kineticpassion

[kineticpassion]

[kineticpassion]

By "made it" I mean any possible way of making: drew it, took a photo, made a collage, made it in Picrew, photoshopped it, etc.

If your pfp is just slightly modified by you (e.g. a screenshot of a character with added pride flag) feel free to choose between options 1 and 4 as you will

Reblog for more votes

#i chose screenshot but it's a screenshot of my rockband avatar from high school. so customized but yeah

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Time machine

(Source)

#aminals #cats #cute #video

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#foxes in love #comic

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#it.... didn't even occur to me rhat it could be taken the other way

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The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.

Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.

Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't be directly observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.

Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.

The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.

When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!

I gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all; if there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.

#science #neuroscience

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The fox that he grew and he grew, until he was the size of the sky, and the huge fox was the night, and stars twinkled in the blackness of his coat, and the white tip of his tail was the hali- moon, shining in the night sky.

#the sandman #dream of the endless #fanart

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I think there should be a reverse factory builder game where you gradually build up an interlinked ecosystem of plants and animals that ultimately dismantles the ruins of a giant sprawling industrial complex and restores it to a natural green space

#sounds pretty cool #i def dont have room in my life for this right now but saving for later #i still have to go back to palworld

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so there’s this story that my grandmother loves telling (well, in recent years. for the first seventy years of her life she did not talk about her childhood at all.)

the story is that a family friend of theirs was Austria’s finance minister*, and Jewish, and after the anschluss he realized he was in trouble, but like many of Austria’s Jews he seriously underestimated how much trouble. by the time he realized it was too late to get out safely. He was also old and in failing health, so dramatics weren’t ideal.

so he asked a family member to drive him to the mountains on the Italian-Austrian border, and he’d cross there. It was easy enough to avoid the Austrian authorities going out, but you didn’t have a chance of avoiding the Italian ones, and they stopped him. 

“Oh,” he said to them, “Benito knows me. Tell him I’m here and he’ll call me a car.” And indeed, they called Mussolini and he called him a car. My reaction the first time I heard this story - and the reaction of everyone I’ve told it to - has been “so Mussolini opposed the Holocaust? He was helping smuggle Jews out of Austria?” And, no, he didn’t and wasn’t. But he knew this guy, they were old friends, the guy was in town, so Benito called him a car. Which is more characteristic of humans than the version where Mussolini was secretly a decent person, really. A million is a statistic, but this guy? I know this guy. He’s a great guy. There’s the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, and I think it applies, but the word that’s always come to my mind is the myopia of evil, the tendency to treat People well but just not look out at the world and see billions of People, not believe that the principles you apply to the ones you know apply to all of them everywhere.

#history #holocaust

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Google is actively blocking Captcha on Firefox

Firefox users have noticed that captchas - both the picture kind and the click the box kind - are not resolving on Firefox. Tests on Chromium based browsers show that it works perfectly fine on them. It is also known that Chrome will be disabling all ad-blockers in June when it moves to Manifest v3, which will greatly limit what extensions can do.

If you use Firefox, there is an extension called User-Agent Switcher and it allows you to change your browser's UA to Chrome. This will allow you to bypass reCaptcha/Captcha blocks set up by Google and make them function properly.

It could be a code snafu on Google's part - but given how predatory they have been acting lately, I'm going to guess not. Don't get locked out of your websites or feel forced to use Chrome again just to browse.

#psa

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Bothersome beast, comforting friend

#so cute #art #animation #cat #aminals

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we passed a sign in boring that said their sister city is dull, scotland

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Hi, I was wondering today, and asking some friends what do they think are the differences between a spell, a charm and a curse. And I thought who better to ask than you :).

Well, in the Young Wizards universe anyway, spells are fairly complex verbal and graphical structures that take a lot of work and thought to compose and enact. They tend to resemble mathematical equations in that the various portions of the spell need to balance one another for the spell to execute correctly. "A spell always works," the docs say. But whether it works exactly the way you wanted it to, if you haven't been careful, is another question entirely. ...For security purposes, only wizards can build and run spells, as the Powers that Be have conferred on them (once they're into or past their Ordeals) the enacture quality that enables them to restructure the universe directly by use of the wizardly Speech.

Charms tend to be standalone segments or fragments of a spell that have acquired (or been built with) enough of the Speech to run independently of any larger structure. They can sometimes be used by the nonwizardly, but the results will be unpredictable due to nonwizardly folks not really understanding what they're using or how it works. In such situations charms will often fail to fire correctly (often producing some undesirable result as a byproduct), or just simply lie there and do nothing whatsoever.

Curses get into a whole different territory (again, in YW-verse mode). This post contains more detailed thoughts on the subject. Caution: Contains putative sweary wizardry (from a fairly off-book source) and BBC!Sherlock in an unexpected mode.

...HTH!

#young wizards #meta #dying rirhait noise

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About cursing in the Speech (and in the Young Wizards universe)

The original query came from @quinfirefrorefiddle-deactivated:

Wizards can’t lie in the Young Wizards universe, or they shouldn’t. Does this mean being carefully accurate when cursing? No incorrectly gendered comments, no calling something what it isn’t, etc? Are there wizard-specific curses to help with that? 

Hmm.

Well, the best place to start is by defining our terms. Where’d I put the OED?…

(To save time, I’m leaving out the meaning-specific etymological citations that the Oxford English Dictionary provides for each entry.)

…So. The noun form of “curse” first. General etymology:  “Late OE curs, of unknown origin: no word of similar form and sense is known in Teutonic, Romanic or Celtic.” Hmm, isn’t it interesting how the word seems to sort of come out of nowhere?

The main meanings (and it’s interesting that the word has only a couple of columns in the OED: normally the shorter words are the ones with the longer entries): 

(1) An utterance consigning, or supposed or intended to consign, (a person or thing) to spiritual or temporal evil, the vengeance of the deity, the blasting of malignant fate, etc. It may be uttered by the deity, or by persons supposed to speak in his name, or to be listened to by him.

(a) A formal ecclesiastical censure or anathema: a sentence of excommunication. (As in cursing “by bell, book & candle”.)

(2) Without implication of the effect: The utterance of a malediction with invocation or adjuration of the deity; a profane oath, an imprecation.

(3) An object of cursing or execration: an accursed thing or person.

(4) The evil inflicted by divine (or supernatural) power in response to an imprecation, or by way of retributive punishment. 

(5) Attributive and combinatory forms such as curse-blasted, curse-scarred (and noting here with interest the unusual formation “curse-meet”, formed after the erroneous “help-meet” for “help meet” or the modern “help-mate”. Huh.)

And the verb form:

(1) To utter against persons or things words which consign, or are intended or supposed to consign, them to evil spiritual or temporal, etc.

(a) Said of the deity or supernatural power.

(b) Said of persons claiming to speak in the divine name, esp. officers of the church: To pronounce a formal curse against: to anathematize, excommunicate, consign to perdition.

(2) Hence (without implication of the effect): To imprecate or invoke divine vengeance or evil fate upon: to denounce with adjuration of the divine name: to pour maledictions upon: to swear at.

(3) To speak impiously against, to rail profanely at (the deity, fate, destiny, etc.), to blaspheme.

(4) To utter curses: to swear profanely in anger or irritation.

(5) To afflict with such evils or calamities as are the consequences or indications of divine wrath or the malignancy of fate: to blast.

Wizards do occasionally have opportunity to get involved with a number of these options. Against some of them, wizards are strictly enjoined—for example, intentional malediction of the “May a truck hit you when you next cross the street” type. When working in a language routinely used to define or redefine physical reality, the dangers of such usage are obvious. Too much of this will get you sanctioned—and not just by your local Senior, either: the Powers take misuse of the Speech quite seriously. 

Sometimes (5) comes up as something you’re going to have to do, but it’s always approached with caution, and first making sure you have the necessary authorizations. Indiscriminate “blasting” is not permitted.

But more often in a wizard’s general practice, (2) of the verb form comes up for use. Some challenges to the Lone Power are phrased as formal adjurations invoking the attention of the One or the Powers to the intervention one is about to enact on Their behalf. (There is a cultural similarity to the concept that one must give fair warning before one uses a firearm or other weapon of deadly force. Cf. Nita at the Crossings in Wizards at War, using one of the numerous forms of the monitory declaration.) 

I assume that what we’re discussing here is (4) in the verb form, and part of (3). It would be the rare wizard who doesn’t succumb to some “railing profanely” every now and then. (”Profane” here should not be considered in its relationship to the word “profanity” but in its position on the far end of a spectrum that has “sacred” residing at the other end.)  

So. Can you be profane in the Speech? Oh yeah. There’s an extensive vocabulary set aside for this, mostly consisting of Speech-words which are “etymological nulls”—with no relationship to any word in the Speech that denotes or implies any real person, place, thing, force, or physical law. This allows the annoyed wizard to vent as necessary in the Speech without being concerned about inadvertently damaging anything real.

There is, however, also another class of swear words in the Speech for those who find the nulls a little too bloodless or unevocative. These words are more specialized, and exploit a function of the way spells work.

Specifically: for a spell to fire, you need two things: enacture and intent.

(And a structural substrate in the Speech.)

You need three things. Enacture, intent, a structural substrate in the Speech…

(And some nifty red uniforms.)

Ahem. Where was I? …Anyway, the second class of Speech-based swear words is “culturally devised” to invoke the spirit or sense of a home culture’s nasty horrible things without actually invoking the things themselves—the words having been “enacture-stripped” by the Powers that Be to prevent accidental ill effects on reality. (And yes, there is a linguistics-oriented Power among whose many jobs is riding herd on the many recensions of the Speech. This Power ranks very high indeed, a colleague of the Michael Power / One’s Champion: in Earth-based cultures it has routinely been identified with Thoth and other such gods intimately involved with language and words of power.)

Anyway. These vocabularies, both the nulls and the devised, are very popular and are frequently enriched by lively additions from wizards in the field. Somewhere in Games Wizards Play we find Nita realizing that while at the Invitational she’s been hearing a lot of fabulous swearing, here and there, and she wonders why she hasn’t spent a lot more time finding out where these words are coming from.  

All the swear words, in the end, are a service the Powers gladly enable for their mortal colleagues who really do put up with a lot in the course of errantry, and ought to find venting easy rather than difficult. But also, it’s kind of an initiative to keep wizards swearing safely in the Speech, rather than in their milk languages / the local vernacular.

Because… well. On occasion, particularly occasions of great stress, enacture can slide out of the Speech (always in the foreground of the working wizard’s mind) and slop over into one’s vernacular usages. The subsequent effects can be, well, disruptive.

Let’s take a readily available example. If this man was a wizard—

—and said what he just said there, well, there’s a range of possible results.

I think it’s fair to assume from the visual and verbal context that occurs before and after this image that John here—had he been a wizard—would not have been intending to inflict shapechange on anybody. Especially not the person he’s addressing. He’s just had a bad last few minutes, that’s all, and his best friend has as well, and then (for, as usual, a tangled knot of ridiculously convoluted reasons) his BF has turned around and played a godawful trick on him. 

The context suggests that John is more interested in having Sherlock stay just as he is, the better for John to hurl invective at him. But let’s assume also, for argument’s sake, that this wizard!John had had a spell ready to use to deal with the problem they’ve just been through, and then he didn’t have to use it because Sherlock found the solution. The spell’s still lying around ready to fire, though. All the energy bound up in that construct is ready to go. All it needs is the trigger.

When there’s already enacture present, and a structure compatible with triggering by more than one method, and if one of those was a mere expression of intent—if you’re a little on the short-tempered side and for the moment blind to the complications that can sometimes ensue in English-language idiom—well, after the above utterance, in the next moment the wizard’s consulting best friend might have been abruptly replaced by… mmm … something like this.*

Because, you know,  accidents do happen.

…So the habit of keeping one’s cursing in the Speech, where the precision of the language doesn’t allow idiomatic hiccups like the above to occur, is generally a wise one; and the thoughtful wizard spends a certain amount of time every now and then looking up the “dirty words”.

Hope this helps.

[Once again thanking the delightful Reapersun, who most kindly created the above illustration for me (and the companion piece linked to below: now relocated to one of our own servers, as Tumblr deleted it for one reason or another.)]

*Or, who knows, if the spell read the uttered idiom a little bit differently… which could happen, where John Watson is involved… you might wind up with something else entirely. …It’s just a roll of the dice, isn’t it? :)

#Young Wizards meta #cursing #young wizards #dying rirhait noise

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You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.

Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”

Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.

I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones. 

Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.

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ppl in zombie media are way too blasé about shooting at close range and getting covered in bodily fluids like. if the bite infects you have to assume fluids are a vector. you can’t be getting covered in thaaattt

#one reason i liked the og Return of the Living Dead #its a comedy but it takes that part seriously and to its logical extremes (the virus hets into the ground and rainwater) #zombies

[kineticpassion]