the end of men in black is so funny. your boss trains you for two days on interplanetary relations then says "ok I think you can take it from here. I'm wiping my own memory so don't bother calling me if you have any questions"
This is just modern on site training
Anonymous asked:
So, would u say what you think the US "House of Cards" show was overtly aiming for, and what did they actually hit? I'm pretty curious on your take.
it’s hard to say what if anything they were aiming for on plot grounds given that it was 73 episodes over six seasons and they were clearly making it up as they went along after they went off the rails laid down by the British original, clearly the ending (which I haven’t seen) was a consequence of Spacey’s implosion and would have scrambled any plans they had drafted in the previous five years anyway.
in the show we see Spacey sardonically addressing the camera a lot, giving the audience this cynical inside view of how DC really works etc. etc. except the view it presents of Washington and of government is mostly an irrelevant fantasy and the real focus of the show is his relationship with Robin Wright, which the writers clearly never figured out how to handle and as a result it’s all over the place.
but I think you can redeem it with a slight reframing: these two people are both sociopaths obviously, the show makes that perfectly clear, but they’re also totally out of their depth at all times and have no idea what is going on.
Spacey’s soliloquies obscure the fact that despite his political skills he doesn’t really understand what makes people tick and he lacks self-awareness into his own personality, but Robin Wright really shines as this incredibly possessed and brutal and frankly quite scary woman who is regularly baffled and even terrified by other people who act in ways that make no sense to her at all.
individually they can’t understand themselves and together they can’t understand each other, they really are like unwitting sharks tragically born in human skin and forced to pretend that they know what they’re doing; as with Breaking Bad the gods of randomness smile upon them and all of their mistakes so they end up failing upwards to the presidency, which is a kind of nightmare all in itself! instead of sinking into confused obscurity all of their flaws are in the public eye as they desperately pretend they understand what is going on and pound on the mental buttons that make people do things without really knowing why.
so yeah that’s my view of House of Cards: what if two incredibly high functioning but fundamentally broken sociopaths ended up in a relationship together that lurched like a tornado across the world; an intentional take would start by focusing on them but gradually shift more to the people around them -- since they never change and aren’t very interesting as characters -- who get drawn in to their whirlwind either opportunistically or accidentally and do not realise the truth of it until it destroys them.
like he's fucking the reporter and in her mind she sees it as an affair following the kind of rules and framework that these things do, right up until the point that he [does the thing that ends it] which really should happen for no reason at all, just because he wants to end it and doesn't know how to so he does that, because he doesn't really understand how anything works and nobody cottons on to that until it's too late.
I think the difference with Breaking Bad (so far as I can tell, I have watched little to none of US HoC past the first season), is that in BB the bumbling is clearly part of Walter White’s character. He learns to be more ruthless and to quickly outsmart his adversaries, but right until the last season, he still feels like the awkward stick in the mud fifty-something that he is, relatively out of his depth among the gangsters and definitely making it up as he goes, and it works out for him because he’s lucky, yes, but also because you get the sense that other characters aren’t nearly as in control as they appear, they also make it up as they go along.
(This is the reason I stopped watching Better Call Saul, because watching it right after ending BB felt like retreading a lot of the same ground. Maybe I’ll get back to it some day)
Anonymous asked:
you know what? fuck you. *unargues your mate*
smugly produces a smaller, even more argued mate
Sauron: “I like your Silmarils”
Morgoth: “Thanks, I stole them from the president”
hold on i have to read the Silmarillion real quick
yeah this is funny
braver than any US marine
I love the new timestamp feature. Instantly see that it did indeed take nearly a month to reply.
Boy do I miss the time when I could just read the Silmarillion in a few days because I liked to spend all of my time reading, even at summer camp with dozens of other things to do.
I get how the whole "listening to music as a dick-measuring contest for who can listen to the most obscure band" thing can get grating sometimes but I don't think people realize just how vital that phenomenon is for new up and coming bands to get a foot in the door. it's understandable to be annoyed by hipsterism but unless you want all music to be industry plants and former child stars you're just going to have to accept it as part of the social ecosystem.
most of your friends probably won't go around hyping up your amateurish self-released bandcamp project, but you know who will? the most insufferable hipster jackass you'll ever meet.
[your best friend playing your music in front of someone else]: yeah haha this is my friend's band... i know it's kinda weird and rough around the edges but i'm kinda into it... if you're not tho i'll turn it off.
[pretentious music guy you've never met before playing your music in front of someone else]: yeah so i found this on bandcamp and it completely blew me away, no one is making music like this today, it's so raw and experimental and interesting, i can't believe they only have 3 listeners on spotify, they're brilliant, frankly if you don't like this music you should kill yourself,
Do this tomorrow.
The best time to destroy a golf course was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
people on tiktok would never survive a day on tumblr
insanely fucking cool. imagine a bigot calling u a faggot and u just lift up ur shirt and point to the tattoo and go “ya! u got it buddy! good job!”
The restaurant industry has long coordinated efforts to suppress labor costs through the NRA, a multimillion-dollar lobbying machine funded both by its restaurant members and by the fees workers pay for required food-safety classes, according to a recent New York Times report.
The group has spent its war chest on lobbying campaigns to preserve a subminimum wage for tipped workers — who are disproportionately young, women, and people of color, and far more likely to live in poverty than regular minimum wage workers — and to help block state and federal sick leave proposals and minimum wage increases.
But now, restaurant executives are on edge. Union campaigns are suddenly penetrating their industry, which employs about 10 percent of the American workforce and has one of the lowest unionization rates of any sector. Over the past few years, baristas have unionized nearly 280 Starbucks stores in the face of enormous odds, and dozens of other coffee shops and restaurants have followed suit.
[…]
“The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, every newspaper reports on every union win… when an unfair labor practice charge is filed, when there are challenges to elections,” said Felice Ekelman, a principal at Jackson Lewis, one of the oldest and most infamous union avoidance law firms in the country. “When did this become first page news?”
“And guess who’s reading it?” replied Laura Pierson-Scheinberg, one of Ekelman’s Jackson Lewis colleagues, as the two sat across from each other on the main stage of the summit. “My kids. Literally. I have an 18-year-old, my kids are into it.”
The two lawyers were discussing a new threat for the restaurant industry: the unexpected rise of union campaigns in workplaces that, for decades, have largely been immune from such organizing efforts.
[…]
“Before, I used to say… ‘[Unionization] isn’t a problem for you in the restaurant industry,’” said Pierson-Scheinberg. But now, she warned, “Kids do not care about paying union dues. Two percent of pay, are you kidding me? Their Netflix costs more. They think it’s a hell of a deal.”
The “kids,” she added, are organizing workplaces which would have previously seemed unreachable.
Source: levernews.com
if we define “gender” as “noun classification systems which govern agreement” (including pronominal agreement), is number not often a kind of gender? german and english for instance morphologically distinguish the masculine, feminine, neuter, and plural, in the pronouns in english, and in articles and pronouns and adjective agreement in german
Number is not a noun classification system because most nouns can be either in the singular or plural (and dual or paucal, in languages that use these numbers)
What is true and has been remarked upon (by Corbett for example), is that the two systems have a kind of competition for marking, where plural forms are often not marked in gender (e.g with Russian adjectives). But this isn’t always the case (Spanish very much has feminine and masculine plurals).
Basically you can have languages which have markers for both number and gender, languages that only have one kind marker, and languages that mark neither.
one thing i do not even begin to have a handle on, and which i struggle to understand, is why anyone should give a shit about complex chomskyan-style theories of syntax–namely, what questions about how language functions do they actually manage to answer, that previous approaches do not? afaict these theories aren’t super interested in the details of language acquisition, or neurobiology, and it’s all well and good to create complex diagrams of sentences according to your pet theory of the underlying grammar, but there’s no great reason to favor one theory over another in a lot of cases. it’s like asking whether 5 + 4 + 3 is really (5 + 4) + 3 or 5 + (4 + 3); there are lots of expressions, in language as in math, that amount to basically the same thing no matter which way you slice them.
at least with other aspects of language you tend to stay in a fairly grounded space–it’s hard to discuss phonology while getting side-tracked in abstractions that have little to do with how the human vocal tract functions or what sounds are perceptible to human hearing! but so many discussions of syntax seem to take place in nothing but the totally abstract realm, in a way that doesn’t actually produce useful insights about how human languages function, or account for the fact that in normal speech grammar can be quite choppy and ambiguous.
Although Chomskyan syntax research hasn’t actually engaged much with neurobiology, for the first 10–20 years or so the programme was quite invested in asserting that its results, yes, actually do represent the structure of underlying neurological makeup of (the “language organ” of) the human brain, and this is what was leveraged for getting people to care. “Universal Grammar exists and also we have a detailed theory of it” is the kind of a claim that’s obviously going to draw a lot of attention.
Once critiques start coming in though, it turns out that actually real neurobiological evidence doesn’t side with almost any of this (there is no evidence of language processing time being even remotely in correlation with how much movements and transformations Chomskyan analyses posit). At this point I would still call the theory to have been a good shot even if unfortunately wrong. Alas from there on the main response was to take the theoretical core off into la-la-land with a series of increasingly pseudoscientific excuses why this is not a problem at all. Devices include e.g. the notion of “derivational time”, some kind of a magical additional time dimension untethered to regular time, where derivational processes happen (or something to the effect, I’ve never seen a coherent definition of what it is supposed to be).
My impression is that the movement is by now just running on fumes, although it does have a lot of fumes from having initially managed to colonize about the entire Anglophone linguistics sphere and quite a few other departments. If you have patience, this might be all going to go away in a few decades and admitted as a farce, at least once the original True Believers are dead or at least firmly retired and the couple obligatory fawning Chomsky hagiographies have been gotten out of the way. Notable further reading includes e.g. the observation that most generative grammarians no longer actually side with innateness and treat the theory just as a descriptive framework (for which job others can easily see it as burdensome and overwrought).
(But don’t get your hopes too high on anything like more traditional grammar theories coming in in its place; this would probably instead put Anglosphere linguistics under risk of either being massively downgraded altogether, as is happening to all humanities already, or captured by some other fad.)
FWIW I wouldn’t even be massively shocked if this were revealed to have been some kind of a Cold War era CIA psyop in at least some part; it all looks awfully close to the case of abstract expressionism, promoted for the sake of being incomprehensible and unproductive.
Most criticism of generative grammar is endlessly muddled by the fact that many people, including many generative syntacticians, don’t know what the word “generative syntax” actually means. Thus they don’t realise that not all generative syntax is chomskian, (HPSG is an example of a non-chomskian generative framework).
(This happens a lot with debates about Chomsky’s theory. See also the entire kerfuffle about recursion).
In any case, one of Chomsky’s main contribution to linguistics is the insight that syntax needs to be described with more formalism than linguists were used to or comfortable with in the 50s. It was thanks to him that more attention was paid to the nitty-gritty details of how syntax can work at the conceptual level (this included collaborating with M-P Schutzenberger to formalise the degrees of computational complexity and resulted in the irritatingly named Chomsky hierarchy of forma languages, among other things).
As has been pointed out in a Pullum & Scholz paper, it is one of the ironies of linguistics that there are now linguists who can call out Chomsky for not being sufficiently rigorous using formal tools that have been developed thanks to Chomsky.
The alternatives to Chomskyism within formal syntax are either other generative models, or dependency models. Some amount of formalism is required to describe syntax with precision. You need to have some definition of what a constituent is.
And finally, if you don’t think phonologists can get lost in a fog of abstraction that have little to do with how the vocal tract functions, check out the Theory of Elements in phonology. (Although it is directly influenced by Chomskyism)
"A quote by the Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was briefly removed from the walls of a Philadelphia-area high school, reportedly because it violated the school’s policy on “neutrality.”
On Wednesday a principal of a high school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, ordered the school librarian to take down four posters with the Wiesel quote. The quote came from Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel acceptance speech and reads: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
That ran afoul of a controversial new district policy banning teachers from engaging in “advocacy activities” or displaying any signs or symbols of “any partisan, political, or social policy issue.”
The irony it really really burns
1/27/2023
austimpowerz
Anonymous asked:
top 3 fruits?
why, i'd love to!
A book about the Andaman islands
I’ve been reading the 2003 book The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders by Madhusree Mukerjee.
It is not a very well written book and at times a bit grating (although it is overall less cringe-inducing than its title might make it seem to be).
Nevertheless it’s an interesting account of both the author’s personal experience with the indigenous people of the Andaman islands (although cringe-inducing nonetheless because self-conscious gawking is still gawking) and their tragic history from the first contact with European colonizers until the year 2000.
For those who don’t know what and who the Andaman Islands and its indigenous people are, here’s a quick recap :
The Andaman islands are an archipelago in the east of the gulf of Bengal, off the coast of Myanmar, that consists in a mainland made up of four very close islands collectively called “Great Andaman”, another big island which is further south called “Little Andaman”, and various minor dependent islands among which the moderately famous North Sentinel island.
The Andaman islands’ first inhabitants came to the islands probably some 60 000 years ago or so, and probably belonged to the first waves of modern humans to leave Africa, much like other indigenous populations in the Philippines and Malaysia (collectively these people are know by the problematic-sounding monicker “negritos”), and also probably like papuans, aboriginal australians and Tasmanians. Indeed, there are striking similarities between the history of the Tasmanians and that of the Andamanese :
After thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the world in their picturesque tropical paradise, barely ever disturbed by the odd merchant ship (that nonetheless gave the earliest accounts of the place), the Andamanese came into contact with western civilisation when the British, having conquered India, decided that the Andamans would be a good stop on the way to China (the Andamans are just north of the strait of Malacca), and founded a penal colony in the south of the Andaman because that’s what the British fucking do with every oversea possessions, apparently they have a never-ending supply of convicts.
For the Andamanese, contact with the so-called civilisation resulted in unmitigated disaster.
The colonisers brought not only their ordinary patronizing racism towards dark-skinned people living naked in the jungle but also all kinds of diseases, and the usual colonial plagues (including alcohol and tobacco which was deliberately introduced to make the andamanese dependent on “trade”).
It was such a disaster that from an estimated 5000 (which I personally think is an underestimation but heh), the Andamanese were barely a few hundreds in the mid 20th century.
In 1948, India became independent. And looking at the Andaman islands it said to itself :
And so, from about 3 000 inhabitants in the 50s, the Andaman islands population grew to about 350 000 today. And the new colonizers fell a lot of trees and created ecological problems and fucked up the islands in various ways, the most glaring of which being a road that goes right through tribal territory.
Today most of the Andamanese “tribes” are extinct, the only surviving cultures being the Jarawas and the Sentinelese. A few Onge and Great Andamanese are left as well but they seem to have lost most of their traditional ways and certainly their languages.
The Jarawas have shown a certain amount of hostility to outsiders encroaching on their territory and hurting them in various ways, but the coup de grâce for them is the Great Andaman Trunk road, a highway that cuts through their land and through which buses full of tourists come gawking at them like they were in a human zoo. It’s clear that the very existence of the road is a threat to the Jarawas.
The so-called Sentinelese are a people that live on the isolated North Sentinel island, 36 km off the coast of the Great Andaman.
They have attained international celebrity in 2018 when they killed a fucking idiot of a missionary who had landed on the island, and are probably at this date the most famous “uncontacted people”.
It should be pointed out that they are not the only ones (there are also uncontacted people in the Amazonian jungle and possibly in New Guinea), and also that given their traumatic encounters with the British in the 19th century, “uncontacted” might be something of a misnomer.
Anyway, in conclusion western civilisation (especially the British) is like a King Midas but for genocide instead of gold, especially towards dark-skinned people.
skeletons could BONE each other at a RAVEYARD and someone might tell them to get a TOMB. if i had one wish from the genie i would ask it to blow up every tesla car no matter how close they are to people
How about we agree to disagree.
so i just learned that people fucking dove inside a god damn iceberg and good to know that even for cave divers, who in my opinion are already a special kind of unhinged, and i say that with all affection, there are people even more unhinged than that
I was going to post some Choice Horrifying Quotes from the article, but turns out the whole thing is a horror story and i’m just.
the fact that they got trapped and pulled in and thought they might die three times and were still like “hey what if we do one more” and only didn’t die because they decided to have a meal first??
yeah you wouldn’t need to change anything for this to be a TMA episode i absolutely agree, the damn thing already tried to kill them three times
okay guys u gotta read it. I was making highlights but it turned into a summary. still. read it. so worth it.
Ok so two people sink down to look around. Jill and her partner. First glimpse of horror (lots and lots of sea creatures) happens. But everything is pretty and they continue on
That’s the sound of their way in collapsing btw.
They find a way out. And then proceed to dive in again
they get out again.
The photos are sublime. So next day, Wes decided, hey, i want to go with you. Remember the camera i tested? We’re going to take even better pictures with it.
so they dive
and the current picks up again
Dude.
They got sucked in, obv. Water pouring down, the three try to get out. Fail. There’s no way up.
And then Jill decides to show human determination and ingenuity. Holy shit.
They get out. They see the boat with the science team, reaching for them. They’re late for two hours, but alive.
i did not manage to find the iceberg photos, but her other stuff is breathtaking
these photos are from some of her other cave dives
Masha The Hero
They forgot the part where the ambulance actually stopped to let the cat in
oh good I was worried
dendritic-trees
What a good cat. What a kind cat. How can anyone not love cats they are so good and loving.
wewill-tryagain
they also forgot the part where they only found the baby because masha was screaming her head off bc she knew this baby was in danger. she went around outside the alley the next morning and yelled at passerby until she got one to follow her to the baby. she kept him warm all night and then made sure someone found him. she was adopted after this bc she was a stray and is in a loving home and is a hero
Hero cat
Thank you, Masha, you’re such a good girl.
See.
Kittens can’t regulate their own body temperature. That’s why they pile up.
Cats see us as colony members.
Masha saw a kitten that was on its own, no mommy, no other kittens to cuddle with. She instinctively knew that was a cold kitten. She knew that a kitten alone on a cold night was very likely to die. Because a kitten would have died too.
So, all she was doing was what any good colony member does - protecting the abandoned kitten. Then when the abandoned kitten’s mommy didn’t come back, she called the rest of the colony for help.
People have this bizarre idea that housecats don’t have a social sense. They do, and it saved this kid’s life. And possibly Masha’s too, as life on the streets is dangerous for a kitty.
We say “good dog” all the time, but Masha was being a very, very good cat…not just by human moral standards but by feline ones.
Rebloging again because who can resist Masha the Hero cat 😻😻😻
NYC Data Stories: Allyship
For when people say they’re sick of seeing gay stuff everywhere. Suck it up. 4 years. 4 years. And that’s just on the books, it’s legal. It doesn’t stop shitty attitudes, actions, or straight up violence.
Source: reddit.com