well i had some chicken stock in the fridge nicely

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well i had some chicken stock in the fridge nicely sealed in a jar and i was like yeah, i’m gonna make soup from this. i thought, oh, it’s been in there a while, though. so i opened it and sniffed it, and it seemed… okay. i dumped it into a saucepan and brought it up to a boil, and all seemed okay, but after it had boiled for a minute I was like… that doesn’t smell right. Dude, in the midst of washing dishes, was like, no, that doesn’t smell right.

So I put the saucepan outside and rummaged through the freezer and instead, made fried rice with uh that bright red chinese sausage, and carrots and celery and onion, and steamed some frozen bao left over from last time we went to Asia Mart, and Dude improvised some dipping sauce from a jar of plum butter and some of the Happy Lady sauce from the little Asian supermarket down on the West Side near the pho place, and it was in general probably a better dinner than the soup would’ve been anyway, and now I’ve halfway cleaned out the fridge and freezer, so. Good for me, I suppose.

Now I gotta remember to retrieve that saucepan and dump the stock out. Alas! It was the good homemade kind, but I have more in the freezer. And I’ve got pierogies and bratwurst defrosting for tomorrow night.
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mayticks-art: My wife got me obsessed with a new series of...

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mayticks-art:



My wife got me obsessed with a new series of novellas called the murderbot diaries and I am in deep oh my gosh

Centers around the main character [Murderbot] who is a bio-android security unit who gets hired out to protect silly humans from dying in space. Follows the character growth of Murderbot and raises BIG QUESTIONS on what constitutes ‘being a person’. Murderbot is genderless which is also interesting to read from a first-person perspective. 

These books are amazing, I’d recommend grabbing all 4 in the series and reading them over a few days. They average at about 150 pages each, and feel like episodes to read. 

First one is called All Systems Red by Martha Wells.
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horror

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So uh. OK I live in a house, a small house, on a little plot, in a city. It has two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, that’s it. One bathroom. 

Out of habit, I usually leave the toilet seat down and the lid closed. 

I got into bed, and shortly, all of the house’s inhabitants were in bed with me. Dude was asleep, Chita was asleep and purring in the crook of my arm, I was asleep. An hour passed, maybe two, it was around midnight I think.

I was awakened, and so were the other two, by– splashing noises. Quite loud ones. Something was– thrashing around in water? Something smallish? In an enclosed space?

Dude sat up. I stared at him. We both turned and looked at the cat. She looked at us, wide-eyed and alarmed. 

Dude got up. I followed him slowly. We followed the sound to– the bathroom. 

We turned on the light and stood in the bathroom. Something, inside the closed toilet, continued to splash around. The lid was shut; I remembered quite clearly leaving it shut on my way to bed. Whatever it was, it had not gotten in there from inside the house.

The two of us stood there, terrified and panicked. What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck. 

I got a broom and prepared to poke the lid open. Dude told me to let him out of the room if I was going to do that. I reconsidered, and put the broom away, and we both stared at the toilet, which had gone quiet. 

“Maybe it will leave the way it got in,” he said. 

Apparently there’s not that much standing water in a toilet. The other side of the U-bend can be dry for quite a distance. I don’t know how far away an opening that anything alive could just… walk through, is, and it disturbs me to think about that, but. There must be one. 

We both eventually just… went and got back into bed, because we weren’t going to open the lid and let whatever it was out, and there was nothing else we could do.

Splashing continued intermittently, and my heart was pounding in horror and I thought I’d never sleep. Dude said, “We could just… flush it.” 

I stared at him. “Would that work?”

He shrugged. “I mean. It wouldn’t not.”

But the splashing stopped, and we lay there for a while and then I fell asleep.

This morning, though. Well, there’s only one toilet in the house, and I’ve got to, well. … … … I’m going to wait for Dude to wake up.

… 

As I was typing this up he did wake up, and I heard him go into the bathroom and knock on the toilet lid, so I went reluctantly in with him, and he pushed the lid up with the broom handle and we both peered in…

Nothing. The water was cloudy and discolored and slightly under its usual level, but there was nothing there.

“Some problems solve themselves,” Dude said, and flushed the toilet. 
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ofalderaan: This has been a long time coming, but for

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ofalderaan:

This has been a long time coming, but for months I’ve been unsure how to say what I want to say, without offending anyone. But I need to say it, because quite frankly, this is a huge factor in why I have had so little muse for Breha, and why I haven’t been on here. But here it is:

I hate the way that Breha’s miscarriages, infertility, and depression were erased and replaced by a physical trauma in Leia, Princess of Alderaan. And more than that, I hate the way that much of the fandom response has been praising LPOA for “making Breha a badass now” whereas she was “weak and sickly” before. That is a hugely, hugely damaging standard to put onto women — that the inability to carry a child makes them weak and sickly, that suffering from depression makes you weak and sickly, but that if you survive a physically traumatic accident then that makes you a badass.
( cut for length )

additional points on the toilet monster from my earlier post:at this moment, in the kitchen, Dude is

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additional points on the toilet monster from my earlier post:

at this moment, in the kitchen, Dude is telling Chita the cat that she took care of the sea monster and the credit is all hers, and is petting and praising her. she is eating this up, mostly because she does not speak English and doesn’t know what he’s on about.

point the second: this happened once before, and it was a mouse, a big mouse, and the lid of the toilet was up, so we heard the splashing and then the thing leapt out of the toilet. Chita was quite young at that point, but we flung her in there and slammed the door shut and there was a ruckus for a little bit and then we relented and went in there and trapped the mouse under a garbage can and threw it out the door, and Chita was mad that we’d taken it away but it had been pretty clear she hadn’t known what to do with it, so. 

Nobody believed us that it had come up through the toilet, last time; they all said it must have been in the house and fallen in there, but Dude researched and found pages about how animals can totally climb through that U-bend, and frequently do, and in the decade or so since I’ve always been slightly unnerved about that toilet whenever I’m drunk or very tired or alone in the house, but. 

Now we can incontrovertibly say, listen, it came up through the toilet. There’s no way whatever that was got in there any other way. And there’s no way all three of us imagined it. We just didn’t see it.

But don’t panic, fellow toilet-users: 1) it generally only happens on the first floor of a building, 2) it is uncommon, 3) you can just flush the animal back down if it’s small, 4) it’s not a bad habit to just take a peek into the toilet before you use it to make sure nothing’s in there, 5) if it’s a large animal like a snake well you’re fucked, figure it out, but i’m good they don’t live in this climate and winter is just the price I pay for that, 6) seriously the next time someone bitches about the weather I’m going to tell them about snakes in toilets so there, 7) honestly we don’t even have big spiders around here, that’s how great harsh winters are, 8) i fucking love winter you guys 9) i’m not scared of rats compared to how scared i am of giant snakes in my toilet ok, 10) i like snakes but not in my toilet, 11) so the composting toilet out by the yurt is literally just a bucket that we empty into its own dedicated compost pile and i have to check around for wildlife every time i use it and somehow it’s less disturbing than this? composting toilet-bucket 4 lyfe y’all.
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rock-cake-with-a-pin-in-it: dexer-von-dexer: danshive: In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction..

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rock-cake-with-a-pin-in-it:

dexer-von-dexer:

danshive:

In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”

I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help

This stuff is cool and much more interesting than the general-AI doomsaying anyway (which I will drag in the tags anyway). :)

Here’s an article about adversarial attacks on image recognition neural networks, and here’s another one about how your training data may mean that your system learns the wrong thing, like “this photo has sheep in” actually being “this photo has places that sheep graze in”.
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ryannightnightbergara: ryannightnightbergara: the height

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ryannightnightbergara:

the height of men’s fashion was whatever the hell was going on with pants and collared shirts in the 70s


we’re never going to beat this so can we please just stop trying

ok here’s the thing about the Found Cat ‘verse, and I stopped working on it so it never got published but in a modern near-Earth A/U, this is the kind of fashion Kes Dameron would have been wearing when he was courting Shara Bey, and I genuinely never posted it because basically nobody wants to actually read this, so I’ll just put up this snippet instead, which is a continuation of this published work that I just kind of put up and left there because nobody really wants to read a modern near-Earth A/U of a minor comic book pairing and I really need to write other stuff, but I got this far so:

Kes changed his shirt three times before he settled on something acceptable. It was dumb, he wasn’t going to be making a first impression, but– Shara had literally never seen him in civilian clothes before, and he knew it was often kind of a shock to see what someone chose to wear on purpose. He didn’t want to shock her in a bad way, but, well. He only had the one pair of civilian trousers on this trip, and like, four shirts, one of which was dirty enough to fail even a cursory sniff test, so his choices were very limited.

He gave it up as a bad job– he only had what he had, he wasn’t going to go buy something different to wear just for this– and slouched out into the sitting room, where Winter and Leia were sitting and painting one another’s toenails.

“Well,” Winter said, looking up, “that’s a bold choice, Dameron.”

Kes looked around, down at himself, back up at her. “What?”

“Don’t be mean,” Leia said, and poked Winter with the nail polish brush, leaving a smear of bright pink on her ankle. Winter hissed, and wiped it off with a tissue.

“About what?” Kes asked forlornly.
( cut for length )

(no subject)

I'm going through my Google Docs, there's stuff in there from twelve years ago at least, it's a mess.
I was looking for snippets of fanfic to post, stuff people would be interested in, but I just found a doc that's labeled "NaNoWriMo 2011" that I have literally no memory of.
I'm actually... not sure I wrote it?
I don't know if I'm still in contact with anyone from 2011. I think that was before I'd gotten back into fanfic? I hadn't been writing, for years, I don't think? I don't... remember, though.

I have no memory whatsoever of writing this. Does anyone recognize this? Did someone share the doc with me and then leave Google so there's no record of it? I just don't know. I would swear I've never seen this piece before, though I can recognize a few details that are the kind of thing I would've stolen from various familiar sources and then edited as I refined my worldbuilding. It's consistent with my writing.
But I have literally zero recollection whatsoever of writing it.

(Like... there's clearly influences from Martha Wells' Wheel of the Infinite, in the details of the guardians and caste markers, and I had been reading that novel around that time, but I literally don't remember any of this.)

Galan was moodily pulling the fringe out of his blanket, listening idly for the hoofbeats that would presage his father's return. His father was still toweringly furious with him over the loss of his old guardian, and the shadow of the powerful man's anger loomed over the tent where they lived for now.
The wooden door in its doorframe slammed open with a shuddering thump, and Galan started, and winced as it jostled the stitches in the wound down his thigh. Kazan strode in, and behind him stalked a weatherbeaten man in a travel-stained, frayed jerkin and standard-issue Mahid helmet, eyes startlingly pale in his sun-dark face.
"Galan," Kazan barked, "you stand for me."
"My leg," Galan said, but bit it off and dragged himself sullenly upright. He recognized this mood of his father's and knew any resistance would meet with a sharp cuff to the head. Kazan's eyes glinted dangerously, and Galan steadied himself carefully, not letting his eyes stray too much to the strange man.
"It's only what you deserve," Kazan said. He turned to address the stranger. "Eyat, you resume your service, but this time to me. This is my son Galan. You guard him. I will speak to you more of this, but must go now."
Kazan whirled and went back through the door, thumping it shut behind him. Galan stood a moment longer, wavering, staring at the stranger, then eased himself warily down to sit on his cot again. The stranger stood utterly motionless, gazing impassively at him.
The man was a soldier, certainly; he had a Mahidim helmet with its face shield pushed up, and a well-worn rifle slung over one shoulder. His jerkin was faded and patched and covered the distinctive shape of a Mahidim breastplate, his shoulders squared by it.
He didn't look like a guardian. Guardians were always clean-cut, always obtrusively unobtrusive. This man was filthy, dirt ground into the creases of skin around his neck, dust settled in the lines of his face, and something in his blank, inscrutable stare was insolent.
"Who are you," Galan managed to demand.
The man hesitated, ice-blue eyes shifting from middle distance to focus sharply on Galan's face. "Eyat," he said, and there was an audible space where a unit appelation and a rank signifier, should have been.
"Eyat who," Galan prompted, annoyed, and unsettled.
"That remains to be seen," the man answered.
Galan eyed the man's ears. There were caste markings there, sure enough; but there were also confusing scars where some had been removed, and Galan couldn't begin to puzzle out what was what. He also had a facial tattoo like a married man, the distinctive dark line along the cheekbone. Even more unsettled, Galan watched the man watching him and wished he hadn't said anything.
"I guess I can't ask you what the hell is going on, then," the man said after a moment's heavy silence. He had no accent; he was Mahid and spoke the language with no inflection. He sounded like a guardian, sounded like the stern disciplined men Galan had grown up surrounded by.
He just didn't look like one.
"I am the last person in the world," Galan said bitterly, "to ever ask what the hell is going on."
Unexpectedly Eyat laughed. His posture changed, some of the steel going out of his backbone, and he unslung the rifle from his shoulder and set it to lean against the partition. He hooked a stool familiarly with his foot and sat on it with a sigh, pulling a canteen off the back of his belt. "I should've known," he said.
Galan wanted to ask what he should've known, but made himself be silent, watching the man drink from the canteen. He put it back on his belt, then unfastened his helmet's dangling chin strap and pulled it off, setting it on the ground next to him.
His hair was a wild mass of overgrown curls. Mahid soldiers cut it off; guardians wore it long, but tightly braided. Galan had never seen hair like this, ungroomed and untrimmed. His own hair was meticulously braided, as befitted his station as a young nobleman.
"What are you?" Galan asked, despite himself.
The man scratched at his scalp, yawning and working his fingers through his thick hair, and after a long moment tossed his hair back and looked up at Galan, looking deeply weary. Guardians rarely showed any kind of emotion or vulnerability. This man was familiar enough to pass as one, but was wrong in too many ways.
"That's what remains to be seen," he said. Galan could see the tension still in the man's shoulders and spine, though he sat as though he were relaxed. No easy feat, on these flimsy canvas camp stools. His shins were curved like a horseman's, toes pointing inward in repose.
A guardian wouldn't have a marriage tattoo. Guardians couldn't marry, it was a feature of their caste. A soldier wouldn't have long hair. But this man was obviously a soldier, dusty from battle. There was even a little spray of dried blood flecking the edge of his neck where the helmet's face shield would have stopped, and decorating the shoulder of the faded jerkin.
It hit Galan like his father's open hand: a mercenary. Eyat was a mercenary.
Kazan had left him alone in a tent with an armed mercenary.
Galan gathered his breath carefully, considering what to do next. He was unarmed; his father had taken his pistol and his knife after Ruat had been killed, despite his protestations that it would leave him utterly bereft of protection.
If Eyat was a mercenary, he had to have defected. He had Mahid caste markings. He was from here. He even had equipment from here. His rifle was of Keloha make, but the body armor and helmet were Mahid.
Kazan had left Galan with an armed mercenary who was a defector or traitor.
Galan glanced up and noticed Eyat's perfectly blank expression. He'd grown up among men with perfectly blank expressions, raised by a woman with an entire spectrum of perfectly blank expressions, so he knew how to read this one. Eyat knew Galan knew, now, and was affecting nonchalance to see how he'd react. Galan closed his face, not letting his eyes flicker to Eyat's hands. In his peripheral vision he could see that neither held a weapon, neither had moved toward the belt or thigh, where standard holsters tended to be. But he refused to look more carefully. He stared at Eyat's face, like a rabbit staring at a snake.
"This is novel," Galan said finally. "Of all the things my father has done to me, this is by far the strangest. I hadn't realized he was quite so upset about Ruat."
Eyat looked startled. "Ruat," he said. "What about Ruat?"
From his tone, he'd known the man. Perfect. Galan sighed, and looked away; he wasn't going to be able to save himself from a man like this. So there was no point staring him down; knowing the exact instant death was coming wouldn't help him ward it off. The man probably had a knife in his gauntlet, like an assassin. Galan had been trained to look for all sorts of things like that, but his ability to defend himself extended solely to fending off an initial attack so that his guardian could have time to save him.
"I got him killed," Galan said. Lies wouldn't help either. If his father wanted him dead now, he was dead. Ruat had been just a servant, and Galan was an irreplaceable sole heir, but Kazan was brutal and ruthless enough to do anything to anyone for any reason.
Eyat was silent, but visibly stricken. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said finally. "Ruat was a good man."
"Not as sorry as I am, surely," Galan said. It was the first time he had admitted that it was his fault. He had insisted up until now that he wasn't to blame. But in the face of this stranger's ice-blue gaze he knew that prevaricating would make him sound like a whiny child. "I did something rash, and he had to rescue me, and died doing his duty."
Eyat nodded, and looked down, something in his shoulders' rigid line drooping. "I see," he said. Galan risked another look at him, counting the scars in his ears. He was younger than Ruat had been; Galan was bad at ages but reckoned Eyat wasn't old yet, but wasn't young; the skin around his eyes was crinkled with years of sun, and a few hairs in his wild mane and full beard had faded to silver, but his skin was still taut, his hands battered but his fingers still straight. Ruat's face had settled into deep creases and his voice had begun to roughen, and in the mornings his hands had ached and he had needed to work them limber again, the knuckles swollen and starting to twist.
And now age no longer troubled him.
"You don't remember me," Eyat said, looking up and catching Galan studying him. "I remember you well. You've grown a great deal."

I don’t have Spotify but my coworker

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I don’t have Spotify but my coworker does.

It’s probably really rude to do this but I follow Heems on Instagram and I know he works for Spotify now and is, like, their Desi editor, I know this from his Stories, and I’m bored of everything I’m used to listening to, so I just went over to my coworker’s computer (he’s not in yet, he works a slightly later shift than I do so we can cover the store’s open hours and also because he’s a late sleeper) and opened his Spotify desktop app and now i’m listening to Bhangra Bangers and it fucking bops ok, but he’s gonna be so annoyed because it’ll mess up his algorithm.

Sorry, I’m a bad person 2k18 style, but like, man, fuck algorithms.
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hellenhighwater: splinteredstar: prokopetz: Do you think anyone back in the day ever spoofed a...

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hellenhighwater:

splinteredstar:

prokopetz:

Do you think anyone back in the day ever spoofed a pigeon?

Okay, so the way sending messages via pigeon works is that each pigeon is “homed” to a particular roost, typically some sort of tower. If you want to send messages to someone, you get them to send you a wagon full of caged pigeons from their roost; later, when you attach messages to those pigeons and release them, they’ll find their way back home.

So picture this: you’re a nefarious sort who wants to intercept messages between roosts A and B, but for whatever reason you don’t have on-site access to either roost – too much security, or lack of personnel, perhaps. So what you do is establish your own roost C, raise a bunch of pigeons, then waylay the regular shipments of caged birds between A and B, steal their pigeons, and replace them with your own pigeons. And here’s the important bit: you keep the stolen pigeons.

Now, whenever someone tries to send a message from A to B, or vice versa, they’ll unwittingly be using a pigeon that’s homed to your roost C instead. The message comes to you, you read it, then you re-attach it to a stolen pigeon homed to the message’s actual destination and send it on its way.

Pigeon spoofing.

…..@hellenhighwater?

This could work, but the problem is the people involved. You’d probably need to get pigeons that look a LOT like the birds that are already in use, and even then, a lot of pigeon keepers might recognize a personality shift in an otherwise identical bird. But yeah, it would be possible!

You might enjoy this article about competitive flock stealing in Cairo.
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salamanderinspace replied to your post

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salamanderinspace replied to your post “additional points on the toilet monster from my earlier post: at this…”

I did not know this could happen omg

WELCOME TO HELL

missbuster

replied to your post

“additional points on the toilet monster from my earlier post: at this…”

A rat came through my friend’s basement toilet and she had to lock it in the bathroom until her husband could kill it. Turns out in Halifax there’s no backflow valves to keep animals in the sewers, which used to be directly open to the ocean/storm drains

AAAAGHHHH

alexiasophronia

replied to your post

“additional points on the toilet monster from my earlier post: at this…”

I lifted the lid of my upstairs toilet to find a dead starling. That was rather alarming, so yeah, things getting in via the U-bend (or even the vent and then the U-bend) does happen.

AAIIIEIEEERRGHHGHGH

Although, I have found enough dead starlings in enough strange places to suspect that their superpowers of annoyance include phasing through solid matter. it’s really incredible, the places those fucking things will get into, just to die. I’d never considered a toilet, but then, they might as well, right? ARGH.

walburgablack

replied to your post

“additional points on the toilet monster from my earlier post: at this…”

this is mostly at random, but in the house i lived in as a smol, we used to get quite large snakes just… chilling in the pantry or the kitchen or the loo.

Mmm hmm yeah ok sure so like here’s the thing, every winter when the weather gets shitty everyone’s like why do humans live in this climate and occasionally  I wonder that too and then I’m like oh right no giant snakes that’s why so I’m really glad we could have this little chat so I could remember why i live in this terrible terrible climate. Like, maybe my skin hurts from just going outside but snakes are tiny shy things that hide from you and have no teeth and hibernate half the year, so. 
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