Check Later - Tumblr Posts - Page 2

finding out there's a frankenstein ballet and that it was in october of last year…DEVASTATING

look at this. look at these. im foaming at the mouth

it’s been long enough i’m making an executive decision that we all need to go reread the tgi fridays infinite mozzarella sticks article

Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.

So you know those dumb little wordcloud things?

You know, where like, they go through your blog and find the words you use most often, and then spit out stylized text with the most often used words as the biggest ones so you can embed or screenshot them or whatever?

I FUCKING HATE THOSE.

Like, the idea is really cool in theory. A standardized analysis generating an artifact characteristic of you, easily digestible at a glance.

Except in practice everyone's word cloud ends up being "like, people, think, want, make, get..." -- i.e. basically just a bag of the most common words in the english language (presuming they speak mostly english).

But what I actually want is a collection of words I use more than the average person does. And while we're at it, also a collection of words I use less than the average person does.

So anyway I made that:

It's on Siikr now. New blogs don't get it yet, only blogs that were indexed as of a few days ago (still working on optimizations to allow for real time generation).

The words in green are the words you use weirdly often.

The words in red are the words you suspiciously seem to avoid.

In both cases, the bigger the word, the more weird your usage of it is relative to all of the other blogs in Siikr's index. This is limited to the most extreme 100 words in both directions.

Hovering over a word gives you some statistics about how much it should appear in your blog vs how much it actually appears in your blog.

So that's fun and everything -- but it can and very well might get even more fun.

Because generating this meant creating a list of all of the words used by every blog, and storing a bunch of numbers per word per blog. Currently, that's ~9 million associations over ~57k words.

Every blog->word relation stores frequency statistics, and every word itself keeps a running average of its frequency across all blogs.

Which means we could in theory (and almost certainly will in practice), treat each word as a dimension in a 57 thousand dimensional space.

Then treat each user as a point in that 57 thousand dimensional space, where their coordinates in the space are (user_word_freq - avg_word_freq).

From there, we can measure the distance (as cosine similarity, or euclidean distance, or even just raw inner product) between users, and return for your blog, an ordered list of:

Dopplegangers - blogs most like yours (closest to your blog in 57k dimensional word frequency space).

Foils- blogs least like yours (furthest from yours in 57k dimensional word frequency space).

Manic Pixie Dream Friends - blogs that overuse the same words you overuse (closest to your blog in 57k freq-space with respect to only positive vector components)

Least Like Un-You - blogs that avoid the same words you avoid (closest to your blog in 57k freq space with respect to just the negative vector components)

What do you do when your relationships keep on *not* working out? Get your roommate to build you the perfect android girlfriend, of course! What could possibly go wrong...

'Stagnation Seed' a new comic from @bennizone, debuting at the fair this October!

This comic will be released digitally in October as part of ShortBox Comics Fair, an online-only event that will see the release of over 140+ new, original comics from artists around the world!

Does anybody have that image of what cyberpunk dialogue is like. "to crack a cyber lemon this nasty" or whatever

As I'm studying, I keep finding fascinating tidbits of mining history/mineral processing that I want to write about. Like Tellurium is highly toxic, and even in low doses, (10 ppm), will give people "garlic breath". That's so cool!!! Gold-Tellurium processing is really cool!!!