sol1056

[sol1056]

while someone does need to be taken outside and shot, it sure as hell ain't you.

White House to Vet Smithsonian Museums to Fit Trump’s Historical Vision

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/white-house-to-vet-smithsonian-museums-to-fit-trumps-historical-vision-78875c8a?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAibU30JiAjgJpLfHwdDJjxOBj3RFnGslA9TOMy-5t0JHoTp4UZHUmrp&gaa_ts=689bbc9c&gaa_sig=rV3-CV_Pk-wktwX3Ut70YD8lS64Zqai7NTuICuyybvtm3nxh67NjRY3VuTjazhH4DfhKmezhqkQeLMF7Wjxo0w%3D%3D

Just take me outside and shoot me like a sick dog in a depressing children’s book.

[sol1056]

So it's like vanity publishing, except it's for working.

Hard no.

[sol1056]

Martha White has more sugar, not less, which is why it's a favorite of we folks from parts farther south. Jiffy is what you use when farther-north friends and family visit, because otherwise they'll choke on the good sweet cornbread you get with Martha White.

(that's assuming you aren't immediately shunned for not making your cornbread from scratch)

[sol1056]

With the one difference that reddit doesn't also waste the equivalent of a bottle's worth of fresh water for every answer it provides.

Im really sick of being judged for using AI by people who boast about never having opened chatgpt. Most people aren't as bad as that one anon you got, but people are still incapable of seeing AI as a tool and instead see it as evil incarnate.

And no I don't even use it to write or make fanart because the prose it generates is truly awful and the art looks uncanny, but there's a million posts out there where the gist is basically "there is NO REASON EVER to use evil generative AI. The only time you should ever use ai is if you're using the Good AI that scientists use to cure cancer and stuff". Theres a decently popular post that basically sats that nobody without a college degree could possibly have the critical thinking and research skills needed to safely use chatgpt in any capacity, and its dangerous for anybody else to even try because it could say something false and you wouldn't even know!! Because we all know that that if you ever believe a lie, its impossible to learn the truth later /s. Oh, and the lies on the internet are fine because they're all natural, and at least somebody with a soul told them.

The culture on here has become so toxic that if I try to counter one of those posts with "hey I've found chatgpt to be pretty useful when it comes to fixing problems on my computer. Just tell it what you were doing and give it the error message, and it can get you on the right track faster than Google", people won't even attempt to figure out for themselves whether that's true (doing exactly what they accuse ai users of doing), and jump straight to calling me an idiot who's opinion doesn't count because I use chatgpt.

I'm not saying that it isn't shitty to fill up fandom tags with AI slop, and people have every right to be mad about that because it's beyond low effort and it sucks. Don't use it if you don't want to use it, but you're not *more qualified* to say what it can and can't do because you don't use it.

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Google is so bad now. It's all paid ads or, well, AI telling me what is common and not what I asked it to find.

[sol1056]

In the UX field, we call it findability. Just like in the alphabet, findability comes usability, because you can't use what you can't find.

So this was inspired by a discussion I had with a friend yesterday.

It started with me mentioning offhand that once upon a time, I had considered arguing with my university that they should publicly post their class schedules because technically, anyone is allowed to sit in on a class, but that's practically blocked off from the community by virtue of them not having access to when and where the courses are happening.

He immediately pulled up a public-facing version of the course scheduling system that I never knew existed and said something like "If people really wanted that information, they could find it."

Information accessibility is a big deal to me, so then I started to explain that "not knowing what you don't know" and the vast amount of info people have to sift through are real barriers to people obtaining information and also that "This doesn't exist," and "I can't find it," look exactly the same, so if people can't find something, they will eventually give up because of diminishing returns on the effort of looking for something that may not exist.

But he just kept saying different versions of "Well if people REALLY wanted it, they'd go find it," which really surprised me because he's liberal, very intelligent and very into philosophy, but he couldn't seem to see the logical end result of a philosophy about information access that basically comes down to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps (and if you can't, you didn't deserve to succeed)."

So he went on this rant about how the general public should simply know almost all information is out there and put in the effort to find it (without any outreach or effort to engage the public on this), and I said,

"You will be perpetually angry at how unmotivated and badly informed the public is with your current attitude. And it will never improve without people who do not have your attitude. This is the reality you are doomed to because of this perspective. It's neither good nor bad. I'm not faulting you for it, but no matter what you have to say to justify your perspective, this will always be the result."

Because any "BUT THE WORLD WOULD BE BETTER IF PEOPLE WOULD JUST ____" philosophy is USELESS if you expect "people" (i.e. the public at large) to spontaneously start or stop doing something without some kind of outside effort - an outreach campaign, an educational movement, an incentive, etc.

If you're falling into those kind of thought patterns, it's not going to be productive for you or society because you're always going to be mad, and you're never going to do anything to change the things that make you mad because you're too caught up in your own feelings of indignance and frustration.

[sol1056]

As a queer elder myself I tried with the younger queers but they’d rather listen to their cishet youtube/tiktok commentary channels that insist I’m sort of predator pedophile who makes Bad Representation by telling my own life stories that are gnc in a “heteronormative” way so I am so good, actually, thanks. They can figure themselves out. Hope capitulating to cishet preferences and calling all queers over 30 pedophiles for liking the wrong kind of fiction works out for you guys.

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[sol1056]

I'm still waiting for someone to twig on the use of 'dollop'.

Does anyone actually have a dollop of cream in their tea?

I ask because it seems to occur reasonably frequently in fics but I've never come across it outside of that.

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My tea is like 60% milk, so no.

[sol1056]

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[sol1056]

The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

[sol1056]

[sol1056]

Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we're dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.

If politicians can take or distribute them, then they're not "inalienable" and they're not "rights."

We don't have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.

And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.

[sol1056]

"When Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast pointed out, correctly, that Musk and DOGE’s directive to cut billions in biomedical funding would end up slashing cancer research funding, he replied, 'I’m not. Wtf are you talking about?' In other words, Musk quite literally has no idea what he’s actually cutting as he mindlessly downsizes the federal government.

The only reason Musk is in a position to do this kind of damage is because he’s a billionaire, and because he threw the president nearly $290 million in the months before voting — the same kind of blatant campaign finance bribery that’s been endemic to both parties for decades, and exactly the kind of Washington corruption that Trump claimed to be cleaning up, only now on steroids.

Beyond the hypocrisy, it’s as clear a demonstration as you can get of the way that the country’s extreme and growing wealth inequality corrodes its democracy: while the vast majority of Americans sit frustrated at how unresponsive Washington is to their needs, the richest man in the world can simply buy his way into government and do whatever he wants with it, no matter what the rest of us think or how it affects us.

But the Musk situation is just one particularly extreme case of a pattern in the four-week-old Trump administration, which has handed over the US government to a record cohort of thirteen billionaires, as well as corporate profiteers more broadly, sometimes running departments that directly impact their business interests. This is also more of Washington business as usual from Trump, whose only deviation from past presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush on this front so far is in how much more brazen and aggressive he’s been in doing it."

- Branko Marcetic, from "If This Isn’t Corruption, Nothing Is." Jacobin, 10 February 2025.

[sol1056]

[sol1056]

so this group of traitors (I mean, call it what it is) has already said plainly what they want: everyone traumatized by what they're doing. they want us miserable.

thing is, there's maybe 100 of them actively doing crap.

and there's about 346 million of us.

and there being not as many of them, that we should have no problem knowing exactly which of people walking past on the street or getting into that cab is an identified nazi.

plus, unlike hollywood claims, there is no centralized repository with pictures of every single citizen. that means no quick and easy way to connect a random person's image to a specific entry in the federal database(s). especially when it's chilly outside and that random person is like the other 200 random people around them, all of them wearing hats, scarves, gloves, and possibly sunglasses -- and not a single one can be tied to a car's license plates because they all walked, biked, bused, or took the metro.

so, hey, if you're considering going for a walk in DC during the day or evening when one of these traitors is out? I recommend getting yourself (and a dozen or so more for friends) some old Radio Shack bulk tape erasers. (protip: keep your phone on the other side of your body). adapt each to battery use and fire up when you're in bumping distance (unlike regular magnets, these are turned on/off). plus, if anyone hassles you, those things are great for self-defense, too.

it might feel like we're outnumbered, but actually, it's the complete opposite. you gotta keep remembering that.

even if we discount the 77 million who voted for trump (many of whom hate the manbaby muskrat, too), there's still 269 million who didn't. you're not alone at all. you just haven't had a chance to meet all of them yet.

These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

Spread their names!

[sol1056]

I'm not suggesting anything, I'm just wondering how well someone could type if all their fingers were broken.

Sand in the gears can take many forms. I'm just sayin'.

“A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system.”

—

Musk Cronies Dive Into Treasury Dept Payments Code Base

This is DEFCON 1.

[sol1056]

El Salvador offers to accept US violent criminals of any ethnicity

Well…this has gotten to Super jail levels of Fascism and we are speeding straight to Judge Dredd type shit.

[sol1056]

"im tired of living through major historical events" is now "dear lord please let me witness a high profile political assassination in the next 1-2 years. amen"