movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….
girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.
if it were me having to repeat my dead father’s instructions on destroying the death star:
I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–”
“Ten,” I said.
“What?”
“J. J is ten,” I said again.
He stared at me.
“I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him.
Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.”
He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room.
I looked at the wall for a while.
He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time.
So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is.
“It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were”
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat.
Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted
ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.
This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.
It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.
I can remember specific details about games I played over two decades ago that I have not played since.
I once forgot it was my birthday. On my birthday. And when my sister (Who lived several hours away) jumped out of hiding and yelled happy birthday, I looked around to see who she was talking to.
my favorite scene in LotR as a kid was when Sam started miserably freestyling in the tower of Cirith Ungol and the only reason he ever found Frodo was because he deliriously tried to join in
…i did read some of the novels, but i couldn’t get through them entirely…
…and so i genuinely have no idea whether or not this is serious. coz i mean, obviously, it could be a joke. but it could also have legitimately happened. people who have only seen the films underestimate the amount of random things that happen in the books that could come off as utterly silly and ridiculous if removed from their context.
Haha, well, it is pretty much what happens. Sam is looking for Frodo in the tower of Cirith Ungol and is despairing that he will ever find him. He sits down and does what any self-respecting Tolkien character does during their moments of hopelessness and bursts into song.
It’s a really good song (ten year old Ship had it memorized) and as he begins the refrain a second time, he hears Frodo’s voice answering weakly from above. Frodo is poisoned and despairing and beaten but he is still a Hobbit and cannot resist a singalong even while on the brink of death.
I just have to reblog because it makes me laugh EVERY TIME
So someone pointed out to me recently that in a few years, maybe a few decades, the history of the us during covid is probably going to get twisted. The fact that we all had to make and wear cloth masks is going to be hailed as a symbol of how we “"came together as a nation”“” or whatever the fuck propaganda spin they try to put on it.
So I just want to say, for the record, the time of the corona virus pandemic was not a time when america came together.
This was a time when people hoarded toilet paper and sanitizing supplies either for themselves or to sell at absurd prices to the desperate people who didn’t get to the store soon enough during the shortages
This was a time when scared parents were sending their kids to finish school in the spring in plastic trash bags because they couldn’t think of any other way to possibly keep their families safe
This was a time when grocery store and retail and service workers were forced to keep working whether they wanted to risk their health or not because they couldn’t make rent otherwise and the people with enough privilege to have remote jobs tried to repay them with applause instead of fair wages
This was a time when nurses had the hold the hands of multiple dying people every day as their families watched their loved ones die over a video call because the hospital couldn’t risk having visitors
This was a time when city governments had to handle so many eviction hearings that they rented out convention centers and called in the national guard instead of doing a rent freeze to stop predatory landlords
This was a time when racism and police brutality were so unbearably horrible that people protested in the streets for months even though there was a god damn pandemic that our federal government wasn’t doing shit to stop and the cops were so mad that they were being asked to stop beating up black people that they were beating up everyone
This was a time when schools being forced to reopen in the fall or lose their federal funding had to draft templates for letters if a teacher or a staff person or a fucking child died from exposure to corona at school
This was a time when the president of the United states demanded that the cdc stop releasing data about all the people who were dying because of the warnings he ignored for months were making him look bad
This was a time when some state governments didn’t mandate masks and forced businesses to reopen because they didn’t want to pay unemployment to people trying to stay safe at home anymore
This was a time when Jeff Bezos was on track to be a fucking trillionare because everyone was ordering things on amazon instead of going to the store and the people he worked to death to get it didn’t see a single cent of it
This was a time when instead of providing homeless people with housing, we painted boxes on the ground to show homeless people how far away the had to be on the street to maintain social distancing
We did not come together to make cloth masks. Cloth masks represent nothing less than the absolute and utter failure of a nation’s government to inform and protect its citizens
This was not a time when we came together. This was a time when we survived, and not all of us made it.
This was a time when people casually talked about how many human lives the economy was worth without considering the evil that had just come out of their mouths.
This was a time when thousands of us died for profit and the ego of a cheating narcissists con man who scammed his way into the white house
This was a time that we survived. Most of us tried to do the right thing, stay home, limit trips to the store and socializing, wear a mask. And still, so many of us were lost. Thousands every day.
But that wasn’t a good enough reason for some people, for those among us who were too selfish to recognize the responsibilities we have toward one another as human beings.
This was not a time that we came together
This was a time that we survived
Not all of us made it
And those of us who did survive will never forget the evil we saw daily in our politicians and those around us
HAD to go and dig for the quote. “sex is the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus.” marcus was just being reductive, but purrp takes his analysis one step further: he correctly identifies that sex is stupid
how can civilisation be in decline when social media abounds with philosophers greater than Marcus Aurelius
Because we’re all poor since capitalism doesn’t like ideas that question it or can’t be exploited
“Birds are fed by their parents in their infancy. When the time comes to feed themselves, there can be some confusion when the food does not go into their mouth by itself.”
go to this random coordinates generator and say in the tags how you would fare if you were dropped where it generates without warning. i’ll go first i’d be dropped in the middle of the fucking south atlantic ocean and perish
Thank god I’m still in Europe
I should be fine just gotta find someone who speaks English and start crying
They dropped me in the middle of the ocean I am going to die
Everyone who has reblogged this from me so far has ended up in the ocean
My plot armour strikes again
Hundred miles off coast of Honolulu. I’d like to believe that on favourable wind I’d have a chance with a row boat and a GPS but without at least that much yeah I’m dead
One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had.
It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!
So if you didn’t know that…now you do
do you know that i think of this post every time i can’t sleep op. what mythbusters did for you, you have done for a great many others.
One instructor in nursing school, fifty years ago: “If you can’t sleep, rest. If you can’t rest, at least lie down and pretend.”
Hey, do y’all remember how Tencent said they were developing faceID AI to identify people in riots, and then they suddenly created an AI art generator to turn your selfies into anime?
Do y’all remember that time that someone discovered facial recognition cameras couldn’t see through Juggalo makeup, then Facebook had a fun “see what you’d look like with Juggalo makeup” thing, and then facial recognition cameras could suddenly see through Juggalo makeup?
Do y’all remember how, on Twitter, Elon started a tirade against artists who ask for credit when their art is reposted, and he suddenly he created one of the first big art AI programs?
Do y’all remember how AI destroyed the field of freelance translation, despite the inferiority of the machine translations, because companies didn’t care about the quality of the translations? They just wanted it done for free?
Do y’all know how companies will see a lot of money going into a New Tech Thing (like, say, AI art apps) and will jump to try and implement that New Tech Thing into their tech? For example, how it felt like every big company and celebrity had an NFT to sell?
I don’t think any movie will make me feel the same ethereal sense of otherworldly sorrow and disembodied awe as that scene in Lord of the Rings where the loyal son is sent off into a doomed battle to please his vindictive father while Pippin sings a mourning song of his people
I was like 12 and high off this shit
These movies CHANGED ME
This is one of my favourite parts of the whole trilogy. It’s haunting.
And that Pippin takes actually a happy walking song of his people, because Hobbit songs are generally happy and about food and drink and gifts and things, and *transforms* it into a mourning song.
The song is from Fellowship, before all the heavy plot hits and they’re still in the Shire. It’s about walking, and how eventually all the bad things that scare or sadden you will fade away and you’ll be home warm by the fire.
And Pippin takes it, changes the lines, the key, and sings a song that is truly fit for Denethor’s great hall.
Knowing Billy Boyd gave his own melody to it and everyone had chills after hearing him sing it. This is how you get actors involved with the story and character, this is how amazingly well these films were cast. Fans have been singing that haunting tune in echoing halls and caves and towers for 20 years now and it never loses its beauty.
Home is behind
The world ahead
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadow
To the edge of night
Until the stars are all alight
Mist and shadow
Cloud and shade
All shall fade
All shall
Fade
And even better: Billy Boyd composed the tune to the song and then performed it for Peter Jackson and everyone else while filming. They only did one take! That very first take is the one that’s used in the film! He’s just that good!!
