We know that Facebook is brainscorching your parents and tiktok is brainscorching your cousins, but some of you refuse to admit that you got your brain scorched here. However unlike those sites there isn't an algorithm here you just make bad choices.
That's all we ever wanted. To arrive at Hell as a result of our own dubious navigation skills instead of as the result of Satan owning all the road sign companies.
As a US folk, yeah, it feels like the end of the US as it was.
It is scary. It is hard.
I’m worried about so many people… as I was before Trump even won.
This was decades in the making.
We will need aid.
There are people I love who are in danger and I feel more and more concerned about my own internet footprints bringing targets on their backs and my own.
I mourn what could have been, if we just managed to once again keep the supremacists from the executive branch…
So many people are already dying. So many people already being imprisoned or shipped off, and there are so many cowards in power.
People of this country are trying, though, now that some of the worst is obvious. I don’t know if it’ll sustain after Musk is quieted, but I hope it does.
I hope the left and the people learn to mobilize, organize, and inform.
Don’t let your country roll back any progressive laws or aid. There is no reason to ever. That is always a conservative power grab.
Don’t let them try to privatize everything and then deregulate that privatization as they gut education, health, and infrastructure.
They do it piece by piece. Pay attention to your local politics.
White supremacists… nationalists… greedy hate mongers are in every country, and they are never satisfied. Get them out of your government before you end up following this stupid country into hell.
I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.
“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”
“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.
She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.
When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.
. . .
If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.
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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.
An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.
Scrolled past this agakn and just can't get over how much I love it. We need to make things beautiful again and this is such a wonderful example. The beadwork on the wires of a utitarian object, contrasted with the grey concrete.
Me: “The food webs we try to teach children and the public are too simple to get the point across. Why do they never bother to show the more intricate relationships between specific species? It can’t be that hard to represent with basic teaching tools... I’ll make the thing!”
The thing:
Me: “....I get it now.”
I have now had several teachers ask me if they can use this image in a class presentation.
It would be funny if nuclear waste warning messages become an attraction for future historical linguists.
I mean look at this thing:
A parallel text in 7 languages, with 4 different scripts between them! And pictograms! All designed to be preserved intact!
maybe nothing of value to you is here
That is legitimately a massive problem that the nuclear waste warning projects are aware of and trying desperately to counteract.
Like, every post about them on tumblr going “lmao let’s be real, if I saw this shit I would stop at nothing to explore it” is highlighting the central conceit of the yucca mountain project.
The project is VERY aware of humanity’s tendency to explore, and the people involved are tormented constantly by the fact that ANYTHING they do to indicate “this specific place is extremely deadly and there’s nothing valuable here, GO AWAY” is going to become a fucking MAGNET for treasure hunters, explorers, adventurers, mystery enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists…like, the MOMENT it’s discovered, people will flood that place.
That’s what makes the project so fascinatingly difficult! There’s so much they have to convey, but at the same time, they have to do so without making the site itself interesting in any way, and without making it significant. Many possible warnings don’t incorporate a message at all, focusing instead on simply making the site as ugly, inconvenient, and unimportant-looking as possible so that it’s just never disturbed because nobody is interested in getting close. (It’s why seemingly crazy ideas like the color-changing cat priesthood are actually more viable than the seemingly “practical” example above, which still depends on written warnings guaranteed to be extremely interesting to future humans AND depends on the idea that those future humans will be able to decipher any of our languages. The most viable ideas focus on exploiting superstition and the subconscious, rather than LITERALLY trying to communicate “This place is not a place of honor” etc in as many words. Those are general ideas to be gotten across, not a script.)
The impossible catch-22 of the nuclear waste warning projects is that they absolutely MUST communicate the level of danger and the importance of keeping your distance…while also being acutely aware that warnings on the walls of ancient burial sites about the horrible curses that would afflict anyone who disturbed them did jack-fuck all to dissuade archaeologists.
Anything we do to make the warning seem important will guarantee it’s disregarded, but if we fail to make the warning unmistakable enough, we’re responsible for whatever happens to the humans ten thousand years in the future who suffer from our mistakes.
If the area is to become unappealing why not put a landfill over it. To get to the death rocks you’ll have to dig through undecayed cabbage
See above re: archeologists. Who just LOVE garbage dumps for what they can learn about people’s day-to-day lives.
‘And there’s the sign, Ridcully,’ said the Dean. ‘You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says “Do not, under any circumstances, open this door”?’ ‘Of course I’ve read it,’ said Ridcully. ‘Why d’yer think I want it opened?’ ‘Er … why?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘To see why they wanted it shut, of course.’ *
* This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.
– Terry Pratchett - Hogfather
I can’t belive they just dropped “color-changing cat priesthood” with zero explanation, so I googled it and here you go:
What I find extra funny about the Pratchett quote was he was the press office for a nuclear power plant before he was a full time author.
tell me my prof didn’t upload the reading by photocopying his kindle reader page by page
bruh
I’m sure someones already said this but I often see Tumblr described as a hellsite. This is fundamentally incorrect.
Tumblr is the faesite. Everybody is super confused and lost, you keep running into random places. Somehow you end up stuck there forever after interacting a couple of times. The people are all strange, everybody simultaneously seems to be from the future and the past as if time is meaningless.
YES
also technology breaks at random, and sometimes you just suddenly feel a thousand years old
Arches National Park, Utah photo: Elliot McGucken
You know, rivers catching on fire used to be a regular occurrence.
Boring, even. Mundane. People just accepted that rivers had oil slicks floating on them that could be lit by somebody throwing their cigarette in the wrong place. Cities had regular protocols in place on what to do when the river caught on fire.
The modern environmentalism movement wasn’t just started by hippies you know. Regular people cared about this stuff because their rivers caught on fire and existing near farms gave them cancer and by the 1970s they weren’t even seeing that much economic benefit from it.
If you don’t live in a world where rivers regularly catch on fire it’s because of stuff like the clean water and air acts. A lot of rivers in the US that in the first half of the 20th century regularly caught on fire are now safe to swim and fish in.
A lot of environmental damage is reversible if we act. We’ve got a lot of success stories like this actually. A lot of formerly endangered species have come back, fish have returned to American rivers, the ozone layer is being restored.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with the environment but I hold out at least a little bit of hope. Because rivers used to catch on fire and now for the most part they don’t.
On top of the Yankees field cat there was a praying mantis on top of the nationals players hat tonight. Huge night in baseball
He was keeping the mantis updated on the number of outs, too
the mantis is making him good at baseball ratatouille style
Listen, nobody on earth is as superstitious as baseball players. My man knows better than to be impolite to the good luck charm that decided to grace him with its presence.
I hate buses so much. Trains are easy, reliable, straightforward. No nonsense. You can trust them. Buses are evil, deceitful creatures who delight in your suffering
yeah that’s fair
ffs ....
Additions from my husband: Bakers wear loafers and Zookeepers wear Crocs
Excellent additions.
Angels wear wingtips.
A lumberjack wears Timberlands.
Ice skaters wear slippers
Addition from my mom: delivery drivers wear vans
VERY good addition!
Achilles wears heels.
how is this post from this decade and not like 2012
A comic based on this poem
