elen42564 - Tumblr blog

[elen42564]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[elen42564]

I need to be kidnapped by kind aliens who take me to the alien vet and they know exactly what's wrong with me and they cure me and feed me nutritious meals

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[elen42564]

Quiet Quitting is when you're not doing anything wrong but the vibes are off

[elen42564]

It would be hilarious if villains loved Nightwing and were terrified of Officer Dick Grayson.

Dick Grayson- who is used to open spaces and adrenaline- being stuck in a boring bleak office, surviving on shots of coffee and red bull with caffeine that would make Tim concerned.

The thugs soon realised that unlike most of the other cops - Dick was from Gotham.

No one fucks with Gothamites.

Villain *shooting at Dick with machine guns*

Dick *appearing from the shadows behind him*: Boo.

Villain: THIS IS A FIVE STOREY BUILDING HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET HERE

Or

Thief *throwing a counting down bomb at Dick*

Dick: *catching and tossing the bomb at a safe distance before turning round and shooting it so it explodes mid air while running after thief*

Thief: .. what the actual fuck

Dick: Gee look at all that time you had! Shame you threw it away :D

Thief:

Dick: I’m from Gotham

Thief *realising they fucked up* : Please don’t steal my bones

OR

Shooter: *sets elaborate booby traps throughout the houses in an active hostage situation*

Dick *using his training as robin and inhuman flexibility to surpass them with ease*: Ah been a while since I got to have a nice stretch thank you.

Shooter:

Dick:

Shooter:

Dick: .. Hi :)

Shooter: Are you Satan?

AND

In interrogation room

Murderer: I think I’ll take your eyes and add them to my collection

Dick *running on spite and caffeine that could give Superman a sugar rush* : Funny.. I was going to say the same thing to you

Murderer: .. what

Dick: I wouldn’t take your eyes though.. they look like the inspiration behind the whole Medusa’s “look at it and you turn to stone” thing-

Murderer: Hey! Take that back before I gut you

Dick *smile stretching wider without blinking* : oh? Or what? I know everything about you. Who says I can’t kill you and walk out with everyone being none the wiser? I know how to kill someone too..you aren’t special.

Murderer:

Murderer: I’m scared for my safety.

Because the thing is, Nightwing is who Dick really is. It’s who he can be free as, be himself as without red tapes and regulations. Where he can give as good as he gets, and he’s kind and empathetic. He gets to help the downtrodden and goes easy on most of them if they give up right away, not to mention the fact that he never causes permanent damage.

But officer Dick Grayson is a different story. He runs on sleepless nights and no self preservation. Seeing an officer with an uncanny skill set they’re scarily good at, not to mention the cheery attitude he always has scares the shit out of criminals. Cuz no way in hell is a smiling Gothamite not a deranged one. He chases crimes like a bloodhound, and isn’t afraid to make good on threats he makes to ensure they never hurt anyone again.

Bonus if the batfam doesn’t know about this.

Red hood: Shit I can’t believe we ended up in Bludhaven

Red Robin *tying up the corrupt politican* : Since this is a sensitive case, we need someone we can trust to make sure it is seen through.

Red hood: .. So we paying a visit to Officer Grayson?

Politician *screeching* : NO NO NO NO! PLEASE NOT HIM!! JUST KILL ME INSTEAD AND TAKE ALL MY MONEY I CANT DEAL WITH HIM!

Red hood: .. is he fucking serious?

Henchmen: Sir he is. And we agree. Please take our bones and kill us but don’t take us to Officer Grayson.

Red Robin: Wait what did he do?

Henchman 1: He asked boss if the hat was sentient.. and said that if it was would it make that hat the top and boss the bottom.

Henchman 2: Last time we met I tried to shoot him but suddenly my gun was blank and he raised his hand and let the ammo drop

Red Hood: Well even I could do that-

Henchman 2: They were my bullets. I had selected the colour personally.

Red robin *growing concerned*

Henchman 3: He sang a lullaby to a child when we were holding the station hostage, and replaced the people with my family members. He even sang their social security numbers!

Henchman 4: He’s the most dangerous of them all. I ain’t shitting ya when I say he’s as scary as the bat from Gotham.

*all nodding in agreement*

Red hood:

Red Robin:

Red hood: Nah that doesn’t sound like Dick

Red Robin: Agreed. Let’s go there Hood.

*villains’ sobbing intensifies*

[elen42564]

“Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.”

— Ted Chiang’s essay about ChatGPT is required reading

[elen42564]

Please stop attacking the past versions of you. They were doing their best at the time and they got you here. It’s amazing how much progress you’ve made and how much you’ve grown but please don’t think your past self lacked worth in any way.

[elen42564]

i feel like this year a lot of dracula takes have focused in an interesting way on the ways that the horror of dracula includes how he makes his victims be or at least feel complicit in their own victimization. some of this is supernatural vampire stuff like the prohibition against entering uninvited or the ways that vampiric hypnotism seems to include as part of its nightmarish quality the experience of a desire that you don’t actually have, which we see the vampire ladies exert on jonathan in the castle and can extrapolate as a drac-power as well. but a lot of it is the straight up weird psychological manipulations and power play dracula does to jonathan in the castle - the emphasis on “enter freely and of your own free will,” all the little moments of dialogue where he makes something jonathan’s fault or purports to presume jonathan’s desires in a way that leaves no room for jonathan to dissent. it’s a kind of horror that still rings as genuinely unsettling today because it remains an unfortunately familiar and very human kind of violation. and actually even the more magical vampire stuff translates pretty easily to a metaphor for familiar human experiences, right? how many people in the midst of a traumatic event have frozen, like jonathan does when the ladies set upon him, and felt the shame afterwards of their inability to fight against what was unfolding? (cw sexual assault) it’s also well attested to that human bodies sometimes react in situations of sexual assault/abuse with physical responses that overlap with those that accompany consensual sexual experiences, something survivors of sexual violence have spoken about as part of what can make it so difficult to emotionally process what happened - and that’s not even getting into situations of coerced consent or other forms of manipulation that result in experiences only recognized as nonconsensual in retrospect and often with much difficulty and doubt.

anyway. it’s a really rich vein in the novel for me on this reread and i’m grateful for all the posts pointing out the count’s language games in particular, which didn’t jump out at me but once my attention was drawn i couldn’t stop seeing them. but while i am on principle neutral about any individual adaptation doing Whatever with the material, tracking this aspect of the novel’s horror has given me a new dimension of But Why for the sheer prevalence of adaptational choices and academic analyses that have looked at a novel that so viscerally captures so many aspects of violation and gone, “but don’t you think she kinda wanted it?” or even that have looked at dracula’s choice of victims and tried to find or place in them some appeal or weakness inherent in their essences rather than their status as victims of opportunity and vulnerability and dracula’s ability to use them to demonstrate his own power and control, which is how he operates in the novel and which is also an extremely strong parallel for how serial predators operate in the actual world. like any individual movie or retelling or whatever can do whatever it wants, but it is hard to look at the ways the contours of the story as “known” through cultural osmosis have morphed across the century-plus of its popularity and not feel like the versions of it that have lingered have done so in ways that ultimately tone down the horror by placing it more in line with many common cultural misapprehensions about abuse & sexual violence.

[elen42564]

shoutout to flags that look like landscapes fr gotta be one of my favorite genders

[elen42564]

starting a collection

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[elen42564]

people born in 24 Are 2000 now

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Omg is that a cool pinecone?!

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a post-doc was doing a guest seminar at my institute and at the beginning of his presentation he was explaining why he chose birds for his evolutionary analysis - so he said "well first of all, because birds are the best and most interesting animals and it's fun to study them" and a few professors in the room gave him a very serious nod

[elen42564]

I was digging through my drafts and found this formerly unreleased picture of Q back when he was still full gremlin mode. Just a complete and utter 'oh shit I shouldn't have fed him after midnight' beast.

He was 1.9 pounds in this picture and being syringe fed, but really wasn't eating much. Most of it just got on the rest of him at the time. Which really didn't add to the whole thing about him. I forget how he got up to the little ledge there. I think he had been trying to dig out the wand toys that are kept in there.

[elen42564]

hello! I was scrolling through your blog (delightful) and found the post about Beef and his whiskers position, and I'm ashamed to say that in all my near-thirty years of being around cats and thinking I understand them pretty well I never thought to pay attention to the 'circle shape'. could you please expound a bit on what to look for when it comes to whiskers position and how to interpret it? Beef is an absolute sweetheart but looking at a brachy cat as an example makes it a bit hard for me to generalize. thank you!

Thank you! And also thank you for your patience--- I wanted to give some really good examples and have been scouring my blog for the best circle whisker cats I could find.

Picture heavy post under this.

so this is the cat grimace scale. It's a sort of way to visually see if a cat is in pain/distress, and it gives a simplified view of the things I'm going to discuss. It's important to recognize that whisker shape/position is just ONE piece of communication and doesn't tell the whole story. A lot of this is also based on CONTEXT as well.

When you're looking at a cat face, here are the things you really want to pay attention to:

Ear position—Ears facing forward, ears slightly pulled apart, or ears flattened and rotated outward.

Orbital tightening—Eyes opened, eyes partially opened, or eyes squinted.

Muzzle tension—Muzzle relaxed (round), muzzle mildly tense, or muzzle tense (elliptical).

Whisker position—Whiskers loose and curved, whiskers slightly curved or straight, or whiskers straight and moving forward.

Head position—Head above the shoulder line, head aligned with the shoulder line, or head below the shoulder line or tilted.

Calypso's huge whiskers give a REALLY good visual on the 'circle shape' to look for. You can see her whiskers are pushed forward and are loose and curved. She's feeling playful and engaged! She really wants to know what I'm up to and what's in my hand (spoiler alert, it was treats)

Compare that to this later picture, taken after she heard a dog bark nearby:

Her muzzle is tighter. Her whiskers are pulled back a bit, and are straight. Her ears are set differently as well, one pulled back a bit. She's concerned, but not terribly worried about this strange sound.

You can also compare it to this handsome lad:

Again, his whiskers are fairly straight. They aren't pulled back as far, but he's still very tense. He was extremely tense and upset that I took his water dish away from him (because it needed to be cleaned and changed).

Milo is another great example of excited whiskers. They're pushed forward and curved, forming a sort of circle. Like Calypso, he's interested in what I'm doing and feeling playful. He was very interested in the toy I was throwing for him.

Gumdrop is a good example of a more relaxed whisker position. She's curious, but not feeling playful. Her whiskers are held very loosely rather than being pushed forward. Her tail nub is up, indicating friendliness and confidence.