I saw the future. And in it, I was alive.

You are not going to pass a skillcheck against a rip current once it has you.

Waves will not bow to your physical prowess no matter how impressive.

Shock does not care that you used to be on your school swim team.

If you hit your head, being good at swimming isn't going to turn you face-up while you're unconscious.

I am an archeologist. I specialize in a somewhat obscure but by no means boring or meaningless Neolithic culture in Germany.

It has a Wikipedia page. A well curated, surprisingly extensive Wiki page that encapsulates all the important information about the culture, including literature references for further research.

One day, we asked Chat GPT about this culture. W were curious which details it would get wrong.

ALL OF THEM, except for the fact that it's a culture in present day Germany.

It didn't even get the chronological time frame wrong and called it a celtic culture.

When we told it it's wrong, it came at us with made up literature sources. Literally made up. It took two well known German archeologist who weren't even active at the same time, added a year - both were already dead - and sold that as source.

And it LITERALLY would only have had to quote Wikipedia to get everything right.

THAT is how unbelievably shitty and wrong all those AIs are.

They are making shit up. They are not sourcing information, they're just slapping words together by their most like relative occurance.

She was a 50 y.o. Siberian woman from 2500 years ago, living a nomadic lifestyle, and look at her tattoos...

Look...

The absence of overlapping images or compositions in the corpus of preserved examples suggests that the construction of tattooed bodies in Pazyryk culture was approached in a structured and deliberate manner throughout an individual’s lifetime. This implies both planning and intentionality in tattoo placement and design. The confirmed use of multiple tools and stylistic variations on a single body also reveals that tattooing in Pazyryk culture was associated with a high degree of craft specialisation and was probably performed by multiple individuals. In this regard, the collaboration between modern tattooists and archaeological researchers has been invaluable in not only illuminating the techniques used by ancient tattooists but also in fostering a deeper appreciation for their artistry and skills, enriching our understanding of past societies and their intricate relationship with body modification.

the whole thing just kind of made me emotional about the great continuity of artistry across space and time. humans love to change our bodies and we put time and effort into making those changes meaningful and beautiful to us! a modern tattoo artist was instrumental in helping understand what some of the finer marks might signify about methods and practice!

also don't sleep on her rooster thumb tattoo

"Housing without people, and people without housing." -Milad Hanna