The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.
So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.
But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.
But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.
Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.
I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.
on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.
The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.
I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.
at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”
love that crowley’s car isn’t all that rebellious at heart it just wants to please whichever parent has custody
crowley: my car ONLY drives fast ONLY plays queen and ONLY lets bad bitches drive
aziraphale in the country listening to classical and going 30km per hour: ok dear
This is Wild Frank (or Frank de la Jungla) and this man is a fucking hero. He’s been involved in a lot of legal battles because he makes a habit of stealing fucking tigers from billionaires in Thailand and helping them get rehabilitation to get back to the wild. Governments hate him, poachers hate him, but in my country this guy is the face of animal freedom.
Source: babyanimalgifs
the second worst thing about the recent surge (no pun intended) in robotgirl posting is that I'm a reverse engineer, and an asexual one at that. if I met a robotgirl we wouldn't have weird sex, I'd open up all her panels and take pictures of her PCBs and figure out what all the chips are and dump her EEPROMs and hard drive image and upload this to archive.org
the worst thing is that most of you robot girl posters would enjoy it
yeah, we would
"If I met a robot girl I wouldn't fuck her, I'd just make the most explicit pornography possible and post it publicly on archive.org"
here's an extremely deep and thought-provoking comic i co-wrote with my theyfriend ☀️
hello everyone let’s stop looking back and wondering if things could have been different, it’s never gonna happen! love you
So with Oppenheimer coming out tomorrow, I feel a certain level of responsibility to share some important resources for people to understand more about the context of the Manhattan Project. Because for my family, it’s not just a piece of history but an ongoing struggle that’s colonized and irradiated generations of New Mexicans’ lives and altered our identity forever. Not only has the legacy of the Manhattan Project continued to harm and displace Indigenous and Hispanic people but it’s only getting bigger: Biden recently tasked the Los Alamos National Lab facility to create 30 more plutonium pits (the core of a nuclear warhead) by 2026. So this is a list of articles, podcasts and books to check out to hear the real stories of the local people living with this unique legacy that’s often overlooked.
hi, gentle reminder that you can reclaim slurs for yourself but not for the entire community! Please don't say g*y when talking about other fags, it is a harmful word that has been used against the queer community to hurt mlm, use less harmful words like cocksucker, faggot, queer, and fairy! Thank you ✨
how long until someone takes this one seriously I wonder
To everyone who read g*y as goy, you know what sure new discourse just dropped, calling people goy is homophobic now and you must call non Jewish people fags that's the rule I'm sure we can wrap the slur discourse enough to lead to that conclusion
shabat shalom to all you christian ass-bandits
fanart
hey op here this is the best thing i’ve ever seen
Me too
hey. it’s me again. this brought me to the verge of tears. i love this. thank you
Hollow Knight Heritage Post
we gotta collect all the art mediums
oh okay. heart steps right out of my chest and falls down the stairs
I, a hearing person who likes subtitles just as a preference, shouldn't have to read a subtitle that's obvious nonsense, go back a couple seconds, and listen again in order to figure out what's going on. An accessibility feature should not be the most half-assed part of a professionally made production. Scripted media has absolutely no excuse for not having subtitles or having subtitles that aren't perfectly verbatim. Professional captioning services should be ashamed of the shoddy work that they put out. Captions should be treated as a part of the production, just like filming, editing, audio balancing, etc - and anything that releases with missing or bad captions should be seen as unfinished
I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.
J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.
You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.
You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.
On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.
Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.
she has almost finished her rooster transformation
you can tell this website is autistic as hell because someone posts a video with a mildly catchy phrase in it and no one shuts up about it for an extended period of time. or image even. image with a mildly catchy phrase in it even. we love phrases here on tumblr dot com love to repeat them. due to the autism
It’s symmetrical :)
we DO grow old and happy. btw.
And you find love and it stays with you.
