Ranma and Akane are a very cute ship but they have no relationship skills between them like sure they love each other probably but can they talk to each other? Can they support each other? No they’re both idiots and that’s why it’ll never work! Even if they did get together it’d just be a bad time all around for everyone! Also, Akane is especially ill suited to supporting Ranma genderwise so like it’s just not realistic
AKANE 👏 DESERVES 👏 BETTER
Anonymous asked:
pyrrhiccomedy answered:
No way dogg, Tippecanoe is going hard going strong going all night long.
A quick summary of Tippecanoe’s activity throughout the game:
- Tricked a party member into betraying a Tremere listening outpost to the Sabbat, wiping out everyone, so Tippecanoe could take over their listening apparatus. Proceeded to blackmail that party member for doing what Tippecanoe told her to do, and used her as a stooge for months.
- After the party betrayed the Prince (Mundir at the time) to his death to the hunters, Tippecanoe went for the position (and probably would have gotten it if not for these Meddling Kids). Persuaded one of them to support her, coerced him into being blood-bound to her, and used him as a stooge for months as well, until he fled to the Sabbat for sanctuary.
- Tricked the Gangrel into attacking Elysium when all of her political enemies were gathered there, once it became obvious that she wouldn’t get the Princedom.
- Turned out to have been a double-agent for the Sabbat the entire time, where she got a hero’s welcome for wiping out half of Elysium, and became the head of their spy network as they renewed their assault on the Camarilla.
- Turned out to be a triple-agent working for the Camarilla the entire time, with the sole mission of using any means necessary to track down Vidke, the progenitor of the Niktuku bloodline, who are the ancient, almost mythical menace to the Nosferatu clan.
- Almost but not quite persuades the party to turn on Vidke for her. Which is pretty good, considering that she’d fucked over the party about 7 times by then. Even though Vidke survived this episode, the party found itself much more incline to work with Tippecanoe going forward.
- Becomes the head of Casimir’s spy network, even though he didn’t love that she was a super hardline Camarilla supporter, because frankly she’s just too good at her job not to give it to her.
- Convinces the party of how very reasonable and not likely to backfire on them at all it would be if they were to persuade Vidke to give up a sample of his blood, so that the Camarilla could at least track down his murderous descendants.
- Takes the information learned from his blood back to the Camarilla and isn’t seen for a bit, but It’s Probably Fine
- Comes back to New York with massive Camarilla firepower in tow, exposes Casimir as a Sabbat collaborator (technically true), installs herself as Prince when he’s driven underground, and proceeds to call blood hunts on Vidke, all his childer, the entire enclave of Gangrel still in the city after Tippecanoe used them for the Elysium massacre (they’re not her biggest fans), Margueritte, Isaiah (a party member), and finally Casimir himself. And Cora (another party member) owes Tippecanoe a life debt now.
And that’s the Tippecanoe situation currently! She is the epitome of a low-charisma, high-manipulation character. Nobody likes her, but she always seems to get her way. And she doesn’t care how many of you dumb bitches she has to punk in order to get it.
You know, as a humble vampire larper, with a basic nosferatu ancilla in my pocket and a much more standard cosmology to deal with, I know there are mechanical reasons I will never be able to go this hard. But god damn, this NPC knows how to do it.
my cat figured out how to open the cabinets so he made a nest in his favorite one. he’ll only come out if he hears the fridge open.
This is about Vid.me vs Youtube specifically, but I couldn’t help thinking of it when I saw that ‘’help us pls we’re just a smol baby website’’ Pillowfort post pop up on my dash that pretty much said the exact same things this guy describes as the death knell of Vid.me.
Points of note:
‘’I’m deeply suspicious of the ‘we’re just pals, help the site grow!’ mentality. We’re just pals… until we’re not. Any platform that doesn’t codify it’s relationship to content creators, that positions itself as ‘just pals’ and ‘we’re all on the same team’ without any structural commitment to that relationship… is ultimately lying.’’
‘‘Failing to codify this relationship ensures that the site will inevitably go through the change in incentives which will in turn lead to the decision making that overwhelmingly favors advertisers [or stakeholders, shareholders, etc] at the direct expense of content creators.’‘
Not saying that Pillowfort is setting out with the *intention* to manipulate their potential audience, I’m sure they have good intentions, but knowing this, it’s setting my red flags off. Tumblr started off as a smol bby website with idealistic intentions and look where we are now?
Compare to something like Ao3, which relies on volunteer support, donations, and a loyal fanbase to keep running as a non-profit website, but which has a clearly codified, structural, and legally defined relationship to its users, and resistance to commercial exploitation built-in to the very foundations of it.
Does Pillowfort have any of that, aside from promises? I haven’t seen an inkling of it in any of the evangelistic posts assuring me that Pillowfort is the next Promised Land, so what’s to stop me from assuming that it’s good intentions won’t eventually be consumed in the corporate machine ala Tumblr?
Lobbyists are pushing a bill that would be super bad for copyright. Think SOPA and Article 13 + 11 meshed together. Like THAT bad.
It’s called H.R. 1695/S.1010, and what it would do is allow the president to appoint who will be the next Register of Copyrights. Right now that office is under the control of the Library of Congress. It’s a non-political position. But Hollywood has been lobbying hard to get this into a political position.
Whoever Trump picks is obviously going to be someone who bows to the whims of Hollywood and pushes for things like website blocking, upload filters, etc. It’s bad. It’s like BAD bad.
Anyway, it’s heading into a Senate committee meeting on December 12. I’m not going to lie, it looks dire. BUT it hasn’t passed the committee yet so it’s not headed to the Senate yet so I mean idk, let’s TRY to at least get them to not pass this law?
Dial
1-916-823-9612 and enter your zip code to call your Senators and ask
they stop this legislation before a crucial committee vote.
You can email your representatives here.
However, calling is the most effective.
AI x-risk is greatly exaggerated, but literally all the other software-related risks are so under-accounted-for that maybe it cancels out.
Software has been killing people with death rays since 1985.
I recall that they didn’t release a bug-fix for a long time, and their suggested workaround was something like “JUST TYPE SLOWER COME ON WHY YOU GOTTA TYPE SO FAST”.*
* The problem was a race condition that only manifested when manual input coincided with something else. As technicians got better at entering the configuration, the more likely the bug was to be triggered. And when I say “bug”, I mean killer death ray. That killed people. With death rays.
I think the best information about the THERAC-25 is this report by Leveson and Turner.
They did release a slightly more substantial fix, in the form of a letter to all users:
SUBJECT: CHANGE IN OPERATING PROCEDURES FOR THE THERAC 25 LINEAR ACCELERATOR
Effective immediately, and until further notice, the key used for moving the cursor back through the prescription sequence (i.e., cursor “UP” inscribed with an upward pointing arrow) must not be used for editing or any other purpose.
To avoid accidental use of this key, the key cap must be removed and the switch contacts fixed in the open position with electrical tape or other insulating material. For assistance with the latter you should contact your local AECL service representative.
The FDA reviewed the letter and deemed it inadequate because “The letter does not provide any reason for disabling the cursor key and the tone is not commensurate with the urgency for doing so”, so they had to send out a second notice which mentioned that, btw, if you do use the up-key it may kill people.
Another fun fact is that the software had at least two completely unrelated bugs, which both caused deaths. (There were also a few deaths which were not completely investigated, so it’s possible that there were additional bugs.) The software quality was really not adequate for the task.
Apparently all the THERAC-25 software was written by a single guy. I kindof wonder how he felt about it afterwards.
The Therac-25 story is, as far as I can tell, pretty well-known at this point - I distinctly recall from my college days the Therac-25 story being part of the curriculum, as an example of why good software development and engineering practices are important. When it’s mentioned, most tech people I know seem to have at least something of an idea of what it was - a badly programmed radiation therapy machine with software race conditions and lack of mechanical safeguards that ended up killing people.
As such, one would … perhaps expect that the industry to have learned and applied important lessons from this incident, perhaps things like
Such lessons … do not appear to have been learned, though. Back in 2010, New York Times had a story about radiation machines that due to race conditions and other software errors were killing people again:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html
As Scott Jerome-Parks lay dying, he clung to this wish: that his fatal radiation overdose — which left him deaf, struggling to see, unable to swallow, burned, with his teeth falling out, with ulcers in his mouth and throat, nauseated, in severe pain and finally unable to breathe — be studied and talked about publicly so that others might not have to live his nightmare.
Sensing death was near, Mr. Jerome-Parks summoned his family for a final Christmas. His friends sent two buckets of sand from the beach where they had played as children so he could touch it, feel it and remember better days.
Mr. Jerome-Parks died several weeks later in 2007. He was 43.
A New York City hospital treating him for tongue cancer had failed to detect a computer error that directed a linear accelerator to blast his brain stem and neck with errant beams of radiation. Not once, but on three consecutive days.
Soon after the accident, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, state health officials cautioned hospitals to be extra careful with linear accelerators, machines that generate beams of high-energy radiation.
But on the day of the warning, at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, a 32-year-old breast cancer patient named Alexandra Jn-Charles absorbed the first of 27 days of radiation overdoses, each three times the prescribed amount. A linear accelerator with a missing filter would burn a hole in her chest, leaving a gaping wound so painful that this mother of two young children considered suicide.
Regulators and researchers can only guess how often radiotherapy accidents occur. With no single agency overseeing medical radiation, there is no central clearinghouse of cases. Accidents are chronically underreported, records show, and some states do not require that they be reported at all.
In June, The Times reported that a Philadelphia hospital gave the wrong radiation dose to more than 90 patients with prostate cancer — and then kept quiet about it. In 2005, a Florida hospital disclosed that 77 brain cancer patients had received 50 percent more radiation than prescribed because one of the most powerful — and supposedly precise — linear accelerators had been programmed incorrectly for nearly a year.
One thing I recall noticing with the 2010 events is that … back in 1985, the Therac-25 thing seems to have been a pretty major scandal - it being seen as the sort of thing that should not have happened and the fact that it did happen being seen as a horror and a gross failing of the people involved - whereas the 2010 events, despite affecting a much larger number of people, seemed to mostly just draw much more muted, kind-of-defeatist reactions like “it’s not possible to write software without bugs”, “it’s better for cancer patients that buggy machines like this exists than for them not to exist at all”.
goddamn that’s horrible
For people who want to use Dreamwidth, but are totally confused about how it works!
What is Dreamwidth?
Getting around your account
Finding new things
Privacy controls?! That’s a thing?!
Comments
You will add new skills to your resume
Holy crap, is this actually going to trigger to LJ renaissance I’ve been dreaming about for a decade (only I guess it’s Dreamwidth now)? Nested comments, gif icons, a UI that makes any goddamn sense, gif avatars…can we really have those things again?
please.
me: *fucks up my sleep cycle*
my psychiatrist, whacking me with a stick: the! base! treatment! for! mood! disorders! is! a! regular! sleep! schedule!
I periodically feel so fucking sad for women in history. I feel like birth control in countries where it is widely used has made women forget an aspect of male cruelty and sociopathy that is now less apparent (giving the illusion that men have improved when only women’s defences against men have)—the fact that for most of history men could live with a woman for decades and not care that they were slowly killing her with endless back-to-back pregnancies which not only resulted in early death more often than not, but also in a total smothering of the woman’s spirit and talents. I saw a quote by Anne Boyer the other day that called straight relationships for women “not only deadly, but deadening”—as I was reading Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane, who was bright and loved reading and wrote some poetry, but had little time to make anything of her life in between her 12 pregnancies. Benjamin Franklin’s mother had 10 sons and 7 daughters. What could they possibly accomplish when their husbands kept impregnating them year after year after year throughout their entire adult life?
Charlotte Brontë eschewed marriage longer than most (writing to Ellen Nussey that she wished they could just set up a little cottage and live together) but she finally married at 38, became pregnant, and died before her 39th birthday. If she had married younger would Jane Eyre exist? I was reading that biography of Charity & Sylvia last month and comparing their life together in their little cottage to the life of their married female relatives, which was honestly hell on earth. One of Charity’s sisters had 18 children. Charity’s mother had 10 living ones, and probably some additional stillbirths. She gave birth to her first child age 19, in 1758, then to a pair of twins in 1760, then another child in 1761, another in 1763, another in 1765, another in 1767, another in 1769, another in 1771, another in 1774, another in 1777. Charity was the last child and her mother had been sick with tuberculosis for months when she became pregnant with her, and she died soon after giving birth.
I wish people would call this murder—this woman was murdered by her husband, like countless other women who do not ‘count’ as victims of male violence because straight sex is natural, pregnancy is natural, childbirth is natural. But when after 20 years of nonstop pregnancies this woman had tuberculosis and suffered from severe respiratory distress, severe weight loss, fever and exhaustion, and her husband impregnated her again, her death was expected. He must have known; he just didn’t care. This woman’s sister—Charity’s aunt—remained a spinster and outlived all of her married sisters by several decades, living well into her eighties. (Ironically, male doctors in her century asserted that sex with men was necessary for women’s health. The biographer quoted from a popular home health guide which said that old maids incurred grievous physical harm from a lack of sex with men.) And this aunt had the time and liberty to develop her skill for embroidery to such an extent that two museums still preserve her embroidered bed drapes. She accomplished something, she nurtured her talent and self. Her name was also Charity, and I find it interesting that Charity’s mother named her last daughter, whose pregnancy & birth killed her, after her childless, unmarried sister.
When I see women reblog my post about Sophia Tolstoy’s misery with her 13 children, adding comments like “thank god marriage is no longer synonymous with this”, I wonder if they realise that men have not magically become any kinder or more concerned about their female partner’s health and fulfillment, it’s just that women now have access to better ways of protecting themselves from their male partner’s indifference to their health and fulfillment.
Now I’m thinking of that tweet by some right-wing tool mocking a couple calling their dog their “baby” that was like
“Your grandmother: 10 kids
Your mother: 2 kids
You: three abortions and a dog”
Like you really thought your grandmother had 10 children because she wanted to, huh? And how dare modern women use the resources (if they can) to avoid the horrors of pregnancy and/or numerous pregnancies. It makes me sick too, the feeling of dread they must have felt as their husband climbed atop them for the umpteenth time, how they must have prayed that this time they wouldn’t get pregnant… and then showing signs that they were and just feeling so. Resigned and helpless. Because what can they do? Maybe try to induce a miscarriage that could potentially injure or kill them, or have them socially ostracized if they were caught. Another year trapped in the cage of their own bodies.
The scope of what men have done to women is unimaginable.
I watch Midwives (awesome show btw) and it takes place in Britain right before the widespread availability of The Pill. In one episode, a lady had 8 kids and was pregnant with the 9th and desperately wanted an abortion because they couldn’t afford the 8 they already had but abortion was illegal and getting her tubes tied was too expensive. So she did a back alley abortion and died from the complications.
The show clearly indicted the government and NHS specifically for not providing poor women with access to birth control and abortion.
But, the whole time I thought how evil is her husband? He didn’t need to get her pregnant. And it’s not even about sexual release because there’s plenty other things they could do. It’s a level of sociopathic selfishness that we don’t think a lot about today but the same stuff would be happening if we didn’t have birth control because men have not changed.
“Why do Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish, with their 8 to 13 million speakers, have Google Translate support and robust Wikipedia presences, while languages the same size or larger, like Bhojpuri (51 million), Fula (24 million), Sylheti (11 million), Quechua (9 million), and Kirundi (9 million) languish in technological obscurity? Swedish, Greek, Hungarian, and Czech have a wealth of language resources, created one human at a time over centuries. They’re the languages of entire nation-states, with national TV and radio recordings that can be used as the foundation for text-to-speech models. Their speakers have the kind of disposable income that makes media companies translate popular novels and subtitle foreign movies and TV shows. They’re found in countries that tech companies imagine their customers might be living in or might at least visit on holiday, meaning it’s worth localizing interfaces and adding them as translation options. They have regularized spelling systems and dictionaries that can be rolled into spellcheckers and predictive text models. They have highly literate speakers with internet access who can contribute to projects like Wikipedia. (Speakers who can even, in the case of Swedish, create a bot to automatically make basic Wikipedia articles for rivers, mountains, and other natural features.) Language resources don’t just appear. People have to decide to create them, and those people need to be fed and watered and educated and housed and supported, whether that’s by governments or by companies or by the kind of personal wealth that lets individuals take on time-consuming intellectual hobbies. Creating parallel corpora and other language resources takes years, if it happens at all, and cost tens of millions of dollars per language.”
— Gretchen McCulloch, The widely-spoken languages we still can’t translate online. (My latest article as Wired’s Resident Linguist.)
Free worldbuilding idea:
Wizards have the same trust in magic that software designers have in software, which is to say, almost none at all.
“Are you fucking kidding me I worked in a reagrent shop for a few years I don’t trust any of that stuff. Who the hell knows what other components are in the ashes.”
“Yeah I was in the circle that made Alston’s Divine Circle of Teleportation. There’s some pretty nasty corner cases you can get into but the headmaster published it without us. I just take ships. It’s way safer.”
“I call bullshit on that Necromancer channeling spirits of loved ones. What did he say he was using? ‘Medium Conduit Ruinic Circles’? That’s just a bunch of buzzwords slapped together, and they don’t even interact with each other.”
“I’ve been looking at this scroll all morning and I’m 90% sure that the scribe didn’t even look at the standard for pyromancies.”
“Help Desk, this is Gloriline, what did you fuck up this time?”
*indistinct vocals*
“Dave, I’ve seen the news, and, frankly, I can see the ash cloud from here. You paid for extended support, not enabling support.”
sonnywortzik
The British in World War I believed that their soldiers were good for several hundred days before inevitably becoming a psychiatric casualty. But this was made possible only by the British policy of rotating men out of combat for four days of rest after approximately twelve days of combat, as opposed to America’s World War II policy of leaving soldiers in combat for up to eighty days at a stretch.
It is interesting to note that spending months of continuous exposure to the stresses of combat is a phenomenon found only on the battlefields of the twentieth century. Even the years’ long sieges of previous centuries provided ample respites from combat, largely due to limitations of artillery and tactics. The actual times of personal risk were seldom more than a few hours in duration. Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.
— Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
