starfishlikestoread

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Got reminded again of my old coworker who was a massive misogynist but also trans inclusive. Told me he believed trans women are indeed women because "only women would be stupid enough to want to be women"

I wonder what he's doing now

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A lot of otherwise intelligent people are scared to criticize chatGPT because they think there is an observed pattern in history where new technology is always either good or inevitable, and people who are skeptical of new technology always look like fools, and they are scared to look foolish when AI is The New Technology That Revolutionized Everything.

I am not scared of any of that nonsense. The first reason, is that chatGPT isn't a "new technology" at all, both because it is just a scaled-up version of stuff that already existed, and because "technology" implies a thing that does something useful and ChatGPT doesn't appear to do anything useful.

The second reason, is that the people frightened of looking like Luddites assume that because we are all alive, the feared bad outcomes of new technology have never happened, and that is just completely false. New technologies have sometimes had awful impacts upon human quality of life and the environment. Sometimes, unilaterally inferior technologies have replaced superior technologies for economic or other reasons. Almost always new technologies have a mix of positive and negative impacts.

In fact, I think the uncontrolled, rapid growth of generative AI and large language models is happening because of the common belief that "new technology" is always inevitable and good. This is a new technology, therefore "developing" it is inherently leading towards Something. But instead, the amount of resources and environmental and human devastation is simply accelerating and accelerating. The new technology takes everything and gives us nothing.

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My favourite harmless prank I've heard of was done by this girl whose dad was a geologist, and they'd go on day hikes with his geologist friends/co-workers and when she got bored on them she'd habitually pick up a random rock and go ask him what it is, and one of them would explain what kind of a rock that is, how it probably got here, and usually some notions of the more unusual features the rock had, if any.

And she had a friend who had once gone on a tourist trip to Iceland and brought back a volcanic rock. So she borrowed the rock and took it with her on the hike, and after two randomly picked up "hey dad what rock is this", she presented the volcanic rock, in the same fashion as all the others.

3 minutes later there are five middle-aged and older men circled around this mysterious rock, all agreeing on what it is, but not why it is. They keep asking her questions, where did she find it? Were there any other rocks around there that looked like it? Was it like this on the ground? People walking past the group try to stretch their necks to see over the geologists' shoulders to see what's the source of such amazement.

And in the end she couldn't take it anymore, burst into laughter and confessed. The geologists agree that it was pretty clever.

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Some five thousand years ago, a 27-foot high granite standing stone was erected by the Neolithic people of future Dartmoor. In the 12th century, a monastery was built on the spot, incorporating the stone into its foundations. The monastery became a manor house in the 14th century, then an inn in the 15th, which it remains to this day as The Oxenham Arms.

The standing stone remains in its place, unceremoniously part of the sitting room wall next to the radiator.

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Character who acts how “horror characters are so stupid, if they made good decisions this wouldn’t happen” people want characters to act, but it’s not a horror movie and it’s abundantly clear that this person is paranoid beyond the point of being able to function

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every day cats fall asleep in front of you because they trust you, yet they look so grabbable. burdening you with emotional labor

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I think it would be better for discussions of decision-making in general, and decision-making by young people in particular, if we reframed decision-making from "avoiding regret" to emphasizing that: -It's okay to change your mind at any point, and -Your feelings at the latest/most recent part of your life are not more important than your feelings at any previous part of your life.

If someone says "You'll regret that in 20 years!" -- first of all, they don't have any possible way to know that, but secondly, what they're really saying is "I expect you to get 20 years of happiness out of that decision." 20 years of happiness is nothing to sneeze at. If you get married and 10 years later, you decide you don't want to be married anymore, and you get divorced, then, okay. You get to make that choice, and you got to be happily married for 10 years.

This whole cultural attitude is based on the assumption, not only that changing your mind is impossible or shameful, but that your life is a linear process of working your way towards a True Final Form, and that if you undergo any changes between [past age] and [final age], that means your [past age] self was not your True Final Form and should have been considered too young to make decisions. It's the underlying premise that at some point in your lifetime, your self-identity (sometimes synechdoche'd as "the brain") stops changing (spoiler: it doesn't), and then and only then are you your True Self; then and only then should you truly be allowed to make your own decisions, because your selfhood is fixed and your decisions will be free of regret.

It doesn't work like that. The self is constantly changing. Just go with it.

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chilling in a hoodie and sweatpants and armoured breastplate, gauntlets and greaves

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This is a comment someone appended to a photo of two men apparently having sex in a very fancy room, but it’s also kind of an amazing two-line poem? “His Wife has filled his house with chintz” is a really elegant and beautiful counterbalancing of h, f, and s sounds, and “chintz” is a perfect word choice here—sonically pleasing and good at evoking nouveau riche tackiness. And then “to keep it real I fuck him on the floor” collapses that whole mood with short percussive sounds—but it’s still a perfect iambic pentameter line, robust and a lovely obscene contrast with the chintz in the first line. Well done, tumblr user jjbang8

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Growing up, my brother and I deeply dreaded going shoe shopping. It took hours, especially if it was for winter boots. My dad would examine the stitching, the brand reliability, the temperature recommendations, every piece of information he could get his hands on, and then when he'd finally found the right brand, it was on to making absolutely dead sure they fit properly - he had a particular way of poking the toe of the boot to ensure our foot was where it was supposed to be that always drove me nuts. This was always on a weekend, and it was about the worst punishment we could imagine.

Years later, I found out that he'd spent his entire childhood on the Canadian prairies with cold feet. My grandmother just bought whatever boots looked like the best value, regardless of whether they'd keep anyone warm. They'd kept him from frostbite, probably, but never, ever comfortable.

The reason my grandmother never had a thought about this was because she was buying her kids real boots. There was a sort of magical quality about real, purpose-made boots that meant that of course they'd work, because when she was growing up on the Canadian prairies, they had the kind of no money that meant you just stuffed some newspaper into your shoes and soldiered on.

The last pair of winter boots my dad bought for me was 15 years ago, in preparation for a three-month stint living in northern Quebec in midwinter. They cost $200 then, or something like it. I've worn them every year since, driving out to the remotest locations on the Canadian prairies and never once thinking about my feet.

When I read the Vimes Boots Theory for the first time, it rang a bell that reverberated back three generations.

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upsides of listening to music:

music yay yay yay!!!!!! yaaaaay!!!! yipee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

downsides of listening to music

if you listen to the right song for the first time while in a certain headspace you will be changed forever as your soul shutters and warps and contorts into new forms never before seen

get an idea for an animatic you will never finish

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So I've got this friend whose nervous because she's trans and dating this guy who she hasn't told yet because they've only been on a two dates. For this story let's call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don't worry.

So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful.

She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal.

He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet...

"Oh you have a dick?"

"... yeah."

He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says

"Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"

And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride.

My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self "Oh they don't think I can't please my girl, but I'll show them!"

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thinking about how in the miles books, Cordelia is almost always described as wearing a tan skirt, and remembering that her old survey fatigues are tan colored, and she continues to wear the color properly as the skirt of a Vor matron

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i'm looking at old school documents i have saved through my email, and here was a letter i wrote to myself in middle school as part of an English class assignment. the intent was it would be redelivered to us when we were graduating high school

It is very awkward to begin a letter to yourself. You don’t know where you are in x number of years – graduation from high school is not even really something that you think about as of now. You don’t know what to say because it’s weird to think about changing, and you don’t want to say anything that will make you sound the same.

So here’s a compromise: if you respect me, then I will not embarrass you.

It is actually more of a psychological thing going on and I am just trying to sound really smart, which should be pointless enough to prove that I don’t have any ill intentions.

I honestly don’t know what could be said to you; apparently when we grow up we are suddenly wiser and therefore any piece of knowledge I can impart to you is rendered– quote unquote – useless. But remember that I am older than you think, and you are younger than you think, and we are not that far apart in terms of years, seeing as time is a concept that humans created, and without that we are just floating in the void, and then I become you.

Middle school is a deeply unhappy part of life. It is two out of five stars. Would not recommend. Seeing as you have already gone through, it I find little necessity in reiterating any points about it; you had teachers, they tried to teach you things; the American schooling system, as refined as it tries to be at times, is flawed; you learned things for the sake of doing well on tests instead of retaining information, and largely succeeded in doing so. Middle school, among other things, made you a deeply unhappy person. I don’t know how you feel, because I suffered from nostalgia and the general ache of living three years ago, and I thought it would be over with by now. But it is now quite evident that the human brain is prone to only holding onto things that the body wants to dispose of. If you are still very much a sad, lonely person that I am now (I bet that you are) and even if you are not – I hate to say this, but you are loved. And if that in itself does not suffice, some stores sell cheap candy, and there are books in the world that you have not read and movies in the world that you have not watched, and by now you may or may not have a cat or something (congratulations prematurely), and even if you do not you have managed to live through high school, and you are off to college now, and you are about to grow up and experience all the parentless freedoms of living in a dorm and having people not tell you what to do. Is that not absolutely terrifying?

But it will be fun.

So, yes – I hope that you are happy. I cannot guarantee that you will be, but maybe something changes in your life, and you are, and maybe you have a cat or a dog or a horse, but a bird or two will do. Maybe those little baby turtles that can both fit comfortably in the palm of my hand, have grown up by now. There’s a book I’m writing, and the protagonist is a girl named Valerie, and I don’t know if I ever finish the book or if I start a new one, and if it sounds terribly juvenile to you now then I apologize, but it is the best that I can do. If you’re still working on it then you are most profoundly a slowpoke. Go get something done.

And maybe you’re not a writer. Maybe you end up in engineering or marine biology or zoo keeping, of all things; maybe you find your roots in mathematics, if you want a plot twist. What I’m trying to say is that this is totally strange and I have absolutely no idea what happens in the future – it’s all up to you while you still have the choice. It’s strange that you grow up and it’s strange that one of these days I will be old, possibly older than you. And maybe this letter never gets to you; maybe something happens and it ends up lost or read by someone who never was meant to read it (if that is the case, hello) and maybe you burn it as soon as you get it because you can’t stand my little childish voice because perhaps you’ve developed so much that you are suddenly beyond these things. Bear with me for a moment.

I am fascinated with the little things that could have happened and might have changed a lot of things: if I said one sentence off in a conversation, which way it would have gone. Maybe these things are the little parts that make up life, because it’s choked with more choices than you or I even realize, and I hope you’ve chosen the right ones, or at least the ones that make you happier. Instead of sitting on the right side of the bus all of the time, try the left. Of course you don’t take the bus and have not taken it in years, but it was something that took up a massive part of your academic life, little did you know; I have not even stopped taking them by the time I am writing this, but tomorrow is Friday, and then I will never ride a school bus to school again.

People tell you to live life to its fullest. That does not mean you live it to the standards of other people. You do not have to live through action and travel to every town in the world. You can sit in your room, and eat an apple, and like its taste and really, that is all. I wrote this as a bet into the future. I feel like I am talking – it’s strange to describe – to someone that I desperately want to impress. I was so disappointed in past reincarnations of myself that I am afraid that I will disappoint a future Self, and I feel inclined to make these last ties while I still can.

That is actually partially a lie. The real reason I wrote this was because my English teacher made me. It was a homework grade and I have likely already written a letter addressed to a future self in other parts of the year, so you are most likely about to see a good bit of me around. I am not completely dead. I will be with you always, whether you like it or not, so you might as well.

But once you get these letters, I’ll establish first: I am not dead. I am gone. You have taken my place. I don’t know in which direction you’ve taken it, but you’ve taken it nevertheless. Perhaps there’s still a part of me left, but really, only time can tell; there are always haphazard, oddly collected parts of people, and who knows if I am one of them.

Personally, I’m really excited to see where this goes.

Sincerely, You / Me / Us

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some of y’all bout to be real mad at me. but it must be said. some of the shit u call corny/cringy is actually just genuine/cute/sweet and y’all r just afraid of expressing any type of positive emotion

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complimented a cashier on her turtle pin this morning and she said "oh thanks, I am a little bit of a Turtle Person" with the carefully contained energy of Cookie Monster telling you he's mildly fond of chocolate chips

I hope she and the multiple tons of turtle merch she definitely has at home are having a wonderful day