#when the wikipedia article says

[somfte]

Me on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19th, 2006: "Yarrr, ahoy matey!"

Me on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19th, 2022: "When a king brands us pirates, he doesn't mean to make us adversaries. He doesn't mean to make us criminals. He means to make us monsters."

#black sails #when the wikipedia article says #'The association of pirates with peglegs parrots and treasure maps #popularized in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island (1883) #has had a significant influence on parody pirate culture' #i am fine im totally fine #🙃🙃🙃 #screaming crying throwing up etc #i hate it here (affectionate)

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

she is THE time machine <3

#i was looking for what time machine is in french and when i put machine temporelle into google dutch wikipedia came up #which is funny bc this page doesnt even exist in french? #but theres also some physics article from 2017 that uses machine temporelle so im gonna assume it's a real word #and use it #bc im not using 'machine à voyager dans le temps' im sorry #it's good for my word count maybe but can you imagine if they had to say all that every time? #i like french a lot but i dont like how many words it uses to say anything #french is like why use 1 word when 4 will do #just make up some words im begging you all this circumlocution is making me nuts #it doesnt gel with my writing style At All #missy voice: im cutting to the chase babey im streamlining im saving us a c t u a l minutes #missy when she needs to say 'machine à voyager dans le temps' every time: okay so we're not doing that #ursula voice: im a very busy lady and i havent got all day #missy writing a letter to the academie français: im a TIME LADY. do you udnerstand #do you understand how using a minimum of 6 SIX words every time i refer to my vehicle is funnily enough a waste of my time? #im sure we can do something about this #and if not im sure your successor can <3

[panvani]

Definitely one of the funniest artistic movements in terms of doing this

#logxx #I also love the definitely not biased Wikipedia article on futurism #Which refuses to identify Italian futurism with fascism and very obviously skirts rhe politics associated w Italian futurism #As much as possible #While also no reference to the actual policies of fascist Italy on art... #But then spends half of its section on Russian futurism talking about how the Soviets were sooo mean to them and they all killed themselves #When the Soviet relationship to Russian futurism was p similar to the Fascist Italian relationship to Italian futurism #That is to say. It was at one point popular. Then it wasn't.

[bereft-of-frogs]

Ngl the main reason I finally deleted TikTok wasn’t just because of the time suck and how it was ruining my attention span or making me feel shitty about myself/everything

But because I saw possibly the worst take to date on Ukraine and that was just the straw of stupidity that broke the camels back

It has been haunting me for two days

#I just hate how social media has convinced everyone they’re experts #god this guy was so stupid #I also hate these ‘intellectuals’ who know absolutely nothing about Eastern European history #or geopolitics in general #being like wow im so right about everything #I’m being so ~anti imperial~ by saying that ukraine should have instantly surrendered to russia #because imperialism good when russia do it? #I mean it was really just a new iteration of the ‘ukraine only hates russia because the us made them’ russian propaganda #because….they’d have no other reason to hate russia??? #maybe like…skim the Wikipedia article first #like 5 minutes bare minimum before commenting #better yet just don’t comment #anyway hopefully this has exorcised the post from my brain #current events cw

[readymades2002]

the way people go to bat for siken on this site is unreal

#i think responding to a teenager emailing you asking about your work with 'your email made me wish i'd died' is kind of evil #the things you say to teenagers stay with them and saying something like that is unbelievably cruel #especially for someone who is apparently a Great Writer though ive yet to see evidence of this #i understand wanting privacy but she emailed him just like. completely standard wikipedia article early life questions #she wasnt trying to be his friend or anything she certainly didnt bring up trauma like the mature tastemakers on tumbler dot net are saying #'people were harsh with me when i was a shitty teenager and it made me learn how to be better' telling a teenager #that them emailing you about an interview for a school paper made you wish a stroke had killed you is beyond harsh i think. a little #did she need to post it? no but when youre a teenager who is presumably interested in the world and in sharing what you know #with other people then this is a way to tell other people 'hey jsyk this author was a dickhead' #so they don't go through the same thing. like. im just #every day i see people on this site being so fucking weird about teenagers...

[iconac]

15.) What were they like as a child in their crèche?

quiet & unsmiling, but attentive. stretching out and out and out in the force like it were a limb to feel things out with, occasionally distressing other children who were not yet acclimated to others interacting with their newly discovered power. as a firrerreo they had grown up in a crèche, hidden away for safety out of cultural habit, so it took some time for them to adjust to the jedi's crèche as one not needing safeguarding, and the other children as just peers and not as those in need of protecting. [ there were several instances where an older jedi would come in to find the whole creche asleep but rye, who would be watching over the other children like a guard. it often took some insistence and the occasional display of jedi prowess to coax them to sleep with the others. ]

they cared for their peers, though. drying eyes and runny noses of those younger and unused to being without their families, comforting them with song and game and treats 'stolen' from older jedi. leading the other younglings in a line, ensuring everyone's hands were linked so no one got left behind. [ these actions were, in their own way, a display of a deep yearning for home. ] they were also incredibly curious and prone to 'escaping' when they believed the other children to be well-protected, exploring the halls and hiding from good-humored jedi who pretended not to notice them [ and it would not be long until other younglings began to follow them, small exploration teams of small jedi trekking through the home of the order as if it were uncharted wilderness. ]

despite their quiet nature they were by no means passive. they were incredibly stubborn, and their frustration come with snapping teeth and a fiery edge that would bleed out into the force. the crèchemasters would be quick to stymie this behavior as much as they could manage, as rye tended to have an area-of-affect to those around them. and when they did open their mouth, it was almost always to ask a question. and every answer given would lead to three more questions. their desire to see / feel / know was boundless [ this was one of the many things that drew them to kreia, and kreia to them in turn ] and in those early years in the order, it was seen as a bright spark rather than an all-consuming abyss.

jedi hc asks.

#in the firrerreo creche it was expected for older kids to look out for each other and look after younger kids. #and adults would watch over them all. kind of a loose hierarchy. and revan retains that sort of habit for a bit #but revan was definitely that weird kid in the group when everyone else is playing they're just. staring unblinking at you. #and you're like 'oh they must be a quiet kid' until you ask them what their favorite animal is and they say a whole wikipedia article #↘ ]⠀canon.⠀:⠀born of the clatter of bone against blade.

[ante--meridiem]

Socialised successfully today!

#it was an lgbtq coffee meetup #i think it went well because it was an extremely small group #just two people who set things up + me #& they were probably happy to see me because they were starting to worry no one would show up #but i did & it went well! #though i may have gone a bit overboard on infodumping maths when someone asked me a question about it #need to remember to preface my answers with that wikipedia article warning #you know the one. 'this section may contain details that are only of interest to a very specific audience' #I got a small houseplant out of it! #.....not technically sure i'm allowed houseplants but it doesn't say in the house rules that i'm *not* allowed #anyway. think this will be my social group for the next few years. just occasionally dropping in for coffee with some nice older students #so i don't *completely* lose touch with the existence of people beyond my lecturers #personal #oh i almost forgot! they have a big plush shark in their office!

[donuts4evry1]

Not to point out other Vietnamese words that people tend to mispronounce, but I often hear “Banh Mi” (Pronounced something like “Bahn Me”) pronounced “bon me”

I know people are trying their best because Viet is a terrible, terrible language but it does always surprise me a little bit lol

#Vietnamese tends to be a lot more consistent when it comes to pronunciation #the vietnamese normal 'a' sounds like the a in ''action'' rather than the a in ''father'' #then of course we have the dialects but we won't talk about those #im not a big fan of a lot of viet words but banh mi is actually one of the good ones #with the accents it's spelled bánh mì which means you say the 'a' with a rising tone and the 'i' with a falling tone #so it goes up and down :) #it's also another reason why the squiggly line accent (~) is my favourite accent #you say the vowel with a falling tone and then a rising tone in quick succession #it's a little embarrassing for me to be rambling about vietnamese when i can barely speak the language but the things I do know about it ar- #-e pretty cool #i'm working up to a sort of... syncretic form of vietnamese #talking in both English and Viet in the same sentence #my mom says I speak very well but it's not enough 😭😭 #i want to at least get to a point where I can read articles in vietnamese #that being #vietnamese jellyfish wikipedia articles #like YEAH i could just use google translate but Viet is just one of those languages that never works with google translate #it's ... mehhh for nouns but god forbid you try to translate a sentence. or a paragraph #lol #mun rambles

[alloutofgoddesses]

I’m writing a paper on my familial history and 1) Thank you McDowell family for having such a clear line through history with people who are well-known 2) The career options were farmer, soldier, or minister, but mainly farmer.

#always fun when you can say you’re family has Wikipedia articles #of course I’m just a nobody from New Mexico but it’s still cool #b rambles #BMO goes to college

[dyaz-stories]

.

#i'm so annoyed #i just started watching wednesday and really enjoyed the first two episodes #went on wikipedia to check the actors and got a huge spoiler in the casting section :/ #so then i went in the 'talk' part and it's some douchebag saying that wikipedia is 'not meant to give you a pleasant experience' #and that they're 'allowed' to spoil it and you shouldn't use wikipedia if you haven't finished the show #which seems ridiculous and just gives the impression they're on a power trip frankly #like no you're not fulfilling some greater 'encyclopedic purpose' here #you're just being a dick #i mean a lot of wikipedia articles only give the character's name + actor when you check them #so i only expected that and i'm upset #i'm pissed lmao it had been a long time since i had last been this into a show #and like i don't think this will ruin it for me completely but i would have liked to have experienced it myself #at least two people in the 'talk' section mentioned having the same experience as me #wednesday #Wednesday Addams

[butchratchettruther]

Thinking about that specific genre of discourse that is an affront to english literature

#Like that one twitter post criticising schools for making students centre their creative writing around a conflict #Or like when I saw someone say that this one ship was selfcest because one guy was an allegorical representation of the other guy’s worst #traits and impulses #Like babes. Babes. No. That’s just how literature works #Just read a book. Take an English literature class. Hell even read one wikipedia article about literary conventions

[umabloomer]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

#palestine #jewish #museums #history #ukraine

[kenyatta]

I once had ChatGPT insist that a particular composer wrote music for a game, even going so far as to list particular songs from the soundtrack that they were supposedly responsible for, and it helpfully provided hallucinatory citations when I asked for them (a broken link on the game publisher's website and a link to Wikipedia, which did not in fact support its assertion either now or at any point in the article's history). Nor could I find anywhere else on the internet where someone even mistakenly believed that that composer had worked on the game. ChatGPT lies not because it's regurgitating falsehoods that it found on the internet - it lies because it invents new falsehoods on its own. It's not just trained on stuff on the internet that's wrong; it's trained to be confidently wrong in general. It doesn't know what facts are, it just knows how to produce things that are shaped like facts and shove them in fact-shaped holes. I personally wasted 30 minutes of my life fact-checking/"not believing everything it says", when it confidently told me something surprising. My horizons were not broadened by exposing me to "different worldviews". This was unequivocally a negative experience for me.

comment on a MetaFilter post about AI: "My goal is to be helpful, harmless, and honest."

#chatgpt #machine learning #internet

[nohoperadio]

Often when I'm reading the Wikipedia article about some zoological group, there'll be a sentence near the start that says something like "[group] varies in size from [smallest species in group] to [largest species in group]". I always immediately click on the largest species. I love to see a huge version of a thing, it's usually some crazy monster that looks sick as hell, it's always worth seeing and I have a great time.

And then I say to myself, come on now, you don't want to be someone who's just interested in the big ones, see what the smallest one looks like. So with a sense of grim duty, I click. It's not even that small usually, most small things aren't like that little frog wrapped around someone's pinkie, they maybe look a bit like the juvenile version of a more median-sized species perhaps. But I nod appreciatively and I say out loud, "Gee yeah, that is a small one of those", and then go back to the main article I started at.

Now both links are purple. No one can accuse me of being narrow-minded or unjust, and I can read my article in peace.

#uninteresting

[pipariperho]

I've been listening Pawn of Proph/ecy by David Ed/dings lately and not sure if it is the reader or the story but so fat it isn't all that memorable. Like there's shitton of characters and I can barely keep track of them buy I only care about Silk, there's hints for the mystery of who the MC's relatives are/were but it is not all that interesting and when the MC tries to ask about his past one of the only persons with answers is like little boys should keep their mouths shut and go to bed all the damn time. Just something about the story makes it meh to me.

#fantasies make money no matter what so i should write one #Considering i last year listened to the entirety of wheek of time i don't care enough about this to continue to the 2nd book #Unless something cool happens #I know there is magic in this world but it just is not mentioned that often #So there hasn't been all that many immersive moments of fantasy in it #Just some don't say his name he can hear it from the other side of the world #Well if the wikipedia article about the whole story being born out of is true #Then is it any wonder the stiry is boring af #Well not exactly boting as i am still listening it and i tend to stop listening when i don't like the story #But there just isn't enough interesting things happening

[welpnotagain]

am a bit bewildered by myself. idk how exactly, i know why, but i'm now reading about how to not be a menace for wiki editors because i tried to tell them a source on an article was kinda shit and i got a very kind and generic copy-pasted message from an apparently very committed, kind wiki editor so now I feel the need to like try harder

#very unfair of this man to have actual pictures of himself on his page showing that he is an old man passionate about Wikipedia as a projec #when i first saw the message i thought i had fucked something up because Wikipedia Is Not intuitive #And Its A Lot you need to read up on to make sense of it #Also. kinda fucked up that i can edit other users personal pages. why can I see their personal page history? that's none of my buisness #the generic message he send wasnt specific to what I did but he pointed out that its important to write an edit summary after editing an #article and like. i didnt edit an article I THINK I added like a little post on the very specific page saying the used source sucks here ar #are better ones godspeed' and his generic message made me think I fucking edited the article and that I needed to edit an edit summary #those little posts on the discussion pages of articles apparently don't need them? or at least I TRIED adding one but it DIDNT WORK #anyway #i should be studying