"Delightfully weird." Sloths, cats, Judaism, queerness, science, psych, randomness, silliness, resistance, sappiness, love. @lewddietsodaactivity is the reason. 41 years old, Jewish.

thisisabernieblog:

liberalsarecool:

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When schools offer free meals for everyone, local families reduce grocery spending. Large chains respond by dropping prices, amplifying benefits to the broader community.

Damn, now we know why they don’t want to give national free school lunches…

naamahdarling:

knitmeapony:

lets-steal-an-archive:

depsidase:

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… so, Leverage?

That video is incredible, but the tag at the end is even better.

When all is said and done, of course the team outsmarts this rich guy trying to steal the heart. The young man who is supposed to get it in the first place gets the transplant. And at the very end Nate and the mark have one last conversation that ends this way:

“Well, Mr. Ford, it seems you’ve killed me after all.”

“Oh, I didn’t kill you. God killed you. I just made sure it took.”

Worth noting that every single Leverage episode is based on shit rich people actually documentably do.

aiweirdness:

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.

Bar graph of rates at which human written essays are misclassified as AI-generated by 7 popular GPT-detectors. Non-native speaker misclassification rates range from 48% up to 75%. Native speaker essays are misclassified at 0%-12% rates.ALT

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

swordkallya:

natalieironside:

charlon-lumi:

natalieironside:

charlon-lumi:

natalieironside:

If u want to write a story about a character that’s just you but hotter with a dark twisted backstory and magical powers and a pet falcon or something, I think u should just go ahead and do that. Who’s gonna stop you? The government?? Fuck the police.

What if someone barges in, points at said character and scream, “Mary Sue!”

Tell them to come back with a warrant

This post came across my dash again and now I am having an absolute blast with self insert hotter me that gets the girls and guys everywhere.

This is the Way

Reblogging because I am very pro-writing whatever the hell you want, even ”bad” things, and also because “tell them to come back with a warrant” BROKE ME

wobblydev:

this may be silly but i am curious. please reblog so this can leave labourblr/anarcblr/commieblr/unionblr

do you like capitalism?

no

yes

See Results

no nuance, i don’t care. simple yea or nay.

is-the-post-reliable:

intrigue-posthaste-please:

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

RATING: RELIABLE

you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here

to-draw-time:

to-draw-time:

Wild how the queer community has been fighting tooth and nail for generations to have some semblance of inclusion and just the desire to not be beaten, arrested, or killed for existing.

Then there is less than 10 years of policies put in place to help us start being treated more humanely and the Conservative party is like “Actually we rather you die again” openly and proudly.

Wild how allowing ppl to live has made them so angry and more open about their fascism.

Meanwhile half of the younger queers online are too preoccupied with terminology and gatekeeping fandom engagement while our country actively works to eradicate the community honing social media to propagate propaganda.

It is going to sound mean and im not gonna sugarcoat it:

Telling other lgbtqia members that using the term “queer” is problematic and bad is more aligned with conservative’s views of hiding and destroying queerness. When you get that gatekeeping towards your own community you are making it easier to break us apart.

mxtomituck:

dancinbutterfly:

weasowl:

pixeltheleopardgecko:

bogleech:

“Oh that animal doesn’t LIKE you it just TOLERATES you”

…..So? If that’s the most a non-social organism can feel towards you isn’t that just as special an honor as whatever it is you think affection means??

“This creature with no natural social instincts outside of mating allows me to freely interact with it, while causing it little stress” is fucking DOPE AS SHIT

also… are you SURE? like, we’re still finding out so much about animals. Wolverines fathers, who we thought were not involved in caring for kits, turn out to travel around and collect all their kits from multiple mothers and take the whole group out on camping trips. Some spiders have tiny frog pets (!) or group up to communally raise their young. Wild sharks, crocodiles, and snakes have formed strong, documented relationships with people. 

this man Gilberto (Chito) Shedden nursed this crocodile back to health after it was shot in the eye, and they were best friends for the rest of the crocodile’s life.

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this python came in out of the wild as a baby snake and curled up next to the family’s infant, Oun Sam­bat (or Oeun Sambat?) and they were inseparable for 12 years

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Cristina Zenato removes hooks from sharks and they let her stick her hand down their throat to do it and they even bring other sharks who need help to see her.

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It’s a relationship that goes beyond a single helpful interaction. For example one of the sharks that would show up when she first started swimming with them was a shark she called Foggy Eye who really didn’t like to be touched. One day, Foggy Eye showed up with a hook in her mouth that Cristina Zenato removed, and ever after, Foggy Eye cuddles when she visits, putting her head in Cristina’s lap and enjoying some petting

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 We don’t know SO much. Some wolf spiders will adopt unrelated orphaned spiderlings and raise them. We recently discovered that the ant-mimicking jumping spider (below) produces “milk” and suckles its young until they are nearly fully grown.

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SO. Don’t assume we know all about what creatures do or feel or whether or not they form social connections or bond with others.

We’re told octopuses are solitary.

That’s the story.

They live alone. They die alone.

Except for Octopus City where they live in a social collective.

Except that I watched with my own fucking eyes a giant Northwest Pacific Octopus who my friend social for an aquariums interact. He hadn’t seen her in a year. He reacted to meeting us and to getting treats? But all he wanted to do was see her, touch her, show her his enrichment items. After a year he recognized her and the response was “YOUR BACK AUNTIE YOURE BACK I MISSED YOU LOOK WHAT I WAS DOING WHAT DO YOU THINK BUT YOURE BACK hi nice to meet your friends YOURE BACK.”

Fucking yeah ok 👍 solitary nonsocial. Idk. If it acts like it loves you then it does. In its way.

The guy who literally wrote the book on wolf social hierarchies realized like pretty soon after publishing that he was completely wrong because he had only been studying animals in captivity, but the erroneous information on “alphas” captured men’s imagination so they still cling to it despite it being just flat out wrong - according to the guy who CAME UP WITH THE THEORY so you know it’s legit.

Europeans who first encountered the platypus assumed it was a hoax.

Knowledge is seeking the limits of our species’ understanding of the universe

Wisdom is looking PAST the limits of our knowledge and staying fucking humble about everything we don’t know.

fairypage01:

fairypage01:

ponderorb:

‘Pumpie' 

Elephant soft toy made of grey felt, dressed as a sailor in a smart, dark blue, woolen jacket and matching trousers, England, 1900.

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Pumpie and his V&A friends post-restoration 🐘 🐻🐇

Pumpie photographed by original Victorian owners, at the seaside and with friends:

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