Really needed to draw Yona I think she'd be besties with Link

Link helping his boyfriend’s wife get closer with him is such a beautiful concept.

Prof says he'll grade students on a curve, so they organize a boycott of the exams and all get As

Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and everyone else is graded accordingly.

Clever students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” figured out that this meant that if they all boycotted the exam, they’d all get As.

So they organized a boycott, milling around the hall outside the class where the exams were being sat, sternly reminding each other that if no one sat the exam they’d all get straight As, ignoring Fröhlich’s pleas to come and sit the exam.

Fröhlich praised his students’ solidarity: “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done. At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.”

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/24/hang-together-or-hang-separate-2.html

Who will ride or die with me this hard

I love that even the professor was like, “YES! They did good!”

He told a bunch of PROGRAMMING students that he was going to grade on a curve.

PROGRAMING.

Like half of programming is looking at sorting algorithms and asking “what could break this?” They looked at the grading algorithm (curve grading) and noticed “if every grade is the same, everything is at the top of the list” and “the easiest way to get all the grades to be the same is to set them all to zero.”

Of course the professor praised them. He may have taught them the exact type of logic that had them organize the boycott in the first place. They found a bug in his grading system and loudly exploited it.

i needed the full songs worth of this not 15 seconds

Have an unproblematic cute. Definitely turn the song on.

Because everyday needs to begin with a smile

And again this shows up at the top of my activity feed 🔥

the thrashy thrashy by the fridge gets cuter each time

AAAAAAA

just a reminder - do NOT boycott streaming services or not watch new things. the unions have not called for one for a reason. for one, it affects residual payments, which as minimal as those currently are, actors are still getting them during this time, and for two, studios will use lack of viewership as an excuse to cancel shows because you are showing them there is no demand. it deeply affects the industry the writers and actors stand to come back to once the strike is over

Also: going to these places puts pressure and demand on the company. Demand they can't meet without actors and writers. That puts stress on them, and stress is good.

^^^^ive been looking for a rb with this addition because YES. if a customer wants a burger and there is no cook to make it, that puts pressure on the owner to pay the cook what they want so the customer will still give them money. if there is no customer, the owner has no reason for the cook to make burgers

Stop watching IF AND ONLY IF the unions call for a boycott. For the time being since they haven't, streaming the shows actually helps. You're not crossing a picket line to watch because that picket line does not exist unless a boycott is called for.

this place sucks im gonna drink six beers and jack off

SEVEN???

Unmute !

The Aussies have a thing or two to learn it would seem.

I’ve never seen an Ostrich look SO offended in my life.

Let’s hear it for unorthodox animal handling skills! 

The ostrich is either so offended that it just can’t stand it, or it’s so confused that this other ostrich thing has gone and shapeshifted on it.

dont play defense

Terfs want my gender-affirming lasers so bad that they stole my art

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

Shiina and Peko, it's been awhile!

birds of a feather

in hysterics

Last night I had a dream I woke up to find that my house had been turned into a Smart House with every wall being a digital screen including the roof so I could see it even laying on bed and the Siri voice said “Don’t worry. You are perfectly safe in your Apple Smart Home™️” knowing I have a BIG phobia of intruders especially at night and it continued with “Let’s explore the neighborhood from the comfort of your home” so it opened google maps and accidentally zoomed past a shitty jpeg of the girl from The Ring standing outside my house and it said “ignore that”. woke up laughing

The Gollum game is such an incredible throwback. Back in the PS2 era that type of buggy movie tie-in game was a dime a dozen & no one would've even noticed but by virtue of coming out in 2023, the last of its breed, it's a king, beheld with quiet horror by all. It crashes every five minutes even on the best hardware and when apologizing for its instability the devs misspelled their own game's name

"It looks like a PS2 game" is usually an inane insult and I guess it is if used for graphics here but in every other way? Yes, it's exactly like something that went right into the budget racks in 2004. It captures the weird frenzy of LotR releases during the trilogy so perfectly, it's like those ones that had the book license but not the movie one or one of the weirder spin-offs EA jammed out to exploit the license

i think the reason so many people online are like "yeah i respect sex workers but i think anyone who's pays for sex is a cum brained freak" is that so many people seem to unintentionally view desiring sexual intimacy as like incel behavior. like i promise you the problem with incels isn't that they want to have sex with beautiful women the problem is they view women as non-human hope this helps.

we justifiably give Biden a lot of shit but I think "at least 3" is the funniest possible response to some right wing dipshit asking you how many genders there are

The fact that the only autistic characters in media usually only work in jobs related to their special interests is yet another extension of the harmful idea Hans Asperger and the like introduced that autistic people are only worthy if they can work. Autistic characters in media are like "this character's special interest is forensics, so they work in crime scene investigation" or "this character's special interest is medicine so they work in medicine" when in real life most autistic people's jobs have nothing to do with their special interest. It's just not realistic. It's just this idea that autistic people and their interests are only valuable if they can successfully contribute to capitalism........I hate it.

This white man is trustworthy in the kitchen