this is called “Amaama to Inazuma” or “Sweetness and Lightning”
it is about a dad who is a school teacher and is trying to raise his daughter after his wife dies. one of the main things is he usually just buys her already made meals, but one of his students show’s him her mom’s restaurant and encourages him to learn how to cook
Omfg this looks SO CUTE
Apparently the daughter, Tsumugi’s, voice actress is only 11 and it’s just such a pure anime.
People who know math: Are questions like this as logically unsound as I think they are?
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, __ What comes next in this sequence?*
I always feel like I could construct a set of rules where “1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 875″ is a correct answer, and the preference to take the simple route and complete the sequence with “32″ is more of a cognitive bias than an actually mathematically preferred answer.
Am I way off here?
(Don’t even get me started on “which one doesn’t belong?” questions.)
What if you looked at it like, “what does the shortest computer program that outputs these numbers output next?”
That actually helps a lot!
…even if the shithead part of my brain wants to respond with:
print(‘1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 875’);
I love this question because I wondered about it myself when I was little!
Someone already namedropped Kolmogorov complexity, so I don’t have too much to add. 😦 But it case it wasn’t clear, the Wikipedia article has a lot of detail:
Okay, I guess the Wikipedia article isn’t particularly easy to understand if you don’t already know a ton of computer science. One of these might be better:
So the idea is that, yes, print(‘1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 875’); works for any string, but if something has low Kolmogorov complexity, there’s an even shorter algorithm than just printing it outright.
For instance, [2^n for n = 0…6] is shorter than [1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 875].
Obviously, this depends on what programming language you choose, but there exists an optimal description language (for which I think any Turing machine qualifies) for which any computable algorithm in any description language can be represented with constant overhead, so, like, your choice of language doesn’t matter that much in the long run.
Okay, now I think this is the really correct answer. Children, please complete the string with minimum Kolmogorov complexity!
if you are white, please refrain from venting to your friends of color about racist white people you encounter. we already deal with enough racist white people in real life, so hearing about even more racist white people after we’ve managed to get away from them is really tiring.
#it’s true we fucking hate when you do this #like i get sometimes we all need to vent but save it for the bigger things #i dont wanna hear about every bigoted comment your pal tim makes #venting to me is not a substitute for calling him out#especially when we both know you’re still gonna stay friends with him anyway
honestly its a microaggression
we’re really not here to absorb your stories about your racist family and friends you’re never going to try to correct…while we already have to live with direct racism like every day
This is basic ring theory, people. Help IN. dump OUT.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms – they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
“there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”
I just died
I lost my shit at “toasts your bread after you’ve eaten it”
Oh please please someone write this
The phrase-in-Vulcan and machine-gun bits above caused me to have to silently and painfully almost fall off a chair laughing in the middle of the QUIET study area of my SLAIS iSchool. XD Just so everyone knows.
There’s something definitely… ironic… when a bunch of fanfic authors sit around and laugh about how “trashy” and “shitty” historical romance novels are.
Like honestly, this is part of why I haven’t written more of any of my historical AUs: if you’re gonna laugh about it and talk about how ridiculous and lulzy the genre is, I do nooot want to crank out more for you to be snidely ironic about.
If I’m writing something, it’s because I believe in it. Even if I know it’s cracktastic and not up to high artistic standards–I’m doing it because I believe that spontaneity and play are important in creative communities. But it knocks me down every time someone acts like the stuff I make is worthy of contempt or mockery.
I have some thoughts about this! Because before I got into fanfic back in, like, March of this year, I had spent the previous six months getting heavily into historical romance and following a number of the current big names in historical romance on Twitter. And let me tell you, those authors? They know their shit. There is no discrete genre that takes its craft *and* its publicity as seriously as romance. I was a witness to the shit show that was the controversy about the SFWA newsletter, and let me tell you, when the dust cleared and people started actually trying to be constructive in their thoughts about how to create a real professional publication? They pointed to the Romance Writers of America, because their newsletter treats all its subscribers like the professionals they are.
And the historical romance writers? They are even more amazing to me, because they do so much incredibly detailed research. Even if their book ends up being a fun, rompy, very-nearly-AU, you better believe they know their historical facts. Do you know another genre where the authors regularly teach themselves to sew and wear accurate period clothing so they can describe ball scenes correctly?
Anyway… I feel like I’ve picked up a huge amount about the craft of writing from both the fanfic and romance writing communities, both of which are generally dismissed for containing sex and feels, so instead of writing each other off, let’s band together! In that spirit, if people would like to read some kickass historical fiction, allow me to recommend some authors:
Tessa Dare: Her Spindle Cove series features a small English coastal village functioning as a haven for
women in need of refuge, whether it be due to scandal or spinsterhood or
poor health or any other oddity, such as excessive independence of
spirit. However, I think my favorite book of Dare’s so far may actually be the latest one in her Castles Ever After series, When a Scot Ties the Knot,
(which can be read as a stand-alone,) because it features a young woman
who establishes a career as a scientific illustrator after avoiding
marriage by faking engagement to a soldier she made up… except all those
letters she sent off into the void to sell the story to her parents
actually went somewhere. So adorable! So hilarious! There’s even a
romantic sub-plot featuring lobsters.
Eloisa James: This particular author is, for her day job, a Shakespeare professor, so you best believe she understands research. Her books are… amazing. Her Desperate Duchesses series is set in the Georgian period (ie, when Hamilton is going on across the sea), and if you long for some men with equally ridiculous fashion sense as the women, look no further. But that’s just a side note; the thing that really makes her books stand out (to me, anyway) is how well she can write unhappy married couples realistically overcoming miscommunications, sometimes years in the making, to fall in love with each other, either for the first time or all over again. Furthermore, in her Fairy Tale retellings series, she doesn’t romanticize what it’s like for virgins with no sex ed to try to navigate their way through things. (Seriously, read Once Up a Tower, it will change your whole conception of romance novels.)
Courtney Milan: Read her Regency-era Brothers Sinister series. The whole thing. The female characters in these books! They are the best! And the male
characters, too, yes, they’re good. But the women all have such
amazingly interesting lives and stories! There’s a chess champion, an
intentionally socially off-putting heiress, a female biologist (and the
man who presents her work to the public), and a suffragette newspaper
editor. Plus the ebook “box-set” comes with all the side-character novellas already
interleaved. And each book has historical notes at the end, which I found fascinating. I love the balance Milan creates between witty character banter and their attempts to address serious societal issues of the times. (She’s also started a modern series about a not!Apple tech company that I am eagerly anticipating the next installment of. Interracial couples! Trans characters! Trading places plot devices!)
Sarah MacLean: I was instructed to start with Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake,
which I did, and oh, the wonderful hijinks that ensued! As if the title
wasn’t a clue. These are again Regency romances with intelligent,
dissatisfied women who decide to take their lives into their own hands. The Love by the Numbers series then leads into the Rules of Scoundrels series, and while each book tells its own romance, you’ll pick up so much more background gossip between the characters and amazingly delicate and interwoven worldbuilding if you read everything in order.
Mary Robinette Kowal: Not actually usually shelved in the romance section, since what Kowal writes are historically-based fantasy novels, but her attention to detail is impeccable. She’s the one who taught herself to make Regency gowns and does all her readings in period costume, down to the shoes and undergarments. She built a custom spellchecker to flag any word not actually used by Jane Austen for her first series, which started as pastiche but quickly gained its own momentum. The worldbuilding is meticulous; everything is period-correct Austen/Regency, until it’s not, because she created a magic system that works with the time and culture, but also changed the time and culture just by existing. She thought about everything. Her new series is set in WWI, and looks at how the war might have been different if spiritualism had been true, ie, what if there had been a corps of women receiving battlefield reports from recently deceased soldiers? I just finished this one, and the level of detail is true #authorgoals.
Meljean Brook: These are actually steampunk romances (rather than true historicals) with an amazing amount of alt history
worldbuilding, but the impression that stuck with me after reading them
was that Brook was putting on an absolute master class in how to do
character-driven plot. Nothing in these books is gratuitous. No detail
of the world is ever revealed unless a character has a reason to be
thinking about it, no interaction the two people involved in the romance
has is done simply for the sake of drama. The people are the story–and they just happen to also be police detectives and sky pirates and treasure hunters. Brook has also clearly put a lot of thought into the various power
structures of her world, and while the books can be viewed through the
lens of romping adventures on airships, she is also addressing serious
themes such as the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, racism,
ableism, and attitudes towards homosexuality.
I could go on, but I’m going to stop here. I have a lot to say about books, clearly.
I also love Alexis Harrington, who writes detailed, wonderful, thoughtful books set in places like Oregon, Washington, and Alaska in the late 19th and early 20th century, and Joanna Bourne, whose series on British spies in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France is absolutely amazing.
All of this, and more. Every trope you love in fanfic? You can find it in romance novels. And I mean that in a completely non-lolzy way – it’s *fantastic*.
But more importantly: The idea that romance is some kind of lesser art than other genres should sound really familiar, guys.
One thing I keep forgetting to post about is that Sci, Knotta, our Shadowy Third, and myself played the card game “Slash” yesterday evening after Pizza Dinner. Slash is a game like Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, where you lay down a card with a character name on it and then everyone draws from the cards in their hands to offer the best (or worst) possible pairing for that character.
The finest from last night was Chewbacca/Bugs Bunny. Just picture Bugs in his finest bonnet, climbing Chewbacca like a tree.
Anyway, I suggested one important innovation I wanted to share, which is *drumroll*
THE ORGY ROUND.
After every player has had a turn as the “dealer” you have the Orgy Round, where nobody draws a character but we all lay down a character card from our hand that we just want to get rid of. Then as a group we determine who had the best time at the resulting orgy, and that person gets all four cards.
The Orgy Round not only can change the course of the game, because you get to take all four cards, but it makes the play move a little faster and it means you spend less time holding cards you don’t like. I strongly suggest an Orgy Round for any Apples-to-Apples style game, because it’s loltastic.
Kimchi and Justice 