It wasn’t the intended message of this but what immediately strikes me is that intersections copied off a city map can make a gorgeous fictional writing system. I am probably going to just do this the next time I need alien runes or something.
serkentsi-deactivated20180207
here are some actual 19th-century american names:
- Ezekiel Bacon
- Fielder Suit
- Barnabas Bidwell
- Ambrose Kingsland
- Gustavus Swift
- Yelverton King
- Learned Hand
- Cadwallader Colden
- Churchill Caldom Cambreleng
- Moses Yale Beach
- Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar
- Orsamas Hylas Irish
- Wheeler Hazard Peckham
- Nathaniel Bowditch Blunt
- Preserved Fish
severnayazemlya
- Ulysses Doubleday
- Pleasant A. Hackleman
- Erastus Newton Bates
- Asa P. Blunt
- Algernon Sydney Badger
- George Partridge Colvocoresses (not to be confused with his father, George Musalas Colvocoresses, or his brother, Alden Partridge Colvocoresses)
- Portus Baxter
- Sylvester Churchill
- Henderson King Yoakum
- Horatio Bisbee, Jr.
- Orlando Boss
- Noble Hull
- Speed Fry
- Hasbrouck Davis
- Zealous Bates Tower
- Sylvanus T. Rugg
- Zebulon Baird Vance
- Leonidas Polk
- Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox
- Alexander Cummings McWhorter Pennington, Jr.
- Alfred Thomas Archimedes Torbert
- Alonzo Nute
- Phineas Clawson
- S. Park Coon
- Haldimand Putnam
- Charlemagne Tower
- Charles McAnally
- Strong Vincent
- Israel Vogdes
- Galusha Pennypacker
- Green Clay Smith
- Verplanck Van Antwerp
- Roeliff Brinkerhoff
- Teunis G. Bergen
- Danske Dandridge
- Lavinia Blood
serkentsi
- George Coke Dromgoole
- Evarts Worcester Farr
- Mahlon Dickerson
- Smith Miller
- Ossian Ray
- Cyrus Spink
- Person Cheney
- Narsworthy Hunter
- Ithamar Conkey Sloan
- Sydenham Elnathan Ancona
- Augustus Octavius Bacon
- Wingfield Bullock
- Cullen A. Battle
- Nedom Angier
- Godlove Stein Orth
- Decimus et Ultimus Barziza
- William Czar Bradley
- Caesar Augustus Rodney
- Eleazar Wheelock Ripley
- Littleton Purnell Dennis
- Noble Leslie DeVotie
- Hedge Thompson
- Nathaniel Hazard
- Zalmon Wildman
- Newton Nutting
- Danville Leadbetter
- Leverett Saltonstall
- Hempstead Washburne
- Isaac Leet
- Noah Virgin
- Tyre York
- Melancthon Smith
- Lewis Vital Bogy
- Pleasant Crump
- Jabez Leftwich
- Cyrus Beers
- Job Durfee
- Job Mann
- Asa Lyon
- Solomon Foot
- George Edmund Badger
- Heman Allen (there were three Heman Allens in the House of Representatives, two from Vermont and one from Ohio; but there was never more than one Heman Allen in the House at a time)
- Outerbridge Horsey (there are at least seven Outerbridge Horseys)
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement: Real Programmers write in FORTRAN. Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators, and “user-friendly” software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term “software” sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly. Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I’ll call him Mel, because that was his name. I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster — drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren’t here to stay, anyway. (That’s why you haven’t heard of the company, or the computer.) I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn’t approve of compilers. “If a program can’t rewrite its own code”, he asked, “what good is it?” Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most popular computer program the company owned. It ran on the LGP-30 and played blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show, and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we never discussed. Mel’s job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instruction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum, the next instruction was located. In modern parlance, every single instruction was followed by a GO TO! Put that in Pascal’s pipe and smoke it. Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code: that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the “read head” and available for immediate execution. There was a program to do that job, an “optimizing assembler”, but Mel refused to use it. “You never know where it’s going to put things”, he explained, “so you’d have to use separate constants”. It was a long time before I understood that remark. Since Mel knew the numerical value of every operation code, and assigned his own drum addresses, every instruction he wrote could also be considered a numerical constant. He could pick up an earlier “add” instruction, say, and multiply by it, if it had the right numeric value. His code was not easy for someone else to modify. I compared Mel’s hand-optimized programs with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program, and Mel’s always ran faster. That was because the “top-down” method of program design hadn’t been invented yet, and Mel wouldn’t have used it anyway. He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first, so they would get first choice of the optimum address locations on the drum. The optimizing assembler wasn’t smart enough to do it that way. Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either, even when the balky Flexowriter required a delay between output characters to work right. He just located instructions on the drum so each successive one was just past the read head when it was needed; the drum had to execute another complete revolution to find the next instruction. He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure. Although “optimum” is an absolute term, like “unique”, it became common verbal practice to make it relative: “not quite optimum” or “less optimum” or “not very optimum”. Mel called the maximum time-delay locations the “most pessimum”. After he finished the blackjack program and got it to run (“Even the initializer is optimized”, he said proudly), he got a Change Request from the sales department. The program used an elegant (optimized) random number generator to shuffle the “cards” and deal from the “deck”, and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair, since sometimes the customers lost. They wanted Mel to modify the program so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console, they could change the odds and let the customer win. Mel balked. He felt this was patently dishonest, which it was, and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer, which it did, so he refused to do it. The Head Salesman talked to Mel, as did the Big Boss and, at the boss’s urging, a few Fellow Programmers. Mel finally gave in and wrote the code, but he got the test backwards, and, when the sense switch was turned on, the program would cheat, winning every time. Mel was delighted with this, claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical, and adamantly refused to fix it. After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$, the Big Boss asked me to look at the code and see if I could find the test and reverse it. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look. Tracking Mel’s code was a real adventure. I have often felt that programming is an art form, whose real value can only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane art; there are lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever, by the very nature of the process. You can learn a lot about an individual just by reading through his code, even in hexadecimal. Mel was, I think, an unsung genius. Perhaps my greatest shock came when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it. No test. None. Common sense said it had to be a closed loop, where the program would circle, forever, endlessly. Program control passed right through it, however, and safely out the other side. It took me two weeks to figure it out. The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility called an index register. It allowed the programmer to write a program loop that used an indexed instruction inside; each time through, the number in the index register was added to the address of that instruction, so it would refer to the next datum in a series. He had only to increment the index register each time through. Mel never used it. Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register, add one to its address, and store it back. He would then execute the modified instruction right from the register. The loop was written so this additional execution time was taken into account — just as this instruction finished, the next one was right under the drum’s read head, ready to go. But the loop had no test in it. The vital clue came when I noticed the index register bit, the bit that lay between the address and the operation code in the instruction word, was turned on — yet Mel never used the index register, leaving it zero all the time. When the light went on it nearly blinded me. He had located the data he was working on near the top of memory — the largest locations the instructions could address — so, after the last datum was handled, incrementing the instruction address would make it overflow. The carry would add one to the operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set: a jump instruction. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way. I haven’t kept in touch with Mel, so I don’t know if he ever gave in to the flood of change that has washed over programming techniques since those long-gone days. I like to think he didn’t. In any event, I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the offending test, telling the Big Boss I couldn’t find it. He didn’t seem surprised. When I left the company, the blackjack program would still cheat if you turned on the right sense switch, and I think that’s how it should be. I didn’t feel comfortable hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.
[source]
Anonymous asked:
I came here to form meaningful relationships with people and chew bubblegum, and boy am I glad I just won this lifelong supply of bubblegum from a Wrigley's promotion.
Same.
Internet friendships are way more fragile than is comfortable to admit. Do you ever think about how easy it would be to just quit tumblr all of a sudden? Do you ever wonder how quickly you’d be more or less completely forgotten? A week? Two, tops?
Fact: if you’re creating a CRPG with an ambiguously Middle Eastern setting - either as a primary milieu or as someplace the party visits - you must take care to frequently remind the player that there’s sand, or else they might forget.
The landscape? Sand. The town? Sand dune right down the middle of the main street. People’s houses? Big piles of sand all over ‘em. Piles of sand in them, too, no need to explain why. The locals employ sand-related metaphors in everyday conversation. The prophecy - and there’s always a prophecy - somehow involves sand, of course. Did I mention that there’s sand?
Because there’s sand.
Gotta keep the Sith away somehow, dude.
…what if I dressed like this every day
doctorcalamityjones
Then you would be even more of an inspiration to me.
periegesisvoid
Do you ever just see something and go “wow I am really not straight”
a milkshake to summon the boys and a cold one to bind them
the line between not going out as an act of self-care and not going out as a symptom of depression is but a gossamer thread
how i tell the difference: i ask myself if i would like to be out by myself in the park, reading in the shade. if yes, then declining an invitation to be around people or handing off an errand run to someone else is self-care, because it’s a stressful activity i’m avoiding. i’m not self-isolating.
if reading under a tree doesn’t sound good, it’s anhedonia, and i need to make myself get up and move around to encourage my body to step up brain chemical production. so i make myself go for a short walk, and after about two blocks i’m usually feeling a lot less meh. i mean, not ‘all better’ or anything, but i no longer want to curl up like an ammonite and fossilize.
nest-deactivated20181209
i just had the weirdest moment, i was feeling my front teeth with my tongue because they’re the tiniest bit crooked, and then i had the thought “i’ll check if they’re also crooked in my other mouth” and then i realized to my shock and confusion that i have only one mouth, leading me to believe that in a past life i was a terrible monster with two mouths
It’s super nice when you realize you have more than one arm, tho.
nest-deactivated20181209
i just had the weirdest moment, i was feeling my front teeth with my tongue because they’re the tiniest bit crooked, and then i had the thought “i’ll check if they’re also crooked in my other mouth” and then i realized to my shock and confusion that i have only one mouth, leading me to believe that in a past life i was a terrible monster with two mouths
imagine a moe history girls anime adapted by the west
veltish
nvm that’s just Hamilton
Everyone who cites Murray positively and unironically are hacks who haven’t done basic research to check him and cannot and must not be taken seriously by serious people.
I’ve read a lot of criticism of Murray over the years and I can’t think of any of it really being justified. What is so easily discovered by basic research that disqualifies everything he says?
Still pretty ill equipped to defend myself so to be fair I’m just being a little bitch coward like always but like to fuckin start despite coining flynn effect said effect is a trend in the data he bases his entire argument on. If IQ tests don’t measure general intelligence, what the fuck was he basing his decline claims on? When IQ tests seem to show increase, not decline?
Actual psychs give better criticisms than I could but generally while IQ and poverty is correlated, it’s poverty that predicts IQ, not the other way around. Turns out developmental effects like nutrition and environmental stress matter more than genes - who knew? Well, most psychiatrists and early childhood people I’ve met.
It’s also hard to stratify a 100 year old society on genetic grounds. I mean that’s what, 3 generations? I’m trying to think of a three step sorting algorithm that would actually produce a noticable effect and the ones I can think of aren’t chunking like this but I’m sleepy and don’t remember them well
“You’re shit.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m shit.”
#persuasive rhetoric
Cephalopods have had enough of your shit
So apparently Senators Collins and Murkowski have pissed of the white male members of the GOP to the point where some members have said that they’d challenge them to a duel if they were in South Texas
Anyway so I’m calling Rep. Farenthold later to accept on Sen. Collin’s behalf and I’m choosing Fists. Can take place in Iowa because if two parties agree to mutual combat, under state law it is totally legal here.
And if he accepts yes I will stream that shit live don’t be silly.
And after I beat his ass once for Collins, I will duel him again on Murkowski’s behalf.
Square up, bitch.
untilstarsfall
OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU SO MUCH GOD CSPAN BOUT TO BE LIT
Submitted
SO I CALLED HIS DC OFFICE AND SAID BASICALLY THE SAME THING I SENT VIA EMAIL.
After about 20 seconds of dead silence, the staffer let out kinda a little laugh and said “Well ma’m, I’ll be happy to pass on your…”
“I’m not joking.”
“Ma’m?”
“You think I’m joking. I am dead serious. You want my address? Or I’ll meet him at the airport. I am absolutely serious about this. Oh, and as the challenged party, I get to pick weapons. I choose fists.”
Another 20 seconds of somehow even deeper silence.
“I…I’ll pass your challenge on to the congressman.”
“No. He issued the challenge. I’m accepting. Unless he’s backing out like the spineless coward he is.”
More silence. “I…I’ll let Congressman Farenthold know, ma’m.”
“You do that.”
ANYWAY SO HOW DID YOU ALL SPEND YOUR LUNCH BREAK TODAY.
Also if anyone wants to contact Farenthold via email or phone and ask when he’s going to man up and meet me on the field of honorable combat I would owe you one, particularly if you’re in Texas.
Okay so I called. Intern didn’t even hesitate anymore. Just asked me my method of dual (I chose fencing) and after taking my contact info (which I flubbed the numbers on) told me he’d pass it on.
Excellent.
Did you ever knooow that you’re my heeeerooooo *serenades*
I hereby nominate Joy to hold up the boombox (or, since this is 2017, the Iphone) and play the fight music from the Pon Farr episode of Star Trek while I apply a rear naked choke to Farenthold.
You can count on me, boss.
I somehow knew you’d have a link to this song within 25 seconds.
@gabriel-wolfe-wordsmith is going to sell popcorn and I think someone else offered to make commemorative t-shirts.
The Washington number to ask him when he’ll land in Iowa to meet me is 202-225-7742, BTW
I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.
About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.
The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.
It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.
Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.
They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”
“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”
It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone.
And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”
The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”
When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.
They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.
When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”
After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.
Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.
It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.
We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.
She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”
Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”
“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.
“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”
And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.
The Independent Record, Helena, Montana, October 14, 1925
semitics
This is butch/femme solidarity
Anonymous asked:
please please expand on your list of Things Which Have Actually Worked, your ask box ghost wants to hear about this
I have the best ask box ghost and I’m sorry to have gone so long without responding to this; I wanted to wait till I was in a place where I could give it the thought and attention it deserves.
(Original post here. I totally encourage other people to share their lists of Things Which Have Actually Worked; that seems like the sort of valuable information which is really useful to have available.)
(Cut for length, and various mental illness stuff.)
