don’t exist. fortunately computers are pretty fast and this adds very little time.
if one of those numbers is 20241230 and the other is 20250102, then instead of checking for seventy or so nonexistent files it checks for some nine thousand or so. each one of those is pretty fast. less than a second. but not, like, much less than a second.
several hours worth of delay in a process that should take seconds, which has been happening longer than i’ve been working here, every year, for a few days around new year’s. which it seems nobody noticed for a number of reasons mostly adding up to ‘several hours worth of delay are invisible unless you’re specifically looking for it and nobody had a reason to look for it until now’
while “January 2nd, 2025” might sound like some far-off date in the distant future, it was in fact last Thursday
Hey, you guys chose these people. This is exactly what “Blue No Matter Who” was always going to lead to. Mindless and indiscriminate support for a political party means the political party will ignore you and chase big donors, and big donors don’t want Trump stopped because his policies are good for them. You fucking idiots were warned, over and over again, that your blind support of the worst Democrats was going to end in disaster, and you refused to hold them accountable in any way at all. Well, congratulations, you got what you wanted.
You people do realise there is no way to keep a party accountable in a two party system that you can’t dislodge, right?
There is no amount of lost elections that will actually hurt the democrats other than the amount that makes them seem unable to ever win.
They only care about having enough ‘strongholds’ where they get to effectively appoint the officials to be able to insider trade and serve Establishment interests, that’s it. They are spineless because they have no purpose other than soaking up the monetary and labor contributions of anyone not in support of the republicans and using them to get lucrative positions.
The Ratchet only turns in one direction, you must use a different mechanism to move it in the other.
the one thing thing funnier than this caption is that the only reason they stopped doing it was that the ferret shit in the tube
That photo makes Felicia’s work seem much more recent than it is. Here’s a picture of the world’s smallest particle physicist herself.
They didn’t stop because she shit in the tube - she had a diaper on because they knew poop would obstruct the particles as well. She eventually stopped running through the tubes because they became too long for her. At that point she was retired and became a pet!
hey boy don’t kill yourself. green’s dictionary of slang is available online and allows you to explore 500 years of english vulgarity. you can search by part of speech, source, time period, etymology, and usage. there’s a whole category for gay slang. they even have specific citations listed so you can see the exact context for yourself. boy did you know that in 1927 “to kneel at the altar” was slang for “to sodomize”
some other hits:
Princess: an effeminate and relatively youthful male homosexual or lesbian (1931-4)
Also a lot of early 20th century vulgarity is recorded in Letter from My Father, which is a collection of letters published by a man who’s dad was, in short, a major slut and human disaster who wrote about his sex life for his son. It’s insane. You can find copies of it online & it’s a wild fucking read (literally!) and I think a really interesting look at the life of a person who goes against our stereotypes of what people in the past were “supposed” to be like.
Anyways feel free to add y'all’s favs to this post. & if you use this for gay historical fanfic please share with the class
note for writers: these are dated to the first time they were recorded, not necessarily to their first use. I imagine for many of these, they came about naturally through spoken language before they were written down anywhere. This is especially true of more underground slang because it’s probably being recorded (in ways we still have) the least. So if you wanna use a term but it’s a little off date-wise, give yourself some wiggle room.
also gonna take this moment to highlight two more i found recently:
Best boy: a sweetheart, a boyfriend, a husband. (1893) [w the obvious equivalent term 'best girl’]
Honeydripper or honeydrips: a sexual partner (1917)
Like. Honeydripper?????? That’s so horny I can’t stop thinking about it. We need to bring THAT back
it really is all of us or bust btw. we cannot accept conditional acceptance of queer people, we cannot accept the exclusion of some in exchange for inclusion of others, it’s all of us or nothing and we have to be so fucking clear about that. don’t let conservatives or terfs or twitter discourse convince you that there’s any other option. don’t let them get away with it. we’re all going to fucking make it and we’re not leaving anybody behind
i love you pubes i love you stomach hair i love you unshaven pits i love you happy trails i love you coarse leg hair i love you untrimmed bushes. i love you body hair
scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon
Based on this post. Reblog and tag what you got on the wheel! In the event this breaches containment; I’m a monsterfucker so be warned that a good chunk of these reflect that.
Apparently today is National Internet Friends Day! So happy there’s a day to acknowledge the love and gratitude you have for the friends in your phone and across the world 💜💞
I used to be like “why has every single blazed post that has ever crossed my dash always without exception been some of the lamest shit I’ve ever seen?” until I realized it’s literally just because by the very nature of the system every post that ever gets blazed is literally hand-picked by the Sort Of People Who Spend Money On Tumblr.
i bet there were guys in the 1800s who were super fucking Reddit about everything, but no one had the right word yet for why those guys were so annoying. so they just had to wonder
Der lästige Kavalier (The Annoying Gentleman), by Berthold Woltze, 1874.
that is a “hello darkness my old friend” face if I ever saw one.
Cybersmith off his shits
keep in mind also that this girl is
A. A teenager, since her hair is almost fully down (the longer skirt and her traveling alone make me think maybe 14-15), and
B. In mourning, as evidenced by her entirely matte and unornamented black dress, gloves, and hat
so this guy is pestering a young girl who’s just lost someone close to her, in absence of clear social cues meant to convey exactly that
I recently saw it pointed out elseTumblr that, a remarkably easy detail to miss, she is going for her hatpin. The clear social cues are about to escalate.
I for one think that is very valid of her and that hatpinning That Guy should still be considered a socially acceptable and perhaps even laudable option.
does anyone have advice for beating sugar addiction 💔 im so over it dude i just want to not feel like garbage
this was my move w nicotine: drink a sip of water every time you crave thing you’re trying to quit
not only did I really successfully get thru the big cold turkey hurdle but I was so dewey and hydrated omg
@time-travel-toke-up I wish you hadn’t left this all in tags! many valid points you’ve made!
its also soooo true that a sweets craving is often a deficiency of some vita or protein.
actually, we crave sweets even when we are dehydrated. every time I want something like candy or cookies I drink a glass of water first but that’s also cause im perma-dehydrated.
soo also love the take on fucking up the water like yesyes make it flavorful! I literally add tea thats actually just whole ass flowers like rose buds and chrysanthemum
I’m big on the “listen to your body” tip but sometimes your body needs a THING and signals you but you can interpret that wrong.
@gatsblergh if you are craving sugar and it’s actually sugar your body needs like for energy, supposedly the best thing to eat is an apple because your body can use those sugars immediately and doesn’t need to process them like it would with the sugar in sweets/baked goods. actually eating and apple will give you more energy than a cup of coffee.
if it’s an oral stim thing (@time-travel-toke-up also mentions in other tags) try some other snacky thing that isn’t sweets. I fuck up a bag of pistachios. they’re as much an activity as a snack- I know they’re spenny but personally, it’s often between a bag of chips or a bowl of pistachios, and in the end, the amount of chips I’d need to buy compared to pistachios does make the pistachios cheaper I the long run. I also buy that shit in bulk. also I know they’re salty not sweet snack but tbh, once you’ve had a palette cleanser for sweets, they become too sweet! I used to be a mad sweet toother but my palette eventually shifted to prefer salty when I stopped eating cookies for a snack and started eating like, olives. or literally just carrots. etc.
lastly I heard a tip from a friend who trained dogs and I am about to put it into practice w stuff in my life but: 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months. for the first 3 days of changing a habit, its gonna be real hard. after 3 weeks you’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel. after 3 months, look around, everything can have changed by then. I’m using this atm w my phone addiction and damn now that I’m out of the glowing rectangle, not only can I BREATHE, but I look around at everyone else nose to phone and im like I literally feel so sorry for you.
Mutely observing as the lewd query was entered into the prompt, a pioneering female archaeologist featured in a Google Doodle bore silent witness to local man Daniel Thornstein’s search for Zootopia porn, sources reported Friday. Harriet Boyd Hawes, an early 20th-century American archaeologist known for her groundbreaking work in Aegean antiquities, reportedly looked on wordlessly as Thornstein typed “judy hopps feet” and “judy hopps stinky feet” into the search bar below a digital illustration of a shovel and a dig site.
Could you explain to someone who doesn’t know computers (or link to an explanation) why garbage collected languages are so much less efficient than languages with manual memory management? What is a human programmer doing with all those let or malloc and free statements that a compiler can’t do? (Or maybe does way more than necessary?)
this is a really complex question that has led to a lot of programmer arguments over the past few decades.
first it is necessary to distinguish between memory management strategies and the languages that favour them: many of the early languages that used automatic garbage collection did so for convenience and safety rather than speed, and since they provided many other features like dynamic dispatch and dynamic typing that are difficult to optimise they became known as “slow languages”.
on the other hand you can use automatic garbage collection with C, but the nature of the language makes it difficult to optimise, so paradoxically the GC in a “fast language” not originally designed for it can be slower than that in a slow language that was.
if we ignore the rest of the language then the fastest memory management strategy is the “null garbage collector” that never attempts to recover unused memory, this sounds like a joke, but for short-lived processes (old-school inetd servers, the famous cruise missile example) you really can’t beat it since malloc can be implemented with a single pointer increment and free is a no-op!
for longer-lived processes this shades into region-based memory management, where you tag your allocations and then throw them all away in one go at the end, for example a compiler might do lots of little allocations while compiling a particular module but then not need them once that module is finished, in which case it can drop the entire region at once instead of freeing each one individually, reducing overhead.
if you don’t know anything about regions then you have to use a more generic strategy, like generational garbage collectors that assume most allocated objects are short-lived and keep them in a “nursery” region unless they live long enough that they get copied out etc. this starts to take more work though as you are tracing through objects at runtime to determine lifetime relationships that ideally would be known at compile time.
many programs that ostensibly use “manual” memory management are actually using reference counting, in which case the programmer has already thrown up their hands and admitted they don’t know how long these objects are going to live so they need the program to check them at runtime; reference counting that traces the dead objects ends up being the dual of garbage collection that traces the live objects (see the paper A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection) and which one ends up faster can depend on the workload.
automatic garbage collection also gets better when you have more RAM, as if you have more RAM you can afford to waste more by running the collector less frequently, which reduces the amount of tracing you need to do; RAM is much cheaper than programmer time for most applications these days.
anyway I’m kind of rambling, for a fast language you want to be able to express as much as possible about your object lifetimes statically at compile time (see Rust for some simplistic examples of this) and use an appropriate garbage collection strategy that is suitable for your workload for the dynamic objects.
Programmers can look at a piece of data and say “I’m certain that this won’t be needed again by this point in the program so I can throw it away now” whereas most languages are not structured in a way that allow compilers to do the same, so they have to make those decisions dynamically at run time which comes with a performance cost.
right, although to throw it away throw it away throw it away now on a principled basis requires proof that you are holding the last live reference to that object, which most languages are not capable of actually proving, which is why relying on the programmer introduces so many pernicious memory allocation bugs.
Rust solves a limited case of this with unique references, but the general case remains in industry parlance a bitch.
I mean, technically yes, but that limited case is pretty damn comprehensive. I can’t think of many situations where I’ve actually needed to use reference counters aside from concurrent shit, in which case you’d probably need some kind of run time locking system even if you were writing in C. Or, to put it another way, I don’t think there are many situations where I would be comfortable declaring that it’s safe to free but trusty ol borrowck wouldnt, even if such situations do in theory exist.
the obvious case is any tree structure with references that go up instead of down, which is incredibly common and just a generalisation of the circular linked list case which Rust cannot describe without reference counting, unsafe code, or indirection through integer indices (but I repeat myself).
oh…her name is uzi doorman because…her father’s business…is doors…
after being so used to him as Jax hearing Michael Kovach voice a literally polar opposite character is weeeeiiirrrddd
No joke I really applaud the character designers for this show, having the upper half of all the characters’ faces be screens and prime material for visual gags was a great idea. I’m liking this show already
aaaah the disassembly drones sleep like bats that’s such a neat detail!
Ship dynamics are always like Sunshine and Sunshine protector~ Cinnamon roll and their grumpy one 🤗 Well what about 2 cunts. They’re both cunts and that’s the dynamic. cunt4cunt.
When I say that Trump has no original play in his playbook this is what I fucking mean. This where America is back sliding into Nazi Germany.
With that said to the people who voted 3rd party fuck you, fuck maga, fuck republicans and fuck you to the people who didn’t vote.
Everyone who knows a tiny bit of history saw this coming.
💯
We saw it ten fucking years ago, some of us knew it was a done deal by 9-11, or by the time we were dealing with another ILLEGITIMATE PRESIDENT and the “hanging chads” (guess which SC “justices” worked on THAT fiasco).
The fruition of the nazi “Long Game” to install their “thousand year rule”.
The US has been back-pedaling into fascism since Ronald Regan. It’s just that it now finally reached a critical point, no longer able to stay hidden.
“Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.
“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”
People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.
“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.””
Everyone should read this article about “DOGE” tearing apart USAID (and then read more reporting about how they are being allowed to do the same to other US federal entities). Elon Musk and his minions are violating our highest laws and destroying lives and livelihoods in the US and abroad. USAID is less than 1% of the federal budget— this isn’t about cost-cutting or “investigating fraud”. It’s about cruelty and seeing how much unlawful devastation and psychological warfare they can get away with, with the intention to repeat this process at one federal agency after another. They already have access to IT systems at the Treasury, NOAA, and other agencies, and have taken over OPM (essentially HR for the federal government), using the latter to send demeaning and threatening e-mail blasts to civil servants.
I’m urging everyone who reads this to recognize what’s happening here and how abhorrent and frightening it is. I wager that even most people who wanted Trump back didn’t want a centibillionaire technocrat making unilateral decisions on which parts of the federal government to “feed into the wood chipper” (as he has described his team’s actions at USAID in a recent post on X, The Everything App).
Please call your elected representatives and urge them to act against Musk now— before his actions make our legislative branch totally irrelevant.
I’ve been seeing posts about Musk’s coup-in-progress going around on here, but I feel like a lot of people still aren’t aware of the extent of it, and I really want to help get the word out. I’m heartsick for all the civil servants at USAID and beyond. Some of them, their unions, and some Democratic congresspeople and others are speaking out, but these workers need us everyday Americans to speak out for them, too.
Thank you for reading. And anyone who isn’t American, please keep us in your thoughts.
