#to think that I found about the existence of this individual on wikipedia when i was doing research for a fic set in the sahara lmao

[gyunikum]

tagged by @davidstirlings thank you so much :3

rules: list ten books that have stayed with you in some way, don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard - they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.

I'm not really an avid book reader so these books are all I can remember:

Operation Salam - Kuno Gross, Michael Rolke, András Zboray Basically a Hungarian desert explorer who was chosen chosen by the nazis to go to North Africa during the Second World War because of his previous experiences in the Sahara, the book tells in GREAT detail his and his team's preparation and execution a daring mission to drive across where no one has driven before in the Great Sand Sea to get two spies into Aswan, and then Allied occupied Cairo. The book is filled with archived reports from MI5, telegrams, photos from private collections, as well as the authors own photos following Almásy László's trail in 2011. Oh, and the English Patient was based off of Almásy László. Also also I got an email from Mr. Zboray when I ordered the book wishing me to enjoy the book lol

Special Forces Brothers in Arms: Eoin & Ambrose McGonigal - Patric McGonigal This is one of those books I never thought I would read before, but the TV series SAS Rogue Heroes made me so so so interested in Eoin McGonigal that I wanted to know more about him. Just... to see glimpses into humans like us, before and during WW2.... puts things into perspective.

Az Ismeretlen Szahara (The Unknown Sahara) - Almásy László Written in the 30s, detailing one of his expeditions into the western part of Sahara. The adoration with which he writes about the desert and its cultures really captivated me. If i could talk with one historical figure, Almásy László would be it. I think every Hungarian should know about him. I could go on for days about him. This is one of his best books.

A Pál Utcai Fiúk (The Paul Street Boys) - Molnár Ferenc Properly traumatised at the ripe age of... idek 13? By having to read this book for school, I couldn't appreciate it until I was an adult.

Rupert Brooke: The completed poems Okay, this is the odd one out, because it's not a proper book per se. But. I love these poems.

Blackwing - Ed Mcdonald I've yet to finish the second book, but the world building, the setting and the atmosphere really captivated me, and though I've read the book years ago, sometimes I still get flashes of images from scenes. There are magically created wasteland, abominations, corruption, hopelessness, asshole gods, and Light being a thread-like material woven in looms to create magic! Fucking love it.

The Raven Boys - Maggie Stiefvater One of the only YA books that I love. It's been ages since I read it, and I may not enjoy it by now, but it will stay with me forever.

Kings of the Wyld - Nicholas Eames Really good fantasy book about a group of retired rockstar-like adventurers who get together for one last ride to save one of the members' daughter stuck in a distant city under invasion.

Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo I just. The pinnacle of found family. Mwah.

And, that's it lol. There are some other books I've read, but I can't remember them to save my life. And I don't want to list off all of Almásy's books lol.

imma tag... uh @katinkulta @jerichoes @jerevision @lintubintu no pressure though!

#thank you so much for the tag i enjoyed looking back to these books!! #i really gotta finish ed mcdonalds book #like literally i will take any and all chances to talk about almásy lászló #to think that I found about the existence of this individual on wikipedia when i was doing research for a fic set in the sahara lmao

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

Today I am thinking about weaving.

I can knit and crochet, but those crafts didn't exist in Roman times. Any historically accurate Roman cloth must be woven. So when a little potholder loom jumped into my shopping basket for 50 cents, it felt like a sign I should learn.

One potholder that was 50% yarn and 50% weird gaps later, I looked up a tutorial, and realized why the damn thing was 50 cents. I needed a better, more adaptable loom. And, because I am a cheapskate and slightly loony, I decided to make one instead of buying it.

So, how does this thing work?

First, you string the warp threads up and down, around the pegs. Here, I made a zigzag shape. Then, you use a needle or shuttle to weave more yarn over and under the warp, horizontally, back and forth. This produces woven fabric.

Some looms weave from the top, some from the bottom. This Greek urn shows two weavers working from the top. The left weaver uses a rod to compact the woven fabric upward, keeping it even and sturdy. The right weaver is passing an oval-shaped shuttle through the warp threads to form another row.

Most Roman looms would have looked like this, with the finished cloth at the top. Unlike my looms, these are warp-weighted. That means you keep the warp yarns taut by hanging weights at the bottom, rather than through a bottom row of pegs.

Warp-weighted looms also have a big advantage over my little potholder loom: you can easily create multiple sheds.

A "shed" is a temporary gap between lifted strands and non-lifted strands. Instead of having to go over and under each strand individually, you raise the entire shed, then pull the shuttle or needle straight through. This saves lots of time! Then, to weave the next row, you close the shed, lift up a different set of threads to create a new shed, and send the shuttle/needle through the other direction.

On a warp-weighted loom, the sheds are opened by loops called heddles (H), which are attached to a heddle rod (G). When the rod is down, shed (1) is open (middle diagram). When you pull the rod up, shed (1) closes and shed (2) opens instead (right diagram). Most warp-weighted looms also have a pair of forks you can rest the heddle rod on, to free your hands.

Here, there are three heddle rods and sets of forks, the heddles are white, and the warp thread is red. This gives you four different sheds, and the potential to weave very complex patterns indeed. Not bad for a device invented over 6500 years ago!

I liked the multiple heddle-rod design so much, I tried incorporating it into my DIY loom, too. I've tested both yarn and paperclips as heddles:

I actually got both sheds and heddle-rods working, too. Which is pretty cool for a lap loom - every other lap loom I found only has one shed, so you have to go over-under the individual threads on alternate rows.* More time-consuming. However, the sheds here are narrow, and I'll need a smaller and smoother shuttle to pass through them smoothly. This wouldn't be an issue on a warp-weighted loom, where the warp hangs freely downward, and can move more flexibly with the heddles.

Anyway. I may get a "real" loom at some point, but I wanted to build one first, and I think it gave me more appreciation for just how resourceful ancient weavers were. They created technology, clothing, and artwork out of very basic materials, and civilization depended on these skills.

Now, I need to go finish the...whatever the hell it will be. Big thanks to Wikipedia and to the lovely Youtubers who make this craft easier to learn. I think it'll be a lot of fun.

(*Edit - found out a rotating heddle bar can make two sheds on a lap loom! Exciting!!)

#jlrrt essays #weaving #textiles

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

I've recently heard about the book The Gods are Thirsty by Tanith Lee. Is it any good or accurate? Thank you.

I’d never actually read the book, but seeing as it could be found for free on Internet Archive I went ahead and read the first 100 pages (three chapters). I figured the historical accuracies and inaccuracies presented there might be able to serve as a sample for the whole 500+ pages book. My findings I think are best presented in a bullet list:

First off, there are things that are clearly made up but I suppose rather harmless at the same time. Here we can for example include Fréron being the one who introduced Camille to Lucile and her family, as well as Robespierre having a dog named Spartan that got run over by a carriage and died in late 1789. We have nothing concreate that stands against these things being possible, but at the same time there’s nothing suggesting they took place either. Someone who doesn’t know that will however be very prone to believe them, which could prove troublesome were they to forget from where they’ve learned it.

Then there are things that, like those listed above, are embellishments, but that I would argue are more problematic, since they actually change, make up or add onto actual people’s beliefs and/or actions. Here we for example have a part about Danton arguing that God doesn’t exist, when, IRL, there seems to be no hard evidence for Danton being either an atheist or a believer. On the eve of the storming of the Bastille, Camille leaves a note for Lucile’s father, telling him to keep his family safe, when no such note has actually been found. In another part, Camille remembers Lucile telling him that she would prefer to never marry, a sentiment that is hard to find when looking over her conserved texts.

There are some instances of the author injecting historical myths without having bothered to check how well backed up they actually are. For example, after Camille has called for the people to arm themselves on July 12, the onlookers go on to take leaves from the nearby trees in order to distinguish themselves as members of the insurrection. If we’re to believe Camille et Lucile Desmoulins: un rêve de république (2018) this is a detail that first appeared in a heavily embellished biography over Camille, written in 1834. Lee also borrows an anecdote right out of the memoirs of Madame Tussaud, where the artist goes to visit the stormed Bastille, trips on the staircase and is saved by Robespierre. Something which is very unlikely to have taken place seeing as Robespierre was still in Versailles when the Bastille was stormed… Still speaking of him, Lee has Camille remember the time when he held a speech to the king and queen in the rain, when the origin of this anecdote doesn’t mention any rain.

Then finally, there are blatant historical inaccuracies, like for example Hébert publishing his journalLe Père Duchesne, Robespierre removing the ”de” in his surname and Camille moving to Rue Thêatre Français already in 1789 (all these three things didn’t happen until a year later), Danton being the inventor of the slogan ”Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” (it’s actually Camille and Robespierre that hold the shared responsibility for it), Charlotte Robespierre being in Paris in 1789 and finally, perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back for me when it came to the author’s historical research, Saint-Just being there already in 1790.

So is it an accurate book? If the first 100 pages are representative for the entirety of it (and if the synopsis on wikipedia is to believed) then NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Is it a good book? That’s entirely up to everyone’s individual taste. I must admit that the author’s choice of switching between past and present tense, third person and first person narrator as well as referring to Camille as both ”Desmoulins” and ”Windmills,” together with SJ being called a unicorn and a scene where Danton feeds Camille grapes before they have a threesome with an OC, made me feel increasingly like I was reading a fever dream. So if you have a soft spot for crack fics (even though this isn’t actually supposed to be one) I’d say go for it, especially since the book can be read for free. I would however not advice you to try to learn actual history from it, but then I would probably say the same for most historical fiction.

#thanks for making me read this anon it was so so cursed #also lee has weird nicknames for all her characters? #like danton calls robespierre ”rose” and lafayette ”little blondie”??? #camille calls robespierre ”petit pierre” and ”my little cat” #like WHY #brount is called broo and is a tiny dog that camille can hold in his hand #camille tells Danton he should ”blow up the jacobins and teach robespierre to suck cows”??? #ask

[longsightmyth]

One particularly tear-filled night, I found Mr. Kadam in the peacock room. He was reading a book by the soft light of a lamp. I sat down next to him, put my head on his knee, and cried softly. He patted my back and hummed an Indian lullaby. Eventually, I calmed down and shared my fears. I told him I was worried that Ren was lost to me and asked him if a broken heart could really heal.

Sorry sorry okay

This would probably be more moving if I believed in their feelings, but since the books are written as if they're wikipedia articles by someone who was bored of the subject it's hard to feel that. Like, just two paragraphs before this Kelsey says,

Ren sadly had no memory of me.

This is a wiki summary, not a first person teenaged girl whose 'true love' has lost all memory of her existence!

Anyway Kelsey tried to jog his memory by making peanut butter brownies, to which I say, expand your repertoire. The brownies obviously didn't work, and now they are playing parcheesi.

Anyway anyway Mr Kadam tells Kelsey that he doesn't think her heart is too damaged to love (which... was not the question) because she could love Ren after her parents' death and then says by way of an awful story about his son accidentally killing a bird the son had nursed back to health that Kelsey should let Ren fly free or something because she will be happier if he is happier. He suggests Kelsey should try to be Ren's friend.

Kelsey is like well he was always my friend [footage not found] so maybe,

"If I could get that part of him back, I won't feel like I've lost everything."

I think perhaps the problem (well not THIS problem: this problem is specifically memory-erasing related, but an OVERARCHING problem) is that I simply never thought Kelsey and Ren were friends. He was clearly romancing her from day 1 as a tiger, and she as clearly into it (also from day 1 as a tiger) and they never did anything that didn't in some way involve one of them thinking or talking about romance or actually romancing. Even when Kelsey dated other people because Ren told her to she was still dating Ren (while he controlled her finances and phone).

In a better book, this memory thing might be a way to acknowledge that and build a new base (which is, coincidentally, a little bit of what I'm using the amnesia for in Wintercry, and whether or not I succeed will be up to the individual reader), allowing Kelsey and Ren to grow and develop and build a friendship that might eventually shift into romance again.

But this is tiger's curse, so it's just for drama.

#myth rags on tigers curse #myth reads tigers voyage

[virtualfreespirit]

*G Note intensifies*

Dear reader,

If there's something I don't like music-wise, besides the entirety of the dupstep genre, it's what I consider generic-sounding songs.

Of course, as Chat GPT says, music taste is subjective, so what sounds generic to me might not be the same as what sounds generic to you, but there are certain production trends across all genres that don't sit well with me.

B-sides and most independent independent artists' songs are more prone to be a hit or miss for me exactly because they use those same production techniques I don't like.

But do you know what rock band has never sounded generic to me and has been able to impress me with each and every single one of their (own) spectacular songs?

Well, besides Rammstein and System of a Down, it's My Chemical Romance! My personal favorite from the Emo Trinity. Or quartet, if we also count 21 Pilots, another favorite of mine.

I somehow discovered MCR's 'Helena' back in 2015 as I was coming out of my Pop & Dance music phase to dive into the Rock world. I think I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me, and I've been in love with their entire discography (and existence) ever since.

As a big fan of them, I've been dying to have one of their albums or merch in my hands. So I almost fainted when I found out that this online store that was selling the CD version of The Black Parade a few months back was accepting special orders for Valentine's Day!

After pondering my options for a bit, I reached out to them and discovered that there was a special offer in which I could snag the CD version of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade bundled up at a lower price, and didn't think a third time before saying yes.

The CDs arrived just in time for my bestie Nin and I to go out on Valentine's Day to pick up the CDs and have a nice brunch together. It was like making two of my teenage dreams come true all at once, minus my job starting in the afternoon.

Now, here are a few pics I took that day as soon as I got home:

I regret nothing.

In terms of judging the book by its cover, the album art is beautiful and completely worth displaying somewhere. I particularly like the TCFSR cover, so much that I drew it once when I was a teen (and lost it :c), but I love that TBP has three times the drawings that TCFSR does:

C'est magnifique.

It's something a Rammstein album couldn't have outdone because, even though their music is amazing, their art leans more toward the grotesque.

In terms of music, all I know is they have a unique sound to them, and you most likely will enjoy it as long as you like any of these music genres from their Wikipedia page:

According to my ears, both albums' songs could easily be listened to on their own or on shuffle, as if they were singles, at the same time they can be listened to in sequence to follow their respective stories, which is quite a feat. 

You can tell that they belong to the same artist without going overboard like AC/DC, who are known for their production consistency and structural simplicity, which can make a lot of people choose about 2-3 songs to listen to and drop the rest. Well, as Angus Young himself said:

I'm tired of people saying we have ten albums that sound the same. We have eleven albums that sound the same.

That'd be me.

Ok, now, as I was saying, let's get to the juicy part: the lore.

Both records are what we can consider a "concept album", those "whose tracks hold a larger purpose or meaning collectively than they do individually", according to Wikipedia. And they have nothing to do with each other.

I feel like TBP is concepting more than TCFSR with how the music videos and songs are much more related to the core story.

Anyway.

In case you didn't already know about this, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is widely thought to be a continuation of their previous and very first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.

I mean, based on this Reddit reply I just found, it looks like Gerard's ONLY weak point was giving these two concept albums a solid story progression, allowing us to theorize at will, but he did confirm what the real ending was in this 2005 interview.

So, the way I understood this, there's this pair of lovers who get in a gunfight, which is believed to be the same one from 'Demolition Lovers', right? Per 'Helena' and 'Cemetery Drive', it looks like the female lover dies, but the male lover doesn't, and misses her so much he goes on a downward spiral full of drugs and other ways of self-destruction. He makes a deal with the devil where he gets to see the female lover again in exchange for the souls of 1000 evil men, a long quest that begins with 'Give 'Em Hell, Kid'.

The male lover seems to realize he's far too gone by the time he has already unalived 999 evil men and, thus, became an evil man himself. So he unalives himself, completing his side of the deal, and either the woman goes back to life without him, or they do reunite... in Hell. 

Way knows - pun intended. Either way, it's fire.

Now, The Black Parade.

What an album.

As usual, no one knows for sure what's the actual linear full story, but the thing is there's this main character known as "The Patient":

He ✨ flatlines ✨ of cancer from the very beginning of the album (see 'The End.' - the irony). The remaining of the songs talk about his reflections on the life he lived, whatever 'Teenagers' represents in the plot, and his journey navigating the afterlife, represented by a "black parade" that resembles the marching band his father took him to see in the city when he was a young boy.

Because of 'Sleep' and 'Mama', I thought this patient guy was a war veteran. And I'll keep thinking that because they kinda make sense together, even if it's not official.

Like Mic The Snare said, TBP was indeed one of the most memorable events in Rock history with its level of theatricality and visual presentation almost comparable to Michael Jackson or Queen themselves.

As a side note, until very recently, I had no clue that Liza Minnelli, whose vocals are featured in 'Mama', was Judy Garland's mom!

Alright, now, to sum things up, I don't have a ton more to say that hasn't already been covered by other folks, because I haven't really watched or read that many My Chemical Romance interviews. I feel like I'm every fandom's ghost, you know?

But, these two albums are pretty special to me. They got me through tough times, kinda like how K-Pop did a few years down the road.

Hopefully soon I'll complete my collection by getting my hands on Danger Days, Bullets and, maybe, Conventional Weapons! I'd consider the live albums, too, but... haven't decided.

So, what about you? What were the first one or two music albums you owned physically?

Until next time!

- N

#mcr #my chemical romance #the black parade #tbp #three cheers for sweet revenge #tcfsr #review #music cds #album art #2000s emo #Spotify

[greenwire]

kiwifarms is down

I am, admittedly, not familiar with this. I was checking kiwi farms and found this message, below the cut because it's long.

My thoughts are below the statement. The double standard is interesting. Curious if anyone else is following this and can tell me more.

General Statement

The Kiwi Farms is an online discussion forum about people on the Internet. It is without agenda. If you want to talk about a public figure and their presence online, there is likely space to do so on my website. All I ask of my users is that they keep a cool head, a good sense of humor, and stay strictly within the boundaries of US law.

In the digital era, personal reputation has become a very valuable form of capital. Google, Wikipedia, online news outlets, and other large websites allow a public figure meticulous control over their public perception.

When a community of random anonymous nobodies can setup a forum and talk about a person candidly, where this control does not exist, it creates problems for influential people.

The opponents of this forum lie about its purpose and character. They misrepresent our speech as violence, our information as harassment, and our discussions as stalking.

Google cleans up their search results, the news prints their hit pieces, and Wikipedia canonizes those stories as truth. Instantly, the general public is left with one narrative available to them.

The mob then harass innocent people running unrelated third party services by sending emails in the thousands and threatening their families. This mob claims to be oppressed, when they can summon a hundred thousand dollars out of thin air and bend multi-billion dollar organizations to do what they want.

Meanwhile, our website is down through criminal behavior. Any outlet I use to discuss the ongoing attack is also targeted.

They have tried to justify this behavior with the logic that we "do not respond to anything except fear." What I fear more than losing my site, being sued, or dealing with police is living in a world where fat eunuchs can groom little boys and girls into mutilating their bodies and taking drugs in secret, while normal people are not allowed to even discuss it.

The mob has already planned subsequent targets. Should we stay down, they will then attack 'gender critical' communities - especially those ran by and for women. No place can exist online which allows criticism of their fetishistic lifestyle, and nothing would excite them more than this power and domination struggle being inflicted on a female space instead.

They've made it clear that I and my family will be targeted for abuse and violence regardless of if I keep the site up or let it stay down. I have no reason to do anything but continue forward. Fuck these people.

See you soon, Joshua Moon

(bolding mine)

While women's spaces and gender critical spaces have already been/are already being targeted (most older receipt posts have had images and links scrubbed via tumblr & wordpress), I think taking down KF is a relief to most of the subjects discussed on there. Getting JK Rowling accepted as a bigot by people unwilling to actually read her essay was a huge win for this cause. Taking people and websites completely off the internet, on the other hand, will be tougher.

Most people don't know what KF is and if this movement is going to get them taken down, and they have to do a take down without drawing an audience there. I know KF were targeted many times. They were targeted after a video game emulator (nobody knows his real name or location) likely faked his suicide and disappeared. These attacks have been apparently sophisticated, and the website is now linking to a former Google employee (a total of four people are listed, all transwomen, who according to evidence posted there, are sending minors controlled substances, what they call "HRT"). These are technologically-savvy individuals who want opinions of them and records of their words and actions taken off the internet.

I was just having a rant about this yesterday. We all have the right to access the same public information and draw our own conclusions. You can't have it both ways. You code and use a tracker that tags internet users and journalists as guilty of wrong-think. You can't demand we all pretend we never saw the things you posted, that you made publicly available of your own free will, and break the law to scrub it from the internet. It's hypocritical and it won't work.

#fuckin hypocrites #kiwifarms #content moderation crisis #long post

[violetosprey]

What kind of mental disorders do yanderes have?

Hello there. Interesting question, but an honest one I think. We’re talking about a character type after all that is strictly defined by abnormal or excessive behavior.

To give you a short and sweet answer: I personally believe it’s not a good idea to associate specific mental disorders with yanderes. The only definite one that would be okay to say a yandere COULD have (but not always) is “Erotomania.” If you don’t mind a wall of text, you can read below a little bit about what Erotomania is and why I don’t think fictional media does (or should) make it very clear at times what mental disorders may be associated with yanderes.

Before I start: I am not a psychologist. It’s a subject that’s always interested me, but I certainly don’t have a vast knowledge of even the most common types of mental disorders. Not to mention, many of them have different variations of the same type. If I’m not careful, I could very easily confuse one for another.

So getting a question like this is intriguing but hard for me because I simply don’t have the knowledge to even consider constructing a possible list.

The only disorder that immediately popped into my head is one I happened to have found out about a few years ago. Erotomania, according to Wikipedia, is a “delusional disorder where an individual believes that another person is infatuated with them (when they’re not).” So they think they’re S/O is in love with them, when the reality is that that said S/O may not even know the afflicted person even exists.

It’s not as simple as the afflicted person receiving “mixed signals” that could be confused as flirting in a conversation either. No, this is the type of delusional disorder where even the most basic or mundane things the S/O does will be interrupted as a “secret message” to the afflicted person. For example, the S/O opening or closing their house windows at a certain time of day might be viewed as a declaration of love to the afflicted person. I feel people could read the Wikipedia article themselves to get the full gist, but in real life this seems to be a disorder people tend to develop more often towards celebrities or just people that are more likely unobtainable for them. It even mentions the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan was committed by someone suffering from Erotomania. It was a weird and very terrifying attempt to impress another celebrity.

This is the only disorder I’m okay saying a yandere COULD be suffering from because it’s specifically about infatuation. Not all mental disorders are focused around that. There’s also technically an “Obsessive love disorder” by the way. That’s…pretty self-explanatory I think. It just seems to be a bit more of a subset disorder than even Erotomania from what I can tell.

My main focus here is on fictional yanderes though. So could you have a yandere character written who is afflicted with Erotomania? Absolutely! It would definitely fall into the “delusional yandere” category, but please keep in mind that depending on how the character is written, not all delusional yanderes would necessarily have Erotomania.

Speaking of fictional yanderes, did anyone notice when it comes to webcomics, manga, anime and light novel media, it’s INCREDIBLY rare for any specific mental disorder to be outright stated regarding the character? I think this is done on purpose for a couple of reasons.

The creator may simply lack the knowledge of various mental disorders.

The selected mental disorder may limit the yandere character’s actions (if going for realism).

There’s the risk of falsely portraying a selected mental disorder.

The portrayal could cause the viewer to develop a very negative association with the disorder in real life.

First one is pretty self-explanatory: If you don’t know enough about mental disorders, it’s smarter to just be vague about the subject altogether in one’s works. If you do know enough about the disorder and go for realism, then you could run into the problem where the character might be restricted as to what actions they’ll perform. I don’t have good examples for this, but perhaps if the disorder is highly linked to paranoia or anxiety, it could be more difficult for example to have the yandere appear more cool and calculated at times.

Attempting to stretch the truth a little though and allow the yandere to think or act in ways that don’t line up with a mental disorder could get criticized. Attempting to remove certain handicaps of a mental disorder from a yandere could make the audience wonder why the creator even bothered to focus on the selected disorder. On the other hand, turning some factors of the disorder up to eleven so to speak, may also paint real life people with said disorder in a much more negative light than needed.

Think of how the movie “Jaws” caused a widespread fear of sharks after its release. Yes, sharks can very dangerous and you shouldn’t mess with them, but attacks on humans really don’t happen a lot either. It damaged the reputation of sharks, and the same could happen to mental disorders in fictional media. Mental disorders in fictional media can be tricky to portray accurately. There are definitely some that have a very ugly reality to them. I say this as someone with loved ones who have unfortunately been afflicted by some of the worst aspects of certain disorders. It can be terrifying and heartbreaking. But having a mental disorder also doesn’t necessarily make someone a bad guy (like a yandere will often be portrayed). It really depends on a lot of factors (like the type of disorder and level of severity in a person). Some mental disorders may also be more manageable or harmless to other people than others.

Non-yandere related, you have films for example like “Split.” I really liked the film and multiple personality disorder is definitely something that’s very interesting (and sounds like a nightmare to live with), but I couldn’t tell you if the film portrayed the disorder well. I’ve heard some people say yes and others say no. Hopefully the film also didn’t convince people that anyone with said disorder is a danger.  I’m sure there are some cases where it could turn out bad in real life, but not always. I think in the webcomic “My Deepest Secret,” the author specifically states in one chapter that one of the main characters is not suffering from any specific REAL mental disorder. I think this was very smart of them to avoid the complications I listed above. If you’ve read the comic, I think you’d definitely agree that if a specific mental disorder was assigned to said character, there could have ended up being a lot more criticism and confusion on how the character acted in the end. Said character had a LOT going on with their head.

Really, I think the fictional media most likely to try to assign a specific mental disorder to a yandere would be anything live action. In the film “Fatal Attraction,” the character of Alex Forrest I believe is hinted to suffer from a form of Borderline Personality Disorder. This would help to explain how the successful and rather cool headed woman you see at the beginning of the film deteriorates slowly over the course of the story. I couldn’t tell you why live action might try to do this more often than other fictional media. I’ve enjoyed shows like Criminal Minds though, so maybe it’s just that with live action, people get more sucked in if they get a better look into the psychology of the characters.

Does that mean I want that kind of same psychological analysis for yanderes in the majority of fictional media? Honestly…not really. I kind of like the separation where it’s never explicitly stated what mental disorder a yandere has…or if they even have one at all. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE seeing how the gears turn in a yandere’s head, but I don’t think I necessarily need or want the restrictions of a mental disorder placed on a lot of the yanderes I look at. I like it if a yandere can surprise me. I can definitely see other characters simply calling the yandere “insane,” and that’s a good enough for me. Some stories aren’t long enough either to go into the specifics of a disorder anyway.

Despite me saying that, could you still give a yandere a mental disorder if you wanted to? Sure. The mental disorder could either be the cause of their obsessive love, or if it’s not the cause, it could exacerbate some of the symptoms of obsessive love. A disorder based around paranoia or anxiety might do the trick. Or the mental disorder could be a completely separate factor altogether. If I think of yandere who also has OCD, ironically the first thing that pops into my head is just a yandere who happens to be a germaphobe, haha. Despite it being called “obsessive compulsive disorder,” I could see it being something entirely separate rather than a cause of obsessive love. I’m not a creative writer, so sadly I have no good advice to give on how to tackle trying to combine the character archetype with a known psychological disorder. Just be mindful of #1-4 that I listed above. Sorry if this seemed a little confusing. I just wrote everything down as I thought of it. My apologies if anything came off as offensive. Again, I try to stick to think of mostly fictional yanderes, but this subject could bleed into people’s views on a real life yanderes. So it’s best to be careful.

#yandere #male yandere #tw mental disorders #analysis #good question but had to answer carefully

[benchowmein]

tbh i agree wtih the other wiki editor, because some of the suggestions seem like a pretty deep cuts. i get where youre coming from about all the political stuff that followed "cottagecore" because of people who apply really "traditional" ideologies to it, but what people politically assign to it depends individual to individual. in the end, it is just an aesthetic, not a political compass

So I think this comes down to misunderstanding what I mean when we discuss cottagecore's involvement in colonialist, conservative, or otherwise traditional values. There are people who apply "traditional ideology" to cottagecore. Some of these people are weird ecofascists. I'm not talking about them.

I'm talking about fairly normal neoliberals who like flouncy dresses and watering cans and watching Anne With An E. These people do not think of themselves as colonialist. They might not even consider themselves conservative or traditionalist.

But cottagecore is an aesthetic. It was not created in isolation. Dark Academia is a more obvious example of this phenomenon. Dark Academia fetishises an elitist, classist system that relied (and relies) on the exclusion of non-white, non-rich, non-male people. You can call Dark Academia 'just an aesthetic', but it is an aesthetic founded in a system designed to promote the ruling class.

Cottagecore, too, was not created in isolation. Consider the main aesthetic sources of cottagecore:

Americana and the visual culture associated with nineteenth century American prairie farms

Cottage farms in the UK and western Europe, including 'folly' farms like Marie Antoinette's model village

The Arts and Crafts movement and neo-medievalism generally, specifically English estates after 1880

Notice the common trends of imperialism and classism here. Regardless of whether you believe that colonialism is a good thing or that a woman's place is in the home, the aesthetic is still rooted in the exact same things. It was founded in the same murky water of empire and imperialism as Dark Academia. You do not have to "apply" traditional values to cottagecore: that wagon is laden already with the weight of the British Empire. Even your common garden varieties are steeped in colonialism: The Secret Garden, possibly the most cottagecore book ever, quite literally opens with an excoriation of the arid climate of British India, which cannot possibly raise children to be good and kind.

I agree that cottagecore shouldn't be understood as a political compass. To use a metaphor I have already alluded to, consider flowers. Your cottage garden might have lovely varieties of daises with lovely big heads, roses that bloom in winter, or irises that withstand the frost. They are all the descendants of their mountain cousins. You cannot remove the wildflower from the rose in the same way you cannot remove the empire from the cottage.

But to set all this flowery shit aside. Wikipedia is not a place where you should be debating this stuff. You should be including relevant information that is useful to understanding the topic at hand. It is not to me to say if something is right or wrong, but as an editor it IS my job to present the information that exists in an unbiased way :)

#and keep in mind that i say this as someone who is an arts and crafts movement enjoyer.

[nmenvs3000w24]

Sense-Making of Butterflies: A Journey of Wonder and Inspiration

In this week's blog I will take you on a journey to discover the beauty and intricacy of butterflies and how they gracefully flutter through the wind while making connections to this week's textbook readings. This week we focus on sense-making which is defined as the "process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences" (Wikipedia contributors, 2024). As we explore the flight of these magical creatures, we will connect to the teachings of interpretation, specifically referencing the wisdom shared by Tim Merriman (Beck, Cable, & Knudson, 2018, p.457-476). 

This is what I still wonder: 

Imagine this, you're walking through a meadow on a warm sunny day as you watch the gracious butterflies dance in the wind, and you can't help but think about what secrets their choreography may hide. The flutter of their wings resembles a mesmerizing performance, and this interpretation connects with Merriman's idea that interpreters are leaders (Beck, Cable, & Knudson, 2018, p.457-476).

How can interpreters guide us in our understanding of different aspects of the environment, helping individuals connect information from parks and interpretive centers to a broader context? Relating to butterflies, how can interpreters act as guides for interpretation, connecting narratives that integrate with the broader ideas of communities, nations, and the world?

This is where I will find my inspiration: 

The Butterfly Conservatory located in Niagara Falls, ON, is where I gained my inspiration. I visited this place when I was younger and it will forever be a core memory for me, as I was captivated by the beautiful designs and colors of all the butterflies. Merriman’s call for interpreters to be proactive leaders aligns with the butterflies' role in the harmony of the meadow (Beck, Cable, & Knudson, 2018, p.457-476). Like the interpretive profession, the dance of butterflies inspires a deeper connection to the natural world and causes us to appreciate the intricate patterns found within our existence.

This is how I can get fired up: 

The idea of sharing an interpretive story of the magical dance of the butterfly fuels a passionate fire inside me as I believe everyone should be able to understand the beauty of these mystical creatures and their role in the environment. This aligns with Merriman's vision that interpreters help clients to confidently build a better tomorrow (Beck, Cable, & Knudson, 2018, p.457-476). The fire within me pushes me to communicate the wonders of nature extending beyond the meadows and the Butterfly Conservatory, which resonated with the textbook’s call for interpreters to ignite love for the earth and humanity (Beck, Cable, & Knudson, 2018, p.457-476). How can we as interpreters, fire up our passion and translate the dance of the butterflies into narratives that uplift perceptions, enrich lives, and contribute to the sustainability of our environment?

 It's this passionate dedication that pushes me to explore new ways of storytelling to paint vivid pictures of nature’s wonders and to inspire others to appreciate the delicate dance of life that lives around us (Dr. Hooykaas, n.d.). 

In conclusion, let the dance of butterflies be our fire for interpretation, connecting us not only to nature’s wonders but also to the insights provided by Tim Merriman (Beck, Cable, & Knudson, 2018, p.457-476). In the delicate flutters of their wings, we find inspiration, wonder, and a direct connection to the teachings that help guide us as interpreters in revealing the beauty of the natural world.

References: 

Beck, L., Cable, T. T., & Knudson, D. M. (2018). Interpreting Cultural and Natural Heritage for a Better World (1st ed.). Sagamore Publishing. https://www.sagamorepub.com/products/interpreting-cultural-and-natural-heritage-better-world

Hooykaas, A. (n.d.). Unit 09: Sense-Making of Nature Interpretation [Lecture notes]. ENVS3000 Nature Interpretation. University of Guelph.

Wikipedia contributors. (2024, March 5). Sensemaking. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking

[lordavatarii]

Mass Psychosis or MPI is a mental state in which groups or individuals experience an illness or illnesses which have no basis in reality. There are often physical manifestations of the delusions. The most common manifestations are coughs, headaches, nausea, and sore throat.

In the late 1500s, there was a case in Germany that is often referenced when researching MPI. It started with one woman who began to dance for no apparent reason. She danced her feet bloody, and onlookers began to join in. It became a serious problem when the whole village followed suit. People began to die, and the church sent out priests to perform exorcisms.

In the 1500’s you had the dancing plague that infected an entire village. If you magnify those same conditions combined with the technology we now possess, the result is as we see today.

There are numerous examples of modern-day MPI, however, the purpose of this article is not to research the entire subject. I have a very specific reason for this article: Covid-19. My hopes are not to scare people or change their minds on the subject, but to lay this out bare for future generations that may or may not come.

In March 2020 we saw reports coming from China about a deadly new disease sweeping the nation. The reports were often followed by some visual examples of what Covid-19 was doing to the individuals there. I saw Chinese citizens falling, spasming, frothing at the mouth, and dying on the streets. This was quickly spread around on social media and panic started to spread.

The first cases outside of China that were reported were nothing in comparison to anything I had seen. When it came to Europe, we were told people had the virus, though we didn’t see the same effect on subjects anywhere outside of China.

I do believe that those people in China were paid by the CCP as actors to cause a wave of MPI across the globe. The reason they would do this? China and the Globalists shut down world economies whilst theirs stayed in full motion. It is no secret that China and the Globalists have imperialistic views on the world, and I believe this to be a motive for what has happened.

A more recent example would be the so-called Indian variant. It is reported that in India 250,000 people have died due to this new strain. We saw scenes of mass cremations which isn’t unusual for the Indian Subcontinent. This India Variant has since arrived in the UK, yet again, there have been no such incidents recorded of mass deaths. This can be boiled down to two things; the world governments don’t want this MPI to end because whilst it continues, they have unlimited powers, and to make as many people as possible take the so-called vaccine.

It is no secret that some highly influential people have spoken about depopulating the world. I think that the vaccine is part of that plan. I have been a shareholder in AstraZeneca for a while now. I did my research on the company after the fact. I found that they have direct ties to Eugenics, past, and present.

Eugenics is not always killing people. A lot of people have misconceptions about eugenics. It is selectively allowing a certain trait to be passed onto future generations or it is limiting those traits. It happened in the USA as late as 1920 when they sterilized, en masse, groups of people they considered to be undesirable. Covid-19 MPI has given nefarious people the opportune moment to act upon these principles.

My final point would be to draw the readers’ attention to the parallels between past and present. In place of a dancing plague, we have a virus. Instead of God, we have science. ‘Trust the science’ we are told on a daily basis. Instead of an exorcism, we have a vaccine.

Civilisation has come a long way, but the human consciousness has remained largely the same. You can summarise human existence with the simple phrase; The more things change, the more they stay the same.

CITATION

Mass Psychosis

Gulf War Vaccine

Eugenics In America

FOOTNOTE

I have cited sources from Wikipedia which may be altered in the future. I have taken the liberty to archive them as they are on the Wayback Time Machine and archive.today in the event that this happens.

#dancing plague #mpi #covid #psychology #psychoanalysis

[burce-aestetablog]

Theories and Philosophies considered in Design and Architecture

It was made known from the discussion that design and architecture are more intimate as compared to other art forms like paintings. They are claimed to be intimate since they are experienced and immersed in by our different senses as it exists to be lived in. Design and architecture have existed to be inhabited by humans for centuries and during the past years, there have been theories made by renowned philosophers. These theories posit different understandings as to how architecture and design should be done such as that architecture is instructive and has a prescribed method, or that it has to be mathematically based and dependent on humanly-scaled proportion. Although, I found Abbe Laugier’s theory intriguing as he supposes that architecture is natural and relies on intuition rather than relying on a structured set of rules. I personally think that architecture has to have more foundational understanding than just intuition.

Other than the theories, the anchoring philosophies of architecture also exist. I have never really thought about philosophizing design architecture. Incidentally, when I think of philosophy, what initially comes to mind is the study of life or existence as a person in general. I limited myself to a scope of thinking that philosophy is only about an individual’s existence or life. As we got to walk through architectural traditions and philosophies, I found similar and familiar ones of that in film theory. I got to correlate it to what I learned before and had an easier time understanding how a certain philosophy applies to architecture and design. In one of these mentioned architectural philosophies, I found one amusing which was the Deconstructivism movement. It approaches architecture through the use of distorted or displaced geometric forms, transcending the traditional construction of how architecture and design should look like. Essentially, the theories and philosophies in line with the discipline of architecture are vital and serve as a guide or considerations to apply when practicing design and architecture. All things considered, the different movements have their distinct characteristics that contribute to the formation of an architecture. This is in line with developing one’s sense of aesthetics and be of a guide to create innovative conceptual and formative designs.

References:

Vitruvian Man. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved April 18, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man#/media/File:Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg

[fredbsmith]

On "Scientism" and Objective Beauty

Dear ___,

Thanks for sharing the links to these videos with me. I enjoyed watching them. I was not familiar with Roger Scruton; I expect to be learning more about him via my You Tube autoplay.

What was appealing to me about Prof. (? Sir) RS was the evident kindness and civility with which he employed his rhetorical skills, in addition to the level of those skills themselves. I see he is identified in Wikipedia’s index as a “conservative philosopher.” It’s good to see that such individuals exist; our noblest institutions created in the past deserve articulate defenders who can argue—in contemporary language—for their preservation in the face of those who would purge and radically reconstruct the culture.

I had some thoughts in regard to the first clip, the argument against “scientism.” RS’s position is reminiscent of (the late) Stephen Jay Gould’s concept that the arts, religion, and sciences each comprise their own “non-overlapping magisteria,” with their own associated axioms and rules of argumentation, their own sources of authority, not applicable beyond their own boundaries. But what is the nature of those boundaries, just what makes them so impermeable? Certainly it is true that works of art are created by human beings and, that human beings, having existence in a material universe, must be made up entirely of the elementary particles that comprise all matter. But the number of such particles, and the complexity of their arrangement, constituting even a single human being would make it impossible to use the scientific laws governing the behavior of elementary particles to deduce anything at all about the nature of art created by that human being. No sane person would carry reductionism to such a ridiculous extreme. But does this mean that the methods and knowledge from the sciences should never be brought to bear in considering issues involving art? Do considerations of the esthetic need to be mentally walled off from all other intellectual endeavors?

In pondering these questions, I’ve found the thinking of David Deutsch quite valuable; DD is a quantum physicist and polymath, who writes on a wide range of subjects, always searching for explanations to tie together the various aspects of reality. He invokes the concept of emergence as a way to understand the relation of highly complex systems to the simpler systems of which they are composed. One would speak of a system of high complexity (inorganic chemistry, poetry) as emergent from a lower-complexity system from which it derives its existence (particle physics, psychology of human emotions). Emergence arises when rules governing the behavior of the high-level system can be formulated simply and intelligibly without resorting to complicated explanations based on the underlying low-level system.

DD’s point, if I read him correctly, is that the boundaries between disciplines studying high- and low-level systems arise from what are essentially computational limitations, of both the human mind and artificial intelligence in its current state. The vast numbers of constituent low-level systems, and the complexity of the ways they are functionally integrated to produce the high-level system, make it impossible —practically impossible in most instances, I should say—for chains of deduction and inference to be carried across from low- to high level disciplines. But DD’s concept allows that there may be rare instances in which it is possible to make such deductions, and, in such rare instances the deductions should not be dismissed just because they are reductive. We should prize all valid explanations that we can find, regardless of their logical construction.

I’ve attached an excerpt from one of DD’s books which presents his ideas of emergence and the status of reductive explanation at greater length, and much more lucidly, than what I’ve just attempted. In a different source, DD provides what I think is a splendid example of a (valid) reductive explanation of a topic in the arts, the nature of beauty, using Darwinian logic from modern biology. He begins by posing the question of why flowers are beautiful, and then devotes a chapter to its answer. Remarkably, that answer includes an argument that at least some things have beauty as part of their objective reality, that this beauty is independent of the subjective experience of the perceiving individuals or their cultures, or even of the human species. I’ve attached an excerpt from this, also.

Fred

At present, we have only approximations to a reductive ‘theory of everything’. These can already predict quite accurate laws of motion for individual subatomic particles. From these laws, present-day computers can calculate the motion of any isolated group of a few interacting particles in some detail, given their initial state. But even the smallest speck of matter visible to the naked eye contains trillions of atoms, each composed of many subatomic particles, and is continually interacting with the outside world; so it is quite infeasible to predict its behaviour particle by particle. By supplementing the exact laws of motion with various approximation schemes, we can predict some aspects of the gross behaviour of quite large objects – for instance, the temperature at which a given chemical compound will melt or boil. Much of basic chemistry has been reduced to physics in this way. But for higher-level sciences the reductionist programme is a matter of principle only. No one expects actually to deduce many principles of biology, psychology or politics from those of physics. The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity ‘emerges’ from low-level complexity. High-level phenomena about which there are comprehensible facts that are not simply deducible from lower-level theories are called emergent phenomena. For example, a wall might be strong because its builders feared that their enemies might try to force their way through it. This is a high-level explanation of the wall’s strength, not deducible from (though not incompatible with) the low-level explanation I gave above. ‘Builders’, ‘enemies’, ‘fear’ and ‘trying’ are all emergent phenomena. The purpose of high-level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena, of which the most important are, as we shall see, life, thought and computation. By the way, the opposite of reductionism, holism – the idea that the only legitimate explanations are in terms of higher-level systems - is an even greater error than reductionism. What do holists expect us to do? Cease our search for the molecular origin of diseases? Deny that human beings are made of subatomic particles? Where reductive explanations exist, they are just as desirable as any other explanations. Where whole sciences are reducible to lower-level sciences, it is just as incumbent upon us as scientists to find those reductions as it is to discover any other knowledge. A reductionist thinks that science is about analysing things into components. An instrumentalist thinks that it is about predicting things. To either of them, the existence of high-level sciences is merely a matter of convenience. Complexity prevents us from using fundamental physics to make high-level predictions, so instead we guess what those predictions would be if we could make them – emergence gives us a chance of doing that successfully – and supposedly that is what the higher-level sciences are about. Thus to reductionists and instrumentalists, who disregard both the real structure and the real purpose of scientific knowledge, the base of the predictive hierarchy of physics is by definition the ‘theory of everything’. But to everyone else scientific knowledge consists of explanations, and the structure of scientific explanation does not reflect the reductionist hierarchy. There are explanations at every level of the hierarchy. Many of them are autonomous, referring only to concepts at that particular level (for instance, ‘the bear ate the honey because it was hungry’). Many involve deductions in the opposite direction to that of reductive explanation. That is, they explain things not by analysing them into smaller, simpler things but by regarding them as components of larger, more complex things – about which we nevertheless have explanatory theories.

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality (pp. 20-22). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Occasionally it happens by chance that the parochial criteria of attractiveness that evolved within a species produce something that looks beautiful to us: the peacock’s tail is an example. But that is a rare anomaly: in the overwhelming majority of species, we do not share any of their criteria for finding something attractive. Yet with flowers--most flowers--we do. Sometimes a leaf can be beautiful; even a puddle of water can. But, again, only by rare chance. With flowers it is reliable.

It is another regularity in nature. What is the explanation? Why are flowers beautiful?

Given the prevailing assumptions in the scientific community—which are still rather empiricist and reductionist--it may seem plausible that flowers are not objectively beautiful, and that their attractiveness is merely a cultural phenomenon. But I think that that fails closer inspection. We find flowers beautiful that we have never seen before, and which have not been known to our culture before--and quite reliably, for most humans in most cultures. The same is not true of the roots of plants, or the leaves. Why only the flowers?

One unusual aspect of the flower-insect co-evolution is that it involved the creation of a complex code, or language, for signalling information between species. It had to be complex because the genes were facing a difficult communication problem. The code had to be, on the one hand, easily recognizable by the right insects, and, on the other, difficult to forge by other species of flower--for if other species could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects without having to manufacture nectar for them, which requires energy, they would have a selective advantage. So the criterion that was evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations; and the flower’s design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it. Thus both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary. When genes are facing a similar problem within a species, notably in the co-evolution of criteria and characteristics for choosing mates, they already have a large amount of shared genetic knowledge to draw on. For instance, even before any such co-evolution begins, the genome may already contain adaptations for recognizing fellow members of the species, and for detecting various attributes of them. Moreover, the attributes that a mate is searching for may initially be objectively useful ones--such as neck length in a giraffe. One theory of the evolution of giraffe necks is that it began as an adaptation for feeding, but then continued through sexual selection. However, there is no such shared knowledge to build on across the gap between distant species. They are starting from scratch.

And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard- to emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty. Consequently the only species that are attracted by flowers are the insect species that co-evolved to do so--and humans.

If true, this means that Dawkins’ daughter was partly right about the flowers after all. They are there to make the world pretty; or, at least, prettiness is no accidental side effect but is what they specifically evolved to have. Not because anything intended the world to be pretty, but because the best-replicating genes depend on embodying objective prettiness to get themselves replicated. The case of honey, for instance, is very different. The reason that honey--which is sugar water --is easy for flowers and bees to make, and why its taste is attractive to humans and insects alike, is that we do all have a shared genetic heritage going back to our common ancestor and before, which includes biochemical knowledge about many uses of sugar, and the means to recognize it.

Could it be that what humans find attractive in flowers--or in art--is indeed objective, but it is not objective beauty? Perhaps it is something more mundane--something like a liking for bright colours, strong contrasts, symmetrical shapes. Humans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry. It is thought to be a factor in sexual attractiveness, and it may also be useful in helping us to classify things and to organize our environment physically and conceptually. So a side effect of these inborn preferences might be a liking for flowers, which happen to be colourful and symmetrical. However, some flowers are white (at least to us--they may have colours that we cannot see and insects can), but we still find their shapes beautiful. All flowers do contrast with their background in some sense--that is a precondition for being used for signalling--but a spider in the bath contrasts with its background even more, and there is no widespread consensus that such a sight is beautiful. As for symmetry: again, spiders are quite symmetrical, while some flowers, such as orchids, are very unsymmetrical, yet we do not find them any less attractive for that. So I do not think that symmetry, colour and contrast are all that we are seeing in flowers when we imagine that we are seeing beauty.

A sort of mirror image of that objection is that there are other things in nature that we also find beautiful--things that are not results of either human creativity or co-evolution across a gap: the night sky; waterfalls; sunsets. So why not flowers too? But the cases are not alike. Those things may be attractive to look at, but they have no appearance of design.  They are analogous not to Paley’s watch, but to the sun as a timekeeper.  One cannot explain why the watch is as it is without referring to timekeeping, because it would be useless for timekeeping if it had been made slightly differently. But, as I mentioned, the sun would still be useful for keeping time even if the solar system were altered. Similarly, Paley might have found a stone that looked attractive. He might well have taken it home to use as an ornamental paperweight. But he would not have sat down to write a monograph about how changing any detail of the stone would have made it incapable of serving that function, because that would not have been so. The same is true of the night sky, waterfalls and almost all other natural phenomena. But flowers do have the appearance of design for beauty: if they looked like leaves, or roots, they would lose their universal appeal. Displace even one petal, and there would be diminishment.

We know what the watch was designed for, but we do not know what beauty is. We are in a similar position to an archaeologist who finds inscriptions in an unknown language in an ancient tomb: they look like writing and not just meaningless marks on the walls. Conceivably this is mistaken, but they look as though they were inscribed there for a purpose. Flowers are like that: they have the appearance of having been evolved for a purpose which we call ‘beauty’, which we can (imperfectly) recognize, but whose nature is poorly understood.

In the light of these arguments I can see only one explanation for the phenomenon of flowers being attractive to humans, and for the various other fragments of evidence I have mentioned. It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness local to a species, to a culture or to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge; but the second kind requires knowledge with universal reach. It reaches all the way from the flower genome, with its problem of competitive pollination, to human minds which appreciate the resulting flowers as art. Not great art--human artists are far better, as is to be expected.  But with the hard-to-fake appearance of design for beauty.

Now, why do humans appreciate objective beauty, if there has been no equivalent of that co-evolution in our past? At one level the answer is simply that we are universal explainers and can create knowledge about anything. Bur still, why did we want to create aesthetic knowledge in particular? It is because we did face the same problem as the flowers and the insects. Signalling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signalling across the gap between two entire species. A human being, in terms of knowledge content and creative individuality, is like a species. All the individuals of any other species have virtually the same programming in their genes and use virtually the same criteria for acting and being attracted. Humans are quite unlike that: the amount of information in a human mind is more than in the genome of any species, and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person. So human artists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap between humans as the flowers and insects are between species. They can use some species-specific criteria; but they can also reach towards objective beauty. Exactly the same is true of all our other knowledge: we can communicate with other people by sending predetermined messages determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new. Bur in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we had better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths. This may be the proximate reason that humans ever began to do so.

Deutsch, D: The Beginning of Infinity, p. 361

#scientism #esthetics #beauty

[himanimehtauniverse-blog]

ChatGPT: What is it and How it Might Change The Work Culture in the Future?

ChatGPT is a chatbot based on the GPT-3.5 - Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce texts that look similar to the texts created by humans. ChatGPT can respond to questions in a natural way, much like a human well-versed in most subjects does. The tool is created for users to receive both technical and non-jargony responses to their questions.

ChatGPT, which is still in the testing stage, is predicted by some likely to eclipse and replace Google. It has features apart from what other chatbots have, including answering questions, solving math equations, composing texts, fixing and debugging code errors, language translation, keyword detection, recommendations, and explanations of all actions, among many others.

What is a ChatGPT and how does it work?

OpenAI - an AI research company - released the beta version of ChatGPT to test what tasks a very large, powerful AI system can perform and it has drawn wider interest from individuals and organizations. You can ask a ChatGPT a limitless number of questions on any subject and is likely to receive answers that are useful and correct. In fact, the ChatGPT has no exact knowledge of anything by itself, it is an artificial intelligence that is trained using deep learning to understand patterns in an enormous amount of text collected from the internet ecosystem and provide useful and precise answers. Its downside is that while the answers it gives may sound authoritative, as OpenAI alerts, it needs not to be necessarily so. The existing chatbot has been in practice for years now, but companies have seen limited success with their trials to replace humans to take care of customer service tasks. A study conducted for Ujet - a company whose technology manages customer contacts -, showed that 72% of people found chatbots to be of no use.Though exact sources of data used by ChatGPT are not revealed yet, OpenAI says it generally combs the web, archived books, and Wikipedia. Bern Elliot, a vice president at Gartner said that for now, ChatGPT is more for OpenAI to gain publicity and to show what’s possible with GPT language models than a use case for businesses to incorporate. Cai GoGwilt, the chief technology officer of Ironclad, said ChatGPT offers “more creative” responses compared to similar language models developed by big tech companies. ChatGPT’s rising popularity shows there is a section of people that prefers getting information via questions and answers as opposed to a typical search query. Google parent Alphabet has developed some of the core AI technologies used to create systems like ChatGPT. Currently, most people use ChastGPT and then go to Google to verify the answers as the search engine has become a habit that will be very difficult to displace.Asking a computer a question and getting an answer is useful, and often ChatGPT delivers the goods. While Google often provides you with its suggested answers to questions and with links to websites that it thinks will be relevant, the quality of ChatGPT's answers is often better than what Google will suggest. That makes GPT-3 a serious rival to Google and other search engines. That said, it is a bit time-consuming to vet the accuracy of ChatGPT answers because it just gives you some raw text with no links or citations, but ChatGPT is doubtless showing the way toward our tech future. 

What questions can you ask ChatGPT?

You can ask ChatGPT any questions (other than the off-limits) like asking for an explanation about Newton's laws of motion or to write a poem, or a computer program, or anything for that matter, though it is not necessary that you might not get an answer. It can write a poem, though it may not impress a literature expert. When I asked, "Is it easier to get a date by being sensitive or being tough?" GPT responded, in part, "Some people may find a sensitive person more attractive and appealing, while others may be drawn to a tough and assertive individual. In general, being genuine and authentic in your interactions with others is likely to be more effective in getting a date than trying to fit a certain mold or persona."

 Who is behind the development of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is the innovation of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, with the mission to develop a "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence system or to help others do so. GPT 3.5 which is an update of GPT-3 on which ChatGPT is built, is an example of AI technology known as large language models. The AIs are trained to generate texts based on what they've seen or learned through experience. They can also be trained automatically using a large amount of computer power over a period of weeks. 

Can ChatGPT code software programs?

ChatGPT can reminisce steps humans have taken to perform something, making it possible for ChatGPT to generate actual programming code. ChatGPT can parse regular expressions (regex), a powerful but complex system for spotting particular patterns, for example, dates in a bunch of text or the name of a server in a website address. "It's like having a programming tutor on hand 24/7," tweeted programmer James Blackwell about ChatGPT's ability to explain regex.

 What are ChatGPT’s off-limits?

ChatGPT is built with the design to filter out "inappropriate" questions or requests, a behavior in line with OpenAI's mission "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." The answer you get from ChatGPT itself to a question to explain what's off-limits will be questions that are discriminatory, offensive, or inappropriate. These off-limit requests include racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise discriminatory or hateful questions, or asking it to engage in illegal activities

Concluding note

It is unlikely that Chat GPT technology will replace humans in jobs, though it will strengthen the accelerated automation of various processes. It is still a long way from being able to replace the unique creative and interpersonal skills of human beings. GPT technology is best used to augment tasks performed by humans, not replace them. When asked what would the future of work in the next 10 years by AiDOOS - a freelance marketplace that provides Task as a Service platform, ChatGPT answered that it would depend on various factors like advances in technology, the global economy, and shifts in how businesses operate. It likely to see increased emphasis on collaboration and remorse work facilitated by technology adoptions. There will be more shifts towards flexible work arrangements in the forms of part-time and freelance work in sync with the adoption of businesses and workers towards new environments and cultures.

#chatgpt #googlebats aidoos

[aidoology]

ChatGPT - Its impact on the work

What is ChatGPT and how will it impact “Future of work?

ChatGPT is a chatbot based on the GPT-3.5 — Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce texts that look similar to the texts created by humans. A ChatGPT can respond to questions in a natural way, much like a human well-versed in most subjects does. The tool is created for users to receive both technical and non-jargon responses to their questions.

ChatGPT, which is still in the testing stage, is predicted by some likely to eclipse and replace Google. It has features apart from what other chatbots have, including answering questions, solving math equations, composing texts, fixing and debugging code errors, language translation, keyword detection, recommendations, and explanations of all actions, among many others.

What is a ChatGPT and how does it work?

OpenAI — an AI research company — released the beta version of ChatGPT to test what tasks a very large, powerful AI system can perform and it has drawn wider interest from individuals and organizations. You can ask a ChatGPT a limitless number of questions on any subject and is likely to receive answers that are useful and correct. In fact, the ChatGPT has no exact knowledge of anything by itself, it is an artificial intelligence that is trained using deep learning to understand patterns in an enormous amount of text collected from the internet ecosystem and provide useful and precise answers.

Its downside is that while the answers it gives may sound authoritative, as OpenAI alerts, it needs not to be necessarily so. The existing chatbot has been in practice for years now, but companies have seen limited success with their trials to replace humans to take care of customer service tasks. A study conducted for Ujet — a company whose technology manages customer contacts -, showed that 72% of people found chatbots to be of no use.

Though exact sources of data used by CharGPT are not revealed yet, OpenAI says it generally combs the web, archived books, and Wikipedia. Bern Elliot, a vice president at Gartner said that for now, ChatGPT is more for OpenAI to gain publicity and to show what’s possible with GPT language models than a use case for businesses to incorporate. Cai GoGwilt, the chief technology officer of Ironclad, said ChatGPT offers “more creative” responses compared to similar language models developed by big tech companies.

ChatGPT’s rising popularity shows there is a section of people that prefers getting information via questions and answers as opposed to a typical search query. Google parent Alphabet has developed some of the core AI technologies used to create systems like ChatGPT. Currently, most people use ChastGPT and then go to Google to verify the answers as the search engine has become a habit that will be very difficult to displace.

Asking a computer, a question and getting an answer is useful, and often ChatGPT delivers the goods. While Google often provides you with its suggested answers to questions and with links to websites that it thinks will be relevant, the quality of ChatGPT’s answers is often better than what Google will suggest. That makes GPT-3 a serious rival to Google and other search engines. That said, it is a bit time-consuming to vet the accuracy of ChatGPT answers because it just gives you some raw text with no links or citations, but ChatGPT is doubtless showing the way toward our tech future.

What questions can you ask ChatGPT?

You can ask a ChatGPT any questions (other than the off-limits) like asking for an explanation about Newton’s laws of motion or to write a poem, or a computer program, or anything for that matter, though it is not necessary that you might not get an answer. It can write a poem, though it may not impress a literature expert.

When I asked, “Is it easier to get a date by being sensitive or being tough?” GPT responded, in part, “Some people may find a sensitive person more attractive and appealing, while others may be drawn to a tough and assertive individual. In general, being genuine and authentic in your interactions with others is likely to be more effective in getting a date than trying to fit a certain mold or persona.”

Who is behind the development of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is the innovation of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, with the mission to develop a “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence system or to help others do so. GPT 3.5 which is an update of GPT-3 on which ChatGPT is built, is an example of AI technology known as large language models. The AIs are trained to generate texts based on what they’ve seen or learned through experience. They can also be trained automatically using a large amount of computer power over a period of weeks.

Can ChatGPT code software programs?

ChatGPT can reminisce steps humans have taken to perform something, making it possible for ChatGPT to generate actual programming code. ChatGPT can parse regular expressions (regex), a powerful but complex system for spotting particular patterns, for example, dates in a bunch of text or the name of a server in a website address. “It’s like having a programming tutor on hand 24/7,” tweeted programmer James Blackwell about ChatGPT’s ability to explain regex.

What are ChatGPT’s off-limits?

ChatGPT is built with the design to filter out “inappropriate” questions or requests, a behavior in line with OpenAI’s mission “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The answer you get from ChatGPT itself to a question to explain what’s off-limits will be questions that are discriminatory, offensive, or inappropriate. These off-limit requests include racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise discriminatory or hateful questions, or asking it to engage in illegal activities.

Concluding Note

It is unlikely that Chat GPT technology will replace humans in jobs, though it will strengthen the accelerated automation of various processes. It is still a long way from being able to replace the unique creative and interpersonal skills of human beings. GPT technology is best used to augment tasks performed by humans, not replace them.

When asked what would the future of work in the next 10 years by AiDOOS — a freelance marketplace that provides Task as a Service platform, ChatGPT answered that it would depend on various factors like advances in technology, the global economy, and shifts in how businesses operate. It is likely to see increased emphasis on collaboration and remorse work facilitated by technology adoptions. There will be more shifts towards flexible work arrangements in the forms of part-time and freelance work in sync with the adoption of businesses and workers towards new environments and cultures.

#chatgpt #ai #technology

[64bitgamer]

[sohinitheexplorer]

Absurdity of packing Cucumbers

The shrink wrap on these cucumbers keeps them fresher for longer.(Tas Country Hour: Fiona Breen)

I need to solve a problem, I want to increase shelf life of the food I buy, but I want something 1) Non-reactive, 2) Protective, 3) Insulating, 4) Cheap and 5) Convienient. I think plastic shrink wraping is perfectly fitting all the criterias however I think is taxing on the environment."You've got to weigh up the differences between plastic waste and food waste," (Why wrapping fruit and veg in plastic could actually be good for the environment, 2019). But the question is....cucumbers already come in a packging...why do we want to pack it again?

Today I will discuss about how I see this object presented as an attitude. Attitude; a precise way of thinking or feeling about something. In my research I realized that this object can symbolize many things. So, I will start with the symbol of when humans stopped foraging food and started cultivating it, as cucumber do not naturally exist on their own in nature…bitter gourd is what we should think about.

Cucumber is a distant cousin only zestier. You can also say, bitter gourd is a wisecrack philosopher and English cucumber is a Kardashian phenomenon. One is good for you, the other is junk food with the gap of 9 million subscribers. Circling back to the attitude part…why did I use this word?

Because I saw the object representing the yuppie side of human attitude. “I will not orient my life according to how things work I will orient the work of things according to my life because my dad didn’t say he loves me enough times. My question is fairly simple. Why does MHRA thinks it is okay to wrap individual English cucumbers in plastic for the consumers? Isn’t there any other sustainable alternative?

I found out four reasons:

1) Protection from bugs and bacteria and create plastic wasteland castles around the world. 2) Retain moisture in cucumber as it slowly evaporates in the refrigerator as if the cucumber will never rehydrate if kept in lukewarm water for 10 minutes. 3) Insulation and isolation from extreme temperature change…. you know funny coincidence the naturally occurring waxy rind does the exact same thing and we don’t even have to burn our fossil fuels for it. Only if we do not wash it right after harvesting. 4) The fruit looks good…I mean its not like we are trying to court a cucumber …it’s definitely used for eating.100%.

I want to draw your attention to a few questions with this demonstration.

1) Why do we want our fruits to look like shiny spotless toys? 2) Why do we want to increase the shelf life of the food rather than radically changing the quality of life we are living? 3) Why doesn’t the MHRA discloses the embodied energy behind every single produce we buy? 4) What is the philosophy of problem and solution then?

In the end I will leave you with some problematic stats to look at.

1) Manufactured English cucumber are nutritionally the most inferior species of cucumber to have(Cucumber, 2020). 2) Each year nearly 973.5 tonnes of single use plastic is thrown out by British residents just by consuming English cucumber, that is equivalent to 1 full cargo ship’s volume and weight (List of countries by cucumber production, 2022). 3) Cucumbers are one of the easiest fruits to grow and harvest and salad bush cucumber species is the most nutritious to consume(TIMG, 2021).

Refferences:

• Why wrapping fruit and veg in plastic could actually be good for the environment (2019) www.abc.net.au. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-03-25/fruit-and-vegetable-packaging-in-supermarkets-and-food-waste/10925374. • Cucumber (2020) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucumber.

• List of countries by cucumber production (2022) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cucumber_production (Accessed: 16 November 2022). • TIMG (2021) 3 Great Cucumber Plants To Grow This Year - For Eating Or Pickling!, This Is My Garden. Available at: https://thisismygarden.com/2021/01/cucumber-plants-to-grow/ (Accessed: 16 November 2022).