amnesia cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

femmenietzsche:

The Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start the Fire is 4:49 long and covers 41 years worth of history. Recorded history began ca. 3000 BC with the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia. Therefore a version of We Didn’t Start the Fire which covered all of history at the same pace would be around 590 minutes long.

Or you could reach the first chorus with bad news from the first day of 2020, which also covers 41 years worth of history.

 

Are you telling me…that the fabled dedicated-to-2020 version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” *existed*…but was *lost*?

I don’t think “spared” is really the right word here, but I don’t want to beat you up over it. In any case, perhaps people will be in a better position to write it after 2020 is over. Hindsight is, after all, 2020.

Tags:

#is what my 2023 self will tell people when they ask her why she owns a P100 respirator #reply via reblog #illness mention #music #history #amnesia cw #please get a cloud sync Nate

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

togglesbloggle:

To: H.R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire
July 18, 1969

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.  These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery.  But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.  They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.  In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.  In modern times, we do the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home.  Man’s search will not be denied.  But these men were the first, and they will remain foremost in our hearts.  For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT:

The President should phone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:

A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

———————————————

It’s a unique kind of pleasure to look back six or seven years in one’s social media history and discover that one’s younger self posted cool things, had neat opinions about unexpected subjects, and was genuinely the sort of person that one likes.  This was one of my favorite autoanthropological discoveries, although being reminded about Hildegard von Bingen was a close second.

Tags:

#moon #space #death tw #unreality cw #amnesia cw #(personally I find moments like that deeply disturbing) #(oh don’t get me wrong I enjoy re-reading my old posts) #(but while enjoyment is a large part of why I re-read old posts another part is to keep the memories fresh) #(I wish to *never* be surprised by them) #(your past self can only surprise you to the extent they aren’t part of you anymore) #(to me that’s something to mourn‚ not be delighted by) #(but anyway we’re not here for that we’re here for the alternate-universe speech)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

charlesoberonn:

charlesoberonn:

“I wish ancient people preserved their writing and artifacts better” I write in electronic signals on a piece of hardware that can’t retain its efficacy for more than a few decades.

Time to laser-print my entire blog on titanium plates and bury them underground.

Tags:

#this but unironically #I want to do more with K-selection strategies but it’s hard to know where to start #and how to do it on anything resembling a budget #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw

Updates to how we enforce our Community Guidelines on hate speech

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

staff:

Tumblr wouldn’t feel like much if it were not for the passionate community filling up our dashboards. You are the reason people turn to Tumblr for a laugh or for a little human connection. You are why Tumblr feels like a home for so many. You care about this place, and you let us know when something doesn’t feel right. Many of you have called on us to further reevaluate how we deal with hate speech, particularly hate speech from Nazis or other white supremacist groups. Today we’re letting you know that we heard you, and we are taking further action.

We’ve listened to your feedback and have reassessed how we can more effectively remove hateful content from Tumblr. In our own research, and from your helpful reports, we found that much of the existing hate speech stemmed from blogs that have actually already been terminated. While their original posts were deleted upon blog termination, the content of those posts still lived on in reblogs. Those reblogs rarely contained the kind of counter-speech that serves to keep hateful rhetoric in check, so we’re changing how we deal with them.

We identified nearly a thousand blogs that were previously suspended for blatantly violating our policies against hate speech. Most of them were Nazi-related blogs. Earlier this week, we began the process of removing all reblogs stemming from the original posts on those previously suspended blogs—that’s approximately 4.47M reblogs being removed from Tumblr. 

Moving forward, we will evaluate all blogs suspended for hate speech, and consider mass reblog deletion when appropriate. 

Consulting outside experts 

We wouldn’t make a change like this without considering the impact to your freedom of expression. We do not want to silence those who are providing educational and necessary counter-arguments to hate speech. We reviewed our approach with a variety of outside groups and experts to make sure we have aligned with their recommended best practices.

There’s no silver bullet solution, AI, or algorithm that can perfectly target hate speech. That’s why we have a dedicated Trust & Safety team, and why we have an easy way for you to report any hate speech you do see.

If you see something on Tumblr that violates our Community Guidelines, please report it to our Trust & Safety team for review.

Lastly…

We are, and will always remain, steadfast believers in free speech. Tumblr is a place where you can be yourself and express your opinions. Hate speech is not conducive to that. When hate speech goes unchecked, it eventually silences the voices that add kindness and value to our society. That’s not the kind of Tumblr any of us want. 

Thank you for speaking up. Please continue to help us make Tumblr the place you want it to be.

<3

>>Earlier this week, we began the process of removing all reblogs stemming from the original posts on those previously suspended blogs—that’s approximately 4.47M reblogs being removed from Tumblr.<<

So by the sound of it, if you’ve reblogged any debunkings or tangents or possibly even unrelated posts from a blog that *also* posted hate speech (by whatever standards they’re using for that), it’s getting thrown down the memory hole.

Hey guys, I wrote a Tumblr reblog once disagreeing with the idea that deleting an OP blog should delete all of its posts’ reblogs. Do you know what happened to my post? It fucking vanished [link]. It lives on because I personally ensured it.

Now is a good time to remind everyone that tumblr-utils [link] incremental backups do not delete old posts if the original gets deleted, and the Wayback Machine sure as hell does not delete them.

Hey, so, about tumblr-utils:

Last week its API key stopped working: trying to use outdated versions of tumblr-utils will now result in “HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized”. The *current* version of tumblr-utils, if I’m understanding this bug report correctly [link], works but is globally rate-limited: no more than 1,000 blogs per hour and no more than 5,000 blogs per day across all tumblr-utils users.

But there is a workaround: apply for an API key *yourself* [link], then go into the Python code and replace the API key with your own (don’t worry, you don’t need to speak Python: knowledge of plain English is enough to make it obvious which bit is the API key). I just did this and it seems to be working now. Note: you must be logged into a Tumblr account to request an API key.

—

(I’m going to put this in a reblog of this thread because it’s one of the most fitting threads available, given that this information really should be on Tumblr specifically (where the people most in need can see it and share it) and I swore I’d never make another Tumblr-hosted OP. (And you can see why!))

Tags:

#reply via reblog #oh look an update #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #PSA #amnesia cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess:

slatestarscratchpad:

The average person has about one or two hours/night of REM sleep, and is awake for about 16 hours/day. So of all your experience, about 90% is awake, and 10% is in dreams.

But dreams tend to involve much stronger emotions than waking. In a typical waking day, you’ll go to the office, maybe hang out with friends, do a lot of boring stuff you’ve done before. In a typical dream, you’ll find true love, or get attacked by zombies, or discover a new continent. So much more than 10% of your interesting emotions, happiness, and unhappiness happens in dreams. Let’s kind of arbitrarily say it’s 50%.

You spend so much work trying to improve the quality of your waking life, and it’s so hard. But you put almost no work into improving the quality of your dreams. And improving the quality of dreams is much easier! A cooler room, a softer blanket, or a cup of tea before bed could all do it. That’s before you even get to all the complicated herbs and meditation techniques people have invented for the purpose. If, as a utilitarian, your goal is to maximize your positive and minimize your negative experiences – then if you’re concentrating on waking life, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

This suggests probably the most important and neglected effective altruist cause is giving people better dreams. It probably costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Amnesty International to prevent one person from being tortured when awake, but far more people are tortured in nightmares, and those probably can be prevented for a few dollars each. The same is true of positive utilitarianism. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to create new lives. But there are dozens of medications and supplements that can give people much more vivid dreams, and if we give those the the people whose dreams are most likely on net to be pleasant, we’re creating vast amounts of extra pleasurable experience.

If your dreams are generally good, take galantamine and melatonin to get more of them. If your dreams are generally bad, take scopolamine and clonidine to get less of them. This is by far the most effective life improvement advice you will ever get.

#to be clear this is a joke #but i am still trying to figure out exactly why

I think this is related to the distinction between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”? Most people remember their dreams pretty weakly (I generally don’t remember mine at all.) We generally seem to treat the “remembering self” as more real than the “experiencing self”. (Consider the use of “conscious sedation” in medicine.)

That just kicks the can down the road to “making dreams more *memorable* is one of the most important things we could possibly do”.

And before anyone is like “but most waking experiences are also not memorable”: maybe your *brain* doesn’t remember, but if you care to arrange it you can get an exoself that *does* [link]. As technology advances (data storage, wearable recorders, automated transcription, etc), this gets more practical every year.

Whereas…okay, I haven’t yet had a chance to post the draft I’m thinking of here, but for now: the scariest part of lucid dreaming is the acute awareness that you’re operating with a malfunctioning memory compiler with *nothing* you can do to compensate for that. Everything around you–every bit of scrap paper, or keyboard, or microphone, or friend–is an illusion even more fragile than your current consciousness.

A sedated me is, if she can *possibly* manage it, wearing a microphone around her neck [link]. A dreaming me gets nothing: maybe an after-the-fact journal entry if she’s *lucky*.

{{I later posted the draft I was thinking of.}}

Tags:

#reply via reblog #amnesia cw #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #dreams #transhumanism #drugs cw?

Updates to how we enforce our Community Guidelines on hate speech

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

staff:

Tumblr wouldn’t feel like much if it were not for the passionate community filling up our dashboards. You are the reason people turn to Tumblr for a laugh or for a little human connection. You are why Tumblr feels like a home for so many. You care about this place, and you let us know when something doesn’t feel right. Many of you have called on us to further reevaluate how we deal with hate speech, particularly hate speech from Nazis or other white supremacist groups. Today we’re letting you know that we heard you, and we are taking further action.

We’ve listened to your feedback and have reassessed how we can more effectively remove hateful content from Tumblr. In our own research, and from your helpful reports, we found that much of the existing hate speech stemmed from blogs that have actually already been terminated. While their original posts were deleted upon blog termination, the content of those posts still lived on in reblogs. Those reblogs rarely contained the kind of counter-speech that serves to keep hateful rhetoric in check, so we’re changing how we deal with them.

We identified nearly a thousand blogs that were previously suspended for blatantly violating our policies against hate speech. Most of them were Nazi-related blogs. Earlier this week, we began the process of removing all reblogs stemming from the original posts on those previously suspended blogs—that’s approximately 4.47M reblogs being removed from Tumblr. 

Moving forward, we will evaluate all blogs suspended for hate speech, and consider mass reblog deletion when appropriate. 

Consulting outside experts 

We wouldn’t make a change like this without considering the impact to your freedom of expression. We do not want to silence those who are providing educational and necessary counter-arguments to hate speech. We reviewed our approach with a variety of outside groups and experts to make sure we have aligned with their recommended best practices.

There’s no silver bullet solution, AI, or algorithm that can perfectly target hate speech. That’s why we have a dedicated Trust & Safety team, and why we have an easy way for you to report any hate speech you do see.

If you see something on Tumblr that violates our Community Guidelines, please report it to our Trust & Safety team for review.

Lastly…

We are, and will always remain, steadfast believers in free speech. Tumblr is a place where you can be yourself and express your opinions. Hate speech is not conducive to that. When hate speech goes unchecked, it eventually silences the voices that add kindness and value to our society. That’s not the kind of Tumblr any of us want. 

Thank you for speaking up. Please continue to help us make Tumblr the place you want it to be.

<3

>>Earlier this week, we began the process of removing all reblogs stemming from the original posts on those previously suspended blogs—that’s approximately 4.47M reblogs being removed from Tumblr.<<

So by the sound of it, if you’ve reblogged any debunkings or tangents or possibly even unrelated posts from a blog that *also* posted hate speech (by whatever standards they’re using for that), it’s getting thrown down the memory hole.

Hey guys, I wrote a Tumblr reblog once disagreeing with the idea that deleting an OP blog should delete all of its posts’ reblogs. Do you know what happened to my post? It fucking vanished [link]. It lives on because I personally ensured it.

Now is a good time to remind everyone that tumblr-utils [link] incremental backups do not delete old posts if the original gets deleted, and the Wayback Machine sure as hell does not delete them.

Tags:

#AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA #amnesia cw #reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #PSA #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #federated Tumblr clone when

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cakesandfail:

So I was just thinking about those posts you get in the Discworld tag about the way belief works on the Disc and how Vetinari and/or Vimes is so integral to the way Ankh-Morpork works that they might just sort of… not ever die.

You know, the ones like ‘Vimes is going to become a god of policemen and he’s going to hate it”.

Well. What if it happens to both of them? There are two parts to the city, after all. ‘Proud Ankh’ needs taking down a peg or two (or seven) by Sam Vimes, and if anyone can terrify ‘pestilent Morpork’ into being better then it’s Havelock Vetinari. And they can drive each other mad with stealth puns for centuries, if they want.

Also, this would potentially make them literally Law And Order, and that just seems very fitting in a way that would probably annoy them both.

 

violent-darts:

My favourite sort of riff on this is the idea that they aren’t there ALL the time, but if someone who’s taken over their authority or whatever starts fucking up, they become Active. 

Sort of like Carrot’s comment in Men At Arms: when you need them, you REALLY need them, but when you don’t, best if they just go away and get on with things (in their cases, being dead). So when things are going all right it’s very quiet and ordinary. 

And then when things start going WRONG suddenly you have things like the current patrician waking up to a Very Angry Manifestation of the Late Duke of Ankh, proceeding to remind him or her (would it be matrician, then?) about How Things Are Done (By Law). 

Or the abusive Commander of the Watch coming into his or her office to find a calm man, thin man like a predatory flamingo there to discuss the virtues of temperance and accountability and not having his/her Watch-house and/or personal lodgings being literally struck from on high by a meteor (can’t be lightning, Vimes and Io can’t even exchange a civil sentence, but Vimes has always been good at getting around these things). 

And yes in the mean time when things ARE quiet, they can watch everything and get on each other’s nerves and it’s basically like Colon’s office except instead of for old street monsters it’s for ancient legends of civil justice who can’t quite stand to even fade away and still have enough people believing and invoking them that they can stick around and growl when people get out of line. 

 

adramofpoison:

I s2g DO NOT make me ship there two

 

westbrookwestbooks:

Oh I like this! 

And now I have headcanon: 

Everyone knows when Vimes appears. There’s a scent of heavy tobacco in the air, a feeling like a thunderstorm that builds and builds and builds as he (his specter? his presence? whatever you want to call it, it’s terrifying to those who are unjust) stalks down the hall towards whomever requires a prod buttock. 

Vetinari? No one knows when he’s coming. You’ll just walk into your office, and he will simply be there. The silent, black-clad figure, sitting in your chair, waiting for you (occasionally, there will be another, silent, black-clad figure, one with a smile and a scythe, waiting for you. DEATH, more than anyone, understands duty, and he and Vetinari exchange greetings whenever their paths cross). And the manifestation of the Patrician will nod to a chair, and the perpetrator will sink into it, unwillingly, and be subjected to-something, no one can ever remember quite what happens during these moments, only that they will be sweating afterwards and the chair behind the desk will be empty. 

Tags:

#Discworld #fanfic #headcanons #amnesia cw

mathamaniac asked: I read ‘CORDYCEPS: too clever for their own good’ like 6 months ago and i can’t get it out of my head. its just now clicked for me that YOU are (probably) the same benedict that wrote it (unless that’s what you want me to think)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

Wait, I wrote Cordyceps? And my name is Benedict? That’s not- wait, now I remember, now I remember, AAAAAAAGhfkjdks

#[passes out and wakes up as. what‚ denedict?], #mathamaniac, #but yeah that me, #glad you liked it!, #or. that you can’t get it out of your head wait uh oh.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #cordyceps tcftog #infohazards #amnesia cw #also what kai-skai said #(”are you just going to skip cenedict or”) #though koito-yuu’s and yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined’s responses are also very good #(respectively ”next is francis‚ right” and ”is there a canonical ordering to all the different ways you can prepare eggs?”)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

i-run-a-trash-blog:

New proposal for a doctor who spin off show: Donna is now immortal and has her memories because uhh I said so. Jack runs into her. Niether of them have a way to contact the doctor, both of them have a knack for hijinks, the show is just the two of them fuckin around and having adventures. Send post.

While you could just leave it unstated why Donna is immortal and intact, may I present to you all a canon-compliant excuse:

You know how Dalek Caan referred to what happened to Donna as “dying”? You know how the Doctor told her family that “that version of Donna is dead”?

You know who *else* considered it a death?

That’s right, the Testimony Foundation.

After that, well, timeship + hijinks…

Tags:

#I wanted to see the universe so I stole a glass avatar and ran away #Doctor Who #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #reply via reblog #death tw #amnesia cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

reasonsmysoniscrying:

‪**Walking some place that we’ve never been**‬

‪8yo: “I’ve seen this before.”‬

‪Me:‬

‪8yo: “You know how sometimes you go to sleep and you see things in your dreams and then later on you see them for real? Like that.”‬

‪Me, quietly terrified: “Umm oh yeah! That’s called ‘Deja Vu’! Great!”‬

 

kaylapocalypse:

I have this too, and like a bunch of the other people who say they have this in the notes have described: it’s like…less prophetic full fledged dreams and more like a 2second snapshot of you doing an activity with no context. Like cutting paper then looking up or opening your purse with specific scenery in the background. Then you wake up and you’re like “what was that pointless dream scene.” Then later (sometimes weeks or months later), when you’re doing The Thing you’re like “oh”

 

fandomsficsandfeels:

I DIDNT KNOW THIS HAPPENED TO OTHER PEOPLE TOO

 

audrey-hepbae:

Good morning all you That So Raven sons o guns

 

living-for-fiction:

…I thought this happened to everyone? Is it really so unusual?

 

maryellencarter:

It’s never happened to me quite that way (although I did once have a dream that a lost checker was behind a desk, where I then found it the next morning), but my younger sisters both had these, one of them quite a bit. Brains are weird as fuck and we don’t understand them.

I once read an article about “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (here’s the article, and coincidentally enough it’s by the guy who was the subject of my previous post), in which the article-writer pointed out that it’s really quite simple to make an entity that remembers the future. All you have to do is take their subconscious guess as to what the future is going to be, and have their conscious mind remember this prediction as fact; then, quietly edit their memories of the *past* continuously/as-necessary, so that at any given time they *don’t remember ever having been wrong* about what the future was going to be.

My precognitive events–such as they are; it’s rather less than what the people upthread are describing–feel suspiciously like a weaker version of this, in which my brain doesn’t even bother to present me with a fabricated memory of having seen this in a dream a while back, just a vague sense that this dream occurred.

(…not that I would *prefer* it present me with fabricated memories)

—

Most of my revelations regarding dreams are about realising what part(s) of the *past* they were referencing, or what puns they were making. In at least one case I didn’t notice the pun for *months*; I wonder how many I’m still missing.

Tags:

#dreams #amnesia cw #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #unreality cw?