Tastules and niblets

How to see whether a Chinese handmade teapot is well done or not - quality of the spout is an important standard. 

The CCs say: “Hey, I want to cover something important. As some of y'all know, I am deeply engrained in the Deaf culture because I want to be an interpreter, and I have Deaf family. The world is slowly becoming more accessible, and I am proud of our progress.

However, I want to discuss this school. This is the Memphis Oral School for the Deaf. The school will be opening soon, but they do not let their students sign, they discourage it. And now they require masks, which means Lipreading is out the window.

This article [there is an article on screen behind them] points out that even without masks, teachers would often cover their mouths when they spoke. So they couldn’t lip read. Their reasoning? To ensure that their students were “listening with their EARS”. Read that again.

You’re taking away their [Deaf children’s] language, they are not being given Dynamic Equivalence. They have nothing. When are y'all gonna learn that Deaf kids don’t need to be fixed? Please spread for awareness.“

in the oralist view, spoken language is always preferable to signed language. this idea very often comes from the (incorrect) assumption that signed languages are not true Languages with their own grammar, syntax, etc, but are instead a simple collection of crude gestures, or a kind of complicated, inefficient game of charades. signed languages are seen as deficient in the oralist school of thought, and every effort is made to teach children to use spoken language instead.

deafness occurs on a spectrum, and plenty of people who are deaf have some level of hearing, just not enough to easily learn to understand and produce spoken language on their own. in this situation, the ethical and sensible thing to do would be to provide a deaf or hard-of-hearing child with an environment where they can learn and use a signed language as their primary form of language, as it is easier by far for a deaf child to simply learn sign language than to painstakingly try to acquire spoken language skills using whatever small amount of hearing they may have.

instead, oralist educators insist on taking advantage of any kind of residual hearing a child has. hearing aids and cochlear implants are touted as medical miracles that allow deaf children to Be Normal and to acquire the coveted Spoken Language Skills, despite 1) the immense extra difficulty and strain this puts on a child trying to learn via a communication method that is not natural to them and that takes constant, unnecessary effort, and 2) the fact that devices like cochlear implants are Hugely controversial within the deaf community. they’re very often seen as an attempt to medicalize and “fix” deafness/deaf people, and causing deaf people to be detached from deaf culture.

Occasionally, alms for also left in there.

These ‘buchette del vino’ (literally ‘little wine holes’) are a typical Florentine phenomenon and had been in use until fairly recently; over the last decade people have started restorating and reopening them. There are about 170 of them around Florence. Here are a few ones:

So far one of my favorite uses of OpenAI’s new API (which people are calling GPT-3) is for making absurd memes. One of the memes from March/April 2020 was quarantine houses, where people under sudden Covid-19 stay-at-home orders took stock of the skills and supplies in each household and starting proposing hypothetical new choices. Which mix of sci-fi characters would you choose to be isolated with? (The house with Murderbot, clearly.)

I did my first GPT-3 experiments back when the quarantine house meme was at its height, but before I could talk about my results. But, due to an egregiously botched coronavirus response, Covid quarantine is still particularly relevant in some countries we might name (thanks, USA). So I present to you: choose your quarantine house!

I did this not by training the AI on quarantine house memes (there aren’t enough of those) but by giving it two handcrafted examples, one on food and another on entertainment. I agonized over making each house balanced, and even gave each house themes within the larger overarching topic. House 1 had the fantasy items, House 2 had the cute stuff, House 3 had the scary/spooky versions, and House 4 had the science fiction stuff.

I needn’t have bothered with all this finesse. It seems to have decided that even staying on theme is fairly optional, and the things it includes are often absurdly overpowered. It was shown consistently four items per house. It ignores this.

It was particularly fun when I let it come up with its own house themes. Since its training data cut off in October 2019, it hasn’t heard of Covid-19 or seen the quarantine house meme.

For some reason it generated a Cocktails quarantine house theme with 16 houses, some of which contain very questionable-sounding cocktails (anyone want an “Eldrich gecko”?) . It wouldn’t fit in this blog post, but you can enter your email here, and I’ll send it to you.

My book on AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place, is out in UK paperback today! Available here, and wherever books are sold.

For example, I am a depressed and reclusive bitch, but taking the dog Charlie out for four walks a day is a great way to meet people and his outgoing little ass does most of the introductory small talk for me. Husbeast is a gregarious person who has difficulty maintaining his living space but the cat Mochi’s housebound nature has kept him company during WFH and helped him figure out how to organize the living space to suit his needs (small mammals like rats and guinea pigs have much the same benefits). Everyone I know who keeps invertebrates and reptiles has self-care and time management difficulties but having to be responsible for a tank animal helps that.

So assuming you do not mean cage birds (and maybe a little even if you do), some reasons I keep peafowl:

someone to scream with

soft

so many feathers to collect and decorate with

they are idiots, and this pleases me greatly

they are clever little shits sometimes, and that pleases me greatly too

absolutely cannot predict them, which means Many Stories

beautiful

warm

basically dinosaurs, and sometimes you just need a dinosaur, emotionally

they are assholes, like cats, except if cats had wings and were bigger idiots

they are often extremely long lived, which means they are gonna be around to be assholes for a very long time, unlike some animals that go away after a few years because hearts only beat so long

they have social drama when kept in groups

the moment someone finds out you have peafowl, you become 85% cooler

following the above, you will always have something to talk about when someone wants to know how you are/what you’ve been doing; things which have absolutely nothing to do with your personal life, like who you are or are not dating, or what smutty gay fanfiction you are writing, or anything. It’s like a free pass out of conversations you don’t want to have

following the above- if someone knows you have birds, especially fowl, they will always feel secure in getting you items with that bird on it. This seems weird, but i feel like it reduces anxiety in others, which makes me feel better.

Following the above again, basically no one knows anything about birds, so if you ever need out of something, you can just be like oh man. oh no. I have to do x for the birds today, it’s gotta be today, so sorry about that, can’t do the thing, and people don’t even question it, they’re just like Yes that sounds reasonable birds are probably like that. which is, some might say, deceitful but also sometimes you just don’t want to go to a party that’s super loud with a lot of people or to go see 50 relatives that are all bigots that will drink a lot and talk about sports you don’t care about at all.

they will judge you for 100% free, no charge. you don’t get to know what the criteria or results are, tho, but who doesn’t like free stuff

They will also inspect anything you show them, and judge that too. One of my peacocks will walk to the mailbox with me, and inspect all of my mail for me every day. Again I don’t know what criteria he’s using, but it’s definitely judged “mail”

eggs; but like, not all the time

if you don’t eat the eggs, they turn into babies, which are SUPER cute

birds have Zero reason to befriend you, but sometimes they choose to do it anyway and unlike humans (who can be nice for many reasons and not all of them are nice) or dogs (who come pre-programmed to love basically everyone) or reptiles (who don’t really have the capacity), you know it’s because they genuinely want to do so.

you can just watch them doing their thing. you can come home from work and sit in the yard and watch them walk around and they don’t even care, it’s so peaceful

you instantly become the most amazing and interesting person in the world if you have their favorite treat, but you also can’t get away with teasing them for it because they will 100% ignore you and the treat if they believe their dignity is being compromised

there is something about watching a bird come running over to you to say hi that dogs just cannot compete with, it’s just not the same

no fur!

i cannot overstate how many feathers there are, if you like feathers you just really have to get a bird, there’s no other animal that will give you as many feathers to put in vases

and to answer your question for real though- they force you to chill. If you interact with a bird and you are high-strung, They Know. and unlike other animals that have been bred to domesticity to want to try to fix it, and unlike animals who cannot tell and don’t care, birds are big dumb mirrors. If you’re not calm, they’re not calm. So you learn to be calm. You learn to slow down for them. You have to learn their body language in order to interact with them, which I think in some ways is… I don’t want to say humbling, but it sort of is like that. You can’t really dominate a bird the way you can a dog, you can’t discipline them nearly the same if at all. You… i dunno. you have to be kind, and patient, and listen to them when they are telling you something (however they are telling it to you), or you lose their trust and cooperation and they hold GRUDGES. You have to work with their rules, you have to find middle grounds. You have to respect their boundaries. And they’re very clear about when you haven’t- you always know exactly where you stand with birds, which is kind of a relief after dealing with humans.

also u can do this: 

Moist owlette