the-eleftheria

[the-eleftheria]

love being worried for 2 full days

[the-eleftheria]

support human artists and stand against generative AI 🖤 buy a wallpaper or leave a tip / twitter / instagram / shop 

[the-eleftheria]

RANDOM DASHBOARD INSPECTION!

#game changer

[the-eleftheria]

god i love my friends. shout out to people who love their friends. this is a post for friend lovers

[the-eleftheria]

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing. It’s the same with painting. All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weigh, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out. What is missing is, precisely, its poetry.”

— Mark Doty, from Still Life With Oysters and Lemon

[the-eleftheria]

[the-eleftheria]

i think its so funny that alumni from schools like harvard and columbia that were there during the protests in the 60s-80s are expressing support for students currently protesting against the genocide in palestine, and random zionists that were NOT at these protests in the 60s-80s have the never ending audacity to tell these alumni "well thats different, what you protested was good and what they're protesting is bad." as if protesters against the vietnam war and apartheid south africa were not also demonized, arrested, brutalized, and even killed for their activism. history only remembers them fondly after the damage has already been done.

[the-eleftheria]

“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin 

[the-eleftheria]

Congrats to Mike Trapp for getting a good grade in the time loop, something that is normal to want and possible to achieve

#game changer

[the-eleftheria]

the wenis dance :D

#everyone was right about this getting stuck in your head immediately #game changer

[the-eleftheria]

[the-eleftheria]

sometimes I feel like discord is lacking emojis and so I make them myself. these ones in particular are my favorites

frog, toad, and soup!

Feel free to use them if you'd like!

[the-eleftheria]

[the-eleftheria]

the joys of a keychain (wow! little object) vs the fears of a keychain (What If It Vanishes)

[the-eleftheria]

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

[the-eleftheria]

She is still on the apple crate

#game changer

[the-eleftheria]

like father like daughter

#antigone #oedipus