#would the time police be able to detect when time travel is done via magic? because time candles are just sitting right there for me to use

[usertransducks]

I’ve managed to write more today than any other day this month so far because I’ve realized a) there aren’t many comics where Gladstone gets kidnapped for his luck and b) Donald’s family never really get targeted with any time crimes and I’ve decided I need both to happen

also people are constantly coming to the conclusion that Gladstone is Paperinik in the other comics so he’s such an easy target if you’re able to nullify his luck for a bit

[ninja-muse]

Urban Fantasy Recommendation Masterpost

This is a list of the urban fantasies I’ve enjoyed most over the years, split down a few lines and to be updated as I discover new series. I’m also including contemporary fantasies because the lines often blur. Hope you find something you like on it!

$ for LGBT characters £ for characters of colour € for characters with disabilities * for potentially problematic depictions of the above ! for #ownvoices (all based on my slightly spotty memory, so feel free to correct if I’ve missed something)

World-Focused

or stories that spend most of their time steeping you in the magical world

American Gods - Neil Gaiman £

Shadow Moon gets out of jail and is hired by the cagey Mr. Wednesday to … he’s not really clear, honestly, but it puts him in the path of people who may or may not be gods. Multiple mythologies.

Among Others - Jo Walton €!

A 1980s teen flees her troubled home in Wales to get to know her birth father and attend an English boarding school. Is her mother’s family able to work magic or is it just wishful thinking? Reading science fiction might give her the answers. British folklore and faeries, and a very interesting take on magic.

The Boggart - Susan Cooper

A Canadian family inherits a Scottish castle inhabited by a mischievous boggart—who then stows away and finds himself in Toronto. Scottish folklore.

The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell £

The life of a woman from teen-hood to old age as she lives her life and occasionally intersects with an ancient war between good and evil, fought with telepathy and other things that look a lot like magic.

The Changeling - Victor Lavalle £ !

After his infant son is violently attacked, Apollo Kagwa, used bookseller, descends into the hidden world of New York in search of his vanished wife.

The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin - $ £ ! for race

New York City, newly alive, is being attacked, and six humans, no longer quite human, must do everything in their power to save their city.

the Dark is Rising series - Susan Cooper €*

A group of English kids—four siblings, a seventh son, and a boy who might be a reincarnated Arthur—versus the forces of darkness. Five books, only the last of which includes all the kids. Cornish and English folklores, Arthuriana.

Gods Behaving Badly - Marie Phillips

The Greek pantheon now lives in North London and is as dysfunctional as ever. Artemis walks dogs. Aphrodite does phone sex. Apollo is a washed-out TV psychic who’s just fallen, via Eros, for the cleaning lady—who’s trying to date someone else, thank you very much. Greek mythology.

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker £

A golem and a jinni both find themselves in turn-of-the-century New York, both literally and figuratively. A beautiful exploration of the immigrant experience, friendship, and identity. Jewish and Arabic folklore.

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

A mostly-good angel and mostly-wicked demon discover they’ve been training the wrong Antichrist days before the scheduled apocalypse. The real Antichrist wants a dog and to save the whales. Also features a legacy witch, a rookie witch-finder, the Four Horsemen, the Four Other Horsemen, Satanic nuns, and a Queen soundtrack. Christian mythology.

The Hunter’s Moon - O.R. Melling

A Canadian teen visiting her Irish cousin ends up mounting a cross-country road trip to retrieve her cousin who’s run off with the faeries. Irish mythology.

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London - Garth Nix $£

In the summer of 1983, Susan Arkshaw travels to London to find her birth father. What she discovers is a family of magical booksellers, and an Old World that’s very much alive.

Middlegame - Seanan McGuire

Roger and Dodger are exceptionally gifted, telepathically linked, and a little more than natural. James Reed will stop at nothing to use them, or people like them, to get ultimate power. Alchemy, time travel, and portal fantasies are involved.

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman £

Richard Mayhew has it all: a good job, a hot fiancée, a nice flat. Then he helps an apparently homeless girl with the power to create doors and is pulled into the magical community below London. Nothing will ever be the same.

Of Blood and Honey and And Blue Skies From Pain - Stina Leicht

It’s tough, living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and Liam finds it harder than most. No one trusts him, he can’t find work, everyone wants him to choose a side, and to cap it off, he feels like a monster is inside him and knows something inhuman is stalking him and his. The war between the Fey and the Fallen is heating up, and the only people keeping peace are an order of priests—who also, surprise, want Liam’s help. Irish and Christian mythology.

The Sixth World series - Rebecca Roanhorse $£€ ! 

Maggie Hoskie is a Monsterslayer of Dinétah, but she’d rather not be. Even rescuing a kidnapped girl is supposed to be a one-shot deal. But the monster’s a new one, an apprentice medicine man’s attached himself to her, and Coyote’s around, so of course it’s not that simple. Navajo mythology.

Son of a Trickster - Eden Robinson £€ !

Jared’s life sucks. He’s sixteen, living in a crap house in a crap town with crap prospects. He’s paying his dad’s rent with weed money. His mom’s more interested in parties than holding down a job. His only friend’s a pit bull. And just when he thinks that’s as low as it gets, a raven shows up and say he’s Jared’s real dad. Heiltsuk (and other First Nations) mythology and folklore.

Sparrow Hill Road - Seanan McGuire

Rose Marshall, the Phantom Prom Date, the Ghost of Sparrow Hill Road, hitches her way from coast to coast while dealing with paranormal problems and route witches—and avoiding Bobby Cross, the immortal who killed her.

Sunshine - Robin McKinley

Rae is a baker. Tough and practical and smart, but a baker. Who’s just rescued herself and a vampire from captivity using magic she’d half-forgotten she had. Unfortunately, the master vampire’s still after them, the magical police know something’s up, and she just wants to keep being normal. Includes mild, realistic PTSD and a whole lot of delicious desserts.

An Unkindness of Magicians - Kat Howard

The Turning has started in New York and every magician in the city has their own reason for entering the tournament—power, status, acknowledgement, revenge, revolution. The high stakes would be enough for anyone, but it’s starting to look like there’s something suddenly wrong with magic, too.

Witches of Ash and Ruin - E. Latimer - $ £ € *

Dayna wants to be a witch, live her life, and block her OCD thoughts so she doesn’t have to deal with them. Then scary but gorgeous Meiner and her coven roll into town prophesying Bad Things, and a serial killer reappears who seems to target witches and shit. Meet. Fan. Themes of family and abuse.

Ysabel - Guy Gavriel Kay

Ned Marriner’s tagging along with his photographer dad to Provence when he begins to notice magic awakening around him. There’s an ancient love triangle that‘s repeated throughout history, using contemporary locals as proxies—and it’s very interested in Ned, his new friend Kate, and his father’s entourage.

Mystery-Focused

or stories that spend most of their time solving a magical crime

The Arcadia Project series - Mishell Baker $£€ !

Millie’s nearly broke, scarred, a double amputee, mentally ill, and Done with all the BS around that. She’s also despairing of ever resuming her directing career, so when a mysterious woman offers her a job with her temp agency, she’s intrigued. What wasn’t mentioned? She’ll actually be an immigration agent working with the Fae of Hollywood, and one of them’s just gone missing.

the Blood series - Tanya Huff $£€

Vicky Nelson is the pinnacle of the tough, no-nonsense PI—which poses a bit of a problem when she’s hired to catch a “vampire” on the streets of Toronto and then actually meets one. (He writes romance novels.)

the Felix Castor series - Mike Carey $*

Felix Castor is an exorcist. A hard-drinking, down-at-the-heels exorcist in a London brimming with ghosts and demons. Unfortunately, he never seems to get the easy cases where he can just waltz in and play a tune—and his past mistakes might be coming back to haunt him.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - Douglas Adams

Dirk Gently solves mysteries by wandering around, getting into strange situations, and then connecting dots no one believes even exist. Like time traveling robots and Romantic poets, or rampaging eagles and mold-ridden refrigerators.

The Grendel Affair - Lisa Shearin £

Makenna Fraser is a seer working for Supernatural Protection and Investigations in New York. “Seer” meaning she can spot the ghoulies and ghosties few people can, including her coworkers. When an off-the-books gnome removal turns into a blood-soaked crime scene, she and her partner are handed the case—but will her eagerness to prove herself just land her in hotter water?

the Greta Helsing series - Vivian Shaw $£

Dr. Greta Helsing serves the undead of London. Her best friends are vampires and demons. The boundaries between worlds are thinning, causing all manner of metaphysical trouble. Plays with 1800s horror classics; equal parts sensible, disturbing, and funny.

the Greywalker series - Kat Richardson $£

Harper Blaine prides herself on rationality and unflappability, but after briefly dying on a case, she’s suddenly wrong-footed and seeing ghosts everywhere. In the middle of all that, she’s hired by a mysterious voice to track down an organ that’s more than it seems, and suddenly haunted street corners are the least of her problems.

the Incryptid series - Seanan McGuire $£

Meet the Price family, a close-knit group of cryptozoologists whose mission is to protect and preserve endangered cryptids like dragons, gorgons, and the religious Aeslin mice from humans. They’re also hiding from the Covenant of St. George, a.k.a. why the cryptids are endangered in the first place. Technically paranormal romance.

the Iron Druid series - Kevin Hearne £

Atticus O’Sullivan is a herbalist and seller of New Age paraphernalia by day, two-thousand-year-old druid by night. He thought moving to Arizona would keep him safe from gods bent on revenge. He thought wrong. Multiple mythologies.

Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge - Paul Krueger $£€ !

Bailey Chen is fresh out of business school, broke, and living with her parents. When a childhood friend offers her a job as a barback, she takes it as a stopgap—but then she discovers the secret cabal of bartenders who fight demons using magical cocktails and after that, there’s no looking back.

Moonshine - Alaya Johnson £

Zephyr Hollis, a charity worker and ESL teacher in 1920s New York, and therefore flat broke, takes a side job from a student, Amir, without asking questions. But will the vampire mob, the drug-crazed vamps, Amir’s literal smoking hotness, or her family history do her in first?

Night Owls - Lauren M. Roy $

Valerie is a vampire with a successful campus bookstore. Elly grew up fighting monsters and fearing for her life. When their paths collide via a book in Elly’s keeping, they must unite to prevent said monsters from unleashing hell and then some.

the October Daye series - Seanan McGuire $£€

Toby Daye wants sleep, coffee, and for everyone to leave her alone already—not necessarily in that order. Unfortunately, as a changeling Knight and PI with a knack of finding people and solving problems with maximum chaos, none of those things will ever be easy to come by. Multiple folklores.

the Olympus Bound series - Jordanna Max Brodsky $£

Selene di Silva’s been keeping her head down for a long time, shutting herself off not just from New York, but from the world. (Being a former goddess will do that.) But then she stumbles on the body of a woman who’s been ritually sacrificed and her past as Artemis comes rising up again. Greek and Roman mythology

the Rivers of London series - Ben Aaronovitch $£€

When Constable Peter Grant meets a ghost at a crime scene, it’s only logical for him to take a witness statement. When DCI Thomas Nightingale learns of this, he offers him a job as an auror the sorcerer’s apprentice a valued member of a magically-focused police unit. London, its river goddesses, various magic workers, assorted Fae, and the Metropolitan Police will never be the same.

the Shadow Police series - Paul Cornell $£

Following the mysterious death of a suspect, four Metropolitan Police officers are drawn into London’s sinister magical underworld in their hunt for a killer.

the Smoke series - Tanya Huff $*£

Tony Foster’s found his footing as a PA on a Vancouver-shot vampire show. Unfortunately, the paranormal weirdness that is his life continues and it’s somehow up to him to save the day.

Unholy Ghosts (and following) - Stacia Kane £*

Chess Putnam works as a Church exorcist, partly out of obligation and partly for the pay, which goes to fuel her drug addiction. Unfortunately, no ghosts are nice ghosts and her private life keeps intruding on her cases.

the Watch novels - Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork is the citiest of fantasy cities. Its City Watch is a bunch of misfits. Sam Vimes isn’t putting up with any nonsense. Somehow, they fight crime.

Zoo City - Lauren Beukes £

Zinzi December is a con artist and occasional finder of lost things who lives in the Johannesburg slums with her sloth familiar. Her latest case? Find a pair of missing teen pop stars—before the apparent assassins do.

[mirceakitsune]

Artificial Intelligence: The baddest hoax in modern history

Over the years I've dealt with a good amount of crazy. I've seen more shit in nearly 3 decades than I imagined I could in 10 lifetimes, as far as sheer human madness is concerned. In the last few years it has rapidly gotten worse, and recently it seems to have reached new unprecedented heights.

In this episode, it's my displeasure to present to you the sentient computer... A.K.A. machine learning, A.K.A. artificial intelligence. No folks we aren't talking about a physical electronic brain... which may actually be possible one day, once scientists figure out how to reconstruct all neurons in the human brain and map them to a circuit of quantum bits. We're talking classic binary code running on your average 64 bit processor (C++ / Java / Whatever) which is supposedly capable of sentient processes... most notably recognizing the meanings and circumstances of objects in photos, up to facial recognition within complex images. Said functionality is supposedly achieved, I fucking kid you not, by training your computer like an animal or a human baby. This delusion seems to be embraced not only by ordinary people, but even programmers who are expected to know the matter at hand, and horrifyingly by government officials who believe this bullshit will give them some magical powers like in the movies. A few cases of this fairytale include, but are tragically not limited to:

Facebook supposedly recognizes who you are and automatically tags you whenever you upload a photo. Obviously this isn't because FB has money to throw at an army of moderators who stalk people in realtime to tag their shit, and because that's controversial and stupid they're hiding it behind an AI story, that would be crazy... it's the midget trapped in the body of a computer doing it!

The human-computer chimera may soon be "hired" by the airport, where it would scan the faces of travelers as they walk through the gate. Dozens of them... in a few seconds... in the same image.

British police are teaching an AI what child porn looks like. You can be sure it's not because they're looking for an excuse to play around with that material, hehe... it's just so the little man in the Windows system tray can learn how to "detect abused kids". Unfortunately for them the program is doing a bad job at singling out them kiddo butts, because it's confusing them with photos of sand dunes in the desert. But not to worry: The police is sure that the dead God is on their side, and their program will one day spot those sexy children without error! Hmmm... I wonder if mister computer man can develop a pedophilia fetish...

An old news article suggested an AI which, hold on to your horses everyone, was capable of detecting gay faces. Yep: If it sees any picture of you, it's able to tell whether you are homosexual or not.

Another AI can supposedly analyze the way you walk, determining if you have criminal intent based on how a camera sees you moving down the street. You better not be dancing back there dawg, the computer people will think you're gettin' ready to mug some homeboy!

An elaborate hoax known as Facerig has done an impressive job at convincing people that a program is capable of understanding not just your face, but your facial expressions... without even needing some super high-resolution video, just a shitty blurry webcam. Their hoaxed demos even show animated 3D characters imitating the facial expressions of someone in a camera... which I assume is either edited manually into the video, or the character is controlled in realtime by someone watching your face on camera (horrifying to think it might be without some users even knowing it).

At least a few of those articles managed to convince me that I couldn't possibly be a member of the human race, even if I look human when I see myself in the mirror (otherkin aspects aside). Nope; There's just no way I'm part of the same species as those creatures: My brain wouldn't be capable of coming up with this bullshit even as I'm dreaming at night, I must have been designed by aliens using a properly debugged brain structure! Jesus fucking Christ on a flying carpet... what in the ever loving fuck?

Now there are multiple reasons why this whole thing has become infuriating for me: One is the fact that whenever I try shedding a ray of reasoning on this trainwreck, I'm immediately attacked by virtually everyone who refuses to accept this is realm of fantasy. At the same time I worry about what is actually going on, seeing that a lot of effort and money were put into this hoax so it's obviously happening for a reason (likely a smoke screen for extreme mass surveillance plans). Further more it makes an unique mockery out of both biological life and programming alike, via the demented insinuation that a CPU is capable of emulating sentience which is a requirement for any content recognition of this degree. There was once a time when I was fascinated with the idea of AI and machine learning, and was planning to learn more about it and possibly play around with such code... today I'm disgusted to even hear about the subject, after those fuckers disfigured and diseased it too with their madness and refusal to understand basic logical limitations.

Because common sense doesn't seem to be obvious to everyone, I'm going to clarify why this is impossible, by explaining the impassible obstacles a computer would have to overcome in order to do something as unthinkably complex as facial recognition. For the proposed functionality, a mindless piece of code would have to do the following things, all on its own using only pixels of different colors from an image:

First of all it must determine what in the photo is a face, from numerous objects and complex structures that each represent all sorts of things. This is barely doable itself but okay.

Next it must work around the face being shot from any possible angle. The head may be rotated in any position relative to the camera, resulting in a radically different structure being visible in the image.

The person's face may be partly covered. Perhaps there's an obstacle between the face and the camera, like a structure or another person. Maybe they're wearing a scarf or glasses, which they weren't in other images. Maybe their hair is brushed differently and they have an emo haircut covering half of the face. Maybe they're wearing lipstick and the color of their lips is different.

People have different facial expressions in each photo. In one you may be smiling, in one you may be frowning... in one your mouth might be open, in the other it's closed. Faces are always shaped differently.

The lighting conditions are guaranteed to not be identical, both brightness and colors differ. Maybe it's day maybe it's night, maybe the environmental light is reddish maybe the atmosphere is blue, maybe different cameras that shot you used different color adjustment filters.

The average camera (even good ones) is still much more blurry than anything we see with the naked eye. Motion blur is also involved if either you or the camera are moving, if the environment is dark it gets worse. Noise is further introduced by a bit of jpeg compression, as no sane camera wrecks your drive space by saving in lossless png.

Many people still upload low resolution pictures of themselves on the internet. When your picture is 1024 x 768 and you're standing at a distance, there is nearly no usable detail to even attempt to work with on a PC.

Suppose it miraculously managed to single out a face throughout all those obstacles: It needs to measure something and use it as an identifying trait! What, how, why? The apparent distance between your eyes in pixels? How wide your mouth appears to be? How bulgy is your forehead? It doesn't even know what those things represent, not to mention anything can look like a head or eyes or a mouth!

Even if by total defiance of all logic, there was something that could be mathematically measured and the program did manage to calculate it on its own: The computer would also need to compare the data to what is probably trillions of photos in the database! Not only do people look similar so there would be millions of false positives, but doing so many pixel comparisons would require 100 times more memory and processing power than all computers on the planet combined today have!

Are you fucking kidding me? Someone is actually trying to tell me that in actual real life, a shitty piece of x64 code would be capable of doing ALL THAT? What the fuck are people smoking these days? No, really... just go take a walk in the park or meditate on the top off a cliff, then ask yourself the question: "How could I possibly be led to believe this crap"? It's 1000 times easier to board a space shuttle and go to Mars TOMORROW, compared to achieving something that gets even close to this. Even if Jesus himself was still alive and had his superpowers to heal the blind and spawn fish from a basket, even if Moses could make the waters split with his mighty staff... not even they could create something like this, even if they called God himself for reinforcements. If you open your bedroom window and leap right through it, you can be more confident that you'll fly like Peter Pan compared to this shit happening. THIS - IS - NOT - POSSIBLE!

And before people tell me "but the CIA has had facial recognition for decades": Yes they do and that's a totally different matter. Criminologists use one or two photos per suspect (frontal and side shot) which are taken in carefully controlled conditions: It's always from the same angle and distance, the suspect is told not to smile or open their mouth, the lighting is the same, etc. There are also only a few million photos of criminals in the database, rather than trillions of pictures from billions of people... if you have a 10 GHz processor you may be able to do a pixel-to-pixel comparison of one photo against all others in less than a day.

I'm sorry, but some harsh shit had needed to be said about this: Every time this pops up on EFF or other rights groups, I find myself compelled to speak out against a big fat lie seeing how everyone else refuses to. There is seriously no excuse for allowing fairytales and mass hysteria to spread all over the media, without one voice of reasoning exposing this obvious lunacy for many months! Also fuck humanity hard for ruining what could have been a beautiful domain of research if it was kept rational and serious and not turned into a distorted fantasy... especially since I'm a programmer, do not expect me to forgive this mockery, as they've put yet another cherry on the cake the way only this disgusting species is capable of doing.