Silmarils, space orcs and odds & ends

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition 

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

but to set one of the most classic british characters in the middle of new york? hilarious. funnier still, sherlock actually seems to disdain this himself quite often.

to make john watson, a traditionally long suffering and slightly stand offish man, into a woman? to make her a retired surgeon who left medicine after failing to save someone's life, and instead turning to working as a sober companion? to have her early seasons characterised by a constant battle between satisfying her desire to help people with a rigid determination to live up to the expectations of her family and peers, and actual self-fufillment? made all the more poignant by having her played by an asian-american woman, a demographic for whom those battles are all too often laid at the feet of? breathtaking.

to make moriarty a woman? to make her sinister and cruel and unyielding but also giving her nuance and failings? AND toxic yuri-ism with watson? sensational.

and perhaps most importantly: to make sherlock a believable genius, someone astonishingly intelligent but astoundingly driven by the desire to do good, to be good. to make him profoundly offended at the abuse of power, at violence against the vulnerable, to make him a champion of people who have been victimised not because he is clever enough to be above such things but because he is genuinely appauled by it. and, to make him an addict, not as some barely noted sideplot or zippy one-line reference, but as a continuous story of personal development and fighting, in which the phantom of his addiction is not vanished by the power of love but an ever-present threat that hangs over everything he does despite his best efforts. this version of sherlock more than any other is powered, singularly, by fighting to be better not than everyone around him, but better than himself the day before. he is still arrogant and proud and occassionally cruel, but he is also allowed to learn and get better and he is enriched by the people who surround him.

“Welcome in what can I get you”

“I want a plain black coffee”

“All rights wha-“

“No sugar or cream or flavor or anything else.”

“Okay, got it, wha-“

“I don’t want no caramachmocha flippy-do’s or frappachina-what-it’s. Just. A plain ol regular black coffee”

“That’s great sir, now please wha”

“Just a old fashioned stright up coff-“