Dear tumblr newbies of #196:

Silmarillion (Etc) Headcanon Survey, Version 5

Part B: Demographics

with its supplement on re-embodiment timelines and reasoning, and also the Finwëan cousins relative ages survey.

Enticements:

(and if you haven't already taken it, here's Part A, which is about the nature of things)

(Part C will cover judgement calls and Elves Elves and Ainur Elves, Men, and Ainur Elves, Dwarves, Men and Ainur Everyone Behaving Badly)

[translates “eucatastrophe” into Quenya just because I can]

“Arandúquerma”, if you were curious

This is officially the best response and a big ass mood right there

At all the people in the notes saying: “Unless it’s this” and “Certain types of shippers need to die” this is fucking targeted at you.

Pattern test for Sew Fresh Quilts. My Darling Catholes (my name for it). I had a lot of fun making this one. Background is origami cats!

The striped one is my favorite 💕

hello we live in a world where someone out there is making patterns for cat butthole quilts and my mother is testing the pattern by actually making the cat butthole quilt. and posting it on tumblr. which I suppose is where this quilt belongs, really.

I didn't even notice, I was trying to work out how it was loss.jpg.

sometimes people ask why I block out names when roasting an opinion and I think fewer people would ask that if they clicked through a few popular posts and saw that the people who got clowned on are still receiving anon hate years down the line

for every opinion I hold lightly enough to joke about, there is someone whose entire life revolves around holding a much more intense and aggressive version of it. every time a post gets reblogged, the odds of that person not seeing it get closer to zero

pls reblog because i'm legit so curious lol! tag around where you're from and how long you had were expected to do it if you like!

Silmarillion (Etc) Headcanon Survey, Version 5

Part A: The nature of things

with its satellite survey on hybridization.

(I will reblog with a link to the results assuming it gets ten responses.)

Part B (Demographics) and Part C (Judginess, previously known as 'Elves Behaving Badly' but that doesn't really cover it) will be released in the coming weeks!

(At the survey hub you can find links to results of old surveys and some other currently active surveys, like Finwëan Cousins Relative Ages, two options for trying to define the relationships between Elrond and Elros and Maedhros and Maglor, and the infamous Cousin Gauntlet.)

Enticements:

Here is your chance to offer opinions on…

and more

Results (from 11 responses as of this reblog)

Still only 19 responses, but in an effort to drum up some more:

(This was a 'check as many as you like'.) (The cut-off choices above are: 2nd option, Hybridization of humans/elves/dwarves; 3rd option, Created by a Vala/Eru combo, like dwarves; 6th option, I have a concrete theory and it's nothing like any of these; 7th option, I don't have a concrete theory but I don't like any of these.)

Nobody should be using GPT detectors for anything important.

This is from a recent study that found that GPT detectors were misclassifying writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated 48-76% of the time (!!!), compared to 0%-12% for native speakers.

It is irresponsible to use AI-generated text detectors as evidence of academic misconduct, and that's putting it mildly.

ten years of fighting and when shit hits the fan tumblr instantly has reddit’s back. the greatest enemies to lovers story ever told.

you understand

Oops, my hand slipped–

humanizations of websites have returned. nature is healing, capitalism is the virus

THE FANART

dark green is a nice color. underrated

ladies and gentlemen, Phtalo Green

This is literally my favorite color. 😩 Smaragd green is another dark shade of green that I’m absolutely obsessed with.

By "theoretically write", I mostly mean "was taught, but it's not what you usually use and it's not necessarily pretty and you forgot what capital Z looks like or that might be just me".

(And "read anything" should be taken to exclude signatures. It includes e.g. nineteenth-century letters, but not signatures.)

*suspicious staring* cursive witches

42.6% of you can just read this

I can pick out, I don't know, three-quarters of the words? Maybe 80%? With effort. Maybe more if I stared at it longer. And you guys can just read it.

Cursive witches.

No, I need you to understand, this is not unusual for nineteenth-century letters.

This is what I was thinking of when I said 'anything'. Have most people never seen this sort of thing???

I mean it's fine if you haven't, obviously. For some reason I assumed this was a universally understood context to 'difficult-to-read cursive'… in hindsight I'm not sure why…

By "theoretically write", I mostly mean "was taught, but it's not what you usually use and it's not necessarily pretty and you forgot what capital Z looks like or that might be just me".

(And "read anything" should be taken to exclude signatures. It includes e.g. nineteenth-century letters, but not signatures.)

*suspicious staring* cursive witches

42.6% of you can just read this

I can pick out, I don't know, three-quarters of the words? Maybe 80%? With effort. Maybe more if I stared at it longer. And you guys can just read it.

Cursive witches.

No, I need you to understand, this is not unusual for nineteenth-century letters.

This is what I was thinking of when I said 'anything'. Have most people never seen this sort of thing???

A lot of folks are responding to the whole Reddit situation by calling for the return of decentralised forums, and I think it's important to remember that, contrary to certain popular narratives, the reason early 2000s forum culture has fallen by the wayside is not because people are Just Lazy. Certainly, ease of use is part of it, but a much larger part of it is how vulnerable self-hosted forums are.

Basically, the problem is that even the largest and most carefully managed self-hosted forums can be rendered unusable more or less indefinitely by a single sufficiently determined hostile actor. This can take the form of both attacks on the forum's social infrastructure (i.e., via sock-puppet accounts, botting, organised "raids", etc.) and attacks on its technical infrastructure (i.e., via hacking, DDoS, etc.). In either case, a self-hosted forum has no real defence, and the majority of decentralised forum communities survive only by virtue of their relative obscurity; once a self-hosted forum manages to attract the attention of That One Guy who's willing to devote his life to shitting the place up over some microscopic slight, it's effectively game over.

Right now, there are essentially only two mitigation strategies:

To be clear, these are not intractable problems; other solutions may well exist. However, any proposed plan for bringing decentralised public forums back needs to address them. If you're going in operating under the assumption that forums have become marginalised simply because corporations are evil and people are lazy, you're setting yourself up to learn the hard way why self-hosted forums no longer seem to be capable of growing beyond a certain point.

I remember in high school my geography teacher said humans will choose to live in unbeatable heat over unbearable cold, but nearly every single person I've met in my life has said they'd rather die in the cold than live in the heat, so now I thought to myself why not outsource this question!

no fahrenheit because if i have to google the answers on polls with no celcius, so do you

For the Americans, -5°C = 23°F and 35°C = 95°F. Between those two options, I'd honestly pick cold weather probably, but both happen every year where I live, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's hilarious how the notes clearly show what climate you're used to. Canadians are laughing at the idea of that being impossibly cold; Australians are laughing at the idea of that being impossibly hot.

And for everyone complaining that there's a limit to how many layers of clothes you can remove: in the heat, you can get into cool water. There are simple ways to deal with it, even if you don't have air-conditioning.

Question for all the Australians comfortable with 35 Celsius temperatures — is it also that hot at night?

Probably more relevant to op's geography teacher's point is that you are not going to grow much if it never gets above freezing. I'm not sure how you're going to do anything besides lie in a pool at all times if it stays that hot 24 hours a day every day, but then I'm a wuss — I'm pretty sure you can produce food under those circumstances, at least if it's humid enough. (You can hunt marine life in the never-thawing zone, so it's still possible, but I think agriculture is out.)

idk when we decided that explaining yourself shouldn't be part of an apology but like. if someone was a dick to me and apologizes but I still don't understand why they did it I'm not gonna feel any better

"Sorry for hurting your feelings earlier. I was trying to say x, but I guess it came across wrong. I don't think you're stupid."

or

"Sorry I snapped at you. I didn't get enough sleep last night so my patience is a little low today."

is a better apology than

"I want you to know that I am sorry that my actions offended you. I take full accountability for my actions and I am listening and learning. I hear you."

Hard agree. I wanna know what went wrong and why, and even more than that, I want to know that you know what went wrong and why.