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Deep Blue is 30 years old and was capable of defeating chess grand champions. It could be housed in a single cabinet.

ChatGPT spans untold data centers devouring massive amounts of electricity and it got its ass whipped by an 8 bit gaming console from the 1970s.

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sorry but we cant be doing "americans are so bad at protesting bc of their education system" NO its bc we're all PRIVILEGED FUCKS dont get it twisted

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i wanna talk about this shot

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I was walking through the toy aisle at Target when I found this thing and had a VIOLENT AND IMMEDIATE FLASHBACK to when JP first came out and they had a bunch of REALLY COOL T Rex toys that I would have sold one of my scrawny small-child limbs for but my mother wouldn’t get me one because they were “too violent and also ate people” :(

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I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of "if Azula hadn't had a mental breakdown, she would've won" and I'm here to tell you that no, she wouldn't have.

There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).

Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.

Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:

People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.

Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.

Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.

Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.

All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.

All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.

Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.

And that's the truth of it.

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While putting your favorite condiment on a sandwich, you accidentally make a magical occult symbol and summon a demon.

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smoking that shit that makes you cry about the horrors of car-centric infrastructure

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Kermit The Frog 1980s and 1955 models, notice the differences.

“Kermit_the_Frog” on Fandom: “The earliest version of Kermit first appeared in 1955 on Sam and Friends, Jim Henson’s five-minute puppet show that aired twice daily on WRC-TV. The soon-to-be-famous frog had humble origins, as Henson explained in 1977: "I’d paint the scenery, and Janie would carry it in the station wagon. We made the first Kermit from one of my mother’s old coats with Ping-Pong balls for his eyes.” Kermit was built in March 1955. The character, however, was first copyrighted in 1956. Kermit’s voice was inspired by a similar voice that Stan Freberg used to do.

In the early days of the character, Kermit wasn’t yet a frog – he was more of a lizard-like, abstract character. As Henson explained, “Kermit started out as a way of building, putting a mouth and covering over my hand. There was nothing in Kermit outside of the piece of cardboard – it was originally cardboard – and the cloth shape that was his head. He’s one of the simplest kinds of puppets that you can make, and he’s very flexible because of that… which gives him a range of expression.”

In later years, Henson said that Kermit didn’t become a frog until the 1971 special The Frog Prince, a claim that made its way into the 1993 book Jim Henson: The Works.

However, Kermit’s froghood asserted itself as early as 1965, when Johnny Carson referred to him as “Kermit the Frog” on a December 31st Tonight Show appearance. The 1966 Montgomery Wards catalog which featured the Ideal Muppet puppets refers to Kermit as a “fanciful frog”. Kermit refers to himself as a frog in the 1968 special The Muppets on Puppets. The special Hey Cinderella!, which was recorded in 1968, featured a redesigned Kermit puppet; his round feet were replaced with flippers, and he was given a fringed collar with thirteen points. By the time that Kermit appeared on the Sesame Street Pitch Reel, he was a full-fledged frog.

Kermit sported a double collar for a brief period in the early 1970s, including in the TV special The Frog Prince and several early seasons of Sesame Street, but by the time he took over as the level-headed but often exasperated host of The Muppet Show, it was changed to the trademark single collar with eleven points that he still wears today.“

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Kermit_the_Frog

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Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

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Lets be honest with ourselves. Death Grips is pretty much only a meme band cus suburban white kids think black people are funny. Memes of MC Ride sitting and eating a fucking sandwich at Subway was soon as kooky whacky edgy stuff that you could post for a cheap laugh, photos of him painting with his cat were "surreal" for a lot of people. You never saw people circulating their interviews or sharing pictures and videos of him when he was younger and expressing really profound thoughts on art and music and politics, even though all of those things are very easily accessible online, cus that's not gonna get you clout.

I really don't get it. Like, yeah, Death Grip's sound is probably pretty jarring if you're not used to heavier music, but it wears off after a while. They're a Punk band with Industrial and Hip Hop elements, of course they scream and have politically charged messages and whatnot, so does every artist in each of those genres. Of course the guy has a fucking life outside of screaming on a stage, every artist does. You never see people making memes of Black Flag or Skinny Puppy for doing the same shit, you don't even really see memes of the other two members in the very same band doing the shit they do, despite being just as erratic and unorthodox as their frontman.

This is why I don't believe people when they tell me a song or band is a meme because people like the song / band in question, I think they are just making fun of people and treating art like a game solely because the art in question doesn't fit their scant little worldview. Shit's so lame.

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Truck comes first and if there is any money left over the kids may eat. - Modern Consumer Patriarchy

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any anti-zionism that is not committed to fighting antisemitism and making the diaspora safe for jews to live in is not just counterproductive: it is worse than useless.

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They De-Tumblrized Ms. Frizzle

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Some of my coworkers work on tree ring data. We use a terrific piece of software called CooRecorder, which takes scanned images of tree cores and let's you create a position file that maps out where each ring is. This is opposed to the traditional method of measuring tree cores, where you put the core on a little rolling platform, look at it under a microscope and had a device that measured how much you moved the platform between marking rings. (Total nightmare, extremely difficult to realize where you'd made a mistake.) It's a great, user friendly piece of software that only costs $68. By comparison, the main competitor costs close to $10k.

When I was buying new licenses a couple years ago, I looked into the story of this software. Apparently this couple bought an old house in southern Sweden in the 1980s, and wanted to date the house using ring widths from its timber beams. Straightforward! But at the time, all the dendrochronology labs refused to share their methods for measuring tree ring widths or any data to cross-correlate their records. So they decided, you know what, we can build software--we'll just do it ourselves. And they created CooRecorder, as well as their own library of ring widths. That's why it's such a good price, it's meant to be accessible. Now tree ring width data is widely shared, and it's easy to create a reference.

Here's the turn for the hilarious and bizarre: there is a well known area of poor correspondence in European oaks from antiquity (Roman era, ~ 518 BC to 314 AD) and modern day (AD ~381 - today). It's believed the Romans cut down too many trees and the weather was bad, leading to many years with missing or hard to measure rings. People have been working on creating better references that span that 'Roman gap'; it's a known issue. However, our Swedish Ring Width Robin Hood couple has decided they have solved the problem once and for all: that misalignment is actually because EVERY SINGLE RECORD OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION IS WRONG BY OVER TWO HUNDRED WHOLE YEARS. Everybody--the Byzantine empire, the Roman Empire--just colluded and wholesale made up 232 years of history. I am actually writing this to you in the Year of Our Lord 1791. Their self-published papers get deep into aligning records of Roman comets, eclipses, etc, with other known astrological phenomena to get the 'correct' dates (they note that this is difficult and the astrologers who 'faked' the records in the Christian era did a very good job), and now they've moved on to re-dating everything in ancient Egypt. It gets very red-string-Pepe-Silva.jpg very quickly, which would be fun except that the papers are completely unreadable and clearly no historian has ever been consulted.

Overall, a great example of how you can make a terrific contribution to science in one area and have no idea what you are talking about in other areas. Stay safe out there folks.