#The Science of Illusion

[achillean-archives]

Community Season 1, Episode 20: The Science of Illusion

[bonniehooper]

COMMUNITY REWATCH, 1x20: “The Science of Illusion”

-Leonard, what the hell are you doing? How did the Dean let him get away with that?

-Troy: "Yeah, that doesn't really describe it. You're more of a fun vampire because you don't suck blood, you just suck." Damn Troy!

-What kind of cult is this that Pierce would genuinely believe that was a robe from his church?

-I love how Shirley and Annie are basically competing to see who's more of a badass.

-Oh Britta, that's not a very good practical joke.

-HOW CAN HE NOT TELL THEY'RE MAKING FUN OF HIM?!?!

-Britta, how did you not think to bring something to transport the frog in?

-Why is there an actual dead body at Greendale?

-They did not just have Britta step on that frog?!

-Shirley and Annie are so ridiculous.

-Abed just following Annie and Shirley around because his cables out is amazing.

-I can't believe we're actually getting a chase scene. This is so ridiculous!!

-Annie blinding herself by running into the pepper spray is so good.

-I love how the Dean just repeats everything Abed says.

-Pierce "reading" Jeff's mind is so fucking funny.

-*annie slams jeff's head against the table twice* Jeff: "What the hell, Annie?"

-Everyone having an emotional meltdown is so good.

-Pierce: "Troy, do you want a bite of my wand?" Troy: "I do." What?

-"Troy and Abed in the Morning!" I love them so freaking much.

[groovygrub]

[markscherz]

Hello, I was wondering what criteria you personally use to decide if something is a species or a subspecies?

I quite like Kevin de Queiroz's recent take on the matter, so I will refer you to him. There has been quite a bit of subsequent discussion, some of which I agree with, some of which I think is a bit moronic.

TL;DR: They should be treated as a difference of degree, not of kind, and can conveniently be used to capture the grey zone that we know characterises the incipient stages of speciation.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Much as staring at inverted colors will leave an after-effect of color on a blank space, our audio senses will do the same. For instance, if you listen to "How You Remind Me" by Nickelback for five hours on a loop and then stop in a quiet room, you will hear the true voice of God.

[cosmicportal]

✦Reality is an illusion✦

[katakosmos]

thinking about her a lot

[riddlerbrandautism]

Michael distortion(tma) stimboard

×/×/× ×/×/× ×/×/×

[linusbenjamin]

Lost 3.12 | Par Avion

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia.

I want to ask— do you backup your wips? How do you do it?

I know there are things like Cloud and Dropbox but those are practically at the mercy of big corporations and with ai scraping now being the norm it feels risky saving work with online backup.

Do you use a USB instead?

Unfortunately nothing is risk-free these days.

I once saved a story to three different USBs, all different brands, and they all corrupted. Not all at the same time, but they all eventually lost the data. This was over a period of ten years, but of course some people have been relying on USBs etc. for this long now. Same with CDs burnt with data (something we used to do before USBs were cheap).

In fact a new study shows that over half of all external hard drives and USBs over a certain age (I think around 5 years) are already corrupted and often not being checked enough to check if they're still containing/keeping the data necessary. (To say nothing of entire batches of like Seagate and other brands being notorious for literally just...losing data and corrupting at any point in time - which is an issue for actual hard drives within the computer as well).

USBs and external HDs aren't necessarily safer.

In general it's a good idea to back up in three places, though this still isn't enough to guarantee safety. Those three places should be: a) hard copy (i.e. USB or external hard-drive), b) cloud copy (i.e. Dropbox etc.), c) on the machine itself (if it's a desktop). You can sometimes do like, a + a + c or b + b + a etc.

It still doesn't guarantee preservation of data! I think that's the hardest thing about preserving data and back-ups overall.

I have an extra bonus 'back up' in that 99.5% of all my writing is already public. And that a lot of that writing has additionally been snapshotted into the Wayback Machine. If all my methods somehow corrupted or failed, I could literally copy/paste my stories from AO3 back into Word documents (in fact I've actually done this before because I frequently go back in and edit AO3 chapters for typos etc. but don't mirror those changes in the original documents, so sometimes if I want to update a story, I'll copy/paste the AO3 chapter and override the original document).

Anyway, I use Dropbox Business (cloud), hard external copy (though not as often as I should), desktop version, and then also the AO3 version. Dropbox Business has additional data recovery protections that general Dropbox accounts don't.

We are always at the mercy of big corporations, anon. Big corporations make USBs. They make faulty external hard-drives that we sometimes mistakenly trust. Like no, they're not scraping for AI the same way, but I no longer believe - unfortunately - that this is truly preventable. Short of going a grassroots Linux direction, which...I can't, lol.

(This is a reminder to all writers: Back-up your writing! The beginning of the year is a good time to remember to do it, if you're not doing it every 3 months).

(And also, check all your USB/external hard drives! And make sure they're not your only source for that content, because you would not believe how much they degrade over time.)

If I ever needed a 5th option, I host my own domain and have done so through the same company for over 10 years with very high fidelity, and I would just dump it all into a database there so I could pull it back if necessary. That's not ideal (it's probably the easiest way I could be hacked because I check into the cpanel the least often), but it's doable.

But yeah I've been Dropbox Business for a long time. I don't like everything about them, but I trust them a lot more than Microsoft OneDrive (which I refuse to use) and many other cloud networks.

As for AI scraping, since 99.5% of my stuff is on AO3, it's already been scraped, and it's delusional of me to think it hasn't been. I have already had the majority of my art scraped into Midjourney, so sadly I've reached a level of disgusted acceptance that the gormless unethical billionaires of the world will just do what they want. If it has an internet connection to it, it's probably been scraped or will be scraped and putting something on a USB isn't going to stop that, because it needs to come off a USB if I want to work on an ongoing story.

[jasonborrowed]

If we did not know better what this is, it would be quite possible to imagine that something was out there watching us. The appearance gave me the instant thought that it looked like an eye in the deep sky of our universe. I want to know if anyone saw anything else at first look. Did you see anything different at first glance, If yes, please tell me what you saw, and I will be fascinated to hear of anything different.

[garfieldstim]

A stim board for Elias Bouchard maybe?

elias bouchard(tma) stimboard for anon

x x x / x x x / x x x

[gayballs6900]

so if light reflects/absorbs on objects to create color, then there is no color, and no color is black, but black is a color, and if theres no color what color would no color be, it cant be a void either because shapes… i want out

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[stemwithjooricanka]

[techtuv]

These illusions might involve shapes, patterns, or images that appear to change or shift depending on how the viewer perceives them, often tricking the brain in a linked or "chained" manner.