yesthatsatumbler

[yesthatsatumbler]

Does it count as polyamory if you are in a relationship with multiple copies of the same person?

#reblogging answer because it phrased the main point of my opinion better than I could #if it's the last case it's definitely not poly unless someone other than you and them is also involved #the self-tree case is kinda tricky and probably depends on what *they* think it counts as but I'd say not really? #foone shitposting

[yesthatsatumbler]

TBF sometimes you try to speculate about the potential societal implications of the technology but the speculations come out as so oddball that you are basically writing fantasy set in space/in the future

(thinking of The Absolute At Large here but there's a bunch of the more singularitarian settings that are also Like That) (and now that I think about it, this also kind of applies to most of Lem's work, though some of it was clearly intended as fantasy-in-space from the start)

I was seriously considering recommending that one story where a bunch of people in a hypertech world decided to simulate a fantasy setting and then insert themselves into it because they were bored, but I really don't like how the author keeps interspersing the actual text with irrelevant interludes about armadas of space sausages fighting armadas of space sandwiches. (It's a lot worse than it sounds like. Though admittedly it's also all in Russian.)

...and also every so often you try to speculate about the potential societal implications of the technology you want to write about, and realize that it would turn out absolutely horrible, so either you end up writing a dystopia (which probably wasn't your original plan) or abandoning that project and trying to do something else, and the latter comes across to the outside world as one less story that bothers with societal implications.

I don't know where I read it but one of the best quotes I've ever read about the nature of sci-fi was "A good sci-fi story is one that predicts not the car but the traffic jam"

#science fiction #fantasy #fantasy in space #fantasy in the future #societal implications #the absolute at large #továrna na absolutno #karel capek #karel chapek #karel čapek #stanislaw lem #stanisław lem #oleg rybachenko #<- that's the guy with the story about hypertech people who simulated a fantasy setting #i don't recall the names of the singularitarian stories that veer into fantasy offhand but there's a bunch of them #i'm sure i'm missing a bunch more tags that i should have added here but forgot #found via foone

[yesthatsatumbler]

Having checked the math, unfortunately no - it's saying that prices measured in bitcoins are dropping, so the value of a bitcoin is rising.

(OTOH that's still rather more volatility than I'd want from a store of value, and it looks like most of the big rises have already passed.)

Baffling advertisement I got today:

Am I reading this right? "Hey, bitcoin price is dropping! Why don't you buy some and join us in losing money!"

#bitcoins #cryptocurrencies #I don't like them either but yeah that's kinda confusing on their part #scrubnuggey

[yesthatsatumbler]

very this but also Tumblr design is so messed up that when I'm reading a themed blog I actually can't tell if the poll had closed or not until after clicking on it so it feels very bait-and-switchy

i hate seeing polls after they close like what the fuck do you mean i don't get to express my opinion

#tumblr polling #closed polls #polls #polling #tumblr polls #I understand why polls are time limited but it's still really awkward #and also the time limits tend to be inconveniently short #but I want to *at least* be able to see if a poll had already closed without having to click through first #annoyances #tumblr

[yesthatsatumbler]

...after my old longpost about it being a lamb I cannot vote anything but "lamb", but I'm starting to agree with the other comments that it's probably some kind of sheepdog.

(If I had to choose a specific one: German Shepherd. Big and angry. Honestly a lot like a lion, except it's a dog and it can herd sheep.)

That said AFAIK his one canonical fursona is indeed a lamb... with seven eyes and seven horns.

This guy.

(Linking instead of posting the pic because it's a really disturbing pic.)

Weird question, I know, but

#jesus #fursona #jesus fursona #lamb of god #sheepdog #sheep dog #german shepherd #yes there's a lion at bottom left of the linked lamb picture #it's not Jesus it's Mark I think #seven eyed lamb #seven horned lamb #seven eyed seven horned lamb #seven horned seven eyed lamb #found via foone

[yesthatsatumbler]

Unfortunately the digits we have are after the fix. The glyph for the digit 5 has that loop at the top because the old glyph looked too much like 7.

(This coin, a 1/3 mark from the German free city of Lüneburg [Numista 297570], is dated 1502, at top left.)

As a side-note, Western numerals at least actually seem to have actually distinct glyphs. I have no idea how do people in, say, Thailand keep the digits ๔ ๕ ๘ distinct in daily life (those are the Thai glyphs for 4, 5, and 8 respectively).

...I wonder if there are equivalents of seven-segment displays for other numeral sets, especially Arabic. There probably have to be? But maybe the tech was so entirely Western that they just agreed to deal with only having calculators doing Western numbers until they could get enough pixels to bruteforce local numeral fonts.

The glyphs for the digits 5 and 6 are too similar. Someone should fix this

#medieval numerals #old coins #1502 #it was less of a problem at the time because the 7 looked like Λ but that one was already partway through an ongoing fix by then #I'm guessing the 7 had to be fixed because it looked too much like ٨ which was an Arabic 8 but I'm not sure if that was the main reason #they also had to fix the 4 which looked too much like a 8 except open at the bottom and then that interfered with their planned 5 shape #honestly the actually similar glyphs in Western numerals are 8 and 3 because you need to be real careful to keep those loops open #there's a bunch of old US coin types where you need to look really close into that loop to tell that the 8 is actually intended to be a 3 #most of them are dated something like 1873 that already has a 8 in it but the glyphs are so similar that even the comparison 8 rarely helps #western numerals #arabic numerals #thai numerals #I looked it up and there are several proposals for segmented Arabic numerals but I couldn't find any evidence that they were actually used #BTW I had to fix one of the tags because Tumblr kept insisting on removing the number from the end and that broke the explanation #foone shitposting

[yesthatsatumbler]

With the additions, I've technically already counted 11 calendars in use on current coinage:

Christian/Anno Domini/Common Era (most of the world)

Lunar Hijra (many Islamic countries)

Solar Hijra (Iran, Afghanistan)

Hebrew/Anno Mundi (Israel)

Buddhist era (Thailand)

Vikram Samvat (Nepal)

Ge'ez calendar (Ethiopia)

Republic of China calendar (Taiwan)

Juche era (North Korea)

imperial regnal years (Japan)

papal regnal years (Vatican City)

Admittedly I'm cheating a little in this list because the North Korean calendar is only used concurrently with the AD years [so that a coin would say something like "97 (2008)"], and the Vatican regnal years are not only that but also limited to non-circulating commemoratives (though AFAICT consistently used on those). All the others, however, are the only calendar on (most) coins of at least one modern country. (And I might well still have missed a few, but I'm failing to think of specific cases.) There are a bunch of other calendars still actively used (mostly in religious contexts) that didn't make it to coinage.

But yes, they're spreading a lot and taking over one another. (Indeed some of this spreading had occurred after WW2.) Historically there used to be a lot more variety within the individual calendars, too (especially in the Byzantine branch of the Anno Mundi calendar, where about half a dozen different variant eras were in active use in the Middle Ages). Even more historically (particularly in antiquity) there's a lot of city-specific calendars, where coins of a particular city would be dated in an era local to that city! (And probably not just coins, but there aren't exactly a lot of dated non-coin objects surviving from that time...) I think a few of those still hadn't been definitively attributed to specific AD dates yet.

(Fun fact: the Ge'ez calendar is counting from the same mythological event as the Anno Domini calendar! But they used a different calculation for the date, so they're eight years off. AFAIK modern estimates suggest that actually Anno Domini is six years off from the most probable actual date of the event in question, and that correspondingly the Ge'ez calendar is fourteen years off. Mythological dating can be like that sometimes.)

...I had also apparently misremembered the history of the Saka era; its use on coinage had apparently ceased just over two hundred years ago, but it continued in non-coinage use and was actually briefly adopted as the national calendar of India after independence.

It only happens rarely but I'm always slightly annoyed at sci-fi stories that are like "oh we don't know what year it is anymore"

Bullshit. Humans love calendars, and there's nothing special about the gregorian xalendar's epoch. Just make a new one.

At least in The Matrix I think we can interpret the canon as there being a new calendar, Morpheus just never bothers telling it to Neo because "years since the founding of Zion" would be meaningless to him. He just says we don't know the gregorian date.

But Transmetropolitan has no excuse. There's no year and no one has come up with a replacement epoch.

#extant calendars #i was also surprised there were that many #and I still had to cheat a bit to get the count past 10 #shout out to Tibet which used a peculiar cycle-based calendar until getting annexed by China well after WW2 #the assorted coin references are because numismatics is one of my special interests so I know a lot about coins in particular #(which does not stop me from sometimes being wrong about it because I misremembered what I've read) #but the Anno Mundi stuff is actually mostly based on non-coinage documents and the coins hardly used the system at all #weird calendar facts #<- I forgot that I had this tag #there should be some way to see all the tags I have previously added to my posts

[yesthatsatumbler]

This depends on what counts as active use! I can name six calendars still in reasonably-active use offhand and at least six more that were still in use at some point after WW2 (some of which might still be used in contexts I'm less familiar with).

...actually no, make that seven: Christian (or however we're calling the calendar used by most of the world), lunar Islamic, solar Islamic (Iran), Hebrew, Thai, Japanese [regnal], Ethiopian. And that's just the ones that are actively used on circulating coins. ...darn, forgot Nepalese. Eight. I'm pretty sure there's a few more that I'm missing at the moment. [Ugh, just remembered Taiwanese. And I think North Korea has one too?]

(The after-WW2 ones: the funky Iranian one they used for a while when they went away from the Islamic years, Korean, Saka [various Indian princely states], Seleucid [Yemenite Jews*], and I forgot what the other two were; possibly some of the calendars I ended up reclassifying as currently used. A bunch more briefly actively used calendars became obsolete as a result of WW2. Vatican used to date their coins in papal regnal years [usually in parallel with the AD date] at least into the reign of John XXIII [1958-63 AD] but I'm not sure if they still do? [Looked it up; apparently technically they still do but only on commemoratives rather than general-issue euro coinage.] I think some other regnal and/or revolutionary years also came up in a few contexts. Mongolia comes to mind for the latter specifically as used on coins but AFAIK the latest coins to use that calendar were contemporary with WW2.)

I do have to admit that (I feel like) we should probably use more stuff like "since the foundation of the republic".

(And also yeah, if the state of the world changes sufficiently to make calendars counting by years impractical and/or inconvenient, we might indeed end up with a situation where people legitimately don't know which year it is. Or for that matter with a situation where the answer to which year it is depends on whose standard on year length you're following.)

(Alternately we could, even without all that much change, end up in a situation to the effect of "of course we know which year it is, it's the consulate of Catulus and Lepidus**", whereas the local default calendric reference does not actually include any kind of meaningful numeric order of the years.)

*) Technically the Jewish legal code explicitly prescribes the use of the Seleucid calendar in some legal contexts! But apparently this was only kept up into the post-WW1 era as a living tradition in Yemen.

[Which reminds me, "different calendars legally used for different purposes" is also a thing that I feel like there really should be more of. I believe British statutes are still officially numbered in regnal years, and Israel insists on doing holidays by the Judaic calendar even as (e.g.) ages of majority had been relegated to the Christian calendar, but other than that and the Seleucid thing I'm failing to think of any other examples.]

**) This is actually [part of] the date of the oldest known inscription in Pompeii. I wonder if the people who found that had to look up the consuls in a table; it's about 150 years prior to the period you'd expect Pompeian inscriptions to have been written in.

It only happens rarely but I'm always slightly annoyed at sci-fi stories that are like "oh we don't know what year it is anymore"

Bullshit. Humans love calendars, and there's nothing special about the gregorian xalendar's epoch. Just make a new one.

At least in The Matrix I think we can interpret the canon as there being a new calendar, Morpheus just never bothers telling it to Neo because "years since the founding of Zion" would be meaningless to him. He just says we don't know the gregorian date.

But Transmetropolitan has no excuse. There's no year and no one has come up with a replacement epoch.

#calendars #calendar #the count of years #Iranian calendars #Hebrew calendar #Ethiopian calendar #Saka era #Seleucid era #Vikram Samvat #I'm not making up the thing about the Jewish legal code and the Seleucid calendar by the way #but I suspect it might have originally been intended to mean that they should be using the local civil calendar instead of the religious on #also there's a lot more interesting difference once you get into the days and months but those are rarely relevant for figuring out the yea #I'm also reminded of a fanfic series I've read a while back that's set in the “21st century” but the locals redefined that to mean 2100-219 #I wonder which calendar would Texas use if it was allowed to get their own calendar #probably something to do with the Texas Republic but maybe they'd just restart it on every governor or something #I'm sure I'm missing a bunch more tags that I should have added here but forgot #foone

[yesthatsatumbler]

As my mother likes to say, every joke has a grain of joke.

The joke is that there's a joke.

[yesthatsatumbler]

...this takes care of some of my safety concerns but not all of them and I think might introduce some new ones.

At least I hopefully wouldn't get stuck if they forget which of their pile of assorted bedroom toys they turned me into. (Though things might get awkward if they try to turn the wrong toy back into me and not realize it.)

OTOH if the transformation is remote (and gradual) I'd probably not go to classes or work at all. Way too risky. Wouldn't want to end up on a bus (or, worse, crossing a road) and then my legs start turning into a tail or flippers or something and I can't leave the bus/road any more. (Honestly even at home would be pretty risky, but at least at home I wouldn't get run over by anything. Probably. And short of particularly contrived coincidences I'll probably have enough time to get out of the riskier spots.) (If it's sufficiently gradual I might be able to figure it out in advance and stop in a safer spot once I start noticing any changes to avoid crossing roads at the wrong minute, but then I'll commonly end up on random street corners that they'd have to find my new body in, and it still wouldn't help much with bus/train/car travel.)

Other concerns that don't seem to have been addressed so far... (Mostly inspired by similar storylines I've read before. It's a surprisingly common concept but for some reason the stories tend to end in tragedy.)

What if they turn me into, like, an ant or a mosquito, or some other kind of bug, and then they (or someone else) don't realize that the bug they're seeing is me and squash it?

What if they turn me into some kind of food (like, I dunno, a chocolate bunny or something) and then eat me? What about if someone else accidentally finds and eats me?

What if they turn me into some nominally-non-food animal (say, a mouse) and then I'm found by some other animal who does in fact eat those (in this example, a cat)?

What if I'm turned into something small, and/or thin, and then when I'm due to be turned back I end up in/partway through some kind of constricted place (such as a drawer or a vent) where my normal form wouldn't fit?

For that matter, what if I'm getting turned into something large and my new body wouldn't fit in my current location? Maybe staying at home is too risky as well...

I'm sure I'm missing a few other extremely inconvenient scenarios but currently failing to think of any that don't require malice on their part.

Idea: you're dating a reverse shapeshifter. They can't change form, but they can change other people.

They're bisexual with eclectic tastes and a thing for variety. Who knows what you'll look like tonight?

#I really like the whole concept #I've also read too many short stories about it turning out wrong #also I think I just generally tend to worry about random stuff overall #still feel like it would be awesome if safe enough #foone

[yesthatsatumbler]

Idea: you're dating a reverse shapeshifter. They can't change form, but they can change other people.

They're bisexual with eclectic tastes and a thing for variety. Who knows what you'll look like tonight?

#I'd want a lot more assurances about safety #read too many stories about people getting stuck as an inanimate object #and/or being turned into food that then accidentally gets eaten #and I guess just normally being stuck in an inconvenient body would be awkward #otherwise yeah this sounds like an extremely nice idea #foone

[yesthatsatumbler]

I'm sure that if the bathrooms weren't divided "by gender" (as a hangover from only-allowed-to-males bathrooms apparently) then we'd have either exactly that or no urinals. I've long been proposing just this setup (at least as the theoretically nice option).

I voted for triangles=men (not Californian) but I tend to see triangle-with-corner-down for men and triangle-with-corner-up for women. (Assuming they don't either draw a pretty picture or use letters.) I agree that it would match an urinals-and-stalls setup even better.

#bathroom signs #gender is complicated #california apparently #foone

[yesthatsatumbler]

TFW for me by far the best/funniest part of the story is that it's the Emperor Norton bridge.

Like, yeah, I know the backstory of why it's called that. But it's just still so hilarious that a guy as ridiculous as Emperor Norton got a major transport link named after him. (Two major transport links if I understand what you're trying to describe correctly.)

Honestly the whole biography of the guy (after arrival in SF at least) is just... so very Tumblr I guess. That feels like a very fitting description.

...There should be more Tumblr stuff about Emperor Norton is what I'm saying.

(Also about Timothy Dexter. But I guess Brockton Bay Innsmouth Newburyport is a much smaller audience than San Francisco.)

I took the Emperor Norton bridge into work today and it was hilarious: there were like EIGHT cop cars parked along it.

They are clearly TERRIFIED that protesters might shut down the bridge again.

The extra funny thing is that all eight were on the Oakland-YBI span, but when protesters shut down the bridge, they shut down the YBI-San Francisco span. Presumably protesters would do that again, because it's more of a bottleneck, but the cops can hang out there: it's so much of a bottleneck that if the cops did hang out there, THEY would be impeding the flow of traffic on the bridge.

But in order to appear like they're doing something, they are guarding the wrong half of the bridge.

(of course, if protesters do close the bridge, they can be there quickly... But it'll probably be too late. You can close a bridge quick)

#emperor norton #timothy dexter #san francisco #brockton bay #innsmouth #newburyport #emperor norton bridge #san francisco-oakland bay bridge #it's named after him because he was one of the first people to propose the idea of building a bridge in that location #I guess also because he's so hilarious overall that it felt like a good idea to name something after him and the bridge was a good candidat #foone

[yesthatsatumbler]

I'm sorry if I went back three months on your blog and liked a bunch of things. I promise it's not a weird horny/stalking thing, I just have extreme ADHD and you have Content

#mood #relatable #more like three years for me #unless it's a really busy blog then it's probably going to be more like three weeks before I get tired of catching up #because I also have enough OCD to want to go all the way and if I realize I can't I tend to just abandon the project for a while #got my first follower that way too #well the first other than the staff accounts that seem to just follow whoever #she apparently really enjoyed that I was going through her content backlog and posting likes and reblogs on it #never thought of it as a stalking thing #but maybe I just don't interact quite as much with people who's legitimately famous so I don't know what it's like for them

[yesthatsatumbler]

The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya. (Wikidata because I can't find a good page about it in English.)

...given that it's a Russian book (...OK, Soviet; it's pretty old) I wouldn't expect a lot of people here to know it though. (But AFAIK it's fairly well known in Russia.)

there r only 2 kinds of g/t fans ppl whose g/t awakening was the iron giant, power rangers, etc etc and ppl whose g/t awakening was arrietty, tinkerbell, etc etc

#the extraordinary adventures of karik and valya #необыкновенные приключения карика и вали #yan larri #ян ларри #not this edition I think #this one is from 2006 so way too late for my memory #can't find the edition I had though #probably also a bunch of other even more obscure works #in retrospect also Alice in Wonderland I guess

[yesthatsatumbler]

TFW the Endless Eight was one of the media I did think of but I also never actually watched it and my memory of it was sufficiently confused that I thought it was the Supernatural episode.

In retrospect it being Haruhi Suzumiya makes sense (and I really should have remembered that part at least) but TIL that it consisted of more than one episode. I definitely didn't know this part of the story.

Thank you to @sleepnoises for making the original poll & for giving us the idea to to this :)

Sorry if we couldn’t get your favorite on here, we were limited to only 12 options (11 if you don’t include the “other” option).

[yesthatsatumbler]

No, that's Banksy. A blanket is a generic term for either of the two most common objects in Conway's Game of Life.

wghat the fuck is a blanket

i think it's when a lot of people sit at the same table and there is like food ! hope ythis helps

#I'm really hoping someone gets this one