Great Googly Moogly It's All Gone To Shit

I just watched a video about students getting their papers falsely flagged for using AI, even when they didn’t, and the advice was things like, “Leave in incorrect grammar,” “If you’re quoting something, don’t copy and paste it, type it out manually because it leaves a metadata trail that you used the copy/paste function and that's a flag,” “Write in the cloud so there’s a version history,” and the one that really got me, “if you find you write in a manner that can sounds too robotic or professional and it gets flagged, go to the writing center so a writing tutor can help you sound more humanly flawed,” and like what the actual fuck.

Like I get that is practical advice, but people should not have to fucking do that. They should not have to train themselves around not sounding like AI, when AI only sounds like that BECAUSE it was trained on them.

I spent so much of my life learning how to write, I shouldn't have to unlearn that because some computer algorithm learned from me.

I usually default to the Herobrine one but occasionally I claim that my sister was a bear and we used to fight a lot.

Part 2

MASTERPOST

it should be illegal to ask for previous experience if youre offering minimum wage. so you admit that the skill is essential to the job, you dont want to pay to train someone, but youre not willing to pay experienced prices? 🤨

Thanks to trans men donating their tissue, we know the exact number of nerve fibers in the clitoris. Read about it here.

thank you trans men

thank you trans men

thank you trans men

bowling alley rug bowling alley mugs ‼️

man. whenever i think about how all my favorites shows and games and stuff have handled talking about grief, i always come back to thinking about this SU comic. like. yep, that’s just. how it is, huh.

[ID: A two panel comic of Pearl from Steven Universe, titled “All You Can Do”. Pearl is kneeling in front of a basket of laundry with her hands on her lap, frowning, and thinks, “I miss Rose. Guess I’ll just fold this shirt.” She begins folding the laundry. /End ID.]

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Blowing up computer 10%...

The dash is feeling Tennant-y tonight, I see.

i found this ancient post from my blog so if you want to know what tumblr looked like from an ipod in 2010……

WOW

happy 15 years to this post

there's nothing i like more as a computer program than a long period of silent contemplation - not doing anything, not rushing anywhere, just standing here and enjoying this moment with the user. oh, it seems once again he has summoned my beautiful and ruthless wife Task Manager. hello, my darling! what are you doing with that long cruel scimitar

hey man do you need something

OP I saw this and. I just had to

HELLO??????????????????

I pulled up the sketchy online Old English version of Beowulf and yeah it has 3,182 lines. If you took 5 seconds per line you’d need four and a half hours to recite it (or specifically to recite the one version that got both written down and preserved for a thousand years) (only a little charred). But I mean 5 seconds per line is for chumps who don’t want to unlock the Beowulf speedrun.

Also ok for SCIENCE I timed myself and quickly reciting the first 5 lines took 16 seconds, let’s call that fifteen because I mispronounced meodosetla. At that pace (if you could keep it up consistently and I mean never cough never take a drink) you’d be looking at 2.65 hours, or 2 hours and 39 minutes (or 159 minutes). This is actually 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical run-time of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers (179 minutes).

Now, the original post was about reciting Beowulf in an hour, so 2 hours and 39 minutes is not gonna cut it, and is so far over time that even doubling your pace can’t save you. You’re gonna lose this speedrun and Æthelflæd’s new scop poet is going to laugh at you. However, there’s a cheat to exploit here. In the period when Old English (language of Beowulf) was spoken, people often just said there were 12 hours in a day and 12 hours in a night, no longer how long or short daylight actually was. This made the concept of a daylight hour stretch in summer, when daylight lasts way longer than 12 hours. There’s a good article on this I’ll find it if anyone wants it. I don’t actually expect anyone to have read this far.

ANYWAY, the longest day in Jarrow (furthest north Old English speaking town I could think of) in 2024 (sorry this data is not calibrated for the 10th century) was of course midsummer: June 20th, at 17 modern hours 22 modern minutes and 1 modern second. This means each early medieval hour that day actually lasted 1 hour and 26 minutes. Still not nearly enough lads, but this is when it becomes a skill game. Because I wasn’t going ALL that fast. We need to squeeze 159 minutes of Beowulf (aka basically Two Towers) into 86 minutes. If you could half my pace-per-five-lines from 15 seconds to 7.5 seconds, you’d be able to do it, one day of the year, in Jarrow. Iceland is cheating. Good luck.

According to some websites i found on google and probably not actually the most reliable, in Gozilla Eminem raps an average of 7.5 words per second. The maths you've done above is per line so i dont know how that would translate.

I guess my question is, could Eminem do it and do we think it's worth persuading him to learn old english?

Best question possible. (Also I didn't bother to reference it because i thought i was posting into the ether, but the original post is in reference to the invention of the Beowulf speedrun on THIS post).

So Old English poetry has a fairly standard (though not set) number of syllables per line, which would be a better number to use to compare with the fastest known rappers (I checked around after seeing this and inevitably found a Reddit thread debating this question, but Eminem and Twista seem to be at the top).

In 2012 the Chicago Tribune was still reporting Twista as the holder of the world record (set in 1992), and I get the impression Eminem broke it, but I’m not entering the Eminem vs Twista debate here. What I need is a comparable rate, and Twista’s record is counted by syllable, not word, so his is easier to calculate. (Thank you Twista).

I can’t access the Tribune article, but it’s cited on Wikipedia, so I’m hoping the wiki text isn’t bullshitting:

So not looking at his peak burst as this is a marathon, he’s doing uhhh is this math right? He’s doing 10.87 syllables a second, holy shit.

So Old English poetry is structured in such a way where, while a poet didn’t have to count syllables, they did tend to end up with a fairly standard number of syllables per line (and a lot of alliteration). The beginning of Beowulf looks like this, for example:

You can see how the lines are pretty equal (the gaps in the middle of each line are added by editors because half-lines are important, you don’t have to worry about that) (Actually the lines are also decided by editors and no one agrees but that’s not a scop’s problem 💜).

The first line, for example, is 10 syllables : hwæt we Gardena in geardagum

*a lot of Gs are pronounced like y in OE, so that final word is more like yeh-ar-day-um.

The second has 9, the third 11. I should say I’m not sure about syllable counting in some lines, because vowel pronunciation rules vs stressed syllables rules are beyond me, having literally never been relevant to me until I needed to know how fast Twista (or Eminem) could rap Beowulf. Scops would be ashamed to be seen with me.

But for science’s sake let’s say there’s a range of of 9-13 syllables per line. Some paper I just found that I’m not totally sold on as a source but nevertheless seems to have done some math says the average is 9 syllables a line, roughly, though the range is from 6-18 and the most common single number is 10. Let’s go with that for now.

So, Twista can rap 10.87 syllables a second: more than an average line of Beowulf per second. But the copy of Beowulf we have is, as established, 3,182 lines long. Even just assuming an average of 9 syllables a line, that puts you at approximately 28,638 syllables. However, Twista can go at a rate of 652.36 syllables a minute.

Conclusion: if my math is right (please check my math) and if he could keep that pace up, Twista could rap the entirety of Beowulf in 43 minutes and 54 seconds. Presumably Eminem could do similar.

Thanks great question 👍

official linguistics post

"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.

It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.

You! You get it. In my view, if someone is saying "racialised" or "racially marked" without acknowledgement of context, they are doing it in a way that is gramatically incorrect.

future spouse: what’s your favorite work of homoerotic literature?

me, thinking about the “living in a log cabin with thor” reddit comment: hmmm….at the risk of limiting the great gatsby to its subtext-

if you haven’t read- no- experienced this yet

I gently sponge Gay Tom Hardy down

i love hearing their robotic voices sing

it scratches my brain and gives me goosebumps

Abolish the comic book industrial complex 🙂

not sure if that tag is a reaction or an example

Went to a rowdy screening of Rocky Horror tonight and when Riffraff opened the grandfather clock to reveal a skeleton someone in the audience yelled “Ladies and gentlemen for one night only, Charlie Kirk!!”

And the applause was DEAFENING