sorairo-deizu:

evecoffn:

character concept: two people who have been reincarnated for thousands of years and have always found eachother but instead of being in love they just fucking hate eachother

Originally posted by darkmanx23

(via brideofourlady)

bodyfluids:

having one of those last names that instead of saying it you just spell it out right away 

(Source: anammv, via funereal-disease)

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profitmaximiser:

via Gene Expression

Some surprising things here:

1. despite the perception of liberal millennials as being Maoist red guardsmen, conservative millenials were more likely to favour censoring politically incorrect speech.
   
2. the group that stands out as the most anti-free speech is neither the left nor the right but the centre. There are several potential explanations for this: “moderates” are often ignorant or stupid people who don’t know enough to form an opinion, and ignorant people are generally more authoritarian. “Moderates” are also conformist and unprincipled, and so there’s no impulse to defend free speech as a principle.
   

I also think people in the centre believe in “freedom and democracy” in a meme sense but not in any real sense. They believe soldiers in Iraq are out “fighting for our freedom” even though the wars have clearly made western countries less free by any concrete measure. They like the EU even when it has steamrolled the results of national referenda, all the while using “democratic” as a shorthand for “good.”

(via neoliberalism-nightly)

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poor-andobsure:

Daenerys Stormborn, by Fadly Romdhani

(via nobodysuspectsthebutterfly)

theunitofcaring:

This article is an instance of a way of talking about women in computer science which annoys me a lot.

Some people did an analysis of internal code submissions at Facebook and found that women’s contributions were rejected more than men’s contributions. Some other people promptly did a re-analysis and found that the effect vanished entirely when controlling for experience - so, what is actually going on is that more of Facebook’s women are junior engineers, and their contributions are rejected at the same rate of all the other junior engineers, and a smaller share of Facebook’s women are senior engineers, and their contributions are rejected at the same rate as other senior engineers.

But, says the article, we would be wrong to interpret this as we might be tempted to interpret it, ‘there does not seem to be bias in the code review’, because we should take the opportunity to be reminded that female perspectives are important and also presumably the reason women are likelier to be junior employees is discrimination in promotions.

I think this completely misses the point.

If I am a woman considering working at Facebook, I want to know whether my code will be reviewed more harshly than my coworkers. I want to know whether I have to be twice as good to get half as far, or for that matter 103% as good to get just as far. The original study was interesting because if it reflected that other things equal women’s code got rejected more, then it would be informative for people who might want to work at Facebook (about the kind of work environment they’d get) and for people doing code reviews everywhere (about maybe whether those should be blinded somehow because gender was affecting reviewing). 

But since there’s no evidence that other things equal women’s code gets rejected more, blinding code review won’t help and this isn’t evidence that women at Facebook are being held to higher standards (they still might be, but these statistics have nothing to say about it.) That matters. A lot. Instead, all this seems to be is evidence that, yet again, there are way less women in the field to start with. At my brother’s middle school, where every student who wanted programming got to take it, there were thirty boys and two girls interested. We know we’ve got a problem there; people are trying from all different angles to fix it. 

And when someone equivocates between these two classes of problems as ‘both related to sexism probably’, I feel like they are seriously failing to think about or empathize with the perspective of actual women in CS, to whom ‘at Facebook you have to be better at coding to pass review’ and ‘at Facebook your code will be reviewed purely on its merits, but because of complex societal and historical forces women are likelier to be in junior roles’ is a huge difference and a hugely significant one. It’s insulting and frustrating to see these wildly different claims treated as pretty much the same thing.

elodieunderglass:

naamahdarling:

“Acceptance” as a part of emotional healing means “acceptance that this is where you are, and all positive progress will stem from this point in time, you cannot move forward from some imaginary point in the past or future, you can only begin from where you actually are.”

It does not mean “you need to learn to regard the shit situation you were/are in as acceptable.”

That shit that happened/is happening to you?  That is merely the reality of what has happened/is happening.  Your goal is not to say “it’s okay”, to forgive, to say “this situation is fine”.  You NEVER have to say those things if you don’t want to, and you SHOULDN’T say those things if they are not true, it will not make things go any faster.

Your goal is to be able to say “WELP, here’s where we are, in Bullshit City.  I guess we start from here.”

Acceptance is a realistic assessment of where you are and a willingness to begin from there.  It is a recognition that old patterns, whether positive or negative, cannot or do not have to continue.

And it’s not a 100% all-or-nothing thing.  Some days you will be a lot more level than others.  Some days you will be really angry or sad about what happened/what you lost/what is happening.  That’s okay.  But on many and eventually most days you will be a lot more focused on the future, and what you can do.  And believe me, that is SUCH a huge relief.

Soooo, if someone is encouraging you to think of “acceptance” solely as “contentment” or “totally at peace”, they are approaching it wrong, in a very not-helpful way.

If you are struggling, maybe it will help you to see that this important recovery stage is not an insultingly tall hurdle you have to jump with a smile on your face and perfect gracefulness.  

It is merely an end to foundering because you have found your new solid ground.  It will be a quiet, messy thing, and it may sneak up on you, but it will come.  And from there, you can go in many different directions.  New ones.  Ones you never imagined.

If you aren’t there yet, keep going.  Fight and scream and cry if you have to. All that shit is necessary shit!  Do what you gotta do!  Just keep slogging, and try to hold on to the fact that eventually, even if you don’t feel like it, you’ll get there.

The bad stuff will never be “okay”.  But YOU can be.  YOU can be okay.  You WILL be.

Related: Naamah is so lovely and so wise and I trust them

(via earlgraytay)

amazing-animatronics:

My favourite before and after from “In Vestimentis Ursum” a project by Matt Kirkland investigating the robots, hidden inside furry toys. (Link to project)

Bonus

(via fruitsoftheweb)

Pokemon generated by neural network

lewisandquark:

toomanyfeelings:

iguanamouth:

lewisandquark:

I’ve been playing around with char-rnn, an open-source torch add-on for character-based neural networks by Andrej Karpathy, using it to generate everything from cookbook recipes to superhero names to a Lovecraft/cookbook mashup.

I decided to train the neural network to randomly generate Pokemon names and abilities based on this list as a training set - and found that it was good at generating Pokemon. Annoyingly good at it - by the time it had gone through the training set 50 times, it was already fluently plagiarizing Pokemon word for word. I had to go back to my very first snapshot of the neural network (16 times through the training set), at which point it hadn’t yet learned the entire set of names and abilities, and was still coming up with hilarious new ones.

Some sample Pokemon:

Quincelax
Abilities: Sturdy, Secene Grace
Hidden ability: Tunged Leus

Tortabool
Ability: Healy Stream

Strangy
Abilities: Wharmwbra, Darp
Hidden ability: Magic Guard

Staroptor
Ability: Stench
Hidden Ability: Stick Hat

Stangute
Ability: Banger
Hidden Ability: Drang

Tyrnakine
Ability: Beak Eye

Minma
Abilities: Buttery armor, Shell Armor
Hidden ability: Weak armor

Ronch
Abilities: None

Mawuh
Ability: Rum Power

I love a good neural network list but these illustrations… I’m trying not to scream laughing.

Omigosh someone drew pictures to go with these…. I’m dying.

… I’m also Quincelax.

duckswearhats asked: Hi, I read that you've dealt with with impostor syndrome in the past, and I'm really struggling with that right now. I'm in a good place and my friends are going through a lot, and I'm struggling to justify my success to myself when such amazing people are unhappy. I was wondering if you have any tips to feel less like this and maybe be kinder to myself, but without hurting anyone around me. It's a big ask, I know, but any help would make my life a lot less stressful

neil-gaiman:

The best help I can offer is to point you to Amy Cuddy’s book, Presence. She talks about Imposter Syndrome (and interviews me in it) and offers helpful insight.

The second best help might be in the form of an anecdote. Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.

(There’s a wonderful photograph of the Three Neils even if one of us was a Neal at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/08/neil-armstrong.html)

bookscorpion asked: Alright, it's me with my list of topics: *people not being all that religious * women's rights *sexuality in general Thanks again :)

dancesontheedge:

qqueenofhades:

The thing to remember is that when I say “not that religious,” it’s relative – i.e. a person not very religious by medieval standards would still be considered quite religious today, because the church was the medium in which public and private life was framed and in which everyone took part. It’s like how pretty much most people in the West celebrate Christmas whether or not they’re religious – it is part of the civic faith of the society. However, the perception that everyone was a bunch of wild-eyed religious zealots who unquestionably accepted whatever the church said is super, SUPER wrong.

Some reading to start you off here:

Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths, by Regine Pernoud (San Francisco; Ignatius Press, 2000), is the closest thing I have to a short, readable, and general history intended for a popular audience. It will give you plenty of quick facts and overall framework for, as noted, refuting some major medieval misconceptions. Everything from here on out will be more specialized/academic.

The canons of the 1215 Lateran council, summarized (Harvard.edu) and in full (Fordham.edu). Among them is canon 21: “Everyone who has attained the age of reason is bound to confess his sins at least once a year to his own parish pastor, or with his permission to another, and to receive the Eucharist at least at Easter.” You wouldn’t think you’d need to compel these supposedly super religious people to take communion AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR, AT EASTER, which is basically when the majority of America goes to church anyway. Hey, also try canon 42: “ No cleric may so extend his jurisdiction as to become detrimental to secular justice.” Now, I’m not gonna say this is a model of a tolerant and forward-looking legal code, because it gets pretty hairy at the end with its insistence on distinguishing Jews and Saracens from Christians and barring Jews from public office (as Innocent III was a hard-liner on this point). But have a read-through the summarized version, because it’s short, and because I guarantee it will say at least three things to make you go, “wow, I didn’t know they already thought like that in the Medieval Era.” (Which is, you know, when they are dumb and religious and etc.) There was also the Capitula de Judaeis of Richard I (my homeboy) made in 1194, which specifically legally protected the Jews of England and the Plantagenet lands in France, which – while made largely for economic reasons – represented a drastic change from the stringent anti-Semitism happening elsewhere in Europe.

Elizabeth Siberry, in Criticism of crusading, 1095-1274, examines how the clerical sources dealt with the idea of crusading and whether or not it was justified. Spoiler alert: the clerics almost always thought it was, as did the noble vernacular sources, but since this is my area of specialty, I can tell you that crusading appeals were extremely elite (focused on those who had the means and methods to go) and with the exception of the First and Third Crusades, and to some degree the Second, struggled to retain popular support after an initial highly-successful emotional appeal. Whenever the major crusades were over, the popes could call for help for the Holy Land for years, but the average layman paid no attention; they just weren’t that fussed about it. The Fourth Crusade was highly criticized and suffered from almost constant desertions, as crusaders exercised their individual right to disagree with their leaders and cynically question their supposedly Christian motives. See “The Fourth Crusade and the Just-War Theory,” for a good explanation of how the average Fourth Crusader thought, the religious influences available to them, and the decisions they made.

The Albigensian Crusade in the south of France, 1209-1229, against the schismatic group the Cathars, was also heavily criticized and viewed by contemporaries as being more about a king and pope’s political power, and its bloody excesses became infamous and condemned in its own day. Also, even a remote scanning of the history of the 13th century will see new movements and challenges to the pope’s authority popping up everywhere.

As for women, I answered a bit of this in an earlier ask, but some reading to start you off:

Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270-1540, by Kim Phillips (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2003)

Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe, by Nancy Goldstone (New York; Penguin, 2007)

The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority, by Tanya Stabler Miller (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

As above, when I say that women were not silent/submissive/raped as we like to believe, I do have to qualify, of course, that that does not mean their situation was anywhere comparable to modern feminism. There were still distinct social roles and expectations for them, there was certainly nothing like sexual liberation/freedom (at least legally speaking, though of course practice was different), and not much in the way of legal redress for the ordinary married woman (though noblewomen had more options). However, women were fully valued in the roles they were allowed to play in society, were respected as patronesses, advisors, even rulers (as regents for a husband or son, usually, but nonetheless), and in general, had far more of a rich and varied life than popular historiography and our cherished notions of Progress would like to give them. It’s of note that people only ever complain about things being “historically inaccurate” when women are given any autonomy and agency at all. They won’t complain about physical or archaelogical or linguistic disparities, sometimes by hundreds of years, but give a woman any personhood at all, and “oh no that’s not accurate.” Which is a) BS, and b) represents a desire to indulge what I call “stylized misogyny” – i.e. the idea that it’s supposedly historically or socially acceptable to discriminate against women without consequences in this environment is half the attraction for the modern MRA type. They don’t want real history, they want their idealized history where women “knew their place.”

As noted, the situation of our foremothers was absolutely very different to ours, and feminism has made many crucial advances. But the liberal idea that it then took until the 20th century to make any of these changes at all, and that medieval women were just a bunch of meek, submissive helpmeets with no minds, personality, ambition, or respect of their own is just as dangerous.

The existence of female medical professionals in Medieval Europe provides a microcosmic look at how women’s rights actually regressed in some ways in the late medieval and early modern periods.  Progress is not, and never has been, linear.  The evidence that follows focuses on the High and Late medieval periods.  In the early medieval period, women who practiced medicine were largely part of religious orders, and most did not leave records behind (the most famous exception is Jill-of-all-Trades Hildegard of Bingen, who left behind extensive writings including medical tracts).

The major Italian medical universities– Salerno, Montpellier, and Bologna– graduated a number of distinguished medica’s, and included women among the teaching staff.  The Ladies of Salerno were the most well documented starting from the earliest time, and Salerno’s Trota is the most well known gynecologist of the entire medieval period.  Trota, or Dame Trot, taught medicine at Salerno in the early 12th century.  She made contributions to the most widely read gynecological text of the medieval period, known collectively as “The Trotula” after her, and attributed to Trotula.  Current scholarship believes that Trota contributed to the text, but did not write the whole thing, unlike earlier scholarship.  Even earlier scholarship believed that Trotula was a typo and the author’s name was Trotulo, as scholars refused to acknowledge the dozens of other primary sources that refer to “Dame Trot” and the women professors of medicine at Salerno, as well as the artwork depicting her as a woman (in my opinion because of sexism and their clinging to the belief that progress must always be linear).

Guilds and other professional medical societies were not segregated by sex, and guild records show a number of women practicing medicine in all the medical professions across Europe.  It was not uncommon for men to leave their medical practice or apothecary to their female relatives, and for those women to continue on in the practice.

As the university system expanded past southern Italy, new medical schools may or may not be segregated by sex or refuse woman scholars.  Most notably, the University of Paris both had a medical school and refused to admit women.  Notable because in 1311, the City of Paris passed a law prohibiting the practice of medicine by anyone without a medical degree.  It was intended to stop unqualified people of either sex from treating patients, but it disproportionately targeted women, as women could not earn a degree from the University of Paris.  This was the first law in western history that de facto prohibited women from practicing medicine.  The trend spread from there.  In 1329 Valencia prohibited women from accepting male patients, and in 1421 England prohibited women from practicing medicine.  In fifteenth century Montpellier (which, a century earlier had had women on the teaching staff at their university) a woman could only legally practice medicine if she was a widow taking over her husband’s practice– and then only until she remarried. By the fifteenth century, guilds had begun to refuse women.  In 1450, a man left his barber’s practice to his wife, and the guild refused to acknowledge her as his legitimate heir– something that had been regularly accepted even 70 years before.  It should be noted that the restrictions did not arrive in all places at the same time: Dorotea Bocchi (1360-1436), not only taught medicine at Bologna’s University, she was the chair of the medical department.  

By 1500 there were no women earning medical degrees or teaching medicine anywhere in Europe, no women standing trial for illegally practicing medicine (a relatively common occurrence beginning in 1311), no women in medical guilds, and no records of women medical professionals anywhere.  Midwives and village wise women were rarely included in guilds or other official sources of documentation to begin with, and probably continued their crafts unnoticed as they had done for hundreds of years (though many of them, especially wise women, probably fell victim to the witch-hunting craze).

So you see, in some ways our ideas of a crushed and repressed medieval woman are entirely fictional.  The Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century and the dozens of 19th century philosophers that followed built the myth that humanity has been constantly progressing since the dawn of time.  That things have been steadily improving for all of humanity since the fall of Rome, that humans have become more rational, more learned, more just as time went on is a comforting myth created by eschatological philosophers who wanted to believe that humanity was getting better and wanted to have the assurance that they were morally superior to their ancestors.  The absolute primacy of the linear progression narrative in historical philosophy means that in Medieval Europe, in “The Dark Ages” women could not have had more rights than women in 1850; must have, in fact, been nothing but abused and economically dependent.  As I have shown in the case of medicine, the barring of women from public life was an intentional thing that was done by men and legislatures. The progress of allowing women to attend medical schools in the 1800s did not support a linear narrative of humans moving constantly in a positive direction, but instead showed the truth of a more cyclic narrative, of women regaining rights that they had been intentionally deprived of.  In some locations, similar deprivations of women’s rights that occurred through the late medieval and early modern periods include: the right to own property independent of a husband or father, some aspects of inheritance law, the right to own and operate a business, the right to testify in court, and the right to any kind of higher education.

That said, modern women enjoy unprecedented freedom compared to their historical sisters.  A European (or white American) woman from the early 1800s, however, would have probably found the 1200s a little bit liberating.

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